This study examines the transition from slave to free society in one northern community, Providence, Rhode Island. The first chapter is an examination of New England slavery in general with special emphasis on slavery in Rhode Island and Providence. The first chapter shows that the slave system in New England was quite different from that in the antebellum South, with which we are more familiar. Slaves in New England were frequently taught to read and write; they learned skilled trades, sometimes managed to earn money and purchase their freedom, and often New England slaves had intimate associations with free people, black, red and white. The first chapter explores how the intimate association between slaves and lower-class free peoples was aided by the presence of significant numbers of apprentices and indentured servants in the white population. The end of slavery in Rhode Island, the role of the American Revolution in bringing about that end, and the role of blacks in the American Revolution is also explored in the first chapter.

Chapter two is concerned with the development of institutions by blacks in Providence after emancipation. The second chapter explores black institutions as an outgrowth of emancipation. They reflected the extent to which blacks in New England had been acculturated while slaves. Exclusion from white institutions caused blacks in Providence to develop parallel institutions, churches, schools, a temperance society and a militia company. These parallel institutions helped form a sense of community among blacks in early nineteenth-century Providence; these institutions also developed an indigenous group of black leaders who represented the aspirations of the community to the larger society.

Chapter three examines the role Providence blacks played in Rhode Island politics. The Dorr Rebellion, the effort of working class white men to eliminate the property qualification for voters, resulted in Rhode Island granting voting rights to black men in 1841. This happened because black men had sided with Rhode Island's Whig faction after having been rebuffed in their effort to make common cause with the white workingmen. After securing voting rights black men became Whig bloc voters in the 1840s, receiving little in return for their support of that party. The third chapter also discusses the efforts of blacks to integrate Rhode Island's schools in the 1850s and how this represented a break in the dependent relationship with Rhode Island aristocrats that had developed in the 1840s.

The social structure of the Providence black community is the subject of the fourth chapter. Drawing primarily on the manuscript censuses of 1850 and 1860, the fourth chapter explores patterns of property accumulation and holding within the community. A detailed occupational profile of the community is made, with a correlation of sex, color (black or mulatto) and region of birth variables and different occupational categories.

The fifth chapter looks at the promise of upward mobility in pre-Civil War America and how that promise of upward mobility exacerbated racial tensions. This final chapter explores how the social science concepts of status, inconsistency and status anxiety can be employed by those wishing to understand the relations between working class whites and blacks in antebellum Providence.