Focusing on early national Massachusetts, this dissertation is about how Americans in the generations leading up to the Civil War understood the significance of the Revolution and how they sought to make that history matter. It traces how historical memory was implicated in three different forms of emancipation: the construction of a free national identity; the ending of chattel slavery; and the elevation to full citizenship of free people of color. Harnessing these political causes to Bay Staters' understanding of their local history (especially the legacies of the American Revolution) was crucial to the success of each of them. In moving from the particular context of early national Massachusetts toward a broader consideration of the politics of memory in American history, then, this dissertation contends that scholars ought to see historical narratives not merely as reflections of their political and social context, but also as interventions into the power struggles of their moment.

A primary aim of this study is to historicize "freedom" and "agency," two keywords of American and African American historiography. The American Revolution inaugurated a debate about who could claim autonomy to make political decisions and have a stake in the distribution of power. Given these origins of the republic, the early national contestation over the meaning of the Revolution was a struggle not only to shake off slavery but also to reframe how different people were situated vis-à-vis such a monumental historical transformation. In Massachusetts, the center of American historical production in this period, it was evident from the earliest days of the republic that the Revolution had destroyed the viability of chattel slavery. There was much less consensus regarding whether and how the liberations of the late eighteenth century had shaped the terms of historical agency: what were the ideals of the Revolution, and who was responsible for fulfilling them? who could claim the Revolution's legacies, and what did that inheritance demand of those who received them? By the eve of the Civil War, abolitionists and civil rights activists were insisting that these prerogatives were theirs. This dissertation traces how those claims took shape.