This book shows how slavery ended within a single generation at the end of the eighteenth century in the important colony/state of Pennsylvania. The authors have made a study of the slaveholders themselves in order to understand the process by which most slaves were given freedom without legislative or judicial efforts and without compensation to their masters. The book also traces a number of individual cases which show the varying processes by which slaves brought pressure for emancipation. This book represents a major milestone in our understanding of slavery and how it was effectively abolished.

With exhaustive research of individual acts of freedom--such as suicide and slave escapes, legislative action, and antislavery appeals--Nash and Soderlund penetrate beneath such broad generalizations and find a more complicated process at work. Freedom by Degrees shows that the cessation of slavery in Pennsylvania was due not only to ideological commitment, but to economic viability for the masters and efforts on the part of the slaves as well.

Deserving of a prominent place beside the best of the southern volumes. Freedom By Degrees, based on a motherlode of documentation including probate and manumission records, abolitionist society papers, and runaway slave literature, masterfully delineates the forces that brought aout the gradual death of slavery in Pennsylvania and the subsequent transition to a semi-free black labor system....Cogent and sophisticated analysis.