Paul J. Polgar - Standard-Bearers of Equality: Americas First Abolition Movement

He should be standing, not kneeling. This was the conclusion the Pennsylvania Abolition Society (PAS) had reached in the fall of 1789 as the group reviewed an illustration that might serve as the centerpiece of the certificates of membership for the newly reconstituted organization. They were most likely referring to Josiah Wedgewoods famed depiction of an enslaved man on bended knee pleading, Am I Not a Man and a Brother, printed in London two years earlier and embraced by abolitionists throughout the Atlantic world (

FIGURE 1. Seal of the Society for Promoting the Abolition of the Slave Trade. From James Field Stanfield, Observations on a Guinea Voyage; in a Series of Letters Addressed to the Rev. Thomas Clarkson (London, 1788). Courtesy, the Library Company of Philadelphia

The emblem that the PAS ended up adopting reflects Pembertons unbridled optimism. Whereas Wedgewoods original design cast a man weighed down by chains and with hands clasped in pleading, almost desperately, for deliverance from bondage, the PASs seal projected a very different conception of abolitionism and black freedom. In the PASs image, the black man stands tall and appears in mid-stride, chest open, arm extended, and one palm facing out, as if greeting freedom with an assured sense of self-possession. Though the traces of bondage remain, unlike in Wedgewoods illustration the manacle in the PAS seal lies broken at the formerly enslaved mans foot, implying that slavery would not continue indefinitely to define either people of African descent or the new nation in which they lived ().

The formerly enslaved man in this etching does not stand alone. His gaze is fixed upon a white abolitionist who has taken the black mans left hand and is looking forward, seemingly announcing to the world the arrival of a new epoch characterized, not by racial slavery, but black liberty and empowerment. The white activists presence projects the conviction of abolition societies such as the PAS that they would play a key role in assisting enslaved peoples transition to free persons, even as it indicates that the cause of emancipation would be a joint effort made up of both white and black actors. Yet the seal also implies a vision of the young Republic in which people of color are included, their humanity recognized, their belonging confirmed, their rights as members of the new nation self-evident.

FIGURE 2. Seal of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery. Papers of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. The seals heading, Work and Be Happy, suggests that the PAS sought to repurpose ideas of black labor that, when associated with slavery, invoked subjecthood and degradation as instead an outlet for self-fulfillment and virtue. At the same time, the heading gestures to how the PAS, and other abolition societies, intended to carefully structure African American freedom. Courtesy, Historical Society of Pennsylvania

The sentiments embodied in the PASs seal were not mere fantasy, and neither did the society have to look to an illustration alone to confirm its brand of antislavery reform. A decade and a half after the PAS created its trademark, Peter Williams, Jr., a free black minster and abolitionist, communicated to a group of abolition societies that included the PAS a similar understanding of emancipation and black liberty. Whereas African Americans had once been held as beasts of burthen and reduced to the deplorable situation of human bondage, the tide of oppression was now falling away. Instead, Williams was struck that abolition societies were helping to place thousands at liberty, and are daily casting off the shackles of numbers more. By rising above the mean prejudices imbibed against people of color, abolition societies had been instrumental in striving to assure that equal justice is distributed to the black and the white. These developments indicated that just over the horizon lay a promised land in which America would eliminate all distinctions between the inalienable rights of black men, and white, Williams boldly predicted.