After six years research, retired genealogist, one-time teacher, and journalist Alethea “Lee” Connolly has published The Seceders: Religious Conviction & the Abolitionist Movement in the Town of Manlius, 1834-1844 (2013). The book makes a significant contribution to our knowledge of the very early abolitionist movement in Onondaga County, and its interactions with similar movements in Madison, Cayuga, and Oneida counties.
Motivated by deep religious values of justice and human dignity, the men and women covered in this book defied local resistance and social pressures. They refused to be silenced in their anti-slavery beliefs. Town of Manlius Historian, Barbara S. Rivette, has called the book “an amazing feat of research.”
“In the course of my research, discoveries and connections were made that bring an only dimly known array of ‘movers and shakers’ front and center to the anti-slavery movement in Onondaga County more than twenty-eight years before President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation,” Connolly told The New York History Blog. “They, in fact, kick-started and provided leadership for the very earliest demands for emancipation of slaves in the nation as a matter of human rights.”
The book price is $15.00, including NYS sales tax. To order (and review shipping options) visit http://theseceders.blogspot.com
On Sunday, March 9 at 2:00 P.M. at the Onondaga Historical Association, 321 Montgomery St., Syracuse, NY.
On Saturday, March 22 at 2:00 P.M. at the Fayetteville Free Library, 300 Orchard Street, Fayetteville, NY.
Note: Books noticed at The New York History Blog are provided by their publishers.