Sarah L.H. Gronningsater, The Rising Generation: Gradual Abolition, Black Legal Culture, and the Making of National Freedom, with Kimberly White

Event Category
Lecture/Panel
Event Type
Open to the Public
Event Location
Members' Room and Online
Event Price
$15/$10

The Rising Generation chronicles the history of American emancipation through the cradle-to-grave experiences of a remarkable generation of Black New Yorkers. In this unique event, historian Sarah Gronningsater converses with legal-history scholar Kimberly White about her book.

Born into precarious freedom after the American Revolution and reaching adulthood in the lead-up to the Civil War, this “rising generation" ultimately played an outsized role in political and legal conflicts over slavery’s future, influencing both the nation’s path to the Civil War and changes to the US Constitution.

Through exhaustive research in archives across New York State, where the largest enslaved population in the North resided at the time of the American Revolution, Sarah L.H. Gronningsater begins by exploring how English colonial laws shaped late eighteenth-century gradual abolition acts that freed children born to enslaved mothers. The boys and girls affected by these laws were born into a quasi-free legal status. They were technically not enslaved but were nonetheless required to labor as servants until they reached adulthood. Parents, teachers, and mentors of this rising generation supported and founded schools, formed ties with white lawyers and abolitionists, petitioned local and state officials for better laws, guarded against kidnapping and cruelty, and shaped New York’s evolving identity as a free state. Gronningsater shows how, as the children of gradual abolition reached adulthood, they took the lessons of their youth into midcentury campaigns for legal equality, political inclusion, equitable common school education, and the expansion of freedom across the nation.

Sarah Gronningsater Headshot

Sarah L. H. Gronningsater is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, focusing on the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century United States, with particular interests in slavery and abolition, legal history, the history of American democracy, and the history of baseball. She works at the intersections of legal, political, constitutional, and social history.

Kimberly White Headshot

Kimberly White is an Academic Fellow and Lecturer in Law at Columbia Law School. She is a scholar of U.S. legal history and holds broad interests in local government law, immigration systems, and the role of empire in the construction of the U.S. state. White earned her JD from Berkeley Law School where she worked at the ACLU, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and the Equal Justice Society. She is currently a doctoral candidate in History at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research has received support from the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation (in consultation with the American Society for Legal History), and The American Historical Association.

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