Freedom For All: Civil Resistance and the fight against slavery in Antebellum Syracuse

This presentation examines the work of a small but dedicated group of abolitionists in Syracuse New York, led by Rev. Samuel May and Rev. Jermain Loguen. Loguen, a man who escaped his own enslavement in Tennessee and settled in Syracuse in 1841, became one of the era’s most successful and well-known Station Masters on the UGRR. These men and their compatriots helped make Syracuse a center for abolitionist activity and organization and were primary participants in of the era’s most significant acts of civil disobedience; the Jerry Rescue, in October 1851. Additionally, the talk will place the efforts of local reformers in the large national context of the growing sectional controversies over slavery, which ultimately resulted in the Civil War in 1861. It ends with a discussion of the National Convention of Colored Men, which met in Syracuse in October 1864.