New York Divided

	The Child's Anti-Slavery Book: Containing a Few Words about American Slave Children and Stories of Slave Life (New York, 1859). Collection New-York Historical Society.
Twin Struggles — Against Slavery and For Equality From the end of the 1834 riots to the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, New York abolitionists — black and white — looked for a winning strategy. Anti-slavery activists concentrated on winning over northern public opinion. They accused slaveholders of violating deeply held American values, including the sanctity of womanhood and freedom of speech and assembly. Many African Americans abolitionists linked anti-slavery with a campaign for equal access to schooling and public accommodations in the North. Repeatedly they tried and failed to end property requirements imposed only on black voters in New York State. Read more...


	There is a great work for the colored people to do in this land: a work not of to day only but of centuries, a generation must be raised up who can recognize the work, and who under God's will have the mental & moral discipline to... do it. — James McCune Smith to Gerrit Smith, New York, May 12, 1848. Courtesy Gerrit Smith Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library.	Girls in School Yard of the Colored Orphan Asylum. Collection New-York Historical Society.