“The Last Slave in Pennsylvania”; or, Black Obituary Politics in a Northern “Free” State

On Friday, November 11, 1859, the Union County Star and Lewisburg Chronicle announced to its central Pennsylvania readership: “Almost every week, we see notices of the death of the ‘last slave in the State.’ Yet there may be many of this class scattered over our counties--hid in some corner, yet living, and cared for.” The Star and Chronicle then proceeded to eulogize Charley McClure, who had been the property of the McClure family for “nearly eighty years.” Five years later, the same paper casually reported the death of “another ‘last slave’” named Hannah Kelley who had lived near the Ohio border. A generation of African Americans born during the last revolutionary war were dying, and with them the institution of slavery in Pennsylvania.

This paper examines “last slave” obituaries in the first state to enact gradual abolition legislation. Leading historians of slavery have perpetuated the myth that the Pennsylvania General Assembly abolished the institution completely in 1847 when in fact they only passed a personal liberty law. This error has the consequence of transforming Pennsylvania’s 1780 gradual abolition law into prologue—one that erroneous presumes the inevitability of immediate emancipation. I argue that these obituaries allowed Pennsylvanians to assert their free state bonafides by clearly demonstrating that theirs was a post-slavery society. The fact that the obituaries appeared “almost every week” reminds us that this was more ideology than material reality.