Revolutions and Reconstructions: Black Politics in the Long Nineteenth Century 9780812297225

Citation preview

Revolutions and Reconstructions

Ear ly Amer ican Studies Series Editors Daniel K. Richter, Kathleen M. Brown, Max Cavitch, and David Waldstreicher Exploring neglected aspects of our colonial, revolutionary, and early national history and culture, Early American Studies reinterprets familiar themes and events in fresh ways. Interdisciplinary in character, and with a special emphasis on the period from about 1600 to 1850, the series is published in partnership with the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Revolutions and Reconstructions Black Politics in the Long Nineteenth Century

edited by

Van Gosse and David Waldstreicher

universit y of pennsylvania press phil adelphia

Copyright © 2020 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-­4112 www​.upenn​.edu​/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 A Cataloging-in-Publication record is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 978-­0-­8122-­5232-­3

Contents

Introduction. Black Politics and U.S. Politics in the Age of Revolutions, Reconstructions, and Emancipations Van Gosse and David Waldstreicher

1

Chapter 1. Women’s Politics, Antislavery Politics, and Phillis Wheatley’s American Revolution David Waldstreicher

24

Chapter 2. Rethinking White Supremacy: Black Resistance and the Problem of Slaveholder Authority Padraig Riley

41

Chapter 3. In the Woodpile: Negro Electors in the First Reconstruction Van Gosse

66

Chapter 4. Freedom and the Politics of Migration After the American Revolution Samantha Seeley

84

Chapter 5. Black Migration, Black Villages, and Black Emancipation in Antebellum Illinois M. Scott Heerman

102

Chapter 6. Practicing Formal Politics Without the Vote: Black New Yorkers in the Aftermath of 1821 Sarah L. H. Gronningsater

116

vi

Contents

Chapter 7. “Agitation, Tumult, Violence Will Not Cease”: Black Politics and the Compromise of 1850 Andrew Diemer

139

Chapter 8. Black Politics and the “Foul and Infamous Lie” of Dred Scott 157 Christopher James Bonner Chapter 9. The “Free Cuba” Campaign, Republican Politics, and Post–Civil War Black Internationalism James M. Shinn Jr.

176

Chapter 10. The Southern Division: Freedpeople, Pensions, and Federal State Building in the Post-­Confederate South Dale Kretz

198

Epilogue. Telling and Retelling: The Diversity of Black Political Practices Kellie Carter Jackson

216

Afterword 223 Laura F. Edwards Notes 231 List of Contributors

305

Index 307 Acknowledgments 313

Introduction

Black Politics and U.S. Politics in the Age of Revolutions, Reconstructions, and Emancipations Van Gosse and David Waldstreicher

This volume gathers historians of the early republic, the Civil War era, and African American life to consider not whether African Americans participated in the politics of the early, ante-­, and postbellum republic, but how, when, and with what lasting effects. Together, the essays advance several important revisions with the potential to transform our understandings of black and U.S. political history in the period between the Revolutionary and Reconstruction eras. These revisions should also lead historians to consider anew the classic questions regarding how revolutionary the Revolution was; whether and how Reconstruction failed; and how conflicts shaped by African Americans and their allies might be considered the rule in American politics, not occasional and cataclysmic exceptions. They also suggest that black politics needs to be analyzed simultaneously as a politics of racial resistance intruding upon the political-­electoral system and as the politics of biracial coalitions inside that system, rather than as one or the other. Emancipation, Reconstruction, and Revolution, in other words, are not solely events or even periods in U.S. history, but rather also interrelated processes that began at the beginning and continued through the nineteenth century. Our project had its origins in the editors’ separate and then shared realization that their own research kept pushing the narrative of an effective, cosmopolitan black politics further back in time than our colleagues who specialize in the twentieth century wanted to go. At the same time, we recognized numerous fellow travelers working in the history of the Revolutionary era and the long nineteenth century. We began to think that the “long

2

Van Gosse and David Waldstreicher

reconstruction” traced in recent decades by southern historians interested in black struggles for and beyond the ballot box had decided parallels in the historiography of the early republic. Increasingly, we saw that formal black politics did not begin in 1865 with the end of the Civil War, nor in the 1840s with agitation by abolitionists like Frederick Douglass, but rather in the Revolutionary era’s antislavery and citizenship activism.1 The gradual, state-­by-­state emergence of free territories, in turn, shaped the terrain of black political action and imagination from the birth of the republic. The stress on rising racism in recent work continues to deepen our sense of what black politics was up against, but as Padraig Riley argues here, it can risk underestimating why racist politics—the reactionary political and cultural coalition-­building that Alexander Saxton memorably called “the rise of the White Republic”—was pursued in the first place.2 Black politics—not just the politics of pro-­and antislavery pursued by various factions of white partisans— was much more than a thorn in the side of democratic U.S. political culture in its mid-­nineteenth century heyday. It did not prove only accidentally disruptive; its expressly motivated and consequential patterns began considerably earlier. The practical strategies and ideological Americanism of black protest confronted and inspired racializing proslavery politics; it infuriated those who sought to establish and maintain cross-­sectional partisan alliances. Black politics in and around the state (not just “resistance” or rebellion) produced racist backlashes that in turn shaped later protest strategies, as suggested in histories that trace the origins of modern left and liberal politics to antislavery and especially the black abolitionists.3 Every story we can tell about the making and remaking of the state, and the parties, needs to be examined as a matter of reciprocal influences, a dialectic of black and U.S. politics that can be surprising only when we forget something U.S. historians should no longer forget: that we are talking about four and a half million people by 1860. This is a number far too large to be an exception and too many not to shape the nature of the polity.4

A Historiographical Ellipsis Before turning to the individual and collective interventions made by the essays in this volume, we need to address the peculiar status of the historiography on black people’s politics prior to the Civil War, without which the voluminous history of black politics during and after Reconstruction cannot be fully comprehended. There is a double problem here, two intertwined

Introduction

3

issues to be unpacked, so as to clarify why a book like this is needed—and why it comes so late, more than sixty years after historians like Kenneth Stampp broke the barrier against “Negro History” inside the then almost entirely white mainstream of the historians’ guild.5 On the one hand, African Americans continue to be excluded from the enormous corpus of antebellum political history, with few exceptions. This is among the most formidable bodies of scholarship in American historical writing, tracing with the weight of tragedy the declension into an extremely bloody civil war. So, the first problem is simply a silence, an ellipsis: insisting that political history is still white men’s history should not be seen as a natural or organic fact.6 The second problem is not an absence, but a profusion of scholarship all in one direction, which ends in the same ellipsis. In the past generation, dozens of historians have written books and articles analyzing what they considered to be the “politics” of black people in this period, and yet only a handful of those books and articles even acknowledge the participation of free people of color in the U.S. political system. By inference, they agree with the normative whiteness presumed by the political historians. Upon reflection, then, one problem, one absence, and one purpose of this book is to challenge that surely unconscious agreement. To do so we will begin by examining what scholarship actually exists on black politics, in the traditional sense of political history—voting, elections, and parties (although, as discussed below, a new focus on legal and constitutional history is generating major insights into how free people of color engaged with the state). From there we will look at the three larger bodies of scholarship that claim to trace the politics of antebellum African Americans: first, and most obvious, the “slave politics” available to the unfree, those barred from any access to voting, elections, and parties; second, the “movement politics” of the free people of color, also outside of the electoral arena; and third, the “cultural politics” highlighted by scholars who focus on expression in various genres of literary and popular culture. Assembling a historiography of black politics prior to Reconstruction is difficult, because the subfield itself is not even recognized as such, and there is no recognized body of work; rather, scholarship on black politics as part of antebellum American politics is spread among subfields that do not engage with each other, like tributaries leading in different directions. Until the 1960s, almost the only historical investigation of the topic came from some of the founders of black history, notably Charles Wesley, who wrote a series of well-­sourced articles, and John Hope Franklin, who included North

4

Van Gosse and David Waldstreicher

Carolina’s pre-­1835 black electorate in his classic study of that state’s free people of color.7 White historians presumed that black politics were defined by Reconstruction, as either a pathetic tragedy or evidence of racial incapacity. When they did mention antebellum voting, as in James Truslow Adams’s brief historiographical comment in 1925, they got it wrong.8 The signal exception was Dixon Ryan Fox’s 1917 “The Negro Vote in Old New York,” long cited as authoritative, although the author’s mix of unattributed claims and analysis based in solid archival research remains bewildering.9 The best proof of historians’ inattention to black politics is that, well over a century later, the only authoritative guide to where and when black men voted in the antebellum era is a master’s thesis completed in 1906 at the University of Wisconsin, published posthumously a few years later.10 Antebellum black politics began to be studied in greater depth as an adjunct to the rediscovery of antislavery radicalism in the 1960s. The title of Benjamin Quarles’s seminal Black Abolitionists (1969) indicates the scope of this revision, unremarkable now but an oxymoron for many white scholars since black people had long been omitted from a historiography focused entirely on William Lloyd Garrison and his opponents.11 In those accounts, Frederick Douglass (and almost no other person of color) recurred as a celebrity-­orator but never as an actor; certainly, the Communist historians Herbert Aptheker and Philip Foner never left African Americans out of their histories, but Marxist historical scholarship did not receive the respect that W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction initially garnered at the height of the popular front in 1935, only to be forgotten by the historical profession for several decades.12 Until the 1960s, abolitionists were presumed by white historians to be white. Quarles took the work of Wesley a step further. He documented how black men’s antislavery work was at least as consequential as that carried out by whites, and further, that the constant meetings, polemics, and attempts to influence policy by both black and white were deeply related. Since much of what black abolitionists actually did was agitate for their suffrage and other civic rights, such as the ability to use public transport and send their children to public schools, Quarles effectively sketched the whole terrain of political action by the North’s free people of color. In his wake came many more studies of Douglass, fleshing out his political engagements (although there is still a tendency to downplay his ardent partisanship), and of other once-­forgotten leaders, including Henry Highland Garnet, Samuel Ringgold Ward, James McCune Smith, all members of what we might call “the New York intellectuals,” beginning with Sterling Stuckey’s anthology The Ideological Origins of Black Nationalism.13 Equally key to this emerging

Introduction

5

scholarship was Leon Litwack’s North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States (1961), the first monographic study of its subject, still remarkably comprehensive.14 Litwack did not seek to write a political history, but he did not leave politics out, and his close attention to legislation and how free people of color interacted with their states’ political establishments remains invaluable. He was the first scholar to attempt to count the possible black electorate in the antebellum North, a key innovation, even if later interrogations indicate a considerably larger electorate than he estimated.15 In the wake of Quarles’s and Litwack’s groundbreaking books came a series of case studies that have, over time, constituted the short but impressive historiography of black electoral politics, although they have been largely ignored by political historians. In 1982, Phyllis Field and Robert Cottrol effectively initiated in-­depth investigation of northern black electoralism. Field captured the century-­long suffrage campaign in New York, from its first constitution-­making in 1777 through passage of the Fifteenth Amendment (later effectively complemented by David Gellman and David Quigley’s 2003 documentary history of the same subject). Cottrol studied the whole history of antebellum black Providence, including thorough coverage of its black Whig submachine during the 1840s and ’50s. In 1989 William and Aimee Lee Cheek brought out their definitive study of antebellum Ohio’s black politics, focused on John Mercer Langston. In 2001, Kathryn Grover published her rich investigation of New Bedford as the “Fugitive’s Gibraltar,” and in 2012, Stephen Kantrowitz examined the full range of black and white antislavery politics in Boston during the mid-­to late nineteenth century.16 The most complete accounting of black electoral politics was not a scholarly monograph, however, but the extraordinary Black Abolitionist Papers documentary series, including five printed volumes published from 1985 to 1991, plus the even more comprehensive microfilm collection.17 Each of the above works documents northern black electoral partisanship in a particular state or city; together, they establish that there was an ongoing, visible, and sometimes consequential role for black men in the mainstream of U.S. electoral struggles. But their effect on political history remains negligible; that vast field has remained monochromatic, with the exceptions of Lee Benson and Daniel Walker Howe.18 As Robert Cottrol observed, “historians who have taken note of black voting . . . have usually dismissed it as an insignificant curiosity or have looked at the struggle to attain the right to vote as the main story. . . . Few have seen the political activities of blacks in the antebellum North as significantly affecting the social relations of the times or as leaving an enduring legacy to northern race relations.”19 The difficulty of perceiving

6

Van Gosse and David Waldstreicher

black political history, even among those with a consuming interest in African American history, can be seen in the two main trends in that scholarship from the 1970s until the recent past: the first documenting the “slave politics” of the southern plantation complex, and the second tracing the “movement politics” of the North’s free people of color. Both of these historiographies are canonical, requiring no full accounting here, but they need acknowledgment to clarify the argument for a specifically new political history.

Slave Politics: All or Nothing at All? Although the term itself was not widely used until Steven Hahn’s definitive A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (2004), the concept of a “slave politics” underlies a vast historiography with an explicitly political purpose: to challenge the narrative of the “Dunning School,” in particular Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, which dominated U.S. historical writing into at least the 1950s.20 In this telling, the four million docile, even satisfied slaves were uninterested (and uninvolved) in their own liberation as of 1860, and the half-­million free ­people of color did not exist. Beginning with Kenneth Stampp’s work in the 1950s and then Eugene Genovese’s studies in the 1960s and ’70s, historians examined how African American “chattels,” deprived of all standing in juridical terms, asserted their agency through work, kinship, small-­scale production, and religious or secular celebration, as well as more overtly political acts like escaping, spreading rumors, poisoning, subterfuge, theft, and sabotage.21 The scholarship in this tradition, surely too large to summarize here, rested on the argument that under slavery, everything personal was political: all activity by people with no rights to their own possessions, bodies, or time was at once prepolitical and yet potentially politicized. The most nuanced version of this argument, based a broad reading of farm and plantation establishments across the entire late antebellum South, is in Hahn’s work, stressing how slaves used kinship networks to protect each other by guaranteeing a reliable level of production, and thus mitigate individualized discipline. He also traced how slaves participated in local cash economies based on the customary right to “provision grounds.” Hahn argues that, under some circumstances, slaves carved out a meaningful degree of autonomy as workers, and he is careful to distinguish autonomy from actual resistance. His version of the master-­slave dialectic looks very different from the near-­total domination practiced in the Deep South’s “slave labor camps,” as explored

Introduction

7

in Edward Baptist’s influential The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (2014), which may reflect the difference between the Upper South and seaboard states versus the Cotton Kingdom. Neither subscribes to Genovese’s picture of a neo-­feudal regime in which “paternal” relationships defined the politics of the plantation household. Whether one is more convinced by Hahn, Genovese, Blassingame, Baptist, Oakes, Gutman, or some combination of all of them, it would be foolish in the extreme to deny there was a “slave politics.” Decades on, however, the depiction of political agency in this scholarship has led to considerable confusion, perhaps even romanticism, which may be a problem of reception rather than authorial intentions. How would the slaves themselves have viewed the claim for a “slave politics” with the implication of constant resistance to oppression? If everything they did (or avoided doing) was political, implying some degree of free will and the ability to resist, why do all the first-­person accounts, from the slave narratives published before 1860 to the WPA oral histories collected in the 1930s, emphasize the impotent rage felt by most slaves, their cynicism regarding their owners’ conscience-­less rapacity, and a profound sadness at how little life they had apart from grinding labor from sun-­up to sun-­down? All households and workplaces have struggles over control. As in those other spaces, should not “slave politics” include the conflicts between slaves, the betrayals and currying of favor, seeking personal rather than group advantage, in accommodation rather than resistance to the master class? Equivalent conditions of extreme powerlessness, in prisons and the military, produce histories documenting internecine conflict and collaboration. If all human activity is seen as equally political, we risk sentimentalizing the barest survival as somehow redemptive, losing the capacity to distinguish actual insubordination from simply going along to get along. The spectrum from deliberate resistance (as in running away, committing violence, destroying valuable property, or theft for a social purpose) through more ordinary work-­to-­rules and petty negotiations over rewards to, finally, resignation and mute submission needs to be recalibrated, with a cold-­eyed appreciation of the class hierarchy within slavery—on farm or plantation, in city and country, between “house” and “field.” We can take seriously the millenarian power of Afro-­Christianity, as memorably captured by Genovese, the vision of the “bottom rail on top” on the day of Jubilee, but should also acknowledge Baptist’s argument that spiritual withdrawal or out-­of-­body exaltation were the politics of desperate survival, not to be confused with physical resistance. It seems like due time to grapple, as well, with how black politics-­qua-­ resistance or “agency” was shaped by post-­1960s theories of revolution, to

8

Van Gosse and David Waldstreicher

the detriment of a more comprehensive and relational understanding of the varieties of black politics.22 Even the most ambitious work on black resistance and rebellion, such as that of Genovese, tended to measure everything in relation to an idealized notion of transformation in consciousness and condition.23 The endless debates about ideology and strategy, hegemony and liberation, that characterized the late 1960s and 1970s gave incremental, electoral, and even coalition politics a bad name in many pro-­black circles, much as it had among many leftists during the 1930s and 1940s; it is only later that we recognize that precisely because of the push—or threat—from radicals, progressive legislative politics actually achieved more than ever before during these very periods. In retrospect, the stark antinomies of mere running away versus real rebellion, or mere rebellion versus organized insurrection, were merely the flip side of a slave politics analyzed under the presumption that slaves were always primarily part of an autochthonous slave community; their politics could only be, and could be only, slave politics. The question of actual slave revolts should not be pushed off the agenda: indeed, in recent years, the emphasis seems to have gone from their absence among North American blacks to their ubiquity in the white imagination, and consequently even in mainstream politics, including the path to 1776 and 1861. Where there were no slave rebellions, whites invented them, so much so that it is hard to tell where the resistance ended and the witch hunts began. A political world in which wars occurred in every generation, and in which resistance to tyranny came to be seen as a human norm, could hardly host a black politics without rebellions, repressions, and recalibrations that involved theatrical performances of disinterest. The seemingly outlying phenomena of actual revolt proves the point that even slave politics could not develop outside a host of local, national, and international political contexts, a point made clear in recent studies of rebellions from New York in 1741 to Richmond in 1800 to Louisiana in 1811 to Southampton in 1832. Haiti, as an example of not only armed liberation and state power, but also the fullest extension of the Atlantic Revolutionary tradition founded in Enlightenment principles, loomed extremely large in slaveholders’ consciousness.

Movement Politics: Shadow and Act “Slave politics” fit into the larger frame of social history, for example the struggles of everyday life—work, family, neighborhood—outside of the state and the political structures that undergird it. Social history is rooted in the belief

Introduction

9

that the history of human self-­activity is deeper and wider than the history of states, nations, empires, and wars—and usually separable from those event-­ driven narratives. It has dominated the historical profession since the 1960s and still exerts a powerful hold, which helps explain the near-­total effacement of traditional political history in relation to African American history. In the antebellum North, where the black population was either free or rapidly moving in that direction, this historiography has taken two overlapping forms. The first is the well-­developed social history of free people of color, as traced by Ira Berlin, Gary B. Nash, Julie Winch, James and Lois Horton, Shane White, Rhoda Freeman, Graham Hodges, Nikki Taylor, Leslie Harris, Erica Dunbar, Leslie Alexander, and many more.24 Building upon Litwack, these histories document the full range of organizational activity that shaped black life above the Mason-­Dixon: the patterns of work and niches in the labor market, churches and churchmen (and women) and their array of benevolence, physical locations and family organization, and legal constraints. These historians either omit the “political” or focus on the politics of the biracial abolitionist movement. The leitmotif of this second approach is “protest,” whether pamphleteering, indirect lobbying, newspaper publishing, or public agitation via lecture tours and meetings.25 Manifestly, social protest movements are political, and Quarles and those who came after him fleshed out the abolitionist movement as intrinsic to black community life. But social histories focused on the abolitionist movement suffer from emphasizing activism for its own sake minus the larger electoral and partisan context, as if people of color and their white allies operated entirely inside their own (usually local) “movement” world, in but not of the American body politic. Certainly, the study of social movements is vital to political history, and the tendency of political historians and political scientists to treat movement activism as an externality to the rhythm of electoral and state action remains a deep-­seated problem.26 Nonetheless, a history of black abolitionism can hardly be the same as a history of black politics. Much of black men’s electoral activity took place outside that movement in the various white-­led parties that wanted their votes (or wanted to deprive another party of those votes), a fact constantly bewailed by abolitionists of both colors. There is a larger point to be made, regarding the writing of American history. Politics and movements are distinct phenomena, and yet closely related—but one would never know that from how “movement” histories are written. As already noted, political histories focus on how power is exercised through institutions, in particular the state, as well as political

10

Van Gosse and David Waldstreicher

parties, legal and juridical structures, and civic bodies, and largely ignore social movements. In contrast, movement histories combine social, cultural, and political narratives “from the bottom up,” focusing on the trajectories of individuals and groups, their organizing practices and confrontations with power, and internal struggles over ideology and direction. As Patrick Rael has pointed out, movement histories are dominated by a “community studies/culturalist paradigm,” which emphasize the social and cultural over the political, as if movements are their own justification, whether or not they succeed. Too often, “larger, potent, and malevolent contexts of power relations have all but disappeared.”27 Similarly, James Brewer Stewart has critiqued what he calls “abolitionist studies,” which “explain abolitionist agency without reference to a demonstrable capacity to shape formal politics” and ignore “how abolitionists are totally expunged from political history, any real agency denied.”28 A third approach to the free people of color, which might encompass both North and South, is the concept of “shadow politics” as developed by Richard S. Newman. Building on a thesis originally suggested by Elijah Anderson’s ethnographies and Gary Nash’s description of the internal politics of early black Philadelphia as “a kind of subcommunity civic existence that operated outside the formal political life of the city,” Newman argues that, rather than actual politics, free black men and women pursued a “shadow politics,” meaning the apparatus of political action carried out entirely inside their separate and autonomous institutional spaces (mainly the black Protestant churches and the benevolent groups associated with those, but sometimes extending further into a miniature civil society). In his rich description, this world included formal and sometimes competitive elections, holding and appointing to office, control of resources, and partisan factionalism. It is a powerful argument, precisely because it resonates with later forms of shadow politics under Jim Crow and through the present, and Newman himself acknowledges its mimetic and thus potentially solipsistic character.29 The validity of this thesis for antebellum black politics is sharply limited, however, by the mistaken insistence that actual politics were summarily barred, making shadow politics the only alternative for a “powerless people [to] act in place of and in conscious opposition to prevailing political practices and norms,” given the overwhelming weight of “antebellum disfranchisement in virtually every northern state.”30 There are two basic limitations to the argument for shadow politics as the main expression of northern black politics. First, it ignores the careful

Introduction

11

scholarship of Cheeks, Field, Cottrol, and others noted above, all documenting intensive black attempts, sometimes quite successful, to engage with “prevailing political practices” in Rhode Island, New York, and Ohio, as well as the extent to which disfranchisement was far from total. Second, it is almost entirely based on Philadelphia; Julie Winch’s deeply researched examination of “Philadelphia’s Black Elite” outlines a more complex story of anti-­politics, based in the conscious avoidance of protest in any form, and a deliberate abstention from electoralism.31

Cultural Politics: Ideologies and Identities as Resistance Cultural politics as an approach to black history has been at least as ubiquitous as the slave politics and the social or movement politics approaches during the past three decades, perhaps because it owes much to those developments. Drawing on sophisticated understandings of black culture in the work by folklorists and anthropologists, historians like Lawrence Levine and Robin D. G. Kelley found resistance in everyday practices and popular culture. Over a series of books both synthetic and focused on New York City, Shane White has brought to life the everyday and expressive dimensions of emancipation as well as slavery. White reads the white press against the grain for evidence of black practices he has variously described as embodied and public-­facing, including festivity, dress, sound, and kinesis (notably broader and more embodied categories than music and dance). His evidence leads him regularly back to the courts as sites of negotiation. In his hands, culture does much more than reflect or embody values: it is action and has consequences.32 Scholars of antislavery like John Stauffer have renewed the attentions of earlier historians of abolitionism to black-­white interactions and to the struggle against racism as a set of intimate relationships as well as a problem of movement strategies. Patrick Rael directed attention to questions of nationalism and racial identity while stressing the passionate and personal investment that northern black activists had in fighting simultaneously against slavery and for their civil rights. Pathbreaking biographies by Nell Irvin Painter and Margaret Washington depicted Sojourner Truth as a traveler between multiple subcultures (they stress different ones) and all the more effective for it. These historians built on community studies while attending carefully to the imbrication of gender and sexual politics with

12

Van Gosse and David Waldstreicher

antislavery and antiracist initiatives. Craig Steven Wilder, Walter Rucker, and others have extended and deepened the inquiries of Sterling Stuckey and William Piersen into how African cultural continuities as well as ruptures shaped resistance and rebellion, North as well as South. Despite major differences in emphasis and interpretation, these historians embraced the complexities of identity and culture as a set of intellectual as well as political challenges with lasting effects for Africans and their descendants, then as much as in the twentieth century.33 If measured by volume of scholarly production, to be sure, the most important development has been a renaissance of interest in published black writing and its genres, a reconsideration aided by a disruption of former categories by which literary and intellectual merit or importance had been determined by literary scholars, intellectual historians, and even political theorists. Instead of stressing intellectual influence on great thinkers or the mainstream, the new work has measured black thought by its ability to meaningfully critique discrimination and to inspire later activists directly or indirectly. By 2010 Richard S. Newman was ready to call print a “liberation technology” for African Americans, and literary scholars were making bolder and bolder claims about the historical importance of black fighting through writing. First arguing for the canonization of neglected slave narratives and novels, then moving onto the rhetorical strategies and identity work in the full range of print and visual culture while rewriting African American literary history, literature specialists are doing the close, and increasingly archival, work with famous and obscure texts, print and manuscript, that intellectual and cultural historians have always done. They have also written pathbreaking and definitive biographies of major activists who were also writers. Increasingly, they argue for the political effect and significance of black writing and new media of the era, including photography.34 Not having to measure short-­or long-­term political effects as consistently as historians or as precisely as social scientists are called to do has surely encouraged these practitioners; so have debates about identity politics and culture during the past several decades.35 The tendency of literary and cultural studies scholars to assert the political implications of discourses and cultural forms, without much attention to institutions, events, or results, continues to reflect a disciplinary divide, though attempts to bridge it proceed.36 At their best, the emphasis on actual (and sometimes revolutionary or emancipatory) political efficacy in the recent work on cultural politics points to greater interpretive ambition and possibly a reengagement with formal

Introduction

13

political events and epochs. There remains, however, the striking distance from mainstream or party politics, a distance that the authors in this volume consistently question. The remainder of this introduction will introduce four related new directions for inquiry that the essays seek to offer.

New Directions Messing with Borders: The Politics of Migration Historians, including Samantha Seeley and Scott Heerman in this volume, are increasingly attracted to a spatial understanding of politics in the early republic. This trend is informed by traditional, even Turnerian, understandings of sections and frontiers and a “continental” response to the Atlantic turn in early American studies. But it is also inspired by a renewed appreciation of the confederative, loosely structured, multiply bordered union and by an understanding of the United States as fundamentally postcolonial, ringed by British and other imperial powers. Seeley suggests that we have considered “colonization” too narrowly: it was one aspect of the larger effort to control the movement of blacks into and out of various states. Indeed, a focus on migration may help to synthesize African American history as much as it has U.S. history for later periods.37 Seeley’s analysis brings out the interplay of on-­ the-­ground decisions by African Americans with local and state legislative actions. If Seeley establishes the “push” factors and the geopolitics of these migrations, Heerman’s case study of Illinois makes clear the stakes for both migrants and other inhabitants of slavery’s borderlands. Where earlier work tended to depict black activists as members of one community, or in a transition from slave to free locations, they are now as often depicted as moving between communities, connecting them not only ideologically but practically, in acts of travel and translation. Such boundary crossing was especially politicized. As Padraig Riley observes, “in the context of the fugitive slave problem”—now seen as emergent with the republic, not the Civil War era—“any defense of black rights in the North had national implications.” Matthew Salafia, Richard Newman, Stanley Harrold, and Andrew Diemer have all applied the concept of a borderland to the Mason-­Dixon line, stressing the dynamism and the multiplicity of actors that characterized such places.38 “Fugitivity” has emerged as a term of art among legal and literary scholars who seek to address not just the successes or failures of fugitive slaves to liberate themselves individually but the many political effects of their movement.39 Richard J. M. Blackett’s definitive

14

Van Gosse and David Waldstreicher

monograph on fugitive slave controversies during the 1850s stresses the persistent creativity of African American communities who worked with white allies to resist rendition.40 All of this, of course, fits quite well with the stress on the slave trade and expansion in the recent literature on “the second slavery”: in light of the work of Steven Deyle, Edward Baptist, and Walter Johnson, the liberation of slaves who were to be moved across borders appears to have been the most practical as well as ideologically resonant way to contest slavery’s capitalization and expansion—its catastrophic worsening, as a nation ostensibly half slave and half free saw Africans facing more, not less, immiseration each decade, even as the numbers of free African Americans also increased. The test of a matured “politics of migration” approach to both slavery’s borderland and the political nation itself will likely be its ability to develop analyses that incorporate the legal and ideological as well as partisan and local aspects of the crossings that simultaneously troubled and inspired de facto and de jure segregation.41 Seeley also reminds us that Reconstruction took initial form from the movement of massive numbers of southerners within the South during the Revolution as well as the Civil War; the movement of troops and northerners to the South; and the movement of freed people and efforts to keep them in place.42 Recent work deepens while pushing further back in time the fundamental insight that Leon Litwack, William B. Cohen, and others brought to emancipation and Reconstruction: for freed people, mobility was freedom, and the struggles to preserve, extend, and limit it allows us to see the politics of mobility as an essential theme connecting the first and second American revolutions.43 “The consistency of a backlash to black freedom and mobility across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries” is striking, Seeley concludes, in arguing explicitly for seeing the more familiar dynamics of postbellum southern Reconstruction in the post-­Revolutionary Upper South and Lower North. This backlash was far from irrational, for as Heerman argues, free black rural settlements, as well as the free black urban communities, were “incubators of emancipation.” Migration patterns and laws changed in many states in reaction to events and lawmaking in the pivotal state of Virginia. The pattern of progress and backlash after the Revolution that is described by Riley and Van Gosse—a period that can be seen as both the rise of effective black politics and as a Great Reaction—seems strikingly similar to the Reconstruction of 1863–77 as described by Du Bois and Eric Foner. In the scholarship on both periods, we see an increasing willingness to question

Introduction

15

what is the beginning and the end of the story and an increasing willingness to see emancipation itself as a struggle shaped by movement and efforts to contain it.44 At the very least, elaborating the politics of mobility for African Americans seems to bridge local and bottom-­up with legal and institutional approaches in ways that augment what we have learned by focusing on labor, community, or “power.” Cultural Politics Revised: Formal and Informal Practices Political theorist Michael Hanchard suggests that in the Americas, politics itself determines when culture becomes political and when the “parallel politics” engaged in by the oppressed and disfranchised jumps the tracks and enters the formal public sphere. Moreover, these processes can only be truly understood in light of the state coercion—the violence and threats of violence—that have punctuated black struggles.45 Waldstreicher’s essay on Phillis Wheatley is perhaps the most insistent in this collection that in the African American context, culture—even high literary culture—was understood by contemporaries as political. What Henry Louis Gates Jr. called a “primal scene” of African American letters—the actual, formal grilling he imagined Wheatley receiving at the hands of a dozen of Boston’s elite men, who understood quite well what was at stake—can be reconceived as one of a series of scenes staged by Wheatley, public as well as primal scenes of black American politics. To make it an event, in short, begs the question of historical analysis, indeed puts it on the plane of political history.46 Much recent work reconceives what used to be studies of ideology, identity, the literary, or popular culture as material practices that, in creating audiences, lobbying the powerful, and seeking to change hearts and minds as well as laws, were neither separate from “organizing” or community building nor reducible to a history of ideas. Closer attention to theoretical questions, and to the language we use to describe black politics, is bearing fruit in this work; there is much dialogue and common ground, exemplified, for example, by the Colored Conventions project led by P. Gabrielle Foreman, which has been archiving and digitizing this central field of black activism.47 In his history of “organizing African American communities between the Revolution and the Civil War,” literary historian John Ernest observes that “community required a common sense of history, shared goals for the future, and lives interconnected by religious, educational, economic, and political forums for mutual assistance and debate.” The dilemma of this period so characterized by migration lay in the need not only to create local

16

Van Gosse and David Waldstreicher

black institutions and community but also to organize those communities extralocally, which meant to connect them communicatively as well. The colored conventions that “gathered to organize their resistance to an oppressive state,” and which themselves performed central republican rituals (including debate, celebration, voting, and the production of newspaper accounts), then emerge as central and substantive beyond their intellectual or ideological heft.48 While earlier scholarship sometimes criticized these efforts for failing to bring the revolution—debates were divisive and the results less than immediate—conventions and periodicals were as important for blacks as recent scholarship has shown they were for the contemporary women’s rights movement, for abolitionists, and indeed for any and every antebellum political party.49 Much as party politics would have been inconceivable without the medium of print and the mediations of the printer-­editors who increasingly by the 1830s themselves often became leading politicians, black leaders organized as well as broadcast using the most exciting media of the day. These actions and strategies need to be addressed in detail, as practices and as events, and some literary scholars, like Ernest and Foreman, seem willing to do that work. Gene Andrew Jarrett acknowledges that “a deeper issue of methodology must be addressed” if we are to understand “African American literature’s role in political imagination, political action’s role in African American literary imagination, and, conversely, African American literature’s role in political action,” which, he argues, has been substantial from Thomas Jefferson to Barack Obama.50 Jarrett stresses how, since the time of Wheatley and Jefferson but with increased intensity by the second half of the nineteenth century, the ability to consume as well as produce literature remained a specific qualification for voting and a key locus of racial discrimination. Waldstreicher has argued that blackface minstrelsy, the long-­acknowledged locus classicus of pop culture racism, had its origins, as a print as well as performance genre, in a backlash against black participation in the War of 1812 and in the voting and politicized festivity of black New Yorkers. Elaine Frantz Parsons has made a similar argument about the origins of the Ku Klux Klan in Tennessee during the late 1860s and early 1870s: The Klan’s response to black organizing was given extralocal life by white newspapers, including northern ones, which inspired copycat performances and mythologizing in print. While certain spectacular cases of black literacy like that of Wheatley, David Walker, and Frederick Douglass have long been understood as politicized flashpoints, we are only beginning to understand the dynamics of publicity and suppression that characterized local and extralocal black politics.51

Introduction

17

By writing as well as invoking history, Jarrett and Ernest meet historians more than halfway and signal the opportunities and needs. But perhaps historians are already there, providing ample proof of Jarrett’s argument that in the particular case of African Americans, culture and politics have never been in less than a reciprocal relationship that has been deeply consequential for citizenship and suffrage. At its best the growing literature on black cultural politics North and South has raised productive questions regarding how we conceptualize the political field, and especially the contests over the boundaries and nature of politics at a time when those boundaries themselves defined the prize. The Politics of Citizenship: Law, the State, and the States There is an alternative to approaching politics either via social movements’ agitation outside the electoral arena or through the regular functioning of voting, parties, and patronage inside it. Politics can also be seen in how individuals and groups engage with the state through the operations of law. Outside of the academy, this seems obvious—of course, it is a political act to go to court or claim a right via the law. Asserting that the ability to negotiate within the state apparatus was not “political” is odd on its face, but historians of African Americans in antebellum America have nonetheless largely ignored this kind of politics for two reasons. The first was, yet again, disciplinary: the dominance of social and cultural history combined with the self-­isolating tendencies of traditional legal history to wall off this kind of inquiry. Of course, court cases and legal judgments often featured in “movement histories,” but the law itself, its quotidian functioning and structure, remained opaque. The second was more fundamental—the mistaken assumption that only those with full citizenship rights, for example white men, could access the law, and therefore this variety of historical inquiry was irrelevant to free people of color and women, let alone slave men and women. “Law was about governance,” as Laura Edwards puts it, “and it overlapped with the kind of dynamics that we usually locate in political history.”52  The perception of the irrelevance of legal history now falls by the wayside. Over the past two decades, a body of new scholarship has demonstrated that women, free people of color, and even slaves (if indirectly) did engage in politics via the operations of law. Sarah Gronningsater’s interpretation of “formal politics without the vote” such as petitioning and lobbying provides another way of conceptualizing both what was at stake and how the battles

18

Van Gosse and David Waldstreicher

were fought by the second generation of free African Americans in the North. Her analysis of school politics also provides another angle on the politics of literacy, and further suggestions of the continuities from the first civil rights movement to the so-­called Long Civil Rights Movement after World War II. Similarly, Scott Heerman’s essay follows recent work that has investigated the “legalities” on the local level as key battlegrounds.53 Citizenship politics in the states and battles in county courts belie the usual distinctions between official politics and cultural politics; Riley makes clear why, by the 1820s, in the wake of both fugitive slave controversies and battles for the vote, arguments about race and belonging had become a critical terrain of struggle for black politics formal and informal. Christopher Bonner’s essay illustrates that while Roger Taney’s theory of black noncitizenship may have been execrably bad history, contesting such arguments made on the national scene publicly remained essential. The turn toward events and responses to them in the work of Bonner and Andrew Diemer in his essay on black responses to the Compromise of 1850 demonstrates how fresh and illuminating it can be to employ the tools of traditional political history to study African Americans. This seems especially important for the 1850s. A decade that has been seen as a low point and a moment of despair was also characterized by heightened organization and effectiveness.54 The essays by Diemer, Bonner, Gronningsater, and Dale Kretz also suggest a renewed interest in how African Americans and their allies understood the nation-­state, the states, and the rapidly changing constitutional order. If Americans of this period reinvented race in a distinct idiom and set of practices, the new history of African American political culture should trace how African Americans pursued forms of antiracism in multiple arenas, often with concrete results locally and extralocally. Legal history has become an exciting and fruitful location of such work, allowing clear lines to be drawn to other realms of politics and to the questions of jurisdiction that so shaped the Revolution, the federal consensus, and the Civil War.55 So has work on what the states and federal government actually did for and at the behest of African Americans, who came to hold, as Kretz puts it, “a vision of freedom bonded with, rather than without, the federal state.” The essays here by Diemer and Bonner also display the fruits of such understandings, as African Americans appear, in the key controversies of the 1850s, as political actors who spurred events that, as every white politician knew well, could not be controlled by compromises or even Supreme Court decisions. Citizenship politics raised basic questions of sovereignty at and between levels of government (or loci of

Introduction

19

politics). At its best, the new histories of citizenship politics support, and are supported by, the new histories of movement as politics and the new work on the transnational dimensions of African American politics. Transnational Politics After American Nationalism: War, Empire, and Diasporas The example of Phillis Wheatley confirms arguments made by Gosse and Gerald Horne that black American politics emerged along Atlantic and imperial as well as domestic and sectional axes.56 Already in the 1790s, the international mobility of Africans had become controversial. Earlier debates about black nationalism versus Americanism among African Americans posed stark choices of strategy and identity—race or civic belonging?—which scholars in the 1970s and ’80s often felt it necessary to parse, as if everyone in African American history saw a fork in the road marked by caricatures of Martin R. Delany, Booker T. Washington, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X. Ultimately historians have found these to be false choices that do not do justice to the flexibility or the vicissitudes of black identities, African diasporic politics, or American political culture. Black liberation has always had universalistic implications just as doctrines of equality inspired periodic nationalist ventures. In these realms, ideological consistency could not compete with changing opportunities for alliances, from the local to the national to the international. The essay by James Shinn Jr. on the Free Cuba movement finds that “thoroughgoing nationalism,” as in American nationalism, characterized “African American international engagement in the years immediately following the Civil War.” Both the international engagement and the nationalism were always simultaneously strategic and immediately political; after all, the earliest articulation of American nationalism, whether of the Hamiltonian or Jeffersonian variety, pivoted on international allegiances and enmities. Debates over nationalism, whether black or American, have too often obscured the essentially colonial or imperial contexts for black politics inside the United States. This volume is shaped by those recent scholars who see a long history, and manifold varieties, of black internationalism in the age of revolutions and emancipations. The rapid remaking of empires and republics in pro-­and antislavery directions meant that African Americans could not just look abroad for inspiration. They had to also position themselves as actors in international struggles with obvious implications for a half-­slave,

20

Van Gosse and David Waldstreicher

half-­free republic that regularly went to war in order to protect its trade, its borders, and its prospects for expansion. Stepping back to see the hemispheric context is sobering, even beyond the current interest in the Haitian Revolution. Jeremy Adelman, for instance, argues that, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, social revolutions (which sometimes but not always led to emancipations) resulted from imperial breakdowns, while conversely the latter were in important ways the effects of the increased autonomy that resulted from ramping up the slave trade.57 Throughout these decades, wars tended to free slaves and codify emancipations, and the differences between civil wars, foreign wars, and wars of independence tended to blur in the African diasporic context. We might as easily have added “Civil Wars” to the title of this volume, insofar as the American Revolution is now appreciated as a civil war, in the South at least. As historians like Edward Rugemer, Matthew Karp, Christopher Leslie Brown, and others stress, between 1790 and 1860, strife in Haiti, Mexico, and the rest of Latin America had real effects on the shape of slavery and emancipation, and the possibility of black politics, in the United States.58 One of the signal opportunities of the “global turn” in American history is that it makes black diasporic politics seem like the norm rather than a desperate exception. In that sense, as Shinn’s narrative suggests, it can complement rather than replace a renewed stress on domestic politics. Choosing between the global and the local is ultimately as false a choice for history now as it would have been for black politics then.

A Conclusion and a Provocation Historians increasingly see the Civil War and Reconstruction as an epoch of revolution and counter-­revolution that turned on the status and the actions of African Americans. We might adapt W. E. B. Du Bois’s famous paradigm from the turn of the twentieth century: the color line was the unresolved question of the nineteenth century as well as the twentieth. After all, Du Bois also later insisted that because of emancipation, the Civil War was the only truly revolutionary thing that had ever happened in the United States. In doing so he put a new spin on Charles and Mary Beard’s notion of the Civil War as the nation-­making “Second American Revolution.” Whatever the story of democracy and freedom in America had been and might become, black people would be central actors in it. Moreover, their story of oppression and liberation, progress and backlash, could not be understood without

Introduction

21

taking the full measure of their own actions and the political contexts in which those actions had many and often surprising consequences.59 The twenty-­first century has seen new interpretations of the late eighteenth century that place the politics of slavery and the actions of Africans nearer to the center of the Founding.60 The Revolution itself now appears as a violent civil war with contours shaped by the “forgotten fifth” of enslaved Americans. The long U.S. Revolutionary settlement, which defined the nation as half slave and half free, constituted not only a First Emancipation but also a First Reconstruction. In this emerging synthesis, there were not two separate, discrete processes of emancipation followed by the contested incorporation of black people as citizens, but a single long process beginning during the Revolution in the North, playing out slowly state by state, and culminating in the South with the passage of the Reconstruction amendments. The United States was not a singular republic whose rising democracy was limited by race and slavery, but only the first among various American republics in which slave-­produced wealth made independence thinkable and a settler revolt precipitated emancipation.61 This literature is fulfilling the agenda David Brion Davis set out decades ago to place the problem of slavery at the center of U.S. history, with the overlapping “Age of Revolutions” and the “Age of Emancipations” constituting its foundational events. Davis paved the way for current directions by seeing slavery and antislavery as dynamically entwined with “the perishability of revolutionary time.” He realized that history did not simply progress in some Whiggish fashion from the politics of a revolutionary elite circa 1789 to the popular politics of the demos circa 1828 before reaching the inevitably delayed politics of antislavery circa 1856. Throughout, we remain on the territory of politics—international, national, and sectional—however we choose to periodize or wherever we focus. Davis’ choice of the term “problem” for slavery, echoing as it did Du Bois’s “problem of the color line,” put the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries squarely into modernity’s realm of contested ideas, in which Africans and their descendants become makers as well as subjects of history.62 In short, as more and more historians look transnationally to define an “age of emancipations,” fewer assume that emancipation was a social and sectional question as opposed to a political and national one, or that either revolutions or civil wars in the United States have been fundamentally political and only accidentally, or afterward, emancipatory. Reconstruction, in all its political complexity and ambiguous beginnings and endings, might be how the United States has done revolution settlements.63 The traditional,

22

Van Gosse and David Waldstreicher

hard-­won federalism of U.S. politics, itself a product of the Revolution and at issue in the Civil War, rested upon strict distinctions between the levels, locales, and modalities of politics. The development of voting as the epitome of democracy during this period reinforces the scholarly division of labor between types and scales of politics, be they executive, legislative, or judicial; local, state, national, or diplomatic; electoral, social movement, or cultural politics. Yet if there is any conclusion to be drawn from the recent literature on black struggles, it is that African Americans confounded these categories or distinctions for pragmatic reasons. The categories themselves were developed in part to exclude, domesticate, or depoliticize them: to render them what used to be called prepolitical beings. A broader perspective suggests that the relationship between U.S. politics and African American political traditions was reciprocal and consequential in shaping two revolutions that were also civil wars, and two reconstructions that were also emancipations. The revolutionary, warring, and emancipatory dimensions of these struggles could not but have international roots and reverberations. The implications of such a revision surely challenge the standard narrative of U.S. history, but it may offer an equally bracing challenge to how we conceptualize African American history and politics. To emphasize the blackness or singularity of African American political traditions may underestimate some of the sources of its transformative strengths, as well as some of the reasons that racial backlashes recur. To see emancipations and reconstructions as a cycle that has repeated means grappling with the reactionary nadirs, the Thermidors, that have provided the segregated ground from which new struggles must arise. To conceive of black politics as only or mainly a social movement or a culture of resistance is just as limiting as seeing only formal politics: it misses the reasons why it has been and continues to be all of these things. Like the civil rights revolution, the first revolutions, emancipations, and reconstructions required coalition politics, black institutions, and a cultural front. Much as a focus on national political history risks marginalizing African Americans, the very act of recovering a lost history of black political activity risks divorcing black politics from the American politics it meant to transform. Emphasizing integration risks missing the counterrevolutions that so often followed, and which testify all too clearly to what had been revolutionary, and sometimes emancipatory, in aspiration and in fact, in black and U.S. politics. Ultimately, this volume advances the perhaps novel argument that black “politics” in all its forms and at all levels is not merely important or integral,

Introduction

23

but actually central to the early history of the United States. Abetted by powerful allies in both Reconstructions (post-­1790 and post-­1865), it challenged in fundamental ways the evolving narrative of a white-­settler state, opening a breach that has not yet closed. What is America to us, to you? That is the question that black men and women began asking during the Revolution, and with ever-­increasing force across the long nineteenth century until the historic period of defeat, retreat, and regrouping Rayford Logan accurately named the “nadir.” They ask it still.

Chapter 1

Women’s Politics, Antislavery Politics, and Phillis Wheatley’s American Revolution David Waldstreicher

By 1773, when she was about nineteen years old, Phillis Wheatley’s poetry had not only made her famous: her publications had made her into a one-­ woman antislavery argument. Aware that her own enslavement was being used against the patriots even as she wrote sympathetically of the American, or at least New England, cause, Wheatley carefully kept her options open. Consequently, her public actions garnered studied responses from leading statesmen: Lord Dartmouth, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson. She became, in other words, a significant player in the intertwined politics of slavery and Revolution. It is time we asked why it was a woman, not a man, who played such a singular role. Wheatley’s death in 1784, at what some have called the high point of Revolutionary-­era radicalism in several realms, makes it hard to test whether she suffered, or would have suffered, a “backlash.”1 Perhaps partly for this reason, Wheatley has not had much of a place in the recent reevaluation of women’s politics in the late eighteenth century. Political historians generally keep their distance, ceding such territory to literary scholars, who rightly see her as a pioneer and have made increasingly bold claims for her political savvy in recent years. Historians of slavery, meanwhile, wonder if she’s typical enough to warrant sustained attention. And historians of women have to face her unusual mix of slave status and her unprecedented, publicized interactions with elites. Popular historical treatments of women in the Revolutionary era sometimes give her a celebratory chapter but not much in the way of analysis.2 The result is some confusion about her role and her intentions. For example,

Women’s Politics, Antislavery Politics, and American Revolution

25

Gary Nash depicts her as lobbing her fascinating critique from the pious, feminine margins, to little effect. By contrast, Henry Wiencek has Wheatley helping to convince Washington to reverse his initially negative policy on free black soldiers, in tacit exchange for the laurels Wheatley could supply.3 But what if we considered Wheatley in relation to recent descriptions of elite and ordinary women’s political activities and the recent scholarship on slaves’ politics? Categories like “mortuary politics,” and expanded definitions of public diplomacy, may indeed apply to Wheatley. Certainly a heightened appreciation of the role of the press in the politics of the Revolution helps explain the threat she posed to revolutionaries like Franklin and Jefferson who needed to spin the slavery question the Americans’ way.4 Careful attention to her actions suggests that Wheatley accomplished something that only a woman, and perhaps only a slave woman who could balance religious, classical, and secular political idioms, could have done: she helped force the issue of the relationship of slavery to the Revolution and American identity. During the mid-­eighteenth century slavery became implicated in the seemingly separate issues of economy and sovereignty. These implications shaped both the Revolution itself and the ensuing creation of the federal republic. Anglo-­Americans faced the fact that the colonies were different from England not only because they had more liberty or more land or less aristocracy but also because they had slavery; that they had slavery because they were colonies; and the same justifications for that or any distinctly colonial state of affairs might also justify limits on colonists’ power, their liberties, or their equality as British citizens. When the patriot side of the pamphlet debate is read for “the ideological origins of the American Revolution” and the British side—along with its tendency to bring up slavery—is rendered backward, irrelevant, and ultimately foreign to American history, we miss a crucial, shaping dimension of our past.5 Moreover, the era’s striking mix of antislavery and backlash—or radicalism and retrenchment—have their parallels in the experience of women. Wheatley operated at the nexus of the politics of slavery, the imperial controversy, and the ambiguous, shifting opportunities and risks that both presented for women. Closer attention to Phillis Wheatley suggests a Wheatleyan moment circa 1772–73 that becomes a landmark in the struggle against slavery and a moment of crisis for the revolutionaries. For an alternative “primal scene” to the apocryphal (and politically isolated) “Wheatley Trial” before Boston’s worthies first imagined by young adult biographer Shirley Graham DuBois and more recently reimagined as “lost to history” (and thus, research) by Henry Louis Gates Jr., we might look to the events of October 10, 1772, when

26

David Waldstreicher

Wheatley took advantage of a visit from Thomas Woolridge, a traveler looking for exotic colonial goods, to get the attention of Lord Dartmouth, the colonial secretary. The poem Wheatley produced suggested that the newly appointed Dartmouth might simultaneously recognize the justice of the colonists’ claims and why an African might “pray / Others may never feel tyrranic sway.” In fairly short order Wheatley traveled to England to get her book published, was shown around the Tower of London by none other than the abolitionist Granville Sharp, and became an antislavery celebrity—and personally emancipated, thanks to the sarcastic comments in the London press about how Americans could hold such a prodigy in chains. For many contemporaries, the issue of the colonial controversy and the matter of slavery had been, effectively, linked—with consequences that shaped both the Revolution and the nascent antislavery movement.6 Phillis Wheatley’s career is as clear a demonstration of this potentially emancipatory process of politicization as we are likely to find. Wheatley brought out the double meaning, and risks, of the classical (and republican) revival in the context of slavery. She did this, in part, by recreating herself through the Greek and Roman classics—as a neoclassical poet—and by making the relationship of the patriots’ dilemma to the ancient and modern politics of slavery a key theme of her very public project. The key question is not whether she was so exceptional as to perhaps mean nothing outside of, perhaps, intellectual or literary traditions; it is what she accomplished politically—and maybe even as a woman in particular. We need to return to the notion of a “moment” in order to emphasize these were not just ideologies or words on a page but events. Imaginative leaps and a new kind of political and cultural practice occurred. In the Somerset v. Steuart case of 1772, Granville Sharp’s reading of the ancient constitution meshed with James Somerset’s inspired fugitivity and with King’s Bench Chief Justice Lord Mansfield’s desire to enforce Parliamentary supremacy to produce a juridical dimension of this happening—a decision. During that same year, a pious Boston slave girl with an astoundingly sensitive ear, an awareness of exactly what it meant to be called “an uncultivated Barbarian from Africa,” and a hard-­won talent for putting herself in others’ shoes provided another happening, at the other end of the Atlantic, in another sector of the public sphere.7 Wheatley’s own realization that she could address her African and enslaved experience as well as her captors’ prejudices and practices through an engagement with the Mediterranean heritage—a heritage seen by her captors as at once distant (ancient) and universal—was pivotal, especially when integrated with her evangelical piety and ability to engage

Women’s Politics, Antislavery Politics, and American Revolution

27

with both patriot and metropolitan skeptics. Her profundity and political effectiveness derived not just from her classicism but from its studied inflection of her Africanism—and her womanhood.

Wheatley’s African Worlds What can we know of Wheatley’s African experience and what it meant to her in the absence of other, or more direct, testimony? We know that Wheatley came over on the Phillis in 1761, at about the age of seven or eight. That’s a lot to know about an individual enslaved person during the Revolutionary era. It has been tempting in recent years to presume she came directly from Senegambia, since she later mentions Gambia as an origin, and the shipowner Timothy Fitch directed the captain to that region. But she could have been taken or retaken at any number of West African ports. Like many slaving ships in this era, the Phillis was also directed by its owner to make as many stops as necessary to fill the cargo. Senegambian voyages did not stay long in port at mid-­century, if only because of a high ratio of shipboard revolts there.8 So we do not know where she was from. And yet if we apply what we do know about West Africa and slavery in the late 1750s and think of those facts as things Wheatley knew (better than us), a meaningful picture emerges, one that allows us to make sense of what she brought to the writing table. It was not unusual for young female children to be caught up in the slave trade. They were more easily captured and pawned; their sale was in some ways where the more traditional forms of enslavement and the newer, more market-­oriented forms overlapped, resulting in an intensified kidnapping of women and children. Historians of Senegambia and West Africa agree that the 1750s saw a ramping up of wars within Africa, violent European competition for trading posts, and pressure from African coastal merchants on their warlord suppliers to liquidate human assets. In general, “most people who found themselves in slave ships did so in the aftermath of war.” She may have traveled significantly before arriving in a West African port—indeed, a sizable chunk of the seven-­year-­old’s life may have been spent within the slave trade before her middle passage. A precociously bright and observant child would have learned quite a bit about trades in women, about travel, about the commonality of slavery and about its spread, and about war and change in the African inland and Atlantic.9 The recent literature on the slave trade, and oral culture in West Africa, stresses the role of women as poets who represented, and often glorified,

28

David Waldstreicher

(male) authority figures. Roger D. Abrahams has described “verbal play directed at powerful figures” as a West African tradition that made it to the Americas. Other scholars of this period underline the importance of death rituals both in African cultures and in the changing Africa emerging from the slave trade. The one detail that exists in Wheatley family lore about Phillis’s African memories involved her mother pouring out water to the sun in the morning, as part of what the recorders understood as a religious ritual.10 Much of this background would have played directly into the role of the poet in eighteenth-­century Anglo-­America—the poets of empire described by David Shields, the elegiac tradition interpreted by Max Cavitch, and the lamentations and narrations of African women in Atlantic slavery analyzed by Vincent Brown and others.11 In both Africa and America during the eighteenth century, a woman talking eloquently about war and death could become a more valued member of an intimate and political community by doing so. It might even be a way to reestablish kin ties in a real, substantive sense. Many of her poems, and especially the early ones, were in effect gift offerings for the bereaved, offered in a Christian idiom to be sure, but universalizing in effect. We know that her poems circulated first in manuscript, between acquaintances, and that she was asked to read or recite in parlors long before male authorities wondered who could have taught her or whether she actually wrote the poems.12 The female networks she found were most likely her first indication that some aspects of her African knowledge of how to be in the world, how to relate to others, how to survive and even thrive amid strangers, might, indeed, translate. Recent studies of Atlantic cultures stress syncretism despite—and sometimes because of—uneven power relationships: even exploitative relations are, after all, relationships. People did not simply choose assimilation or cultural autochthony any more than our grandparents did or they do today. What would the various middle grounds have looked like to a slave in Boston? It surely varied depending on who was listening. Jeffrey Bruce, who was captured in the Niger Valley, spent a few months in Barbados, and arrived in Boston just the summer before Wheatley did, remembered that Africans there “asked me many questions about my native country.” At the same time, as Anne Bailey suggests, the slave trade had an effect on individuals of the sort we associate with modern wars: veterans often do not like to talk about it directly, and certainly not to people who not only did not share the experience but, more importantly, do not admit their responsibility for the horror of it all.13 It is entirely possible to interpret Wheatley, then, as not experiencing complete culture shock even as she converted and acculturated enough to

Women’s Politics, Antislavery Politics, and American Revolution

29

write contemporary English verse. It seems likely that she chose poetic roles and forms for their very continuities with her West African memories. The issue here is not whether Wheatley had African or slave trade memories, kept them alive, or knew how and when to share them; it is how they related to the idioms she did choose in her writing, which made her a public figure at an astonishingly young age.

Wheatley’s Ancient Worlds Most scholars have neglected, or continued to condescend to, what to most of us is most foreign and inaccessible about Wheatley—I mean, besides her Africanism: her classicism.14 We’ve been so shaped by our generations’ lack of a classical education, and perhaps by the idea that, as Bernard Bailyn argued, the American founders were not real classical scholars and that their appropriations of classics had no substantive meaning, that we tend to view classicism in this period as mere window dressing, or the playful and pragmatic use of pseudonyms—a kind of heady yet superficial identity politics, the equivalent of a toga at a frat party.15 But what does the naïve reader of Homer, Terence, and Virgil, who were so central to mid-­eighteenth-­century education both in the original and in translation, discover? Tricksters and gods who intervene in human lives. Gods that behave like humans; humans who are godlike. Direct speech with the dead. An overwhelming importance given to eloquent acts of speech, and to “professional rhapsodists” who represent “the dead and defeated” while singing of gods, of battles, and of heroes who might even be present at the feast. Libations poured out for the gods, ritually, regularly. A world of war (The Iliad). A world of consequential, tragic and yet sometimes redemptive travels (The Odyssey). Women as prizes—booty of war—and as slaves: most of the slaves in The Odyssey are women. Individual women who are on the bottom but seem to have the power to determine the doings of men, and not merely as catalysts. A “dread of enslavement” as a central trope, as slaves are made free, and men and women made slaves.16 Slaves who are smarter than their masters, who manipulate situations to their own ends in Terence’s comedies, or who may be the loyal keys to the reclaiming of the kingdom, like Eumaeus in The Odyssey. Eumaeus is a boy prince who was sold away, captured: he indicates a world in which anyone might be enslaved, but still might come to love his captors, and be in some sense a member of the family. In their careful words and whispered

30

David Waldstreicher

intimacies with the storm-­ tossed and himself formerly captive Ulysses, Eumaeus and the maid Eurycleia, a parallel female figure, emerge as central to the plot and denouement of the epic poem. They appear at first to be bit players, happy slaves, but they make history happen—and gain at least the prospect of freedom as a result. Indeed, in Homer’s ancient world, there is a discernible relation between travel, encounter, war, and enslavement, one that would have meant all the more because of the several mentions of Egypt and Ethiopia in the text. In the later Greek and Roman literature the importance of slaves in everyday life, as “vibrant violators and exploiters of the intimacies of family life” only intensifies. So does the ubiquity of war as a cruel leveler. Africa appears with even greater clarity and frequency as a place on the map. The very first of Virgil’s Eclogues, often used as a teaching text for children, is a dialogue in which one interlocutor speaks of his escape from slavery while the other forecasts exile to, among other places, Africa, in the wake of the forcible transfer of land to soldiers. And Horace, so clearly a favorite of Wheatley as of her other favorite, Alexander Pope, repeatedly makes a theme of how patronage and his talents made it possible for him to live a better life despite his father’s low status as a former slave.17 Students of slavery have made much of the travesty committed by masters who gave names like Caesar and Pompey to their household bondsmen. Wheatley carried the name of the slave ship she was bought from, the Phillis. But was it refreshing to learn that the name referred to a beautiful woman in Virgil’s third Eclogue? A tragic, eloquent figure in Ovid’s Heroides? Or that, in one of Horace’s Odes, Phillis is a slave so virtuous “she must / Have come down from kings!”18 If the late colonial master class fulfilled their imperial fantasies by imagining their slaving as akin to Greek and Roman varieties, that required, or at least allowed, them to do more than merely condescend to their slaves as primitive and pagan. Like the Christian and republican traditions, classical idioms had universalizing, as well as inegalitarian, potential. In short, by the time Wheatley opens her 1773 Poems by citing the Roman slave poet Terence, “African by birth,” as a precedent, in a poem titled “To Maecenas,” the patron of Horace, she had connected a certain set of dots. The classical world, her Africa, and her America exist in the same universe. Poets are actors in this world. They make sense of war, of cross-­cultural encounters, enslavement, the supernatural. Women can be central to a cultural and political drama: the traffic in women is a kind of original sin that makes and unmakes the world—the real origins of slavery in fact—and it is the job of the poet to knit the world back together, and maybe free herself

Women’s Politics, Antislavery Politics, and American Revolution

31

in the process. Classical example and models do not consist of unattainable brilliance (the best that has been thought and said), or primitive exoticism to be appreciated, if at all, for its very difference from a modern Christian world; rather, the classics are classic because they apply to her worlds. They are pagan, but they are witty, playful, worldly. Squaring what’s good, what’s not so good, what’s the same and what’s different, what’s sacred and profane about the ancient and the modern, is like any other act of comparing times, places, and mores.19 And most of all, if a women and a slave seeks to hitch her desires to those of men and nations, it is wisest to work by indirect comparison. The classical revival provided her with a way of talking about her experience without talking about it directly. In that light, I would like to propose another, earlier primal scene of the Wheatleyan Moment—perhaps the moment when she first made real in practice the possibilities of a dialogue between the African, the classical, and the contemporary. Wheatley’s first published poem, which appeared in a Newport paper in 1767, is about a near-­shipwreck of two Nantucket Quaker merchants. Written by a Bostonian, it nicely exemplifies a kind of archipelagic New England experience analogous to the ancient Greek world, and resolves a distinctly Homeric set of queries about the causes of a shipwreck into a Christian salvation. Did Fear and Danger so perplex your Mind, As made you fearful of the Whistling Wind? Was it not Boreas knit his angry Brow Against you? Or did Consideration bow? To lend you Aid, did not his Winds combine? To stop your passage with a churlish Line, Did haughty Eolus with Contempt look down With Aspect windy, and a study’d Frown? Regard them not;—the Great Supreme, the Wise, Intends for something hidden from our Eyes.20 It isn’t hard to imagine why the survivor of a slave ship could identify with another storm-­tossed voyage. But these lines are also literally evocative of The Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid. In Pope’s translation of The Odyssey, the ghost of Agamemnon asks the ghost of Amphideon, one of the suitors slain by Odysseus, “What cause compell’d so many, and so gay, / To tread the downward, melancholy way? . . . did the rage of stormy Neptune sweep / Your lives at once, and whelm beneath

32

David Waldstreicher

the deep?” There are many such storm-­tossed voyages in Homer, accompanied by questions about the gods’ intentions. An even more direct thematic link lies in the beginnings of Dryden’s Aeneid, which begins with Juno asking Eolus, who rules the winds and the waves, to bring down the ship of the Trojans, whom she calls “a race of wandering slaves.” He does so with the help of Boreas, the north wind. Ultimately Neptune calms the waves. Aeneas and his Trojans land in Libya—later described as part of “Africk,” one of numerous references in the poem to North and East African peoples.21 The poem to Hussey and Coffin is also typical of Wheatley’s later work in calling attention to the inspired poet’s role as a mediator between God and the subject, simultaneously humbling herself and exalting her role. The poet, in Pope/Homer’s version of such a scene, channels the dead; in Dryden/ Virgil, he channels the gods, the ultimate religious act and act of translation. In Wheatley’s version, the poet and the audience come together in response to trauma and a Christian supersession that is beyond the ancients. Yet the entire project presumes a careful building upon the classics—classics that, for Wheatley, depict a world and a set of experiences that are not only analogous to her own voyage, but also refer directly to Africa, to slaves, and to women as central actors.22 When we pay careful attention to the contextual information we have, we see the thirteen-­year-­old Wheatley writing the role of her lifetime. The preface to the poem published in the newspaper described her hearing the story of Hussey and Coffin’s voyage while waiting at table—precisely the kind of banquet scene with slaves and poets in attendance that recurs throughout The Odyssey. Moreover, Coffin, one of the merchants she addressed, was a member of what would become a staunchly antislavery family. Wheatley chose this occasion because she knew that her (Quaker) subjects were more than usually sympathetic to her situation, perhaps more open to the possibility of a special status for her. What’s most striking here is the boldness of the identification. We’re all on the same Christian and classical team. Poetry linked these worlds in a universal culture. Wheatley does insist on progress from the pagan worldview to the Christian, and in that sense is certainly a “modern,” but she manages to do so in a way that levels the playing field. If the ancient Mediterranean is standing in for Africa—for her, and for her audience insofar as she is speaking that language of neoclassicism—her performance opens up another, more historicized way of viewing her seeming self-­distancing from Africa. Wheatley’s relationship to Africa in her poems has been the subject of much angst and speculation. It is usually construed in a negative fashion, most famously in “On Being Brought from AFRICA

Women’s Politics, Antislavery Politics, and American Revolution

33

to AMERICA,” a poem Henry Louis Gates Jr. reports as “the most reviled poem in African-­American literature” because of its seeming thankfulness for enslavement, refigured as conversion: ’TWAS mercy brought me from my pagan land Taught my benighted soul to understand That there’s a God, that there’s a Saviour too: Once I redemption neither sought nor knew. She moves on immediately, however, to question her readers’ racism: “Some view our sable race with scornful eye, / ‘Their colour is a diabolic dye.’ ” Recent readings argue there is a more challenging antiracist statement in the final couplet, “Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain, / May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train,” if one pays attention to the italics and imagines the voice as ironic rather than pleading. But even a more literal reading of the middle of the poem must admit that at its center is a critique of those who focus on race.23 The would-­be Christians are the only ones in the poem not moving forward. The poem is an attempt to seize control of the meaning of Africa and America in time, and to say that race is a static, ahistorical way of thinking about slavery, Christianity, and civilization. The ambivalence about Africa parallels her contemporaries’ ambivalence about the ancient world. Even from 1767 Wheatley’s invocations of Africa are decidedly double-­ edged. They use presumptions of African pagan backwardness to challenge easy notions of progress. “Must Ethiopians be imploy’d for you / Greatly rejoice if any good I do,” she asked in “Deism,” an early unpublished poem that went through a number of extant variants and might also be seen as following a self-­hating script—if it did not end in a prose encomium that sounds like an adaptation of her African mother’s morning sun rite, but Christianized: “May I O eternal salute aurora to begin thy Praise, shall mortal dust do that which immortals can scarcely comprehend.”24 In a similar 1767 poem, later revised, an appeal to wayward Harvard students, she refers to “the Sable land of error’s darkest night / There, sacred Nine! For you no place was found, / Parent of mercy, ’twas thy Powerfull hand / Brought me in safety from that dark abode.” Christianity saves—but it also allows her access to the “sacred” classical muses. If this is a refusal of Africa on behalf of Christianity, it is also a valorization of her authority to mediate between that ancient world and this modern one. And that is the real game changer. When Wheatley successfully entered into the colonial controversy and won her transatlantic audience, she found

34

David Waldstreicher

herself enabled to say rather different things about Africa. In her Dartmouth poem of 1772, she can mock Anglo presumptions that Africans remember their home country as a “fancy’d happy seat,” given that it is a place where fathers lose their daughters to the slave trade. This is not the first reference to paternity in the poem: in the first eight lines, celebrating Dartmouth’s ascent to the secretaryship and its possibilities for the preservation of colonial liberties, the new secretary is the “sire” as well as the “friend, [and] messenger” of peace and liberty. Wheatley improves upon patriot hopes for Dartmouth, the “psalm-­singer” Lord, by celebrating New England liberties revived and then intuiting that the good Lord is wondering how and why she would care. Her African experience, she insists, is precisely what allows her to understand liberty deprived and the generational discourse through which patriots sought to influence imperial politics. The praise song, in other words, permits her to criticize slavery, participate in the Anglo-­American conversation about liberties, and seem very, very discerning as well as polite.25 Even given the enhanced appreciation of young women as a demographic and cultural force and as potential symbols of and participants in rebellion in the late eighteenth century, this is a remarkable bid to link antislavery to the patriot appeal.26 It seems time to ask whether it would have been possible if Wheatley had not been a woman. To be blunt: Could a man have done it, and in the process become a touchstone of the debate about slavery and American protest? I do not think so. Her ability to coyly shame Anglo-­Americans while praising the colonial secretary depends on her feminine perspective as well as her African and slave identity. The presentation of the poem, as recounted by Thomas Woolridge in the letter sent enclosing the poem to Dartmouth, supports such a gendered reading of Wheatley’s actions. When Woolridge showed up in the Wheatleys’ parlor and asked to see the goods, Phillis told him “she was then busy and engaged for the Day,” but he could “propose a subject” and return in the morning. This is a slave woman turning the tables, acting like a lady, at once acknowledging her servitude and seducing the genteel visitor, because she has something that he wants. For she did not always play the daughter, the child prodigy, or the feminine mourning specialist: she could play it as a romance as well. In a 1775 verse dialogue with British officers, she accepted their feminizing pastoral reading of Africa, which makes her the bard of the continent. Like Virgil, Horace, and Alexander Pope, she retailed pastoral nostalgia in part to be able to comment on the effects of war, including enslavement. Who, indeed, was a barbarian in a world at war? Wondering, in early 1776, about “the proceedings

Women’s Politics, Antislavery Politics, and American Revolution

35

of nations that are fav’d with the divine revelation of the gospel,” sharing her “anxious suspense concerning the fortune of this unnatural civil contest,” she laid the stakes on the line. Maybe the British “thirst of Dominion” was “design’d as the punishment of the national views of others,” the Americans, “tho’ it bears the appearance of greater Barbarity than that of the unciviliz’d part of mankind.”27 We ought to wonder, more than we have, what she did during the rest of the Revolutionary War in her lost second book manuscript, or what she might have done had she survived past 1784.

Sometimes by Simile Ultimately Wheatley followed through on an analogy that proved useful in confronting the American Revolution as well: as she put it in her last published poem in 1784, “new born Rome shall give Britannia law.”28 The missing term, the simile implicit I think for many readers as well as for Wheatley, was Africa. As in the poem to Lord Dartmouth, where she did explicitly compare her enslavement to the oppression of the colonists by way of explaining why she could understand the latter, Wheatley’s great theme is one of triangulation by analogies: or in her preferred term, in the most resonant description she gave of her own craft, “Sometimes by Simile, a victory’s won.”29 These similes depend on something very important that modern scholarship on slavery has reasserted, but which American slaveholders came to deny in the wake of antislavery: the exceptional, not at all progressive or even timeless, quality of American racial slavery. The first, crucial step was the realization that, as Joseph C. Miller writes, “for the ancient Mediterranean . . . more relevant analogies come from Africa than from the modern Americas.”30 The relationship of Africa to Atlantic America might still be analogous to (not reducible to) the relationship between the classical world and the modern, but it was neither a simple equivalence—empire’s historical return—nor, given the spread of racial slavery as a sine qua non of New World empire, necessarily an improvement or supersession. The implications are stunning. If you say that the modern is superior, you can be shamed when you do “ancient” practices, including slavery. If you think the ancients are a worthy model, or at least not inferior in certain regards, then comparisons between them and the present are warranted— and Africa might be part of the conversation. Wheatley engaged in precisely these sorts of comparisons in a letter to Samson Occom published in eleven New England newspapers in 1774.

36

David Waldstreicher

I have this Day received your obliging kind Epistle, and am greatly satisfied with your Reasons respecting the Negroes, and think highly reasonable what you offer in Vindication of their natural Rights: Those that invade them cannot be insensible that the divine Light is chasing away the thick Darkness which broods over the Land of Africa; and the Chaos which has reign’d so long, is converting into beautiful Order, and [r]eveals more and more clearly, the glorious Dispensation of civil and religious Liberty, which are so inseparably Limited, that there is little or no Enjoyment of one Without the other: Otherwise, perhaps, the Israelites had been less solicitous for their Freedom from Egyptian slavery; I do not say they would have been contented without it, by no means, for in every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of Freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance; and by the Leave of our modern Egyptians I will assert, that the same Principle lives in us.31 To refer to modern Egyptians, and call them “ours,” raised the question of American slavery and its modernity. Wheatley insisted that slavery was implicated in the very meaning, and thus the future, of America.32 These were practical as well ideological questions. Phillis Wheatley in Boston was caught between slavery’s possible or incipient amelioration and its extension—that is to say, between slavery’s seemingly ancient persistence, indeed its cycles in imperial histories, and its modern American apotheosis in race. One of the things that have led historians away from Wheatley is that her experience does not look like typical plantation slavery. Wheatley’s slavery looks like some aspects of ancient slavery. She was taught, like a member of the family; she was emancipated because of her skill. Our imaginations are so shaped by the later use of classical precedents by antebellum southerners, and perhaps by similar polemical battles over the character of African slavery and the role of Africans in the slave trade, that we forget the basic differences between varieties of ancient or traditional slavery, and the North American variant. In Africa and in the classical world, slavery was brutal and ubiquitous, but slavery was not racial, and slaves, especially in the Roman world, could become, or more often became, free.33 Homer, indeed, seems to dwell on precisely this process of people becoming enslaved and becoming free. But it is precisely this that made Wheatley a potential threat to the American revolutionaries, such that the patriot newspapers and printers began to decline to publish her around, interestingly enough, 1772. It isn’t just that

Women’s Politics, Antislavery Politics, and American Revolution

37

she proved Africans can write poetry, that they’re capable, so race as a justification for slavery was a lie. It’s that she showed that modern, American slavery was worse than the ancient kind precisely insofar as it did not celebrate or even free individuals like Wheatley. She raised the distinct possibility that history was going backward, not forward, in America and signaled the implications in numerous ways, even as she kept lines of communication open with both sides of the imperial controversy. A London reviewer of her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) registered the possibilities here by spending his first paragraph mocking her use of solar imagery as all too African and not really classical (“Homer and Hesiod breathed the cool and temperate air of the Meles, and the poets and heroes of Greece and Rome had no very intimate commerce with the sun”), only to conclude by stating how poorly it reflected on “the people of Boston” and their “principles of liberty” to keep even a “merely imitative” African poet in bondage. Similarly, some months later, Thomas Day, in the preface to the second edition of his popular antislavery poem “The Dying Negro” (1774), chided American “inconsistency” and called Americans worse than Spartans.34 This is why Thomas Jefferson built the “Manners” chapter of Notes on the State of Virginia around his famous cocktail party–like slam: “religion, indeed could produce a Phillis Whately; but it could not produce a poet. The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism. The heroes of the Dunciad are to her as Hercules to the author of that poem.” Jefferson had a copy of Wheatley’s Poems in his library, and marginalia in the Library of Congress copy that appears to be his handwriting suggests that he tracked her appearances in newspapers in 1773.35 The misspelling of her name may be in the manner of a Freudian slip, but I think he knew exactly what he was doing. Jefferson accepts the classical context for Wheatley and its implications for the future of slavery (and America) but inverts it. Her poetry is merely religious, not classical; mock-­epic, not epic.36 The short-­ guy joke on Pope and his Dunciad evokes Jefferson’s lengthy attack, in earlier chapters, on Comte de Buffon’s notion that the New World had led to a natural degeneration of mammalian life—a degeneration that de Buffon and others had seen in the practices of the colonizers, including the shocking revival of slavery. The discussion of Wheatley and other black writers parlays directly into Jefferson’s insistence that American slavery is kinder and gentler than the Roman kind. Jefferson disparaged Wheatley, in other words, because Wheatley herself had become a protagonist as well as a subject in the controversy about empire, slavery, and the meaning of America.37

38

David Waldstreicher

Jefferson’s response to Wheatley is complex, but its most telling aspect may be his handling of the precedent of the Afro-­Roman slave poet Terence. He doesn’t tell us that Wheatley claimed him (why would a merely religious writer do that?), but he asserts that Terence does not prove anything about black slavery, since he was “of the race of whites.” He also ignores the other dimensions of Wheatley’s identification with Terence as “African by birth”: Terence too was suspected of getting help in writing, and he earned his freedom by his pen.38 Wheatley had put herself in the tradition of classical—male—writers with something to say about political men and about the relationships between slaves and masters. Jefferson proceeds to deny the qualifications of a few male slaves to participate in the republic of letters and thus to suggest the possibility of emancipation on the grounds of African equality. Why must Wheatley—or “the poems published under her hand”—be dismissed out of hand? Why must her religion be stressed, and her engagement with Pope and the very poets Pope translated—Homer, Horace—be winked away? Ultimately Jefferson resolves the classical, or temporal and spatial, question of slavery and American modernity in one of race—the hallmark of American slavery. In short, in the aftermath of Phillis Wheatley, Jefferson has to reply on race (and, for the international audience of his Notes, an admission of slavery’s wrongs and a promise of eventual emancipation) in order to establish a virtuous Virginian-­American identity. Wheatley’s nonracial, Christian universalist, neoclassical, feminine antislavery testimony is inadmissible—because of Jefferson’s need to claim aspects of universalism, classical revival, and antislavery for the Americans. In Jefferson’s emerging world, nothing but race can trump the suspicion of colonial and early national inferiority in the face of the classical—nothing, that is, but the stunning achievement that is Wheatley’s poems, or of the establishment of the American nation, which, as Jefferson writes, is not yet certain. If she’s a poet, arguments for America as an improvement over European corruption, as a selective “countercultural” classical revival, do not stand up, at least not yet, not with slavery; if people are listening to Wheatley, the Founders have not “drove the ancients from their pedestals and occupied their places,” unless it is the other ancients, the barbarians and Spartans, we are talking about.39 And the best way to make her something other than she was, was to get the audience to not read her, but instead, to read her race and sex, with an exaggeration of her piety as a kind of feminine foible. When Jefferson makes Pope and Terence his instead of hers, he denies the very grounds of both her art and her politics, while reducing it to a feminized religion he has already argued,

Women’s Politics, Antislavery Politics, and American Revolution

39

in another chapter, ought to be separated from truly political questions. He shows just how much was at stake in seemingly literary matters, and that the segregated and gendered boundaries of American independence could not be taken for granted. They had to be rewritten, in part because Phillis Wheatley had rewritten them. The patriot movement and its call for liberties created a crisis that gave an extra charge to the reasonable question about whether the American colonists, in the wake of world wars and a heightened slave trade, were, in fact, (still) barbaric—that is, ancient in all the wrong ways. Is it too much to claim that the very public entry of an African woman into the conversation about ancients, moderns, Africans, and Americans, in as informed a manner as Wheatley, helped precipitate a cultural and political crisis every bit as much as the Somerset case? If not, it is little wonder that Jefferson began, around 1774, to deny the relevance of classical precedents for public matters, insisting that the uses of the classics were wholly private—not unlike the way his fellow planters would begin to describe slavery itself.40 Wheatley will not be fully understood or appreciated as an actor in history until we realize the striking multiplicity of reasons why she was Jefferson’s kryptonite. It was not just that she was an African and a slave writing, or writing poetry, or writing Christian poetry: it is that she was writing neoclassical poetry, and in so doing bringing by stealth (or by simile) her African and female experience to bear on various aspects of secular as well as religious life, including the politics of the Revolution. Wheatley’s emergence, like those other moments when blacks became participants in the imperial struggle, were the moments when mutually serving Anglo-­American myths, and with it the colonial structures they sustained, began to break down— when the factors that created liberties were perceived to threaten them. That a woman played a significant role in this process also has implications for our understanding of the American Revolution. The problem of the empire, whether looked at from Boston, from Norfolk, or from London, proved inseparable from the politics of slavery. Empire, republicanism, and slavery implicated each other. Lord Mansfield’s decision in Somerset v. Steuart is one index of this; Wheatley’s emergence shortly thereafter is another. Somerset linked the two of them personally and politically, and Jefferson, being Jefferson, could detect that, even if it took him a decade, the victory of the Continental Army, and perhaps also Wheatley’s death in 1784, during Jefferson’s initial composition of his Notes, to resolve it on paper to his own satisfaction. Wheatley lived long enough to propose

40

David Waldstreicher

a rather different postcolonial identity for America than Jefferson did, and even if the story of the American Revolution must be a story of Jefferson’s real and imagined victories, it cannot be an accurate story until it shows how Phillis Wheatley and James Somerset actually chose some key battlegrounds, in verse as in the courtroom, well before their fellow slaves chose Dunmore and Washington’s armies.

Chapter 2

Rethinking White Supremacy Black Resistance and the Problem of Slaveholder Authority Padraig Riley

During the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump, advocates of white supremacy returned to the mainstream of American public life. Under the banner of the so-­called alt-­right, a number of ideologues peddled ideas of white grievance, white nationalism, and even “white genocide,” echoing the racial dogma of the nineteenth-­century United States. Despite occasional and alarmingly mild rebukes of his racist supporters, Trump appealed to many of the racial anxieties that white supremacists made more explicit. Fear of racial and religious others undergirded his campaign from the outset, and Trump’s appeals to “law and order” and invocations that “all lives matter” targeted Black Lives Matter activists, while minimizing the discrimination and brutality faced by people of color at the hands of law enforcement. That such a campaign won the support of almost 63 million voters—and the presidency—only underscores the deep and unyielding power of whiteness in the United States. Our current moment demands rethinking the origins, genesis, and resiliency of white supremacy and antiblack racism in American politics. This essay focuses on the early republic, a pivotal period in the evolution of racial ideology. Many scholars have identified the years after the American Revolution as a turning point toward a fully racialized social and political order, one that emerged most fully in the northern states in the aftermath of abolition. Generally, the growing power of race in the early nation is told in terms of transformations in white consciousness, and the narrative is often one of decline—the early United States moved away from the natural rights

42

Padraig Riley

ideals that inspired revolution and toward race; the postabolition North shifted from hierarchies based on slavery and status to hierarchies based on racial essentialism, thus undermining the promise of abolition; a politics of deference that recognized character and respectability over skin color was trumped by a more democratized politics that made race the key category of political belonging.1 This essay outlines a different framework for understanding white supremacy’s rise by emphasizing the crucial conjunction of free black political activity and the national politics of slavery in the early nineteenth century. Ideologies of racial difference and control, while virulent, remained unstable throughout this period. As free black people acted to extend and protect newfound freedoms in the northern states, they found themselves at the center of national debates over the governance of slavery, and southerners and northern allies increasingly turned to race to police black political life. White supremacy, in other words, marked less a decline of Revolutionary values than a reaction to a new and transformative politics of emancipation that threatened slaveholder power. Slavery produced inordinate wealth for slaveholders and for the American economy as a whole. To secure that wealth, masters exercised an extreme degree of coercion over enslaved people. Slaveholder coercion was structured by politics: masters claimed institutional power at various levels of government in the new American nation, they depended on legal rights defined by statute and common law, and they relied on a national political culture that accepted their right to enslave. Together, institutional and ideological politics transformed slaveholder power into authority. To maintain their authority, masters needed a broad portion of the nonslaveholding electorate of their own states and of the United States to deem slavery legitimate.2 And the legitimacy of slavery was in question during the American Revolution and the early national period, in multiple ways. The Somerset case of 1772 led to a ruling limiting the power of masters to maintain bondage in England, thus posing a challenge to the status of slavery throughout the British empire.3 Freedom suits in Massachusetts in 1781 and the adoption of gradual abolition in Pennsylvania in 1780, followed by Connecticut and Rhode Island in 1784, New York in 1799, and New Jersey in 1804, likewise destabilized slavery in much of the North. Emancipation was driven not only by legal and legislative decisions, but also by direct action as enslaved people fought to free themselves through negotiation and flight. Thousands of slaves fled to British lines during the Revolution and the War of 1812, seeking freedom from the slaveholding republic. Others remained and fought alongside

Rethinking White Supremacy

43

Americans in exchange for liberty; in doing so, they sought to turn Revolutionary concepts of natural rights against slaveholding.4 By various paths, African Americans won freedom and began to build communities in the northern states. As symbols of liberty, places of refuge for fugitives, and sites of social and political organization, free black communities played a crucial role in maintaining the antislavery struggle. Northern blacks knew their freedom was insecure, given the persistence of bondage and racial control under gradual abolition and the national power of southern masters. They thus focused their energies on local self-­defence, on claiming rights and political standing in the northern states and in the nation, and on the grand objective of ending slavery altogether. As such, free blacks helped escalate an unfolding “emancipation process” linking the early republic to the antebellum period to the Civil War and Reconstruction.5 Slaveholders turned to race and white supremacy to deal with these political challenges in two intertwined ways. They sought to create a national polity that tolerated slavery ideologically and that actively supported slaveholder rule. White supremacy proved an ideal tool in this regard. It helped explain slavery in a democratizing world, by denying that African Americans truly belonged to the “people” who governed the United States. In an era when the terms of national citizenship were poorly defined, slaveholders made a concerted effort to limit political belonging to whites.6 Such acts of exclusion built racial solidarity with nonslaveholders, but they also sought a crucial institutional goal—by rendering black people effectively stateless at the national level and thus politically vulnerable, slaveholders could better control enslaved people, better recapture fugitive slaves, and better manage the national politics of slavery. White supremacy was hardly embraced wholesale in the early republic— there was no “racial consensus” among white Americans.7 Slaveholders fought to suppress black political belonging precisely because free African Americans fought to claim citizenship in the United States—and did so with some success. Slaveholders thus fought on shifting terrain, sometimes winning, sometimes losing fights to constrain free black political life. In this essay, I look at three issues where the demands of slaveholders, the political activity of free blacks, and the sentiments of white nonslaveholders collided: the rendition of fugitive slaves, black suffrage, and the status of black citizenship in the United States. I focus on conflicts in Pennsylvania, New York, and the United States Congress from the late 1790s to the Missouri Crisis and the disfranchisement of black New Yorkers in 1821. Debates over fugitives, voting, and citizenship defined

44

Padraig Riley

a political battleground between emancipated men and women, who sought to protect a vulnerable freedom, and American slaveholders, who sought to advance their political and economic power. Both groups fought for recognition from the free white majority: northern blacks needed some recognition of their status as free persons, in order to protect themselves from kidnapping and reenslavement; while masters sought to diminish black freedom, so that they might better control enslaved people in a partly free world—a world where some African Americans were enslaved, some were free, and some were caught in between, on the run from slavery. The questions facing slaveholders, free blacks, and northern whites were, in essence, always the same: would northern states and communities acknowledge the political standing and political rights of free African Americans? Or would they deny black claims to belonging, in order to ensure that all African Americans remained political outsiders, unable to achieve protection or recognition in the American republic? The stakes of these questions were enormous, affecting not only the fates of individual blacks seeking to escape slavery or vote in northern elections, but hundreds of thousands of people who remained in slavery. Slaveholders fought to dismantle black freedom in order to protect their massive capital investments in enslaved people. Free blacks and sympathetic whites, by demanding recognition of black autonomy and citizenship, by demanding that black people be incorporated into the wider body politic, threatened the basic foundations of slaveholder power.

Fugitive Freedom The complicated struggle over fugitive slaves in the early republic illustrates the contested intersection between free black politics, white supremacy, and slaveholder power. As scholars like Stanley Harrold have shown, conflict over fugitive slaves was continuous from the early years of the United States to the onset of the Civil War. While the intensity of that conflict escalated in the antebellum period, especially after the passage of Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, the basic features of the fugitive slave problem were etched in the early national period. Northern abolition created conflicting legal regimes within the United States and slave flight forced those regimes into conflict, as states and communities fought over the power of masters to recapture runaways. The early national expansion of slavery and the demand for slave labor on the frontier added another crucial layer to the fugitive struggle, as kidnappers preyed on free blacks in the North in order to make a profit through the

Rethinking White Supremacy

45

interstate slave trade. Kidnapping provoked black communities and antislavery whites to defend the freedom of black people in the North, precipitating yet more interstate conflict over the rights of African Americans and the power of slaveholders.8 The majority of white people in the early United States had little problem tolerating slavery so long as they did not have to confront it directly. But fugitives who fled to the emerging free communities of the North forced masters to exercise slaveholder power in an arena where such extreme authority was under challenge. By 1804, every northern state had taken steps to abolish slavery. Although the late adoption of gradual abolition in New York and New Jersey ensured that some form of northern slavery would persist well into the nineteenth century, the legal and political landscape had been permanently altered.9 Northern states did accommodate southern masters, allowing slaveholders to “sojourn” in their states with their slaves for a limited period of time, but antislavery groups also used these same provisions to liberate slaves whose masters overstayed their period of welcome. As southern congressmen who brought enslaved people to Philadelphia, the national capital in the 1790s, could and did testify, slave property was not secure in the postabolition North.10 The growth of free black communities and organized antislavery movements in Pennsylvania and New York proved a significant threat to slavery. The free black population in the North grew to 75,156 by 1810, when free people formed a majority of the black population in every northern state outside of New Jersey. The largest free black communities were in Philadelphia (9,653) and New York City (8,137).11 Under constant threat from the long reach of slaveholder power and everyday racism in the North, free black people managed to persist and to build independent religious, political, and cultural institutions. Black autonomy represented the antithesis of slavery and it directly threatened slaveholder power, as masters often noted. Free blacks provided refuge for fugitives, they worked alongside white abolitionists to protect black freedom, and they sought to claim citizenship status in the northern states and in the nation, undermining racial justifications for enslavement. Masters grew increasingly disturbed by the presence of free black people in the United States. Upper South states constrained manumission in the early nineteenth century in order to better protect slavery. Virginia restricted the movement of free black people into the state and sought to police its free black residents; in 1806, legislators decreed that any slave manumitted in the state would have to leave within a year. In response, Delaware and

46

Padraig Riley

Maryland then blocked free black in-­migration. Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana also adopted laws restricting black migration, as did other northern states in the antebellum period. In the North, such laws expressed racist paranoia, but they first arose in an effort to control enslaved people.12 Similarly, early southern advocates of the American Colonization Society emphasized the danger that free blacks posed to slavery. By the time of the Missouri Crisis, southerners in Congress argued that no slave could be fully emancipated within the United States and that no black person could ever be an equal citizen of the slaveholding republic. White northerners conceded considerable power to their southern counterparts through the fugitive slave clause of the Constitution and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. Pennsylvania’s 1780 Abolition Act likewise acknowledged the right of masters to recapture fugitive slaves. These concessions made free blacks in the North vulnerable to kidnapping and sale into the domestic slave trade under the guise of being claimed as fugitives. However, as black and white antislavery activists agitated on behalf of free blacks, northern states took efforts to prevent kidnapping. Pennsylvania adopted an antikidnapping statute in 1788 and New York followed suit in 1808. On the ground, antislavery lawyers and activists fought to protect free black people from enslavement. Those efforts in turn created new obstacles for the recapture of fugitives. Slave flight exposed the political construction of slaveholding authority and the masters’ need for allies beyond their limited circles of control. As much as masters liked to claim autonomy when it came to regulating slavery, they needed the support of a significant majority of white Americans to uphold their rule. While white northerners had taken specific steps to reassure their slaveholding countrymen that they would respect their property rights, fugitives and antislavery activists continued to call slaveholder authority into question. In theory, slaveholders possessed the legal power to recapture fugitives in northern jurisdictions. But in practice, they required the support of northern officials and citizens to exercise that power. Ultimately, they needed legitimacy. They needed white northerners to accept slaveholder power as a normal part of political life and to refuse to grant rights or refuge to fugitive slaves. From the slaveholder’s perspective, that dilemma was best resolved by a political order that discounted the rights of all African Americans, free and slave alike, in service of mastery. Read in this light, fugitive advertisements in northern papers were solicitations to participate in a national project of racial surveillance for the benefit of slaveholders.13 They invited white northerners to police the boundaries of political belonging and freedom in order to return fugitives to slavery and

Rethinking White Supremacy

47

uphold the prerogatives of mastery. By requesting northerners to seek out specifically named runaways, whose dress, physical appearance, and general characters were often described in meticulous detail, fugitive advertisements encouraged white readers to regard all free blacks with suspicion, as potentially fitting the description of escaped slaves. Prior to the Revolution, advertisements for slaves ran alongside advertisements for runaway indentured servants in northern papers; notices for servants typically outnumbered those for fugitive slaves. But with the decline of indentured servitude after the Revolution, the line between freedom and unfreedom became racialized.14 In effect, early national fugitive advertisements solicited a particular form of white supremacy in which skin color indicated the possibility of slave status, so that fugitives might be more quickly discovered and returned to bondage. By promising increasingly lucrative rewards to be recouped from their named “subscriber”—more often than not the master in question—fugitive advertisements asked readers to identify with aggrieved slaveholders and to claim a stake in the preservation of slavery. However, while fugitive advertisements could solicit participation in a regime of racial control, they could not guarantee popular support for slaveholder property rights in the northern states. As Richard Newman has suggested, the high rewards offered in fugitive advertisements likely indicate the difficulties masters faced in recapturing their slaves. In Pennsylvania those difficulties were produced by African American and white abolitionists who sought to ensure that the state protected black claims to freedom. Although state and national law required Pennsylvanians to support fugitive rendition, masters frequently complained of recalcitrance and obstruction when they attempted to recover their former slaves.15 The obstacles masters faced on the ground in Pennsylvania were replicated institutionally in the United States Congress, where white northerners rejected southern attempts to modify the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. They argued that a stronger fugitive law would infringe on their states and jeopardize the lives of free black northerners. National-­level debates over fugitive slave rendition occurred in a wider context of conflict over slavery stretching back to the first federal Congress, when the House debated at length antislavery petitions from Pennsylvania and New York Quakers and the Pennsylvania Abolition Society (PAS).16 In the late 1790s, the House confronted multiple petitions about slavery and the kidnapping of free blacks, including two submitted by African Americans from Philadelphia. In January 1797, the House debated whether or not to receive a petition from Jacob Nicholson, Jupiter Nicholson, Job Albert, and Thomas Pritchet, all of whom had followed a difficult path to an unstable

48

Padraig Riley

freedom. They had been freed by Quaker masters in North Carolina, but fled to Pennsylvania under threat of reenslavement, as North Carolina law strictly limited manumissions and authorized county courts to seize slaves illegally manumitted and sell them at auction. With the assistance of Pennsylvania Quakers, the four men petitioned Congress for redress. Pointing to the case of a fellow North Carolinian who had escaped from slavery but was currently held as a fugitive in a Philadelphia prison, they asked Congress to investigate the operation of the Fugitive Slave Act. “Human beings,” they claimed, “merely on account of color and complexion, are, through prevailing prejudice, outlawed and excluded from common justice and common humanity, by the operation of such partial laws in support of habits and customs cruelly oppressive.”17 In other words, the fugitive law authorized the racial control of black people in the North in service of slavery. The House rejected the petition on technical grounds, as southerners argued that the petitioners were slaves under the laws of North Carolina, and that the federal government could not intervene into the regulation of slavery by the states. The petitioners appealed to the “human right to freedom”; but that abstract right proved meaningless without political standing in the American nation.18 However, the back and forth of debate indicated that some northerners believed the four men did have some rights before Congress. Such limited recognition of black political standing at the national level exposed the vulnerability of the slaveholders’ appeal to federalism and the control of slavery by the states. Multiple northern members argued that the petitioners had the right to be heard, because their slave status was in doubt and because the “sacred right” of petition belonged to all persons. Many states, Federalist George Thatcher of Massachusetts reminded the House, had declared “that every man is born equally free, and that each have an equal right to petition if aggrieved.” Such claims provoked South Carolina’s William Loughton Smith, who imagined that slaves might start petitioning the House en masse. Receiving the petition, he claimed, would “spread alarm throughout the Southern States; it would act as an ‘entering-­wedge,’ whose consequences could not be foreseen.” From Smith’s perspective, by claiming rights and finding white northern support, the two Nicholsons, Albert, and Pritchet threatened to undermine slavery as a whole.19 Similar conflicts arose in January 1800, when the House debated receiving a petition signed by Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, and sixty-­seven other free blacks from Philadelphia. The petitioners asked Congress to better regulate the international slave trade, and they objected to the Fugitive Slave Act

Rethinking White Supremacy

49

of 1793. They also asked the House to adopt plans for gradual emancipation throughout the United States, “to prepare the way for the oppressed to go free, that every yoke may be broken.” And they proposed a broad and provocative definition of American citizenship: enslaved people, their “afflicted brethren,” the petitioners suggested, were “objects of representations in your public Councils, in common with ourselves and every other class of Citizens within the Jurisdiction of the United States.”20 Just a day before Allen signed the free black petition in Philadelphia, he gave a eulogy for George Washington in which he made a similar claim for black political belonging. After celebrating Washington for manumitting his slaves, Allen directed his audience to “love your country” and obey its laws. Doing so, Allen promised, “will make you good citizens—and greatly promote the cause of the oppressed.” In tones of deference, Allen’s eulogy and the free black petition mounted a bold claim for black citizenship at the national level.21 In light of such demands, southern congressmen fought to have the petition rejected in the harshest possible terms. James Jones of Georgia was disgusted at the suggestion that slaves might be included in “we the people” of the United States Constitution. He “hoped the petition would be treated with the contempt it merited and thrown under the table.” South Carolina’s John Rutledge Jr. echoed William Smith when he described the petition as an “entering wedge to the inevitable loss of our property.” These demands persuaded the House to reject the petitioners’ plea to emancipate American slaves by a vote of 85 to 1, George Thatcher the sole opponent. The vote appeared (and still appears to many historians) to define a national consensus against interfering with slavery as well as against accepting petitions from African Americans. But as Nicholas Wood clarifies, the House received the parts of the petition pertaining to the fugitive law and the slave trade, thus effectively acknowledging the political standing of the petitioners, in contrast to the rejection of the 1797 petition. A House committee even suggested revising the fugitive slave law in order to better protect free African Americans. Instead of consensus, the 1800 debates revealed considerable conflict over how and to what extent Congress might regulate slavery and over the political status of free blacks.22 Subsequent conflict over fugitive slaves likewise indicated the difficulty of maintaining white solidarity at the national level. In 1801, Maryland slaveholders pleaded with their governor to demand a stronger federal fugitive slave law. They claimed that residents of Pennsylvania and New Jersey (as well as Delaware) placed “every possible obstruction’ ” in the way of recapturing slaves and that without stricter fugitive laws, “the slaveholders on this shore

50

Padraig Riley

must be ruined.” Their requests led Maryland congressman Joseph Nicholson to introduce a bill in the House of Representatives updating the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. The bill proposed sweeping restrictions on black people in the North, in order to ensure that fugitives would find no sanctuary. All northern employers would have to advertise the names of black people they hired, and all northern blacks would have to carry a certificate proving their free status. Anyone employing an African American without a certificate was liable to a $500 fine. Southerners sought to constrain the rights of free blacks and the civil society of the northern states in the service of slavery.23 When the bill finally came up for debate in January 1802, the large majority of northerners in the House rejected these southern demands, and the bill was defeated 46–43 in a sectional vote. Northern legislators chose to protect free blacks over the property rights of southern masters. But the vote was close and a handful of northerners, including leading Philadelphia Jeffersonian Michael Leib, supported the southern position. If only a few more northern votes had changed sides, slaveholders would have governed the basic patterns of daily life for northern blacks.24 While northern blacks might take some solace from the fact that white men defended their interests in Congress, they also had ample evidence of how vulnerable they remained in the face of white racism and slaveholder power. A dynamic economy in enslaved people ensured that kidnapping would remain a threat for all northern blacks. “We knew not but ere long we might be reduced to slavery,” said James Forten in a letter to George Thatcher that was widely republished in the northern press. Forten, a wealthy sailmaker and leader of Philadelphia’s black community, appealed to natural law and “the birth right of the human race” to condemn slavery, but he knew that such principles offered little security without political support. “A deep gloom now envelops us,” he wrote, from which men like Thatcher provided “some comfort” through their efforts to “preserve the Free Blacks in the full enjoyment of their rights.”25 The fight for black rights had multiple fronts, as Forten was well aware. Whatever might be decided in Congress, northern blacks remained under threat from state and municipal governments that had far more power over their daily lives. In 1813, Philadelphia Republican Jacob Mitchell proposed legislation in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives that in many ways mirrored earlier southern demands in Congress. After introducing petitions from white Philadelphians asserting that the city was overrun with fugitive slaves, Mitchell proposed to restrict all future black migration into Pennsylvania and compel all current black residents to register themselves and carry

Rethinking White Supremacy

51

certificates proving their status as free persons. Like southerners in Congress, Mitchell was willing to curtail black freedom in order to expose runaways to reenslavement.26 The Pennsylvania Abolition Society and free blacks remonstrated against Mitchell’s bill, as they had against similar efforts in previous years, and it never became law. In a spirited rebuke, Forten argued that such legislation would violate the spirit of equality that animated the constitutions of the United States and Pennsylvania and rob black people of the protection of the laws. In a series of letters from a “A Man of Colour” first published in the Philadelphia press, Forten asserted that Mitchell’s bill would render any black person who could not produce a certificate liable to imprisonment. Jailors would advertise their captives, hoping to find owners of fugitive slaves; if, at the end of six months, “no owner appear for this degraded black, he is to be exposed to sale, and if not sold to be confined at hard labor for seven years!!” Forten imagined a day when white children, instigated by a racist constable, would hound black people in the street, demanding their certificates: “The boys, delighting in the sport, immediately begin to hunt him, and immediately from a hundred tongues is heard the cry—‘Hoa, Negro, where is your Certificate!’—Can any thing be conceived more degrading to humanity! Can any thing be done more shocking to the principles of Civil Liberty!”27 Forten’s argument in defense of free black rights indicates the treacherous politics of race in Pennsylvania and the complicated tactics African Americans had to adopt to preserve their freedom. Forten decried the proposed certificate law but took a deferential tone toward Pennsylvania legislators, pleading with them to protect the rights of black people and Pennsylvania’s reputation as a land of freedom. Forten insisted that free blacks did not “wish to legislate, for our means of information and the acquisition of knowledge are, in the nature of things, so circumscribed, that we must consider ourselves incompetent to the task.” Instead, he only implored, in an “appeal from the heart” to convince white legislators to “yet remain the Black’s friend.”28 But such pathos and deference had a radical aim, to insist on black equality under Pennsylvania law. In the context of the fugitive slave problem, any defense of black rights in the North had national implications. Preserving the limited autonomy of Pennsylvania’s black community inevitably made life more difficult for southern slaveholders seeking to regain their liberated property, as events would soon demonstrate. The fugitive problem returned to Congress after the War of 1812, as the rise of the domestic slave trade led to a renewed focus on the problem of kidnapping in the northern states. Pennsylvania representatives repeatedly

52

Padraig Riley

brought petitions to Congress pleading for better protection of northern free blacks and for revision of the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act. Southerners responded by demanding a fugitive law that would better serve their interests, once again at the expense of free black people in the North. In late 1817, southerners in the House proposed legislation that would have streamlined the process of rendition and constrained northern states from protecting fugitives by allowing the slave status of a presumed fugitive to be determined in southern courts. When the bill came up for debate in January 1818, northern representatives warned that it would infringe on the right to habeas corpus and provide legal cover for kidnapping free blacks and selling them into slavery. Philadelphia Federalist John Sergeant presented a petition from the Pennsylvania Abolition Society in the midst of debate asking a revision of the 1793 Act to better protect free blacks, rather than slaveholder property rights. As Connecticut Federalist Thomas Scott Williams put it, northern representatives were caught between the demands of two classes of citizens, slaveholders and free blacks. “In attempting . . . to secure the right of property of one class of citizens, it was unjust that the rights of another class should be put in jeopardy.” This seemingly banal summary indicates how northern recognition of black rights posed a significant threat to slavery. As long as free people of color counted as citizens with rights that had to be respected, northerners were likely to block southern proposals that sought to streamline fugitive rendition in service of southern masters. Although the fugitive bill initially passed in the House, when it returned from the Senate, a northern majority kept it from becoming law.29 Debates over fugitive rendition and kidnapping exacerbated sectional tensions over slavery and slaveholder power. Those tensions would explode in the Missouri Crisis of 1819–1821, which redirected national attention to the problem of slavery expansion. But as Congress turned to the conflict over Missouri, the fugitive issue hardly went away. In the spring of 1820, Pennsylvania passed a new antikidnapping law that imposed harsh penalties on kidnappers and constrained lower officials (aldermen and justices of the peace) from taking jurisdiction of slaveholder claims under the 1793 act.30 Enslaved people fleeing bondage forced slaveholders to exert their power beyond the boundaries of southern jurisdictions. Runaways precipitated conflict in the courts, in state and national legislatures, and within northern communities, where blacks had a better chance of defending themselves against reenslavement than in the southern states. In late 1820, one John Read, claimed as a fugitive by Maryland master Samuel Griffith, killed Griffith and an accomplice named Thomas Shipley when they tried to forcibly return

Rethinking White Supremacy

53

Read to a state of slavery. Read was eventually found guilty of manslaughter for the murder of Shipley; the presiding judge in that trial also ruled that under the 1820 antikidnapping law, masters retained the right to seize fugitive slaves without appearing before a court. Read’s case propelled a new round of interstate conflict with Maryland that led to Pennsylvania’s 1826 Fugitive Slave Act, a law that arose from southern demands that Pennsylvania better protect the interests of slaveholders. However, lobbying by Quakers and the PAS helped ensure that the final version of the 1826 act worked in the interest of free blacks and fugitives. Slaveholders were now obliged to undertake complicated legal proceedings in order to reclaim fugitive slaves. The course was set for escalating sectional tension in the years ahead, as the border war over fugitive rendition and kidnapping laid the foundation for a civil war over slavery.31 Those later conflicts turned on the same questions that runaways and free African Americans had forced into political consciousness in the early years of the republic: the legitimacy of slavery in the northern states and the political standing of African Americans.

Disfranchisement and Exclusion In the contest over fugitive slaves, southerners failed to achieve the national and interstate protections of slaveholder property rights they desired. But in other areas, they won major victories on behalf of slavery in the early republic. The federal government aided the expansion of slavery to the southwest through diplomacy and military action, from the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 to the Transcontinental Treaty of 1819. Northern nationalists endorsed Andrew Jackson’s military campaigns against the Red Stick Creeks during the War of 1812 and his raids into Spanish Florida in 1817. All of these actions helped secure the heartland of the antebellum cotton empire.32 The Democratic-­Republican party facilitated this tacit accord with slavery. As they fought to elect Thomas Jefferson to the presidency in 1800, his partisans crafted a nationalist politics that helped protect slavery from ideological challenge. Northern Democratic-­Republicans did oppose slavery in Congress and a few ultimately broke with the national party on sectional lines, but the Jeffersonian coalition remained resilient. Military conflict with Great Britain from 1812 to 1815 cemented the North-­South Jeffersonian alliance, helped Republicans to defeat Federalism at the national level, and propelled Andrew Jackson, soon to be the icon of a more aggressive version of the Jeffersonian synthesis, into national prominence.

54

Padraig Riley

Jeffersonian nationalism incorporated slaveholders and slavery expansion into a broad vision of American autonomy. As such, Jeffersonian politics as a whole suppressed the limited defense of black rights that some northern Democratic-­Republicans demonstrated in Congress. At the state level, Jeffersonians attacked black citizenship in more direct ways. Driven by partisan conflict with Federalists, Republicans acted to suppress black voters throughout the northern states, often by restricting the suffrage to white men. White supremacy at the polls undermined arguments for black citizenship and equality, which had been so crucial to the defense of northern blacks from kidnapping and reenslavement. Beginning in the 1790s, northern Jeffersonians fought Federalism in the name of equality and democratization, but those ideals were compromised by formal and informal practices of racial exclusion. The onset of gradual emancipation coincided with the decline of property qualifications for the suffrage in the northern states, as more men voted in local, state, and national elections than ever before. In 1800, no northern state barred suffrage on the basis of race, which meant that growing numbers of free black men in the North could theoretically exercise the right to vote. But that possibility was soon disclosed in a number of states by laws restricting the franchise to white men. Ohio restricted the franchise in its 1802 constitution, while Republicans in New Jersey adopted a white manhood suffrage clause in 1807 to eliminate voting by African Americans as well as women. When Connecticut Republicans finally seized power from Federalists in 1818, they wrote a new constitution that limited the franchise to white men. Pennsylvania instituted formal restrictions in 1838, but informal practices seem to have kept most black Philadelphians from the polls well before then. In 1838, Democrats and some Whigs at a state Constitutional Convention explicitly limited the suffrage to white men, in good part to prove their antiabolitionist bona fides to the South. As David Waldstreicher has aptly put it, Jeffersonians built a political culture in which white men celebrated themselves.33 Disfranchisement arose in a complicated conjuncture of democratization, the national politics of slavery, and efforts by northern free blacks to consolidate emancipation and establish claims to citizenship—including, where possible, the right to vote. New York was exemplary in this respect. At the 1821 New York Constitutional Convention, “Bucktail” Republicans, followers of Martin Van Buren, successfully abolished property requirements for the suffrage. Bucktails also pushed for an outright ban on black voters and eventually settled for a prohibitive $250 property requirement that applied

Rethinking White Supremacy

55

only to blacks. The push for disfranchisement was at least a decade old. As Paul Polgar and Sarah Gronningsater have shown, before 1821, many free black men in New York City could meet the limited property requirements needed to vote in local elections, elections to the state assembly, and elections to the House of Representatives. In the heightened partisan context from Jefferson’s embargo through the War of 1812, Assembly elections were extremely close, and African American voters could presumably have tipped the at-­ large selection of New York City assemblymen in the favor of the Federalist Party. The question of black suffrage thus became a major issue in partisan politics at the state level, which were in turn bound up in the national politics of slavery.34 As in Pennsylvania, black New Yorkers viewed southern slavery as a threat to their lives and interests. The Federalist Party won black support because Federalists better represented black interests at the state level— most obviously, they resisted black disfranchisement. But some black New Yorkers were equally motivated to reject Democratic-­ Republican rule because of Jeffersonian support for slaveholders at the national level. In an 1809 oration commemorating the close of the international slave trade, Joseph Sidney professed his hope that slavery would soon become “unheard of and unknown” in the United States. To achieve that end, he told African Americans to vote for Federalists, given the strong relationship between the “democratic party” and white southerners, “the very people who hold our African brethren in bondage.” As Sidney logically concluded, southern slaveholders “are the enemies of our rights. And as the democrats in this state are acting with these, our enemies . . . we should be destitute of the spirit of freemen, were we not to turn our backs upon democracy, and unite with our federal friends.”35 Republican efforts to suppress black voting likewise sought to suppress such pragmatic antislavery politics. Instead of confronting Federalist charges of support for southern slavery, Republicans argued that New York Federalists were elected by the votes of slaves. In March 1811, Republican John Lester proposed an amendment to a bill intended to prevent fraud at elections. Lester wanted all black voters to acquire a certificate proving their freedom in order to vote. His apparent objective, as a later iteration of the bill’s title indicated, was “to prevent slaves from voting.” Lester’s amendment passed in a party-­line vote, 56 to 24.36 But Federalists on the Council of Revision blocked the legislation on the grounds that it would do little to prevent voter fraud and much to discriminate against citizens of color. As the council put it

56

Padraig Riley

Heretofore it has been assumed as a principle, that every male citizen, of full age, possessing the other qualifications to vote, required by law, was presumed to be a freeman, until the contrary appeared. In the present bill a different principle is established, to wit: That all black men, and men of color are presumed to be slaves until they prove that they are free.37 Much like the 1813 proposal to ban runaways in Pennsylvania, the 1811 elections bill was eerily similar to the 1802 fugitive bill in Congress. African Americans, unless proven otherwise, should be assumed to be slaves. Black freedom, unlike white freedom, could not be taken for granted. Republicans in the New York Senate now pushed to overturn the council’s objections and force a new bill into law, less than a month before elections for the state assembly. They succeeded in another series of party-­line votes.38 The assembly then approved the new bill on April 8, 1811. The certificate requirement had become remarkably complex, placing burdensome financial and bureaucratic obstacles in the face of black voters. Whereas white voters only had to swear a rather liberal oath if challenged by election inspectors, a black voter had to take the extra step of obtaining a “certificate of his freedom.” He first had to prove his liberty before “any one of the justices of the supreme court, any mayor, recorder, or judge of any court of common pleas.” Should the officer believe that the said black voter was indeed free, he would—for the fee of thirty-­seven and a half cents, paid by the applicant—produce a certificate of the voter’s freedom. That certificate then had to be filed with a town or county clerk for an additional fee, and a copy of the official record, produced by the clerk, would function as the certificate that all black voters needed to produce at the polls in order to vote. The differential burdens placed in the way of white and black voters anticipated the discriminatory suffrage requirements (liberal for whites, prohibitive for most blacks) imposed at the 1821 Constitutional Convention.39 The certificates survive in the archives today; they are testament both to white obstructionism and black insistence on accessing the vote. Ironically, the 1811 law created a detailed record of black political activity, documenting precisely what Republicans hoped to suppress. New York Jeffersonians were soon aware that the first certificate law did not go far enough. In 1814, after winning the assembly back from Federalists, Republicans passed a new certificate law focused specifically on blacks in New York City, placing new hurdles in the way of African American voters. They updated the certificate law again in 1815, in a further effort to constrain black voting. By 1821, many

Rethinking White Supremacy

57

Republicans dropped all pretense of preventing electoral fraud and simply argued that only white men should be allowed In New York, white Republicans construed the danger of black suffrage in narrow partisan terms, but from a national perspective, free black voters posed a threat to the power of slaveholders in the United States. In a polity where voting had come to represent full autonomy for male citizens, black voters were a striking rejoinder to racial apologetics for slavery. Their status contested attempts to racialize freedom and suggested, contrary to Jefferson’s dire warnings in the Notes on Virginia, the possibility of formal equality in a postemancipation future. And black voters were far more than symbols, as New York politics made clear. Following Joseph Sidney’s logic, black support for the Federalist Party meant opposition to the national rule of the Jeffersonian Democratic-­ Republicans and their support for slavery. While scholars have complicated simplistic dichotomies between proslavery Republicans and antislavery Federalists, Sidney had a point. At the local level, Federalists dominated the ranks of the New York Manumission Society (NYMS) and thus appeared far more invested in the cause of abolition and the advancement of black freedom than their Republican counterparts.40 At the national level, northern Federalists routinely attacked slaveholder political power. Shortly after the election of 1800, Federalists denounced Jefferson and demanded the repeal of the three-­fifths clause of the United States Constitution. In the short-­term, they achieved little besides inspiring a Republican backlash; however, in retrospect, they began an interrogation of slaveholder political power that abolitionists would continue in the antebellum period.41 Black orators like Sidney arguably anticipated that intergenerational exchange between Federalists and abolitionists. In 1809, Sidney was already transforming Federalist attacks on Jefferson, which could at times be quite racist, into sincere antislavery argument.42 Federalist antislavery did have significant limitations. The NYMS did not outlaw slaveholding among its members and Federalists often took a paternalist attitude toward free blacks.43 Yet in terms of national politics, Federalism represented a clear alternative to Democratic-­Republican rule, one that gained newfound relevance in the years before the War of 1812. By 1809, when Sidney gave his oration, Federalists had begun to regain ground in the North, where Jefferson’s embargo and worsening diplomatic relations with Britain catalyzed discontent. In 1812, many Federalists openly supported New York Republican DeWitt Clinton’s dissident campaign against James Madison in an effort to undo Virginia’s hold on the presidency. Clinton’s failed campaign was nowhere near as strident in its opposition to slavery as Sidney,

58

Padraig Riley

and Clinton, it should be noted, supported the original 1811 certificate law as a member of the New York Senate. But his presidential bid created political space for sectional attacks on southern power and those attacks persisted during the War of 1812, as Federalists bitterly denounced the political rule of slaveholders.44 These national political conflicts were in the background when New York Republicans renewed their efforts to limit black suffrage in 1814 and 1815. In the midst of a war, where Jeffersonians invoked white fears of Indian attack and slave rebellion to forge a racialized nationalism, New York Republicans took concrete steps toward white supremacy in order to defend their control of the assembly and the national power of the Jeffersonian coalition against Federalist attack. Doing so meant defending the Republican accord with slaveholder power.45 The New York Republicans who constrained black suffrage through the certificate laws and then attempted to deny black voting outright in 1821 were likewise engaged in a larger political struggle over the legitimacy of slavery in the United States. During the Missouri Crisis of 1819–1821, the Jeffersonian coalition broke along sectional lines, exposing slavery to attack. In Congress, northern Federalists and Republicans joined forces in support of slavery restriction; in the northern states, politicians used their antislavery position on the Missouri question to win local elections. Clintonians in New York supported the restriction of slavery in Missouri, and they managed to elect Clinton governor in 1820 partly by appealing to antislavery sentiment. Black voters appeared to come out for Clinton because of his antislavery stance. But the Clintonian coalition was fragile. Bucktail Republicans, led by Martin Van Buren, fought back against Clinton, arguing that the governor represented the old values of Federalism. Bucktails pushed for the Constitutional Convention in 1821 in order to advance democracy in New York and undermine Clinton’s power. Because they believed the black electorate would likely back Clintonian men and measures in the future, they sought to strip African Americans of the suffrage.46 Once again, Republicans attacked black voters to preserve their power in New York and in the nation. In doing so, they helped restore the legitimacy of slavery in a moment of crisis. After the Missouri Crisis, Van Buren worked to revive Jeffersonian democracy and keep the slavery question from disrupting cross-­sectional political alliances of white men. When Congress returned to session in the late fall of 1821, he helped engineer the defeat of New York’s John W. Taylor, a leader in the fight to restrict slavery in Missouri, for Speaker of the House of Representatives. Instead, Virginia’s Philip P. Barbour, an outspoken opponent of restriction, took over the speakership. The House election proved to be a

Rethinking White Supremacy

59

trial run of a new alliance between “the planters of the South and the plain republicans of the North”; by 1828, that alliance had taken solid form as Jacksonian democracy.47 Thus ultimately, the question of black suffrage at the New York Constitutional Convention was enmeshed in a much wider and more complicated tactical struggle. In seeking to suppress black voters, white men sought to keep Van Buren’s Bucktail Republicans in power. Van Buren leveraged his influence in New York to develop a new national coalition that would protect slavery from direct political challenge. Of course, Republicans were hardly so candid at the New York Constitutional Convention in August 1821 as they fought first to limit the suffrage to white men—and then, upon losing that question, to impose the $250 property requirement only on blacks. As one of the advocates of a white man’s democracy insisted, the question of whether or not blacks should vote had no “connection at all with the question of slavery.” They instead listed a host of racist reasons why black men should be denied the suffrage. Bucktails argued that black men were “not competent to vote”; that their votes would be controlled by Federalists; that a small population of black men in New York City would dictate the political fortunes of the entire state; and that white New Yorkers, having evinced their objections to social equality with blacks, should not be forced by their Constitution to share political equality with them.48 Such racist arguments, however deeply felt, obscured the wider issues at stake, and thus worked to keep the problem of slavery off the table. But as Federalist Peter Jay pointed out, the question of black suffrage in New York could not be extricated from the national politics of slavery. If New York should prohibit black voters, said Jay, “you will hear a shout of triumph and a hiss of scorn from the southern part of the union.”49 As Jay and other defenders of black suffrage contended, discrimination on the basis of race would violate the promise of equal citizenship under the Constitution—the promise that, as the comity clause of Article IV, Section 2 put it, “The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States.” If a free black male citizen of Vermont should move to New York, he would not be able to claim the privilege of voting. Such claims led to a technical debate about whether or not Article IV meant to include “political” rights in its protection of comity, or only civil rights, thus permitting discrimination when it came to voting. Those debates demonstrated the ambiguous nature of national citizenship, which was not well defined in the Constitution or in federal law.50 However, in the recently concluded debates over the constitution of the new state of Missouri,

60

Padraig Riley

southerners had mounted an ambitious argument that only white people could claim national citizenship in the United States. That was Jay’s point— by stripping black New Yorkers of the suffrage, the convention would push New York closer to a white supremacist definition of citizenship, in service not only to racial prejudice, but to slaveholder power. Jay wondered why black New Yorkers, “who were born as free as ourselves, natives of the same country, and deriving from nature and our political institutions, the same rights and privileges which we have, [are] now to be deprived of all those rights, and doomed to remain forever as aliens among us?” The choice to disfranchise was not simply expedient, as some Bucktails tried to argue.51 It was tantamount to declaring African Americans subordinate members of the polity of New York, thus eroding their claims to national belonging.

Black Citizenship The problem of black citizenship was all the more momentous in the fall of 1821 because it had occupied Congress for much of the previous winter. When the new slaveholding state of Missouri applied to enter the Union, it submitted a constitution that prohibited free African Americans from crossing its borders. Northerners, still bitter over losing Missouri to slavery, were aghast that Missouri now sought to restrict free black migration and thus the privileges and immunities of black citizens in the North. Missouri’s provocation compelled some white northerners to mount an open defense of black rights and the basic equality of all persons in the United States. Attacking the Missouri Constitution in the New York Assembly in the fall of 1820, Clintonian John Spencer emphasized that free African Americans in New York would be banned from migrating to Missouri, “a palpable violation . . . of the express terms of the Constitution of the United States.” Spencer did not doubt that black men were equal citizens in New York, for they had “the distinguishing characteristic of a citizen, the elective franchise.”52 A year later, that argument was no longer plausible, because the New York Constitutional Convention had stripped most black men of the vote. Southerners in Congress took the argument against black citizenship much further. In defense of the ban on black migration in the Missouri Constitution, southerners argued that black people were never intended to be, were not, and could never become citizens of the United States. Anticipating the Dred Scott decision of 1857, southerners argued that the United States was in origin and purpose a community of white people.

Rethinking White Supremacy

61

Far from being a “fire bell in the night,” the Missouri Crisis arose in the wake of three decades of intermittent but intense conflict over slavery in Congress.53 Prior debates indicated that southern congressmen would fight hard to defend slaveholder property rights and that they were willing to suppress the rights of free African Americans in order to do so. They hinted at such inclinations in debates over the petitions from black Philadelphians in 1797 and 1800 and made them explicit in the 1802 debate over fugitive slaves. In 1803, petitioners from Wilmington, North Carolina sought federal support to keep emancipated slaves from the French Caribbean out of their state. A House committee proposed federal penalties in support of any state that wished to ban all black migration outright. That prompted an early version of antebellum conflicts over the rights of free black seamen, as some northern congressmen argued that many black sailors, whose work would require them to enter southern ports, were citizens of the United States. Their rights under the comity clause would be impaired by blanket racial restrictions. Such objections led Congress to specify exemptions for citizens of the United States and registered seamen.54 Once again, northerners managed to check the southern impulse toward national racial control and a white supremacist understanding of American citizenship. But southern paranoia about free blacks only increased over time. In 1807 debates over ending the international slave trade, southerners fought hard to ensure that no slaves recovered through interdiction efforts would be emancipated within the United States, not even in the North. Georgian Peter Early explained that most southerners would have to kill any free blacks admitted into their states out of “self-­preservation.” His violent hyperbole expressed an emerging consensus among American masters: emancipated black people threatened the basic structure of slaveholder power.55 John Randolph said much the same at an early organizational meeting for what would become the American Colonization Society in 1816: “the existence of this mixed and intermediate population of free negroes was viewed by every slaveholder as one of the greatest sources of the insecurity, and also unprofitableness, of slave property.” Beginning in South Carolina in 1822, multiple southern states compelled free black sailors to remain in prison while their ships were in port, lest they incite slave rebellion. Such laws undermined prior recognition of the national citizenship of black sailors by the federal government.56 In the debates over the Missouri Constitution in 1820–1821, southerners openly argued that no black person could be a citizen of the United States. Nature, history, and custom all protested such an abomination, they claimed. “Indians, free negroes, mulattoes, slaves!” cried Virginia slaveholder Philip

62

Padraig Riley

Barbour, “Tell men not that the Constitution, when it speaks of We, the ­people, means these.” South Carolina Jeffersonian Charles Pinckney claimed that not only had he been at the Constitutional Convention, he had drafted the privileges and immunities clause, and that he “perfectly knew that there did not then exist such a thing in the Union as a black or colored citizen, nor could I then have conceived it possible such a thing could ever have existed in it; nor, notwithstanding all that is said on the subject, do I now believe one does exist in it.” Louis McLane of Delaware felt similarly, as he appealed to an even older history of white supremacy. The settlers who colonized the lands that would later become the United States, he explained, were essentially a white community. In its origin the black population could have formed no part of it, and throughout its progress the invincible barrier to a mixture of white and black, and the positive regulations of society, have perpetually excluded them. They could not, therefore, upon the principles of the association, and in the nature of things, be entitled to equal rights. Should a slave be emancipated by his master, said McLane, he became not a citizen but a “stranger.” Here he echoed Virginia’s Alexander Smyth, who insisted that “nature seems to have made the negro a perpetual alien to the white man.” Pinckney added an appeal to natural science, citing Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia to demonstrate black inequality. African Americans could never be the equals of white people, he explained; indeed, they “were most probably intended to serve them.”57 Such racist arguments intended to strip all African Americans of the most fundamental rights of political life. Free blacks could not even aspire to what Pennsylvanian John Sergeant, in criticism of the Missouri Constitution, called “the humble simple principle of locomotion.” They could not walk freely across the Missouri state line. Barbour, Pinckney, and McLane anticipated by over thirty years Justice Roger Taney’s infamous decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, which denied Dred Scott’s capacity to sue in federal court on the grounds that African Americans had never been, and under the Constitution of 1787 never could be, citizens of the United States. In the 1780s, as in the 1850s, claimed Taney, they had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”58 Whether or not Taney’s ruling was bad law, it was obviously bad history. As northerners complained during the debates over Missouri’s Constitution, black people were full citizens in many of the states and had been since the origins of the American republic. “This was their native country,”

Rethinking White Supremacy

63

said Pennsylvania Federalist Joseph Hemphill, “as dear to them as to us.” They had fought for the United States during the Revolution and the War of 1812. They owned property and they voted in a number of states. Their rights could not be infringed by the state of Missouri. As a Massachusetts Republican reminded the House, the Constitution began with the phrase “We the people,” not “We the white people.”59 Despite a long record of racist acts and beliefs, McLane’s story about the white community that gave rise to the United States was simply a fantasy. But as northern blacks knew all too well, the fantasy of a white nation had real power and real effects. By 1821, multiple northern states had stripped free African American men of the right to vote; during the Missouri Crisis, southerners threatened their permanent alienation from the political community. Henry Clay cobbled together a compromise measure in which Congress stated that Missouri’s constitution should never be construed so as to prohibit the “privileges and immunities” of citizens of the United States. Of course, if African Americans were not citizens, as most southerners seemed to believe, the point was moot—they could be discriminated against at will. In 1825, Missouri passed a law that restricted the rights of free blacks and reaffirmed its commitment to ban free black migrants from the state. The law made a careful exception for anyone who was a citizen of another state, but placed burdensome demands on free blacks. Any free black person could be brought before a justice of the peace and compelled to produce a “certificate, attested by the seal of some court of record in some one of the United States, evidencing that he is a citizen of such state.” If the black person in question could not produce such a certificate, the justice of the peace was to command them to leave the state within 30 days. If they did not do so, they were to be jailed, and then, should a court inquiry find said person in disobedience of the law, they were to receive “ten lashes on his or her bare back.” The process was to be repeated “as often as may be necessary, until such person shall depart the state.”60 Missouri planned to whip free blacks out of the polity. Missouri’s restrictions on black in-­migration, which echoed earlier laws in the Upper South, Illinois, and Ohio, were part of a wider process to undermine black rights and bring the vision of southerners like Pinckney, Barbour, and McLane into reality: to make sure that the United States would be a nation founded not on equality but on exclusion, a nation defined not by principle but by race. By the early 1820s, with the admission of a slaveholding Missouri, the loss of black voting rights in New York state, the rise of the American Colonization Society, and the first attempts to build the Jacksonian coalition, their vision of white nationalism appeared to be winning.61

64

Padraig Riley

But it is important to remember significant countercurrents to the rising tide of white supremacy: the antikidnapping and fugitive slave laws passed in Pennsylvania in 1820 and 1826, and protest against colonization by free blacks, which checked the efforts of the ACS from the outset and helped define an emboldened argument for black birthright citizenship in the United States. It is also important to be clear about where white supremacy came from. It was not simply written into the DNA of the United States and it was not inherited ready-­made from the settler colonists of North America. White supremacy became more entrenched in the early national period in order to protect the coercive authority of slaveholding. By any measure, American slaveholders gained considerable power after the American Revolution, but they also faced new legal and ideological challenges to human bondage. In the context of a new republic where some states had adopted abolition, gradual and immediate, where enslaved people achieved freedom through means legal and extralegal, and where free black communities openly agitated against slavery, slaveholders required a racial logic to justify their rule as never before. The stakes were high and they only became higher as the nineteenth century wore on. Race was the terrain for a great struggle over slavery and freedom. During the Missouri Crisis, slaveholders rejected the radical idea that all people deserved political freedom by their very nature; they argued instead that political rights came from society. In a racist society, they argued, political rights were quite rationally circumscribed along racial lines.62 Plus, as Charles Pinckney reminded northerners during the last stage of the Missouri Crisis, white people derived considerable benefits from their political union with the slaveholding states. It hardly seemed rational to discard those benefits simply “to give to a few free negroes and mulattoes the right to settle in Missouri.” Many northern whites reconciled themselves to slaveholder power and racist rule precisely on these lines. They would rather hold on to the benefits of being a white citizen of a slaveholding republic than challenge a political order that required the subordination of black people.63 Pinckney’s very dismissiveness pointed to the ongoing danger of black resistance, however. By his own logic, “a few free negroes” could disrupt the national accord between white men that allowed slavery to flourish. As conflicts over fugitive rendition demonstrated, a single runaway slave could cause significant problems for slaveholder rule. White supremacy tried to suppress that threat by forcing black Americans out of politics altogether— by ejecting them from the “people” who governed the United States. But in many respects such efforts only set the terms for a revolutionary politics of

Rethinking White Supremacy

65

inclusion. By seeking freedom and political belonging, African Americans sought not simply to overcome domination and exclusion but to transform the fundamental terms of citizenship and democratic governance in the United States. Free and enslaved African Americans in this respect both contested the American political order and preserved the radical promise of the Age of Revolution.64 First and foremost, they fought to destroy American slavery, an insult to democracy and the foundation for white supremacy. Their fight is worth recalling today, as white nationalists rehash the old arguments of American slaveholders. In many ways, the basic terms of American history still need revision, to better account for the dominance of slavery in American political life and the long struggle against slaveholder power. That struggle formed a radical democratic politics that contested the white male rule of the slaveholding republic. As black New Yorker Adam Carman closed an oration celebrating the abolition of the international slave trade in 1811, he attacked the folly of racism and called on his audience to join together in a great struggle: that we may all be as one man aiding the confederated friends of humanity to accelerate that desirable period, when despotism shall be hurled from the theatre of nations into the abyss of contempt; and humanity and justice take that first seat of power, and control the empire of the world, sway her equivalent scepter from pole to pole, from hemisphere to hemisphere.65 These words summoned a politics of emancipation, a politics of overcoming, a politics of human rights—a politics founded on the abolition of slavery. The question faced by Carman and other black activists was whether that universalist vision could prevail in the face of white supremacy and the powerful accord between American slaveholders and the American nation-­state. White supremacy sought to deny black claims to political belonging, in an attempt to render such broad claims to rights effectively meaningless. Fighting to establish black citizenship and protect freedom, fugitives, free blacks and antislavery whites forced a reckoning with race, exposing the bonds between white supremacy and slaveholder authority. In doing so, they joined an ongoing battle to emancipate the United States: to end slavery and create a polity where all human beings might be free. Such aspirations are worth revisiting in our own age of white nationalism and antidemocratic power.

Chapter 3

In the Woodpile Negro Electors in the First Reconstruction Van Gosse

Black reconstruction with its aftermath then is only one aspect of the Negro’s political history in the United States. —Charles Wesley, 1944

This essay focuses on those states least studied in terms of black suffrage and the politics of the early republic: North Carolina, Tennessee, Maryland, Delaware, and New Jersey.1 Its goal is to clarify the unsettled, wide-­open character of the “revolutionary settlement,” a term I borrow from John L. Brooke to describe “the variable and uneven fabric of consent, legitimacy, and institutions woven in thousands of localities across the new Republic,” at the center of which “lay the question of who was a citizen: the law-­protected, consenting individual free to participate in civil life.”2 Although little noticed in contemporary scholarship, the question of whether free black persons were citizens and, if men, voters was central to how that fabric got woven—and the process that eventually tore it apart. Black men voted early and often in large parts of the early republic, and this plain fact challenges the presumed whiteness of the revolutionary settlement. Indeed, the electoral mobilization of black men in the republic’s first decades was less controversial (as in noticed, challenged, and recorded) than later, when disfranchisement swept the Lower North in 1818–1822 (Connecticut, New York, Rhode Island), and spread to those Upper South states where free men of color had traditionally voted, Tennessee and North Carolina, in 1834–1835, and finally Pennsylvania

In the Woodpile

67

in 1838. From the perspective of the scholarship advanced in this volume, that first settlement embodied not only a First Emancipation, but also a First Reconstruction, and even a First Redemption, as underlined by the first of many Compromises over the location, position, and rights of persons of African descent, in this case over Missouri in 1819–1821.3

Revolutions and Restorations Casting the events of the Revolution and the post-­Revolutionary generation in this light is not so much radical revisionism as a return to radical republicanism. On July 4, 1865, speaking in Ravenna, Ohio, Representative James A. Garfield offered a deeply partisan account of the Founding, prior to the settlement that he had just helped overturn or, rather, return to what men like him believed to be its first principles. He began by reminding his fellow Republicans that “In the extremity of our distress, we called upon the black man to help us save the Republic. . . . we made a covenant with him, sealed both with his blood and with ours . . . that, when the nation was redeemed, he should be free, and share with us its glories and its blessings.” Having asserted “liberty is no negation” but “a substantial, tangible reality,” the thrust of this Radical’s speech was to insist on a nonracial franchise. He denounced the “senseless dogma . . . that the color of the skin shall be the basis of suffrage,” since even the newly freed men understood “the nature of our institutions better than the equally ignorant foreigner,” a nativist trope long common to antislavery men, black or white. Garfield then went to the root of the problem—the presumed whiteness of Americans. Speaking eight years after Chief Justice Taney asserted that persons of African descent had never been and never could be citizens, he administered a dose of originalism, that “to grant suffrage to the black man in this country is not innovation, but restoration. It is a return to the ancient principles and practices of our fathers.” To bolster his case, he offered “a few facts . . . but little studied by the people and politicians of this generation,” including that at the Constitution’s ratification there was “but one State among the thirteen whose constitution refused the right of suffrage to the negro. . . . South Carolina” (untrue in point of fact, as colonial Georgia and Virginia both made “white” a criterion for voting). He noted, as many Republicans had in the late 1850s, the overwhelming defeat of South Carolina’s 1778 attempt to insert “white” into the Articles of Confederation’s stipulation that “the free inhabitants” of each state ”shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities

68

Van Gosse

of free citizens in the several states.” He also pointed out that although “Congress [had] passed ten separate laws establishing new Territories. . . . No federal legislation prior to 1812 placed any restriction on the right of suffrage in consequence of the color of the citizen.” The future president concluded on a ringing note of historical finality intended to bring to closure the argument over whether the Constitution was proslavery, a “covenant with hell,” as the Garrisonians had long insisted, or a charter of freedom, as Frederick Douglass and Gerrit Smith claimed in the 1850s: “I affirm, therefore, that our present position is one of apostasy; and to give the ballot to the negro will be no innovation, but a return to the old paths,—a restoration of that spirit of liberty to which the sufferings and sacrifices of the Revolution gave birth.”4 Garfield’s speech registered the temporary victory of one side in a conflict that began at the Founding—who was an American, a citizen, and therefore a voter? From the perspective of self-­defined “Northern men” like him, the revolutionary settlement had been premised on a massive betrayal. For a long time, this was a minority viewpoint, shared by black men and a few allies drawn disproportionately from what remained of the Federalist Party, and only episodically expressed (as at New York’s 1821 constitutional convention). In the late 1830s and early 1840s, this view gained a national voice via a small group of antislavery Whigs in Congress led by John Quincy Adams, plus Liberty men like James G. Birney and Gerrit Smith out of it.5 After the Free Soil outbreak of 1848, these outliers became a gathering host led by powerful party figures like William H. Seward and Salmon P. Chase. All of them portrayed themselves, like Garfield, as restorers of the Revolution’s “pristine republican purity.” That was how Birney described his intentions in a letter to the South Carolina congressman Franklin Elmore in 1838, evoking a range of the Founders, all northerners: Gouverneur Morris, Alexander Hamilton, Roger Sherman, James Wilson, Benjamin Franklin, and Rufus King, insisting “They would be the last to brand” their memory “with the ineffaceable infamy of intending to ingraft upon the Constitution, and therefore to perpetuate, a system of oppression in absolute antagonism to its high and professed objects.”6 William Jay, son of the Founder best known for racial egalitarianism, put it even more directly that same year: “Our Fathers [emphasis added], in forming the Federal Constitution, entered into a guilty compromise on the subject of slavery, and heavily is the sin now visited on their children.”7 Like the first cohort of northern antislavery Republicans in 1800–1820, men like Adams, Birney, and Seward found themselves, in Padraig Riley’s evocative words, “in a dilemma that was essentially historical. They wished to check both the advancing power of slavery in the United States while believing that

In the Woodpile

69

the nation, in its truest sense, had never countenanced the institution in the first place. They had long been living in the midst of slavery without doubting that they also lived in the midst of republican freedom. They liked the poetry that was the United States.”8 This republican mystique—that the Revolution betrayed could still be saved—was on full display in October 1855 when William Seward, the most important politician in the nation’s largest state, rallied his partisans in Albany, soon after he and Thurlow Weed announced the birth of “the gigantic party of freedom,” as Weed called it, New York’s Republican organization, out of the wreck of Whigs.9 At the core of Seward’s call to action was the assertion that the Slave Power constituted a counterrevolutionary “aristocracy” against which true republicans must mobilize.10 He began by explaining how the battles of 1775–1783 had brought into the world “the simple and practically new principle of the equal and inalienable rights of all men, and therefore it [the colonies in arms] necessarily became a republic. Other governments, founded on the ancient principle of the inequality of men, are, by force of an equal necessity, monarchies or aristocracies.” He wasted no time in declaring, “Think it not strange or extravagant when I say that an aristocracy has already arisen here, and it is already undermining the Republic.” As explanation he offered an authentic if now anachronistic form of class analysis: “Every state, however republican its Constitution may be, is sure to become an aristocracy, sooner or later, if it has a privileged class standing firmly on an enduring special foundation.” Aristocracy, despite its European trappings, did not require “feudal tenures . . . military command . . . ecclesiastical authority, or that its rights be hereditary.” Indeed, it was “even the more insidious and more dangerous for lacking all these things.” Then came the hard fact: “A privileged class has existed in this country from an early period of its settlement,” and in 1855, the 350,000 slaveholders “constitute that class.” Having named the class enemy, Seward sketched “the revolutionary age,” before the fall. In that first dawn, “a speedy, complete, and universal abolition of African Slavery” was expected, and even the “privileged class” acknowledged it was “indefensible, and favored its removal.” To give them time, “the most decided opponents of Slavery consented to some provisions of the Federal Constitution” that protected slavery-­as-­it-­was, expecting the states themselves would act and “certain” that slavery’s end was “close at hand.”11 Then came the betrayal, the Thermidor, as the slaveholders took advantage of the North’s magnanimity to perpetuate their special power: “The policy of emancipation was set back in this country during the reaction against revolutionary principles which necessarily attended the reorganization of Government,”

70

Van Gosse

and the “disastrous failure of the first republic in France. The privileged class promptly seized the advantages which the Constitution afforded,” meaning equal representation in the Senate and the three-­fifths clause, “to fortify itself in the Federal Government.” Seward then moved on to the Missouri Compromises. In his telling, an extension of the Northwest Ordinance into the Louisiana Territory was expected, but southerners “denied the power of Congress, although in the Territories it was supreme and exclusive,” and northerners were defeated in the House through “a new form of strategy—the strategy of compromise.” Here the revisionism was truly audacious, since the architect of that and many later compromises was Henry Clay, whom Seward had personally championed in multiple presidential candidacies. But it was 1855, Clay was dead, and Seward had plenty of contemporary targets, including the “atrocious usurpation of the government of Kansas” and the long record of Democratic militarism, the “millions upon millions . . . lavished in war and diplomacy to annex and spread Slavery over Louisiana, Florida, Texas, Mexico, Cuba, and Central America.” He finished with a call for revolutionary renewal: “Shall we organize? Why not? Can we maintain the revolution, so auspiciously begun, without organization? Certainly not. . . . We must restore the demoralized virtue of the nation. We must restore the principle of equality among the members of the State—the principle of the sacredness of the absolute and inherent rights of man. . . . We want a bold, out-­spoken, free-­spoken organization . . . like that army, which Cromwell led, that established the Commonwealth of England.”12 Given that the Whig and Republican base in upstate New York was composed of self-­conscious Yankee immigrants who understood themselves as inheritors of Cromwell’s legacy, this was powerful stuff. Whose head should be taken off after defeating the new Cavaliers was left unsaid, but it is easy to imagine John Brown reading this speech as endorsing armed struggle, and southern white men saw Seward as that kind of foe. Seward was a brilliant politician, but any number of Founders and their descendants, southern and northern, never did, never have, and never will agree with his understanding of the Revolution. For them, the compromises over slavery and freedom that made the Union possible were settled matters, a sacred compact between sovereign states, which only fools or traitors would seek to disrupt. On this rendering of the Revolution, Northern Whigs like Daniel Webster and southern Federalists like Charles C. Pinckney agreed, and their agreement had preserved the “Union as it is,” in Webster’s famous formulation, for seventy years. Seward and Garfield had nothing to say to these men—the histories could not be reconciled.

In the Woodpile

71

The nucleus of truth in Garfield’s and Seward’s narratives was that slavery had taken severe blows during the Revolution. It was ideologically discredited by the Revolutionaries’ claims to an absolute natural liberty, made that much worse by Great Britain’s buildup of “moral capital” from the 1772 Somerset v. Stuart decision. Both the British and the Americans practiced military emancipations, and both parties accepted that military service led to freedom for slaves. Finally, black people had consistently evinced an intense disposition to liberty by petitioning, running away, buying themselves, enlisting as soldiers and sailors, and inserting themselves at every point into the Revolutionary drama. The combination of these factors—recognition of black men as soldiers, the heightened risk of fugitivity making human property a risky business, the hegemony of republicanism in popular discourse— led to a development wholly unforeseen when colonial agitation began in 1765, a First Emancipation during and after wartime in a few of the new states (Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire), spreading slowly to those with larger numbers of slave laborers (New York and New Jersey), and finally lapping up against the borders of the South via large-­scale manumissions in Virginia and Maryland.13 All of the above is now well known, thanks to the sea change in scholarship on the Revolution since the 1960s, when historians like Benjamin Quarles and Staughton Lynd were outliers, ignored or reviled for their insistence that the Revolution had never been an exclusively white affair. We now know a great deal about what the people of color did during the 1770s and 1780s but, perhaps surprisingly, the historiography on black political (rather than social) activism in the early republic is quite limited. Most scholarly attention to race and politics in the period 1789 to 1821 has continued to focus on debates among white men.14 Certainly, black voices and lives in this period have been examined with great assiduity, from the evolution of community and religious institutions to the development of a black “public sphere” and a concomitant literary and pamphleteering tradition. But politics—as in parties, elections, legislation, the state (or “States”), and how power was exerted within them—is presumed to have been white men’s business. Black electoralism and partisanship are absent from the classic studies of free black communities in Boston, New York City, and Philadelphia by James Horton, Shane White, and Gary Nash, respectively, and the studies that followed their example largely repeat this omission.15 Isolated episodes, as in Greenbury Morton, Benjamin Banneker’s cousin, trying to vote after Maryland’s 1802 disfranchisement, have been treated as anachronistic or residual, unconnected to larger patterns.16

72

Van Gosse

The appropriate starting point for a new historiography of black politics is the forgotten story of disfranchisement’s defeat in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and New York in 1778–1785. This conjuncture at the height of revolutionary mobilization suggests a road not taken in the three largest northern states at exactly the point when, as Douglas Bradburn reminds us, “the bright line [was] drawn between American citizens and American Indians,” making “the exclusion of Native Americans” from citizenship “clear by the end of the war,” while “the place of newly freed blacks . . . remained unsettled.”17 First, as documented in Oscar and Mary Handlin’s 1966 The Popular Sources of Political Authority, in 1778 Massachusetts’ town meetings overwhelmingly rejected a draft constitution disfranchising all but white men, with many towns vehemently denouncing any “complexional” franchise.18 Two years later, in 1780, the opposition to Pennsylvania’s gradual emancipation act included claims that even if “slaves might be safely emancipated, we could not agree to their being made free citizens,” since that would require “giving them the right of voting for, and being voted into offices.” Said objections were simply ignored by the majority.19 Finally, in 1785, New York’s legislature sent a bill for gradual emancipation to the new state’s Council of Revision (a proto–Supreme Court, with the constitutional authority to veto legislation). The proposed legislation disfranchised all former slaves and was vetoed via a ringing endorsement of nonracial citizenship that was probably authored by the arch-­aristocrat, Chancellor Robert Livingston, affirming the danger of what we would today call white-­skin privilege—that “The creation of an order of citizens who are to have no legislative or representative share in the government, necessarily lays the foundation of an aristocracy [emphasis added] of the most dangerous and malignant kind, rendering power permanent and hereditary in the hands of those persons who deduce their origin through white ancestors only.”20 Although the episodes outlined above are hardly unknown, to the extent that historians have tracked black voting in the early republic, they have focused instead on the rising tide of disfranchisement. This is putting the cart before the horse. Disfranchisement proceeded from the fact that ten of the original thirteen states had enfranchised their free men of color, and in one case free women too. Further, various scholars have insisted that only one new state enfranchised black men after 1791 (when Vermont came in): Maine in 1819. That is simply not true. In 1792, Kentucky enacted nonracial suffrage, and in 1796, Tennessee did the same.21 That these facts have slipped by is remarkable, given that Tennessee saw a well-­publicized battle over disfranchising men of color in 1834, the penultimate southern state to do so.

In the Woodpile

73

Looking at Tennessee and North Carolina, the other southern state to maintain black voting, is thus an appropriate place to begin examining black men’s electoral participation as part of the original Revolutionary settlement.

Southern Exceptionalisms? North Carolina’s original charter in 1663 produced confusion about who could vote, all “Freemen” or just “Freeholders,” which was gradually clarified to require a freehold of fifty acres. Concerns remained, however, that “boys and other unqualified persons” were voting, so the first elections law in 1715 specified that “no person whatsoever Inhabitant of this Government born out of the Allegiance of his Majesty and not made free no Negro Mulatto or Indians shall be capable of voting for Members of Assembly.” In 1734–1735, the assembly repealed this white freeman’s suffrage and substituted language specifying that only an “Inhabitant” with a “bona fide Freehold in his own Right of at least fifty Acres of Land” could vote. As Albert McKinley observes, this was “remarkable . . . the formal exclusion of negroes was laid aside.”22 The 1776 Revolutionary constitution largely continued this qualification, with no racial bar in its suffrage provision. It enacted a two-­tier system, in which voting for the state senate and governor required “a freehold . . . of fifty acres of land,” whereas the only qualification for the lower House of Commons was to have “paid public taxes.” Crucially, in both cases, the operative category was “all freemen, of the age of twenty-­one years, who have been inhabitants of any one county within the State twelve months immediately preceding the day of any election.”23 On this basis free men of color began (or continued) to go to the polls, and this practice was accepted as routine, their votes sought or purchased like other men’s, notably the class of poor whites with whom they were closely associated, according to one chronicler.24 The best evidence for black voting in North Carolina comes from two counties, Cumberland and Craven, with much in common. Both were centers of Loyalism during the Revolution, and afterward of Federalism, a pattern advantageous to support for black suffrage.25 In Cumberland County, whose major town was Fayetteville, biracial politics were ordinary, and no one made a fuss about “treating” and marshaling men of color to go to the polls, although “Their ballots often decided the outcomes of town elections in the early nineteenth century.” In one controversial 1810 election for the House of Commons, the Federalists prevailed 119–88, in large part because of black men’s votes.26 Craven County presents a more complex picture because of

74

Van Gosse

the presence of the ex-­slave John Carruthers Stanly, one of the largest slaveholders of any race in the state. Born in 1774, while a slave he established an extremely successful barbering business, and bought himself in 1795. By the late 1820s, he was worth $68,000 and owned 127 slaves on several plantations. He was also closely linked by blood to the Stanlys, a leading white family in New Bern, and acknowledged by them. His half-­brother born the same year, also “John C. Stanly,” was a Federalist member of Congress and then a longtime member of North Carolina’s House of Commons, eventually its Speaker.27 John Carruthers Stanly attended church with white people, guaranteed their notes and loans, and in all ways lived as a “gentleman of color”; indeed, what brought him down was backing his half-­brother’s overextended loans as president of the local bank. From John Hope Franklin’s classic study of the state’s free people of color, we also derive the sense that Stanly headed a significantly larger group of black freeholders.28 Before presuming that John Carruthers Stanly was functionally a white man, we should note that for two years, 1827–1829, he was listed in the New York–based Freedom’s Journal as one of two North Carolina agents for that black-­edited newspaper. Nor was he an anomaly. Its other agent was the only slightly less wealthy Lewis Sheridan, a merchant grocer connected with the New York trade.29 Another prominent man of color in North Carolina was the Presbyterian minister John Chavis, a Revolutionary veteran who trained at the College of New Jersey (later Princeton) and Washington Academy (later Washington and Lee) in the 1790s and was ordained in 1800. In 1808 Chavis organized a school in Raleigh, enrolling the children of the planter elite, including future political leaders like Senator Willie Mangum, with whom Chavis maintained a long friendship. Like other black men of this generation, he was a Federalist who outlived his affiliations and ended up disgusted by the new Jacksonian Democracy.30 Because of the absence of local studies like Harry Watson’s, we know less about black voting in Tennessee. Certainly there was no figure comparable to Stanly, Sheridan, or Chavis. All chroniclers agree that the state was founded in 1796 as an extension of North Carolina to its east, with a constitution modeled on that state’s, copying its nonracial “freemen’s” suffrage, approved “apparently without any debate whatever” following a delegate election in which the territorial governor stipulated that “all free males” should vote. Indeed, what distinguished Tennessee from the rest of the Upper South for many decades was the intensely antislavery counties of East Tennessee, populated by Scots Covenanters who moved west from South Carolina, who petitioned in large numbers for emancipation in 1796 and kept up that losing fight through 1834.31 By that point, “the constant growth of the political

In the Woodpile

75

influence of the free Negroes was” the main “cause of the withdrawal of the franchise,” suggested one historian in the early twentieth century, noting its chief sponsor came from Davidson County, with the largest population of free people of color in the state, and that “the presence of this large number of free Negroes had come to be a very troublesome factor in state elections, especially when these elections were closely contested.”32 At the 1834 convention, the leading disfranchiser noted his surprise at “old gray headed gentlemen in plaintive and importuning language, contending” to let free black men continue voting. Against these sentimental graybeards, he warned that the free people of color were “in the habit of trading with our slaves and corrupting them,” and their voting furnished “an evil example to our slaves” that could lead to “the overthrow or total extinction of the white race, one instance of which is yet fresh in our memory—that of the ill-­fated island of St. Domingo.”33 During the debate, another ardent supporter of white suffrage referred repeatedly to the “old and venerable” delegates defending black suffrage, acknowledging it as “a right they had enjoyed for thirty-­eight years.”34 The best proof of their legitimacy is that, as a compromise, Tennessee preserved voting for a few men of some color by specifying first that “All negroes, Indians, Mulattoes and all persons of mixed blood, descended from negro and Indian ancestors, to the third generations inclusive” were barred from voting, but also that “no person shall be disqualified from voting in any election on account of color who is now, by the laws of this State, a competent witness in a court of justices against a white man,” grandfathering men with one black great-­great-­grandparent.35 The experience of these two states shows a long-­term tolerance for the fact of a biracial electorate, which, as Lacy Ford has argued, should complicate our understanding of the Upper South.36 In conjunction with developments in Maryland, it suggests an unwillingness to deprive men born free, or who had earned their freedom, of the most basic republican right; one notes the absence of explicit claims in any of these states that voting should be preserved for men of mixed blood, “whiter” than the mass, although Tennessee’s grandfathering suggests that by this time, degrees of “color” did matter, and that, like Virginia, it intended to create a category of neither white nor black.37

Along the Middle Border Moving northward, the most interesting site of voting in the early republic was the Middle Atlantic borderland, the four states in the environs of the Chesapeake (Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey), a region

76

Van Gosse

bound by a shared political economy and culture, however it was eventually divided into “slave” and “free.” These states also held the nation’s largest concentrations of free people of color, with manumission rapidly advancing in all four, so the prospect of substantial black electorates was a real one. Delaware moved earliest to foreclose that possibility, with profound implications for that tiny state’s future. Even in the early nineteenth century, it was moving away from slavery toward the creation of a disenfranchised racial proletariat.38 Although its colonial suffrage had been nonracial, in 1787, the Delaware legislature passed a law forbidding the sale of slaves out of state, clearly meant to encourage manumissions, while depriving freed slaves of the suffrage and other basic rights, and disfranchisement was confirmed when its new constitution in 1792 authorized suffrage for “every free white man.”39 Although the 1787 law did not deprive men of color born free of the right to vote, it ensured that the emerging caste of freedmen was deprived of power. Minus such legislation, Delaware’s black electorate would have expanded dramatically; in 1820, an estimated 2,903 black men of voting age would have constituted 20 percent of the adult male population of 14,531.40 That some number did vote is clear. Only two years after the passage of the 1787 law, amid a newspaper polemic for and against emancipation, a proslavery writer avowed that as “dearly as some of us love negroes, we would not wish to see them share in our councils, marry in our families and be exalted to rule over us. There might be some instances of such depravity of mind—I cannot help relating a striking one, when a negro, a few years ago, was admitted to vote in the borough of Wilmington, and shook by the hand as a clever fellow, for espousing a particular party, in order to gain an election in their favor.”41 Delaware points to the relative simplicity of voting in the colonial era, where a man who could be brought to the poll would be—if only because he owned a freehold, or could be given a deed like any other poor man, tenant, or legatee to cast a “fagot” vote. Early in the eighteenth century various southern colonies felt constrained to pass laws barring men of color from voting simply because the practice was common enough to warrant attention. In that sense, Delaware represented a prerevolutionary continuity, albeit one abruptly cut off. Tracing the narrative of disfranchisement, scholars often point to Maryland as the first state to end black voting, in 1783. But these claims are off the mark. Anticipating a wave of manumissions like Delaware, Maryland did disfranchise all slaves freed after that date. Simultaneously, however, it enfranchised freeborn men of color, a decision reaffirmed in a 1796 election bill.42 Via the 1783 legislation, Maryland effectively created an intermediate caste of “Historically Free Blacks,” who, if they owned “50 acres or had $30 in assets

In the Woodpile

77

could vote while women and poor white men could not.” Nearly all of these men were mulattoes.43 Benjamin Banneker is an excellent example. Born free (with a white grandmother), in 1759, he inherited one hundred acres, and thereafter, “his legal rights were virtually indistinguishable from those of a white man.”44 Disenfranchisement of this group remained controversial, if only because their political rights rested on the same absolute affirmation of property as slavery itself.45 In 1792, an attempt was made to revise the constitution so “that no negro or mulatto, whether born free or manumitted, or made free under any past, present, or future law of this state, and no issue of any such negro or mulatto, shall be entitled to the privilege of voting at any election, or of being elected to the legislature or the council, or as an elector of the senate, or of being appointed to any office whatsoever,” but it was voted down 13–43.46 As if in response, to highlight the rights claimed by black Marylanders, a free man named Thomas Brown announced his candidacy for the state House of Delegates, asking Baltimoreans to choose “one Man of Color to represent so many hundreds of poor Blacks as inhabit this town, as well as several thousands in the different parts of this State.” Tantalizingly, Brown alluded to his service in the Revolution, the offices he had previously held, and his strongly “anti-­Tory,” proto-­Federalist sentiments.47 There is no further record of his candidacy, so we have no way of knowing whether he actually attracted votes. An effort at disfranchisement in 1798, “to give the right of suffrage to all free white citizens,” also failed because the Federalist-­ controlled Senate would not consent to eliminate the property requirement for all men.48 Thanks to the scholarship of the legal historian David Bogen, we have detailed evidence for how Maryland’s black electorate acted in the 1800 race for Annapolis’s two seats in the House of Delegates. Bogen unearthed a poll book indicating that twenty men of color attempted to vote in that election and fifteen were accepted by the inspectors. Most challenges to their voting alleged a given man had been manumitted only since the 1783 legislation, and the names of many of these men are notable. Seven had remained slaves into the 1790s, but were freed via high-­profile court cases proving they were the descendants of women born in England, and thus never had been legally enslaved.49 Having litigated their freedom with great effort, these men now intended to exercise the rights of freemen. Given that each was entitled to cast two votes, and the total votes cast were only 475, men of color constituted 6.3 percent of Annapolis’ potential electorate, hardly minimal; Bogen’s conclusion that “the law of 1783 failed to prevent growth in the black suffrage” seems irresistible. The fact of black voters in conjunction with pressure

78

Van Gosse

to enfranchise poor white men converged in the law passed in 1801, ratified in 1802, to limit suffrage to whites, although Bogen stresses that Maryland’s disfranchisement was not “the product of a concerted plan” but rather arose from “disparate concerns, including not just the implications of a wider suffrage in general, but “losses suffered by slaveholders from escape and theft” and laws expanding the scope of manumission in Virginia.50 Turning to New Jersey, it is remarkable that the state deservedly known as the North’s proslavery backwater through the Civil War, where bondage lasted far longer than anywhere else, was a citadel of revolutionary democracy during and after the Revolution for people of color and women.51 In their major Journal of the Early Republic article in 1992, Judith Klinghoffer and Lois Elkis presented substantial evidence of black men and independent (single or widowed) black women voting in New Jersey from 1776, when the new state instituted nonracial, nongendered suffrage based on a minimal property qualification, through 1807, when all but white men were disfranchised.52 Indeed, there was nothing obscure or accidental about women, people of color, and women of color voting in the Garden State; for decades after it was cited either with jocularity, or as evidence of a potential threat, whenever black disfranchisement was being urged.53 In 1776, New Jersey adopted a constitution stating “All Inhabitants of this State of full Age, who are worth Fifty Pounds, Proclamation Money, clear Estate in the same . . . shall be entitled to vote for Representatives in Council and Assembly.”54 Suffrage provisions like these, among the broadest in the world, had been debated since the Revolution broke out the year before, and the New Jersey framers clearly intended to enfranchise economically independent women of any race (those not covered under either a father’s or husband’s sovereignty) and all men, regardless of race. The underlying premise was that any economically independent person should be able to vote, far more democratic in terms of race and gender if not class, than the unrestricted white male suffrage enacted in 1807, when the legislature declared that “doubts have been raised and great diversities in practice obtained throughout the state in regard to the admission of aliens, females, and people of color, or negroes to vote in elections.” As Emil Olbrich pointed out more than a century ago, there is contextual evidence for New Jersey’s nonracialism. In 1778, as Congress debated the Articles of Confederation, New Jersey’s Legislative Council, the upper house of its legislature, denounced using only a state’s white population as a basis for assessing military levies. After quoting the Declaration regarding the equality of “all men,” it suggested that “all the inhabitants of every society, be

In the Woodpile

79

the color of their complexion what it may, are bound to promote the interests thereof according to their respective abilities,” and since slaves contributed in the slave states, they should be counted. On the same day that Congress debated that measure, June 5, South Carolina lost decisively when attempting to restrict “privileges and immunities” to “free white inhabitants.”55 Similarly, in 1794, New Jersey’s Supreme Court affirmed black voting rights by throwing out an election because “the bare word of one man that he was qualified,—the affirmation of a black man that he had been manumitted was held sufficient to entitle these persons to vote,” clarifying that if that man had a certificate or a witness proving his freedom he certainly could have voted.56 Finally, in 1800 (to quell partisan inspectors refusing voters on specious grounds), an amendment was proposed to an election bill, “that the inspectors of election in the several townships of this State, shall not refuse the vote of any widow on unmarried woman of full age, or any person of colour of full age, provided each of the said persons shall make it appear on oath or otherwise, to the satisfaction of said inspectors, that he or she is worth L50 clear value, proclamation money of this state.” “Almost unanimously,” the legislators decided that, since this proviso was “clearly within the meaning of the Constitution, and as the constitution is the guide of the inspectors, it would be entirely useless to insert it in the law.” A Republican newspaper report added with a certain sarcasm, since both women and black voters usually voted Federalist: “Our Constitution gives this right to maids or widows black or white.”57 Beginning in 1800, however, with Republicans in the ascendance nationally but still out of power in New Jersey, the election process saw multiple accusations of “illegal voting.”58 Typically, Republicans charged “false and fraudulent impositions,” that the Federalists had “admitted people of all descriptions, white and black, British officers under half pay, French aristocratic paupers, negro wenches supported by charity, and everything else that offered itself, if it was but truly federal.”59 Sometimes the charges went the other way—just months later, Federalists complained that New Jersey’s delegation to the House of Representatives (then elected statewide) was compromised by malfeasance in Essex County, where more votes were recorded than the entire white male population “16 years & upwards” because the “jacobins” had allowed “girls of 16, negro slaves, boys of 18 . . . to vote.”60 The fight over black and female suffrage climaxed in a Hunterdon County state senate race in 1802, victory in which would decide control of the body; since the legislature elected all state officers, if a tie prevailed, New Jersey would be leaderless for the coming year—which is what happened. Republicans insisted that “Irishmen, Scotchmen, and every description of foreigners

80

Van Gosse

[were] conducted to the poll,” and that in Trenton, “Persons under age—Persons not worth the sum specified by the Constitution; and some who are actually maintained by private charity and public contribution.—Persons who have not resided in the County the time prescribed by law—And blacks who are actual slaves” had voted.61 The most incendiary charge was that a single black woman’s vote had elected the Federalist Senator, producing a deadlocked legislature. “Were not Negroes allowed to vote—even Negroes who were Paupers?—Nay, were not Negro Slaves allowed to vote—and one Negro Woman who was a Slave to a Negro Man?—And after all, the Federal ticket had but a majority of one vote! . . . does it not follow that the party in the Legislature who wish to dictate what shall and shall not be done, hold their power by the vote of one Negro Woman, and she a Slave to a Negro?!!!” In a fashion later common, a doggerel rhyme was attributed to black voters, with a Newark Republican editor describing “An election scene exhibited with a number of negro slaves advancing to the poll with federal tickets, chaunting the following lines: Massa be good, he gibbe me holiday, / De tory again be de bes men of all he say, / So de paper I tick in de box as he said, / And I be no more slave, cause I vote for a fed.”62 The committee appointed by the legislature to resolve the dispute “found that the married woman in question had been separated from her husband for several years and paid taxes under her maiden name” and that “The slave was a black woman who had acquired her freedom by contract and was accepted in the community as a free woman.”63 The demise of black suffrage in New Jersey was prosaic. As late as 1804, Republicans championed gradual abolition for partisan purposes, including an effort to garner black votes by publicizing their support for that year’s emancipation bill. Indeed, major party figures like Governor Joseph Bloomfield (1801–1802, 1803–1812) and Congressman James Sloan had sterling antislavery reputations; on the floor of the House, Sloan was notorious for how he “confronted slaveholders in almost every congressional session.”64 In 1806, a challenge to free blacks voting developed suddenly, as the price the “liberal Republicans” were willing to pay for a larger enfranchisement of propertyless white men, since if suffrage remained nonracial and nongendered, Federalists would have disproportionately benefited from the additional black and female voters who had not met the old property requirement.65 When a leading Republican, Joseph Condict, presented a bill in 1807 to restrict suffrage to “free, white, male, citizens,” he pointed out the full potential of the existing interpretation of the Constitution. Taken literally it included not only all the free men and unmarried or widowed women who met the minimal property requirement, but also “the Negro slaves, male and, married and single. . . .

In the Woodpile

81

Aliens, male and female, married and single, black or white, bond or free. For each of these . . . strictly speaking might be ‘inhabitants,’ that is, they might have resided twelve months in the county; and might also be worth 50 pounds—women by marriage contract, and slaves by consent of owners, might either have the sum fixed by the constitution, and both there fore, under the construction contended for by some, have a right to vote.” He then revised the state’s history backward to claim a spurious original intent: “no man could suppose the framers of the constitution intended under the term `all inhabitants’ to include married women, Negro slaves, and aliens of every description, as entitled to the right of suffrage. . . . The right construction might also be collected from the spirit of the times when I was adopted, and the general practice of all the other states—as well as from the common law, which excluded women from the right of government. Besides, if women, negroes and aliens are entitled to vote, it must follow that they are eligible to office, as the right of electing and of being elected are reciprocal and inseparable. Yet it cannot for a moment be supposed, that the authors of the constitution meant to entrust the command of our armies and the direction of the state, either to women, to negroes, or to aliens.”66 This logic, linking plain suffrage rights to a much wider set of possibilities and threats—“negro governors and legislators”—would be repeated in every fight over black suffrage up to Lincoln’s election. Condict’s argument rested on the Republican vision in which white male egalitarianism superseded all previous arrangements in an emergent rather than residual political culture, to invoke Raymond Williams’s famous formulation. But this move to disfranchise cannot be seen in strictly or even mainly ideological terms. As Klinghoffer and Elkis point out regarding the simultaneous disfranchisement of women: “If the New Jersey case proves anything, it is the centrality of electoral politics in American history. The growth of gender ideology was not the reason for the disfranchisement of women. Power politics was.”67 The political history of states further to the north where black men voted for considerably longer (as in New York until 1821, or Pennsylvania until 1838) or were never disfranchised (as in Upper New England through the Civil War) emphatically underlines their thesis. The long-­term survival of black suffrage in two Upper South states, the two decades (1783–1802) during which “Historically Free” black Marylanders continued voting, and the Garden State’s leveling up of all “free people” (in conjunction with regular black voting across much of New England, New York, and rural Pennsylvania, not addressed here) undermine both

82

Van Gosse

liberal and radical understandings of early republican politics. The claim that extending the ballot to all white men was the main thrust of democratic development in the early United States is no longer tenable. As Rogers Smith has pointed out, all of the narratives making this claim, from Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America through Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s The Age of Jackson, Louis Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in America, and, most recently, Sean Wilentz’s The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln “center on relations between a minority of . . . white men, largely of Northern European ancestry.”68 But persistent black voting also challenges the newer body of scholarship asserting the implacability of herrenvolk democracy, led by historians like David Roediger in The Wages of Whiteness and Alexander Saxton in The Rise and Fall of the White Republic. Although these histories acted as bracing correctives to any triumphalism regarding “American democracy,” the historiography of whiteness has hardened into “racial consensus history,” in James Oakes’s formulation, “a totalizing thesis, in which an impregnable commitment to white supremacy flourishes in the near complete absence of conflict.”69 Ironically or perversely, declensionist narratives of the White Republic have become the Janus face of Whiggish teleology. Assuming the worst about the early American polities instead of distinguishing carefully between them scants the agency of those black men who marshaled their votes, the white men who sought their disfranchisement, and, most intriguingly, the white politicians in both parties who “brought them to the polls” year in and year out. As James Brewer Stewart presciently argued two decades ago, although “suffused with prejudice,” the early republican North “fostered a surprisingly open premodern struggle over claims of `respectability’ and citizenship put forward by many social groups, and in particular by free African Americans.”70 With so much else up for grabs for so long, whiteness was highly contested. Unresolved conflict and inherent tension remained the dominant theme of black electoral politics in antebellum America in the half-­century before Lincoln’s election. By the early 1820s, the Lower Northern states, with the exception of rural Pennsylvania, had disfranchised most of their black citizens (Connecticut in 1818, grandfathering existing voters; New York in 1821, maintaining a residual fraction of freeholders; Rhode Island in 1822). But the trend toward exclusively white suffrage was met by significant countervailing tendencies. Nonracial suffrage was neither accidental nor residual in the “Yankee Republic” of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine, constituting 32 of 187 members or 17 percent of the House of Representatives in 1820, versus 3 percent today. They were joined by Rhode Island, which

In the Woodpile

83

reenfranchised its black men in 1842 during the Dorr War; Ohio, where an 1831 state Supreme Court decision defined any man as legally white if accepted as “nearer white than black” and “negro votes” were a central political issue by the 1850s; and New York, where thousands of black men appear to have met or evaded the existing property requirement in that same decade. Why was this history effaced postbellum, while abolitionism and the war itself were alternately celebrated or execrated, from the “national-­patriotic” memory of New England represented by Saint-­Gaudens’s memorial on Boston Common, to the still-­vivid bitterness in Birth of a Nation? The eclipse of ordinary black electoral participation in the early republic raises the perennial question about how memory not just shapes but becomes history. For too many historians, from the liberal center to the radical left, these stories stretching from North Carolina and Tennessee to upstate New York and rural Vermont are not worth explaining, as they vitiate the coherence of existing narratives. I disagree with the core conclusions of Joanne Pope Melish’s influential Slavery Disowned: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780– 1860 regarding the racial politics of New England, since she generalizes for the entire region from its two lower states, but her book is extremely valuable in another way. It challenges us to examine how national mytho-­history is written over real time, whether by Daniel Webster or Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Over the past generation we have participated in a progressive or radical recovery of black political history in which the “unfinished revolution” of Radical Reconstruction led over time to the epochal, still unfinished battles of the Second Reconstruction. Before that, however, from the 1880s through the 1950s, the actual black power of 1868–1877 was demeaned and denied. Obliterating or ignoring the memory of black voting in the early republic, the First Reconstruction, is a piece of that larger erasure, in which case this essay, and the volume of which it is a part, are further acts of necessary recuperation.

Chapter 4

Freedom and the Politics of Migration After the American Revolution Samantha Seeley

Caesar Hope came to his trade during revolutionary times. Kidnapped into the transatlantic slave trade as a child, Hope arrived in Virginia in 1743 as the slave of Yorktown tavern owner Benjamin Catton. Hope was made to learn the art of barbering in Catton’s wig-­making shop. It was a trade that would serve him well. Yorktown was only a short distance from Williamsburg, the seat of royal government in colonial Virginia. Hope’s new trade put him in the path of the men who would grow old upholding the cause of independence. Virginia’s Revolutionary leaders like Thomas Jefferson and Edmund Randolph passed through Catton’s shop. In 1775, at the start of the war, when Virginia’s royal governor, Lord Dunmore, fled from the capital to the safety of the British ship HMS Fowley, Hope might have watched as hundreds of enslaved people also ran to join the British fleet in a bid for freedom. Hope did not run to British lines during the war like some men and women he knew. Hope’s son was enslaved by another Yorktown family, and he wagered that he could use his connections and his trade to make a place for his family in independent Virginia. Hope bet correctly. He was manumitted in 1779 in the midst of war and he cast aside the name “Caesar” for a new one of his own choosing: John. John Hope spent the next several decades laboring at his trade. When the capital of Virginia was moved from Williamsburg further inland to Richmond in 1780, Hope eventually followed his political connections. He purchased a hillside lot on the slope of Shockoe Hill, a short walk from the new capitol building. In those same years, Hope labored to build a stable future for his family. Over the course

Freedom and the Politics of Migration After the American Revolution

85

of several decades, he worked as a barber to purchase his enslaved wife, Tenah, and his son Aberdeen. Tenah emancipated his daughter Judith after his death in 1810.1 Hope experienced both the promise of antislavery ideas in post-­ Revolutionary Virginia, the largest slave-­holding state in the new nation, and the eventual backlash against those ideas only two decades later. Manumitted during the war, Hope may have imagined that the language of universal liberty would be translated into legislation against slavery in Virginia eventually. Certainly, this was so in Vermont and Massachusetts where slavery was abolished outright and ended as a result of new legal precedents in 1777 and 1783, respectively, or in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, and New Jersey, which all implemented gradual emancipation laws between 1780 and 1804. As Hope soon learned, post-­Revolutionary legislative action against slavery in the Upper South would be more limited. Deeply invested in slavery, elites in Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia loosened laws that had previously restricted manumission, but they went no further.2 As manumission restrictions were lifted in these states after the Revolution, thousands of people were emancipated or took advantage of the new laws by purchasing themselves and their families. In the Upper South, free movement became a means of self-­determination for the formerly enslaved. Freed people like John Hope moved to urban areas to take up trades and to build the capital that would allow them to purchase family members. In the process, they carved out economic opportunities and institutions for themselves across the Upper South even as those states remained committed to slavery. Thousands of others moved to neighboring states. Their journeys were not unlike the paths that enslaved people took “out of the house of bondage” during and after the Civil War.3 Precisely because black mobility became more conspicuous after the loosening of manumission restrictions, Upper South legislatures avidly pursued the control of movement and removal as emancipation’s corollaries. Registration laws attempted to limit where and how freed people could settle in towns and counties. Some slaveholders in Virginia particularly lauded colonization—a project of racist exclusion in which newly freed people would be sent outside the bounds of the state or nation—as a solution to what they considered the “problem” of emancipation in the region. Freedom appeared to be a “problem” to Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware elites because there were more enslaved people living in those states than in any of those that seriously debated emancipation in the early republic. Some Upper South colonizationists supported emancipation but not black citizenship;

86

Samantha Seeley

others saw free people as a politically destabilizing force in a region committed to slavery; still others argued that white prejudice would prohibit free African Americans from finding formal equality in the new United States.4 Regardless, colonization was built upon the desire to prohibit free blacks from continuing to access local politics and institutions that they already saw as their own.5 In Virginia, the largest slaveholding state in the new nation, colonization went beyond parlor discussions and pamphlets and into the realm of the law. In 1806, Virginia passed a law that exiled all newly freed people from the state within one year of their manumission. In response, neighboring Maryland and Delaware passed their own migration restrictions, closing their borders to black migrants, whether they were freed or enslaved. This domino effect spread across what early Americans might have thought of as the middle states—Virginia, Delaware, Maryland, Ohio, Kentucky, and eventually Indiana and Illinois. The only exception was Pennsylvania, where such legislation was considered but never enacted. The spread of restrictive migration laws shows that colonization was not solely an ideological movement in the early U.S. republic. Colonization thought moved from local politics in Virginia into the realm of state law—an act of transmission that had national effects.6 In their efforts to pass restrictive migration laws, the middle states issued a stark challenge to the concept of the union and of citizenship. The free passage of people between the states gave meaning to the union itself. Black migrants in search of an asylum in the early republic faced a central problem of federalism: in a period in which states and localities clashed over the boundaries and meaning of citizenship, removal could render one—although only in theory—stateless.7 As one legislator would suggest a decade later during the congressional debate over Missouri’s state constitution, which also included a restrictive migration clause, mobility and the power of settlement were “indispensably necessary to the social relations of life, and to the preservation of the State.” He continued by noting that “Indeed, vastly the greatest proportion of the citizens of a State have no other external mark of their citizenship.”8 As the states chipped away at the ability of black men and women to move across their borders, they also challenged the notion that black Americans could access citizenship at all—an act of exclusion that was far from a foregone conclusion at the end of the American Revolution. A decade before African American migration gained the attention of Congress, mobility had already emerged as a battleground in the negotiation of the meaning of freedom and citizenship.9

Freedom and the Politics of Migration After the American Revolution

87

Mobility and Becoming Free in the Upper South In Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware, the post-­Revolutionary period was a brief window in which the language of natural rights was translated into legislation against slavery. The economic concerns of many older Tidewater elites—fluctuating tobacco prices and the declining fertility of their fields— convinced them that their futures did not lie in slave-­grown tobacco.10 At the same time, planters, evangelicals, and legislators were spurred to antislavery action by the wartime emancipation work of enslaved people. Thousands of enslaved people ran to British lines over the course of the war. By some accounts, gradual emancipation in the post-­ Revolutionary period arrived naturally out of the latent, liberatory promises of the language of natural rights. If the language of natural rights did contain latent promises that would lead to abolition, that inevitability was produced over and over again by enslaved people who used mobility to grasp freedom for themselves during and after the war. The post-­Revolutionary period was part of a long process of emancipation that spanned the nineteenth century. African American mobility was one of the driving forces behind that process during the “first reconstruction” just as it was after the Civil War.11 This was particularly so in the Upper South where, for most of the eighteenth century, the colonies had restricted manumission. In Virginia and Maryland, slaveowners could not manumit people without special permission from the royal governor and assembly. Since 1740, Delaware had required that slaveholders give security to ensure that freed people would not become a public charge.12 By the late eighteenth century, the laws became particularly problematic for Quaker slaveholders, who were prohibited from taking action on a vital new application of Quaker peace testimony. In Virginia, Quakers banned their members from purchasing enslaved people after 1768 and from selling them after 1775. Unlike northern Friends who also banished slaveholders from their society altogether, Virginia Quakers were limited by the colony’s restrictions against manumission. They instead began to skirt the law by arranging private manumission agreements outside of the courts.13 Seeking protection for private agreements, Upper South Quakers spent the 1780s petitioning their assemblies to ask for the ability to manumit enslaved people. In Virginia, Quaker petitioning and the persistent lobbying of Pennsylvania Quakers led to a 1782 law allowing manumission by individual slaveholders.14 In Delaware, petition campaigns by Quaker and Methodist meetings and abolition societies from the 1780s to the 1810s put emancipation on the legislative agenda. While the campaigns failed to

88

Samantha Seeley

shepherd a gradual emancipation bill through the legislature, they did spur Delaware to drop surety bonds as a requirement for manumission in 1787. In 1790, the Maryland legislature repealed the state’s prohibition on manumission by will for all but the elderly.15 In the ten years after the war’s conclusion, all three Upper South states made it significantly easier for African Americans to find freedom amid slavery. It was important that the new laws permitted manumission rather than mandating emancipation; the measures were as much a reflection of respect for property rights as they were indicative of antislavery ideas. Even manumission liberalization was controversial, however, and particularly so in Virginia, the largest slaveholding state in the new nation. One Virginia observer reported that there were many “strong advocats for the liberty of the Black’s” in the General Assembly and that most legislators expected emancipation to become “universal.”16 Nonetheless, some slaveholders reacted to the new manumission law with vitriol, producing a veritable petition war across the state after its passage. Antislavery Methodists at half a dozen congregations in the western Piedmont passed around petitions after worship proposing gradual emancipation in 1785.17 In response, proslavery activists carried their own petitions against manumission liberalization into shops and taverns and pinned them up on courthouse doors. The majority of the proslavery petitioners came from the Southside, a tobacco-­growing region just north of the North Carolina border that would soon grow to be “the epicenter” of slavery in the new nation. These protests had real effects. In a sampling of counties and towns across the state there was a stretch of manumissions immediately after the passage of the 1782 act, followed by a dip during the proslavery campaign. The legislature also took the proslavery voices seriously, drawing up an unsuccessful bill to end voluntary manumission as a result of the protest.18 Freed people made the new laws their own by more strongly asserting their liberty in the 1780s and 1790s than they had been able to before. In Maryland and Virginia, the post-­Revolutionary decades yielded unprecedented opportunities for enslaved people to grasp freedom by legal means. Black and white abolitionists in both states had success in encouraging voluntary manumission in the first few decades after the Revolution; 25,000 people in Maryland became free in the two decades after manumission liberalization. While there were only 3,000 freed people living in Virginia in 1782, by 1800, 20,000 people had purchased their freedom or had been given free papers. In Delaware, manumission liberalization had an even greater effect. When Quaker and Methodist activists failed to shepherd a gradual emancipation

Freedom and the Politics of Migration After the American Revolution

89

bill through the Delaware legislature, white and black Delawareans crafted Delaware into a “free” state through other means. The state legislature subjected slaveholders to heavy fines if they sold enslaved people to the Carolinas, Georgia, the West Indies (and later Virginia and Maryland) without the permission of the courts. Enslaved people brought into the state for sale would be freed. Without the ability to legally sell enslaved people out of the state, slaveowners manumitted people instead. These laws made it possible for black Delawareans and their Quaker and Methodist allies to protect and encourage black freedom, crafting Delaware into something resembling a “free” state in a matter of decades.19 Abolitionist societies organized largely by Quakers and ­Methodists in Dover, Wilmington, and Sussex put protection of those who were “detained by fraud or violence” at the center of their mission.20 Black Delawareans worked with the societies to pursue freedom suits, halt kidnappers, and uncover illegal sales of slaves-­for-­a-­term across state lines where their indentures might be converted to permanent slavery. It was so common for enslaved people to use the law to their advantage that slaveholders petitioned the legislature in 1810, complaining that the societies had involved them in an excess of freedom suits. The Wilmington Society reported that their work had freed eighty people from slavery through these means in less than a decade. Delaware was an early leader in the antislavery movement in both the Mid-­Atlantic and the Upper South, despite the fact that the state never passed an emancipation bill. The rapid decline of slavery in Delaware outpaced that of its Mid-­Atlantic neighbors for several decades—including New York until 1820 and New Jersey until 1830. In 1790, 70 percent of black Delawareans were enslaved. Only 24 percent of black Delawareans were enslaved twenty years later.21 In the 1780s and 1790s, newly free people used migration as a tactic to pursue economic autonomy and self-­determination. Some free people and runaways reenvisioned the Upper South as a watery regional corridor leading to northern free communities. Sitting at the edges of multiple slave states and separating the Upper South from the Mid-­Atlantic, Pennsylvania, in particular, functioned as a borderland between so-­called “slave” and “free” states. Philadelphia stood as a “city of refuge.” It became host to one of the most significant free communities in the post-­Revolutionary United States in part because of its proximity to the Upper South. Gary Nash has shown that the majority of African Americans recorded in Philadelphia’s vagrancy dockets in the 1790s came to the city from the Upper South.22 In 1809, members of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society observed that in decades past, “the approving voice of the community and the liberal interpretation of the

90

Samantha Seeley

law” had encouraged them to assist hundreds of fugitives and free people to resettle in the state and “claim the protection of our statutes.”23 Although they went unacknowledged in this account, free black elites in Philadelphia shaped the city’s reputation as a refuge against slavery. Black Philadelphians had built independent churches, businesses, schools, and fraternal organizations beginning in the 1790s. Philadelphia became an asylum because it had an active black elite who supported newly arrived migrants and their freedom claims.24 For some free and enslaved people who remained in the Upper South, freedom of movement and the growth of new urban centers enabled them to accumulate the social and real capital to purchase themselves and their family members. In the southern Tidewater counties of Virginia, in Richmond, Petersburg, and Norfolk, and—by the early nineteenth century—in the central and southern Piedmont, free black people made up a significant percentage of emancipators.25 Some enslaved people, as well, made partial wages for self-­purchase by hiring themselves out in the Upper South’s towns.26 In doing so, they helped to create the Upper South’s first urban boom. Free black migrants who moved to Wilmington, Delaware, in search of wage labor spurred the growth of the city and made it the center of free black life in the state by the Civil War. Black Marylanders also moved into the city of Baltimore in droves. By 1830, one-­fifth of the city’s residents were free African Americans, outnumbering enslaved people four to one.27 Urbanization shifted the gravity of free black life and created places where people could find a modicum of autonomy and economic security. Late eighteenth-­century runaway ads printed in Virginia newspapers frequently mentioned that enslaved fugitives were headed to Philadelphia, but also to Baltimore, Norfolk, Petersburg, Alexandria, or Manchester.28 The ease with which both free and enslaved people moved in and out of the towns, and through their taverns and homes and streets, was a means of asserting self-­ownership.29 In Richmond, free and enslaved black Virginians flocked to the town after it was transformed by the move of the capital in the 1780s. White shopkeepers, tradesmen like John Hope, and enslaved people created the ancillary businesses that would cater to representatives and their families. Precisely because enslaved people in the Upper South grasped freedom in greater numbers than before, white elites simultaneously considered methods for limiting their mobility.30 The states tried to strip free black men and women of many of the rights of citizens at the very moment when thousands of people newly claimed their freedom. Slowly, they began to assert control over movement.31

Freedom and the Politics of Migration After the American Revolution

91

The Backlash in Virginia Observing the hard-­won successes of free people at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Upper South elites began to fill the halls of state legislatures with petitions demanding control over free black mobility. These calls were first reinvigorated in Virginia after news of a slave rebellion in Saint Domingue reached American newspapers in 1791. White fear of black revolutionary politics prompted Virginia’s General Assembly to restrict one of the most basic principles of interstate comity: the right to free movement between the states. Virginia’s legislators believed that it was the circulation of people carrying dangerous ideas that promoted rebellion, and particularly so in urban spaces. New state laws required every free black person living or working in cities and towns to register with the county clerk. Legislators forbid free people who were not Virginia residents from migrating into the state. Virginia’s was the first law passed in the nation to restrict black migration between the states.32 When the rumor of revolution arrived in Virginia once again in 1800, legislators reacted by more firmly controlling African American mobility in the legal code. In August of that year, Virginia governor James Monroe and the mayors of Richmond and Petersburg received word of an extensive rebellion organized by an enslaved man named Gabriel Prosser, who planned to lead thousands of enslaved people to take the capitol, the armory, and the governor’s house in Richmond. The specter of rebellion set off a flurry of arrests and trials that lasted two months.33 That winter, when the Virginia Assembly gathered for the year’s legislative session, they more firmly established removal and control over mobility in the legal code. From the state capitol building on top of the high plane of Richmond’s central plateau, legislators could see down the sloping hillside southeast to Shockoe Bottom, the swampy riverbed of Shockoe Creek that emptied into the James River. They might have looked carefully for the low-­lying spot just at the creek’s embankment designated as a “Negro Burying Ground,” where Gabriel and most of his compatriots had been hung for insurrection two months prior. From that perch, Monroe asked them to take action to prevent another rebellion.34 The legislature addressed Monroe’s call by increasing urban policing, curtailing mobility, and embracing exile as emancipation’s corollary. As Richmond had grown, the city’s residents met, regardless of status, in the city’s streets, taverns, and shops. The Richmond Common Council perceived the city’s fluidity as turmoil, and they regularized what had been sporadic city

92

Samantha Seeley

patrols after 1797. Magistrates in charge of Richmond’s wards were encouraged to make monthly accountings of those who appeared “disorderly.”35 After Gabriel’s Rebellion, new policing laws moved from the general to the specific, targeting the movements of free black Richmonders. Legislators established a regular guard in the city, armed militias in Virginia’s most populous towns, and new patrols in Petersburg and Fredericksburg. The policing laws were an explicit reaction to Monroe’s address and to two petitions that demanded legislative action to scale back manumission.36 Legislators also proposed prohibiting free black residency in Virginia’s towns altogether. Governor Monroe similarly believed that Richmond city officials should “expel” free and enslaved black Richmonders from the city, while only permitting those who came in from the surrounding countryside to visit the city during daylight hours.37 Meanwhile, a new law passed in 1801 required county commissioners of revenue to maintain accurate annual registers of all free black Virginians living in their districts. Those lists were to be posted on the door of the county courthouse, so that community members could assess the legality of any black person’s presence in the county. Magistrates could lawfully arrest and jail as vagrants black migrants from out of state and those who moved between counties without employment.38 Finally, legislators opened a correspondence with President Thomas Jefferson about the colonization of enslaved people in the “vacant Western territory of the United States.” In this secret correspondence, Jefferson imagined a program of mandatory removal for all newly free people.39 Jefferson’s colonization plan that he published in his Notes on the State of Virginia often stands as a symbol for colonization thought in the early U.S. republic, but the correspondence demonstrates the extraordinary influence that colonization had on a host of other elite white Virginians. In the 1780s and 1790s, Virginians published pamphlets and opinion pieces that promoted the colonization of freed people outside of the nation as a solution to what they saw as the “problem” of emancipation and population in the Upper South. They sketched out calculations for public consumption that “emptied” the Upper South of its free African American residents over a matter of decades.40 Just so, the Virginia House of Delegates continued to secretly request Jefferson’s plans for colonization for years after Gabriel’s Rebellion. His ideas were periodically embraced and endorsed by state legislative committees. The Virginia Assembly even took action, applying to Congress for “a portion of the late acquisition beyond the Mississippi” to create a black colony in 1805. These efforts made it clear that many white Virginians hoped that emancipation would ultimately be an exclusionary project.41

Freedom and the Politics of Migration After the American Revolution

93

The fate of the Virginia application to Congress for a Louisiana colony demonstrates the extent to which colonization, so popular among white Virginians, was unpopular at the national level. While legislators working at the state level avidly pursued colonization, the state’s congressmen working a few hundred miles away in Washington, D.C. saw only “insurmountable difficulties” in the idea of western colonization. Virginia’s congressmen knew that the other states would never agree to use Louisiana land, which provided “a secure and reserved Inheritance for unborn millions of our own Posterity,” as a colony for free African Americans.42 As a regional obsession, however, exile continued to resonate in Virginia’s statehouse and into the halls of local courthouses. Undaunted by the rejection of Virginia’s Louisiana colony by Congress, Monroe’s successor, Governor John Page, continued to press the state legislature to sponsor it. He wished to place a tax on Virginia slaveholders to fund a Louisiana removal project. Page believed that, with his plan, “but few blacks would be found in these states after a half century.” In effect, Page’s ideas amounted to gradual emancipation, but with removal as its end. If his idea failed, Page suggested that Virginia might alternatively offer free people “some inducement to leave the country.”43 At the same time, a group of Petersburg councilmen petitioned the Virginia Assembly to ask for various measures that would curtail the mobility of free African Americans. The Petersburg Common Council had already agreed that year to bring the state’s restrictive laws “into more Energetick effect into this town” by counting everyone in their wards likely to become chargeable as well as “their mode of living.” The Petersburg councilmen then asked the state legislature to bind emancipated Virginians to the counties where they were freed, prohibiting travel to and residency in other locales. The petitioners also wanted the legislature to purchase enslaved people to serve as indentured servants beyond the state or nation.44 In the post-­Revolutionary period, hundreds of free African Americans from outlying counties moved to Petersburg in search of work and community. Freed men and women created separate churches and institutions in a black neighborhood in Petersburg called Pocahontas Island. Of all of the Virginia towns, Petersburg had the most predominant black community in the state: One-­sixth of Petersburg residents were free black men and women by the early nineteenth century, or about one-­third of the town’s free population.45 The Petersburg petitioners couched their proposal in stark terms as a response to free black migrants who “flock[ed] from the country to the towns.” Not just resistance or rebellion, as David Waldstreicher and Van

94

Samantha Seeley

Gosse write in the introduction to this volume, but also black politics in all of its multifaceted forms and on its own terms prompted racist backlashes.46 While historians think of colonization as solely an ideological movement in the United States in this period, the Petersburg councilmen succeeded in their campaign to make removal a condition of emancipation. Because there were property requirements for voting, petitioning was the only avenue to direct political participation for many people in the early republic. It was also the way that most legislation was introduced into Virginia’s assembly. Addressing the Petersburg petition and Governor Page’s instructions in 1806, legislators passed a law that exiled any enslaved person freed after May 1, 1806, from the state. If newly freed people did not leave within one year of manumission, they risked reenslavement and sale to the Overseers of the Poor for the benefit of the parish. After Gabriel’s Rebellion, several attempts had been made to ban manumission in the state entirely. Unable to overcome the antislavery position, legislators instead mandated that freedom and removal be legally bound together.47 The new legislation was intended to work in tandem to refashion free African Americans into exiles from their place of residency by depriving them of freedom of movement and the right to settlement.

Restricting Migration Between the States The Virginia law had national implications. As free black men and women grappled with Virginia’s new exile law in 1806, bordering Maryland and Delaware immediately passed restrictive acts forbidding them from entering. The mobility of black men and women between states with varied emancipation statutes prompted some of the first significant discussions of interstate comity in the new nation. The right of free movement between the states gave meaning to the union itself, but it was the very power of locomotion and settlement that the Upper South began to restrict in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Ideas about removal and internal colonization spread outward from Virginia in the form of exile laws passed by the rest of the middle states. The Maryland General Assembly, for example, passed a statute by an overwhelming margin directly on the heels of Virginia in 1806, fining free black migrants for each week that they remained in the state. Maryland’s reaction to Virginia’s 1806 exile law was informed by the state’s stark regional divide; over the course of the nineteenth century, the epicenter of free black life for Marylanders moved to the northern counties, while the southern countries

Freedom and the Politics of Migration After the American Revolution

95

remained committed to slavery. On Maryland’s grain-­growing Eastern Shore, where planters preferred to hire free laborers to meet their seasonal labor needs, manumission had the greatest effect. The number of free people living on the Eastern Shore rose markedly after 1790.48 Eastern Shore planters lamented a “labor shortage” in their counties. When they did so, they may have been referring to the power of black Marylanders to use mobility to their advantage. If they were unsatisfied with the terms of a contract, free laborers could leave planters without workers at critical harvest time, travel to find better working conditions, and even demand higher wages. It is not surprising, then, that in 1796, the state legislature attempted to curb black mobility by imposing fines upon free African Americans who traveled through the state without employment. When the Maryland Assembly banned free black migrants from entering the state, the few legislators to oppose the bill hailed largely from the Eastern Shore counties. Given complaints about labor shortages, planters on the peninsula welcomed free black Virginia migrants who moved into the state across Maryland’s eastern border.49 Neighboring Delaware also reacted vigorously to the law. In his address to the legislature in 1807, Delaware governor Nathaniel Mitchell described Virginia’s new exile law as a problem of migration and federalism. Mitchell predicted that free black men and women exiled from Virginia would likely travel to Delaware or the northern states, and he objected because he claimed that Virginia migrants were “utter strangers to us, and have no claims of indulgence or protection from us.”50 On Mitchell’s instructions, Delaware passed its own restrictive emigration bill on the heels of Virginia in 1807. Free black men and women would be “warned out” within ten days of crossing into Delaware. Warning out was a colonial and early national practice adopted from Elizabethan poor laws in which impoverished people could be sent back to the towns where they were born for poor support. There was significant overlap between laws that restricted migration and poor laws, which had defined the meaning of residency and “settlement” since the colonial period. In the Virginia law of 1806, that connection was made explicit: The Overseers of the Poor stood to benefit from the sale of those who remained in the state illegally. The Delaware law went further than the poor law. Those who refused to leave the state could be arrested and fined, and sold into indentured servitude if they could not pay.51 Repealed in 1808 after a contentious vote, Delaware’s restrictive emigration law was reinstated in 1811.52 Support for the measure was informed by the way that black migration had shifted the geography of freedom in the state to create a middle ground

96

Samantha Seeley

encompassing northern Delaware and southeastern Pennsylvania. Abolitionists were disproportionately centered in Delaware’s two northern counties most connected to their grain-­growing neighbor, Pennsylvania.53 Even as the two northern counties remade themselves in the image of gradualist “free” state Pennsylvania, southernmost Sussex County, only a day’s ride from Pennsylvania, recommitted to slavery. It was slaveholding Sussex County that pushed through Delaware’s restrictive emigration law in reaction to Virginia in 1807. Sussex County slaveholders had long agitated for greater restrictions around free black mobility. In 1786, a group of Sussex residents had complained that “under the name and Character of Free Negroes many idle and evil-­disposed slaves throughout this County stroll thro” the state.54 In the legislature, those who supported the Sussex petitioners also charged men and women who ran from slavery with “corrupting the minds of many both free and slaves” by their example.55 The petitioners hoped to bar mobility because they believed that it threatened slavery—they argued that running away, like rebellion, could be contagious. It was precisely because free black Delawareans carved out significant communities of protection and economic and social autonomy for themselves that the legislature pursued a restrictive emigration bill in 1807. By 1810, free black people in Delaware made up 18 percent of the total population—a striking difference in comparison to any other northern or southern state. By comparison, in the same year only 9 percent of Marylanders, 3 percent of Virginians, 3 percent of Pennsylvanians, 2 percent of New Yorkers, and 1 percent of Massachusetts residents were free African Americans. White petitioners made it clear that they saw the “problem” of emancipation as one of population and politics. One group of 1810 petitioners complained that state laws encouraged runaways to see Delaware as a “refuge,” thereby “daily increasing the number of those, of whom experience has proven we have already too many for the good of society.”56 Mitchell himself believed that black tenants were taking away opportunities from white farmers by buying and renting lands in part of the state. He supported restrictive emigration laws, insisting that “we have already a great sufficiency of this description of persons.”57 Restrictive emigration laws did not stop with the Upper South. They spread across the other middle states that bordered the Ohio River—Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois. In the early republic, thousands of Virginians left the state for the western territories, bringing their laws and legal traditions with them. The Northwest Ordinance had prohibited slavery north of the Ohio River, but challenges to African American citizenship and belonging abounded nonetheless. In Ohio, where white Virginians were one of the most significant groups of migrants in the decades after the Revolution, the

Freedom and the Politics of Migration After the American Revolution

97

state constitution prohibited African Americans from voting. In 1804, the new state legislature required that black Ohioans register their certificates of freedom with the counties and prohibited Ohioans from aiding, sheltering, or employing those who did not carry free papers.58 When Virginia passed its exile law in 1806, the backlash in the western states was immediate. One Ohio editorialist remarked that “Ohio will suffer seriously from the iniquitous policy pursued by the States of Virginia and [Kentucky] in driving all their free negroes upon us. The people of Ohio are bound in justice to themselves to adopt some counteracting measure.” The Ohio legislature did just that, taking up a new restrictive bill in their very next session. The 1807 law required black migrants to post a five hundred dollar surety bond with the local court when they crossed the border. Observers at the time described Ohio’s efforts to restrict free African Americans from settling in the state as a reaction to Virginia’s exile measure and to a similar law passed in Kentucky the same year. In 1813, Illinois Territory prohibited free black settlement entirely and gave migrants 15 days to depart. After statehood, Illinois followed with a restrictive settlement law in 1819 and Indiana in 1831.59 In 1815, Quaker Benjamin Ladd protested migration restrictions in a letter to Ohio governor Thomas Worthington by attempting a comparison. Neighboring Pennsylvania, he wrote, had “adopted no such law. And yet we do not hear her complaining of the inconveniencies which the law of this state was calculated to guard against.” Ladd was not quite right, however. Even in the antislavery refuge of Pennsylvania, lawmakers reacted to black migration by considering restrictive bills that would ban migrants from the state. Economic dislocations in the 1810s hit African American Philadelphians the hardest. They increasingly occupied low-­wage positions. Working on the docks and as mariners, black men lost their positions when Philadelphia’s Atlantic-­oriented economy suffered disproportionately from Jefferson’s 1807 embargo. In the first decade of the nineteenth century, the city became increasingly spatially segregated, with black communities centered on the outskirts of Philadelphia and white neighborhoods in the center. Rather than perceive these changes as the result of racial discrimination amid an economic crisis, white Philadelphians began to turn against their black neighbors as a result of urban and labor segregation on the eve of the War of 1812.60 Between 1804 and 1813, the state legislature debated various measures to exclude black migrants from the state—from restricting immigration to requiring all African Americans to carry freedom papers. In 1813, Pennsylvania legislators debated one of the most restrictive anti-­immigration and registration bills considered in any state. Under the proposed bill, constables could arrest any black person in Pennsylvania who was without free papers.

98

Samantha Seeley

If they were unable to prove their freedom, they would be liable to sale after six months of imprisonment, or seven years of hard labor for the benefit of the state. Free black Philadelphians and their allies in the Pennsylvania Abolition Society (PAS) submitted petitions of their own to counter the bill. Yet the house committee appointed to consider it also found support in petitions from white Philadelphians who complained about their free African American neighbors and asked for special taxes on free people to pay for poor support, or for the indenture of those who committed crimes.61 The PAS, black Philadelphians, and PAS lawyer William Rawle petitioned and lobbied against the bill, but by far the most detailed argument against it was the pamphlet Letters from a Man of Colour, written by free black sailmaker and businessman James Forten and published anonymously in 1813.62 Forten published his Letters after the bill had already failed in the Senate, and before it was schedule to be debated once more. Where Pennsylvania was once an asylum, Forten contended, the law would completely dismantle the city’s benevolent reputation. “Where shall the poor African look for protection, should the people of Pennsylvania consent to oppress him?” Forten turned to the term protection to explain the meaning of place for black Philadelphians. If Pennsylvania joined the other states in passing an exile law, “Where shall he go? Shut every state against him. . . . Is there no spot on earth that will protect him!” Forten drew attention to the way in which the law effectively cast all free African Americans outside the bounds of state citizenship. He argued that the process of registering and monitoring the movements of all free people and their children extended the mechanisms of slavery into free life. The bill that Forten protested did not pass, but anti-­black petitions from white Philadelphians continued to be sent to the legislature the following year.63 The ability to remain just as much as the power to move became one of the defining ideas of African American political movements in the early nineteenth century. A decade before the founding of the American Colonization Society prompted trenchant critiques from black communities, people began to resist state laws that implemented migration restrictions. Across the middle states, black Americans protested that removal and exile laws as well as migration restrictions treated free black men and women as a separate, moveable population, just as under slavery. They organized as families and communities to protect people from removal when the state would not do so.64 Historians have documented the rise of racism in the north that was a backlash to the growth of black freedom in the first few decades of the nineteenth century. Open clashes about who had the right to occupy public space

Freedom and the Politics of Migration After the American Revolution

99

inspired Prince Hall’s 1797 Charge, Delivered to the African Lodge, in which he beseeched black Masons to exercise patience and “bear up under the daily insults you meet with in the streets of Boston . . . at such a degree, that you may truly be said to carry your lives in your hands.” During his travels from New York in 1812, African American sea captain and merchant Paul Cuffe refused to be seated at a segregated table in a local tavern, and he wrote to friends lambasting the racism he experienced on stagecoaches. Northern mobs targeted free African Americans in the 1820s and 1830s, while overseers of the poor warned out free black men and women at a rate that grew exponentially over the same period. The growth of restrictive migration laws across the middle states demonstrates that a backlash to black freedom was a national phenomenon that went far beyond the urban north. When the Massachusetts legislature formed a committee in 1821 to consider a restrictive migration law of its own, they echoed the actions of the middle states.65

Emancipations, Reconstructions, Revolutions The transmission of these laws from state to state catalogued a general desire to force free African Americans out of spaces and political institutions. The states used mobility laws as a proxy to work out the status of free African Americans on the ground. The laws meant very little without the will of local officials to put them into practice, however. Counties most clearly exercised their discretion when they determined not to use mobility laws at all, and they were only rarely and sporadically enforced. In Virginia, for example, cases of reenslavement were exceedingly rare. Yet the laws were nonetheless challenged by hundreds of free black men and women who petitioned the state legislature for the legal right to remain. They produced a litany of petitions about their grief at the loss of family, friends, and neighbors in the event of their banishment. A petitioner named Nansy detailed the impossible choice before her in 1813 when she told the legislature that “Your Petitioner is compelled either to renounce the greatest possible of all human blessings or to burst asunder forever all those bonds which connect us to friends, kindred and country.”66 For someone like John Hope, the backlash in the Upper South had real effects that made his family’s future feel precarious, regardless of whether those laws were uniformly or frequently enforced. Hope was not able to emancipate his daughter Judith Hope before he died. If he could have, he might not have dared to do so for fear that she would be banished from Virginia as a result of the 1806 law. When Judith’s mother finally purchased her freedom after

100

Samantha Seeley

John Hope’s death, Judith Hope petitioned the state legislature three times between 1819 and 1821 for permission to remain with her family. Like Nansy, she imagined that becoming free at the cost of “eternal banishment from a kind mother . . . and every habit and partiality of her life” was “too dear.”67 In a period in which states and localities determined citizenship, the policies of the middle states limited citizenship rights and the right of free passage that made the union meaningful. In the same years that Judith Hope petitioned the Virginia legislature to remain, Congress engaged in a national debate over restrictive migration laws when they considered the admission of Missouri to the union. Delegates to the Missouri state constitutional convention included a clause in the draft constitution mandating future legislation to prevent free African Americans from entering the state.68 When Missouri delegates sent the new constitution to Congress for approval, they provoked a debate in the House of Representatives over restrictive migration laws. Some representatives argued that the Missouri constitution was an assault on the privileges and immunities clause of the U.S. Constitution, which guaranteed that “The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States.” To Representatives John Sergeant of Pennsylvania and James Strong of New York, black Americans were citizens of their states, and “the humble simple privilege of locomotion” and its mirror, the power of settlement were both “right[s] indispensable to citizenship.”69 Other representatives, by contrast, argued that black Americans could not be considered citizens, precisely because their rights were already limited by restrictive migration laws in the individual states. They insisted that the states should have the ability to pursue their “self-­preservation” through “the right of exclusion” and they echoed racialized arguments for migration restriction at the state level made in decades prior. Philip Barbour of Virginia charged that free African Americans were “perpetual monuments of discontent, and firebrands to the other class of their own color.” He insisted that free black Virginians were “a nondescript class” rather than citizens.70 Ultimately, the debate ended with an ambiguous compromise. Congress approved Missouri’s constitution but prohibited the legislature from passing a law that would restrict the privileges and immunities of the citizens of the various states. Left unresolved was whether black Americans had access to citizenship at all, and how citizenship was determined when states and localities disagreed about its boundaries. The desire to protect birthright citizenship, as Martha Jones argues and as Christopher Bonner has shown in this volume, would animate black activism across the antebellum period, and particularly in the wake of Dred Scott v. Sandford in 1857.71

Freedom and the Politics of Migration After the American Revolution

101

Restrictive emigration laws, registration laws, and exile provisions passed by the middle states as a reaction to black mobility after the Revolution were echoed during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Free movement and the power to remain were crucial battlegrounds of emancipation work—the fight by enslaved people to dismantle slavery on the ground with a “politics of the feet”—across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.72 Reconstruction scholars have long worked to detail the movement of free people away from the plantation and “out of the house of bondage” during the Civil War and its aftermath. Tera Hunter and Thavolia Glymph have highlighted mobility and its repression as central to everyday negotiations of freedom in the post–Civil War South. From Stephanie Camp’s writings about truancy as a prelude to escape during the war, to Susan O’Donovan’s writings about enslaved people who crossed Union lines, Civil War scholars have detailed the geographic and political knowledge of those who freed themselves. These scholars have shown that efforts to move away from the plantation, or to take possession of city streets, or to leave one workplace contract for another were not divorced from politics. They were political acts in and of themselves. These same moves toward self-­determination animated the process of becoming free after the American Revolution.73 In the second reconstruction after the Civil War, just as in the first reconstruction after the American Revolution, mobility was also a battleground for white elites who sought to diminish the rights of African Americans. During the Civil War, the Union army imposed restrictions on the labor mobility of freed people across the occupied South from Sea Island cotton fields to Louisiana sugar plantations. Immediately after the war, the southern states passed a series of Black Codes that sought to control labor mobility by making any black person liable to arrest if they could not produce a labor contract. Those convicted of “vagrancy” could be fined, jailed, hired out, or forced to labor on chain gangs. Even while coercive labor codes were repealed by southern Republicans, the northern states simultaneously passed their own vagrancy laws to punish dependency and restrict mobility at the same time. The timing of these laws demonstrates the consistency of a backlash to black freedom and mobility across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. During the first reconstruction as during the second, individual choices to stay or to go had political effects that exposed the exclusions of the states.74

Chapter 5

Black Migration, Black Villages, and Black Emancipation in Antebellum Illinois M. Scott Heerman

John and Priscilla Baltimore faced an uncertain future when they migrated into Illinois. They had been born slaves in Missouri, and by the 1820s they had managed to scrape together $1,100 to purchase their freedom. They desired to live in a free state and build a new life, which in part motivated their migration across the Mississippi. In 1829 they settled in St. Clair County, Illinois along with a dozen other free black families who had made the migration. Together these black migrants founded Brooklyn, an all-­black town. By the 1840s, John and Priscilla had become landowners, and their family enjoyed a growing civic life in Brooklyn. With leadership from the Reverend William Paul Quinn, the African Methodist Episcopal Church opened a congregation in Brooklyn. By owning land, protecting their families, and building black institutions, John and Priscilla Baltimore found an alternative to life in slavery.1 Yet that freedom stood always in the shadow of slavery. When the Baltimore family arrived in Illinois, human bondage clung to life in St. Clair County. The black town’s growing community of freedmen and women lived alongside the state’s remaining population of “French Negroes,” slaves who descended from the original African and Indian slaves that French settlers held in the Illinois Country. It would not be long before the black community in Brooklyn set its sights on at last freeing the slaves in rural Illinois. Together with enslaved men and women, residents in black towns waged an assault on slavery in Illinois. In southern Illinois, slavery had a lease on life long after emancipation laws were on the books. Although the 1787 Northwest Territory Ordinance

Black Migration, Black Villages, and Black Emancipation

103

and the 1818 Illinois constitution nominally forbade slavery, masters connived a series of legal loopholes that kept human bondage in the state. Most notably, they identified all of the enslaved men and women in Illinois in 1818 as “French Negroes” who had been brought to the region when the French Empire claimed Illinois as part of Louisiana. They exempted these people— who were of African, Indian, French, British, and Spanish descent—from emancipation, and inheritable bondage remained in the state until the 1840s. Additionally, masters who arrived in Illinois from Virginia, Kentucky, or Missouri could convert their slaves into lifelong uncompensated indentured servants, and hundreds of slaveholders did just that.2 Census data offers an incomplete picture, but in the 1820s slaves comprised 8 to 10 percent of the population in rural counties, and they worked in a host of industries.3 These percentages were roughly similar to other societies with slaves in North America, including colonial New York, New England, western North Carolina, and Maryland.4 As a consequence, because these towns sat in parts of southern Illinois where slavery existed, town leaders helped to propel the processes of emancipation forward. Not merely defensive or protective, the antislavery energy from black villagers took numerous forms: they served as beacons for runaway slaves from neighboring states as well as those running from within Illinois, they protected freedmen and women from kidnapping and reenslavement, they built churches and other civic institutions, and they helped enslaved men and women sue in local Illinois courts for their freedom. Settlements like Brooklyn were incubators of emancipation whose residents engaged in local legal processes that posed an existential threat to human bondage in the state. Enslaved people in southern Illinois faced daunting odds as they turned to the local courts to secure their freedom. Even if the law was on their side, enslaved men and women needed to access legal information, assemble evidence, enlist white allies including attorneys and witnesses, and accrue enough money to cover the legal fees associated with emancipation. The residents of black towns provided some or all of this aid to Illinois’s slaves. These activities created the foundations of a legal culture in black towns, and that legal culture allowed residents in these communities to become critical actors that helped eradicate slavery from the state.5 In southern Illinois as elsewhere, the law had little power apart from the courts that interpreted and mediated its effects.6 As African Americans appeared in court and learned to work within the state’s legal system, a local culture of the law developed, allowing some people in slavery and involuntary servitude to use the courts to their advantage.7

104

M. Scott Heerman

Brooklyn did not stand alone in Illinois’s rural landscape.8 Migrants established four black villages in southern Illinois before the Civil War, and many more such settlements existed across North America.9 Life in black villages offered African Americans, free, enslaved, and in degrees of unfreedom, an opportunity to build a life apart from the nation that slaveholders made. Black migrants who settled in these towns empowered African Americans to live out a capacious set of freedom practices. It insulated them from a world that equated blackness with bondage and freedom with a bundle of political rights, the franchise paramount among them, which served to channel the jubilee of slavery’s emancipation into the boundaries of nationalism. They sought an alternative to slavery, but did not necessarily embrace notions of freedom that were commonplace in antebellum America. If, as it has long been argued, human bondage in part defined freedom in the United States, these villages helped to make spaces where African Americans could try to insulate themselves from the contaminated notions of liberty that pervaded the nation.10 The location of black towns in southern Illinois, along the borders of slave states, and in places where free soil was not yet firm, shaped the content and form of the struggle for freedom. As with certain other places in the United States, the boundaries between slavery and freedom became blurry in southern Illinois. Like those enslaved people living along the borders of Ohio and Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Maryland, or in the far West, unfree people in Illinois exploited the uncertainties of slavery and freedom in their quest to forge a more durable life out of bondage.11 Because African Americans in Illinois lived in a world where their freedom had no sure basis in the law, or firm support among local political leaders, the strategies and tactics they adopted necessarily changed to meet these circumstances. Rather than making sweeping claims for their blanket emancipation or making universalizing arguments about their access to freedom, they adopted a more circumscribed, piecemeal approach. They challenged their subordination based on specific, technical grounds, and they cultivated allies in shrewd ways, knowing that appealing to antislavery ideology would do them little good. In this way their movement toward freedom resembled the terrain of slavery and freedom in other borderlands of slavery. Taken as a whole, the diverse sets of freedom practices and antislavery politics that emerged from these black villages challenges a tendency in the literature to cast black towns as maroon communities.12 In some ways the characterization works well: runaway slaves and recently freed men and women in these northern towns fled slave country and made a new life on slavery’s borders. Akin to the “grand maroons” or “hinterland maroons” of

Black Migration, Black Villages, and Black Emancipation

105

the new world, African Americans built communities designed to protect their freedom, which they accomplished by settling far from the plantation complex.13 However, two major differences stand out that set Illinois’s black settlements apart. First, residents of black towns in Illinois were not simply reacting to and defending against slaveholders’ broad authority in the United States. Instead they played a critical role in dismantling forms of bound labor in the state. Second, most of the residents in Illinois’s black towns had been legally freed, unlike the maroons of Jamaica, Surinam, and Florida. Some scholars argue that this distinction was not that significant, because all African Americans lived under the perpetual threat of reenslavement.14 This is correct in certain cases, and residents in these communities were kidnapped.15 However, inhabitants of black towns often owned land, holding a recorded legal title to it, making their existence more durable than maroon settlements. Illinois’s rural black community could turn to the courts and successfully use the law to protect some of the foundations of their freedom. This quotidian interaction with the law shaped the black freedom politics that emerged from the towns. Black villagers’ struggle against slavery in part stemmed from their experiences with emancipation. Becoming free offered people legal knowledge and other important resources that could help enslaved people in southern Illinois win their emancipation. Black villages like Brooklyn were more than maroon communities; they served as incubators of emancipation that helped formerly enslaved men and women create a life outside of bondage. * * * In Illinois, as elsewhere, emancipation did not happen at a given moment, but it played out as a process that could be protracted, contested, and costly.16 Illinois had a series of Black Laws on the books that stood out as some of the most restrictive antiblack legislation in the antebellum North. Passed in 1819 and revised in 1853, the Black Codes degraded black citizenship by denying African Americans the vote, the right to testify in court against white people, freedom of mobility, and militia service and gun ownership.17 Yet the most burdensome elements of the law required all African Americans to record their manumission documents at the county courthouse and pay a bond of $500, later raised to $1,000, to obtain a certificate of freedom. These registration requirements were not easy to meet. Free African Americans could record their master’s will, an expired servitude contract, manumission

106

M. Scott Heerman

papers, or other legal proof of freedom at the county clerk’s office. African Americans who lacked these documents could rely on the testimony of two witnesses to swear to their free status. As they went about assembling this evidence they remained in limbo; they were slaves no more, but not yet secure in their legal freedom. People without these documents risked arrest and sale at public auction. Entering legal freedom was a long process that required both an initial act of emancipation and a legal process registering proof of that freedom in county courts. By virtue of the Black Laws, all African Americans in Illinois, no matter their circumstances, had to undergo a legal process to live in freedom. Four major sets of experiences stand out in this regard: filing suits for freedom, signing an indentured servitude contract, posting freedom papers at the local courthouse, and petitioning for freedom as a runaway slave. In each of these instances African Americans would have gained an intimate knowledge of the law as they secured legal emancipation. Freedom suits were rare, even exceptional, but because they taught black litigants so much about the law, they remained an important part of the black freedom struggle. In one early case in the 1810s, Bob and Lydia took their master, Jincy Mitchel, to court for holding them in slavery without first complying with a series of technical registration requirements that permitted masters to keep slaves in Illinois. Although that was a minor violation, the local court sided with the enslaved couple and granted them manumission.18 Cases like these came up in various counties across southern Illinois and they would afford African Americans an important source of information about slavery, freedom, and the law.19 Signing a servitude contract, and securing freedom papers at the expiration of its term, represented the second way African Americans gleaned legal knowledge. To cite only one case in 1835, Ailsy was held as an indentured servant for an unstated number of years, and during the 1830s she fulfilled her service. Yet she had no manumission papers or expired contract to register. Instead she protected her freedom by bringing witnesses to the Gallatin County courthouse who swore to her freedom.20 In another case from the same time and place, Prucey called upon two local white men who testified to her freeborn status.21 Hundreds of similar cases exist across the state. Black migrants coming into Illinois also had exposure to the law, which in time would be an important resource in struggles over slavery. Once in Illinois, free African American migrants had to register proof of their free status at the local courthouse, and this required using various types of evidence ranging from sworn statements, notarized declarations, to certified manumission papers or wills. These were not the only black migrants that

Black Migration, Black Villages, and Black Emancipation

107

used the law to secure their freedom in Illinois. African Americans captured and detained as runaways could also earn freedom papers. After runaways were caught in Illinois, sheriffs would issue notice of their capture and hire them out for one year. If no owner came forward to reclaim them, runaways could then apply for freedom papers and win manumission orders.22 They had to petition the local court, prove that they had been in Illinois for one year, document that notice of their capture was advertised, and demonstrate that no one had tried to claim title to them during that year. It was a difficult burden to prove, but some did. To cite only one instance, William Robinson, “a man of colour . . . produced to the court the certificate of the sheriff of Johnson County” to establish “William was legally committed to the custody as a runaway” and “hired out . . . for the space of one year.” The certificate also established “due notice by publication in a public newspaper printed in this state, has been given.” William was “henceforth . . . a free person.”23 The law acted on all African Americans, regardless of their circumstances, and required they navigate legal processes to live in freedom. But if African Americans were targets of the law, in time they used their experiences to become shrewd legal operators.24 It proved consequential, then, when the free black community in Illinois began to grow. Between 1830 and 1855, black immigration ticked upward in part because Kentucky, Tennessee, and various other southern states issued restrictive black laws in response to Nat Turner’s rebellion, and African Americans voted with their feet and sought out nominally free states, including Illinois.25 Many black migrants into the state came as part of larger kin groups, and family migrations created shared history among founding families of freedom villages, despite their diverse origins. Brooklyn provides a case in point. In 1829, eleven families migrated from Missouri to the east bank of the Mississippi River and founded the town of Brooklyn.26 A few years later, a second settlement formed farther north on the Mississippi River at New Philadelphia when “Free Frank” and his family migrated from Pike County, Kentucky. Miller Grove, on the opposite side of the state, shared much in common with these other towns. Sometime around 1840, forty-­seven freedmen and women migrated from Tennessee to Pope County in southern Illinois. Harrison Miller appears to have led these migrant families, and not long after landing they settled in Miller Grove. This black town sat on the banks of the Ohio River, just north of slave country.27 Its population grew over time, perhaps to 150 people by the Civil War.28 Located deep in the forest, and fifteen miles from the county seat at Golconda, the settlement allowed freedmen

108

M. Scott Heerman

and women to distance themselves from the white community in southern Illinois and slaveholders in the neighboring Upper South. In this way, the black migrants isolated their village from its surroundings, defending the free men and women from the kinds of subordination and white supremacy that enveloped much of the nation, north and south. Yet the town sat adjacent to Hayes Creek, a navigable waterway that let them welcome new migrants, venture into town when necessary, form partnerships with local white settlers, and integrate selectively into Illinois’s social fabric. Life in the villages supported African Americans as they built a life free from slavery. Many black residents owned land and recorded their ownership in deed books. For instance, in New Philadelphia, “Free Frank” owned a plot of land, and he effectively used the local courts to protect it from encroachment by local settlers.29 This was not unique. By 1860 resident in Miller Grove had accrued land and modest estates. Harrison Miller owned land valued at $1,500 and a personal estate of an additional $600. His neighbor Robert Sides, a Maryland-­born freedman, had similar prosperity with an estate valued at more than $750. The Hicks family, also residents of Pope County, bought land after emancipation, too. Ephraim Hicks had been born in Virginia around 1810, and in July 1850 along with his family of four he posted an emancipation bond. By 1860 his son William owned a farm valued at $250.30 It seems likely that freedmen and women in the villages cleared the land they owned to farm, both for subsistence and to sell surplus for export. Along the Mississippi River the soil was well suited for grain cultivation, while on the banks of the Ohio corn and flax would have thrived. It also appears that in Miller Grove, at least, residents ran distilleries and profited from selling alcohol to surrounding towns.31 Whatever other activities went on, the inhabitants in these towns appeared to have made a good living. They had enough money to post freedom bonds and to pay legal fees.32 Some of these funds could have also come as freedom dues, paid to indentured servants at the time of their emancipation, or from damages won in court proceedings. In short, some residents of these towns accomplished what few other freedmen and women could: they owned land of their own, worked it for profit, and created spaces that would support a more secure life out of bondage. More than serving as protective, defensive spaces, these black towns, sitting on state borders, acted as beacons for runaway slaves that charted a course toward freedom.33 Isolated though they may have been, residents in black towns commonly maintained ties to neighboring slave states. One runaway notice from the 1840s indicated a self-­emancipated slave was headed toward Golconda, which had a neighboring black settlement.34 During the

Black Migration, Black Villages, and Black Emancipation

109

1830s and 1840s, a handful of runaways applied for their freedom and won manumission orders—some relocated to freedom villages.35 Brooklyn in particular was an outpost for Missouri slaves contemplating flight, and residents of the town found ways to draw slaves across the Mississippi into Illinois.36 Its location made it Illinois’s first station on the so-­called Underground Railroad. Led by the town’s African Methodist Episcopal minister, the Reverend William Paul Quinn, fugitives hid in churches and cellars until they could be taken to nearby Alton, which would connect them with a well-­worn migration route to Chicago.37 As these individuals traveled in and out of black settlements, their movement brought the tiny black enclaves into the wider world of abolitionism. Moreover, at times itinerant ministers came through Illinois, and they stopped in black villages. In at least one instance they brought antislavery texts David Walker and Frederick Douglass authored and circulated them through Miller Grove.38 Here, as in other places in the borderlands of slavery, the push for freedom was incremental, contingent, situational, and fragile. In addition to supporting runaway slaves, residents in black villages helped slaves in Illinois use the local courts to secure their freedom. In particular, they provided legal knowledge to enslaved people, which represented a crucial component of the emancipation process that played out in the state. Early attempts to use Illinois’s courts to end bondage failed, and the cases faltered in large part because African Americans did not time their suits correctly, or craft the specific, technical arguments that could persuade jurists. Moreover, in Illinois as elsewhere, the law served administrative functions, and winning legal emancipation did not necessary involve judges, lawyers, and juries. Instead, the legal process of emancipation could hinge on wielding the correct types of evidence or other seemingly minor bureaucratic steps that required specific legal knowledge.39 By the 1830s, African Americans in the courts developed a familiarity with the law: they sued for freedom at higher rates and registered freedom bonds more frequently. Several developments in state politics made this possible, and one factor was growth of the free black community that enabled enslaved men and women to use the courts. African Americans used their experience with the law, which included self-­purchase, signing servitude contracts, selling their labor, and even litigation, to assemble a working legal knowledge that supported emancipation. In time, African Americans assembled legal knowledge into a legality that took shape in their villages. In the close quarters of small, tightly knit black towns, legal information and literacy probably passed through informal networks. Free and enslaved people across the United States commonly relied

110

M. Scott Heerman

on gossip, eavesdropping, and idle chatter to spread political information and organize their communities.40 Servants and slaves in Illinois presumably adopted similar tactics. The legal skill that African Americans possessed does not appear to have hinged on formal literacy. Virtually none of the extant servitude contracts or other legal documents included signatures.41 Yet illiteracy did not preclude the effective use of courts.42 As information passed around, it seemingly became a basis for a more broad-­based legal literacy. Looking at the black inhabitants in St. Clair Country confirms that residents of Brooklyn would have had relationships with people that had a diverse set of legal experiences. As was common, migrants into St. Clair County recorded their freedom papers before settling in the black town. For instance, in 1837 the Rain family, six members in all, relocated from Missouri and posted emancipation bonds.43 Likewise, those enslaved in Illinois offered proof of their manumission, as Abraham Padfield did in 1835.44 More dramatically, one enslaved woman filed a freedom suit and won. While her victory predated Brooklyn’s founding, she appears to have remained in St. Clair County and could have associated with the town’s inhabitants.45 In time, each of these freed men and women would have learned something about the law, and leaders in Brooklyn knit together the legal knowledge their neighbors possessed into a legal culture. Brooklyn was by no means unique. Focusing on the migrants who arrived in Miller Grove confirms that the town was a hodge-­podge of legal backgrounds. Miller Grove attracted manumitted slaves from within Illinois, servants whose terms expired, victors in freedom suits, and migrants from the Upper South—all of whom understood at least something about slavery and the law in Illinois. In one instance of several, a free black family applied for freedom papers after a term of indenture expired. They recorded their manumission papers, secured freedom certificates from the county clerk, and then relocated to the Grove.46 In another instance, Winny and her children relocated to Miller Grove after winning a freedom suit to escape extralegal slavery.47 In a different 1853 case, a master “set free from slavery” Thomas, a thirty-­five-­year-­old man, who then recorded his manumission papers before removing to Miller Grove.48 Runaway slaves seem to have made it to Miller Grove, as well.49 Adept village-­based black litigators harnessed local legal knowledge and wielded it to the town’s advantage. One of Miller Grove’s prominent residents, Moses Lewis, led this small cast of amateur black lawyers. Lewis won his freedom in the 1840s and relocated from Tennessee to Miller Grove. He earned part of his living peddling liquor. Local officials indicted Lewis six times on

Black Migration, Black Villages, and Black Emancipation

111

alcohol-­related charges but never won a conviction. They charged Lewis for “keeping an open tippling house” and “selling and suffering whisky to be sold in his house.”50 After Lewis secured an acquittal on these charges, the local prosecutors indicted him for “selling whisky by a less quantity than one gallon.”51 Over a short time span, authorities brought Lewis up on charges of selling alcohol and for selling alcohol in too little quantities. Lewis beat back both sets of charges and continued his commerce undeterred. Lewis’s legal acumen—likely drawn from networks in Miller Grove, his own emancipation process, and his frequent battles in court—helped manumitted African Americans use the judiciary to protect their freedom. In three separate instances freedmen relocating from Tennessee to Pope County used Moses Lewis as their agent with the county clerk to post their freedom bond.52 Recording a migrant’s freedom rarely was a straightforward process. Clerks required validation of documents: wills or manumission papers had to bear the seals and signatures of other jurisdictions and carry sworn statements of their authenticity. Freedmen and women lacking manumission papers had to rely on the testimony of at least two witnesses. Free African Americans, like Lewis, routinely served in this capacity. In Gallatin County, which neighbored Miller Grove, Eva Davis, a free black woman, on two occasions testified before the county clerk in Gallatin County and helped document two freedwomen’s status.53 By helping freedmen and women navigate the court’s registration requirements and acting as witnesses, freed African Americans like Lewis and Davis helped advance the process of emancipation. Members of the black community also found ways to forge ties with white allies that pushed forward legal processes of emancipation. These supporters served a host of functions from swearing testimony to gathering evidence and serving as legal aides. Yet the ties with white lawyers willing to take on cases could be the most significant of these relationships. Henry Eddy, who lived in Gallatin County, was one such attorney. He had served as a state representative and general consul for the Illinois State Bank. During the 1830s and 1840s, he argued multiple freedom suits. Eddy was a Democrat and no abolitionist. Still, he took case after case. In one such instance, Eddy “commenced a suit in the Jackson circuit court against Mr. Linn and others,” and he argued that “that the Defend[ants]s have no more right to hold the pl[ainti]ff in slavery according to the laws of Ill[inois].”54 The case began when a family member reached out to Eddy and retained his services. In another instance an enslaved woman wrote to a Gallatin County official and insisted that “a man by the name of Champ or Carr” and also a “lawyer by the name of Eddy . . . and one by the name of Green also know her to be a free woman.”55

112

M. Scott Heerman

Here again, the enslaved woman knew whom to enlist. Lawyers like Eddy may have seemed invaluable, but he nevertheless put a price on his services. As one attorney noted while referring a freedom suit, “I believe your humanity would incline you to defend the rights of the oppressed how degraded so ever their condition. But it is right you should be paid for the trouble.”56 The lawyers, then, should be seen as extensions of the black legal culture, not as independent actors.57 African Americans initiated cases, cultivated allies, and pooled money to ransom themselves and their families from slavery. Lawyers could be hired and fired and some white attorneys hostile toward slavery accepted slaveholders as clients based on their ability to pay rather than out of principle.58 Moreover, serving as an attorney to help someone post an emancipation bond or escape illegal bondage did not necessarily mean they were part of a wider antislavery movement. Some of the lawyers who worked with African Americans, such as Henry Eddy, never appeared to join the abolition movement or even become part of the Republican Party. As was common in southern Ohio and Pennsylvania, on the borders with slave states, the alliances free men and women made with white attorneys did not always rest on a common antislavery ideology, which was more common in places like New York and Boston. In southern Illinois, as elsewhere, lawyers’ motivations for taking on the cases could range widely. In some instances, like Eddy, profit or a personal connection to the defendant could bring him into a case. Yet other lawyers had political motivations and wanted to see slavery abolished, both in Illinois and in the wider nation. For this reason, the motivations and desires of individual lawyers cannot say much about the wider struggle for freedom coming within the black community.59 Notwithstanding these limitations, alliances with attorneys sometimes took on outsized proportions because some of the local litigators would go on to win elected office. In one case in the 1840s, Lyman Trumbull acted as the attorney in a case concerning a man enslaved in Illinois.60 In Matthew Chambers v. People of the State of Illinois (1843) Trumbull argued for slavery’s abolition in Illinois before the State Supreme Court. The Chambers case began in 1842, when an enslaved man from Randolph County, along the Mississippi near St. Louis, escaped from his master in Illinois and sought out local allies to help shepherd him north. The sheriff discovered this collusion and a jury convicted and fined Matthew Chambers for “harboring a negro.” Chambers challenged his conviction before the Illinois Supreme Court. On appeal, his lawyer questioned the state’s authority to criminalize aiding servants and slaves who resided in Illinois.61 Trumbull argued that the man was

Black Migration, Black Villages, and Black Emancipation

113

held in conditions “which [were] but another name for slavery,” and that his captivity was illegal in Illinois. Consequently, “an indictment will not lie for harboring a description of person that, by the ordinance [of 1787] and constitution [of Illinois] cannot exist.”62 The chief justice dismissed this argument as “untenable” in light of earlier precedent.63 Yet this would not be Trumbull’s last attempt to help the enslaved: he would go on to be a U.S. senator and chair of the committee that authored the Thirteenth Amendment. This trajectory from local lawyer to elected officeholder was not unique. In the 1840s Brown and Yates, a law partnership in southern Illinois, took on a freedom suit. The firm responded to a request to aid “the negro man Peter” to prove he “was emancipated by the will” of his late master. The firm assembled a case that they were certain would “be sufficient for this negro to obtain his freedom.”64 In 1860, one of the partners, Richard Yates, would win the governorship. During his tenure he would strike decisive blows for black freedom: he repealed Illinois’s Black Codes and he pushed for rapid ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment. Yet before Yates climbed to those heights, his career involved the ordinary work inside and outside of the courtroom. When African Americans used the courts to secure their freedom, they initiated a public process that involved clerks, witnesses, and sometimes judges and juries. Bringing a wider constituency into the emancipation process, African Americans managed to turn their individual pursuits for a life free from slavery into a larger process of emancipation that, in turn, shaped the antislavery politics of people like Richard Yates, Lyman Trumbull, and even Abraham Lincoln, who twice acted as a lawyer for people in Illinois seeking emancipation.65 Serving as a lawyer for African Americans as they navigated the process of emancipation did not always inspire attorneys to embrace antislavery politics. Henry Eddy remained a lifelong Democrat and never advocated for avowedly antislavery platforms. Lincoln, famously, argued on behalf of slaveholders who brought their enslaved workers into Illinois and hoped to take them out of the state again. Moreover, a series of important intellectual and political developments propelled the rise of antislavery politics in the antebellum era that often had greater sway over people’s politics than their list of former clients.66 However, looking at these relationships offers new context for the rise of antislavery politics in antebellum America. Rather than working out a platform opposed to slavery in strictly free-­soil spaces, some of the most influential figures in the Republican Party had an earlier history of combating slavery in southern Illinois, in the borderlands of slavery. Those

114

M. Scott Heerman

local contests over slavery in southern Illinois grew out of the ways in which residents of black freedom villages made emancipation a reality for the state’s population of unfree African Americans. * * * Foregrounding black towns as communities that advanced the cause of abolition can show new dimensions of black abolitionism in antebellum America. Black abolitionists were long neglected, but new scholarship is stressing that abolition was always interracial.67 African Americans in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore joined antislavery institutions and forged a politics of abolition that had traction with northern bourgeois audiences.68 They pioneered tactics that appealed to a broad constituency by chartering antislavery newspapers, authoring pamphlets and petitions, and conducting speaking tours.69 Additionally, African Americans adeptly used the law to protect their freedom.70 They frequently turned to courts, and they managed to enforce the various emancipation statutes that were on the books in their states. Across the U.S. North, free African Americans were co-­workers in the politics of abolition. The arc of abolition ran a different course in Illinois. No gradual emancipation statute that freed all children born after a given date ever passed Illinois’s legislature, and African Americans suing for freedom could not appeal to freedom statutes in their cases. A large urban free black population, like the ones in East Coast cities, did not take shape before the Civil War. Chicago did not incorporate until 1837, and it did not become a great metropolis until after the Civil War. Before the very end of the 1830s, there was no statewide abolition society or antislavery newspaper. Even as the Civil War approached, antislavery politics had uneven effects. While abolitionism found a foothold in Illinois’s northern districts, the state’s rural southern counties remained hostile to the prospect of slavery’s emancipation: as late as the 1860 election Democrats won most of the vote in southern Illinois.71 Southern Illinois was no Land of Lincoln. Black freedom villages, and their diverse antislavery agitation, shed light on new dimensions of the long freedom struggle before the Civil War. Miller Grove, New Philadelphia, Brooklyn, and other black towns were more than maroons. Residents in these towns used their experiences with legal emancipation to forge a set of resources that supported enslaved men and women in their quests for freedom. They relied on their local knowledge of

Black Migration, Black Villages, and Black Emancipation

115

the landscape to insulate themselves from attack and help runaways chart a course to Chicago. Villagers built on their knowledge of the law to assemble a legal culture that could help freedmen and women secure freedom papers, and assist enslaved people in finding white allies to advance their cases. ­People like Moses Lewis used local institutions to help secure freedom for many African Americans in Illinois’s southern reaches. Black towns were always small but their efforts had far-­reaching significance. African Americans in rural counties, together with a larger cast of allies, accomplished what acts of Congress alone could not do: they freed slaves in rural Illinois, fragile though that freedom was.

Chapter 6

Practicing Formal Politics Without the Vote Black New Yorkers in the Aftermath of 1821 Sarah L. H. Gronningsater

In the winter of 1846, a free black laundress named Phebe Ray appeared before the Rochester, New York Board of Education to petition its Committee on Grievances. She asked for permission to “send colored children” to School Number 11 on Chestnut Street, a short walk from her family’s home. The city’s single “colored school,” by contrast, stood on the far side of the Genesee River, whose swift currents were particularly icy and treacherous that time of year.1 Phebe, the matriarch of a politically active family, was the fifty-­six-­year-­ old widow of a New Jersey–born man named Isaac Ray. Born in Pennsylvania in 1790—ten years after the state passed the nation’s first gradual-­abolition act—she lived in unpredictable emancipation environments her whole life. She gave birth to her first child, the future abolitionist barber David H. Ray, in New Jersey in 1810. When David was young, the Rays moved to western New York, where David’s sister Mary was born. Phebe, David, and Mary were all born in gradual-­abolition states where they and their generational peers inhabited a range of liminal statuses along a spectrum of free and unfree.2 By the time Phebe approached the Rochester school board in 1846, she was settled with David, Mary, their spouses, and her grandchildren in the Fifth Ward, a few blocks from the Chestnut Street school.3 Phebe’s efforts to secure equal school access were part of a long and spirited campaign by ordinary black Rochesterians to educate their children. Although the school board denied Phebe’s request that winter, it allocated funds to move the colored school to a better building, “centrally located.”4

Practicing Formal Politics Without the Vote

117

Unsatisfied with half-­measures, black Rochesterians continued to press for full privileges. It took four more years, but they eventually succeeded in opening the city’s common schools to black students. Phebe and her fellow school advocates were operating in an era when the politics and realities of slavery, freedom, and citizenship were undergoing profound transformations, at times in contradictory directions. Between 1821 and 1822, New York State drafted and adopted a new constitution that stripped most black men of voting rights, revoking a tool of political influence and a previous marker of equal citizenship that black voters and families had prized since the American Revolution.5 In 1827, the state freed its remaining slaves, giving black New Yorkers more opportunity to address concerns not immediately related to their own population’s bondage. Soon thereafter, the Whig Party—a counterweight to the dominant Democrats—and antislavery third parties began to emerge, reshaping mainstream party politics in ways that reoriented and refueled local, state, and national conflicts over slavery and citizenship.6 Phebe’s political efforts tell us a great deal about what it meant, and what it took, for ordinary black people to advocate for rights in the gradual-­abolition North during the first half of the nineteenth century. Black New Yorkers did not cease to be politically influential simply because black men no longer accessed the polls in substantial numbers. The everyday struggles inherent to the region’s slow and patchwork abolition process taught families like the Rays how to seek redress in courtrooms, councils, boards, and legislatures. Voting, they knew, was not the only way to practice politics—a fact that black women grasped particularly well, never having had the right to begin with. On a daily basis, in campaigns small, large, individual, coordinated, short-­lived, and long-­sustained, black New Yorkers engaged with political institutions to protect and to enlarge the privileges and rights attached to their free status.7 More than has been recognized or theorized, ordinary black New Yorkers participated in the formal politics of their towns, cities, and state during the Second Party System. The practices of petitioning and lobbying especially illustrate this point. Claiming the mantle of citizens and taxpayers, black men and women routinely appealed to officials and legislative bodies to address their concerns. In so doing, they prayed for relief of specific grievances, but they also, perhaps less consciously, developed relationships, networks, and skills that laid the groundwork for more sophisticated mass petition campaigns at the state level.8 Scholars tend to miss the depth, import, and methods of ordinary black northerners’ participation in formal politics during the Second Party System

118

Sarah L. H. Gronningsater

for several reasons. For one, petitioning and lobbying are not always taken as seriously as voting in accounts of political action and efficacy, especially at the local and state levels, where black citizens acted with gusto. Exciting new work is refocusing our gaze on early Americans’ use of petitions, but ordinary black petitioners are not yet integral to the story.9 The congressional “gag rule” controversy of the 1830s may also be part of the historiographical problem. The controversy is rightly central to political histories of the period, but the failure of the national antislavery petitioning campaign to achieve its ends (at least in the short term), and the vehemence with which proslavery forces shut down the effort, has perhaps resulted in the mistaken impression that antislavery petitioning rarely worked as a political method that black people used in the 1800s.10 Another conceptual stumbling block is the complicated nature of black citizenship, both state and national, in the early 1800s. Scholars rightly point out the ways in which black Americans were either treated as second-­class citizens or denied citizenship altogether.11 But in some cases, including in New York—even after the enactment of the 1821 constitution—free black residents were recognized as citizens of their state, with certain rights, and they knew it. One of these rights was the right to petition the government, which they did regularly both in person and on paper.12 Lastly, scholarship on black northerners’ political history often focuses on cities, or specific regions within states, rather than on events across local areas from an integrated statewide view. There is much to be gained from fine-­grained local studies, but it behooves us to piece together how local and statewide political practices echoed and intersected, especially when grievances and solutions concerned state law.13 In New York, the nation’s most politically powerful northern state, black citizens used petitioning and lobbying in order to improve their daily lives, to protect the rights of black inhabitants in the state, and to address the suffering of slaves outside the state. Local efforts, like petitioning for school rights, bolstered more sophisticated, geographically diffuse efforts, including a historically undervalued statewide petition campaign to combat the Slave Power in the 1830s and ’40s. In this campaign, over the span of a decade, black men and women across New York petitioned the state legislature for three critical reforms: a law guaranteeing accused runaways the right to a jury trial (which passed in 1840); a law repealing an 1810 law that allowed visiting masters to keep slaves in New York for nine months (which passed in 1841); and a law promoting the return of the equal franchise (which failed to pass in the 1840s, but nonetheless kept the subject alive in the public sphere). Allying with

Practicing Formal Politics Without the Vote

119

white abolitionists, black New Yorkers injected these concerns into political campaigns, applying pressure on Whigs and Democrats to adopt antislavery policies. By urging legislative change, they also created an atmosphere that encouraged amenable partisan leaders to stand for antislavery causes. When Phebe Ray petitioned the Rochester school board in 1846, she was engaged in a decades-­old tradition of black political engagement with local school authorities; this tradition both inspired and intertwined with broader statewide petition campaigns in the 1830s and ’40s. Petitioning and lobbying did not and could not give black citizens everything they hoped for within their various and overlapping political communities. But recognizing this truth should not lead us to discount the ways in which black New Yorkers engaged with the government in its local and state manifestations. From unequal positions of power, black New Yorkers practiced formal politics without the vote, at times quite effectively, during the many years that slavery remained legal throughout much of the American republic.

Educational Rights Black petitioners in New York had prayed to their governments for redress of grievances since the earliest years of colonization. In 1644, eleven bonded black men petitioned the Council of New Netherland for freedom, which the council granted, noting the men and their wives had “been promised” their liberty “on the same footing as other free people.”14 Individuals and small groups of men and women continued to petition for freedom or other personal remedies after the English captured the colony from the Dutch in 1664, throughout the period of British imperial control, and into the first years of the American republic.15 That said, black petitioning before the early 1800s was relatively uncommon and not, as a rule, focused on “general” remedies (in the sense of asking for comprehensive legislative change).16 The frequency and nature of black petitioning began to change as increasing numbers of black people became free during gradual abolition, as the state began to pass more antislavery laws, as free black associational life blossomed, and as politics in general took on a more democratic cast. Enslaved individuals continued to petition for their freedom, but there was also a rise in the number of free black petitioners who asked for measures to protect their livelihoods, to incorporate their religious and mutual aid societies, and for changes to municipal laws that favored slave masters.17 In the early decades of the nineteenth century, petitioners started to devote their attention to education

120

Sarah L. H. Gronningsater

privileges. Since common schools were sprouting up across the state, even in small towns and rural areas, black citizens everywhere had a potential interest in school politics. Exploring school-­related advocacy reveals the statewide scope and development of black politics.18 The oldest children born during gradual abolition—like Phebe Ray— began raising their own sons and daughters during the same years that New York began establishing a permanent system of common schools. Between 1812 and 1822, the legislature created a framework for funding and governance. Every county received money from the state, which was then distributed to towns according to the number of resident children. Each town was responsible for raising matching funds and electing commissioners. Within the towns, taxpayers in individual school districts elected trustees. In some cities, common councils appointed trustees. A state superintendent of common schools was empowered to settle local controversies.19 Free black New Yorkers, as taxable citizens of their towns, fell under the purview of these laws. The question was whether they would be treated equally under these laws—or what “equal” even meant. The definition of “equal” differed according to local circumstances. In some places, like Rochester, black parents wanted access to white schools. Elsewhere, parents cared more about equitable funding, curricular rigor, and hiring black teachers. Given both the diversity of local needs and the details of state law, black citizens found themselves moving between local and state arenas as they advocated for their children. In the process, they not only improved black schools, but also sustained and strengthened face-­to-­face ties with each other. Agitating for school rights on a local level made it easier, in the long run, for black citizens to cooperate on statewide issues. In Brooklyn, for example, where black residents comprised 20 percent of the population, black families proved extraordinarily adept at marshaling their own private assets in combination with public resources to educate their children.20 In 1815, a year before Brooklyn established its first state-­funded common school, a black whitewasher named Peter Croger, a founding member of the local African Woolman Society, opened a “Day and Evening School” in his house for students wanting to learn “the common branches of education.”21 Croger, along with his brother, Benjamin, who was also a whitewasher, were among a number of determined local leaders who worked on behalf of Brooklyn’s well-­rooted black community for decades. The Crogers—like the Rays in western New York State—were typical of political black families in their melding of educational, associational, religious, business, and political interests and spaces. The two brothers lived next

Practicing Formal Politics Without the Vote

121

door to each other; they both served as class leaders in the African Methodist Church; they took part in local and state petition campaigns; they used both their private property and associational property to teach students and to talk politics.22 Black schools were important to the development of black politics not only because education was ideologically and practically useful to antislavery efforts, but also because many schools created financial ties between taxpayers and the state. Furthermore, schools provided brick-­and-­ mortar meeting spaces—intimate town squares—where relationships and ideas could develop. Women used schools to collect and distribute clothes for poor children; men met after work to plan political parades; families came together to hear antislavery performances and speeches by students.23 The communitarian ethos that made Croger’s private school possible remained crucial throughout the common school era. In 1818, Brooklyn’s school commissioners established the village’s first district school building, with a separate floor for black children.24 Officials failed to provide the black classrooms with adequate funding. In response, black families raised their own funds while also advocating for a larger share of public money. In the early 1820s, the local African Church hosted exhibitions of “Speaking and Staging” by the “coloured children attached to the district school” to meet a “debt due to a former school-­master.”25 In 1827, after the colored school was kicked out of the district building, the Woolman Society constructed an African School House.26 Meanwhile, black Brooklynites refused to let local officials off the hook. “A Colored Man Who Pays School Taxes,” for example, wrote a letter to the Long Island Star lamenting the commissioners’ stingy funding: “Our school,” he insisted, “needs a further proportional allowance of the school fund, that our destitute children may be properly taught.”27 White politicians noticed the persistence with which black parents and taxpayers lobbied for schoolchildren. The influential editor of the Star, Alden Spooner, regularly printed black citizens’ letters and notices while also publishing his own editorials on behalf of black education. Over time, black Brooklynites managed to persuade local officials to meet some demands. In 1839, five years after the legislature chartered Brooklyn as a city and granted the common council power to appoint school trustees, the council placed three black men—George Hogarth, Sylvanus Smith, and Henry Brown—in charge of the city’s African School. Hogarth, a grocer, AME minister, and Liberator agent, was also a teacher. Smith was a prosperous pig farmer with particularly bright daughters (Susan Smith became the state’s first black female MD). Brown was a cab driver.28 In 1841, after the council reappointed the three men, Spooner wrote that the colored school was directed by “three

122

Sarah L. H. Gronningsater

intelligent colored citizens” who employed a “very competent colored young man” to teach. The institution now received better public funding, but remained housed in the Woolman Society’s private building. 29 Across the East River in New York City, black parents, like their peers in Brooklyn, cared more about the quality of the black schools than they cared about access to white schools. Their particular school politics were influenced by prior experiences with the New York Manumission Society’s African Free School, which inhabited six buildings by the 1820s. (The Manumission Society was a white philanthropic organization that provided antislavery legal services, lobbied the legislature for abolition laws, and educated many of the city’s black children.) Black parents had quarreled with the school’s paternalistic white trustees over the years, but they had also forged a beneficial working relationship. In 1834, when the Manumission Society handed the schools over to the Public School Society (PSS)—a state-­chartered corporation that controlled the city’s common schools—the parents of the 1,600 children in the African Free School lost their longtime white abolitionist allies.30 The PSS handled the transfer poorly. Black parents started withdrawing their children and sending them to private school. When asked, a group of “leading coloured citizens” gave the PSS a list of grievances: parents did not know or trust the PSS, the PSS had reduced “all the schools except one to rank of primaries,” and the PSS had fired African Free School teachers.31 Receptive to the complaints, the PSS adopted several reforms: black and white schools would be “conducted strictly” the same, an additional black schoolhouse would be built, a black female monitorial school would be opened, and a black agent would be hired to communicate with black families.32 As the PSS implemented the reforms, black mothers in particular demonstrated their interest in the outcomes. In August 1836, at a meeting for black parents, “mostly females” appeared in the “new African School House” to discuss the developments.33 Though unnamed, these women were no doubt a group that included graduates of the African Free School, members of the African Dorcas Society (a female benevolent organization), and former servant children who had tussled with their masters over literacy laws. These women were not voting, or running for office, but they were in conversation with government officials who were charged with providing the city’s children with a taxpayer-­funded resource. This was politics. 34 At times, black school politics burst beyond the confines of the local. In these instances, events in the smallest of places made an impact on state policy and general understandings of black citizenship. In 1833, for example, white citizens in the rural town of Hunter, on the west side of the Hudson

Practicing Formal Politics Without the Vote

123

River, filed a complaint with State Superintendent John A. Dix after the district’s trustees appointed “a colored man to teach the district school, which was attended almost exclusively by white children.” Dix, a moderate antislavery Democrat, noted the law was “silent as to the description of persons to be employed as teachers.” His personal view was that the town’s trustees had neglected their duty to cultivate “a spirit of harmony and good feeling” in their district. He hoped the trustees would reverse course, but legally, he would not and could not compel them to fire the black teacher. The trustees were obligated to “pay the teacher the public money for his wages,” and to collect “the residue” from “those who send [their children] to school.”35 The Hunter story is intriguing. On the one hand, certain details are not surprising. Integrated schooling was not unheard of in rural areas. Small towns did not always have the funds or the populations to support separate schools.36 On the other hand, it was exceedingly rare to find a black teacher instructing white children. For whatever reason, Hunter’s trustees hired a black man, a choice that upset some white parents. Ultimately, Dix’s response reflected a consensus among the state’s centrist politicians about the nature of black citizenship: black New Yorkers were indeed state citizens, they had access to many rights under the law, but social separation was salutary, especially in cases where black people held positions of authority. In 1836, Dix received another question from a rural area about black participation in the school system. Residents of Schodack, in Rensselaer County, asked Dix for an opinion “with regard to the right of colored persons, who had been assessed to pay highway taxes, to vote at school district meetings.” Dix was unequivocal: “Colored persons have the right to vote at meetings in the school districts in which they reside. . . . Indeed, colored persons are permitted to vote at popular elections under certain circumstances.”37 It is unclear, from Dix’s report, whether black taxpayers had asked him to grant or affirm their right to vote, or if white residents had appealed in an attempt to stop black residents who had already been voting. Whatever the query’s origins, Dix ruled in favor of black political rights in local school governance. School districts across the state were supposed to abide by Dix’s rules. In 1837, the legislature ordered a printing of his most important rulings for the purpose of rendering them “serviceable as precedents.” Dix, who made the selections himself, included the Hunter and Schodack cases. Every town in New York received a copy.38 All the same, local officials retained a great deal of control over black educational opportunities.39 In Schenectady, for example, black parents had a particularly hard time acquiring their fair share. In 1833, the local African

124

Sarah L. H. Gronningsater

School Society petitioned the common council for a lot to build a school building, to no avail. Despite the fact that their families paid taxes, they received no portion of the school fund, nor were they permitted to enroll their children in the local Lancaster school. Instead, they relied on their own resources to sustain a Sabbath school and a day school. The Female Benevolent Society was especially instrumental; in 1837, the women donated $50 “for a lot purchased by the people of colour, as a site for a school room.” The “Colored Ladies” also organized fundraising fairs. Simultaneously, black citizens petitioned the common council repeatedly for funds. In 1843, the council deigned to grant the African School $25; it raised the sum to $75 a few years later.40 Meanwhile, two hundred miles west, black Rochesterians were facing their own problems. In 1832, when the village was still relatively small, black citizens successfully petitioned the legislature to open a colored school with money from the local fund. As Rochester expanded, black adults were increasingly upset that their children had to cross the city to receive an education, especially since their school was habitually neglected. In 1841, a black “clothes renovator” named John H. Bishop spearheaded a petition to the common council asking to be “exempted from taxation for building school houses for white children because their children are not permitted to attend the schools thus taxed.” After the council conceded that black children had the “right to attend the common schools in the districts where they live,” the white trustees of School Number 3 wrote a letter of protest to the new state superintendent, John C. Spencer. Spencer replied with an ambiguous, fence-­ straddling letter that, in effect, counteracted the council’s decision.41 In other words, even after local officials had ruled in favor of school equality, white parents prevented integration from occurring. This was the school campaign that Phebe Ray joined when she went before the school board in 1846 to protest that fact that her grandchildren had to trek across town to receive an education when a perfectly good white school stood a few blocks away. Phebe’s visit to the school board is worth highlighting not only for what it reveals about how black northerners, including women, practiced politics, but also because her example helps restore ordinary local people to the center of a well-­known story. The Rochester school campaign was one of the most sustained and successful of the nineteenth century, remembered in large part because of Frederick Douglass’s prominent role in its later stages. Douglass’s involvement, admirable as it was, has drawn focus away from everyday people like John H. Bishop and Phebe Ray, whose efforts predated his arrival. Douglass did not start a school campaign; he joined one.42

Practicing Formal Politics Without the Vote

125

When Douglass moved to Rochester in late 1847, he entered a city with a tight-­knit and politically engaged black community. At some point, he grew acquainted with the Ray family. Phebe’s son, David, owned a barbershop business, working alongside his sister Mary’s husband, Elza, and an apprentice named Henry W. Johnson. In 1848, Douglass joined David, Elza, and Henry in a commemoration of West Indian emancipation. Elza led the parade, David read the British and French Emancipation Acts, Henry gave a speech, and Douglass delivered the final address. One can only imagine the discussions of black rights that took place at work as David, Elza, and Henry cut their customers’ hair in the 1840s, or what was said at the dinner table in the Ray-­Johnson house on Mechanic Alley, where Phebe also brought home wages, and likely political news, from her cooking and laundry business.43 In the fall of 1849, with Douglass’s vocal support, black Rochesterians decided to boycott the separate schools. They made this tactical choice after the Democrat-­leaning school board decided to open a new black school rather than to adopt a proposal to drop the color restrictions. At a meeting led by James Sharp, a cart man, and Z. D. Patterson, a barber, on the subject of “Equal School Privileges,” black parents resolved that they would not send their children to black schools. They also crafted a petition to the school board praying for an affirmation of their “legal right to equal participation in the common schools.” Shortly thereafter, Douglass noted in the North Star that “the colored schools are almost deserted.”44 The Rays almost certainly joined the boycott. It is also likely that Phebe and David attended the “meetings against colored schools” and signed the ongoing petitions to the school board. David had run political meetings with James Sharp in the past.45 David’s wife, Betsey, may also have participated, along with Elza, Mary, and Henry. In 1849, the boycott ongoing, the school board’s Committee on Colored Schools—a four-­man body including the abolitionist Samuel D. Porter, a friend of Douglass’s—issued a remarkable report agreeing to black citizens’ demands. The committee observed that black Rochesterians had been petitioning for full access to the public schools for almost a decade and that they paid taxes “equally with other citizens.” It made no financial sense to maintain boycotted schools. Moreover, equal access would relieve “the mortification [black children] must feel in being forced from the districts in which many of them were born and have ever lived, and where the property of their parents has been taxed to build commodious school buildings which they are not permitted to enter.”46 The following spring, twenty-­four black students

126

Sarah L. H. Gronningsater

were enrolled in five different neighborhood schools.47 Soon thereafter, the school board closed the colored schools entirely. In September 1854, Douglass reported gleefully in his newspaper that he “lead four of our little ones” to their neighborhood school on the first day of term. “[O]ur liberal city,” he explained, “does not compel a colored child to walk by the door of the school house in his own District.” Douglass was pleased that the school’s senior teacher invited him to say a few inspiring words to the integrated classroom.48 Phebe Ray, meanwhile, was still living in Rochester with two granddaughters, Mary and Emma. Perhaps Phebe, like Douglass, had the satisfaction of walking her own little ones to a nearby school whose doors she and her family had helped to open.49 School campaigns across New York in the 1820s, ’30s, and ’40s were important in their own right, but they also helped families and leaders develop skills and relationships that applied to their work on other political objectives. The same black New Yorkers who petitioned local school boards, appealing to their equal rights under the law, also petitioned the state legislature using similar language. School politics, in short, helped forge ties and promote leaders within local communities in a manner that helped these same communities mobilize across the state to advocate for changes in state policy.

“Petitions to the Legislature” Black New Yorkers’ intensifying interest in mass petitioning and legislative lobbying at the state level inspired and coincided with a broader movement of antislavery campaigns across the nation. In 1833, a group of white and black abolitionists from ten states founded the American Anti-­Slavery Society (AASS) in Philadelphia.50 Soon thereafter, the AASS launched its famous mass petition campaign to Congress, which drew hundreds of ordinary people across the northern states, including women, into political agitation. In 1836, during the Twenty-­Fourth Congress, southern congressmen succeeded in instituting a “gag rule” forbidding consideration of antislavery petitions in the House of Representatives. Viewing the gag as a violation of their First Amendment rights, many northerners, nonabolitionists among them, found the rule offensive and dangerous.51 Amid this national controversy, black New Yorkers increasingly took advantage of the right to petition for antislavery remedies in their home state. Before the national petitioning frenzy of the mid-­1830s, black New Yorkers had sent petitions to the state legislature only sporadically. In these cases,

Practicing Formal Politics Without the Vote

127

black citizens from a given town or city prayed for locally targeted legislation. These were important interactions; they gave local citizens practice engaging with state government and imagining legislators as potential allies. But the work black petitioners undertook in the mid-­’30s to promote three state laws—laws that challenged southern masters and affirmed black civil rights— raised the profile and the stakes of black political engagement. The three-­ pronged petition campaign required black strangers living miles away from each other to work together to push for legislation that, to be sure, affected their daily lives, but, even more grandly, affected people they had never met before. This was petitioning in the name of mass antislavery politics during the competitive and fractious Second Party System. Black New Yorkers’ three goals were the passage of a jury trial law, the repeal of the nine-­months exception for visiting slave masters, and the restoration of equal suffrage. Thousands of black men and women took part in the multiyear campaign.52 Many of the petition movement’s leaders were involved in local school politics or had attended the schools that their parents had worked to build. This fact in itself is not necessarily surprising—people who cared about local politics were likely to care about state politics—but it is important because it sheds light on the mechanics, skills, and relationships that were crucial to mobilizing effective statewide action in a relatively short amount of time. In early 1837, Samuel Cornish, a black editor who had advocated on behalf of the African Free School in the 1820s, and Philip A. Bell, an African Free School graduate, published the second edition of the Colored American in New York City.53 Cornish and Bell reported on the progress of three petitions submitted by “the colored People of this City” to the legislature. The first, signed by 607 men and 271 women, asked for the repeal of “laws authorizing slavery” (the nine-­months law was the most egregious). The second, signed by 489 men and 272 women, asked for a jury trial for any person accused of fleeing slavery. The third, signed by 620 men, asked for a constitutional amendment to remove the “distinction of color” from the right to vote. In implicit recognition of the ways in which schooling could foment effective political agitation, Cornish and Bell noted proudly that “more than half of [the signatures] have been written with their own hands, and some of them very beautifully.”54 Although it was not necessary to know how to read or write in order to place one’s mark on a petition, it certainly helped to have basic literacy skills, especially as petitioners began to organize across town and city borders. The skills of school politics and the skills learned in schools bolstered the wider antislavery campaigns of the 1830s.

128

Sarah L. H. Gronningsater

The legislature received various antislavery petitions signed by “colored citizens” from four different cities in 1837: New York City, Brooklyn, Troy, and Albany.55 A dozen similar antislavery petitions arrived from the state’s western counties, as well, signed by “sundry citizens.” White petitioners likely provided the majority of signatures on these western petitions, which is not to say that no black citizens signed. Black men and women did sometimes sign petitions organized by white recruiters, especially in areas like western New York, where radical abolitionism had taken root.56 In instances of interracial petitioning, petitioners often presented themselves as “sundry citizens” or used a similar non–racially specific designations. Black-­only petitions, however, often explained that the document was signed by “colored citizens” or “men and women of color.”57 Of particular note in the cache of 1837 petitions was the prefatory language on the black petitions from New York City and Brooklyn. The Journal of the Assembly rarely printed petition texts in full, but the assembly clerk did record that the New York City and Brooklyn petitions were submitted by “fathers and mothers, and men and women of color.”58 This descriptor was an explicit acknowledgment of black women’s political engagement in state politics. To be sure, black women had long interacted with officials, judges, and lawyers in their local neighborhoods in order to protect their own and their families’ interests, but these 1830s petitions marked a shift in the visibility of female engagement in the public sphere, especially in the state arena. Black women—like white women—were entering formal politics in new ways, seizing upon the personal and ideological politics of antislavery and of motherhood to explain and fuel their involvement.59 None of the other petitions, antislavery or otherwise, recorded in the 1837 Assembly Journal cited “women” or “mothers” as specific signatories. Unlike the United States Congress, the New York legislature both acknowledged and considered the antislavery petitions they received. The judiciary committee, for example, responded specifically to the “colored citizens” of New York City’s request for equal suffrage. Unfortunately, the committee “reported adversely.”60 This was obviously not the petitioners’ desired outcome, but at least they knew they had succeeded in putting their agenda before state lawmakers, who did not dispute black citizens’ right to formally express their concerns.61 Undeterred by the 1837 legislature’s lackluster response, black petitioners pressed forward. Several commentators in the Colored American discussed how to improve their operation.62 One contributor, under the moniker “Publius,” observed that even though it was admirable that black citizens had been

Practicing Formal Politics Without the Vote

129

sending equal suffrage petitions to the legislature since 1834, they had not been collaborating across county lines as effectively as they might. Moving forward, “The work must be begun, and carried on, systematically.—We must have simultaneous petitions, come in from every quarter and district of the state. Let every member of the next Legislature see the names of as large a portion as possible of his own constituents.”63 That summer, Bell announced that he would embark on a state tour to excite people about “their political rights.”64 He and his colleagues wrote to peers in “the cities and towns of the Hudson border, as well as the many in the Inland counties.”65 Bell and Charles B. Ray, the paper’s new general agent, began to travel the state; Bell canvassed towns up and down the Hudson while Ray voyaged west.66 The Colored American printed a model petition so that local citizens could compose matching documents. The particular model they provided asked the legislature to abolish “the odious distinction, which, while it acknowledges them as citizens, denies them the rights which all others possess as attached to that honorable appellation.”67 The newspaper also continued to publicize the need for a jury trial law and the nine-­months repeal.68 As Bell and Ray traveled the state, they met men and women who had participated in local petitioning and lobbying before. As the history of local school campaigns demonstrates, there were, in many places, existing foundations of political participation on which state leaders could build. The fervent statewide organizing paid off. In 1838, black New Yorkers, petitioning in higher numbers than ever before, were joined by white New Yorkers, also petitioning in higher numbers than ever before, in a statewide push to convince the new Whig-­majority state assembly to grant the three statute requests. According to the Journal of the Assembly, 518 “colored young men” from New York City prayed for “an extension of the right of suffrage”; “numerous colored citizens of Troy and Lansingburgh” prayed for “equal political rights and privileges with other citizens”; “sundry inhabitants of the county of Albany” prayed for the repeal “of the law authorizing the holding of persons coming into this State, as slaves” and a law “securing a jury trial to all persons claimed as fugitive slaves”; 650 “ladies of the city of Rochester” prayed “an act to immediately repeal all laws which make any distinction on account of color”; 3,737 ladies of New York City prayed the same. Petitions also streamed in from rural areas, especially from counties along the Erie Canal—the famous Burned-­Over District. They arrived from places like Jasper in Steuben County, Mexico in Oswego, Homer in Cortland, Ogden in Monroe, Whitestown and Paris in Oneida, Butternuts in Otsego, Vernon in Oneida, Collins in Erie, Williamson in Wayne, Auburn

130

Sarah L. H. Gronningsater

and Sennett in Cayuga, Russia in Herkimer, Shelby in Orleans, Granville in Washington, Moriah and Jay in Essex, Champlain in Clinton, and Lowville in Lewis—and this is an incomplete list. On February 5, 1838 alone, lawmakers received thirty petitions from the towns of Cazenovia, De Ruyter, Eaton, Nelson, Lenox, and Sullivan in Madison County. Two weeks later, another batch came in from “numerous inhabitants, male and female, of the counties of Livingston, Ontario, New-­York, Oswego, Ulster, Monroe and Westchester.”69 What had been a stream of petitions in 1837 was a flood in 1838. The number of petitions the assembly received in 1838 compared to 1837 is staggering. The 1838 legislature did not respond to the petitioners’ prayers, but reformers, politicians, and ordinary citizens nonetheless grasped that antislavery political momentum was building. In June, when the legislature adjourned, black men in New York City created a permanent organization called the “Political Association.” In the pages of the Colored American, they urged “our people throughout the state” to do the same. Several of the association’s officers were African Free School graduates, who emphasized that the “rising generations” and “colored young men” of the state had a particular responsibility to be active.70 Among those who answered their call was David H. Ray, Phebe Ray’s son, who became an agent for the Colored American in Ontario County, just southeast of Rochester, a few weeks after the Political Association printed its plea in the paper. David was eighteen years old.71 During the same weeks that David began working for the Colored American, the senior leaders in the newspaper’s orbit were encouraging the state’s white abolitionists to strengthen their commitment to the petitioners’ three legislative priorities. In September, the New York Antislavery Society, the state affiliate of the AASS, met in Utica—a few counties east of the Rays’ home—to discuss priorities for the upcoming year. White reformers William Goodell, Beriah Green, Henry Stanton, Gerrit Smith, and Myron Holley attended, as did black leaders Charles B. Ray, Nathaniel Paul (a minister from Albany), Theodore S. Wright (a minister from New York City), and Alexander Crummell (a nineteen-­year-­old African Free School graduate). Wright brought blank equal suffrage petitions to the meeting, printed by the Political Association. Ray solicited subscriptions for the Colored American. Thereafter, the NYASS passed a resolution explicitly commending the “laudable and increased exertions” of the state’s black petitioners. There was a consensus at the meeting that it was high time that New York’s government act more forcefully to eradicate slavery and to promote black equality.72

Practicing Formal Politics Without the Vote

131

Aware that New York’s 1838 gubernatorial election was on the horizon, the abolitionists debated whether it was prudent to support only those candidates who backed immediate emancipation, regardless of party, or to create a third party devoted to antislavery.73 Deciding against a third party for the moment, the NYASS instead seized upon the election as an opportunity to press politicians to recognize that jury trial rights, the nine-­months law repeal, and equal suffrage were important to a small but fervent group of voters. The abolitionists would publicly request that statewide candidates answer their “interrogations,” and then encourage antislavery voters to choose candidates accordingly. The NYASS appointed two of their most prominent members, Gerrit Smith and William Jay, to send queries to the candidates.74 For black petitioners, NYASS involvement in the 1838 election was a strategic breakthrough in the formal political sphere. The moment was ripe for the NYASS to intervene in electoral politics. Rising star William Seward, from Auburn in western New York, won the Whig nomination, and he would try for the second time to unseat the Democratic incumbent, William Marcy. Seward and his running mate, Luther Bradish, were men of moderate antislavery views, but it was unclear to abolitionists— and to the rest of the state’s voters—how far they would take their sympathies if elected. Marcy and his lieutenant John Tracy, like many politicians in Martin Van Buren’s Democratic political machine, had demonstrated little interest in the rights of slaves or black citizens. The NYASS interrogations produced some unpredictable results. Bradish, apparently without consulting Seward, responded promptly. He supported all three antislavery goals. The Colored American printed his answers in full.75 Seward, who agreed with Bradish in principle, feared alienating conservative swing voters, including business-­oriented Whigs who worried about angering southerners with financial interests in New York’s ports and banks. Acting cautiously, Seward declared support for a jury trial law, but refused to endorse equal suffrage or the nine-­months repeal.76 Marcy and Tracy, less surprisingly, replied the same as Seward.77 The contest was a nail-­biter, and Seward’s inner circle worried that his cautious replies to the abolitionists may have sunk his campaign. The anxious Whigs were jubilant when both Seward and Bradish won their individual races by roughly 10,000 votes each.78 The Colored American declared the result an “Abolition Victory”: “We assert that there were 1,500 abolition votes given in the city for Seward, and more than 1,800 for Bradish. In the State, Bradish received more than 20,000 votes from abolitionists, and Seward more than 15,000. Their election has been effected by abolition suffrage.”79

132

Sarah L. H. Gronningsater

Although it is impossible to know exactly how many votes were won (or lost) because of Seward’s tepid antislavery responses and Bradish’s full-­throated ones, both the abolitionists and the politicians concluded that antislavery voting had mattered. It is worth pausing here to consider what black petitioners both could and could not accomplish in their engagement with formal politics. Their multiyear petitioning raised awareness—in public, in reform circles, and in the legislature—about the ways the state might effectively take legal steps against slavery. The spokesmen among them—the leading lights of black abolitionism in the state—formed partnerships with white abolitionists, lawyers, and politicians, creating relationships with white citizens who had more leverage to operate within electoral and legislative politics than they did. In the right partisan climates, with the right candidates and lawmakers in office or running for office, black political maneuvering could make a difference. To be sure, black citizens would have been able to apply even more pressure had they been granted the equal right to vote, or had they been permitted to serve as lawmakers themselves. The overall point is not that black citizens had all the political power they wanted or needed just because they were able to shape state politics through petitioning, lobbying, and strategic political partnerships, but rather, to assert that, in specific circumstances, ordinary black citizens used formal political action and structures to their advantage. Perhaps out of pure necessity, they maintained—even willed themselves to maintain—a certain faith in the political process. The proof is not just in how they shaped the 1838 gubernatorial campaign, but in what happened afterward in state lawmaking during Seward’s tenure. During Seward’s second year in office, the state’s voters maintained a Whig majority in the assembly and installed a Whig majority in the senate for the first time ever. For antislavery legislators, this was a good time to execute change. Early in the session, Seward called for “informal conferences” with lawmakers to craft antislavery legislation. One result, “An Act to extend the right of trial by jury,” explicitly satisfied one of the black petitioners’ requests. Seward also signed “An Act More effectually to protect the citizens of this State from being kidnapped, or reduced to slavery.”80 Seward’s son later wrote that his father had acted because he “felt a ground-­swell of popular opinion” in favor of the measures.81 The Colored American agreed that the “intelligent citizens” of the “grand Empire State” deserved credit for the “progress.”82 With one goal achieved, there were two remaining. The state’s black leaders ramped up their petition efforts yet again. In the summer of 1840, the Colored American organized a three-­day State Convention of Colored Citizens

Practicing Formal Politics Without the Vote

133

in Albany, the first state-­oriented black political meeting of its kind in American history. Towns and cities across the state elected male delegates to represent local concerns at the convention. Women were invited to attend as members of the audience. Participants came from everywhere in New York— from major cities and small hamlets, from Long Island to the Great Lakes. “Leading men of Albany of the Whig political party” also took part, giving the proceedings their “most respectful attention.”83 The primary goal of the convention was to address the “political condition” of black New Yorkers. Restoring equal suffrage was paramount, but the delegates also discussed the broader rights, privileges, and obligations of citizenship, as well as the history of their patriotism and service to the country. A committee of statistics collected data on schools, property ownership, churches, and mutual aid organizations in local areas. The convention allowed New York’s most prominent black abolitionists—Alexander Crummell, Henry Highland Garnet, Austin Steward, Theodore Wright, Charles B. Ray—to inspire, guide, and meet the state’s small-­town leaders, but it also provided the less-­famous delegates the chance to share and explain what they faced, and what they had accomplished, in their own backyards.84 The delegates repeatedly emphasized the importance of petitioning. A committee charged with writing “recommendations to the people” highlighted “the strength and importance of petition or prayer.” At the close of the convention, the delegates emphasized “the inconsistency of complexional enactments being passed in a professed republican state like New York” and expressed “an untiring determination to petition.” To coordinate a new wave of petitions, the convention created a “central committee” of seven men from Albany and Troy to organize efforts in every county. The convention also appointed five men in each county to correspond with the central committee. Benjamin Croger—whose family had been so key to the success of Brooklyn’s black schools—was one appointee. New York County’s appointees included several graduates of the African Free School. David H. Ray, Phebe’s son, was appointed in Ontario County.85 Energized, the delegates went home from the convention and began to work. Benjamin Croger and fellow school leader George Hogarth, for ­example, presided over a “mass meeting” in Brooklyn whose purpose was to organize a petition to repeal the “unjust and odious” law that “demands a certain amount of freehold property, as the qualification of a colored voter.” The participants formed committees to canvas the city for black and white signatures.86 As the volunteers went door to door, they no doubt encountered the familiar faces of the parents and grandparents of schoolchildren, and of schoolchildren

134

Sarah L. H. Gronningsater

themselves, who had been thinking about their citizenship rights well before the mass statewide petition campaigns of the 1830s and ’40s. The petitioning energy on the ground was matched by a complementary energy in the legislature, which remained in Whig hands in 1841. As black petitioners were gathering signatures, Seward prepared his annual message. In a section devoted to the elective franchise, he cited the “unfortunate race, which, having been plunged by us into degradation and ignorance, has been excluded from the franchise by an arbitrary property qualification incongruous with our institutions.” Seward was now officially in favor of black men’s equal right to vote. A few days later, several Whig assemblymen created a committee to consider the governor’s position.87 Across the river in Troy, Henry Highland Garnet, chair of the central committee, was keeping one eye on the state capitol and the other on black petitioners’ local efforts. In early February, Garnet reported to the Colored American that he had received 107 signatures from Rochester, 101 from Poughkeepsie, 84 from Utica, 55 from Newburgh, 21 from Windsor, 80 from Troy, 12 from Lansingburgh, 26 from Schenectady, 70 from Syracuse, 82 from Hudson, 100 from Flushing, 1,300 from New York City, and 20 from St. Andrews. He encouraged those who had not yet sent him their documents to do so promptly.88 In mid-­February, Garnet began delivering the petitions to members of the assembly and lobbying lawmakers in person. In his own words to the Colored American: The petitions, as they have from time to time been received, have all been presented to some member [of the legislature] by [me] in person. Previous to my presenting the petitions, on every occasion, I have taken the opportunity of conversing with some influential member, and have not failed to receive his word, promising his favor in regard to the measure. . . . Those gentleman have informed [me] that they believed the time had come, when the mind of the House was prepared to act. Garnet was particularly heartened by his meeting with Whig assemblymen William Van Schoonhoven, Erastus Culver, and George Simmons.89 On February 18, at Simmons’s invitation, Garnet appeared before the Judiciary Committee. Garnet explained to the Colored American that he had highlighted several facts in his testimony: “1st. Our citizenship, the right of which we claimed as our birth-­right. . . . 2ndly. Our conduct, when we enjoyed the

Practicing Formal Politics Without the Vote

135

elective franchise, which was purely republican and loyal. 3dly. The fallacy of the reasons. . . . that disfranchised us. 4thly. The deleterious effect that the arrangement has had upon us.”90 Garnet’s visit to the Judiciary Committee was noteworthy—a black citizen invited to explain his community’s political priorities to the men who made the laws.91 But it is equally crucial to note that Garnet was not the only black New Yorker present. Dozens of unnamed black men and women appeared in the assembly chambers to watch the legislature at work that winter. In fact, doughface legislators were so agitated by their presence that one of them, a Democrat from Schoharie named Jacob Skillman, introduced a proposal to “cause a portion of the gentlemen’s gallery to be set apart exclusively for the use of persons of colour.” At a moment when many legislators were absent from the floor, Skillman’s segregated seating measure passed.92 Five days later, Culver introduced a successful motion to overturn the rule. The Colored American editors were furious that black citizens had been assigned, albeit briefly, to a “negro pew.”93 On March 10, a Whig named Alvah Worden—who happened to be Governor Seward’s brother-­in-­law—delivered the Judiciary Committee’s report on equal suffrage. Arguing that freedom meant more than the right not to be property, he observed that full emancipation included the right to exercise political will. He turned to the petitions, signed by “many thousand” New Yorkers. The petitions were an indicator of “public sentiment” and an expression of “popular will.” The petitioners should be trusted, he argued: “All matters of this kind are safe in their hands, and the committee are of opinion that the Legislature should take the necessary measures to bring the question, in the mode provided in the Constitution, before the electors of this State.” The report concluded with the text of a proposed constitutional amendment that would remove the word “white” from the franchise clause in the 1821 state constitution.94 A few weeks later, Worden’s committee issued another report, this one in support of repealing the nine-­months law. When slaves entered New York, the report explained, they became “members of the State” under “the protection of our institutions.” Since the state constitution declared “no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, and property without due process of law,” the nine-­months law was “unconstitutional and void.”95 Following these two reports—reports that vindicated the black petitioners’ prayers—the assembly agreed to the nine-­months repeal, but not to an equal suffrage measure. By May, both houses of the legislature had agreed to legislation that would forbid masters from bringing their slaves into New

136

Sarah L. H. Gronningsater

York State. Seward—who had been unwilling to endorse openly the nine-­ months repeal during the 1838 election—signed the bill into law. The repeal was not only a slap in the face to slave owners, but it also meant that, technically, every black person (except runaways) standing on New York soil was now considered free.96 That summer, black New Yorkers celebrated their victory.97 The black abolitionist David Ruggles arranged a gathering at Manhattan’s Asbury Methodist Church so that “every colored person” could learn the “facts growing out of the repeal.”98 In Williamsburg on Long Island, black citizens celebrated the anniversary of West Indian emancipation and the nine-­months repeal together. Boys and girls from the “Sabbath and day schools” were front and center of the festivities.99 From Geneva, in western New York, local leader J. W. Duffin wrote a buoyant letter to the Colored American about the “favorable reception of our petitions in the Legislature.”100 Optimistic, black petitioners planned a second state convention for August.101 In retrospect, black petitioners were perhaps too sanguine about the prospect of equal suffrage, especially given the procedural difficulties of changing the constitution. But they were also unfailingly determined, and they continued to petition for the vote throughout the 1840s, ’50s, and ’60s.102 In 1846, a state constitutional convention put the question of equal suffrage before the state electorate and the electorate voted it down; in 1860, after two successive legislatures in a row voted in favor of equalizing suffrage, the state electorate again said no. Black men did not regain equal access to the vote until the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1870, five years after the close of the Civil War.103 The story of the 1846 and 1860 equal suffrage referendum failures is one that political historians of the nineteenth century know well.104 And yet it seems that the familiar narrative—so focused on voting rights in particular— results in a tendency to discount or to miss the ways that black citizens both practiced politics and effected legislative change during the Second Party System. The 1840 jury trial law, which promised due process to accused runaways, mattered deeply to those black people who made use of it in the state’s courts. The law also mattered symbolically; it promised basic civil rights to people that slave masters preferred to treat as property under the law. The 1841 nine-­months repeal made New York less hospitable to masters and signaled the state’s willingness to take a side on the moral and political question of slavery. In time, the nine-­months repeal would become a major flashpoint between New York and national proslavery forces in the lead-­up to the Civil War.105 In short: we should absolutely register the profound disappointment

Practicing Formal Politics Without the Vote

137

and pessimism that black petitioners felt due to their persistent disfranchisement; we should also register the sense of possibility and accomplishment they felt in the summer of 1841 after achieving two of their three statewide petition goals.106 One critical reason to register the sense of possibility and accomplishment that black petitioners felt is that it helps explain, at least in part, why black petitioners kept petitioning. Political movements, whether small and local, or sophisticated and mass-­based, need (at the very least) sporadic success in order to survive. For slaves and free blacks, methods and measures of success could take a variety of forms: running away to start a new life, teaching others to read, sustaining autonomous religious institutions, forming abolitionist societies, or parading on significant historical anniversaries, to cite a few examples. Sometimes, as the case of New York’s black petitioners shows, success occurred when citizens employed their formal political rights in the formal political system to create formal political change. In demonstrating their faith in the process and their right to engage in it, they also held white politicians accountable to the system. The Ray family, in their paradigmatic efforts as petitioners, experienced both the highs and the lows of having prayers both answered and ignored. In 1846, as we know, Phebe Ray went before the Rochester Board of Education, in the dead of winter, to petition for the redress of a grievance suffered by the city’s black schoolchildren, including children in her family. Phebe’s initial plea was met with an inadequate solution, but eventually, in the wake of sustained pressure, the Board of Education reversed course. Phebe and her neighbors won that particular fight. One month after Phebe petitioned the school board, her son, David H. Ray, helped organize a “Suffrage Meeting” for the “colored citizens” of Rochester with the view of petitioning the upcoming state constitutional convention in the summer of 1846.107 Their purpose was to encourage the conventions’ delegates to extend the right of suffrage. As we also know, the suffrage meeting’s goals remained unmet that summer, and for decades thereafter. Phebe and David, mother and son, no doubt discussed their simultaneous petition efforts in the winter of 1846. It seems reasonable to assume they were mutually supportive of each other’s work, and we know from additional evidence that their relatives were also engaged in antislavery politics. Northern black families like the Rays—mobile, enterprising, education-­oriented, and not necessarily well known beyond their immediate towns or regions— were integral to antislavery political and legal progress in their state, and in

138

Sarah L. H. Gronningsater

the nation at large. Petition movements, in order to work, required all sorts of people to participate, including ordinary washer-­women grandmothers like Phebe and her small-­business-­owner son David. The history of nineteenth-­ century antislavery politics comes into much sharper view if we pay as much attention to the Rays, and their engagement in formal politics, as we do to the standard figures of political history.

Chapter 7

“Agitation, Tumult, Violence Will Not Cease” Black Politics and the Compromise of 1850 Andrew Diemer

In the summer of 1850, Stephen Douglas guided through Congress a series of bills that quickly came to be known as the “Compromise” bills and have come down to us as the Compromise of 1850. There were, of course, no black members of Congress to vote these bills up or down, and most African Americans lived in parts of the United States where they were denied the right to vote. The Compromise had tremendous consequences for free African Americans, especially the Fugitive Slave Law that in many ways was its core, yet when historians have accounted for the political failure of the Compromise, free African Americans have often played an ambiguous role, or perhaps more precisely they have played a very specific and limited role. In the years following the passage of the Compromise bills, many free blacks rejected the legitimacy of the Fugitive Slave Law and resolved to resist it, by force if necessary.1 Other African Americans, holding that their native United States no longer afforded them reasonable protections, decided to emigrate across the border into Canada (or to a lesser extent, elsewhere).2 Both actions can and should be seen as broadly political, yet despite the increasing scholarship that demonstrates the political engagement of free African Americans, many historians, especially those focused on national politics, have continued to depict the period immediately following the passage of the Compromise as a period in which black politics were marginalized. For example, though Sean Wilentz notes that there was a brief backlash in the North to the Fugitive Slave Law, he insists that this backlash quickly subsided. Subsequently, he argues, moderates of both parties came together

140

Andrew Diemer

in order to celebrate the salvation of the Union, and even northerners who were morally troubled by the Fugitive Slave Law saw it as the price of the Union and fell in line. This white consensus would only be shattered by the crisis over Kansas.3 Before then, this argument goes, the largely white world of partisan politics turned its back on the concerns of free African Americans. There would be no place for black politics until concerns about the expansion of slavery reopened sectional wounds and empowered a sectional Republican Party, which would be somewhat more sympathetic to black criticisms of the Fugitive Slave Law.4 This chapter argues, on the contrary, that during this period, 1850–1854, black politics played a far greater role in shaping the Compromise of 1850 than has often been recognized. In order to make this argument, the chapter focuses not on efforts to influence the most radical white opponents of slavery and not on the most antislavery regions of the North. Instead it looks at the efforts of black politics to appeal to “moderate” white northerners in the Lower North states of New York and Pennsylvania, places where African Americans remained either entirely or largely disfranchised.5 Certainly many white moderates in this region expressed their support for the Compromise, even for the Fugitive Slave Law. Yet this support was always weaker than pro-­Compromise politicians wished it to seem. Black politics sought to play on the tepid sympathies of white moderates and on the conditional support of white northerners for free black citizenship rights in order to undermine support for the Fugitive Slave Law. In doing so free African Americans undercut the very foundation of the Compromise.6 In order to understand the role of black politics in the failure of the Compromise of 1850, we need to begin by thinking more carefully about the nature of that “compromise” itself. Historians have long remarked that by many measures these bills hardly constituted a compromise at all. Perhaps most famously, David Potter remarked that “there really was no compromise—a truce perhaps, an armistice, certainly a settlement, but not a true compromise.”7 Contemporaries, especially those critical of one or another of the bills, also noted the lack of a true “compromise” in the Compromise of 1850. The National Era, reporting on pro-­Compromise meetings, refers to “what they style the ‘Compromise Acts’ ” and “the recent legislation of Congress on the subject of slavery, commonly called the ‘Compromise Acts.’ ”8 In reality, of the six bills that made up the “Compromise” only one (the New Mexico bill) received a majority of support in both the North and the South and then only in the Senate. All other bills passed with either a northern majority or a southern one.9 Southern defenders of slavery certainly

“Agitation, Tumult, Violence Will Not Cease”

141

understood the lack of northern congressional support for the Fugitive Slave Law, and this meant that the Compromise would only work if the vast majority of northerners committed themselves to its success. Many southerners were skeptical that this support would materialize and looked for assurances. The Georgia state convention, assembled to consider the state’s response to the Crisis of 1850, determined to remain in the Union, for now. “It is the deliberate opinion of this Convention,” they announced, “that upon a faithful execution of the Fugitive Slave Law . . . depends the preservation of our much beloved Union.”10 In Maryland, a state where slaveholders felt the flight of fugitives more acutely, a convention then assembled to consider revisions to the state constitution concurred with their Lower South brethren: “and it is equally the duty of all good citizens to encourage and support the officers of the Government in the execution of the laws, and to discountenance and rebuke the efforts of those who seek to subvert them.”11 Slaveholders across the South wanted proof that the “good citizens” of the North would hold up their end of the Compromise. What made these laws, then, passed by different coalitions of legislators into a compromise was the belief that they were one. For these distinct laws to function as a compromise, it was not enough for them to become law. It was not enough even for them to work as they were intended to work. They needed to be embraced. Northerners needed to convince their southern brethren that they would faithfully enforce the Fugitive Slave Law. What this means is that the success of black politics should be measured not simply in its ability to thwart the functioning of the Fugitive Slave Law, but in its puncturing of the carefully crafted illusion of northern unanimity. Free African Americans had for decades pushed two related lines of argument in their effort to shape the politics of fugitive slave recovery. The first was that whatever law facilitated the recovery of fugitive slaves also needed to ensure the safety of legally free blacks from illicit kidnapping, since there was often little practical difference between slave catchers and kidnapping. As Manisha Sinha notes, the first federal fugitive slave law, passed in 1793, arose from a dispute over the blurred line between kidnapping and fugitive slave rendition.12 In the decades that followed, and across the Lower North in particular, African Americans needed to be vigilant against the threat of kidnapping, and black newspapers constantly publicized instances of kidnapping under the cover of slave catching. A typical example from Freedom’s Journal in 1827 recounts “a barefaced attempt having been made to arrest, secure and carry off a coloured man, born in this town and the offspring of free parents, under the pretext of his being a runaway southern slave.”13

142

Andrew Diemer

The primary goal of this effort was to protect the liberties of free African Americans, but clearly many realized that strong protections for free blacks tended also to serve as a deterrent to slave catching. While white moderates reluctantly accepted their constitutional obligation to return fugitive slaves, free black activists were more successful in appealing to concerns about the vulnerability of free blacks. The second, and closely related, argument that African Americans made was that only a jury trial in the state in which an accused fugitive was recovered would be adequate to protect the liberties of the black citizens of northern states. Here free blacks were often unsuccessful, but nevertheless the call for jury trials served as an important rallying cry, as clear evidence that the denial of black citizenship rights posed a threat to the most essential liberties enjoyed by black northerners. For example, when the black abolitionist Robert Purvis penned his denunciation of the proposed disfranchisement of black Pennsylvanians, he also noted that the same convention that would disfranchise the commonwealth’s black citizens would also deny them the right to trial by jury if accused as a fugitive. “Need we inform you,” he writes, “that every colored man in Pennsylvania is exposed to be arrested as a fugitive from slavery? And that it depends not upon the verdict of a jury of his peers, but upon the decision of a judge on summery process, whether or not he shall be dragged into southern bondage?”14 Calls for jury trials remained an important part of black abolitionist rhetoric up to and beyond the crisis of 1850. In February 1850, Frederick Douglass’s North Star included text for a petition “To Secure to alleged Fugitives the right of Trial by Jury” along with instructions for sending it along to members of Congress.15 Thanks in large part to the work of free African Americans, this line of criticism, seeking to establish protection of free blacks and the guarantee of jury trials as the moderate centrist position in the debate over fugitive slave recovery, was pervasive enough by 1850 to feature prominently in the congressional debates on the new Fugitive Slave Bill.16 An early exchange in the Senate debate over the Fugitive Bill illustrates the contentiousness of the jury trial issue. James Mason, who had first introduced the bill, defended the right of a master to reclaim his enslaved property wherever he may find him, “by virtue of ownership, and without any warrant or other process in law.” This right, he insisted, was antecedent to the Constitution. William Seward countered this assertion with an amendment that would guarantee that if “the person so seized may deny that he owes such service or labor as alleged . . . And the issue thus joined shall be tried before a jury of twelve persons duly qualified to serve as jurors for the district.” Seward’s amendment elicited fierce denunciations

“Agitation, Tumult, Violence Will Not Cease”

143

from southern senators. Henry S. Foote called it “demagogism” and lamented that it showed “so little of that manly respect for the rights to be secured in the great national compact which binds these states together.”17 The debate on the bill had reached an impasse, in large part due to what seemed an irreconcilable difference over the issue of jury trials. If the radical defenders of slaveholder rights dismissed these concerns about the kidnapping of free blacks out of hand, the self-­styled voices of compromise took them more seriously. The bill was sent to a Committee of Thirteen, chaired by Henry Clay and tasked with hammering out a compromise. The committee proposed what it hoped was a middle position between the sectional extremes. If a master claimed a fugitive in a free state, and if that alleged fugitive claimed free status, he would post a bond in the free state pending a jury trial in the master’s home jurisdiction, which would establish the identity of the claimed fugitive. The committee hoped that the jury trial would allay the concerns of at least some northerners. Most northern congressmen remained unconvinced, though. William Dayton of New Jersey spoke for many when he doubted that southern juries could be trusted to fairly evaluate the claims of “a man standing upon free soil, recognized there as a freeman.”18 It was not simply a matter of procedure. Many northerners simply did not trust southerners to make these determinations, whatever the actual means for doing so. Clearly at least some of this concern was driven by the work of free black activists. Not only had African Americans laid the groundwork for this demand, but their voices continued to be heard in the midst of this debate. On July 16, John Hale of New Hampshire submitted a petition from free black citizens of Alleghany County, Pennsylvania. “They state that they are subjected to every degree of cruel and harassing treatment. Being born in a free State, and colored, they have not the legal proof of freedom, and are subject to be claimed as slaves, and are at the mercy of those who may set up a claim to them.”19 At the very least the voices of free blacks were invoked as an authority, as evidence for the dire threat posed by the provisions of the proposed Fugitive Slave Law. For their part, southern congressmen had little confidence that northern juries could be trusted to respect the rights of slaveholders. “Everyone knows,” insisted Thomas Pratt of Maryland, “that if they have, in Pennsylvania, or any other state to which a slave may escape, the right to trial by jury, his delivery to his master is an impossibility. Every man in this body knows this.”20 The new Fugitive Slave Laws would seek to overcome this skepticism in a number of ways, both by empowering a federal bureaucracy of commissioners,

144

Andrew Diemer

appointed by U.S. circuit courts, and by instituting harsh penalties for those who might interfere with the recovery of accused fugitives.21 Despite these provisions, southern skepticism remained. Increasingly it had become apparent that this lack of trust was the essence of the sectional dispute and the passage of a law was not nearly enough to make the Compromise effective. Reflecting upon the fugitive slave clause of the Constitution, Senator Daniel Dickinson, a Democrat of New York, opined that “the theory of the compact is, that the fugitive will be justly dealt with in the jurisdiction to which he is returned . . . [without this] for a just and necessary provision of the fundamental law a system of conflict and violence will be substituted.” Such conflict and violence could only be avoided if the northern public had confidence in southern justice. Dickinson insisted that this this confidence could only be secured if “the masses of the people of the free States” rejected abolitionists who “under the garb of benevolence and superior sanctity” had undermined the recovery of fugitive slaves.22 In the eyes of many the center of this debate would be this matter of trust, and resolving this lack of trust was a critical issue in the politics of the Compromise of 1850. Lack of trust might be seen as legitimate skepticism of southern “justice” or it might be seen as a product of abolitionist agitation, but in either case it was an obstacle to the success of the Compromise. From a southern perspective, this mistrust was certainly compounded by the fact that the Fugitive Slave Law had passed without significant northern support. In fact, it had passed largely due to the abstention of significant numbers of northern congressmen, hardly a reassuring endorsement of their commitment to the recovery of fugitive slaves.23 In other words, the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law was just the beginning of the process of making it work as a part of the Compromise. If the passage of the legislative components of the Compromise had been the province of a small number of white congressmen, this larger political struggle would necessarily involve far more participants, including free African Americans. Many white northerners, especially given the immediate and vociferous opposition of free African Americans and their allies, felt that the key to making the series of laws that had passed Congress by slim margins into a true compromise lay in a public performance of northern support for the Fugitive Slave Law.24 Across the North, self-­styled defenders of the Union organized mass meetings as a means of demonstrating this support. Meetings were carefully orchestrated and publicized as a performance of northern commitment to the Union and respect for southern grievances. Each meeting was different, but a few consistent features stand out. First, the men who

“Agitation, Tumult, Violence Will Not Cease”

145

spoke at these meetings claimed to be above politics. They reassured their audience that this was the case, in many cases insisting that they had never been politicians or that they had long withdrawn from political affairs. This nonpartisan status was reinforced by the carefully chosen bipartisanship of the speakers. Finally, those who organized these meetings hoped not simply to demonstrate the overwhelming support that the people of the North were ready to give the Fugitive Slave Law, but they also sought to delegitimize any further antislavery agitation. “The object of calling this meeting,” insisted George Wood, president of the New York meeting, “is to express our approval of these measures, and our disapproval of the attempt to continue this agitation.”25 These meetings sought to rally public opinion in order to silence opposition, not just to ensure the functioning of the law. If we accept these meetings at face value, then white northerners overwhelmingly supported the vigorous enforcement of the new Fugitive Slave Law. They may not have liked it, but they saw it as the price of preserving the Union. Any agitation on this issue was a betrayal of the Union, of the “spirit of ’76.” If this were the case, there really were only two options: violent resistance or emigration. Many free African Americans, however, fervently believed that the “consensus” that the organizers of these public meetings tried to portray was illusory. While many whites, perhaps most, accepted their own constitutional obligation to return fugitive slaves in an abstract sense, free blacks recognized that far more whites were troubled by this fugitive slave law, by what they feared that fugitive slave rendition would actually look like. If we look beneath the surface of these meetings we see that even in the midst of these expressions of supposed unanimity, fissures were emerging. While these celebrations sought to produce a veneer of bipartisanship, partisan differences remained. Democrats generally offered unabashed support for the Fugitive Slave Law, but Whig support was more measured. The president of Philadelphia’s union meeting, the venerable Whig John Sergeant, admitted that some provisions of the law would likely need to be changed in order to satisfy northern sensibilities. Whigs like Sergeant, who was a longtime opponent of slavery’s expansion but who was certainly no abolitionist, insisted that the Fugitive Slave Law needed to be obeyed in the meantime, and that changes would be made “peaceably, quietly and if not without excitement, at least without the nullification of an Act of Congress.”26 This might seem like mild criticism, but since the advocates for the Fugitive Slave Law had already made it clear that the alterations suggested by these Unionist Whigs were a nonstarter, the emergence of this sentiment even in these pageants of unanimity demonstrates a deeper concern among the northern public. Even in cases

146

Andrew Diemer

where no mention was made of alterations to the law, Whigs felt the need to reassure their audience that fears of free black northerners were unfounded. “I will,” announced James W. Gerrard, a New York Whig, “with all my heart, without fee or reward, give to any alleged slave who may be arrested under the act, my services as his counsel, if he will trust me with his cause.”27 Such assurances fell far short of satisfying the law’s critics, but that fact that they were made suggests that even the advocates of the Fugitive Slave Law recognized the pervasiveness of northern fears of the functioning of the law. Free blacks had long argued that in practical terms kidnapping and fugitive slave recovery were indistinguishable, but in the wake of the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 black abolitionists took up this argument with a renewed vigor. This was, of course, not the only argument that free blacks made against the Fugitive Slave Law; they also objected to any recovery of fugitive slaves and to slavery itself. They recognized, however, that emphasizing the extent to which the functioning of the Fugitive Slave Law as it was written threatened legally free black citizens of northern states would help broaden the public’s opposition to the recovery of fugitive slaves and would help weaken the law’s effectiveness. Even when black leaders explicitly endorsed the turn toward violent resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law, they often did so in a way that sought to couple these calls with language of political resistance. Frederick Douglass provides a useful example of this phenomenon. In the aftermath of the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law and the Compromise of 1850, Douglass explicitly defended violence as a legitimate response. His most famous expression of support for violent resistance also employed language that sought to remind the public of the blurry boundary between kidnapping and fugitive slave recovery. The only way to make the Fugitive Slave Law a dead letter is to make half a dozen or more  dead kidnappers. (Laughter and applause.) A half dozen more dead kidnappers carried down South would cool the ardor of Southern gentlemen, and keep their rapacity in check. That is perfectly right as long as the colored man has no protection. The colored men’s rights are less than those of a jackass. No man can take away a jackass without submitting the matter to twelve men in any part of this country.28 While historians have often cited the first sentence of this quote as evidence of Douglass’s growing militancy, the longer quote shows that Douglass

“Agitation, Tumult, Violence Will Not Cease”

147

continued to depict slave catching as kidnapping and to fault the Fugitive Slave Law, in part, for its denial of jury trials to accused fugitives. The use of “kidnapping” in this context as a synonym for slave catching needs to be approached carefully. Certainly, abolitionists often talked about slavery itself as a form of theft. Douglass himself employed this sort of language in his 1845 narrative, comparing his master’s claims on his labor to that of a “grim-­visaged pirate upon the high seas.”29 Historian Edward Baptist has written of a related sort of language found often in the WPA interviews of former slaves. He notes that in many of these interviews the subjects speak of being “stolen.” Baptist argues that such language seems not to have been appropriated from abolitionist literature but rather emerged from a “vernacular history,” stories handed down among slaves themselves.30 This creates the intriguing possibility that this language of “kidnapping” flows at least in part from the enslaved themselves, from their understanding of slavery’s immoral foundations. Whatever the origin of this language, though, Douglass’s use of it shows that it serves multiple purposes in black protest. Clearly it captures an ideological critique of slavery itself as an illegitimate and illegal appropriation of black labor, but it also serves a more narrowly political purpose. Douglass’s coupling of the language of kidnapping with a critique of the Fugitive Slave Law’s denial of jury trials suggests he is not simply using it in an ideological way. He is also using it to raise doubts about the practical operation of the law, about the threat that it posed to legally free African Americans. Douglass-­edited newspapers were suffused with the language of slave catching as kidnapping, but during the early months of his coverage of the Fugitive Slave Law debate, he tended to use “kidnapping” in a more ideological sense. In a signed editorial published in March 1850, Douglass terms Henry Clay the “distinguished senatorial kidnapper,” but the context makes it clear that the kidnapping that Douglass refers to is Clay’s determination to hunt down and recapture escaped fugitives. “He talks as coolly,” Douglass tells his readers, “of his right to hunt down, bind, and fetter his brother man, and to drag him back to the infernal prison-­house, as though his victim were a wolf or a bear.”31 Clay is denounced as a cruel bloodhound, ruthlessly pursuing fugitive slaves as an illustration of the cruelty of the proposed bill itself, not as a part of any suggestion that the bill will treat the fugitive and the legally free alike. As the debate over the Fugitive Bill progressed, though, Douglass demonstrated a somewhat more fluid use of the term “kidnapping.” Certainly, he shows an appreciation of the use of this language of kidnapping by the

148

Andrew Diemer

congressional opponents of the bill. In April 1850, Douglass reprinted a speech of Congressman Joshua Giddings in which Giddings uses the “kidnap[ping of] our colored people” as a part of his argument against the Fugitive Bill. Giddings further muddies the water between kidnapping and slave catching by noting that “when our free colored people visit the slave States, they are seized, imprisoned, sold, and enslaved.” This, he notes, raises that prospect that the Fugitive Slave Law may be used to reenslave those who had been born free in first place and illegally enslaved.32 Certainly Giddings and Douglass knew that such cases were hardly typical, and yet they also knew that “moderate” northerners who were willing to accept the return of fugitives under certain circumstances were also concerned about how the law would actually work. The first application of the Fugitive Slave Law in New York only stoked fears that the law was a threat to those who had been born free as well as to those who had fled from slavery. In many ways, white New Yorkers were among the northerners most eager to demonstrate their willingness to vigorously enforce the Fugitive Slave Law. The political environment in New York City had long been hostile to abolitionists, black and white. Just eight days after the passage of the law, a black porter named James Hamlet was seized in New York. Hamlet claimed that he was legally free, but a Maryland woman named Mary Brown insisted that he was her slave and that his rightful name was James Hamilton Williams. He was seized based on an affidavit from Brown and spirited back to Maryland before any defense could be mobilized.33 Hamlet was fortunate that friends and allies were quickly able to raise the money needed to purchase his freedom, but black New Yorkers were committed to making Hamilton’s case into an indictment of the functioning of the Fugitive Slave Law. On October 1, black New Yorkers assembled for a meeting of protest, in which Hamlet’s case was held up as emblematic of the practical effects of the law. “There are,” declared William Powell, president of the meeting, “a thousand and one ways by which the unsuspecting colored man, woman and child may be entrapped into the hands of the blackhearted villainous kidnapper, and spirited away into Slavery almost instantly.” To be sure, Powell’s address played on the ambiguity inherent in the word “kidnapper.” His words can be read, and surely were heard by much of his audience, as a broader denunciation of the capture of fugitive slaves, whatever their legal status. He also issued a call to arms to black New Yorkers, to resist the incursions of the “bloodthirsty slaveholder,” but the meeting was also clearly

“Agitation, Tumult, Violence Will Not Cease”

149

an effort to reach out to “moderate” white officials in an effort to undermine the functioning of the Fugitive Slave Law. The published account of the meeting included a letter to the mayor of New York, inquiring as to what legal protections his office was able to offer “her citizens against the unjust operation of the law.”34 Black New Yorkers were ready to actively resist the law, but they also recognized that white officials, even white officials in what William Wells Brown termed “the pro-­slavery, negro-­hating city of New York,” were potential allies and that this support could mean all the difference. Similarly, a meeting of the “colored citizens of Philadelphia” insisted that the Fugitive Slave Law violated both the Declaration’s guarantee of “liberty” and the Constitution’s assurance that “ ‘the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended;’ and [ ] Art 5. of the Amendments, that ‘no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.’ ”35 Clearly black abolitionists were unwilling to admit the justice of slave catching whatever the mechanism, but at the same time they recognized the strategic importance of appealing to white moderates with concerns about the functioning of this particular version of the Fugitive Slave Law and its violation of free black citizenship rights. In the years following the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, the antislavery press, and the black press in particularly, would continue to push this linguistic assault on the law. In October 1850, the North Star reprinted a lengthy analysis of what it alternately termed “the kidnapping law” and the “manstealing law.” Once again, these terms did not necessarily imply a critique of the workings of the law, its denial of the legal rights of free African Americans, rather than of slavery itself. However, the analysis of the bill offered in these articles coupled with this language of “kidnapping” and “manstealing” served to emphasize the extent to which the law posed a threat to the legally free black population of the North. In another issue, Douglass reprinted a letter that accompanied the payment of a subscription: “The infamy of the fugitive slave bill is showing itself in its natural deformity, and the poor white slaves of perjured kidnappers at the North stand up in all their beauty.”36 Once again, the emphasis is on the workings of the law (its “deformity”), not simply on the injustice of slavery and slave catching. Without a jury trial it was all too easy for the “perjured” testimony of unscrupulous whites to send a free man or woman off into bondage. Once again, none of this is to deny that black northerners were committed to the resistance of the capture of fugitive slaves, no matter the workings of the Fugitive Slave Law; but if we consider some of the specifics of

150

Andrew Diemer

two of the most famous cases of violent resistance we can see that African Americans and their white allies recognized the importance of coupling this violent resistance with a rhetorical outreach to white moderates. Perhaps the most dramatic instance of violent resistance to the functioning of the Fugitive Slave Law came in Christiana, Pennsylvania. In September 1851, a Baltimore County slaveholder named Edward Gorsuch had learned that four individuals who had fled from his farm were living in Christiana, members of a sizable black community that was part of a long-­running struggle to protect itself in the midst of the borderlands of slavery. He obtained a warrant, and along with a group of men that included two Philadelphia police officers and a deputy marshal, Henry Kline, set out to recapture them. While Gorsuch was in Philadelphia acquiring the warrant, word leaked to local black activists of their plans, and warning was soon sent to Christiana. When the slave catchers arrived, then, their intended targets and much of the black community of Christiana were ready. Before the end of the day, Gorsuch was dead and the fugitives he had sought were on their way to Canada. The resistance of the black community of Christiana stands as one of the bloodiest incidents in what historian Stanley Harrold has identified as a long-­running “border war,” decades of violent conflict over slavery leading up to the Civil War.37 If this had been the end of this matter, it would simply have been an illustration of the willingness of African Americans to resist the Fugitive Slave Law with violence, and of the flight to Canada as a response to the law. It is certainly both of those things, but the aftermath of the Christiana uprising shows how violent resistance worked hand in hand with black politics. Following the violent confrontation, a combined force of U.S. Marines and Philadelphia police officers swept the area and rounded up any individual suspected to have been involved in the resistance. It was one thing for a group of free blacks and some of their white allies to resist the legitimate functioning of the Fugitive Slave Law, but southern observers felt that there needed to be consequences for such resistance. “The event cannot be passed over with an indeterminate result,” warned the Baltimore Sun, “without greatly impairing the confidence of southern people.” Southern newspapers demanded that northern Unionists prove their commitment to the law. Perhaps in response to these calls, prosecutors decided to charge the rioters with treason.38 The defense offered by the accused suggested the broad political appeal of the language of kidnapping that African Americans had used to attack the Fugitive Slave Law. It made the case that southeastern Pennsylvania was a

“Agitation, Tumult, Violence Will Not Cease”

151

dangerous borderland where free African Americans lived under a constant threat from kidnappers operating as legitimate slave catchers. Certainly, the free black resistance of Christiana made little distinction between free blacks and fugitive slaves; both were to be protected from capture. The Christiana defense, led by radical antislavery lawyer and congressman Thaddeus Stevens, made the case that this position was legally justifiable. The jury took only fifteen minutes to find the first defendant not guilty, convincing the prosecutors to drop the charges for the remaining defendants. Maryland attorney general Robert Brent, speaking no doubt for many southerners, warned that if northerners accepted this argument, his state would be “powerless to protect her citizens.” Black abolitionists predicted the same thing, but of course with approval. Black Philadelphian William Still insisted that the Christiana case would expose those “who under shelter of the brutish Fugitive Slave Law, manage to acquire the title of ‘Marshal,’ whereby they have felt they were authorized to commit all manner of outrage upon colored people with impunity.” A sympathetic meeting of black New Yorkers also pointed to the frequent “kidnapping” of free blacks as justification for the actions at Christiana.39 Free African Americans were increasingly convinced that they had a winning political response to the Compromise. Perhaps equally as bold was the rescue of the captured fugitive slave known as Jerry. Originally known as William Henry, Jerry had been recaptured in Syracuse, New York, by an agent of his former master. An interracial crowd attacked the jail where Jerry was being held and assisted him in his escape to Canada. Twenty-­five of these participants were indicted for their actions, though much to the chagrin (though perhaps not the surprise) of southern observers, none was officially punished for those actions. Support for Jerry and for the participants in the Jerry rescue brought together those from across the antislavery spectrum. Liberty Party leaders were major participants in the planning and execution of the rescue. Whig senator William Seward and Garrisonian abolitionist Samuel May were among those who signed bail bonds for the accused.40 In the years after the Jerry rescue, the celebration of these events became an opportunity to make a complex set of arguments against the Fugitive Slave Law. Shortly after the Jerry rescue, a letter from an observer (which was reprinted by Douglass) referred to his capturers as “kidnappers,” despite the fact that no real effort was made to deny Jerry’s legal status. Beyond this, though, the first day of October would be celebrated by many antislavery New Yorkers as “Jerry Rescue Day.” Unsurprisingly, many of those observing this antislavery holiday saw it as an opportunity to praise the violent resistance to

152

Andrew Diemer

the Fugitive Slave Law. The announcement for the first anniversary celebration of Jerry’s rescue read: “THE FIRST ANNIVERSARY of the Rescue of the man JERRY at Syracuse on the 1st day of October, 1851, from the custody of Official Kidnappers, is to be celebrated.” The resolutions adopted by this meeting indicate that many of the celebrants would have read this in an ideological sense; they affirmed the belief that all slave catching was illegitimate. Many of the letters read at this celebration, though, emphasize the workings of the law as a part of their objection to its function. They pointed in particular to its denial of trial by jury to accused fugitives as evidence for its illegitimacy. In her account of the Jerry rescue, historian Angela Murphy notes that these celebrations became a site of contest over abolitionist tactics.41 The most obvious sort of disagreement was over the use of violence, but Jerry Rescue celebrations also became an opportunity to express a multitude of justifications for opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law.42 Denunciations of the injustice of the Fugitive Slave Law frequently pointed to its denial of trial by jury to the accused fugitive as evidence for its unconstitutionality. Such denunciations became a frequent part of the state and national black conventions that met in the years following the Compromise of 1850. Black conventions had long advocated for black citizenship rights of various kinds, with voting rights a particular focus in the 1840s. In the early 1850s, though, the citizenship rights threatened by the Fugitive Slave Law were, for obvious reasons, a particular focus. The Albany convention held in 1851 pointed out not only that the Fugitive Slave Law violated the Declaration of Independence, but it also asserted “that this law directly and palpably violates those fundamental provisions of the Constitution of the United States which secure to ‘every person’ the right of trial by jury.” In Cincinnati the same year, black abolitionist John Mercer Langston denounced the Fugitive Slave Law because “It strips man of his manhood and liberty upon an ex parte trial; sets aside the constitutional guarantee of the writ of Habeas Corpus, which, under the constitution, can never be suspended, except in cases of rebellion or invasion; declares that the decision of the commissioner, the lowest judicial officer know to the law, upon the matter of personal liberty.”43 Langston, of course, opposed the capture of fugitive slaves on other grounds as well, but denunciations of these particular elements of the Fugitive Slave Law might help broaden that opposition. Some black abolitionists did worry that these sorts of technical critiques of the Fugitive Slave Law might, by implication, suggest acceptance of the broader principle behind the law. Douglass in particular wrestled with his practical desire to use every tool at his disposal to fight the Fugitive Slave Law

“Agitation, Tumult, Violence Will Not Cease”

153

while at the same time maintaining his conviction that all slave catching was kidnapping. In a signed editorial, Douglass thanks the congressional opponents of the Fugitive Slave Law, especially William Seward, for their willingness to defend the rights of free blacks. “While we thank him for extending to us all the legal protection which the Constitution—strained to its utmost tension—will allow,” Douglass writes, “while we thank him for demanding the Rights of Habeas Corpus and Jury Trial, for the fugitive from bondage, we submit that no such trial can be rightfully had, as the trial of a man for his freedom.”44 Despite this objection, Douglass continued to print approving accounts of those who might not have shared his broader opposition to the capture of fugitive slaves, but who were willing to raise particular objections to the functioning of this Fugitive Slave Law. Opponents of the Fugitive Slave Law hoped that an emphasis on the denial of jury trials to accused fugitives would reach out to white moderates who otherwise were willing to accept the Fugitive Slave Law. In response to the proslavery Union meetings organized in the wake of the Compromise of 1850, opponents of the Fugitive Slave Law also held meetings across the North in order to dispel the impression that the North was united behind the Compromise. They too publicized the accounts of their meetings and these accounts show frequent use of the jury trial issue as an argument against the Fugitive Slave Law. This was not the only argument that these meetings presented, and some of these meetings entirely eschewed the issue of jury trials, but many of these meetings looked to use the denial of a jury trial as a way to broaden the opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law.45 In Philadelphia, public concerns about the functioning of the Fugitive Slave Law were heightened by the very public case of Adam Gibson. Gibson had been claimed as a fugitive slave by a notorious slave catcher, George Alberti, despite conclusive evidence that Gibson was not the man Alberti claimed him to be. Antislavery papers heavily publicized the case, but they also proudly noted the widespread coverage of the case in other venues as well. Alberti was ultimately convicted under Pennsylvania’s 1847 antikidnapping law. His case helped raise concerns among moderate northerners that absent such protections, and absent provision for jury trials, the Fugitive Slave Law made such crimes inevitable. Defenders of the Fugitive Slave Law sought to vindicate Alberti, arguing that his conviction was a product of abolition fanaticism. A published defense of Alberti insisted that “had his skin been black, considerable sympathy would have been excited in a certain portion of this community, but he is a white man, and very few, comparatively, appear to evince an interest in his fate.”46 They sought to downplay the concerns raised

154

Andrew Diemer

by free black critics of the Fugitive Slave Law, and continued to insist that the law as written provided ample protections for free black northerners. Many Whig elected officials found themselves in a sticky situation. They recognized that while many of their constituents were willing to accept their obligation to return fugitive slaves in the abstract, they had significant doubts about the way the Fugitive Slave Law functioned. Governor William Johnston of Pennsylvania refused to sign the repeal of his state’s personal liberty law after it was passed by both houses of the legislature. In his annual message in 1851, he supported what he termed “the claims for the People the right to demand its amendment.” In the same year, Governor Reuben Wood of Ohio criticized the functioning of the Fugitive Slave Law, noting specifically that it was “a law that makes ex parte evidence conclusive of the master’s right to recapture and return his slave; that denies a jury trial here and elsewhere.” The following year, Ohio’s legislature would take up a bill granting the right to trial by jury to fugitives, though it ultimately came to naught. Johnston’s support for black rights also came to nothing, as he was defeated the following year and the first act of his Democratic successor was to sign the kidnapping law’s repeal, delivering on one of the central promises of his campaign; he also pardoned the kidnapper, Alberti.47 Clearly, despite the best efforts of many self-­styled defenders of the Union, the functioning of the Fugitive Slave Law had become a partisan issue. It seems that insofar as Whig politicians were committing themselves to the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law as it stood, they were doing so in the face of their voters. James Buchanan, who, whatever his failings as a public official, was an astute observer of Pennsylvania politics, had predicted that “modification of the Fugitive Slave Law” would be one of the main emphases of the Whig campaign in 1852. The Whig Party’s failure to make much of this issue, in fact their decision to cast themselves as the true defenders of the Union, surely played a significant role in their abysmal performance in the election of that year. Elsewhere Whig newspapers lamented the fact that the administration and its allies had pushed the party into endorsing positions that were at odds with the sentiments of its voters. “The Fugitive Slave Law, as it now stands, is rankly offensive to our people,” insisted the Boston Atlas, and yet the Fillmore administration “mock at the TRIAL BY JURY, and where that institution obstructs their designs, they endeavor to break down its ancient independence, and drive from it every citizen who has kept a conscience clear of offense.”48 While many critics of the Fugitive Slave Law pointed to it as a violation of the Constitution, others correctly noted that rights it stripped from accused fugitives were even older than the United States. Many of the Whig Party’s leaders

“Agitation, Tumult, Violence Will Not Cease”

155

continued to push for acceptance of the Fugitive Slave Law as the price of Union, but many of their voters remained unconvinced. Even if they had doubts about the leaders of the Whig Party, free African Americans across the North continued to reach out to disillusioned Whig voters. The Colored National Convention of 1853 produced an “Address to the People of the United States,” in which they pressed the case for black citizenship. “We are Americans, and as Americans, we would speak to Americans. We address you not as aliens not as exiles, humbly asking to be permitted to dwell among you in peace; but we address you as American citizens asserting their rights on their own native soil.” It was on this ground that they asked for the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law. “We ask, that the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, that Legislative monster of modern times, by whose atrocious provisions the writ of ‘habeas corpus,’ the ‘right of trial by jury,’ have been virtually abolished, shall be repealed.”49 This split between Whig voters and Whig elected officials would not bear its full fruits until after the collapse of the party and its replacement by an explicitly antislavery successor. The crisis provoked by the Kansas-­Nebraska Act not only energized the nascent Republican Party, it also undermined northern commitment to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law. The passage of the Nebraska Bill has operated as a practical repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law. Even here in Pennsylvania, the favorite hunting ground of slaveholders—made such by our geographical position and political subservience—it is now next to impossible to execute this infamous statute. The people have for some time only wanted a pretext for open hostility to it, and now one affords them in the outrage that has been perpetrated in the passage of the Nebraska Bill.50 Perhaps this author, writing in the National Anti-­Slavery Standard, overstated his case. Certainly, many Republicans remained committed to upholding the Fugitive Slave Law, and yet the second half of the 1850s saw northern states pass a flurry of personal liberty laws, some simply seeking to hinder all recovery of fugitive slaves, but others offering protections for legally free African Americans. These personal liberty laws, in turn, would help contribute to the ultimate breakdown of the Compromise of 1850 and the secession of the states of the Deep South, and yet it is clear that these late 1850s laws were merely the fruit of the agitation of the early 1850s. The legal protection of free African Americans offered by personal liberty laws, and more broadly the northern resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law, were not simply a response to

156

Andrew Diemer

southern efforts to expand slavery into Kansas, they were also a reflection of the long-­simmering concerns of white northerners, concerns that had been carefully cultivated by free blacks. While it may have taken a realignment of political parties to make this happen, free African Americans had helped to lay the groundwork for this legislation. In the years following the passage of the Compromise of 1850, free African Americans redoubled their political engagement, seeking to undermine moderate white northerners’ confidence in the Fugitive Slave Law, even as they also looked for other ways to resist.

Chapter 8

Black Politics and the “Foul and Infamous Lie” of Dred Scott Christopher James Bonner

In the antebellum decades, African Americans used the vagueness of citizenship to claim legal protections and make arguments about the relationships between individuals and governments. Their work resonated among state and federal lawmakers because of the uncertain meaning of citizen status. Black politics helped push northern lawmakers to pass personal liberty laws, and in areas where activists did not make tangible gains, they urged lawmakers to think about the content of citizenship and black people’s legal status. Federal lawmakers tried to curtail certain forms of black politics with the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, but citizenship remained undefined and continued to be useful for black activists. In 1857, Supreme Court chief justice Roger Taney looked to forestall the opportunities of citizenship when he dismissed Dred Scott’s freedom suit on the grounds that no black person had been or could be a citizen of the United States. The Dred Scott decision threatened black people’s work to use citizenship in pursuit of rights. In response, activists adopted new tactics designed to ensure the status remained unsettled and useful for their politics. The central questions in Dred Scott’s suit concerned slavery in the territories and the processes of emancipation, but much of Taney’s decision focused on explaining why black people could not be citizens in order to bar them from American political, legal, or social communities.1 The chief justice worried that freedom suits in federal court might destabilize slavery, but he was also concerned about the implications of black citizenship politics. Taney’s decision reflected his awareness of black protest strategies and his desire to prevent activists from using citizenship to seek legal protections.

158

Christopher James Bonner

After Dred Scott, activists continued to pursue specific legal protections, but Taney’s decision permeated black political life. On September 14, 1858, for example, thirty-­seven black men gathered for a state convention in Troy, New York, to demand the repeal of the state’s property qualification for black voters, which had stood since 1821.2 In addition to seeking changes in state laws, they spoke out against Chief Justice Taney’s opinion. Taney handed down his ruling eighteen months before the Troy convention, but activists refused to leave it in the past. And so William J. Watkins stood before his colleagues at Concert Hall in Troy and denied that Roger Taney had the authority to interpret the U.S. Constitution. Watkins was the son of a Maryland activist also named William Watkins. He worked as a teacher in Rochester, traveled to deliver abolitionist lectures, and collaborated with Frederick Douglass on his publishing work.3 The younger Watkins did not mince words when he spoke about Taney’s ruling. “The Dred Scott decision is a foul and infamous lie,” he declared, “which neither black men nor white men are bound to respect.” The ruling perverted fundamental constitutional principles; it was simply untrue that black people were not citizens. Rather than a statement of legal fact, Watkins called the decision “an utterance of individual political opinions” and urged people to reject the ruling in order to defend the republic.4 The chief justice failed to suppress black citizenship politics even as he attempted to foreclose the very possibility of black citizenship. The meeting in Troy in 1858 was typical of gatherings held in the late 1850s to strategize and respond to Dred Scott. Free black Americans were anxious and angry in the aftermath of that case; they made radical statements denouncing the nation’s laws, they considered violent revolution as a political tool, they questioned whether they should remain in the United States, and some decamped for foreign soil. But many black activists remained in the United States and continued using citizenship in their politics after the nation’s highest legal authority declared they could never be citizens. They put forth their own version of American history to challenge Taney’s central arguments about black people’s legal status in the past and future.5 In the late 1850s, black northerners chose to stay in the United States because they saw ways to continue working to secure legal protections through citizen status in spite of Taney’s decision. Longstanding forms of black citizenship politics helped black people offer potent challenges to Taney’s arguments and convinced many that they had a legal future in the nation. Taney’s ruling encouraged activists to continue the work they had done for decades, and it sparked new ideas and arguments. By contesting the chief justice’s claims, black people pushed their way into lawmaking

Black Politics and the “Foul and Infamous Lie” of Dred Scott

159

conversations. Watkins’s response to the decision—calling it “a foul and infamous lie”—was key to black northerners’ political strategy of the late 1850s. By calling the chief justice a liar, rejecting his narrative of the nation’s history, and challenging his interpretation of the Constitution, African Americans held onto a space in which they could make public arguments about citizenship. They presented Roger Taney as a radical outlier, working to delegitimize him and push his proslavery, white supremacist ideas out of discussions about the nation’s legal future. Taney used Dred Scott to define the nation as a slaveholding republic in its past, present, and future. In their challenges to his opinion, black people made transformative claims about American history, law, and society. Black activists were convinced Roger Taney’s opinion would not be the last word on their legal status. The terms of citizenship remained vague after Dred Scott, and so African Americans remained in their country, confident that citizenship was a viable tool to shape their legal position in the United States. In the spring of 1857, activists took up their work with the direct, transformative claim “we are citizens.”6

* * * Roger Taney’s ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford concluded a decade of tortuous legal proceedings involving several black and white people across multiple state and federal jurisdictions.7 Dred Scott, born a slave in Virginia around 1800, was transported to St. Louis, where U.S. Army surgeon John Emerson bought him in 1833. Emerson’s career required significant travel, and he brought Dred Scott to Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory in the mid-­1830s. In Wisconsin, Scott met and married an enslaved woman named Harriet, whose owner then gifted the woman to Emerson.8 Emerson subsequently moved to New Orleans, where he met and married Irene Sanford, who took the doctor’s surname. The Emersons brought the Scotts south to New Orleans, then back north to Illinois. On the return trip, Harriet gave birth to a daughter on a boat on the Mississippi River between Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory. John Emerson died in 1843 and title to the Scott family passed to his wife. After Irene Emerson refused to allow Dred Scott to purchase himself in 1846, Scott and his wife sued for their freedom on the grounds that they had resided in Illinois, territory deemed free under the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. The Scotts lost their first suit on a technicality, won a retrial in 1850, and then saw the judgment reversed by the Missouri Supreme Court in 1852. In the meantime, Emerson had transferred ownership of the Scott family to her brother John Sanford (rendered as Sandford

160

Christopher James Bonner

in subsequent records), who lived in New York. This transfer of ownership allowed Dred Scott’s lawyers to sue in the U.S. circuit court in 1854, presenting their case as a dispute between citizens of separate states. The federal judge instructed the jury to follow Missouri precedent, which led them to uphold Sanford’s title. Scott and his attorneys filed a writ of error, requesting a new trial before the U.S. Supreme Court, and the justices agreed to offer Scott his final legal option with a hearing in Washington, D.C. Sectional politics and questions about slavery’s future in the expanding United States shaped the decisions in the suits Dred and Harriet Scott filed. The judge for the Missouri Supreme Court was reluctant to declare Scott free because he wanted to keep himself and his state out of the fight over slavery’s expansion. The “inevitable consequences” of antislavery lawmaking “must be the overthrow and destruction of our government,” and he wanted no part in encouraging that process.9 In federal courts, judges recognized that a decision to free the family could empower the national government to restrict slavery in new territories, allow northern states to emancipate the human property of traveling slaveowners, or encourage enslaved people to use the courts to escape their owner’s grasp. When Scott appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, Taney recognized the transformative potential of the suit. The chief justice seized the opportunity to present his vision of a potentially limitless slaveholding republic, a nation with powerful state governments and without black legal personhood.10 Roger Taney responded to Dred Scott as both an enslaved person seeking freedom in court and a black person making an argument about the content of citizenship. The complex forms and possibilities of African Americans’ politics permeated the chief justice’s ruling, which he delivered on March 6, 1857. Taney declared Congress had no authority to govern U.S. territories added after the ratification of the Constitution. This invalidated the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which had barred slavery from Illinois and Wisconsin, and prevented the federal government from restricting slavery’s future expansion. He also declared unconstitutional both the Missouri Compromise and popular sovereignty, both of which made possible state legal restrictions of slavery.11 He added that the Fifth Amendment protected an individual’s right to bring property, including slaves, anywhere in the country. In theory, his decision opened the entire United States to slavery, decisively answering complex questions about the nation’s political geography and curtailing the arguments enslaved people might use in freedom suits. Taney’s vision of slavery expansion called for fundamental changes in the nation’s legal structures, but for many observers his denial of black citizenship

Black Politics and the “Foul and Infamous Lie” of Dred Scott

161

was equally stunning and outrageous. Dred Scott’s counsel had filed suit in federal court on the grounds that he was a citizen of Missouri and also of the United States. Taney asked whether Scott, or any person “whose ancestors were imported into this country, and sold as slaves” could subsequently “become entitled to all the rights and privileges and immunities guaranteed to the citizen?”12 He responded with a resounding no. In a wide-­ranging reinterpretation of the Constitution and the country’s history, the chief justice ruled black people could never be considered rights-­bearing members of the nation. Each state had the power to decide who was a citizen of that state, he argued. Though a state might confer rights and privileges on an individual, neither the federal government nor any other state had to provide the same protections. Taney imagined his way into the racial attitudes of the founding generation and said black exclusion was logical because when the Constitution was written, black men had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” And Taney elided disagreement on the court, ruling with a confidence that suggested he wielded all the authority of the federal government and encouraging the impassioned response to his opinion.13 “If anything related to the construction of the Constitution can be regarded as settled,” Taney wrote, “it is that which we now give to the word ‘citizen.’ ”14 Despite his confidence, Taney made a series of inconsistent arguments that reflected the vagueness of citizenship in the United States. The content of his opinion indicated the persistent uncertainty in the relationship between rights and citizen status. He concluded that a descendant of slaves could not become a “member of the political community . . . and as such” secure legal protections including the right to sue in federal court. This argument suggested legal belonging preceded and produced rights. But he also said free black people could never be citizens because states denied them certain legal protections, suggesting that a person’s rights determined their legal status. He wrote with an air of certainty, but Taney could not describe definitively the relationship between citizen status and a person’s rights. Black activists insisted that Taney’s ruling was based on a fundamentally inaccurate reading of the Constitution. At the Troy convention, in addition to calling the chief justice a liar, they said he had falsely claimed the authority to annihilate decades of legal precedent that limited the spread of slavery. His constitutional arguments and his history of the framers were flawed, designed only “to satiate the wolfish appetite of the oligarchy.” Taney’s argument that citizens of a state did not necessarily possess legal protections in other states contradicted the comity clause of the U.S. Constitution and

162

Christopher James Bonner

reflected persistent uncertainties about how the federal system should operate. He argued that there were multiple citizenships; a state could declare a person a citizen within its borders, but only state citizens who were also already citizens of the United States could be secured in their legal protections when they entered other states. Rather than clarifying the foundations or content of citizen status, Taney’s ruling highlighted its uncertain terms.15 Like African American activists, Taney invoked the past to make arguments aimed at crafting the terms of citizenship. His most infamous statement—that black people “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect”—was an assessment of popular opinion on racial categories in the eighteenth century. The key to black people’s legal position in the Constitution could be located in the Founders’ racial ideas, he reasoned. He abandoned recent federal precedent on slavery expansion but looked to the early eighteenth century for colonial laws to support his claims about black rights. Lawmakers in Massachusetts in 1705 and Maryland in 1717 erected barriers to interracial marriage, which Taney said indicated their desire for “a perpetual and impassable barrier” between the races. Taney then turned to the early republic, citing New Hampshire’s 1815 law excluding black men from militias and Connecticut’s 1833 act to outlaw black schools.16 Taney used that evidence to claim that an ideology of racial exclusion motivated the nation’s founding lawmakers and should continue to determine black Americans’ legal status. Chief Justice Taney understood black activists as a threat to the nation’s racial order, and crafted his decision to suppress African American politics. Taney acknowledged that black protest and abolitionism had begun to reshape the nation. He recognized some “change in public opinion or feeling, in relation to this unfortunate race” in the United States. Black activists sought to transform the ways lawmakers and other white Americans thought about African Americans, and Taney noted their halting success. In addition, many white northerners did confer some rights on black ­people, such as legal protections for alleged fugitives.17 But Taney refused to allow antebellum realities to shape his interpretation of the nation’s laws. He insisted that he could not “give to the words of the Constitution a more liberal construction . . . than they were intended to bear.”18 He ruled that a history of slavery and exclusion defined the present and future of African Americans’ legal status, regardless of their political aspirations and achievements. Taney’s chief aim was to protect the institution of slavery and justify its expansion. But Taney revealed his anxiety about black northerners when

Black Politics and the “Foul and Infamous Lie” of Dred Scott

163

he denied the significance of changed public opinion across the country. He wrote so forcefully and at such length on the question of black citizenship in order to curtail the legal possibilities the status held out for African Americans. The decision constituted an effort to restrict black voices to the margins in discussions of individuals’ rights.19 As enslaved black people used the law to seek freedom, they destabilized slavery and convinced the chief justice of the transformative potential of their politics. Dred and Harriet Scott were part of a history of enslaved people who sought and attained access to formal legal proceedings in pursuit of freedom. They were two of nearly 300 enslaved people who sued for freedom in Missouri before the Civil War. Each of those suits argued that black people should have a formal relationship with American lawmaking authorities and, in the approximately one-­third that resulted in freedom, suggested that such a relationship could threaten slave ownership.20 Freedom suits reflected the concerns of enslaved black people beyond the South, and carried meanings for legal developments across the country. Scott’s freedom suit was a claim for formal legal protections through citizen status. It stood alongside northern black politics and sought the same broad outcome—a legal connection between black people and governments in the United States. Scott and his lawyers claimed a black person could be a citizen, and they used the Constitution to say the status must entail the right to file suit in federal court. Roger Taney recognized the political threads connecting Scott to other black southerners in courtrooms and to black northerners in protest meetings, and he looked to suppress their possibilities through his ruling on Scott’s case. Throughout the decision, Taney indiscriminately cited legal restrictions on enslaved and free people, North and South. He argued free black northerners were legally no different from Dred Scott, and he believed denying Scott’s freedom was also a threat to the politics of those who were already free. One of Taney’s chief aims was to ensure that no African American could make legitimate claims on federal legal entities. Taney focused nearly half of his opinion on denying black citizenship because the status was such a potent political tool. To bolster his sweeping argument, the chief justice cited an 1857 State Department pronouncement denying African Americans passports on the grounds that they were not citizens. Like Taney, those officials declared black people could not be citizens because various states restricted their rights. The State Department’s decision was a direct response to a group of free black people who sought a specific legal privilege as citizens.21 Taney’s ruling gave that policy the legal sanction of the

164

Christopher James Bonner

Supreme Court. African American activists transformed ideas and debates on citizen status and black people’s rights. Roger Taney aimed to end those debates and secure slavery and racial exclusion for the United States.22

* * * There was a compelling logic to the historical arguments at the center of Chief Justice Taney’s ruling. He was right to dig for the roots of American racism in the soil of European colonialism and slavery. When the United States broke from England in 1776, and when its leaders crafted a constitution in 1787, few abandoned their convictions that black people were “ordinary articles of merchandise.” Most of the nation’s Founders did see black people as different and inferior, and few denounced prevailing prejudices. As Roger Taney noted, white supremacy had profoundly shaped the nation’s legal development. But Taney’s history of the United States was incomplete. The legal precedents he cited, such as the Constitution’s fugitive slave clause and state laws against interracial marriage, did not explicitly exclude black people from all rights or deny the possibility that they could be citizens. He willfully ignored a history of black people engaging with legal processes and securing legal protections. In the late 1850s, black activists saw the opportunity to challenge white supremacy by complicating the chief justice’s portrait of the past. They revised Taney’s history, arguing that state and federal law offered explicit and implicit openings for them to secure legal protections. Taney’s bad history provided a clear path for black activists to challenge Dred Scott. William J. Watkins took a lead role in correcting Taney’s history during the New York state convention of 1858. Watkins reported resolutions from the business committee to the convention as a whole for debate, and his list began with a direct statement about African Americans’ legal position in the country. Black New Yorkers were gathered “for the security of the rights guaranteed to them, as part of ‘the people,’ in the Constitution of the United States.” They declared themselves “citizens of the State of New York, and, consequently, of the United States,” in a direct rebuttal of Taney’s central argument. The activists demanded “influence, as a political power,” in the country’s formal lawmaking structures. Like the chief justice, they looked to the past, citing the nation’s legal foundation to prove their case. But rather than citing specific laws that secured their legal position, they spoke more broadly of “the theory of human rights set forth in the Declaration of American Independence” in support of their claims.23

Black Politics and the “Foul and Infamous Lie” of Dred Scott

165

These black New Yorkers, like the chief justice, were convinced their arguments about the nation’s history were urgent and legally significant beyond their own concerns. They had “a great work to perform in the conflict being waged between liberty and despotism.” Resisting the chief justice upheld the ideal of equality on which the nation had been founded. Black New Yorkers called on others “to trample, in self-­defence, the dicta of Judge Taney, beneath their feet.” Preserving American freedom required people to oppose the decision, a judicial embodiment of the corrupt and dangerous influence of slavery. From their opening statement that black Americans were part of “the People,” these black New Yorkers declared Taney’s ruling inaccurate and illegitimate. Their approach suggested they knew the law better and were more suited to defend it than the chief justice. These were powerful claims to make the midst of the sectional crisis of the 1850s as American people argued over and worried a great deal about how the federal government might influence their lives and shape the nation’s future. In that context, black activists presented themselves as legitimate lawmakers by disparaging the chief justice. They worked to marginalize Taney and developed arguments that would encourage the continued fight for legal change. Their work at the Troy convention represented key elements of African Americans’ responses to Dred Scott. Black and white activists from across the North joined those New Yorkers in attacking Taney’s legitimacy. In November 1858, delegates to an Ohio state convention echoed their colleagues to the east, urging people to “trample the Fugitive Slave Law and the dicta of the Dred Scott decision beneath our feet, as huge outrages.”24 Editors of a Boston religious newspaper joined the parade of disrespect, declaring “judges are not infallible.” They continued, “we do not believe that this decision of the Supreme Court will command either respect or obedience.” Judges should not attempt to “transcend their power to secure partisan ends,” and it was particularly outrageous for a Supreme Court justice to do so. “The decision is an attempt to sanctify falsehood and injustice, and it cannot stand.”25 White lawmakers joined the questioning of Taney’s authority, including his colleague Justice Benjamin Curtis. After Taney delivered his opinion on May 6, Curtis read a dissent denying that Taney had the authority to supplant the limits Congress had imposed on slavery.26 In the summer of 1857, a group of state senators in Maine asked their state supreme court to decide whether free black people could legally vote. According to Maine’s constitution all men could vote who were citizens of the United States and at least twenty-­one years of age. But Dred Scott seemed to require Maine to disfranchise black men. The state supreme court ruled that no racial qualification existed for

166

Christopher James Bonner

Maine’s citizen status. Their ruling contradicted the claims of “high judicial authority,” but nowhere in Maine’s history could the justices find evidence of a racial suffrage restriction, and so, they said, black men were “citizens of the United States” based on state law and practice. Through the history of rights in their state the justices made arguments about citizen status and explicitly challenged the U.S. Supreme Court.27 And also like Taney, the Maine court used specific legal protections as evidence of a broad legal status. The persistent uncertainty in the terms of citizenship made possible legal challenges to Taney’s ruling. After Dred Scott people in positions of power, like Maine’s lawmakers, continued working to understand citizenship and to secure legal protections for black Americans. Taney was only one among many legal theorists opining on the terms of citizenship. But these challenges also helped instill further uncertainty about the nation’s legal structures. The forceful, logical arguments lawmakers made to dispute the chief justice seemed to prove that the ruling was not definitive and urged others to question Taney’s ideas about slavery and citizenship. The Maine decision could encourage black protest. Lawmakers’ opposition to Taney helped preserve the uncertain legal space black activists had used to claimed citizenship and pursue rights through the status.28 At a black state convention held at the New Bedford City Hall in Massachusetts in the summer of 1858, activists took a number of steps to show their disregard for Taney’s decision. Charles Remond informed his fellow delegates he was tired of political displays without substance, and he wanted “to see a position taken.” He urged his colleagues to take “a defiant position . . . towards legislatures, and congresses, and supreme courts—never forgetting Judge Taney.” Activists often declined to use Taney’s proper title, choosing instead the diminutive “judge.” They refused to acknowledge him as “chief ” of anything, particularly justice. Remond was so angry “that he was prepared to spit upon the decision of Judge Taney.” “Judge Taney was an old story,” he admitted, but Remond felt “he could never say all he wanted upon the subject.”29 Before the meeting began in City Hall, black people claimed public space in ways that denied the authority of state legislators and federal judges who tried to formalize black exclusion. Delegates stood on Elm Street, in the heart of the city, and watched a parade of two black militias. Around 10 o’clock on the morning of the convention the New Bedford Blues greeted the Liberty Guard of Boston for events to commemorate West Indian Emancipation Day. Forty-­five armed men marched through the city, accompanied by two brass bands from the nearby towns of North Bridgewater and Malden. These military companies organized, gathered, and marched in flagrant denial of

Black Politics and the “Foul and Infamous Lie” of Dred Scott

167

a state law barring black people from joining or creating militias.30 After a long day winding through “the principal streets” of New Bedford, the men continued on to Pope’s Island, just off the coastline, “where a grand chowder was served up.” Perhaps the summer weather was pleasant; convention visitors could also have watched a parade of black sailors that ended with a clambake in a park. These groups of black people luxuriated in the public space of New Bedford. On a day when activists gathered to protest the Dred Scott decision, black people declared through their public actions that formal legal statements would not confine them to the margins of society. The day’s events amounted to a public show of disdain for legislated racial exclusion. Roger Taney had denied black citizenship but could not decisively exclude African Americans from the nation. Even black youths joined the work. The men of the Liberty Guard marched alongside “a company of colored boys, numbering some twenty or more, who were very neatly dressed.”31 When black activists disregarded the decision or, like William Watkins, called Taney’s decision “a foul and infamous lie,” they put forth their own interpretations of the nation’s history. Attacks on Taney’s character did political work, pushing the chief justice to the margins of constitutional interpretation in order to make space for their claims about American law. To call the chief justice a liar was a vicious insult, perhaps even more outrageous than Remond’s eagerness to spit on the decision. Much of early American political culture was built around personal reputation and honor, both of which grew out of an individual’s trustworthiness.32 Saying Taney had lied about the law encouraged people to continue seeking answers to questions about black people’s legal status. And because the chief justice’s ruling was rooted in his reading of American history, calling him a liar argued for an alternative past. Taney said the country had been created as a white man’s republic and that it must remain so, but African Americans insisted that the nation’s laws had historically left room for black people to belong. Activists continued to make public statements about the terms of citizenship, building their political claims around alternative historical arguments. Attacking Taney’s legitimacy made room for black citizenship politics. A Fourth of July celebration in 1859 offered a tremendous opportunity for black activists to present their history of the United States. Members of the Banneker Institute gathered in Philadelphia in 1859 to celebrate the eighty-­ third anniversary of the nation’s independence and to denounce the chief justice. Founded in the early 1850s, the institute was a center for black literary and cultural development, sponsoring lectures, debates, and other intellectual events for black urbanites.33 Jacob White, a Philadelphia teacher, opened

168

Christopher James Bonner

the day’s events with a speech in which he wondered whether black people had any reason to celebrate American freedom. How should they feel given the “supreme judicial decision” that at the nation’s founding, black Americans “had no rights that others were bound to respect”? White informed listeners that the chief justice’s position did not demand blind obedience to his claims. The decision demanded critical questioning because it purported to redefine the nation. “An opinion like this, emanating from a body of such learned men as compose our supreme court, should be examined with the greatest scrutiny.” The Banneker Institute’s decision to celebrate the founding denied Taney’s claims that black people had never belonged in the United States. Further, Benjamin Banneker, the namesake of their institute, who had helped design the nation’s capital, revealed a history in which black Americans had been critical to national development and had earned positions of respect in the country. Jacob White’s thesis was simple: “Ladies and Gentlemen, we have rights.”34 White crafted his own history of the United States, citing alternative foundations to support his sweeping argument. The history of black military service was key to his claims. He celebrated the ideals of the Declaration of Independence, which he described as a document “for whose principles Attucks died.” Though White’s chronology was imperfect, he invoked Crispus Attucks, a black man killed in the Boston Massacre, to highlight black ­people’s sacrifice and to show that African Americans joined the Revolutionary War because they believed the framers were sincere in the egalitarian words of the Declaration. One could read the nation’s true principles in the blood of black men who fought to create it. White reminded his audience that black men had joined the Founders in the fight for liberty and in so doing had forged an emotional connection linking black people with the United States through a shared history of struggle. And he encouraged his audience to enjoy a spirited celebration of their American history. Their revelry would “broadcast the doctrine of our American citizenship.”35 William H. Johnson, the main speaker for the day, also crafted an argument through a history of the United States. He was skeptical of Taney’s claim that the Founders wrote powerful statements about equality while also intending to exclude black people. “Are you willing to believe that they were base enough to have invoked God’s presence whilst they committed perjury?” he asked the delegates. Black and white people together had formed the nation and sanctioned its government. A history of cooperation belied “the new dogma which has just been put forth by the head of the Supreme Court.”36 The nation’s history proved black people’s Americanness and drove

Black Politics and the “Foul and Infamous Lie” of Dred Scott

169

their legal challenge to Dred Scott. For Jacob White, the depth of his emotional connection to the United States rooted in African American history, the legal order Taney had proposed was impossible. When black Americans slept, he said, they dreamed “of our rights as citizens,” and they knew lawmakers excluded them only through “a strange perversion of the correct principles of legislation.”37 Jacob White and William Johnson adapted Roger Taney’s argumentative approach, using the nation’s history to support their political argument about black people and American citizenship. Their approach had the power to change ideas about black people’s legal status because it challenged Taney’s narrative of absolute black exclusion across the nation’s past. Activists did not intend to prove black people had never been marginalized. Instead, they looked to overcome their exclusion by showing that the nation’s history made possible black legal inclusion. By using Taney’s tactics and offering their historical narrative, White and Johnson presented the chief justice as a historian who had simply misread the nation’s past. Challenging Taney’s history with their own facts and interpretations was key to black politics of the period. Delegates to the 1858 Massachusetts convention spoke about Crispus Attucks as well as Peter Salem, a former slave who joined the army and killed a British officer at the Battle of Bunker Hill. They noted that black soldiers had distinguished themselves in the years since the Revolutionary War, fighting at the Battle of New Orleans and on the Great Lakes during the War of 1812. The United States had declared war on Britain in 1812 in part as a response to the impressment of three sailors, “two of whom were colored—satisfactory proof, at least, that they were American citizens.”38 Black military history stood at the center of activists’ challenges to Dred Scott. In Massachusetts, African Americans celebrated Crispus Attucks Day annually in the late 1850s. They observed Attucks Day on March 5, 1858, at Faneuil Hall, which had been a center of political activity during the Revolutionary period and the origin point of Attucks’s funeral procession after the Boston Massacre. Inside the hall, visitors found a display of artifacts from Attucks’s life as well as gifts black Revolutionary soldiers had received for their service.39 In a series of speeches, activists praised Attucks for his courage in having made “the first move in the cold streets of a revolutionary epoch.” William Cooper Nell, an early historian of black American soldiers, described Attucks as “the first to attack, and himself the first martyr” of the Revolution.40 Crispus Attucks was central to the challenges activists issued to Roger Taney. Black Bostonians planned the celebration “to commemorate the names and services of Colored Americans in the wars of their

170

Christopher James Bonner

country, and to Protest against the Dred Scott Decision which denies them Citizenship.” The blood of Attucks and other black forefathers entitled African Americans to legal protections.41 William Watkins, speaking in Albany in February 1859, summarized this thread of black protest: “Whatever may be said of Justice Taney’s law, he was certainly very wide of the mark in his facts of history.”42 African Americans saw how important the past was to Taney’s decision. Revising Taney’s own revisionist history refuted his argument that black Americans could not be citizens.

* * * While many black northerners refused to accept Taney’s portrait of the United States, others saw in Dred Scott a confirmation of their longstanding doubts about black life in the country. On learning of the opinion, some stood firm in their convictions that the nation’s laws were designed to uphold slavery, and it pushed them to abandon efforts to establish a legal relationship with American governments. A number of prominent black activists considered and encouraged emigration from the country. Most black people chose to remain in the United States, but they took part in complex conversations about legal change in the country. African Americans’ ideas about the purpose of the Constitution and the potential of the nation’s laws shaped their responses to Dred Scott. In May 1857, Robert Purvis spoke at the annual meeting of the American Anti-­Slavery Society, the organization he had helped William Lloyd Garrison establish and which brought together abolitionists who rejected formal politics. In the immediate aftermath of Taney’s ruling, Purvis felt assured of his ideas about American laws. “The doctrine of the anti-­slavery character of the American Constitution,” he said, “seems to me one of the most absurd and preposterous that ever was broached.” Both “history and common sense” disproved that doctrine. Purvis said the chief justice had simply told the truth about the nation’s racism, and he was disgusted with black activists who thought otherwise. He could not fathom a man who agreed to be “trampled upon and judicially declared to ‘have no rights which white men are bound to respect,’ and then turn round and glorify and magnify the laws under which all this is done.” He seemed perversely pleased with Taney’s decision. The chief justice had confirmed Purvis’s longstanding beliefs; the nation’s government was proven to be an “atrocious despotism,” both “in its formation and essential structure as well as in its practice.” The rot of prejudice came from the nation’s legal core. Purvis was glad for the opportunity to

Black Politics and the “Foul and Infamous Lie” of Dred Scott

171

use Taney to prove the righteousness of his brand of antislavery. He suggested dramatic change outside the bounds of law might be necessary for black people’s political aims, and he hoped his fellow abolitionists were prepared for such a struggle. “There is a prospect of this atrocious government being overthrown, and a better one built up in its place.” Purvis was ready to take part “in the revolution” for which radical abolitionists had labored and that Dred Scott might spark.43 Other black activists agreed that the nation’s racism came from its legal foundation, but they did not welcome potential revolution. Though William Still read truths in Taney’s decision, he urged African Americans to leave the country rather than revolt against it. Only two weeks after Taney’s ruling, Still, who had taken the reins of the Vigilant Committee of Philadelphia, described black Philadelphians’ disheartened responses to the case. Before Dred Scott black Americans had been hopeful in spite of themselves; many had refused to acknowledge “the proslavery usages and policy of this Government.” But he criticized those activists who seemed optimistic. Some seemed to believe the decision would spark a unified push among white and black northerners toward racial justice, an idea Still found to be absurd. He seemed ready to accept Taney’s argument that black people could never experience equality in the United States. “I confess,” Still wrote, “I see but a faint prospect of any very great change for the better, at least in the present generation.” He suggested black people should look for a better future beyond the United States. He encouraged readers to go to Canada, where African Americans could be “in possession of all our rights—and citizen of the most powerful nation on earth.” There, “all the immunities and privileges are as sacred to the black man as to the white.”44 Believing the legal protections Taney denied him were beyond his grasp at home, he turned his eyes abroad to continue the search. Still wrote of his feelings about Dred Scott in a letter to Mary Ann Shadd Cary, editor of the Provincial Freeman, a newspaper based in southwest Ontario, Canada. Shadd Cary identified Still as “Our Philadelphia Correspondent,” inducting him into a black expatriate community though he still lived in the United States. Shadd Cary had been born free in Delaware in 1823, then left the United States after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, hoping to aid those who fled to Canada in their search for freedom and community. She began publishing the Provincial Freeman in 1853 as a way to allow black Canadians to communicate with one another and to remain attuned to legal developments in the United States. William Still was a useful correspondent because his antislavery vigilance work concerned and connected

172

Christopher James Bonner

black people on both sides of the border. But Shadd Cary did not need a correspondent in the United States to tell her readers what Dred Scott meant. As she looked south, she found reasons other than Roger Taney to doubt the government would provide black people with legal protections. Shadd Cary criticized the Republican Party’s free labor ideology, which appealed to white northerners’ anxieties about competing with enslaved people in the labor market. Antislavery politics in the United States often involved elements of white supremacy. She was especially outraged by a speech William Seward delivered in early 1857. He and other Republicans glorified white labor, always, Shadd Cary said, in contrast with “black African slave labor.” Republicans denounced black slavery only in contrast with “free white labor,” implying that black Americans could be nothing other than slaves. Seward’s speech emphasized “distinctions of color,” and it had been delivered before the Dred Scott decision. To the emigrant editor, Taney’s ruling was simply part of its American context. Even when fighting slavery, white Americans did so in a way that marginalized black people, expressing concern not for those in bondage but for white people threatened by the increasingly sprawling exploitation of African Americans. Seward and the Republicans, together with Taney and the Democrats, represented racism so deeply ingrained in the United States that, to Shadd Cary, it was impossible for black people to seek a meaningful citizenship in the country.45 Ultimately, William Still did not follow Mary Ann Shadd Cary to Canada. He remained a key player in black Philadelphia’s politics through the Civil War years.46 Still and many others who thought seriously about leaving the United States after Dred Scott continued to seek avenues to secure a legal position in their native country. For instance in 1858, Henry Highland Garnet organized the African Civilization Society, an organization whose title called to mind the old and persistent American Colonization Society. Garnet planned for his ACS to pursue missionary work in West Africa, and he thought of it as an emotionally fulfilling project for black Americans in the wake of Dred Scott. In promotional literature for the society, Garnet declared his love for Africa, “the land of his ancestors,” and said individuals who chose to emigrate would help build “a Christian nation” and help improve the continent as a whole. Garnet confessed that he was disheartened by legal circumstances in his native country, and he “hoped to see a national flag yet of which he would be proud.” Still, Garnet was careful about the society’s aims. He refused to promote forced or mass emigration, and he hoped his ACS would serve as a tool to fight slavery and prejudice in the United States.47 While he looked to other shores, Garnet remained interested

Black Politics and the “Foul and Infamous Lie” of Dred Scott

173

in the possibilities of the United States, even after Justice Taney had denied any such possibilities existed. Despite the brutal plainness of black legal exclusion and Roger Taney’s efforts to make it permanent, most African Americans chose not to leave the United Sates. Many chose to remain because they continued to believe in the potential of their politics. They called Taney a liar, presented themselves as citizens, and persisted in their efforts to establish a legal relationship with American governments. Taney could not suppress the forms of black citizenship politics, and activists, along with white Republican lawmakers, ensured Taney would not stand alone in presenting arguments about the nation’s laws. In a way, Dred Scott gave black politics more currency because it brought questions about the meaning of citizenship and black people’s legal status to the center of sectional disputes of the 1850s. Even for black people who believed the Constitution was proslavery, Dred Scott sparked a renewed commitment to pursuing changes in the law. Among those activists was Charles Remond, a longtime ally of William Lloyd Garrison and an outspoken critic of the U.S. Constitution. But in the same speech in which Remond wished to spit on Taney’s ruling, he attacked a fellow delegate who called for black emigration to Canada. Remond “ wouldn’t hear of such a thing as liberty in Canada; he must have liberty in America.”48 William Wells Brown, also a Garrisonian ally, said the purpose of the Massachusetts convention was “to proclaim to the world that we have rights,” and to call on the state legislature “to assume a defiant attitude towards the Dred Scott decision.”49 Though these activists believed the Constitution was fundamentally corrupt and proslavery and that Roger Taney had affirmed their reading, they remained committed to changing the nation’s legal order. In their resolutions, convention delegates noted that Taney’s decision contradicted the privileges and immunities clause, using the terms of the Constitution to dispute Taney’s proslavery vision. Remond and Brown felt bound to their native country. Brown declared black people were “Americans in every sense of the world,” who would rely on “American climate . . . American government, and American manners to sustain their American bodies and minds.”50 Black activists insisted on remaining in the United States because they saw that they could continue to challenge Taney’s interpretation of the laws. They were encouraged by the possibility of using principles like the privileges and immunities clause to make arguments about the terms of citizenship. Activists did not believe Roger Taney had the last word on the nature of American citizenship, and in the late 1850s their political statements ensured his decision was not definitive. Calling the chief justice a liar and challenging his authority

174

Christopher James Bonner

as a historian and constitutional interpreter were critical ways black people worked to sustain the possibility of legal change in the United States.

* * * The Dred Scott decision did not suppress African Americans’ arguments about citizenship, but it did change some of the central priorities of black political work. After Taney’s ruling, black people at times neglected their efforts to define the content of citizenship. Frederick Douglass used the nation’s founding language and his own Christianity in a speech protesting Dred Scott in May 1857, but much of that speech was a response to Chief Justice Taney rather than a concrete argument about the terms of citizen status. Douglass described Taney’s ruling as another imperfect settlement in the ongoing debates over slavery and black people’s legal status in the United States. Taney “may decide and decide; but he cannot reverse the decision of the Most High.” Religious faith helped sustain black activists in the late 1850s. Douglass explained the politics of his faith to the gathered audience: “You will readily ask me how I am affected by this devilish decision—this judicial incarnation of wolfishness. My answer is . . . my hopes were never brighter than now.” Douglass looked to other authorities. “The Supreme Court of the United States,” he said, “is not the only power in this world. It is very great, but the Supreme Court of the Almighty is greater.” His Christianity explained his optimism about black people’s American lives.51 For Douglass, this was not simply an expression of hope for a better life in the hereafter. His faith fostered a political response to Roger Taney’s denial of black rights, bridging his ideas about God and about the nation’s laws.52 Douglass said Taney, rather than a thoughtful interpreter of the Constitution, was instead comparable to the radical abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. He asked American people to see the chief justice as a fringe ideologue who had no place in the nation’s lawmaking conversations. The Constitution had been designed to secure freedom and legal equality, Douglass argued, but Taney, like Garrison, incorrectly read the frame of government as a proslavery document. Taney and Garrison were among “those who seek slavery in the Union,” but they and their supporters were “most woefully mistaken.” The comparison aimed to push Taney, author of a “devilish decision,” out of discussions about American laws. Douglass claimed the power to interpret the nation’s law and history, presenting himself as a champion of the Founders’ vision against an array of corrupting forces. “Law is in its nature opposed to wrong,” he proclaimed. Any exclusionary measure departed from “the

Black Politics and the “Foul and Infamous Lie” of Dred Scott

175

general system of the law.” Taney needed to find “an intention . . . expressed with irresistible clearness” in order to support his sweeping exclusion of black Americans from the benefits of the Constitution.53 Douglass’s speech highlights central aspects of black people’s responses to Dred Scott and points to their vital political potential. Activists worked to shift the ground of discussion about the nation’s laws, to claim Taney and other proslavery ideologues should have no part in debating the future of slavery or the terms of citizenship. But in Douglass’s multilayered argument for black citizenship, he did not say in specific terms what the status would mean for black people’s legal lives. Rather than detailing the terms of citizenship, Douglass focused on explaining the reasons Taney was a liar. The force of the denial of black citizenship from the Supreme Court compelled activists to focus on claiming citizen status in whatever form it might take. “We are citizens of the State of New York,” convention delegates declared in 1858, “and, consequently, of the United States, and should enjoy all the rights and immunities of other citizens.”54 But what criteria made them citizens? And what were those rights and immunities? The Dred Scott decision struck at the heart of antebellum black protest. As they worked to indict Taney as a liar and deny the logic of his decision, they wrestled against the truth that a ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court was a powerful legal statement that compelled black people to do different kinds of political work. Taney’s judicial position gave his opinion the weight of authority, and Dred Scott posed a serious challenge to a particular strand of black politics. Still, in their legal, historical, and personal arguments against the Dred Scott decision, black activists emphasized that they were forceful interpreters of the nation’s laws. Taney’s decision responded to the real potential of black people inserting their voices in lawmaking conversations, and in their responses to the ruling black activists ensured that their longstanding political forms could continue. The chief justice remained at the forefront of black activists’ political concerns until the sectional crisis turned to war. The slaveholders’ rebellion, sparked in part by Taney’s sweeping proslavery claims, would offer unprecedented opportunities for black men and women to solidify their positions in American communities, to build relationships with American governments, and to make powerful claims through citizenship that would influence the process of rewriting the laws of a broken nation.

Chapter 9

The “Free Cuba” Campaign, Republican Politics, and Post–Civil War Black Internationalism James M. Shinn Jr.

In October 1868, landholders in eastern Cuba took up arms against Spanish rule, igniting a decade-­long conflict that would come to be known as the Guerra de los Diez Años, or “Ten Years’ War.” The primary goal of the uprising was independence. Yet, from the start, rebel military leaders also made a practice of emancipating the slaves who came under their control. Eventually, Cuban rebels took the fateful step of abolishing slavery altogether. In this way, a war for national independence and self-­rule became something more: a struggle over the fate of slavery in one of its last New World strongholds.1 As it happened, neither emancipation nor independence was accomplished during the Ten Years’ War. The former was not achieved until 1886; the latter, not until 1898. Yet none of this was obvious at the time—not to the combatants in the closely fought, back-­and-­forth conflict, nor to African Americans in the United States, many of whom took a profound and deeply personal interest in events on the island. Indeed, between 1869 and 1874, few issues, foreign or domestic, elicited more passion among African Americans than the cause of “Free Cuba.” In public meetings, parades, petitions, newspaper editorials, speeches, and letters to policymakers, black activists proclaimed their sympathy for the Cuban rebels and called on the U.S. government to intervene in the struggle. “What colored American,” W. H. Hillery asked attendees at a meeting in San Francisco in 1873, “can forget to breathe a prayer for the success of those in Cuba who fight for their liberties, their families, and their homes?”2 Black Free Cuba fervor peaked during the winter of 1872–73, when activists organized a series of mass meetings in New

“Free Cuba” Campaign, Republican Politics, and Black Internationalism

177

York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. in an attempt to pressure the Grant administration to extend diplomatic recognition to the rebels. Widely publicized and well attended, these meetings attracted some of the most prominent voices in Reconstruction-­era black politics, including Henry Highland Garnet, William Cooper Nell, George T. Downing, Joseph Rainey, and P. B. S. Pinchback. Why were African Americans so interested in the Cuban rebellion? For the most part, scholars have viewed Free Cuba activists as if they were motivated by much the same radical and internationalist beliefs that inspired twentieth-­century Pan Africanists and anti-­imperialists. But this interpretation is anachronistic. By conflating the Free Cuba campaign with later movements, it misses what was distinctive about African American international engagement in the immediate post–Civil War years—namely, its thoroughgoing U.S. nationalism. In the first part of this essay, I argue that African Americans were interested in the Ten Years’ War in Cuba in no small part because they saw it as a field for the application of U.S. power and influence. After the Civil War, many African Americans argued that the United States had a duty to promote the principles it had vindicated in the Civil War—free labor and republican government—throughout the world. For them, Free Cuba was an important first test of this duty. Black activists called on the U.S. government to take action on behalf of the Cuban rebels. Some went further, arguing that the United States must be prepared to annex Cuba if its inhabitants proved incapable of creating a viable government by themselves. Yet, as I explore in the second part of this essay, African Americans faced an uphill battle in their campaign to pressure the U.S. government to aid the Cuban rebels. The leaders of the Republican Party did not share the same enthusiasm for Free Cuba. Wary of conflict with Spain—and warier still of the impact U.S. recognition of Cuba might have on a separate, longstanding diplomatic dispute with Great Britain—the Grant administration and its allies in Congress refused to come to the aid of the rebels. Black activists were deeply disappointed. Some spoke out, sharply criticizing the president and his followers. Other activists held back, arguing pragmatically that black Americans, who depended on the Republican Party for what little political power they had, were in no position to break ranks. As I show in this essay’s final section, the resulting disillusionment with the Republican Party and with U.S. foreign policy in general planted the seeds of a more internationalist outlook among African Americans. As an episode in the history of African American international engagement, what is remarkable about the Free Cuba campaign is just how national

178

James M. Shinn Jr.

it was. Scholars have generally depicted African American involvement with the world as an escape from the nation, a rejection of the United States in favor of broader, extranational forms of solidarity. African American support for Free Cuba was different. It represented an embrace of the United States and an affirmation of U.S. ideals and institutions—and U.S. power. The Free Cuba campaign was national in another sense as well. Because it threatened to cause a rift with white Republicans, black activists’ support of the Cuban rebels gave rise to larger questions about African Americans’ place in the Republican Party and in the U.S. political system generally. In a sense, then, the story of the Free Cuba campaign tells us as much about black Americans’ complex relationship with the post–Civil War United States as it does about their interest in Cuba and the wider world.

“The Mightiest Nation on the Globe”: The Post–Civil War United States and the World During the late 1860s and early 1870s, African Americans demonstrated their interest in and support for the cause of Free Cuba in many different ways. Black activists held mass meetings about Free Cuba in at least nine cities, from New York and Boston to Wyandotte, Michigan and San Antonio, Texas.3 In Baltimore, African Americans organized a petition drive, while in New Orleans they “paraded the streets in torchlight procession, carrying the American and Cuban flags.”4 In South Carolina, Louisiana, and Massachusetts, black state legislators offered resolutions expressing sympathy with the Cuban people and urging the U.S. government to take action on their behalf.5 Likewise, delegates to “colored conventions” in Pennsylvania, Washington, D.C., California, and Missouri introduced pro-­Cuba amendments.6 In nearly every part of the country, black orators at events commemorating the anniversary of emancipation and the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment routinely invoked “our Cuban brethren.”7 Popular enthusiasm for Free Cuba could also be observed in more mundane settings. On a train from Washington, D.C. to Ohio, black passengers hashed over the latest war news from Cuba.8 At his shop in Philadelphia, an African American artist displayed an “original drawing” with a stirring title: “Cuba Must be Free.”9 Why did African Americans go to such lengths—organizing meetings, signing petitions, parading by torchlight—to show their sympathy for a foreign freedom struggle? What did the Free Cuba cause mean for its black supporters? In trying to answer these questions, scholars have usually

“Free Cuba” Campaign, Republican Politics, and Black Internationalism

179

worked backward from more recent, better-­known episodes of African American international engagement, projecting the views and aspirations of twentieth-­century thinkers like Marcus Garvey and W. E. B. Du Bois into the minds of activists in the late 1860s and early 1870s. The result is a suspiciously familiar picture: Free Cuba activists, we are told, were internationalists who sought new, alternative forms of racial and political solidarity beyond the nation-­state. They were anti-­imperialists who believed in demolishing global hierarchies and promoting self-­determination for oppressed peoples. Finally, they were clear-­eyed critics of the United States and its “imperial tendencies.”10 In short, scholars have tended to see the Free Cuba campaign as a precursor to twentieth-­century radical internationalism—a first step on the road to Pan Africanism, anti-­imperialism, and the like. Yet by seeing Free Cuba in this way, through the distorting lens of hindsight, scholars have misconstrued what it was all about. In fact, if we approach African American writing and activism about the Cuban uprising on its own terms, we discover that most black Free Cuba supporters were not radical internationalists at all, but enthusiastic U.S. nationalists.11 On the whole, their ideas about global politics were more in line with those of William H. Seward or James G. Blaine than of Garvey or Du Bois. In order to better understand what Free Cuba meant to African Americans, we must first reconstruct the larger vision of America’s role in the world that black thinkers articulated in the aftermath of the Civil War. During the late 1860s and early 1870s, many African Americans came to believe that Union victory and the abolition of slavery had endowed the United States with unique power and moral stature. In a few short years America had become, in Frederick Douglass’s words, “the mightiest nation on the globe . . . the nation which more than any other beneath the sky is to give direction to the civilization of the next fifty years.”12 In keeping with its newfound prominence, black thinkers argued that the United States should adopt a more active, ideologically assertive role on the world stage. Above all, they urged the U.S. government to encourage and support the spread of liberal and democratic ideals abroad. Florida congressman Josiah T. Walls argued that a “great nation” like the United States should “pursue a policy which will . . . conserve and propagate the principles upon which it is founded.”13 Such a foreign policy was seen as a fitting complement to the ongoing work of Reconstruction at home. Thus, attendees at a Free Cuba meeting in New Orleans in 1873 declared that U.S. support for Free Cuba was “in harmony with the genius of our own emancipation of slaves.”14

180

James M. Shinn Jr.

For African American thinkers, promoting freedom abroad was not just a matter of policy, but a sacred national duty. The United States, they believed, had been ordained by Providence as a champion of republican ideals and institutions. While slavery existed, this destiny had gone unfulfilled. But emancipation had at last made it possible for the United States to achieve its mission in the world. “Nations, like individuals, have their missions to perform,” the activist and poet Frances E. W. Harper declared in a speech in 1869. “What,” she asked, “is to hinder this nation from always being the leading one of the earth, a nation tried by suffering, purified by sorrow . . . wearing justice as a crown, and equity as a girdle?”15 Postbellum black thinkers placed considerable faith in the United States as an agent of global freedom. As the California educator Jeremiah B. Sanderson proclaimed in 1868, the reconstructed United States, a nation “built upon justice and suffrage to all citizens,” was destined to be “the fulcrum of the lever that will move . . . the World.”16 This grandiose vision of U.S. power and influence framed black thinkers’ response to the Cuban rebellion. In an 1874 address, the renowned orator (and future congressman) John Mercer Langston declared that “Every nation . . . ought to have, like our own, a ‘new birth of freedom,’ and its ‘government of the people, by the people, and for the people.’ ” Langston insisted that it was the “duty” of the United States to secure “freedom and free institutions upon the American continent, especially in the islands of the seas.” He further argued that “the oppressed and suffering people of Cuba, may justly expect, demand our sympathies and support in their struggle.” In his view, withholding aid from the rebels was a violation of “all the pledges made by our nation in favor of freedom and equal rights.” On the other hand, if the United States fulfilled its duty to the Cuban people, Langston predicted a bright future for the fledgling republic: “We would see the ‘Queen of the Antilles’ free from Spanish rule; her slaves all freemen, and herself advancing in her freedom, across the way of national greatness and renown.”17 Free Cuba held special importance for African Americans because it was in part an antislavery struggle. From the outset, Cuban rebels had emancipated the slaves of loyalist masters, often enlisting them directly into the army. They also publicized their intention to abolish slavery throughout the island at the first opportunity.18 African Americans cheered these developments. When Carlos Manuel de Cespedes, provisional president of the Cuban government-­in-­arms, issued a decree abolishing slavery in December 1868, the Christian Recorder gushed that he had “made as good a commencement as Lincoln.”19 In 1873, black Free Cuba activists in Philadelphia

“Free Cuba” Campaign, Republican Politics, and Black Internationalism

181

expressed confidence that “in the event of the triumph of the Cuban patriots, the benefit of freedom will be secured to our enslaved brethren.” At the same time, they insisted that “slavery and the slave trade will be forever continued in event of the triumph of the Spanish arms.”20 With the end of slavery in the United States, many African Americans felt that it was only a matter of time before the institution was eradicated throughout the Western Hemisphere. In their view, hastening slavery’s demise in Cuba—one of its last bastions, along with Puerto Rico and Brazil— should be a paramount goal of U.S. foreign policy. “[We] are resolved that the beginning of the end of negro slavery the world over is at hand,” the Christian Recorder declared in 1868, shortly after the outbreak of the Ten Years’ War.21 Having only recently escaped the horrors of bondage themselves, African Americans identified viscerally with the plight of Cuban slaves. “We, the colored people . . . remember full well the dire effects of our past bondage,” declared the attendees of a Free Cuba meeting in New Orleans in 1873. “The constant toil and pain; the separating of the husband from the wife, the parents from their children; denied a political equality before the law”: Black Americans longed for the day when their “enthralled brethren” would no longer have to endure such horrors and would be free to enjoy the “great and glorious benefits that have at last come to us.”22 Some African Americans also felt that they had a direct political stake in the cause of emancipation in Cuba. In their view, the persistence of slavery in such close proximity to the United States was a standing threat to the free. “As long as a slave lives anywhere in any country the effect will be to recoil on us,” observed P. B. S. Pinchback, the former governor of Louisiana, at a Free Cuba meeting in Washington, D.C. in 1873. “If colored men wish to be respected they should not permit one of their number to wear the shackles of slavery. If we are sufferers in the matter of civil rights, it is perhaps because slavery exists so near our doors.”23 By helping the Cuban rebels end slavery on the island, African Americans would thus be bolstering their own position in the United States. The anticolonial and republican character of the Cuban uprising was also a source of deep interest for African Americans. Black activists saw Free Cuba as a kind of belated sequel to the Age of Atlantic Revolutions, part of a lineage that included the American Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, and the Spanish American wars of independence. Samuel R. Scottron, a leading black Free Cuba activist, claimed that the “Cuban patriots” had endured “wrongs as galling as those which adduced the American patriots to rise up against the oppression of Great Britain.”24 A writer for the San Francisco Elevator with a

182

James M. Shinn Jr.

flair for allegory imagined a scene in which guardian angels symbolizing the United States, Haiti, and the republics of Central and South America hovered over a figure representing Cuba, “gently whisper[ing]” that “the day of your deliverance is near at hand, for they have passed the same ordeal before.”25 Louisiana educator William G. Brown evoked the spirit of the antimonarchical Monroe Doctrine when he bluntly proclaimed that “the destiny of Cuba was to be a republic. The soil of this continent is for republics only.”26 African Americans of the post–Civil War era believed that the Cuban people were engaged in an epochal struggle for emancipation and republican government—one Americans could not remain aloof from. But how should the United States help? What form should U.S. support take? Certainly, the American people acting as private citizens had a role to play. As heirs of the antislavery intellectual tradition of “moral suasion,” black thinkers put considerable stock in the power of passive influence, even on an international level. Thus, the New Orleans Tribune assured its readers that “nothing can so cheer and stimulate the unhappy Cubans as the hearty and persistent expression by us of interest in their progress.”27 But African Americans also embraced more practical means of helping Free Cuba. In Washington, D.C., Charleston, and New York, black activists raised money for local Cuban exile organizations that secretly purchased arms and munitions to ship to the ­rebels.28 In July 1873, a former black Union Army corporal named Ernest Hewlett tendered his services—and those of one hundred and fifty men under his command— to the Cuban Army through an intermediary in New Orleans. Cuban agents politely declined the would-­be mercenary’s offer.29 Yet there was only so much that private citizens could do for the rebels. For more substantial help, African Americans looked to the U.S. government. They were not alone. During the late 1860s and early 1870s, American and Cuban émigré activists mounted a vigorous public campaign to press the Grant administration to take action in support of Free Cuba.30 Their central demand was that the United States recognize the Cuban rebels as “belligerents”: quasi-­sovereign actors with certain rights and privileges at war, including the all-­important right to engage in privateering. Such recognition, they hoped, would place Cuba on a more equal footing with Spain in the international arena.31 Black activists eagerly took up the demand for belligerent recognition. In so doing, they placed U.S. state power at the very heart of their plans for helping Cuba. As the Elevator argued, the Cuban rebellion presented “a strong case for the interference of the American government.”32 But belligerent recognition was only the beginning. Some black Americans envisioned an even larger role for the United States in Cuba’s future.

“Free Cuba” Campaign, Republican Politics, and Black Internationalism

183

From the start, the heady excitement surrounding Free Cuba had been tempered by a gnawing uncertainty about whether the island could ever exist as a free and independent state. Some black thinkers worried that the Cubans’ culture and history rendered them incapable of creating a stable, orderly republican government and a peaceful civil society. Catholicism was seen as an especially serious obstacle to the establishment of institutions; indeed, some black thinkers went so far as to argue that lasting change in Cuba would only take hold following mass conversion to Protestantism. In 1869, African Methodist Episcopal bishop Benjamin T. Tanner placed a call for Spanish-­speaking blacks to serve as “good, reliable evangelists” in Cuba. “What a splendid missionary field is here opened,” he exclaimed, “300,000 immortals to Christ!”33 Underscoring the link between Protestantism and liberty, Tanner predicted that “Romanism and Slavery” would “both go down together.”34 Nor was “Romanism” the only impediment to progress. Black thinkers believed that centuries of colonial government had also left their mark on the Cuban people. Accustomed to the distant and arbitrary rule of Spain, Cubans lacked what the Christian Recorder called the “modus operandi of Republican government”—the instinctive appreciation for local autonomy and individual rights that made republicanism possible.35 Without this cultural matrix, any attempt to establish a viable republic was doomed to failure. In light of these factors, some black thinkers concluded that there was only one way to ensure that antislavery republicanism took root in the unpromising soil of Cuba: The United States must annex the island. Annexation would allow the United States to abolish slavery and install a republican government tailored to Cuba’s level of civilization. It would also allow Americans—African Americans, in particular—to settle among the Cubans and tutor them in the finer points of freedom. “The Spanish people are not the people to reorganize the Queen of the Antilles,” the Christian Recorder confidently proclaimed. Cuba “needs America—our force of character, our modern ideas, our Democratic institutions, and last but not least our Protestant faith to do the work.”36 The Washington, D.C. New National Era echoed this conclusion: “Cuba of right should be a free State of the American Union, and we fear that there will be no end to slavery on that island until it is annexed to the United States.”37 In a sense, postbellum black thinkers were unlikely advocates for the annexation of Cuba. Before the Civil War, Caribbean expansion had been a pet project of slaveholders and their northern allies. Now, however, with slavery a thing of the past, African American thinkers were beginning to see empire in a different light. “There was a time . . . when extension meant more

184

James M. Shinn Jr.

slavery, more ignorance and barbarism,” Frederick Douglass explained in an 1873 lecture. “That time is now gone by.” Indeed, during the late 1860s and early 1870s, African Americans regularly called for U.S. expansion not only in the Caribbean, but also in Canada, Central and South America, and the Pacific. Douglass himself looked forward to the day when “all the adjacent Islands and Capes of this Continent” would be part of the United States.38 Attendees at a Free Cuba meeting in Washington, D.C. in 1869 predicted not only that Cuba, but also “Brazil, Central America, Hayti and the Seward Islands [Hawaii]” would “eventually come to us.”39 In 1873, the Elevator proclaimed that it was “the ‘manifest destiny’ of this nation” to absorb the entire North American continent “from the frozen regions of the north to the Gulf of Mexico on the south, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific ocean, including the archipelagoes of both oceans.”40 Black thinkers were not oblivious to the commercial advantages that territorial expansion would bring. However, they tended to view annexation in humanitarian terms. To their thinking, empire was simply the most direct, effective means of extending the blessings of republicanism and free labor to foreign peoples. As Douglass declared, “Extension . . . means freedom, knowledge, and progress.”41 This notion of expansion as a tool of civilizational uplift could also be seen in black thinkers’ support for U.S. annexation of the Dominican Republic (which was being debated at roughly the same time as belligerent recognition). In an 1870 letter to Charles Sumner, Hiram Revels, the African American senator from Mississippi, suggested that it was “the duty of our powerful, wealthy, and christian nation . . . to extend its institutions, or various means of enlightenment and intellectual, moral, and religious elevation with which God has blessed us, to the inhabitants of that Republic.” Revels felt that this “duty” could be fulfilled “more effectually by annexation than in any other way.”42 Though his comments were not about Cuba, they might as well have been. As Revels’s reflections make clear, African Americans’ thinking about global politics in the late 1860s and early 1870s was a far cry from the radical internationalism of later periods. Instead of a transnational vision of racial solidarity and autonomy, it centered on a straightforwardly nationalist and even imperialist vision of the United States as an agent of global progress. This enthusiasm for U.S. power bespeaks a deep sense of faith in the nation itself. Thus, black thinkers endorsed an aggressive foreign policy after the Civil War because they trusted the U.S. state as never before. Likewise, they championed expansion because they believed in sharing the blessings of U.S. citizenship with as many people as possible. If the history of African

“Free Cuba” Campaign, Republican Politics, and Black Internationalism

185

American international engagement is, for the most part, a record of disaffection with the United States, the story of the Free Cuba campaign shows something different: a sense of optimism. In this, it was no doubt a reflection of the heady early days of Reconstruction, when the United States seemed poised to fulfill its revolutionary promise both at home and abroad. But as the domestic situation began to unravel, so, too, did African Americans’ support for an expansive conception of U.S. global power.

“We Are Now a Political Power”: Free Cuba and the Republican Party Even as African Americans dreamed of incorporating Cuba into the United States, their own place in the body politic was far from secure. The ratification of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments granted citizenship and suffrage to hundreds of thousands of black men, creating a new and potentially weighty constituency in U.S. politics. Yet in reality, black Americans’ options for exercising political voice were severely constrained. The post– Civil War Democratic Party was white supremacist to its core, bent on overthrowing Reconstruction in the South and perpetuating racial segregation in the North. This meant that the Republican Party was, for all its faults, the only viable political outlet available to African Americans. (“The Republican Party is the ship,” Frederick Douglass was known to tell people, “and all else is the sea.”43) This put black political activists in a bind. Though they differed with white Republicans on a number of important issues, African Americans had to tread lightly lest they lose their place in the only party that would have them. At times, suppressing dissent and accepting the party line were the price of continued inclusion. The Free Cuba issue illustrated this dilemma plainly. Despite pressure from both black and white voters, the foreign policy eminences in the Republican Party—including President Grant, Secretary of State Hamilton Fish, and Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Charles Sumner— staunchly opposed recognizing the Cuban rebels as belligerents. They did so for several reasons. In the first place, Grant and his allies feared that belligerent recognition might provoke a war with Spain. They also harbored serious doubts about the rebels’ ability to defeat the Spanish, even with U.S. support. But the main reason why Republican leaders resisted recognizing Free Cuba was that they worried such a step might upset another pending international question: the so-­called “Alabama Claims.” This complex dispute hinged in

186

James M. Shinn Jr.

part on whether the British government had been wrong to recognize the Confederate States as a belligerent. Obviously, it would be the height of hypocrisy for U.S. policymakers to maintain that Great Britain had erred in granting belligerency to the Confederacy, only to grant the same status to the (far weaker) Republic of Cuba. Thus, if for no other reason than to protect their case against Great Britain, Grant, Fish, Sumner, and other leading Republicans believed that the United States could not afford to recognize Cuban belligerency or assist the rebels in any substantial way.44 Though disappointed in the leaders of their party, African American supporters of Free Cuba were still confident that they could win them over through political voice and activism. “Let the colored people unite as one and ask that the chains of slavery be broken,” declared the New National Era in 1873.45 The Elevator was more assertive. “We are now a political power in the land, and are in a position to demand that a Republican administration shall carry out the true principles of Republicanism,” it announced. “We should show to the American people that we are alive to the interests of our race; in favor of the promulgation of Republican institutions, and opposed to the existence of slavery under any form whatever.”46 Since public pressure campaigns required a high level of organization in order to be effective, the New National Era called on activists to build a network of “Cuban associations” that would “meet throughout the nation and arouse public sentiment.” In the South, where the emergence of Free Cuba activism among the freedmen had been stalled by a “lack of information,” the paper also recommended printing a translation of the antislavery Cuban constitution “in every Republican journal.”47 But the fact remained that by campaigning for belligerent recognition, African Americans risked alienating the leaders of the only political party most of them had ever known. This was a sobering prospect. Party affiliation gave black activists a measure of influence over policymaking—small, perhaps, but real. For some, it also provided access to lucrative patronage jobs.48 Was challenging Republican policy toward Cuba worth the risk of losing these advantages? Few felt this dilemma more acutely than Frederick Douglass, who sympathized with Free Cuba but nevertheless believed in toeing the party line. In an 1870 letter to Sumner, Douglass hedged, noting that he could not “see entirely with you on the Cuba question” before adding that “upon this question I have assumed that you understand its relations and bearings, far better than I do.”49 A year later, when a friend cited Grant’s inaction on Free Cuba as a reason to support the renegade Liberal Republican ticket of

“Free Cuba” Campaign, Republican Politics, and Black Internationalism

187

Horace Greeley, Douglass exploded in frustration.50 “I had better get a pistol to my head and blow my brains out, than to lend myself anywise to the destruction of the Republican Party,” he thundered. “If Genl. Grant is wrong concerning Cuba, and I think he is, he is in company with Senator Sumner and other great and good men.”51 For Douglass, staying on good terms with Grant and his party (and helping them stay in power) was more important than speaking out about Cuba. Not all African American critics of Republican Cuba policy were so deferential. In December 1869, a pseudonymous “Colored Man” wrote a letter to Sumner upbraiding the abolitionist icon for his opposition to belligerent recognition. “I am one of the race you have for so many years upheld with more perseverance than ability,” he sneered. “You have forsaken the slave for the slave-­holder & enemy of mankind, as appears from your course with regard to the struggle in Cuba for universal freedom.”52 But anonymous sniping in private correspondence was one thing; conspicuous public criticism, something else entirely. And there was very little of the latter during the early stages of the Ten Years’ War. While black activists continually voiced their support for Free Cuba and belligerent recognition, for the most part they did so without criticizing Republican policy or policymakers. The Grant administration, they believed, would eventually come to its senses. In the meantime, the best policy was (as one activist later recalled) “patient waiting.”53 But as the rebellion entered its fourth year, black Free Cuba supporters’ patience ran out. Between December 1872 and April 1873, black activists organized at least eleven public meetings, nearly all of which took direct aim at Republican Cuba policy. What accounts for this shift in tone? Some in the press speculated that the meetings were nothing more than a stunt concocted by Cuban émigrés and Democrats seeking to embarrass the Grant administration.54 A more likely answer is that black activists felt greater freedom to criticize fellow Republicans in the wake of the party’s victory in the elections of November 1872. With Grant safely in power for four more years (and Congress in Republican hands for two more years), it was possible to air grievances and hash out differences that had previously been suppressed in the interest of party unity. In December 1872, African American activists in New York City founded an organization called the “Cuban Anti-­Slavery Committee.” The committee promptly issued a call for a public meeting to discuss “proper action . . . to advance the cause of freedom” in Cuba:

188

James M. Shinn Jr.

Now that we are confirmed in the possession of our liberty, it ill becomes us to sit idly by, while five hundred thousand of our brethren groan beneath the chains of slavery at our very doors, in the Island of Cuba. We would therefore unite our voices and strength in favor of their just rights, and in behalf of the Cuban Patriots, who have already decreed and put in practice the doctrine of the equality and freedom of all men.55 The probable author of these words—and the driving force behind black Free Cuba activism in the early 1870s—was Samuel R. Scottron, the chairman of the Cuban Anti-­Slavery Committee. Though little known today, Scottron was a fairly prominent figure in his own time. Born in either 1841 or 1843 in Philadelphia, Scottron was raised and educated in New York. During the Civil War, he worked as a contractor for the Union Army, selling provisions to USCT regiments in the occupied South. After the war, Scottron settled in Brooklyn, where he built a successful career as an inventor and manufacturer. Scottron first entered politics in 1865, when he served as a delegate to the National Colored Convention in Syracuse, New York.56 How the Brooklyn-­ based inventor came to be interested in Free Cuba is unclear; what is clear is that, by 1872, he had already shown a willingness to buck the Republican Party leadership. During the presidential election of that year, Scottron had campaigned for Horace Greeley against Grant, even serving as secretary of the National Liberal Republican Committee of Colored Citizens.57 Free Cuba was not his first brush with political controversy. The Cuban Anti-­Slavery Committee held its inaugural public meeting at the Cooper Institute on December 13. In attendance was a “motley crowd” of some four hundred “Cubans, colored people, and whites.”58 On stage, Scottron was joined by several prominent black leaders, including the noted orator Henry Highland Garnet.59 But it was the chairman of the Cuban Anti-­ Slavery Committee who delivered the main address that evening. Scottron described at length the deep sympathy that African Americans felt for Cuban slaves, one grounded in a shared set of experiences: “the cruelties of family separation, of the lash, constant toil and pain, of inequality before the law.” In order to mobilize this instinctive sympathy on behalf of Free Cuba, Scottron outlined plans for a national campaign. He invited black Americans to hold Free Cuba meetings throughout the country and call on the government “to accord to the Cuban Patriots that favorable recognition that four years’ gallant struggle for freedom justly entitles them to.” The freedpeople of the South were not exempted from Scottron’s call to action. “Shall the four

“Free Cuba” Campaign, Republican Politics, and Black Internationalism

189

million in our own land, who have so lately tasted of the bitter fruit of slavery, stand idly by,” he asked, or would they “rise up as one man and with one accord demand for them simple and exact justice?”60 That such a national campaign was even possible, Scottron argued, was a testament to the momentous changes black Americans had witnessed in the last decade. “We look back but a very brief period to the time when it was necessary for other men to hold conventions, appoint committees, and form societies, having in view the liberation of four millions among whom were ourselves,” he recalled. Now, however, “thanks to the genius of free government, free schools and liberal ideas,” African Americans themselves were in a position to mobilize civil society “with voices and with power” in support of causes they cared about.61 Echoing other advocates of belligerent recognition, Scottron declared that support for the Cuban rebels was a matter of national greatness and duty. “Our own Republic,” he intoned, “has placed herself foremost among christian nations.” It was incumbent upon the United States to pursue the “great work” of promoting liberty abroad “till all nations . . . shall be educated up to our standard.”62 By opposing belligerent recognition, Republican leaders had abdicated this glorious national mission. Scottron laced into these Republicans manqué for retreating from their earlier radicalism. Men like Grant and Sumner, he claimed, had allowed the “philanthropist” to be “swallowed up in the statesman.” “Shall we allow the cause of freedom to suffer that we might pursue a line of conduct very becoming to statesmen . . . but ill-­becoming to philanthropists?” Scottron asked the audience. “No: let us be resolved on one thing: we must have freedom.” At this line, the audience burst into loud applause.63 In the months following the Cooper Institute meeting, the Cuban Anti-­ Slavery Committee took to the road, holding public meetings in Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. At each event, Scottron, Garnet, and other committee members took the stage with local African American activists who shared their enthusiasm for Free Cuba. On December 23, William Cooper Nell, Lewis Hayden, and other leaders of Boston’s black community gathered at Menonian Hall to demand belligerent recognition.64 On February 12, 1873, black Philadelphians attended a Free Cuba meeting at Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church.65 The next night, black Baltimoreans (including, as one newspaper noted, many of the “gentler sex”) did the same at the Madison Street Presbyterian Church. At all three events, speakers recapitulated the principal theme of Scottron’s Cooper Institute address, insisting that the campaign for belligerent recognition would succeed (despite Republican leaders’ intransigence) if African Americans banded together and made themselves

190

James M. Shinn Jr.

heard. As Scottron himself assured Free Cuba supporters in Baltimore, “The 800,000 voices of the colored people here would have their weight.”66 The Cuban Anti-­Slavery Committee also tried to harness popular pressure by collecting petitions. At each public meeting, Scottron, a firm believer in “the sacred right of petition,” invited attendees to sign an appeal “praying that the government accord belligerent rights to Cuba.”67 On February 19, a delegation led by Scottron and Garnet presented more than eleven hundred signatures to President Grant. But if the committee expected this gesture to win the president over, they were sorely disappointed. Grant’s reply to the men was courteous, but noncommittal: He promised to do “all he could, consistent with his views of public duty.”68 While Scottron and the Cuban Anti-­Slavery Committee worked to mobilize support for the Cuban rebels in the cities of the Eastern Seaboard, another, more or less distinct Free Cuba movement was getting underway in Washington, D.C. On February 6, 1873, George T. Downing, a wealthy caterer and Republican power broker, invited Frederick Douglass, Robert Purvis, P. B. S. Pinchback, and other leading black Washingtonians to his home to discuss the Republican party and belligerent recognition. The informal gathering generated a call for another, larger meeting to be held the following month.69 On March 10, African American delegates from “more than a dozen states” converged on the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C. for a “national convention” about Free Cuba.70 The event was on shaky ground from the start. In his opening remarks, Downing unexpectedly announced his opposition to belligerent recognition. Then, he offered a series of fulsome resolutions praising the course that Grant and Sumner had taken on the issue.71 These gestures did not sit well with the pro-­Cuba diehards in the audience—including one white attendee, former Massachusetts congressman Nathaniel P. Banks. Banks had been a leading champion of Free Cuba (and a fierce critic of Grant) before losing his seat in the election of 1872. Stepping up to the podium after Downing, he lacerated the president and his allies. “When will men at the State Department and at the White House and the men at the Capitol say they are ready to accord belligerent rights?” Banks asked indignantly. “They will say it as soon as you require it; as soon as you demand these men struggling for liberty shall be treated like Christians and not shot like pirates or dogs.” Banks called for additional public meetings to keep up the pressure on the Grant administration. “The Government is hard of hearing,” he bellowed, “and does not like to hear what it does not want to hear.”72 When Banks sat down, South Carolina congressman Joseph H. Rainey took the stand. “I rise to address this convention with a degree of trepidation

“Free Cuba” Campaign, Republican Politics, and Black Internationalism

191

unusual with me,” he began cautiously. “Some think we ought to demand of our Government the accordance of belligerent rights to Cuba. I take position against it. I do not think this demand would be wise in any sense.” Rainey reviewed the legal objections to belligerent recognition raised by Republican policymakers, concluding that “there is nothing in the state of affairs in Cuba to warrant it.” Referring to Great Britain’s hasty recognition of the Confederacy, he asked, “Why is it that we should assume to repeat England’s folly in regard to Cuba?” For Rainey, the issue of belligerent recognition was above all a test of black Americans’ political maturity and restraint. “We are no longer slaves; we are vested with all the responsibilities of citizens,” he observed. “If a war breaks out, we must bear our part. Let us wait until the proper time comes before we invite war.”73 Rainey gave way to P. B. S. Pinchback, the former governor of Louisiana. In a brief, blunt speech, Pinchback, a Free Cuba diehard, cut a sharp contrast with the pragmatic Rainey. “I am a fighter by instinct. I am not a policy man, and hate the very word,” he crowed. “I do not propose to become the truckling tool of any faction.”74 With every speech, the audience at the “national convention” grew more tense and restless. Free Cuba supporters repeatedly heckled and interrupted pro-­administration speakers. Finally, the room exploded. One group of delegates leaped to their feet and proposed a new series of resolutions in place of Downing’s, but the chair refused to give them a hearing. Amid “great confusion,” the original, pro-­administration resolutions were read and carried, at which point “a fierce and general protest arose from all parts of the house.” The gathering broke up in “the wildest disorder.”75 In the wake of the turbulent “national convention,” Free Cuba diehards could not hide their frustration with black activists who put party loyalty before principle. “We regret the sad termination of the meeting,” the New National Era observed, “not only on account of Cuba, but because it displays a truckling to power on the part of some of our people from which they need emancipation more than Cuba does independence.”76 The charge was plain: On the issue of Free Cuba, some leading African Americans were guilty of shameful subservience to the Republican Party. They lacked the courage to think and act for themselves. But for Downing, Rainey, and others, the matter was not so clear-­cut. In their view, African Americans were simply not in a position to dictate to Grant and Sumner about foreign policy. Their place in the body politic was precarious. Breaking with the Republican Party over Cuba would jeopardize all that had been accomplished since emancipation. It would be political suicide.

192

James M. Shinn Jr.

Certainly Frederick Douglass held this view. Indeed, the disastrous outcome of the “national convention” seemed to reinforce the veteran activist’s earlier decision not to take a public stand on Free Cuba. In a private letter to Scottron three weeks after the gathering in Washington, D.C., Douglass candidly admitted that “the first gleam of the sword of freedom and independence in Cuba secured my sympathy with the revolutionary cause.” But he also reiterated his intention to avoid “joining in reproaches.” “I have assumed that President Grant and his Cabinet were better judges than myself of the international duties of the Republic,” Douglass explained, before wistfully adding, “I still think with my limited knowledge that a grand opportunity has been lost.”77 Despite his ambivalence, Douglass chose to remain quiet.

“At the Bar of the World”: Toward Internationalism The months following the dissolution of the March 1873 “national convention” witnessed a flurry of additional demonstrations on behalf of Free Cuba. In late March, African Americans in San Antonio, Texas passed a resolution expressing sympathy with the rebels.78 In April, the black residents of Wyandotte, Michigan did the same.79 In November, at a “colored convention” in California, a resolution “recommending the General Government to recognize the independence of Cuba” provoked “considerable debate,” but ultimately carried.80 Black Free Cuba supporters also endured their share of setbacks. In December, an attempt to insert “extreme views of the question of Cuban belligerence and Cuban annexation” into the platform of a Missouri “colored convention” was defeated by partisans of the Grant administration.81 Later that month, a group of black Bostonians publicly endorsed the government’s policy of nonintervention toward Cuba.82 These events underscore the continuing importance of black Free Cuba activism. But they also reveal the political limitations of the campaign in the wake of the disastrous “national convention.” Compared with the run of meetings held between December and March, the events that followed were essentially local and small-­scale. They lacked overarching coordination or vision. Even worse, they were wracked by infighting. Debates over Free Cuba at “colored conventions” in California and Missouri played out like state-­level reprisals of the “national convention,” with fierce contests between Grant loyalists and advocates of belligerent recognition. Samuel Scottron had a solution for breaking out of this impasse. Despite skipping the “national convention,“ Scottron had “not been idle.“ The Cuban

“Free Cuba” Campaign, Republican Politics, and Black Internationalism

193

Anti-­Slavery Committee continued to collect Free Cuba petitions; by July, as the organization reported to the Cuban émigré leader Carlos del Castillo, they had amassed some three thousand signatures.83 Even more importantly, Scottron had begun planning an ambitious “international convention” that would bring together the “liberty loving citizens of all countries.” He entertained high hopes for the event, which was scheduled to take place in New Orleans in September 1873. “We desire to make the proposed convention equal to anything of the kind ever held in this country,” Scottron declared in a letter to Nathaniel P. Banks.84 Scottron’s announcement of the “international convention” was accompanied by a lengthy statement of principles. Addressed to “the friends of Liberty throughout the World,” it opened by boldly echoing and reworking the central credo of the Declaration of Independence: We believe the time has arrived when all nations and peoples enjoying the humanizing influence of christian civilization should recognize the self evident truth that “all men are created equal and are endowed with certain inalienable rights among which are life liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” and should conform their policy of government to meet the requirement of this truth. As Scottron noted, people in many parts of the world endured “oppression and slavery.” Denied the enjoyment of their “natural rights” by unjust rulers, they had only one recourse: to plead their case “at the bar of the world.” It was the duty of civilized nations not only to hear the pleas of oppressed people, but to come to their aid whenever possible—legal and diplomatic shibboleths be damned. “The rights of governments to nonintervention in their affairs,” Scottron argued, “cease when they themselves are not respecting the natural rights of those over whom they have authority. Only those States in which every citizen is a freeman has [sic] the sacred right to preserve their course unmolested. A mans [sic] house is only sacred against intrusion when himself is conforming to the laws of right and justice to his fellows.” According to Scottron, Spain had committed “the most horrible crimes” against the people of Cuba. As a result, it had forfeited its right to sovereign inviolability. The international community must now place Spain “without the pale of diplomatic intercourse.”85 Scottron’s statement of principles is remarkable for a number of reasons. In arguing that the global community may intervene in the internal affairs of sovereign states to protect citizens’ “natural rights,” it strikingly anticipates

194

James M. Shinn Jr.

twentieth-­ century liberal internationalism.86 For present purposes, however, what is most notable about Scottron’s manifesto is that it envisioned no special role for the United States in liberating Cuba. This was surprising, to say the least. After all, black thinkers had consistently placed the United States and U.S. power at the center of their campaign to liberate Cuba. Scottron himself, in his address at the Cooper Institute in December 1872, had described the United States as the “foremost among Christian nations” and argued that the nation had a special duty to help the rebels. But in the lead-­up to the New Orleans convention, he made no mention of America’s unique global role. Instead, Scottron envisioned Cuban liberation as a broadly international and multilateral project. “It is the duty of nations as well as of individuals to support each other in their endeavors to secure to themselves these natural rights,” he claimed.87 What explains the internationalist turn in Scottron’s thinking? Likely it reflected his disappointment with U.S. foreign policy. Even though the Cuban rebels had more than held their own against Spain for almost five years, the United States was still no closer to recognizing them. So, Scottron decided to argue Cuba’s case “at the bar of the world.” Frustrated in his efforts to enlist the aid of the Grant administration, he appealed to an authority outside of and above the U.S. government: the international community. But Scottron was not only arguing Cuba’s case before “the bar of the world”; in a sense, he was also arguing his own. In refusing to help Free Cuba, the Grant administration and its allies had steadfastly ignored the pleas of Scottron and other black activists. If the Republican Party was no longer responsive to African Americans, perhaps it was time to seek new avenues of political action outside the United States. Scottron and the Cuban Anti-­Slavery Committee pressed ahead in planning for the “international convention.” In June, Scottron informed Castillo that he had extended invitations to activists from “Hayti, St. Domingo, England, France, and other States.” He also reported that “several Governors as well as members of Congress” had “signified their intention of cooperating with us.”88 But it was all for naught. The convention never took place. Although the precise reason is unknown, Scottron’s proposed location points to one possible answer. New Orleans possessed several obvious advantages as the site of an “international” Free Cuba gathering. Steamboat lines connected it to ports in the Caribbean and Central America. A sizable Cuban émigré community called the city home.89 But the choice also involved serious risks. Reconstruction-­era New Orleans simmered with social and political unrest. Violent clashes between Democrats and Republicans were routine.

“Free Cuba” Campaign, Republican Politics, and Black Internationalism

195

In March 1873, at roughly the same time Scottron came up with the idea for a convention in the city, a Democratic mob laid siege to the headquarters of the integrated New Orleans Metropolitan Police in what became known as the “Battle of the Cabildo.”90 Outside of New Orleans, where the “White Leagues” held sway, the situation was even more dire. In April 1873, more than a hundred black Republicans were massacred in the northern Louisiana town of Colfax in what Eric Foner has called “the bloodiest single instance of racial carnage in the Reconstruction era.”91 These atrocities were surely not lost on Scottron and the other members of the Cuban Anti-­Slavery Committee. Indeed, though it cannot be known for sure, they may have factored in the decision not to hold the “international convention.” If this was the case, it reveals a bitter truth: Black Free Cuba activists did not feel secure enough in their own rights as U.S. citizens to demonstrate on behalf of the “natural rights” of others. Over the long run, however, domestic insecurity and alienation would only deepen African Americans’ determination to forge alternative solidarities and new modes of political action outside the United States.

Conclusion The abortive “international convention” marked the last serious attempt by black activists to enlist U.S. government support for Free Cuba.92 Although the Ten Years’ War dragged on until 1878, African Americans no longer campaigned publicly for belligerent recognition. They faced more immediate problems. The early and mid-­1870s witnessed the steady dismantling of Reconstruction, as one by one the southern states were “redeemed” through violence and fraud. By 1877, the political turmoil that had made New Orleans such a risky place to hold an interracial political gathering had spread far and wide. Understandably, for African Americans, events in the South carried greater weight than the ongoing struggle in Cuba. But African Americans did not withdraw from the world. The end of Reconstruction sparked renewed interest in African emigration, especially among southern ex-­slaves. Hounded by terrorism, locked in poverty by sharecropping and declining cotton prices, freedpeople looked to the West African nation of Liberia as a promised land of safety and opportunity. For many, this embrace of Africa was accompanied by an explicit rejection of the United States. “In the United States of North America many of our p ­ eople have been debarred by law from the rights and privileges of freemen,” the

196

James M. Shinn Jr.

delegates to an Arkansas emigration convention proclaimed in 1877. “We continue to seek an asylum from this deep degradation by going to Liberia . . . where we will be permitted to more fully exercise and improve those faculties which impart to man his dignity.” Although African American emigrants continued to see themselves as agents of freedom and civilization—and to see nonwhite people outside the United States as badly in need of moral and political tutelage—these views no longer implied a belief in U.S. territorial expansion. Emigrants wished to live in a proud, independent Liberia—not a colonial satellite. As one black Arkansan noted, it was time for Liberia to assume its place as “a nation among nations.”93 In 1895, Cuba rose up against Spanish rule once again. Three years later, the United States entered the conflict on the side of the rebels. The U.S. government had at last come to the aid of Free Cuba. Yet, by 1898, many African Americans had long since ceased to believe that their country could be a force for good in the world. “Is America any better than Spain?” asked the Cleveland Gazette. “Has she not subjects in her midst who are murdered daily without trial?” Others in the black press wondered why African Americans should fight and die to bring freedom to Cuba, even as they were denied freedom in their own country. “The Negro has no reason to fight for Cuba’s independence,” noted the Washington Bee. “He is opposed at home. He is as much in need of independence as Cuba is.” No longer did territorial expansion seem like a medium for (as Douglass had claimed) “freedom, knowledge, and progress.” Now, it was a means of exporting Jim Crow to the world. As the lawyer and activist Archibald H. Grimke wrote, the government’s “absolute supineness . . . on the subject of lynching” made him “shudder for other people who may come under the yoke.”94 What a difference thirty years had made. The failure of the Free Cuba campaign—and the larger failure of Reconstruction—brought an end to the aggressive, missionary vision of U.S. global power championed by black thinkers and activists in the late 1860s and early 1870s. Although African Americans continued to engage with the world, increasingly they did so in ways that stood apart from, and even ran counter to, U.S. foreign policy and U.S. nationalism. Having lost their faith in the U.S. government at home, they were now less inclined to support its ambitions abroad. Moreover, as black Americans came to feel excluded from U.S. nationalism, they began to seek fulfillment in alternative, extranational forms of belonging. The result of black Americans’ disappointment with the United States was a new outlook on the world: cosmopolitan, anti-­imperialist, grounded in racial and political solidarities that transcended the nation-­state.95 And yet, we should be careful

“Free Cuba” Campaign, Republican Politics, and Black Internationalism

197

not to project this more recent, and in some ways more familiar paradigm of black global engagement back into the past; to let it obscure or distort our understanding of the distinctive nationalist vision articulated by Douglass, Langston, Scottron, and others in the post–Civil War period.96 This vision may have been fleeting, but it was real. If nothing else, it reminds us that African Americans’ embrace of internationalism was not as inevitable as it may appear in retrospect. It was the product of discrete historical circumstances. It was the fruit of disillusionment.

Chapter 10

The Southern Division Freedpeople, Pensions, and Federal State Building in the Post-­Confederate South Dale Kretz

The Civil War made possible the American nation-­state’s consolidation on the ashes of slaveholder sovereignties. That consolidation was shaped by a massive project of state building premised, in part, upon the subjugation of the occupied South and the emancipation of over four million enslaved men, women, and children. Yet historians have generally regarded the post-­Confederate South as more or less unincorporated during the era of Redemption, from the early 1870s to the first decade of the twentieth century. The closing of the Freedmen’s Bureau, the withdrawal of federal troops, and the end of Reconstruction all suggest the evaporation of federal authority from the South, leaving behind a violent landscape of disenfranchisement for southern freedpeople.1 Yet if one looks beyond the familiar electoral arena that has so long characterized the political, it becomes clear that the demise of Reconstruction did not destroy the institutional engagement at the heart of black politics.2 Nor did it entail the complete departure of the federal government from the postwar South. Rather, the federal government maintained an active presence in the postwar South and in the lives of countless freedpeople through the U.S. Pension Bureau. Most importantly, for their part, southern freedpeople proved determined to maintain their foothold in the federal government planted during the Civil War, what historian Chandra Manning calls the “wartime alliance.” To the ex-­slave refugees who had forged that relationship—what they called citizenship—as well as to their

The Southern Division

199

kin, the Pension Bureau served as a primary translator of that tenuous wartime alliance to civil authority.3 Perhaps owing to the sort of historically limited understanding of black politics challenged in these essays, the Pension Bureau appears all too infrequently in studies of postwar America, and especially African American history.4 This oversight is surprising, not only given that the Pension Bureau was the largest and most controversial federal agency in the late nineteenth century—accounting for better than one-­third of the federal budget in the 1890s—but also because it became a focal point for southern black politics in the dark years after Reconstruction. At the turn of the twentieth century there were nearly three-­quarters of a million pensioned Union army veterans. Perhaps as many as 130,000 black veterans and widows applied by the time of the New Deal, flooding the Pension Bureau’s Southern Division in Knoxville, Tennessee.5 What follows, then, is an exploration of how formerly enslaved men and women engaged federal officials of the U.S. Pension Bureau and, in the process, grappled with the construction of the federal state in the post–Civil War South. In so doing, it reveals a critical watershed in the history of black politics described in this volume: the use of the nation-­state itself to garner actual material benefits. By negotiating their inclusion in the federal administrative state through making claims grounded in their disability and dependency, freedpeople crafted a unique political identity as loyal, embattled, rights-­ bearing citizens.

* * * In the waning years of the nineteenth century, former slave and washerwoman Callie House helped lead a crusading organization known as the National Ex-­ Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty, and Pension Association, headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee. Members of the grassroots organization not only organized mutual aid societies but also lobbied the federal government for reparations in the form of pension payments to every former slave. The association quickly attracted the attention of the U.S. Pension Bureau. One of the most active and influential commissioners of pensions, Henry Clay Evans, spearheaded the effort to destroy the Ex-­Slave Association. His annual reports to the secretary of the interior reflected his sense of mission. In 1899, addressing rumors of a law “granting pensions to ex-­slaves,” Evans replied “that there is absolutely no prospect or possibility of any bill of this nature ever becoming a law, and that the slave was granted his pension when he was presented with his freedom.”

200

Dale Kretz

With this, Evans absolved the federal government of any financial or moral responsibility to the survivors of slavery because the debts had already been paid. Freedom itself had been a “pension.”6 By equating freedom with a gift bestowed—and a financial, monthly award no less—Evans also sought to erase the self-­ liberating efforts of enslaved men and women during the Civil War, focusing instead on the sacrifices made by white American men. Situated at the high tide of national reconciliation after the war, such a statement was hardly uncommon. Commenting on the historical amnesia of early twentieth-­century Americans, one historian of the U.S. Colored Troops remarks that “the country tried to resign the image of the black soldier to the remotest corner of its collective memory, or to forget him entirely.”7 Yet the commissioner’s remarks contained a perplexing omission: much as Evans tried to divorce the role of former slaves from their own liberation narrative, as he spoke many ex-­slave veterans and widows were in fact drawing military pensions. The commissioner’s rhetorical erasure of actual ex-­slave pensioners also reflected the widespread confusion surrounding the grassroots Ex-­Slave Association and its efforts to “pension” all former slaves regardless of military service. In the 1890s several bills were introduced in Congress, referred to the Committee on Pensions, defeated, and ridiculed; even the sponsor of one of the bills, Senator Mark Hanna of Ohio, distanced himself from the legislation. “Senator Hanna explains that he has introduced it by request,” relayed the Colored American, “and declines to state that he favors it. The leaders of the Republican party take no stock in it. It is at war with every principle, which underlies our present pension system.”8 Undeterred by the sheer political impossibility of passing a universal pension law—regardless of the number of signatures gathered or the moral force of the movement’s argument—local chapters of the Ex-­Slave Association sprang up across the South. By the turn of the twentieth century, the entire association had upward of 300,000 members, according to government estimates. Others put the figure at 600,000.9 In 1896, after the defeat of Senate Bill 1978, a bill to deliver pensions to all former slaves, the Pension Bureau began receiving reports of fraud associated with various “Ex-­Slave Assemblies.” Perpetrators would apparently arrive in a town, advertise they were agents of the government, declare that the Senate bill had indeed become law, and collect fees of twenty-­five cents or more to secure a bounty or pension for each former slave.10 One of the bureau’s special investigators, J. L. Davenport, sent a circular to forty-­five leaders of various assemblies across the South. In it he explained, “While any class of citizens has an unquestioned right to associate for the purpose of attempting

The Southern Division

201

to secure legislation believed to be advantageous, it is an unfortunate fact that certain imposters have taken advantage of the organization of your assembly, and of similar associations, to prey upon the innocent through false and fraudulent representations.”11 Evidence suggests that defrauding members of the Ex-­Slave Assemblies was a common if not widespread practice. Many leaders of Ex-­Slave Assemblies told Davenport that there had indeed been impostors swindling money from “ignorant colored people.”12 For example, R. J. Lowry from Texas told an investigator, “You know again that my people have been frauded enough since the ‘Emancipation’ by such humbugry. Of course, I know the old ‘ex-­slaves’ need a pension and all the helpers [they] can get, but we don’t want to be frauded by so called ‘agents.’ ”13 There were so many cases of impostors portraying themselves as government agents and infiltrating the Ex-­Slave Association meetings that the Pension Bureau eventually assumed the entire group was fraudulent. This was certainly the conclusion to which Henry Clay Evans came. In the commissioner’s mind, the assemblies of the Ex-­Slave Association were not the victims but the criminals. In May 1899, W. L. Reid, another inspector for the Pension Bureau, reported that the movement was “setting the negroes wild, robbing them of their money and making anarchists of them.” He warned that the government will soon “have some very serious questions to settle in connection with the control of the race.” Shortly thereafter the bureau charged the Ex-­Slave Association with fraud, claiming that it existed only to steal money from its members.14 Just as the Pension Bureau conflated the Ex-­Slave Association and fraudulent agents, so too did many white southerners confuse legitimate military pensions for ex-­slave veterans and widows with fraudulent ones. In fact, reports of the latter were so ubiquitous and so salacious that they entirely eclipsed any sustained attention to actual black pensioners in the South. Headlines ran: “Negro Pension Scheme Again,” “Vain Efforts to Swindle the Pension Bureau,” and “Ex-­Slaves Are Being Fleeced by Promises of Big Pensions.”15 One newspaper lamented in 1899 that “in spite of the fact that the ignorant colored people have been warned against these swindlers the poor creatures persist in giving up their hard earned quarters under the impressive eloquence of the promoters of the swindle and their confederates. The ‘Ex-­Slave Mutual Benefit and Pension Association,’ with headquarters at Nashville, Tenn., was exposed” as the culprit.16 In the eyes of many southern whites, there were no legitimate formerly enslaved pensioners—none could apply for a federal military pension, that is. They could only be victims of the Ex-­Slave Association’s roving charlatans.

202

Dale Kretz

Other more sensible white onlookers may have assumed time ran out for actual black veterans to legitimately claim their federal military pensions. The Daily Constitution in Atlanta was typical in this regard. In 1880, a writer recently “learn[ed] that there are a large number of disabled colored men in Georgia who lost their usefulness as members of the federal army during the late war. . . . These men are entitled to pensions from the government and many to arrears of pensions [i.e., back payments], amounting in some cases to several thousand dollars.” But according to the article, these “colored ex-­ soldiers, by reason of ignorance of the law, have never had applications filed and we believe the law limits the time to July 1, 1880. If they have not applied by that time they will be shut off.” And although the Pension Bureau relayed that “several thousand colored persons [were] entitled to pensions residing in the state,” the bureau received few applications. “Persons knowing of such cases,” the writer noted, “might perform a worthy charity by aiding these colored men to get their share of the largess which the government is distributing to nearly a million men in the north.”17 Yet formerly enslaved veterans and widows, it turns out, were not unaware of their entitlements to federal military pensions. Nor were they ignorant of pension laws and bureaucratic procedures. (And nor would there be any deadlines to their applications.) In fact, as white observers distracted themselves with allegations against the Ex-­Slave Association in Nashville, many thousands of former slaves quietly pursued their pension claims through the Pension Bureau’s Southern Division in Knoxville. In so doing, they would give the emerging federal administrative state in the postwar South its form and function.

* * * In 1873, Congress passed the aptly named Consolidation Act. This law sought to reconcile the conflicting layers of pension legislation and standardize rates for specific disabilities incurred in service. The act also contained an important though largely ignored provision: it lifted the prohibition of federal military benefits against all “colored persons who enlisted in the Army during the war of the rebellion” and who were “borne on the rolls of their regiments as ‘slaves.’ ” Following the Consolidation Act, they “shall be placed on the same footing as to bounty and pension as though they had not been slaves at the date of their enlistment.”18 The provision’s author and spokesman was Thomas Boles, a white Union veteran from Arkansas. Elected to the House of Representatives in 1868 as a Republican, Boles immediately began

The Southern Division

203

pushing for the inclusion of former slaves in the pension process. His initial bills all met inauspicious ends, whether tabled indefinitely or unromantically dispatched in congressional committees. Finally, Boles was able to attach a provision to the latest pension bill, the Consolidation Act. On March 3, 1873, his last day in office, Boles defended his provision as an effort “to do justice to a class of our soldiers who have been denied it for ten long years.” What’s more, “if any one class of our soldiers deserve more at our hands than any other, it is that class which this bill is intended to benefit.” They “did not wait to be liberated from bondage,” and many risked or gave their lives “in defense of free government, even before they had any legal assurances that that free government would be shared by them after the victory should be won.”19 Although his speech focused primarily on the issue of full bounties denied to ex-­slave soldiers and veterans, after the Consolidation Act of 1873, formerly enslaved veterans and their widows were unquestionably entitled to seek their bounties and federal military pension alongside the many thousands of other Union veterans and widows. Immediately following its passage, pension agents in the South began soliciting for potential clients. In the nation’s capital, one G. J. Ferris took out weekly ads in the New National Era, informing his African American readers that “Colored soldiers, were, by the act of March 3, 1873, placed on an equal footing with white soldiers,” and were now eligible for bounties and pensions.20 Issues of inclusion and statutory equality dominated civil rights debates in the 1870s. Nine months after the passage of the Consolidation Act, and a week before a meeting of the National Convention of Colored Men in Washington, Charles Sumner reintroduced a bill supplementing the 1866 Civil Rights Act. It sought to prohibit exclusion from any public institution on the basis of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” After two years of struggle—and in the penumbra of major Democratic victories in the 1874 elections—Republicans passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875. By that time, white Americans of all stripes had grown increasingly weary of special legislation to protect freedpeople. Opponents of the bill feared that it would dramatically and unconstitutionally expand the power of the federal government on behalf of the worst part of the population: freedpeople who insisted on social equality and racial “mixing.” As such, with little political capital to gain and much to lose, the Civil Rights Act of 1875 served as a capstone to Reconstruction. Less than ten years after its passage, the Supreme Court would radically deconstruct federal citizenship rights, relinquishing hard-­earned sovereignty back to the states. Other civil rights–inspired efforts—including various bills in the 1880s and 1890s to provide for the federal supervision

204

Dale Kretz

of elections—met with widespread upheaval and ultimately failed to reverse the vector of devolution. Detractors of federal civil rights legislation complained about the creation of a paternalistic federal government dedicated to protecting unworthy dependents. Similar concerns animated opposition to pension legislation. Despite such legislation being race neutral, pensioners nevertheless represented a special interest group, and their advocates opened themselves up to accusations of laziness, greed, and socialism.21 Federal military pensions came to be a highly charged political issue in the 1880s, paralleling and exacerbating the partisan divide. As late as 1876, both the Democratic and Republican party platforms acknowledged the “just claim” veterans had upon their fellow citizens and the nation without any specific talk of pensions. The bipartisan pieties and symbolic gestures would not last long. In the year 1880 pension expenditures first surpassed 20 percent of the federal budget, raising both the visibility of the pension issue as well as its political importance.22 By 1884, pensions had emerged as a litmus test for political loyalties. Republicans promised a far more expansive system of pensions with legislation increasing pension rates and repealing limitations on eligibility. For their part, Democrats insisted on restricting the pension system to protect the taxpayers. Partisanship reached its apogee in the 1888 presidential campaign. While barnstorming on the liberalization of pension laws, Benjamin Harrison, himself a veteran, memorably told crowds it was “no time to be weighing the claims of old soldiers with apothecary’s scales.”23 With strong support from Union veterans Harrison won the presidency and the Republicans took back both houses of Congress for the first time since the Democratic resurgence of 1875. Harrison installed Corporal James Tanner as his commissioner of pensions, making good on his promises of distributing benefits widely and generously—and, many would say, indiscriminately.24 The polarizing figure of Commissioner Tanner drew considerable attention. The Bee, an African American newspaper in Washington, D.C., complained that while the commissioner “manifests so much interest in white soldiers and their widows” he had yet to demonstrate an awareness of colored claims. “We want to see Commissioner Tanner do more for the colored soldiers, their widows, and the worthy clerks in his department,” it protested.25 The next month, the newspaper took pride in Tanner’s employment and promotion of black clerks in the Pension Bureau, including the physician J. W. Curtis, “who is regarded as one of the best clerks in the office and one of the few colored clerk’s [sic] who was not afraid to aid the republican party under the last democratic administration.”26 As early as April 1889, the Bee declared Tanner to be “a first class politician,” and stated that “as a republican

The Southern Division

205

he is among the purest and will no doubt give the party satisfaction.” The paper then began asking the commissioner to “appoint a few of our worthy colored young ladies”—after so doing “the race will call him blessed.” Manifestly, the black press saw the Pension Bureau as a viable avenue of patronage and professional advancement, above and beyond its largess to black pensioners.27 In stark contrast to the praise and optimism among African Americans, an editorial in the Atlanta Constitution ruminated on Tanner’s recent decision to admit a previously rejected claim to the rolls. The case involved a formerly enslaved mother claiming dependency on her son who was killed in action after leaving his plantation and joining the U.S. Colored Troops. When the case was previously tried, a “democratic commissioner decided that the mother was not dependent upon her son because both were slaves,” and hence both were dependent on their master. But, the article continued, “This reasoning did not strike Corporal Tanner,” who “argued that the earning of the son went into the pockets of the master who supported his mother, and thus in this indirect way his mother had an interest in his earnings.” With this decision Tanner revealed himself to be “the most radical of republicans.” The article predicted that his new policy “will place 20,000 new colored pensioners on the rolls.” Yet there could be found some consolation, for at the same time, “his 20,000 new pensioners will draw just that much money southward. The sum expended in the payment of their pensions will be an unjust burden upon the country at large, but in the long run it will be utilized in building up the south. Perhaps,” the writer concluded, “when the commissioner thinks it over, he will not be so well satisfied with his ruling.”28 With this logic, the mouthpiece of the New South, the Atlanta Constitution, found a way to stomach the perceived federal favoritism of black pensioners: as slaves they had built up the ill-­fated agricultural South; as pensioners they would indirectly infuse federal dollars into the construction of the New South economy.29 In the 1880s and 1890s, as the Republican-­sponsored pension juggernaut grew unremittingly, Democrats solidified control of state politics in the “redeemed” South and began introducing state-­run and state-­funded pension programs for Confederate veterans and widows. In fact, given the legislative control of state budgets, it was not until the overthrow of Reconstruction governments that spending could be allocated to rebel veterans and their widows. After Redemption it began apace. Although the Confederate pension systems varied by state, all were veritable monuments to the Lost Cause ideology—and monumentally underfunded compared to federal pensions. Aside from the comparative inadequacies of Confederate pensions, the programs seem to have generated little public controversy. In contrast to

206

Dale Kretz

congressional Republicans, Democrats in southern statehouses maintained stricter eligibility requirements for pensioners, thereby resisting the liberalizing trends driving the federal pension system.30

* * * Pushed in ever more “liberal” directions by Republican policymakers and veteran lobbying groups such as the Grand Army of the Republic, the federal pension system eventually developed two separate tracks. The first, known as the general law, had operated since 1862. It offered generously sized pensions to Union veterans who could prove their present disability had its origin in military service. On June 27, 1890, Congress passed the Disability Act, creating the second pension system to operate alongside the general law. Those veterans applying under the so-­called new law could claim disabilities irrespective of origin, though they would in the end receive lower pensions. Against strong opposition from congressional Democrats, Republican lawmakers created the new pension system as an alternative means to provide benefits to disabled veterans and widows ineligible under the general law. This included many thousands of freedpeople who struggled to establish their general law eligibility. Yet under the new law black veterans applied at a proportionally higher rate than white veterans. Moreover, the number of new law claims registered by African Americans was four times greater than the number of general law claims. One study has shown that from 1890 to 1907 the percentage of surviving black Civil War veterans and widows who applied for a pension was nearly 94 percent, whereas only 20 percent applied before 1890.31 Over time the Pension Bureau generated an elaborate system of administrating claims. When the bureau received a veteran’s application for a pension it would forward the case to the proper geographical division: the Eastern, Western, Middle, or Southern Division.32 There the application would be passed off to an examiner who would determine whether the declaration for a pension and the accompanying evidence warranted further investigation. If so, the examiner requested service and medical records from the army and ordered the claimant to appear before a medical examining board. After 1883, nearly all boards consisted of three civil physicians (known as “surgeons”) appointed by the Pension Bureau to perform evaluations on veteran claimants. With legal and medical evidence at hand, the examiner would decide to recommend or reject the claim, and the division chief would forward the approved claim to the Board of Review at the bureau’s headquarters in

The Southern Division

207

Washington. From there the approved claim would be sent to the medical referee, who would affix the size of the pension based on degree of disability.33 Although ostensibly “on equal footing” with their freeborn counterparts, formerly enslaved veterans and widows encountered remarkable difficulties in their bids for federal military pensions. Reasons abound for why exactly the claims of former slaves met with atypically high scrutiny from bureau officials, not least of which is the evidentiary void of their prewar lives. As newly documented citizens, former slaves often struggled to produce official records or track down official testimonies. In his quest to certify his age, Abram Haywood explained to an examiner, “When I was born it was slavery times and the churches kept no records of the birth of children, my old parent was ignored being a slave, and the church at that time really did belong to our master and if they had any record of the birth of their slaves it was with them, and we as slaves knew nothing of it.” Haywood confessed to “relying and depending solely on what my former master told me, as he is the only record I know.”34 A corresponding frustration gripped the Southern Division of the Pension Bureau. In August 1883, the chief of the Southern Division explained to the commissioner of pensions the unique difficulties the division faced, especially when “compared with that of examiners in other divisions.” The records of the U.S. Colored Troops, he complained, “are very meager,” and “call after call must be made, in most cases, to obtain the testimony necessary to make up for the lack of an official record.” Gathering satisfactory evidence was “exceedingly difficult,” and hence the “correspondence of this division has been very large, 72,437 letters and 234,374 circulars having been sent out.” Often the service record and medical record requests for the U.S. Colored Troops were unable to be procured by the War Department. The division chief estimated that “in not more than one in six of the claims filed since June 30, 1880, can a record of the disability alleged be found.” Matters would improve little as the years went on, until June 1890 when the new law system provided an escape hatch by obviating the burdensome service-­origin requirement. A few years before then, another chief of the Southern Division would complain, “The proportion of illiterate claimants and witnesses in the cases before this division is large, obviously increasing the difficulty of obtaining from them satisfactory evidence.”35 Unsurprisingly, in July 1888, the Southern Division had over the previous twelve months submitted 9,212 original claims (veteran, widow, and dependent alike) for admission to the Board of Review in Washington, 9,096 for rejection, and 2,191 for special examination.36

208

Dale Kretz

If these documentary and demographic issues imparted a special burden to the claims of ex-­slave veterans, they also necessitated more administrative attention at the Southern Division. By 1888, the division employed about 100 individuals, including 64 examiners who constituted “the real working force of the division.” The volume of work for the division increased dramatically after passage of the Disability Act in June 1890. One year later, the division employed roughly 150 individuals, including 24 clerks engaged in the claims of widows, minors, and dependent relatives and another 24 clerks charged with adjudicating new disability claims as well as increases in rates for disability claims. Together, in the twelve months following the creation of the new law system, they examined over 177,000 claims, made over 429,000 calls, and ordered over 132,000 medical examinations; 70,460 claims were submitted to the Board of Review, of which 45,859 were accepted and the rest either rejected or submitted to the Special Examination Division. Whether accepted, rejected, or investigated, former slaves would pursue their claims with unparalleled persistence.37 When the Southern Division addressed the claims of former slaves, it brought them into the gaze of the federal administrative state like never before. Though the enslaved population was quantified broadly on federal census reports, little information was gathered about slaves as individuals. For example, those with “disabilities” (which was confined to deafness, blindness, or insanity) registered simply as a tally, offering what one historian calls “a composite portrait of anonymous disabled bondspeople.” A major task facing pension applicants and Pension Bureau officials was therefore undoing the anonymity of enslavement. Proving identity was often a difficult endeavor. Not only did many slaves and freedpeople use aliases, but also many masters did not assign their slaves last names and freedpeople either adopted their master’s surname or chose their own entirely as an act of self-­assertion and independence. Horace Brown, an ex-­slave veteran from South Carolina who had served in the regiment of famed abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson and lost a leg in battle, was one who failed to prove his identity. Having had so many masters before the war—and thus accumulating a raft of surnames and aliases—he had forgotten which name he gave at enlistment and thus could not be found on any regimental rolls.38 Above and beyond establishing identity, bureau physicians conducted extensive medical examinations on the bodies of formerly enslaved veterans, creating a rich record for each individual applicant. Their files contain years, even decades, of intimate information. The standard “Surgeon’s Certificate” listed for every male claimant his pulse, respiration, temperature, height,

The Southern Division

209

weight, and age, as well as his hair color, eye color, and skin color—all in addition to the various notes from the physical examination itself. Any clerk at the Southern Division would have been able to access and monitor the claims of any freedperson. So, too, would the commissioner of pensions himself. Fifty years after the Civil War, Woodrow Wilson’s commissioner of pensions asked Dr. J. P. Waring of South Carolina for more detailed information about an ex-­ slave veteran. Waring’s earlier report, uncharacteristically given in haste, failed to convey the thoroughness required by the examination procedure. “Give condition of muscles, tendons, and joints,” the commissioner instructed. “Describe fully and in detail all objective symptoms of rheumatism and disease of heart. Is the heart normal in size, location and function?” he inquired. “Do you find cardiac murmurs? Does [the] soldier appear to be well nourished? State condition of lungs and kidneys. Rate separately every disability found. Show clearly the degree of disability for the performance of manual labor due to the pensioned causes alone.” The level of scrutiny applied to the claims of former slaves extended far up the bureaucratic hierarchy. It bespoke a vision of citizenship wherein the federal administrative state both reserves and regularly exercises the power of examination over the bodies of its citizens, especially those who make claims upon it. In this way, it also prefigured the means-­testing that would come to dominate the U.S. welfare state.39 Given the intense scrutiny of the medical examinations, the pension files of former slaves therefore offer a unique way into understanding the bodily effects of black life in the late nineteenth century. This material register has proven very difficult to document outside of spectacular acts of violence, including so-­called race riots, the Ku Klux Klan trials, and lynchings.40 Though rarely if ever mentioning the direct violence perpetrated by whites on black southerners, their claims instead centered on issues of the more adjacent violence resulting from the sharecropping regime: poverty, hard labor, unhealthy environments, and inadequate medical attention. In 1897, Ellen Bird gave an affidavit recorded by one J. R. Reed in Cotton Hall, South Carolina. In it she declared that “she has no property of any kind what ever, real, personal, nor otherwise, and that she derives no income from any source, and has no one legally bound to support her. That she is wholly dependent upon her own daily labor, for support which is mostly done by tilling a few acres of land as a tenant.” Still, she “is mostly dependent upon charity for support or assistance.” Having established her dependency, she continued to express her material privations. Bird was “now in poverty and want for food, clothing, and shelter living now under the dilapidated roof of a storm-­destroyed house wherein she suffers very much from the cold and from the rain which leaks

210

Dale Kretz

in upon her from all sources. She also asks and prays that her claim be made special so that she may soon get the assistance of a pension.”41 Serving alongside Ellen Bird’s late husband was Sampson Cuthbert. Cuthbert had injured his back during the war while building a wharf at Hilton Head, South Carolina. After trying unsuccessfully for a general law pension, he decided to apply under the new law. The emphasis of his claim shifted accordingly, incorporating new ailments and disabilities incurred after the war. In an affidavit filed in May 1892, Cuthbert explained how “About one year and a half after I was mustered out of the U.S. Service, and while living on Beaufort Island, S.C., my head began to trouble me, with pains” that “have continued to increase on me until the present.” In 1889, moreover, Cuthbert “contracted the malarial fever on my little farm near Beaufort S.C. in the month of June, and said fever lasted on me until September 1889.” With intermittent bouts of fever, Cuthbert believed he was prevented “from performing manual labor to [the degree of] about 2/3.”42 As Cuthbert pursued his claim, he elaborated on the hardships he and his family faced, indicating both his need for, and worthiness of, a federal pension. In February 1895 he testified “that his old sickness is also increased on him so that he is now wholly unable to support himself by manual labor.” Furthermore, Cuthbert “has no trade or learning to inable [sic] him to earn a support otherwise.” Whenever he would attempt “to do a little work on his farm his sickness raised on him” and would force him to quit. The ex-­ slave managed to secure a physician’s affidavit from one E. M. Pinckney. Upon examining Cuthbert, Dr. Pinckney found evidence of “general rheumatism affecting the whole body, particularly the left shoulder, hip and leg.” The bouts of malarial fever, for their part, caused an enlarged liver, painful and tender to the touch. “The claimant is a farmer by occupation,” concluded the physician, “but in consequence of disabilities as stated above he has been obliged to suspend all forms of labor within the past year and depends solely upon his wife & friends for a livelihood.”43 Far from an individual effort, the bids former slaves made for a pension frequently depended on the testimony of a sizeable group of allies, from former fellow slaves and comrades to relatives and neighbors. Any one application by a veteran or widow could draw on dozens of other individuals, particularly if the claim required a special investigation to make up for a lack in official documentation. Against the atomization engendered by the bureau’s application procedures, formerly enslaved veterans and widows engaged in a collective struggle to achieve not only federal benefits but also federal recognition. Given the obstacles each black claimant faced, such collective engagement was

The Southern Division

211

altogether essential. Moreover, the stories of Ellen Bird and Sampson Cuthbert point to the increasingly popular and politicized language of dependency. Formerly enslaved claimants certainly spoke, as did many others, in the long shadow of the Civil War, but they did so more often from within the administrative state rather than without. Well before the more familiar Progressive era modernizations of the state, freedpeople confronted a rationalized, systematic administrative hierarchy, at once impersonal and intimate. Through countless examinations, testimonies, and appeals, former slaves etched deep grooves into the bureaucratic channels of the Pension Bureau’s Southern Division, where claiming dependency paid off.44

* * * As the above stories demonstrate, although structured hierarchically, the point of face-­to-­face contact for pension applicants were the examining boards deputized by the Pension Bureau. Southern veterans therefore met examining boards in places like Charleston, Beaufort, New Orleans, and Mobile. By 1905, there were seventy-­eight medical examining boards in the Deep South: nine boards in Alabama, twenty-­four in Arkansas, seven in Florida, nine in Georgia, five in Louisiana, seven in Mississippi, four in South Carolina, and thirteen in Texas.45 While some federal officials praised the decentralized nature of these medical examining boards, others complained that (northern, white) claimants took advantage of their examining physicians, pressuring them to accept their claims prima facie. As early as 1877, the reform-­minded medical referee of the Pension Bureau, Dr. T. D. Hood, complained that examining physicians were “so under local influence as to prejudice their reports in favor of claimants.”46 But in the post-­Confederate South, the situation was exactly the opposite. As elsewhere, examining boards were staffed by men of varying ages and tenures in the medical profession. Some examining physicians were just beginning their careers in medicine. Others had been practicing since before the Civil War. No doubt many of the elders had treated slaveholders or slaves. Some had even been slaveholders themselves or were sons of slaveholders. Many had served in the rebel army. Frustrated by rejections, special examinations, and low ratings, many former slaves protested that the very decentralized structure of the Pension Bureau undermined its statutory equality. The case of Richard Dargan is illustrative. Dargan was a formerly enslaved veteran in South Carolina who was dropped from the pension rolls during the mid-­1890s by William Lochren, President Grover Cleveland’s second commissioner of pensions. As

212

Dale Kretz

he reapplied, Dargan suffered repeated rejections from the examining board at Charleston who found no ratable disability. He sent letters to the commissioner of pensions as well as the secretary of the interior and alleged the examining physicians were all “descendants of former slave holders.” Dargan singled out one man on the board for being “against me and universally against the old veterans hereabouts.” Another he called a “full fledged democrat and former slave owner. One who can not possibly do Justice, particularly to negro soldiers for their part in the last war (war of the rebellion).” He declared himself “always ready to kick against such a board,” and that “I am determined to receive proper treatment without regard to the amount of agitation necessary on my part.”47 Like many other veterans, Dargan was dropped from the pension rolls in the mid-­1890s because of Cleveland’s new policies. As a Democrat vigorously opposed to federal spending, Cleveland ordered a purging of the pension rolls to save the Treasury. Although Cleveland and his commissioner could not simply replace the nearly 4,000 examining surgeons in one fell swoop, he cleverly ordered them to reconduct examinations on all claimants with the aim of decreasing or eliminating disability ratings, thereby trimming the number of pensioners and the sum total of pension payments. Medical examiners in the South were especially quick to execute Cleveland’s orders. Patronage and party allegiance doubtless played a major role in their willingness; so too did their racial allegiance. Although some commissioners, notably William Dudley (1881–1884), attempted to politically balance examining boards by including members from both parties, others felt no such compulsion. Moreover, by the 1880s, comparatively few Republicans could be found among the South’s professional classes. Although the Pension Bureau could not be entirely remade with each political regime change, its commissioners did have considerable administrative discretion, and the bureau’s compass spun according to the orientation of the president in power.48 The bureau’s capacity for accommodating change was not lost on Richard Dargan; nor was its ability to absorb conflict. Coupled with Dargan’s agitation over bureau personnel was his contempt for what he rightly felt to be a policy restricting applicant mobility. The Southern Division repeatedly ordered Dargan to appear before the Charleston board for his examinations. As he put it, “I do not see any reason why . . . we [are] not permitted to appear before any examining surgeon appointed for the purpose without regard to locality.” Unsurprisingly, the commissioner of pensions refused Dargan’s demand to replace the board members at Charleston and likewise refused to allow Dargan and the numerous other complainants to appear before the

The Southern Division

213

board at nearby Georgetown. “If we [are] not permitted to request” a reexamination by a different board, he continued, then “are we not permitted to ask information in relation to our rights under the law?” Confounded by the lack of transparency in bureau policy, Dargan asserted that “some disposition on the part of the Secty of the Interior is demanded to correct the evils coming from the present department.” By so confining the access points in the postwar South, Dargan believed that he and his fellow formerly enslaved veterans and widows were “inslaved [sic] to the will of the clerks in the department rather than the liberality of the law.” Indeed, he demanded answers directly from “the Commissioner of Pension[s] . . . not from a clerk who perhaps does not know and does not care.” Dargan therefore spoke of reenslavement as a kind of power exercised arbitrarily by the petty bureaucrats of the federal government. He likewise criticized the very structure of the Pension Bureau in terms understood today as institutional racism, and instead drew a capacious vision of citizenship, the law, and equality. The principle of equality was not a “colorblind” equality; rather it was an equality that takes full measure of the slave past that found its way into the structures of the new federal state. The bureau’s race-­neutral (and status-­blind) policies unconsciously attempted to depoliticize African American claimants emerging from slavery with special grievances.49 As pension claimants, freedpeople invoked the issue of loyalty to the nation-­state, complaining of the disloyalty of subordinates while appealing to a distant, more powerful leader.50 Indeed, ex-­slave veterans criticized the parochial politics of medical examinations in the language of loyalty. Having grappled with special investigators over his general law pension for more than ten years, ex-­slave Robert Green pointedly stated: “My case is held back because of a rebel policy on a rebel’s testimony manipulated by a willing fool who . . . would not hesitate to make up any evidence to suit his secrete [sic] orders.” “If the evidence of my comrades in that case is not equal to the alleged evidence of one old rebel, then the fact should be known as quickly as possible.” Just as the very presence of colored troops in the earliest years after Appomattox signaled that the war was far from over, then the pension process itself prolonged the war when it handled the claims of black veterans and their widows. For ex-­ slave pensioners, the Civil War and all the resentments of slavery reverberated with every indignity, every rebuff, and every disappointment.51 Facing relatively high probabilities of rejection, special examination, or low disability ratings, ex-­slave veterans persistently appealed bureau decisions through the Board of Review, which was tellingly structured as an appellate body.52 In their appeals they frequently requested the Southern

214

Dale Kretz

Division order another medical examination in the hope of a higher disability rating. Pensioned at $8 a month under the new law, William Wallace applied for an increase in December 1898. Wallace’s pension attorney relayed that “he believes himself to be entitled to an increase of pension on the ground that the rate allowed him is too low and not commensurate with the extent of his present disability.” Wallace therefore requested “that he be favored with another medical examination with the view of determining his right to $12 per month, the full rate allowed under the Act of June 27, 1890 for the reason that he is now totally unable to do any manual labor.”53 Isaiah Taylor also believed himself “entitled to a re-­rating,” arguing that “the rate originally allowed him was too low and not commensurate with the extent of his disability, nor in proportion to the rate allowed to others for similar and equivalent [disabilities].”54 Even more so than other pension claimants, formerly enslaved veterans and widows aggressively challenged the bureau’s rulings—not in spite of their disproportionate hardships but because of them. They proved time and again that they would exploit bureaucratic procedures just as the structure of the bureau seemed to exploit them.55

* * * Despite the interminable obstacles, no other organization did more to incorporate former slaves into the consolidated American state than the Pension Bureau. Accordingly, the struggle of tens of thousands of freedpeople with medical examiners and clerks at the Southern Division paints a new picture of former slaves and the nation-­state in emancipated America. It reinforces the compelling notion that freedpeople cultivated a “statist understanding of freedom,” that is, a vision of freedom bonded with, rather than without, the federal state.56 It also underscores that the federal presence in the postwar South did not evaporate with the demise of the Freedmen’s Bureau and the withdrawal of the Union army—indeed, with the collapse of Reconstruction. Although that presence was certainly compromised by the decentralized nature of the Pension Bureau, it did not have the same effects as the ceding of federal authority back to the states in the 1870s. Nor for that matter did the agency function simply as a vehicle of oppression. Rather, it circulated power among various actors, from bureau officials to local physicians to formerly enslaved claimants. As an enduring site of contest over federal authority, the Southern Division would inadvertently extend the reconstruction project into the twentieth century. Redemption undoubtedly signaled the legal and electoral betrayal of freedpeople, but those years also witnessed an astounding transformation in

The Southern Division

215

the American administrative state—a transformation of which freedpeople took full advantage. Indeed, the growth of the Pension Bureau was one of the most profound acts of consolidation and construction in the late nineteenth century.57 In turn, it offered African American an unprecedented opportunity to engage directly with the nation-­state that had so recently either kept them in chains or attempted to render them politically marginal or inert. As the essays in this volume demonstrate with full force, such attempts to depoliticize African Americans ran headlong into a robust, adaptable tradition of black politics and political engagement stretching back to the Revolutionary War.58 In the case presented here, by seeking federal recognition for sacrifice and suffering, freedpeople implicitly resisted the machinations of Henry Clay Evans and many others to trivialize their role in the Civil War, deeming freedom itself as the gifting of a “pension” and thereby dismissing any further positive claims upon it. Thomas Boles understood as much when he argued for lifting prohibitions against ex-­slaves receiving federal military benefits. As he warned in 1873, “If we do not do so we will hear of it hereafter, for these colored soldiers know what their rights are and will hold us responsible if we fail or refuse to award them equal rights before the law as soldiers as well as citizens.”59 Through word and deed, ex-­slave claimants recognized the Pension Bureau as an apparatus for the realization of their citizenship rights, the most viable remaining avenue in the postbellum South and, perhaps, the nation-­state at large. As one African American newspaper put it, “There is one department under the government where colored men are treated like human beings, and that is the Pension Office.”60 Southern freedpeople remained insiders. At a time when African Americans were formally marginalized within or shut out of government institutions entirely, freedpeople were sine qua non to the lesser-­known project of federal state-­building in the post-­Confederate South. There, the tens of thousands of freedpeople were often the only southerners in any given area who had access to the Pension Bureau and, with it, the power and resources of the federal government. Far from being outsiders, southern freedpeople made themselves consummate insiders. Better than any other class of citizens, formerly enslaved pension applicants understood that the creation of the post– Civil War American nation-­state was one of the greatest and most imperiled fruits of the black freedom struggle. Their efforts therefore deserve to occupy a central place in the long history of emancipation and black politics.

Epilogue

Telling and Retelling The Diversity of Black Political Practices Kellie Carter Jackson

When I first began teaching, back in 2009, I promised myself and my students that there would be two things that I would always strive to teach them: something valuable about a topic that they did not previously know, and something entirely new about a topic they thought they knew all about. To many students, history can feel tedious or redundant mainly because we are often presented history through the narrative of what Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls “The Danger of a Single Story.”1 We are all in danger when history is presented as a narrow or one-­dimensional text. With the single story, Christopher Columbus becomes the only explorer, Frederick Douglass becomes the only narrative of American slavery, Martin Luther King Jr. becomes the only leader of the civil rights movement, and America becomes the only story of democracy and freedom. Combating these fallacies requires a diversity of stories and a nuanced definition of power. History cannot be summed up as a single heroic effort or in a succinct one-­liner. Nor should history be presented as a toxic blend of patriarchy and patriotism. I understood early that pedagogy is political. What is remembered and what is forgotten, what is preserved, what is taught and to what extent, is highly contested. Accordingly, I have often teased my students and colleagues that American history focuses on one great black man and black woman per century. For the eighteenth century, it is Crispus Attucks and Phillis Wheatley. For the nineteenth century, it is Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. For the twentieth century, we emphasize Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks. I

Epilogue

217

have no doubt the twenty-­first century will feature Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey. Even the best of historians can get seduced by the romanticism of beloved historical figures and monumental victories. While nothing should be taken away from Frederick Douglass, who according to President Donald Trump is “an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more,” we rob other black activists, men and women alike, when we boil the movement down to one man or one moment. I am happy to say that for the past decade the field of American slavery and freedom is headed in a direction that offers increased attention to the marginalized. In particular, a new generation of scholars is keenly invested in centering and multiplying the voices and lived experiences of the enslaved. I have been to conferences where the words of the enslaved or free black Americans have gone completely unspoken. It should not be possible to discuss any aspect of American history in the long nineteenth century and fail to discuss the influence or contributions that black Americans played. From capitalism, to politics, to legislation, to transportation, black labor and black bodies made virtually every aspect of American progress possible or necessary. Today’s scholars are not content with discussing slavery in the abstract sense, where black voices, experiences, and humanity are denied. What I appreciate about this collection of essays is the way each scholar has achieved the goals I tell my students: They teach us something new or reveal something new about what we thought we knew. I am encouraged by how the field of American slavery and freedom is changing. I am hopeful that we are entering an era where the lives and lived experiences of the enslaved are taking center stage in ways that have not previously been studied. Scholars and historians are beginning to take on the invaluable practice of moving the margins to the center, and not only socially but politically as well. Revolutions and Reconstructions works to recover and even reconfigure the political ramifications of black politics. This collection does the hard work of amplifying voices that have been muffled and provides additional utility for the voices that are familiar to our understanding of the era. I thoroughly enjoyed reading these chapters in tandem and appreciated how each author built upon or informed one another’s work. These scholars found ways to examine popular topics such as Phillis Wheatley, Dred Scott, or black suffrage in original and nuanced ways. Each scholar managed to supply the field with an understanding of neglected leaders or neglected contributions to the freedom struggle of black Americans. Each scholar magnified the political tools black leaders employed and illustrated specifically how those tools went beyond stirring controversy, but ensured that their

218

Kellie Carter Jackson

grievances were addressed at all levels. At the local, state, and federal level the government was compelled to respond (even in their denial) to the rights of African Americans. Slavery and racism have always made it difficult to cultivate spaces where black people can be and belong. It is clear that the long nineteenth century poses questions that we are still struggling to answer. Who belongs? Or more specifically, who are African Americans in America? What spaces (socially, politically, and economically) can African Americans occupy? And what guarantees can African Americans trust to ensure their being and belonging? How can black Americans claim the legal protections of the federal government? Thus, the themes of citizenship, enfranchisement, and mobility circulate throughout the archives and are even more pronounced in legislative and political contests. Restrictive laws have been used as a tool, or as a weapon in many cases, to ensure the disenfranchisement of black people. Yes, slavery prevented black people from gaining freedom, but a denial of citizenship kept free black people from any protection that freedom ensured. New scholarship on mobility, or lack thereof, shows it is just as much a feature of freedom as it is of slavery. Mobility and citizenship are intimately entwined. White supremacy’s chief investment has been the prohibition of black political, economic, and social mobility. In these essays we learn that freedom was not only confinement for black Americans, but freedom could also mean exile. The construction of “freedom” for black people could be confounding, particularly when free states prohibited black people from living within their borders. The paradox of living in this free and yet bound condition is not lost on black Americans today who experience constant policing of their bodies and whereabouts. Samantha Seeley’s claim that “the ability to remain just as much as the power to move became one of the defining ideas of African American political movements in the early nineteenth century” could equally be said of the Black Lives Matter movement. Accordingly, the field of slavery and abolition cannot be understood without carefully considering all of the myriad ways that antiblackness manifests itself. Local and state legislators cultivated animosity for the enslaved and free black people who managed to acquire anything of value for themselves. Antiblack sentiment is old and its ideological, political, and legal ramifications are enduring, even in spaces where antislavery sentiment reigns. I contend it is important to move away from a binary that fosters the North as “moral” or “savior” against a slaveholding South. Antiabolitionism was present and even vibrant throughout the North. We need additional

Epilogue

219

scholarship that will provide a deeper analysis of northern antiabolitionism and antiblackness. Too few are doing the work of magnifying northern racist practices and ideology in this moment. Slavery was, after all, a national crime, and this volume does an excellent job of explaining the political entrenchments of antiblack sentiment in the North. It was northern states that passed legal restrictions on free black people. It was northern states that placed color stipulations on voting, militia participation, land ownership, and education. In Boston, antiabolitionists ran Frederick Douglass and others off the stage in Tremont Temple and ransacked black homes and businesses when the abolitionist community attempted to honor the anniversary of John Brown’s raid. And economically, it was the North’s most populous city, New York, that failed at an attempt to secede with the Confederacy.2 While the field can change perspectives regarding the North, it can also change the way we imagine an empowered black class. For instance, the danger of single stories robs readers of fully understanding the complex history of black men who had been voting since the Revolution. We have forgotten about the pockets of black people who were doing what was deemed impossible. Avoiding the single story means moving beyond the Fifteenth Amendment to fully understand the scope of black male suffrage. It is right and relevant to investigate and document black men’s electoral participation after 1790 because it allows us to rethink early republican politics. To borrow from Representative James A. Garfield, in Van Gosse’s chapter, “suffrage to the black man in this country is not innovation, but restoration.” White supremacist ideology compels its supporters to examine progress as always at the expense of white power structures. However, reparations, reconstruction, or restoration is about the work of completion, not competition. History should teach us that liberty and justice are not finite commodities. We cannot underestimate the role black politics played during the antebellum period. In my own work, I examine the 1850s as one of the most intense decades in the nineteenth century for black politics before the Civil War and Reconstruction.3 Black leadership played a far greater role in shaping the politics of the Compromise of 1850 than has often been recognized. By specifically examining the efforts of black abolitionists to appeal to “moderate” white northerners in the Lower North, places where African Americans remained largely disfranchised, Andrew Diemer claims here that sectional tensions were in a sense accelerated. Additionally, calls for jury trials remained an important part of black abolitionist rhetoric up to and beyond the crisis of 1850. I contend the fugitive slave became the most contested political figure of the antebellum period. While neither side trusted

220

Kellie Carter Jackson

the other to declare truthfully the status of African Americans, black leaders took it upon themselves to ensure that the lives of free black Americans were protected, by force if necessary. Black responses shaped the entire conversation surrounding sectional politics, particularly in cases such as the Christiana Resistance of 1851 or the Anthony Burns Fugitive case in which a U.S. marshal was killed in his attempt to uphold the law. When David Potter contended that “there really was no compromise—a truce perhaps, an armistice, certainly a settlement, but not a true compromise,” this might also apply to how black leaders saw their own options in combating the Fugitive Slave Law; compromise was impossible. And language has to be intentional, clear, and specific. In the long nineteenth century, we also learn that language is political. Diemer’s desire to distinguish the semantics regarding “slave catching” versus “kidnapping” is key. He argues Douglass’s use of the term “kidnapping” served multiple purposes in black protest. Certainly, it captures an ideological critique of slavery itself as an illegitimate and illegal appropriation of black labor, but it also serves a more narrowly political purpose. Douglass’s coupling of the language of kidnapping with a critique of the Fugitive Slave Law’s denial of jury trials suggests he is not simply using it in an ideological way, but to raise doubts about the practical operation of the law, about the threat that it posed to legally free African Americans. Above all, African Americans and their white allies recognized the importance of coupling this violent resistance with a rhetorical outreach to white moderates. Language such as antislavery versus abolitionist or runaway versus fugitive had tremendous implications for how activists emphasized the motivations and even humanity of black people. Time and time again we see how mobilization by black men and women had significant impacts in the political arena. Hard-­fought-­for provisions by predominantly local black leaders who remain on the periphery of historical scholarship take center stage in every chapter. While much of the history highlights setbacks or failures, it is equally important to discuss the victories black activists earned. Sarah Gronningsater’s work exemplifies how two of the three petitions to legislature were achieved through political mobilization of black men and women. Also interesting is that the one petition they were not granted, removal of the color distinction from voting, was the one factor that would have required white politicians to reckon with an enfranchised African American voting bloc. It begs the question, what major changes could have been effected without the vote and how much more could have been accomplished had black men (and even women) been given unrestrained

Epilogue

221

voting rights earlier? A study of the long nineteenth century is not restricted to failures and victories; new scholarship also should explore what I see as limitations and possibilities. Furthermore, I am always appreciative when the contributions to political discourse are not limited to men alone. The future of the field depends on developing an engagement with women’s work, activism, and leadership that is not simply an add-­on. Historian Stephanie Camp’s words cannot be underestimated: “women’s history does not merely add to what we know; it changes what we know and how we know it.”4 Even in the long nineteenth century, we know that politics and gender were not mutually exclusive. Throughout history African American women have been actively engaged in the pursuit of freedom, socially, economically, politically, or otherwise. While simplistic single stories of Phillis Wheatley present her as a poet, David Waldstreicher illustrates how and why this young black woman was able to garner the attention of leading statesmen and how it should change the way we all think about her poetry. What does it mean to place Wheatley as a provocateur? For too long, historians have failed to couple Wheatley with political shrewdness. Wheatley’s intersections as an intellectual, a woman, and an African have major implications for the way she is presented outside of the literary canon and in the realm of public intellectual.5 Future scholarship cannot deny how black women’s identity as both women and as slaves explains their political ideologies. This is what moves the field forward; it is how we add to what we know. Gronningsater, too, reveals aspects of black women leaders that have been overlooked. The role black women played in their activism extends educational grievances to larger questions about black citizenship and community belonging. It is worth highlighting black women such as Phebe Ray and her visit to the school board in 1846, not only because the Rochester school campaign was one of the most successful in the antebellum United States, but also because her role—and the role of people like her—is often forgotten. We need to remind readers that change is possible without the help of national figures. Perhaps one of the best lines of the chapter explains the role of unknown people who contributed major changes to their communities without the leadership of prominent abolitionists. Gronningsater contends: “[Frederick] Douglass did not start a school campaign; he joined one.” Indeed, black women New Yorkers created conversations about the content of equal citizenship and in the process, their efforts shaped the careers and ideas of some of the nation’s most influential white antislavery figures, including Gerrit Smith, Myron Holley, William H. Seward, John A. Dix, Thurlow Weed, and Horace Greeley.

222

Kellie Carter Jackson

Essentially, each chapter is asking: how do people effect change? Moreover, how do people effect political change when they have no access or limited access to the ballot? How can we as scholars give equal value to political agitation outside of voting? If we have placed “an overemphasis on voting as the only way, or the main way, to practice politics,” as Gronningsater contends, in what ways have we discounted the methods by which many ordinary ­people practiced formal politics in the early nineteenth century? I might also ask: how has the ballot been used as a weapon to deprive African Americans of equal protection under the law? Reading these essays, I could not help but think how the effective strategies of black activists during the long nineteenth century might inform the contemporary struggles of black Americans in education enfranchisement, citizenship and belonging, migration, mass incarceration, or any space African Americans struggle to occupy. Many of the grievances expressed in these pieces could easily be reiterated by black people who continually fight for voting rights, school desegregation, fair housing, employment opportunities, and equal allocation of resources to this day. Success will require solidarity and sacrifice; otherwise, these struggles continue. Though it is often attributed to Malcolm X, nineteenth-­century activists were giving the “Ballot or the Bullet” speech 100 years earlier.6 In fact, Frederick Douglass stated, “What we want is anti-­slavery government, in harmony with our anti-­slavery speech, one which will give effect to our words, and translate them into acts. For this, the ballot is needed, and if this will not be heard or heeded, then the bullet. We have had enough, and are sick of it.”7 It was not the civil rights movement but the abolitionist movement that created a precedent for national activism regarding human rights. The long nineteenth century is quintessentially about black people confronting power, resisting oppression, and demanding the United States live up to its creed. Moreover, if our creed as historians is to avoid the dangers of a single story, then the long nineteenth century must be a vibrant telling and retelling of the diversity of black political practices.

Afterword Laura F. Edwards

In her commentary, Kellie Carter Jackson emphasizes the diversity of black politics that the essays in Revolutions and Reconstructions have uncovered. I can only agree and applaud, with great enthusiasm, all the ways that these essays extend our understanding of African Americans’ politics in the long nineteenth century. In this epilogue, I want to raise another issue, one that runs through all the essays, but that none address directly: Why has it been so hard for historians to see the depth and breadth of African Americans’ political engagement in the long nineteenth century? Specifically, what is it about our historiographical frameworks that makes it so difficult to acknowledge what, as these essays suggest, has been right in front of our noses for so long? I think that there is an implicit answer in these essays. They all point to the fact that we tend to assume too much about the terrain on which African Americans waged their political battles. In particular, there is a tendency to assume that they were always already political outsiders, without access to any of the new republic’s governing institutions. But, as these essays suggest, the presumption of exclusion not only misconstrues the operation of governing institutions and African American politics in the long nineteenth century, but also keeps us from integrating the insights of these essays into the larger historiography of American politics. David Waldstreicher’s discussion of Phillis Wheatley’s engagement in post-­Revolutionary politics provides a good place to start in both chronological and conceptual terms. As Waldstreicher argues, Wheatley extended the forms of classicism, “a heritage seen by her captors as at once distant (ancient) and universal,” to the larger Mediterranean world, including Africa. In so doing, Wheatley highlighted a central contradiction of the Revolution: If people of African descent had always been part of the larger culture that defined the American experience, then why were they excluded and subordinated? As Waldstreicher maintains, she could pose that question directly

224

Laura F. Edwards

because of the way she wrapped it up in evangelical piety and posed it in a decidedly feminine voice. That she had such a wide audience underscores the power of those ideas. In the context of the historiography of Revolutionary politics, Wheatley is often seen as unrepresentative because her life was so different from the lives of other people of her race and gender. As Waldstriecher’s analysis suggests, though, Wheatley is actually representative of the power and possibilities of the Revolution’s broad political currents. But wait. Was Wheatley really unrepresentative of other African American women? In fact, Waldstreicher’s analysis adds to the substantial body of work produced by historians of African American women, who have made a compelling case for black women’s engagement in the political debates and intellectual currents of the long nineteenth century. Still, what is now a small mountain of scholarship has yet to change the basic contours of the historiography, particularly in the context of political history, where African American women still figure as outsiders. As these historians have been arguing, the problem actually lies in deeply rooted historiographical frameworks that position African American women as political outsiders. Specifically, there is a tendency to assume that all the legal restrictions placed on African Americans, free and enslaved, kept them on the margins, if not entirely outside the realm of politics. Even work that focuses on African Americans tends to place those constraints at the center of the analysis, tracing the effects, challenges to them, and efforts to create meaningful lives despite them. The institutional terrain of politics, however, extended well beyond those restrictions, even for African Americans. Focusing only there artificially separates them from the broader political culture and obscures many of the ways they engaged with it.1 The Revolution gets in the way of that broader picture. Within the historiography, the Revolution serves as the defining watershed for the nineteenth-­ century United States: it marks the end of the colonial era and the beginning of the new nation. Yet the governing institutions of the new republic were built on the foundations of its colonial past, characterized by multiple jurisdictions and porous conceptions of state sovereignty. As recent scholarship emphasizes, legal pluralism characterized colonialism before the nineteenth century, mixing together the legal regimes of colonizers and colonized. In other historiographical contexts the term “pluralism” is linked to conceptual paradigms that posit a false equivalency among vastly unequal parties and obscure the operation of power. In the context of legal history, though, pluralism refers to the simultaneous operation of different legal frameworks. Those mixed legal regimes did not indicate the weakness of colonial powers.

Afterword

225

To the contrary, they shored up colonial authority.2 In fact, as historian Lauren Benton has argued, the idea that states could claim sovereignty within certain geographic bounds developed slowly, over time. As a result, the territorial borders of nation states remained permeable in the early modern period, resulting in overlapping legal regimes, connected to different authorities operating in the same place. That conclusion comports with recent work in Indian history, which emphasizes the importance of native sovereignty, which persisted within the geographic boundaries of European colonies in North America as well as the new United States.3 Wheatley’s poetry emerged from this institutional context, one where the juridical borders of the new republic were not as well defined as the historiography so often assumes. The country’s institutions, moreover, were connected to a world in which colonizers and the colonized were tied together through the exchange—often exploitative—of goods, people, and ideas. In that context, Wheatley did not claim a political culture that belonged to her oppressors; she made use of a political culture that already belonged to her, as the heritage of people from Africa as well as those from Europe. Despite all the legal constraints placed on them within the American colonies and the new republic, Wheatley and other African Americans were part of the new republic from the outset. Overlapping jurisdictions and dispersed authority obtained within nation states as well. The legal order of early modern England consisted of a patchwork of jurisdictions associated with different governing bodies: estates, municipalities, corporations, the military, Parliament, the church, and the king. Operating simultaneously and handling similar issues, these jurisdictions reflected the political context of the time, one in which authority was dispersed through multiple governing bodies—a situation analogous to the kind of legal pluralism that scholars describe in the colonial context, although involving different legal frameworks within nations. Within nation states, there was no singular, definitive set of rules that applied universally in all like matters. Law took form in particular historical moments, amid particular social configurations. Even as it reflected context, law also constituted it. That institutional context traveled to the North American colonies, where the legal system, as historian Stanley Katz has described it, was “a complex, pluralistic, asymmetrical, gendered, and multicultural set of systems—messy systems, if indeed the term ‘system’ can be applied . . . at all.” 4 Messiness—to use Katz’s term—persisted after the Revolution in a system where states and the federal government shared authority not only with each other, but also with counties and municipalities. The Articles of

226

Laura F. Edwards

Confederation created “the United States of America,” but located sovereignty within the states, which retained “the sole and exclusive Regulation and Government of its internal police.” That term—“internal police”—represented an open-­ended grant of authority, which covered virtually any issue that touched on the public interest, including all issues relating to social welfare, public health, and economic matters as well as an open-­ended array of interpersonal conflicts where the point was the maintenance of the peace, not the preservation of individual rights. At the time, conceptions of police power were decidedly local as well as exceptionally broad, which meant that the actual practice of internal policing lay with local governments. States generally kept that system in place for most of the period between the Revolution and the Civil War. While the U.S. Constitution did elevate the federal government as a sovereign authority, at least in certain areas, it did not alter the situation otherwise. On paper, the division of authority was clear, with the federal government dealing with certain issues, the states handling matters relating to the public welfare, and local governments administering the states’ policies. In practice, though, this system operated just like the overlapping jurisdictions of the colonial era: a distant central government (although considerably weakened); states instead of colonies (although states had more power than colonies, at least in theory); and local government (which still had expansive authority, particularly in matters involving the public order).5 African Americans had experience with governing institutions of the colonial era and the new republic, just as they did with the wider institutional context of colonial rule. As Scott Heerman argues, African Americans in southern Illinois made use of the local courts to establish and protect their freedom in the first half of the nineteenth century. Doing so required constant work in this free state that bordered slave states and where slavery still existed, which was why African Americans were always in court. “As African Americans appeared in court and learned to work within the state’s legal system,” he writes, “a local culture of the law developed, allowing some people in slavery and involuntary servitude to use the courts to their advantage.” In fact, though, African Americans may have arrived in Illinois with considerable knowledge of the law and the legal system. Free blacks had to know how to navigate the legal system, regardless of where they lived, both before and after the Revolution. The laws of slavery and the legal restrictions placed on free blacks had the effect of drawing African Americans into the legal system of early America: not only were they frequent targets of public regulation, but they also frequently required the court’s intercession because their subordinate status made it difficult for them to defend themselves on their own.

Afterword

227

As a result, free blacks were in and out of courts all the time. Even enslaved people would not necessarily have been isolated from the legal system or the law, which also defined their status in ways that made it difficult to ignore. The possibility that African Americans in southern Illinois used legal knowledge that they already had, though, does not detract from Heerman’s underlying point: that African Americans used the law in pursuit of political goals, despite the legal constraints placed on them.6 African Americans insisted on their place within the new republic’s governing institutions not necessarily as outsiders looking in, but as insiders uncertain of their status and determined to stay, as Martha Jones shows so compellingly in Birthright Citizens. Van Gosse’s essay on African American suffrage underscores that point. As Gosse reminds us, free African Americans voted for decades following the Revolution in unlikely states, including North Carolina, Tennessee, Maryland, Delaware, and New Jersey. Gosse’s frustration with the historiographical silence on the the issue is palpable throughout the essay, as is the unstated question that frames the analysis: How could historians just dismiss the fact that African Americans voted in the post-­Revolutionary era when they spend so much time on efforts to claim suffrage once it was taken away? Part of the answer lies in the historiographical tendency to downplay the importance of the new republic’s colonial past. As Gosse’s analysis suggests, African Americans’ exercise of the franchise had as much to do with continuity as change: established practices that linked the franchise to the possession of property as well as Revolutionary ideals of equality. The enfranchisement of African Americans extended colonial institutional practices, which limited the vote to those with property, but did not elevate it as the only means of accessing governing institutions. In that institutional context, African American suffrage was consistent with both slavery and racial inequality. But, as Gosse’s analysis also suggests, context mattered. In the post-­Revolutionary era, when the franchise became a symbol of political equality, the fact that some African Americans had it did challenge underlying structural inequalities—which explains disfranchisement.7 Drawing on the work of both Maggie McKinley and Dan Carpenter, Sarah Gronningsater reveals petitioning as yet another form of meaningful political participation that African Americans used to great effect. The title of the essay, “Practicing Formal Politics Without the Vote,” communicates both the political success of African Americans’ petitioning campaigns as well as the weight of historiographical frameworks that still measure political power in terms of suffrage. Even Gronningsater characterizes petitioning as a fallback position, once the vote was lost. Yet petitioning suggests both

228

Laura F. Edwards

the extent to which African Americans insisted on participation within the new republic’s governing institutions and the availability of means of access beyond the vote. Petitioning was a longstanding pratice that allowed people without the franchise or other rights the means of accessing government. That was why the U.S. Constitution and many state constitutions included petitioning as a fundamental right. As Gronningsater shows, African Americans used it to initiate and realize a range of policy goals that they might not have been able to obtain through voting, by itself.8 The fact that all the layers of government did not always operate in sync provided African Americans more scope for political action. That institutional backdrop is evident in Samantha Seeley’s essay, which charts the path of legal efforts to limit black mobility across various jurisdictions. Echoing the findings of other recent work, Seeley argues that state laws limiting free blacks’ mobility in the Upper South and mid-­Atlantic were rooted in local efforts to exclude free blacks from counties. This “act of translation” from the local level to state policy then had national effects, raising questions of African Americans’ citizenship to the federal level, where they propelled the new republic toward the Civil War. The divisiveness of debates over African Americans’ mobility, however, also resulted from a particular institutional context, one in which citizenship had multiple valences because no single jurisdiction could claim authority over the issue. In the period between the Revolution and the Civil War, neither states nor the federal government completely controlled citizenship. As Seeley’s essay makes clear, it was a profoundly local issue as well, in the sense that residency in a county or muncipality was a necessary prerequisite for civic participation. Poor relief depended on residency in local areas, as did other claims on government.9 All those layers were on full display in the New York City Ordinances of 1817, which required municipal officials to be “citizens of the State of New-­ York” as well as “inhabitants and householders of the City of New-­York.” State citizenship was essential for officials who had to uphold state as well as municipal laws. So it was important in that context. But that definition of citizenship disappeared in ordinances dealing with matters relating to governance within the city, such as the regulation of markets, assembly in public areas, and fire prevention and control. Those measures referred to the citizens of New York City, a category that seemed more like “inhabitants,” because everyone was obligated to abide by those regulations. Nowhere did the ordinances refer to U.S. citizenship. There was little need, since that status had a negligible effect on governance within the city, as described in the municipal ordinances. Applications for U.S. citizenship in Boston’s municipal court

Afterword

229

underscore the point. That municipal courts handled the process speaks volumes about the power of local jurisdictions over citizenship. So did the fact that applicants had to establish residency in Suffolk County in order to qualify for U.S. citizenship at all. Local citizenship was a necessary component of U.S. citizenship. In this context, questions about free blacks’ mobility were not just about their movement from state to state, but also about their movement across local, state, and national jurisdictions that all approached citizenship differently. State laws, moreover, only went so far. As the work of other scholars has shown, enforcement rested with local areas, just as the naturalization process did. Local areas did as they saw fit, producing wide variations in practice within states. Given the overlapping jurisdictions that defined governance in the period between the Revolution and the Civil War, citizenship and the related issue of mobility were even more contested than Seeley’s essay suggests.10 Inclusion was a constant battle on ever-­shifting ground, a point that all the essays in this volume underscore. As Padraig Riley argues, the virulent forms of racism that emerged in the decades following the Revolution had deep roots in post-­Revolutionary politics. Slaveholders doubled down on slavery and other racial restrictions in response to all political claims made by African Americans—the kinds of claims to freedom and equality that the other essays in this volume explore. But their authority depended on a “national political culture that accepted their right to enslave” and “a broad portion of the nonslaveholding electorate of their own states and of the United States to deem slavery legitimate.” The racial politics, however, were never certain, as Andrew Diemer shows in his analysis of African Americans’ success in shaping the Fugitive Slave Act, which figured prominently in the Compromise of 1850. As Christopher Bonner reminds us, Roger Taney’s decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford was just another volley in this ongoing fight. Taney completely misconstrued the history of African Americans’ relationship to citizenship status in order to justify his own decision denying them that status. But his decision was new, not a summary of past practices. James Shinn’s essay on African Americans’ support for the Free Cuba movement in the 1860s underscores how far off the mark Taney was. As Shinn argues, African Americans’ support for Cuba came from their identification with the political traditions of the United States, not their alienation from them.11 Taney’s decision in Dred Scott obscures the actual history of African Americans’ political connections to the United States. Yet, oddly, Taney’s false claims—that African Americans had been excluded from the polity at the outset and were kept on the outside—still undergird the historiography.

230

Laura F. Edwards

It is time that we set Taney and his false narrative aside, so that we can see the complicated history that he and so many other white Americans in the Civil War era were trying so desperately to deny—and to change. If we do that, then we can use the findings of this amazing collection to change the historical narrative of American politics and finally retrieve a powerful past that lies waiting for our attention.

Notes

Introduction 1.  Pioneering accounts of the modernity of early national black politics include the work of Benjamin Quarles, Vincent Harding, and, more recently, Richard S. Newman and Paul Polgar. Often this work has persuasively employed language associated with twentieth-­century movements to those of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These works exist in tension with another tradition, discussed below, of analyzing the transformation of slave politics in, for example, the work of Eugene D. Genovese, Sterling Stuckey, and Steven Hahn. 2. Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic (New York, 1990); for a similar emphasis earlier, see Leon Litwack, North of Slavery (Chicago, 1961). For a critique see James Oakes, “Conflict Versus Racial Consensus in the History of Antislavery Politics,” in Contesting Slavery: The Politics of Bondage and Freedom in the New Nation, ed. John Craig Hammond and Matthew Mason (Charlottesville, VA, 2011), 291–303; and Oakes, “The New Cult of Consensus” (2016), http://​nonsite​.org​/feature​/the​-­new​-­cult​-­of​-­consensus. 3.  This is a strain that began in the 1960s and has been developed with care and sophistication in the work of Eric Foner and some of his students. Foner, The Story of American Freedom (New York, 1998); Timothy Patrick McCarthy and John Stauffer, eds., Prophets of Protest (New York, 2006); Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause (New Haven, CT, 2014); for its incorporation into the narrative of the coming of the Civil War with a notably lengthened perspective see Elizabeth R. Varon, Disunion! The Coming of the Civil War, 1789–1859 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2008). For a recent synthesis see Ralph Young, Dissent: The History of an American Idea (New York, 2014). For alternative groundings that are more attuned to religious radicals and to the seventeenth-­ and eighteenth-­century origins see Staughton Lynd, Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism (New York, 1968) and Vincent Harding, There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America (New York, 1981). 4. The phrasing here deliberately echoes that of Edmund S. Morgan’s Organization of American Historians presidential address and article of 1972, “Slavery and Freedom: The American Paradox,” Journal of American History (1972): 3–27, in which he noted that historians had for too long ignored the importance of slavery to the development of the nation. In the first footnote of his essay, Morgan singled out the influence of Staughton Lynd, Class Conflict, Slavery and the U.S. Constitution (1968; repr. New York, 2011). 5.  Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-­Bellum South (New York, 1956), followed by Stampp, The Era of Reconstruction, 1865–1877 (New York, 1965); August Meier and Elliot Rudwick, Black History and the Historical Profession, 1915–1980 (Urbana, IL, 1981). 6. Canonical works in this area include William H. Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852–1856 (New York, 1987); Michael F. Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s (New York,

232

Notes to Page 4

1978); and Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (New York, 1999). Eric Foner, Free Labor, Free Soil, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York, 1970) pays far greater attention to race and racialism than do the conventional political historians, but mentions black men as Republicans only in passing. For works that began to depart from the new political history’s exclusions of African Americans in the form of fugitive slaves and rebels as political actors, see James Oakes, “The Political Significance of Slave Resistance,” History Workshop Journal 22 (1986): 89–107; Oakes, Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South (New York, 1990); William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion, 1776–1854 (New York, 1991); Freehling, The Reintegration of American History (New York, 1994); John Ashworth, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic, 1820–1850 (New York, 1995). 7. Charles H. Wesley, “The Negroes of New York in the Emancipation Movement,” Journal of Negro History 24/1 (January 1939): 65–103; Wesley, “The Participation of Negroes in Anti-­ Slavery Political Parties,” Journal of Negro History 29/1 (January 1944): 32–74; Wesley, “The Negro’s Struggle for Freedom in Its Birthplace,” Journal of Negro History 30 (January 1945): 62–81; Wesley, “Negro Suffrage in the Period of Constitution-­Making, 1787–1865,” Journal of Negro History 32 (April 1947): 143–68; John Hope Franklin, The Free Negro in North Carolina, 1790–1860 (1943; repr. Chapel Hill, NC, 1995). 8.  James Truslow Adams, “Disfranchisement of Negroes in New England,” American Historical Review 30 (April 1925): 543–47. 9. Dixon Ryan Fox, “The Negro Vote in Old New York,” Political Science Quarterly 32/2 (June 1917): 252–75. 10.  Emil Olbrich, The Development of Sentiment on Negro Suffrage to 1860 (1912; repr. Freeport, NY, 1971). 11.  Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969). For the older literature, see Theodore Clarke Smith, The Liberty and Free Soil Parties in the Northwest (New York, 1897); John Jay Chapman, William Lloyd Garrison (New York, 1913); Gilbert H. Barnes, The Antislavery Impulse, 1830–1844 (New York, 1933); Gilbert H. Barnes and Dwight L. Dumond, eds., The Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimke Weld, and Sarah Grimke, 1832–1844 (New York, 1934); Dumond, ed., The Letters of James Gillespie Birney, 1831–1857 (New York, 1938); Dumond, Antislavery Origins of the Civil War in the United States (Ann Arbor, MI, 1939); Dumond, Antislavery: The Crusade for Freedom in America (Ann Arbor, MI, 1961); David Herbert Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War (New York, 1960); John L. Thomas, The Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison: A Biography (Boston, 1963); Aileen S. Kraditor, Means and Ends in American Abolitionism: Garrison and His Critics on Strategy and Tactics, 1834–1850 (New York, 1969). Merton L. Dillon, “Gilbert H. Barnes and Dwight L. Dumond: An Appraisal,” Reviews in American History 21 (1993): 539–52 is a useful exploration of Dumond and Barnes’s extremely important intervention, after decades in which abolitionists were denigrated as marginal fanatics. 12. Although both published a great deal more in black history, the signature works were Philip S. Foner, The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, Volumes 1–5 (New York, 1939–1952); and Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York, 1943); followed by Aptheker, ed., A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States, Volumes 1–7 (New York, 1951–1994). 13.  Sterling Stuckey, The Ideological Origins of Black Nationalism (Boston, 1972). Even before Stuckey, Arno Press had reprinted Samuel Ringgold Ward, Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro: His

Notes to Pages 5–6

233

Antislavery Labours in the United States, Canada & England (1855; repr. New York, 1968), and the first biography of Garnet appeared that same year; Earl Ofari, “Let Your Motto Be Resistance!” The Life and Thought of Henry Highland Garnet (Boston, 1972); followed by Joel Schor, Henry Highland Garnet: A Voice of Black Radicalism in the Nineteenth Century (Westport, CT, 1977). Little known but invaluable is David E. Swift, Black Prophets of Justice: Activist Clergy Before the Civil War (Baton Rouge, LA, 1989), which examines Charles B. Ray, Samuel E. Cornish, James W. C. Pennington, Theodore Wright, Amos Beman, and Garnet. The only book-­length work on Ward is Ronald K. Burke, Samuel Ringgold Ward: Christian Abolitionist (New York, 1995), but he badly needs an investigation equal to the searching investigation of McCune Smith in John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge, MA, 2001), which, however, omits entirely his long career as a Black Whig in the 1840s. 14. Leon F. Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790–1860 (Chicago, 1961). 15. Ibid., 75, for the comment, often cited, that “By 1840, some 93 per cent of the northern free Negro population lived in states which completely or practically excluded them from the right to vote. Only in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine could Negroes vote on an equal basis with whites,” although later (90), he cites as “plausible” an 1851 assertion by a black convention in New York that that their five thousand voters “held the balance of power” in the state. 16.  Phyllis F. Field, The Politics of Race in New York: The Struggle for Black Suffrage in the Civil War Era (Ithaca, NY, 1982); Robert J. Cottrol, The Afro-­Yankees: Providence’s Black Community in the Antebellum Era (Westport, CT, 1982); William Cheek and Aimee Lee Cheek, John Mercer Langston and the Fight for Black Freedom, 1829–1865 (Urbana, IL, 1989); Kathryn Grover, The Fugitive’s Gibraltar: Escaping Slaves and Abolitionism in New Bedford, Massachusetts (Amherst, MA, 2001); David N. Gellman and David Quigley, Jim Crow New York: A Documentary History of Race and Citizenship, 1777–1877 (New York, 2003); Stephen Kantrowitz, More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829–1889 (New York, 2012). 17.  See http://​bap​.chadwyck​.com for a complete description. Some scholars have observed, however, that the documents chosen for the printed volumes underestimate engagement with mainstream or electoral politics, when compared with the microfilm edition. 18.  See Lee Benson, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case (Prince­ ton, NJ, 1961), which takes New York’s black men into account, and Daniel Walker Howe in The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago, 1979), which acknowledges the role of black men in the Whig Party. 19.  Robert J. Cottrol, “In Search of Afro-­Yankee History,” New England Journal of Black Studies 1/3 (1983): 19–39. 20.  Phillips’s bibliography is massive, but the definitive works were Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime (New York, 1918); followed by Life and Labor in the Old South (New York, 1929). 21. Like Phillips’s, Genovese’s bibliography is massive, but the most definitive interventions were Eugene D. Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South (New York, 1965); The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation (New York, 1969); Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974); and From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-­American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World (Baton Rouge, LA, 1979). Equally influential were John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community:

234

Notes to Pages 8–10

Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York, 1972); and Herbert H. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York, 1976). James Oakes, The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders (New York, 1982), remains a powerful counter to Genovese; see also Oakes, Slavery and Freedom. 22. An important reassessment of the concept of agency in southern slave studies is Walter Johnson, “On Agency,” Journal of Social History 37 (2003): 121–34; see also Johnson, “Slavery, Reparations, and the Mythic March of Freedom,” Raritan 27 (2007): 41–67; and Johnson, “Agency: A Ghost Story,” in Slavery’s Ghost: The Problem of Freedom in the Age of Emancipation, ed. Richard Follett (Baltimore, 2011), 8–30. 23. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll; Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution. 24. Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York, 1974); James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, Black Bostonians: Family Life and Community Struggle in the Antebellum North (New York, 1979); Julie Winch, Philadelphia’s Black Elite: Activism, Accommodation, and the Struggle for Black Autonomy, 1787–1848 (Philadelphia, 1988); Gary  B. Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720–1840 (Cambridge, MA, 1988); Shane White, Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New York City, 1770–1810 (Athens, GA, 1991); Graham Russell Hodges, Root & Branch: African Americans in New York & East Jersey, 1613–1863 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1993); Rhoda Golden Freeman, The Free Negro in New York City in the Era Before the Civil War (New York, 1994); Hodges, Slavery and Freedom in the Rural North: African Americans in Monmouth County, New Jersey, 1665–1865 (Madison, NJ, 1997); Winch, A Gentleman of Color: The Life of James Forten (New York, 2002); Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863 (Chicago, 2003); Nikki M. Taylor, Frontiers of Freedom: Cincinnati’s Black Community, 1802–1868 (Athens, OH, 2005); Erica Armstrong Dunbar, A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City (New Haven, CT, 2008); Leslie M. Alexander, African or American? Black Identity and Political Activism in New York City, 1784–1861 (Urbana, IL, 2008). 25.  Richard Newman, Patrick Rael, and Philip Lapsansky, eds., Pamphlets of Protest: An Anthology of Early African-­American Protest Literature, 1790–1860 (New York, 2001); McCarthy and Stauffer, eds., Prophets of Protest. 26.  The key distinction between political and movement histories lies in their temporality, in that the latter trace the usually brief life cycles of movements as they ebb and flow over a few years, sometimes a decade, very occasionally a generation. This framing is at odds with the calendar of political history, based on the long-­term workings of party systems and unending, repetitive sequences of elections. Conventional political histories are equally problematic, however, in that they treat movements as temporary disruptions, ignoring the extent to which politicians and parties respond to pressure from below. In part, this is because electoral competition goes forward at a steady state, even a high pace of partisan intensity, regardless of whether movements are rising or declining. This bifurcation is especially noticeable in the antebellum era, where slavery and race were always present as a subtext of partisan and sectional tension. 27.  Patrick Rael, Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000), 9. 28.  James B. Stewart, “Reconsidering the Abolitionists in the Age of Fundamentalist Politics,” in his important collection Abolitionist Politics and the Coming of the Civil War (Amherst, MA, 2008), 205–6. 29.  Elijah Anderson, “Black Shadow Politics in Midwestville: The Insiders, The Outsiders, and the Militant Young,” Sociological Inquiry 42 (1972): 19–27; Nash, Forging Freedom, 191.

Notes to Pages 10–12

235

See Richard S. Newman, Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers (New York, 2008), 209, for a succinct description of shadow politics as “the mimicry of formal political activity in black-­controlled institutions.” Earlier, Newman had explored a generation change from deferential-­Federalist to Jacksonian-­activist black politics: see his “Protest in Black and White: The Formation and Transformation of an African American Political Community During the Early Republic,” in Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic, ed. Jeffrey L. Pasley, Andrew W. Robertson, and David Waldstreicher (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004), 180–206. 30.  Richard S. Newman, “Faith in the Ballot,” Common-­Place 9/1 (October 2008), www​ .common​-­place​.org. 31. In contrast, see Andrew Diemer’s account of “dynamism and engagement” in The Politics of Black Citizenship: Free African Americans in the Mid-­Atlantic Borderland, 1817–1863 (Athens, GA, 2016). 32. Lawrence Levine, Black Culture, Black Consciousness (New York, 1977); Roger D. Abrahams, Singing the Master: The Emergence of African American Culture in the Plantation South (New York, 1992); Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York, 1994); Kelley, Yo Mama’s Disfunktional! Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (New York, 1997); Shane White, Somewhat More Independent (Athens, GA, 1991); White and Graham White, Stylin’: African American Expressive Culture from its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit (Ithaca, NY 1998); White, Stories of Freedom in Black New York (Cambridge, MA, 2002); White and Graham White, The Sounds of Slavery (Boston, 2006); White, “The Death of James Johnson,” American Quarterly 54 (1999): 753–95; White, “Freedom’s First Con: African Americans and Changing Notes in Antebellum New York City,” Journal of the Early Republic 34 (2014): 385–409. 33. Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men; Lawrence J. Friedman, Gregarious Saints (New York, 1982); Paul Goodman, Of One Blood: Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial Equality (Berkeley, CA, 1998); Walter Rucker, The River Flows On (Baton Rouge, LA, 2006); Rael, Black Identity and Black Protest; Craig Steven Wilder, In the Company of Black Men (New York, 2006); Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York, 1987); Stuckey, Going Through the Storm (New York, 1994); William D. Piersen, Black Yankees (Amherst, MA, 1988); Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol (New York, 1996); Margaret Washington, Sojourner Truth’s America (Urbana, IL, 2009). 34.  Richard S. Newman, “Liberation Technology: Black Printed Protest in the Age of Franklin,” Early American Studies 8 (2010): 173–98; Jasmine Nicole Cobb, Picture Freedom: Remaking Black Visuality in the Early Nineteenth Century (New York, 2015); John Stauffer, Zoe Trodd, and Celeste-­Merie Bernier, Picturing Frederick Douglass (New York, 2015); Robert S. Levine, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity (Chapel Hill, 1997); Levine, Dislocating Race and Nation: Episodes in Nineteenth-­Century Literary Nationalism (Chapel Hill, NC, 2008); Levine, The Lives of Frederick Douglass (Cambridge, MA, 2016); P. Gabriele Foreman, Activist Sentiments: Reading Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (Urbana, IL, 2009); Ezra Greenspan, William Wells Brown (New York, 2014); Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Stein, eds., Early African American Print Culture (Philadelphia, 2013). 35. One might, consequently, also observe something of what Eric Slauter calls a “trade gap” between literary and cultural studies work and history, as “critics” consume historical scholarship without themselves being taken as seriously by historians, if citations are the measure of influence. The consequences of the disciplinary divide can be unfortunate, as when the perhaps most ambitious and searching account of black intellectual and political life during the

236

Notes to Pages 12–14

period was published by the late historian Dickson D. Bruce Jr. as The Origins of African American Literature, 1680–1865 (Charlottesville, VA, 2001), and not initially appreciated by historians despite its rigorous consideration of ideologies and movement strategies as well as literary form. Slauter, “History, Literature, and the Atlantic World,” Early American Literature 43 (2008): 153–86. 36.  For a critique focused on the twentieth century see Adolph Reed and Kenneth Warren, eds., Renewing Black Intellectual History (Boulder, CO, 2011), introduction. 37. Ira Berlin synthesized African American history in terms of four migrations in The Making of African America: The Four Great Migrations (New York, 2010). 38.  Richard S. Newman, “ ‘Lucky to Be Born in Pennsylvania’: Free Soil, Fugitive Slaves and the Making of Pennsylvania’s Anti-­Slavery Borderland,” Slavery & Abolition 32 (2011): 413–30; Stanley Harrold, Border War: Fighting over Slavery Before the Civil War (Chapel Hill, NC, 2010); Andrew Diemer, The Politics of Black Citizenship: Free African Americans in the Mid-­Atlantic Borderland, 1817–1863 (Athens, GA, 2016); Matthew Salafia, Slavery’s Borderland: Freedom and Bondage Along the Ohio River (Philadelphia, 2013); Christopher Phillips, The Rivers Ran Backward: The Civil War and the Remaking of the American Middle Border (New York, 2016). 39. Jeanine Marie DeLombard, Slavery on Trial: Law, Abolitionism, and Print Culture (Chapel Hill, NC, 2007); DeLombard, In the Shadow of the Gallows: Race, Crime, and American Civic Identity (Philadelphia, 2012); Stephen M. Best, The Fugitive’s Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession (Chicago, 2004); Edlie L. Wong, Neither Fugitive Nor Free: Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits, and the Legal Culture of Travel (New York, 2009); Hong Gia Phan, Bonds of Citizenship: Law and the Labors of Emancipation (New York, 2013). 40.  Richard J. M. Blackett, The Captives’ Quest for Freedom: Captive Slaves, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, and the Politics of Slavery (New York, 2018); Scott Hancock, “Crossing Freedom’s Fault Line: The Underground Railroad and Recentering African Americans in Civil War Causality,” Journal of the Civil War Era 2 (June 2013): 159–92; Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, Colored Travelers: Mobility and the Fight for Citizenship before the Civil War (Chapel Hill, NC, 2016). See also William W. Freehling, “Why the U.S. Fugitive Slave Phenomenon Was Crucial” (Lecture at Yale University, 2002), https://​glc​.yale​.edu​/sites​/default​/files​/files​/maroon​/freehling​.pdf; Harvey Amani Whitfield, Blacks on the Border: The Black Refugees in British North America, 1815–1860 (Lebanon, NH, 2006); Gerald Horne, Negro Comrades of the Crown: African Americans and the British Empire Fight the U.S. Before Emancipation (New York, 2013); Sarah E. Cornell, “Citizens of Nowhere: Fugitive Slaves and Free African Americans in Mexico, 1833–1857,” Journal of American History 100 (September 2013): 351–74; Damien Pargas, ed., Fugitive Slaves and Spaces of Freedom in North America (Athens, GA, 2018). 41. Anthony E. Kaye, “The Second Slavery: Modernity in the Nineteenth-­Century South and the Atlantic World,” Journal of Southern History 75 (2009): 627–50; Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA, 1999); Steven Deyle, Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (New York, 2005); Walter Johnson, ed., The Chattel Principle (New Haven, CT, 2004); Johnson, River of Dark Dreams (Cambridge, MA, 2013); Edward Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York, 2014). 42. Matthew Spooner, “Freedom, Reenslavement, and Movement in the Revolutionary South,” in Race and Nation in the Age of Emancipations, ed. Whitney Nell Stewart and John Garrison Marks (Athens, GA: 2018); 13–34; Julie Saville, The Work of Reconstruction (New York, 1998); Yael Sternhell, Routes of War: The World of Movement in the Confederate South (Cambridge, MA,

Notes to Pages 14–17

237

2012); James Oakes, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 (New York, 2011); Gregory P. Downs, After Appomattox (New York, 2015). 43. Leon Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York, 1979); William Cohen, At Freedom’s Edge: Black Mobility and the Southern White Quest for Racial Control, 1861–1915 (Baton Rouge, LA, 1991). 44.  W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (New York, 1935); Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution (New York, 1988); William A. Link and James J. Broomall, eds., Rethinking Emancipation: Legacies of Slavery and the Quest for Black Freedom (New York, 2016); David W. Blight and Jim Downs, eds., Beyond Freedom: Disrupting the History of Emancipation (Athens, GA, 2017). 45. Michael Hanchard, Party/Politics: Horizons in Black Political Thought (Chicago, 2006), 14, 50. 46.  Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Trials of Phillis Wheatley (New York, 2001); David Waldstreicher addresses Gates’s invented primal scene and some of the disciplinary issues it suggests in “The Wheatleyan Moment,” Early American Studies 9 (Fall 2011): 522–51 and the literature cited there. For a version of the essay in this collection that is focused on these questions and how they relate to the historiography of the American Revolution see Waldstreicher, “Ancients, Moderns, and Africans: Phillis Wheatley and the Politics of Empire and Slavery in the American Revolution,” Journal of the Early Republic 37 (2017): 701–33. 47.  For the project at the University of Delaware, see http://​coloredconventions​.org/. 48. John Ernest, A Nation Within a Nation: Organizing African-­American Communities Before the Civil War (Chicago, 2011), ix, 132–33. Ernest began in the field with a study of Liberation Historiography: African American Writers and the Challenge of History, 1794–1861 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004); see also Ernest, Chaotic Justice: Rethinking African American Literary History (Chapel Hill, 2009). For the conventions as a print phenomenon see also Derrick R. Spires, The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States (Philadelphia, 2019), 79–120. 49.  For conventions in the women’s rights movement see especially Nancy Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill, NC, 1998). For the centrality of the press and editors to party politics see Jeffrey L. Pasley, The Tyranny of Printers: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (Charlottesville, 2001); Pasley, “Minnows, Spies, and Aristocrats: The Social Crisis of Congress in the Age of Martin Van Buren,” Journal of the Early Republic 27 (2007): 599–653. 50.  Gene Andrew Jarrett, Representing the Race: A New Political History of African American Literature (New York, 2011), 4, 27, 53. 51. David Waldstreicher, “Minstrelization and Nationhood: ‘Backside Albany,’ Backlash, and the Wartime Origins of Blackface Minstrelsy,” in Warring for America: Cultural Contests in the Era of 1812, ed. Nicole Eustace and Fredrika J. Teute (Chapel Hill, NC, 2017), 29–55; Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1997), 293–348; Elaine Frantz Parsons, Ku Klux: The Birth of the Klan During Reconstruction (Chapel Hill, NC, 2015). 52. Laura Edwards, in an email to the authors, March 23, 2019; see also Edwards, The ­People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-­Revolutionary South (Chapel Hill, NC, 2009); Edwards, A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction (New York, 2015); Edwards, “Sarah Allingham’s Sheet and Other Lessons from Legal History,” Journal of the Early Republic 38 (2017): 121–47.

238

Notes to Pages 18–21

53. Laura F. Edwards, “Status Without Rights: African Americans and the Tangled History of Law and Governance in the Nineteenth-­Century U.S. South,” American Historical Review 112 (2007): 365–93; Edwards, The People and Their Peace; Edwards, “Sarah Allingham’s Sheet.” 54.  Jane Pease and William Pease, They Who Would Be Free: Blacks’ Search for Freedom, 1830–1861 (1974; repr. Urbana, IL, 1990). 55.  See, for example, Martha Jones, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (New York, 2018) and the literature cited in Laura Edwards’s epilogue. 56.  Van Gosse, “ ‘As a Nation, the English Are Our Friends’: The Emergence of African American Politics in the British Atlantic World,” American Historical Review 113 (October 2008): 1003–28; Gerald Horne, Negro Comrades of the Crown; Horne, The Counterrevolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States (New York, 2014). 57.  Jeremy Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic (Princeton, NJ, 2006), 7, 56. 58. Christopher Leslie Brown and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Arming Slaves: From Classical Times to the Modern Age (New Haven, CT, 2006); Edward B. Rugemer, The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War (Baton Rouge, LA, 2009); Elizabeth Maddock Dillon and Michael Drexler, eds., The Haitian Revolution and the Early United States (Philadelphia, 2016); Gregory P. Downs, “The Mexicanization of American Politics: The United States’ Transnational Path from Civil War to Stabilization,” American Historical Review (April 2012): 387–409; Matthew Karp, This Vast Southern Empire (Cambridge, MA, 2016); Steven Hahn, A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars (New York, 2016). 59.  W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), in Du Bois: Writings, ed. Nathan Huggins (New York, 1986), 372, 391; Du Bois, Black Reconstruction; Charles Beard and Mary Beard, The Rise of American Civilization (New York, 1931), ch. 18. For a recent elaboration see David Roediger, Seizing Freedom: Slave Emancipation and Liberty for All (New York, 2014). 60.  Gary B. Nash, The Forgotten Fifth (Cambridge, MA, 2006); Michael McDonnell, The Politics of War: Race, Class, and Conflict in Revolutionary Virginia (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006); Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (Chapel Hill, NC, 1998); Horne, The Counterrevolution of 1776; Robert Parkinson, The Common Cause (Chapel Hill, NC, 2015); David Waldstreicher, Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery and the American Revolution (New York, 2004); Waldstreicher, Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (New York, 2009); Robin Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery (Chicago, 2006); Staughton Lynd and David Waldstreicher, “Free Trade, Sovereignty, and Slavery: Toward an Economic Interpretation of American Independence,” William and Mary Quarterly 68 (2011): 597–630; Hammond and Mason, eds., Contesting Slavery; Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia (New York, 2013); Taylor, American Revolutions: A Continental History (New York, 2016). 61. Arthur Zilversmit, The First Emancipation (Chicago, 1967); Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet (Cambridge, MA, 2002); Hahn, The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom (Cambridge, MA, 2009); Ira Berlin, The Long Emancipation (Cambridge, MA, 2015); Patrick Rael, Eighty-­Eight Years: The Long Death of Slavery in the United States (Athens, GA, 2015); Whitney Nell Stewart and John Garrison Marks, eds., Race and Nation in the Age of Emancipations. While we admire many aspects of Steven Hahn’s A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars (New York, 2016), we are uncertain as to what is gained by claiming the United States was more an empire than a nation-­state in 1830.

Notes to Pages 21–26

239

Nationalism was an essential aspect of the age of revolutions and emancipations; we do not understand either, or black politics, without understanding the relationship of nationalism to the rest of political culture. 62. This latter theme increasingly marked Davis’s later work. The older dichotomies between makers of political and intellectual history, and subjects of social history, no longer applied. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, NY, 1966); Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca, NY, 1975), 306; Davis, Challenging the Boundaries of Slavery (Cambridge, MA, 2009); Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipations (New York, 2012). For New World Africans as central subjects of modernity see also the work of Eric Williams; C. L. R. James; Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (Cambridge, MA, 1993); and Michel-­Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, 1995). 63.  For “Revolution settlements” in the U.S. context John M. Murrin, “The Great Inversion, or Court Versus Country: A Comparison of the Revolution Settlements in England (1688–1721) and America (1776–1816)” in Murrin, Rethinking America: From Empire to Republic (New York, 2018), 31–98; Alan Taylor, Liberty Men and Great Proprietors: The Revolutionary Settlement on the Maine Frontier (Chapel Hill, NC, 1990); John L. Brooke, Columbia Rising: Civil Life on the Upper Hudson from the Revolution to the Age of Jackson (Chapel Hill, 2011). A recent elaboration of the long reconstruction theme is Gregory P. Downs and Kate Masur, eds., The World the Civil War Made (Chapel Hill, NC, 2014); for its national ramifications see especially Heather Cox Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction (Cambridge, MA, 2001); and Richardson, West from Appomattox (New Haven, CT, 2008). Chapter 1 1.  Rosemarie Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia, 2007). 2.  For examples, see Karen Weyler, Empowering Words: Outsiders and Authorship in Early America (Athens, GA, 2013); Catherine Adams and Elizabeth Pleck, Love of Freedom: Black Women in Colonial and Revolutionary New England (New York, 2010). 3.  Gary B. Nash, The Unknown American Revolution (New York, 2005), 137–39; Henry Wiencek, An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America (New York, 2003), 205–14. 4.  Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, MA, 2008); Brown, “Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery,” American Historical Review 114 (2009): 1231–49; Catherine Allgor, Parlor Politics (Charlottesville, VA, 2000). 5. David Waldstreicher, Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution (New York, 2004), ch. 7; Waldstreicher, Slavery’s Constitution (New York, 2009), ch. 2; Staughton Lynd and David Waldstreicher, “Free Trade, Sovereignty, and Slavery: Toward an Economic Interpretation of American Independence,” William and Mary Quarterly 68 (2011): 597–630. 6. David Waldstreicher, “The Wheatleyan Moment,” Early American Studies 9, no. 3 (Fall 2011): 522–51; Waldstreicher, “Phillis Wheatley, the Poet Who Challenged the American Revolutionaries,” in Revolutionary Founders: Rebels, Radicals, and Reformers in the Making of the Nation, ed. Alfred F. Young, Gary B. Nash, and Ray Raphael (New York, 2011), 97–113; Christopher L. Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006);

240

Notes to Pages 26–28

David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca, NY, 1975). For further reflections on the historiography, see my “Ancient, Moderns and Africans: Phillis Wheatley and the Politics of Empire and Slavery in the American Revolution,” the version of this essay published in the Journal of the Early Republic 37 (Winter 2017): 701–33. 7.  Thomas Hutchinson et al., “To the Publick” in Wheatley, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (London, 1773), vii. 8. Tim Fitch to Capt. Ellery, January 14, 1759; Timothy Fitch to Peter Gwinn, Jan. 12, 1760, Nov. 8, 1760, Sept. 4, 1761, Nov. 1, 1761, Oct. 1762, Medford Historical Society; Alexander X. Byrd, Captives and Voyagers: British Migrants Across the Eighteenth Century Atlantic World (Baton Rouge, LA, 2008), 21–22; G. Ugo Nwokeji, The Slave Trade and Culture in the Bight of Biafra: An African Society in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, Eng., 2010), 38–9, 137; Claude Meillassoux, The Anthropology of Slavery: The Womb of Iron and Gold, trans. Alide Dasnois (Chicago, 1991), 67; Vincent Carretta, Genius in Bondage: A Biography of Phillis Wheatley (Athens, GA, 2011), 7–9. 9.  Joseph C. Miller, “Introduction,” in Women and Slavery, Vol. 1, ed. Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller (Athens, OH, 2006), 17; Philip D. Curtin, Economic Change in Precolonial Africa: Senegambia in the Era of the Slave Trade (Madison, WI, 1975), 110; David Eltis, “The Volume and Structure of the Transatlantic Slave Trade,” William and Mary Quarterly 58 (2001): 44; John K. Thornton, Warfare in Atlantic Africa, 1500–1800 (London, 1999), 146–47; Joseph C. Miller, “The Dynamics of History in Africa and the Atlantic Age of Revolutions,” in The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, 1750–1840, ed. David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyan (New York, 2010), 118; James F. Searing, West African Slavery and Atlantic Commerce: The Senegal River Valley, 1700–1860 (New York, 1993); Rebecca Shumway, The Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Rochester, NY, 2011); Audra A. Diptee, “African Children in the British Slave Trade During the Late Eighteenth Century,” Slavery and Abolition 27 (2006): 183–96; Paul Lovejoy, “The Children of Slavery—The Transatlantic Phase,” Slavery and Abolition 27 (2006): 197–219; Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship (New York, 2006), 98, 201. 10.  Ruth Flanagan, The Oral and Beyond: Doing Things with Words in Africa (Chicago, 2007); Roger D. Abrahams, The Man-­of-­Words in the West Indies (New Haven, CT, 1983); Roger D. Abrahams, Singing the Master (New York, 1992), 111; George E. Brooks, Eurafricans in West Africa (Columbus, OH, 2003), 31; Robert M. Baum, Shrines of the Slave Trade: Diola Religion and Society in Precolonial Senegambia (New York, 1999); Margaretta Odell, “Memoir,” in Memoir and Poems of Phillis Wheatley, a Native African and a Slave (Boston, 1834), 11. 11. David Shields, Oracles of Empire (Chicago, 1990); Max Cavitch, American Elegy (Minneapolis, 2006); Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden; Brown, “Social Death and Political Life”; Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, MA, 2007), 196–98; John C. Shields, Phillis Wheatley’s Poetics of Liberation: Backgrounds and Contexts (Knoxville, TN, 2009), 103–4, 117, 122. 12. In this respect, Gates’s imagined “trial” is also a particularly gendered telling of her story. Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Trials of Phillis Wheatley (New York, 2003). It is necessary only if one cannot imagine or recover women’s practices of circulating manuscripts and poetry. For Wheatley’s support network of women, see especially David Grimsted, “Anglo-­American Racism and Phillis Wheatley’s ‘Sable Veil,’ ‘Lengthn’d Chain,’ and ‘Knitted Heart,’ ” in Women in the Age of the American Revolution, ed. Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville, VA, 1989), esp. 370–94, and Caroline Wigginton, In the Neighborhood: Women’s Publication in Early America (Amherst and Boston, MA, 2016), ch. 3.

Notes to Pages 28–31

241

13.  Jeffrey Brace, The Blind African Slave: Memoirs of Boyereau Brinch, Nicknamed Jeffrey Brace, ed. Kari J. Winter (Madison, WI, 2005), 152; Anne Bailey, African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade (Boston, 2005), 161–62. 14.  With exceptions including John C. Shields, The American Aeneas: Classical Origins of the American Self (Knoxville, TN, 2001), ch. 6; Shields, Phillis Wheatley’s Poetics of Liberation; John C. Shields and Eric D. Lamore, eds., New Essays on Phillis Wheatley (Knoxville, TN, 2011), Part I; Martha Watson, “A Classic Case: Phillis Wheatley and Her Poetry,” Early American Literature 31 (1996), 103–30. 15.  Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 1967), 26; contrast Richard Gummere, The American Colonial Mind and the Classical Tradition (Cambridge, MA, 1963); Eran Shalev, Rome Reborn on Western Shores: Historical Imagination and the Creation of the American Republic (Charlottesville, VA, 2009); Caroline Winterer, “From Royal to Republican: The Classical Image in Early America,” Journal of American History 91 (2005): 1264–90; Winterer, “Model Empire, Lost City: Ancient Carthage and the Science of Politics in Revolutionary America,” William and Mary Quarterly 67 (2010): 3–30. Other scholars emphasize the multivalent and sometimes subversive potential of various ancients in early modern contexts: Sabine MacCormack, On the Wings of Time: Rome, the Incas, Spain and Peru (Princeton, NJ, 2007); Eric Nelson, The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought (Cambridge, MA, 2004); Nelson, The Hebrew Republic (Cambridge, MA, 2010). 16. Homer, The Illiad, trans. Robert Fagles (New York, 1990); Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Fagles (New York, 1996); Page DuBois, Slaves and Other Objects (Chicago, 2008), 102, 128, 134– 35; Orlando Patterson, “Slavery in the Pre-­Modern World and Early Greece,” in Slave Systems Ancient and Modern, ed. Enrico del Lago and Constantine Katseri (Cambridge, Eng., 2008), 62–3; M. I. Finley, The World of Odysseus, 2nd ed. (New York, 1965), 39, 46, 53–54, 59, 145; Page DuBois, Trojan Horses: Saving the Classics from Conservatives (New York, 2001), 66, 114; Edith Hall, The Return of Ulysses: A Cultural History of Homer’s Odyssey (Baltimore, 2008), 36, 101, 116, 120, 132, 203; Alberto Manguel, Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey: A Biography (Vancouver, 2007), citing Peter Levi at 54 (“dead and defeated”); William Fitzgerald, Slavery and the Roman Literary Imagination (Cambridge, 2000), 87, 90; David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years (Brooklyn, NY, 2011), 189, 208. 17. Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles (New York, 1996); Terence, The Comedies, trans. Peter Brown (New York, 2006); Joseph C. Miller, The Problem of Slavery as History (New Haven, CT, 2011), 67; Peter Hunt, “Slaves in Greek Literary Culture,” in The Cambridge World History of Slavery, Vol. I: The Ancient Mediterranean, ed. Keith Bradley and Paul Cartledge (New York, 2011), 22–47; Virgil, The Eclogues, trans. Guy Lee (New York, 1984), 22, 33; Horace, The Complete Odes and Epodes, trans. David West (Oxford, Eng., 1997), v, 4–5, 12; Niall Rudd, ed., The Satires of Horace and Persius (New York, 1987), 16, 18, 66–70, 118–20. 18. Virgil, The Eclogues, trans. Guy Lee (New York, 1984), 51, 53; Eric Ashley Hairston, “The Trojan Horse: Classics, Memory, Transformation, and Afric Ambition in Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral,” in New Essays on Phillis Wheatley, ed. John C. Shields and Eric D. Lamore, 66–67; Ovid, Heroides, trans. Harold Isbell, rev. ed. (New York, 2004), 10–16. 19.  She shares, in short, her model Alexander Pope’s ambivalence about the classics, an ambivalence that led him to translate Homer as well as use classical forms as models for Christian and Enlightenment arguments. For Pope and the ancients and moderns, see, e.g., Steve Shankman, “Pope’s Homer and His Poetic Career,” and Howard D. Weinbrot, “Pope and the Classics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Alexander Pope, ed. Pat Rogers (New York, 2007),

242

Notes to Pages 31–36

63–75, 76–88; Weinbrot, Britannia’s Issue: The Rise of British Literature from Dryden to Ossian (Baltimore, 1995), ch. 6–7. 20.  “On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin,” in Phillis Wheatley: Complete Writings, ed. Vincent Carretta (New York, 1999), 73–74. 21.  The Odyssey of Homer in the English Verse Translation by Alexander Pope (New York, 1942), 345; Virgil’s Aeneid, Translated by John Dryden, ed. Frederick M. Keener (New York, 1997), 6–8, 91, 101, 235, 305. 22.  For trauma, see Phillip M. Richards, “Phillis Wheatley: The Consensual Blackness of Early African American Writing” in New Essays on Phillis Wheatley, ed. John C. Shields and Eric D. Lamore, 262. Wheatley could be talking about herself, imagining herself into the world of the poem—as storm-­tossed hero, as voice of the dead, as vessel of the gods. More important, however, is how she is in control of the ancient references, the presence of the ancient that she comes to inhabit as much as she inhabits her Africanness for the reader. 23. Wheatley, Complete Writings, 13; Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Trials of Phillis Wheatley (New York, 2003), 71; William W. Cook and James Tatum, African American Writers and the Classical Tradition (Chicago, 2010), 11; Tara Bynum, “Phillis Wheatley’s Pleasures,” Common-­ place 11, no. 1 (October 2010), http://​www​.common​-­place​.org​/vol​-­11​/no​-­01​/bynum. Dwight McBride makes a useful distinction in noting that in her writings Wheatley “does not hate Africa; she hates ‘pagan’ or ‘Egyptian’ Africa.” McBride, Impossible Witnesses: Truth, Abolitionism, and Slave Testimony (New York, 2001), 113. 24. Wheatley, Complete Writings, ed. Carretta, 70, 71, 105. Carretta places “Deism,” dated 1767, before “On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin,” probably because the latter appeared in a newspaper on December 15 of that year. 25. Wheatley, Writings, ed. Carretta, 130–31; New York Journal, June 3, 1773, and Thomas Woolridge to Lord Dartmouth, Nov. 24, 1772, in William H. Robinson, ed., Phillis Wheatley and Her Writings (New York, 1984), 388–89, 454; Joseph Rezek, “The Print Atlantic: Phillis Wheatley, Ignatius Sancho, and the Cultural Significance of the Book,” in Early African American Print Culture, ed. Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein (Philadelphia, 2011), 35. 26. I am thinking here in particular of Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word (New York, 1986); Julia Stern, The Plight of Feeling (Chicago, 1997); Susan E. Klepp, Revolutionary Conceptions (Chapel Hill, NC, 2009). 27. Wheatley, Complete Writings, 40, 83–7; Wheatley to Obour Tanner, Feb. 14, 1776, in “The Hand of America’s First Black Female Poet,” http://​www​.npr​.org​/templates​/story​/story​.php​ ?storyId​=​5021077. 28.  Wheatley, “Liberty and Peace,” Complete Writings, 101. 29.  Wheatley, “America,” Complete Writings, 75. It seems important in this context that in this unfinished mini-­epic poem the next line—the simile—is explicitly gendered: “A certain lady had an only son,” referring to Britain and America and, allusively, to Mary and Jesus. 30.  Joseph C. Miller, “Slavery as a Historical Process: Examples from the Ancient Mediterranean and the Modern Atlantic,” in Slave Systems, ed. Enrico Del Lago and Constantine Katseri, 98. 31. Wheatley, Complete Writings, 152. 32. In her 1773 Poems Wheatley had revised her 1767 reference to her homeland as a “sable Land of error”—too racial?—to “land of errors, and Egyptian gloom.” Kimberley Clay Bassard, Spiritual Interrogations: Culture, Gender and Community in Early African American Women’s Writings (Princeton, NJ, 1999), 43–44. For the debate over “slavery and the meaning

Notes to Pages 36–42

243

of America” in the early modern period, the essential starting point is David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, NY, 1966), ch. 1. 33.  Sandra Joshel, Slavery in the Roman World (Cambridge, Eng., 2010), 41; Page DuBois, Slavery: Antiquity and Its Legacy (New York, 2009), 101; Jean Andre and Andre Descat, The Slave in Greece and Rome, trans. Marian Leopold (Madison, WI, 2011), 10, 25; Robert Knapp, Invisible Romans (Cambridge, MA, 2011), 172–94. 34.  Monthly Review 49 (December 1773): 457–59, repr. in Mukhtar Ali Isani, ed., “The British Reception of Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects,” Journal of Negro History 66 (1981): 147– 48; Eric Slauter, The State as a Work of Art: Cultural Origins of the Constitution (Chicago, 2009), 192; Brycchan Carey, “A Stronger Muse: Classical Influences in Eighteenth-­Century Abolitionist Poetry,” in Ancient Slavery and Abolition: From Hobbes to Hollywood, ed. Edith Hall, Richard Alston, and Justine McConnell (New York, 2011), 131–32. 35.  Thomas Jefferson’s Library: A Catalog with the Entries in His Own Order, ed. James Gilreath and Douglas L. Wilson (Washington, DC, 1989), 117; Wheatley, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (London, 1773), v, Library of Congress. 36.  Emily Greenwood deftly observes, in a mode reflective of the new interest in classical receptions, of the larger tradition of dismissing Wheatley, “You know you have been well and truly marginalized when even your neoclassicism is held to be derivative,” but in this regard Jefferson’s refusal to even admit of her neoclassical dimension seems most telling. Greenwood, “The Politics of Classicism in the Poetry of Phillis Wheatley,” in Ancient Slavery and Abolition, ed. Edith Hall, Richard Alston, and Justine McConnell, 165. 37.  Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia with Related Documents, ed. David Waldstreicher (Boston, 2002), 178–79; Caroline Winterer, The Mirror of Antiquity: American Women and the Classical Tradition, 1750–1900 (Ithaca, NY, 2007), 31–35. 38.  Wheatley, “To Maecenas,” Complete Writings, 10; Terence, The Comedies, trans. Peter Brown, 101, 316n; Betsy Erkkila, Mixed Bloods and Other Crosses: Rethinking American Literature from the Revolution to the Culture Wars (Philadelphia, 2005), 87. 39.  Gordon S. Wood, “Prologue: The Legacy of Rome in the American Revolution,” in Thomas Jefferson, the Classical World, and Early America, ed. Peter S. Onuf and Nicholas P. Cole (Charlottesville, VA, 2011), 15; Carl J. Richard, Greeks and Romans Bearing Gifts: How the Ancients Inspired the Founding Fathers (Lanham, MD, 2008), ix. 40.  Eran Shalev, “Thomas Jefferson’s Classical Silence, 1774–1776: Historical Consciousness and Roman History in the Revolutionary South,” in Thomas Jefferson, the Classical World, and Early America, ed. Peter S. Onuf and Nicholas P. Cole, 219–47. Chapter 2 1.  For idealism to race see, e.g., Gary Nash, Race and Revolution (Madison, WI, 1990); and Nash, The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 2006); from slavery to race: Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in America (Cambridge, MA, 1998), esp. 358–65; Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780–1860 (Ithaca, NY, 1998); from character to race: James Brewer Stewart, “The Emergence of Racial Modernity and the Rise of the White North, 1790–1840,” Journal of the Early Republic 18 (1998): 181–217; Stewart, “Modernizing ‘Difference’: The Political Meanings of Color in the Free States, 1776–1840,” Journal of the Early Republic 19 (1999): 691–712. 2.  This analysis draws on Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA, 1982), 34–37.

244

Notes to Pages 42–45

3. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca, NY, 1975); William M. Wiecek, “Lord Mansfield and the Legitimacy of Slavery in the Anglo-­ American World,” University of Chicago Law Review 42 (1974): 86−146; Wiecek, The Sources of Antislavery Constitutionalism in America, 1760−1848 (Ithaca, NY, 1977), 20−39; George William Van Cleve, “Somerset’s Case and Its Antecedents in Imperial Perspective,” Law and History Review 24 (2006): 601–45; Van Cleve, A Slaveholder’s Union: Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early American Republic (Chicago, 2010), 31−34; David Waldstreicher, Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (New York, 2009), 21−56; Justin B. Dyer, Natural Law and the Antislavery Constitutional Tradition (Cambridge. Eng., 2012), 37−73; James Oakes, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 (New York, 2012), 8–14; David Olusoga, Black and British: A Forgotten History (London, 2016), 113–42. 4.  Van Gosse, “ ‘As a Nation, the English Are Our Friends’: The Emergence of African American Politics in the British World, 1772–1861,” American Historical Review 113 (2008), 1003–28; Gerald Horne, The Counter-­Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America (New York, 2014); Horne, Negro Comrades of the Crown: African Americans and the British Empire Fight the U.S. Before Emancipation (New York, 2012); Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772–1832 (New York, 2013); Christopher Leslie Brown, “The Problems of Slavery,” in The Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution, ed. Jane Kamensky and Edward G. Gray (New York, 2012), 427–46; Mia Bay, “See Your Declaration Americans!!! Abolitionism, Americanism, and the Revolutionary Tradition in Free Black Politics,” Americanism: New Perspectives on the History of an Ideal, ed. Michael Kazin and Joseph A. McCartin (Chapel Hill, NC, 2011), 25–52. 5. On the “emancipation process” see Steven Hahn, The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom (Cambridge, MA, 2009), 1–53; see also Ira Berlin, The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States (Cambridge, MA, 2015). 6. On the ambiguity of national citizenship, see William J. Novak, “The Legal Transformation of Citizenship in Nineteenth Century America,” The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History, ed. Meg Jacobs, William J. Novak, and Julian Zelizer (Princeton, NJ, 2009), 85–119. 7.  James Oakes, “Conflict vs. Racial Consensus in the History of Antislavery Politics,” in Contesting Slavery: The Politics of Bondage and Freedom in the New American Nation, ed. John Craig Hammond and Matthew Mason (Charlottesville, VA, 2011), 291–303. 8.  Stanley Harrold, Border War: Fighting over Slavery Before the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Andrew Diemer, The Politics of Black Citizenship: Free African Americans in the Mid-­Atlantic Borderland, 1817–1863 (Athens, GA, 2016). 9. On the slow decline of slavery: James J. Gigantino II, The Ragged Road to Abolition: Slavery and Freedom in New Jersey, 1775–1865 (Philadelphia, 2014); Graham Russell Hodges, Root & Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613–1863 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1999); Shane White, Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New York City (Athens, GA, 1991). 10.  E.g., South Carolina’s William Loughton Smith in February 1790 (when New York City was still the national capital): “A gentleman can hardly come from that country [the South] with a servant or two, either to this place [New York] or Philadelphia, but there are persons trying to seduce his servants to leave him” (Annals of Congress, 1st Cong., 2nd Sess., 1244). John Rutledge Jr. echoed Smith in 1797 when he described Philadelphia Quakers as “a set of men who attempt to seduce the servants of Gentlemen traveling to the seat of Government” (Annals of Congress,

Notes to Pages 45–50

245

5th Cong., 2nd Sess., 569). On the sojourner laws, see Paul Finkelman, An Imperfect Union: Slavery, Federalism, and Comity (Chapel Hill, NC, 1981). 11. Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 372–75; Paul J. Polgar, “Standard Bearers of Liberty and Equality: Reinterpreting the Origins of American Abolitionism” (PhD diss., City University of New York, 2013), 163–64; Gary Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720–1840 (Cambridge, MA, 1988), 137. Scholars give varying numbers for Philadelphia, depending on whether or not they include outlying areas in Philadelphia County that were effectively part of the city. I am using Nash’s estimate. The total free black population for Philadelphia County was 10,514 in 1810. It is worth emphasizing the significance of this demographic growth, a direct outcome of the emancipation process. According to Berlin’s calculations, in 1790, the northern free black population was 27,054, only 40 percent of a total black population of 67,474. The majority of northern blacks remained in slavery. The free population effectively tripled to 75,156 by 1810, 74 percent of a total black population of 102,237. 12.  See Samantha Seeley’s essay in this volume, “Freedom and the Politics of Migration After the American Revolution.” 13.  Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, Colored Travelers: Mobility and the Fight for Citizenship Before the Civil War (Chapel Hill, NC, 2016), 6, 46–54. 14. David Waldstreicher, “Reading the Runaways: Self-­Fashioning, Print Culture, and Confidence in Slavery in the Eighteenth-­Century Mid-­Atlantic,” William and Mary Quarterly 56 (1999), 243–72, see especially p. 258; Aaron Fogleman, “From Slaves, Convicts, and Servants to Free Passengers: The Transformation of Immigration in the Era of the American Revolution,” Journal of American History 85 (1998): 43–76. 15.  Richard Newman, “ ‘Lucky to Be Born in Pennsylvania’: Free Soil, Fugitive Slaves, and the Making of Pennsylvania’s Anti-­Slavery Borderland,” Slavery & Abolition 32 (2011): 413−30. 16.  William diGiaocomantonio, “ ‘For the Gratification of a Volunteering Society’: Antislavery and Pressure Group Politics in the First Federal Congress,” Journal of the Early Republic 15 (1995): 169–197; Richard Newman, “Prelude to the Gag Rule: Southern Reaction to Antislavery Petitions in the First Federal Congress,” Journal of the Early Republic 16 (1996): 571−99. 17.  Annals of Congress, 4th Cong., 2nd Sess., 2015–24, quote at 2017. This overview relies on Nicholas Wood, “A ‘Class of Citizens’: The Earliest Black Petitioners to Congress and their Quaker Allies,” William and Mary Quarterly 74 (2017): 109–44. 18.  Annals of Congress, 4th Cong., 2nd Sess., 2018. 19. Ibid., 2019 (“sacred right”); 2021–22. 20.  Annals of Congress, 6th Cong., 1st Sess., 229–45. The Annals gives a synopsis of the original petition, which is held in the National Archives. A copy can be found in Sidney Kaplan and Emma Nogrady Kaplan, The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution, 1770–1800 (Amherst, MA, 1989), 273–76. For more details on the petition, see Wood, “ ‘A Class of Citizens.’ ” 21. Allen’s eulogy can be found in The Philadelphia Gazette & Universal Daily Advertiser, December 31, 1799. See especially Richard Newman, Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers (New York, 2008), 128–57. 22.  Annals of Congress, 6th Cong., 1st Sess., 235, 241; Wood, “ ‘A Class of Citizens,’ ” 138–44; Richard S. Newman, The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic (Chapel Hill, 2002), 89. 23.  Mr. Nicholson’s Motion . . . 22nd January 1801 (Washington, DC, 1801); Annals of Congress, 6th Cong., 2nd Sess., 916, 940−41, 1054; Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s Relations to Slavery (New York, 2001), 211−16.

246

Notes to Pages 50–54

24.  Annals of Congress, 7th Cong., 1st Sess., 423–25. Five northern Republicans and 1 Federalist joined 37 southerners of both parties in support of the bill; 2 North Carolina Federalists and 44 northerners of both parties opposed it. Roll-­call at 425, partisan identifications from Congressional Biographical Directory (bioguide​.congress​.gov). See Van Gosse’s essay in this volume for an explanation of one of the North Carolina “nays” on this bill, John C. Stanly. Gosse, “In the Woodpile: Negro Electors in the First Reconstruction,” n. 27 (253–54n27). 25.  The Universal Gazette (Philadelphia), June 12, 1800, p. 4; for other citations see Wood, “ ‘A Class of Citizens,’ ” 138 n. 116. 26.  Journal of the Twenty-­third House of Representatives of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (Harrisburg, 1812 [1813]), 216, 417, 432, 481–82, 566–67, 588–89; Nash, Forging Freedom, 180–83. As Samantha Seeley argues, Mitchell’s proposal also echoed laws from the Upper South as well as Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Kentucky that sought to impede or prohibit free black migration. Seeley, “Freedom and the Politics of Migration,” in this volume. 27. James Forten, “Letters from a Man of Colour,” in Early American Abolitionists: A Collection of Antislavery Writings, ed. James G. Basker (New York, 2005), 313; Julie Winch, A Gentleman of Color: The Life of James Forten (New York, 2003), 169−74; Winch, “The Making and Meaning of James Forten’s Letters from a Man of Colour,” William and Mary Quarterly 64 (2007): 129–138. 28.  Forten, “Letters,” 307, 314–15. 29.  Thomas Morris, Free Men All: The Personal Liberty Laws of the North, 1780–1861 (Baltimore, 1974), 36–41; Annals of Congress, 15th Cong., 1st Sess. (House), 446–47, 513, 825–31, 837–40, 1339, 1393, 1716–17; Sergeant at 829, Williams at 839–40. 30. Morris, Free Men All, 45–46; Gary B. Nash and Jean R. Soderlund, Freedom by Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its Aftermath (New York, 1991), 200–201. 31.  “What Right Had a Fugitive Slave of Self-­Defence Against His Master?” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 13 (1889): 106–109; William R. Leslie, “The Pennsylvania Fugitive Slave Act of 1826,” Journal of Southern History 18 (1952): 429–45; Morris, Free Men All, 46–53; Diemer, The Politics of Black Citizenship, 56–62; Wood, “ ‘A Class of Citizens,’ ” 143–44; Harrold, Border War. 32. Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge, MA, 2005); Robert E. Bonner, Mastering America: Southern Slaveholders and the Crisis of American Nationhood (New York, 2009). 33. On early national democratization, see Donald Ratcliffe, “The Right to Vote and the Rise of Democracy, 1787–1828,” Journal of the Early Republic 33 (2013): 219–54; for overviews of disfranchisement, see Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States, rev. ed. (New York, 2009), 43–49 and Tables A.4 and A.5, 315–20; Andrew W. Robertson, “Jeffersonian Parties, Politics, and Participation,” in Practicing Democracy, ed. Daniel Peart and Adam I. P. Smith (Charlottesville, VA, 2015), 99–122; Van Gosse, We Are Americans: The Origins of Black Politics, 1790–1860 (forthcoming, University of North Carolina Press); and Gosse, “In the Woodpile: Negro Electors in the First Reconstruction,” in this volume. On Pennsylvania, see Nicholas Wood, “ ‘A Sacrifice on the Altar of Slavery’: Doughface Politics and Black Disfranchisement in Pennsylvania, 1837–1838,” Journal of the Early Republic 31 (2011): 75–106; and Gosse, We Are Americans. As Gosse shows, African Americans outside of Philadelphia voted in significant numbers before 1838. David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1997), 245.

Notes to Pages 55–57

247

34.  Paul J. Polgar, “ ’Whenever They Judge It Expedient’: The Politics of Partisanship and Free Black Voting Rights in Early National New York,” American Nineteenth Century History 12 (2011): 1–23; Sarah L. H. Gronningsater, “ ‘Expressly Recognized by Our Election Laws’: Certificates of Freedom and the Multiple Fates of Black Citizenship in the Early Republic,” William and Mary Quarterly 75 (2018): 465–506. See also Emil Olbrich, Development of the Sentiment on Negro Suffrage to 1860 (Madison, WI, 1912), 29–30; Dixon Ryan Fox, “The Negro Vote in Old New York,” Political Science Quarterly 32 (1917); David N. Gellman and David Quigley, Jim Crow New York: A Documentary History of Race and Citizenship, 1777–1877 (New York, 2004); David  N. Gellman, Emancipating New York: The Politics of Slavery and Freedom, 1777–1827 (Baton Rouge, LA, 2006); Christopher Malone, Between Freedom and Bondage: Race, Party, and Voting Rights in the Antebellum North (New York, 2008), 23–55. 35.  Joseph Sidney, An Oration Commemorative of the Abolition of the Slave Trade . . . (New York, 1809), 13−14. For a different reading of this oration, emphasizing Sidney’s deference to white Federalists and rejection of African ties, see Leslie M. Alexander, African or American: Black Identity and Political Activism in New York City, 1784–1861 (Urbana, IL, 2008), 19–23. 36.  Journal of the Assembly of the State of New York, at Their Thirty-­Fourth Session (New York, 1811), 310–11. Of the 56 members voting in favor of the amendment, 51 can be identified as Republicans by cross-­referencing electoral returns at the database A New Nation Votes: American Election Returns, 1787–1825 (elections​.lib​.tufts​.edu). All 24 opposed can be identified as Federalists. Discrimination against black voters on the grounds that they were slaves had occurred informally before the 1811 legislation. See Malone, Between Freedom and Bondage, 41. 37.  Journal of the Senate of the State of New York, at Their Thirty-­Fourth Session (New York, 1811), 193. 38.  Scholars have been somewhat confused about the 1811 legislation. As Gronningsater clarifies, it passed over the council’s objections. Republican Henry Yates Jr. introduced a new bill the day after the council’s objections were read. In a representative vote in the Senate, 19 Republicans and 1 Federalist defeated 7 Federalists in order to adopt the bill into law despite the council’s objections. See Journal of the Senate . . . (New York, 1811), 196–97 for Yates Jr. and the roll-­call; partisan identifications from A New Nation Votes. For the assembly’s final deliberations and passage of the bill, see Journal of the Assembly . . . (New York, 1811), 401, 404–406. 39.  “An Act to Prevent Frauds and Perjuries at Elections and to Prevent Slaves from Voting,” April 9, 1811, ch. 201. Laws of the State of New York, Passed at the Thirty-­Fourth Session of the Legislature . . . (New York, 1811), 370–74. 40. Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African-­Americans in New York City, 1626– 1863 (Chicago, 2003), 101. Nash and Soderlund found a similar correlation between Federalism and PAS membership in Pennsylvania: Freedom by Degrees, 136. 41. Linda Kerber, Federalists in Dissent; Imagery and Ideology in Jeffersonian America (Ithaca, NY, 1970); Paul Finkelman, “The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Federalism,” in Federalists Reconsidered, ed. Doron Ben-­Atar and Barbara Oberg (Charlottesville, VA, 1998), 135–56; Rachel Hope Cleves, The Reign of Terror in America: Visions of Violence from Anti-­Jacobinism to Antislavery (Cambridge, Eng., 2009); Cleves, “ ‘Hurtful to the State’: The Political Morality of Federalist Antislavery,” Contesting Slavery: The Politics of Bondage and Freedom in the New American Nation (Charlottesville, VA, 2011), 207−26; Kevin Vrevich, “Mr. Ely’s Amendment: Massachusetts Federalists and the Politicization of Slave Representation,” American Nineteenth Century History 19 (2018): 159–76.

248

Notes to Pages 57–61

42.  For Sidney in the context of black abolitionism, see Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven, CT, 2016), 153–54. 43. On Federalist and NYMS limitations, see White, Somewhat More Independent, 81–86. Some black New Yorkers, led by the educator John Teasman, supported the Jeffersonians, in part because of tensions with the Federalist leadership of the NYMS. In 1814, a meeting of “People of Colour” in New York City resolved to support Republican candidates in New York and national elections. In a series of resolutions, participants asserted that all men were created equal, that the Republicans were “the genuine patriots and defenders of this country,” and that “as free citizens of the United States, it is our duty to maintain the rights of the land in which we dwell.” They appealed to wartime sentiment to support the Republican administration and oppose Federalism, implying that the Jeffersonian coalition would protect black rights (The Columbian, April 26, 1814). See also Robert J. Swan, “John Teasman: African-­American Educator and the Emergence of Community in Early Black New York City,” Journal of the Early Republic 12 (1992): 331–56; and Polgar, “ ‘Whenever They Judge It Expedient’,” 7, 18 n. 11. 44. Matthew Mason, “ ‘Nothing Is Better Calculated to Excite Divisions’: Federalist Agitation Against Slave Representation During the War of 1812,” New England Quarterly 75, no. 4 (December 2002): 531–61; for Clinton’s 1811 votes, see Journal of the Senate . . . (New York, 1811), 143–44, 197, 200–202. 45. I make this argument in Padraig Riley, Slavery and the Democratic Conscience: Political Life in Jeffersonian America (Philadelphia, 2016), 191–98. 46.  Polgar, “ ‘Whenever They Judge It Expedient,’ ” 12–13; see also Donald Ratcliffe, The One-­Party Presidential Contest: Adams, Jackson, and 1824’s Five-­Horse Race (Lawrence, KS, 2015) on the persistent influence of the slavery question in New York politics into the 1820s. 47.  Robert Pierce Forbes, The Missouri Compromise and Its Aftermath: Slavery and the Meaning of America (Chapel Hill, NC, 2007), 125–30; Richard Brown, “The Missouri Crisis, Slavery, and the Politics of Jacksonianism,” South Atlantic Quarterly 65 (1966): 55–72. 48. Nathaniel H. Carter and William L. Stone, eds., Reports of the Proceedings and Debates of the Convention of 1821, Assembled for the Purpose of Amending the Constitution of the State of New York (Albany, 1821), 181 (“no connection”), 185–86, 190–91 (“not competent”), 198. For an overview of the positions taken in these debates, see Gellman, Emancipating New York. 49. Carter and Stone, Reports of the Proceedings, 184. 50. Carter and Stone, Reports of the Proceedings, 190–98; Novak, “The Legal Transformation of Citizenship in Nineteenth Century America.” 51. Carter and Stone, Proceedings, 183, 190 (“It is a question of expediency,” said Samuel Young, “and believing as I do, that the blacks would abuse the privilege if granted, I am disposed to withhold it”). 52.  Spencer as recorded in the Democratic Press, November 20, 1820. 53. Matthew Mason, Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006); John Craig Hammond, Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion in the Early American West (Charlottesville, VA, 2007); Hammond and Mason, eds., Contesting Slavery: The Politics of Bondage and Freedom in the New American Nation (Charlottesville, VA, 2011); Riley, Slavery and the Democratic Conscience; Polgar, “Standard Bearers of Liberty and Equality”; Nicholas Wood, “Considerations of Humanity and Expediency: Slave Trades and African Colonization in the Early National Antislavery Movement” (PhD diss., University of Virginia, 2013). 54.  Annals of Congress, 7th Cong., 2nd. Sess., 467–72, 534, 1564–65.

Notes to Pages 61–65

249

55. On this point see especially Seeley, “Freedom and the Politics of Migration.” 56.  Annals of Congress, 9th Cong., 2nd Sess., 174 (Early); for Randolph see Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser, December 27, 1816, cited in Diemer, The Politics of Black Citizenship, 11; Philip M. Hamer, “Great Britain, the United States, and the Negro Seamen Acts, 1822–1848,” Journal of Southern History 1 (1935): 3–28; Michael Schoeppner, “Peculiar Quarantines: The Seamen Acts and Regulatory Authority in the Antebellum South,” Law and History Review 31 (2013): 559–86; Nathan Perl-­Rosenthal, Citizen Sailors: Becoming American in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 2015), 270–75. 57.  Annals of Congress, 16th Cong., 2nd Sess., 550–51 (Barbour); 556–57 (Smyth); 616–20 (McLane); 1134–35 (Pinckney). For an interpretation of these debates in terms of the longer conflict over slavery, see James Oakes, The Scorpion’s Sting: Antislavery and the Coming of the Civil War (New York, 2014), 77–103; on free blacks as foreigners, see Kunal Parker, Making Foreigners: Immigration and Citizenship Law in America, 1600–2000 (New York, 2015), 85–99. 58.  Sergeant in Annals of Congress, 16th Cong., 2nd Sess., 530; see also comments by New York Federalist James Strong along similar lines, ibid., 570–74; and Seeley, “Freedom and the Politics of Migration.” Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics (New York, 1978), 347−48. 59.  Annals of Congress, 16th Cong., 2nd Sess., 598 (Hemphill); 636–37 (William Eustis, a Massachusetts Republican). 60. Act of Jan. 7 1825, Laws of the State of Missouri . . . Vol. II (St. Louis, MO, 1825), 600–602. 61. On state-­level in-­migration restrictions, see Seeley, “Freedom and the Politics of Migration.” From one perspective, the outcome of the Missouri Crisis supports Douglas Bradburn’s argument that blacks had lost any chance at national citizenship by the early nineteenth century: “the vast majority of non-­enslaved blacks across the United States lived within the bounds of the law, but not as accepted citizens of the United States of America.” Instead, he contends, free blacks were “denizens,” a common law category designating residents who had some but not all the rights of citizens. “For most white Americans,” Bradburn argues, “only whites were wanted for the great republican experiment.” Douglas Bradburn, The Citizenship Revolution: Politics and the Creation of the American Union, 1774–1804 (Charlottesville, VA, 2009), 237–38, 261. But Bradburn overlooks countervailing attempts to achieve black equality within the northern states and to argue for a national citizenship on that basis. As the examples in this essay suggest, attempts to discriminate based on race were contested throughout the early republic. Some failed outright and none succeeded without considerable protest. 62.  James H. Kettner, The Development of American Citizenship, 1608−1870 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1978), 312−13; Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven, CT, 1997), 175−77. 63.  Annals of Congress, 16th Cong., 2nd Sess., 1143; Riley, Slavery and the Democratic Conscience, 249–51. 64. David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1997), 294–348; Manisha Sinha, “To ‘Cast Just Obliquy’ on Oppressors: Black Radicalism in the Age of Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 64 (2007): 149–60; Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000), 6–7; Sinha, The Slave’s Cause; such claims are indebted to W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (New York, 1935), 13–16. On black citizenship politics, see Diemer, The Politics of Black Citizenship; Christopher Bonner, “Black Politics and the ‘Foul

250

Notes to Pages 65–68

and Infamous Lie’ of Dred Scott,” in this volume; and Martha S. Jones, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (New York, 2018). 65. Adam Carman, An Oration Delivered on the Fourth Anniversary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade (New York, 1811), 19–20. Chapter 3 Note to epigraph: Charles H. Wesley, “The Participation of Negroes in Anti-­Slavery Political Parties,” Journal of Negro History 29 (January 1944): 74. 1. As my forthcoming book examines black electoral politics in New England, New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio between 1790 and 1860, I chose a different emphasis here. My scholarship draws upon Mia Bay’s insight that rather than viewing “the early nineteenth-­century free black community as a powerless and poorly organized group buffeted by an increasingly large web of racial restrictions, who had little claim on American citizenship,” we should acknowledge their active participation in the politics of the earlier republic, and the “decades of active pursuit of American rights and freedoms on the part of free blacks” considerably predating the rise of colonizationism in the late 1810s and ’20s, and immediatist abolitionism in the 1830s; see Bay, “ ‘See Your Declaration, Americans!’: Abolitionism, Americanism, and the Revolutionary Tradition in Free Black Politics,” in Americanism: New Perspectives on the History of an Idea, ed. Michael Kazin and Joseph A. McCartin (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006), 35. 2.  John L. Brooke, Columbia Rising: Civil Life on the Upper Hudson From the Revolution to the Age of Jackson (Chapel Hill, NC, 2010), 3–4; also Douglas Bradburn, The Citizenship Revolution: Politics & the Creation of the American Union, 1774–1804 (Charlottesville, VA, 2009), 15, on how his “study clarifies the political settlement of the American Revolution,” avoiding compensatory “ ‘forgotten’ narratives: microhistories, the history of the exploited, and the peculiar experiences of exceptional figures” to focus on “the more typical experiences and ultimately the stakes, significance, and broader contours of the founding of the United States.” Bradburn makes the strongest case for a declensionist reading, from the Revolutionary era, when the position of African Americans was unsettled, to the early nineteenth century, when the United States whitened up systematically via a “denization” (or denaturalization) of free black people. I disagree, in that Blackburn’s own exploration of the Jeffersonian revolution, which guaranteed a decentered polity with citizenship residing primarily in the states, contradicts his claim for any national or nationwide process of denaturalization. In the absence of an overriding national citizenship, the extension of state citizenship in a significant part of the nation—specifically Upper New England (Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Massachusetts)—documents how recessions in black citizenship were neither unilinear nor uncontested. As Bradburn’s scholarship fully documents, there can be no single story of American citizenship prior to the Civil War; rather, the citizenship regime of 1790–1860 functioned entropically, constantly dissolving and recombining, and in some cases black rights and political weight significantly expanded outside of constitutional dicta, as in Ohio and New York’s growing electorates of color in the 1850s. 3. Documenting black men’s electoral participation after 1790 contributes to rethinking early republican politics as more democratic, party-­ish, and mass-­based than formerly presumed; see Donald Ratcliffe, “The Right to Vote and the Rise of Democracy,” Journal of the Early Republic 33 (2013), 219–53 for an especially cogent articulation of this argument. 4.  Burke A. Hinsdale, The Works of James Abram Garfield, Volume I (Boston, 1882).

Notes to Pages 68–71

251

5.  See Corey M. Brooks, Liberty Power: Antislavery Third Parties and the Transformation of American Politics (Chicago, 2016) for an exceptionally clear account of the relations between these two groups, which ultimately shifted the axis of American political debate. 6.  William Birney, James G. Birney and His Times, The Genesis of the Republican Party with Some Account of Abolition Movements in the South Before 1828 (New York, 1890), 338. 7.  William Jay, A View of the Action of the Federal Government in Behalf of Slavery, quoted in Robert A. Trendel Jr., William Jay: Churchman, Public Servant and Reformer (New York, 1982), 2. 8.  Padraig Riley, Slavery and the Democratic Conscience: Political Life in Jeffersonian America (Philadelphia, 2016), 240–1; see also the excellent analysis in Rachel Hope Cleves, “ `Hurtful to the State’: The Political Morality of Federalist Antislavery” in Contesting Slavery: The Politics of Bondage and Freedom in the New American Nation, ed. John Craig Hammond and Matthew Mason (Charlottesville, VA, 2011), 207–26. 9.  Hendrik Booraem V, The Formation of the Republican Party in New York: Politics and Conscience in the Antebellum North (New York, 1983), 29. 10.  The fight against aristocratic privilege was the through-­line of Seward’s politics. In 1831 he had written the Antimasons’ “Address of the Minority of the Members of the Legislature” describing how “On the one side is an aristocratic nobility, composed of men bound together by the most terrific oaths” and on the other men like him (quoted in Benson, Concept of Jacksonian Democracy, 19). Eric Foner originally outlined how Seward “identified slaveholders with the reactionary aristocracies throughout history which had blocked the progress of political and social reform,” quoting him naming many of those, including the “patricians in Rome,” the “noblesse or clergy of France,” and the “landholders in Ireland”; see Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (1970; repr. New York, 1995), 65. 11.  This analysis resembles in key respects that in Gary B. Nash, The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 2006). 12.  “Dangers of Extending Slavery, October 12, 1855” (Albany) in Speeches of William H. Seward, Delivered at Albany and Buffalo in October, 1855 (Washington, DC, 1855). Everyone present knew what Seward had left unsaid, that New Yorkers played a central role in keeping Virginians in power for the quarter-­century after 1800, during which slavery was extended into Louisiana and Florida. Vice presidents from the Empire State had repeatedly guaranteed the intersectional compact that made Jeffersonian Republicanism invincible, including Aaron Burr in 1801–1805, George Clinton in 1805–1812, and Daniel D. Tompkins in 1817–1825. Seward had begun his speech by constructing a bi-­or even multipartisan lineage for the northern antislavery origins he claimed—one made up of “the Spencers, of Kent and Van Renssalaer and Van Vechten, of the genial Tompkins, of Clinton the great, and the elder Clinton, of King and Hamilton, of Jay the pure and benevolent, and Schuyler the gallant and inflexible.” Here we see a truly “gigantic party” being constructed, everyone but the Jacksonians, in fact. 13.  See Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves, and the American Revolution (London, 2005); Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006); Douglas R. Egerton, Death or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America (New York, 2009); also my “ `As a Nation, the English Are Our Friends’: The Emergence of African American Politics in the British Atlantic World, 1772–1861,” American Historical Review (October 2008): 1003–28.

252

Notes to Pages 71–72

14. Donald L. Robinson, Slavery in the Structure of American Politics, 1765–1820 (New York, 1971) was the starting point, still quite valuable. 15.  James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, Black Bostonians: Family Life and Community Struggle in the Antebellum North (New York, 1979); Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720–1840 (Cambridge, MA, 1991); Shane White, Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New York City, 1770–1810 (Athens, GA, 1991). In the interim, key books have made it easier to posit the centrality of black citizenship. James H. Kettner, The Development of American Citizenship, 1608–1870 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1978), established a baseline in the first serious study of citizenship in several generations. Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven, CT, 1997), exploded the edifice of Hartzian consensualism, after which no responsible historian could assert there was a single “main current” of American citizenship. Rather, Smith showed us, there have been (and continue to be) two opposing notions of what or who constituted an American. In a different vein, David N. Gellman and David Quigley, Jim Crow New York: A Documentary History of Race and Citizenship, 1777–1877 (New York, 2003), exposed the era’s longest struggle to exclude a significant electoral constituency of black men, leading up to the 1821 constitutional convention establishing “freehold” suffrage for men of color while nearly universal suffrage was mandated for white men. 16.  Emil Olbrich, The Development of Sentiment on Negro Suffrage to 1860 (1912; repr. Freeport, NY, 1971), 21, is the earliest mention. 17. Bradburn, Citizenship Revolution, 55, 60. 18. Oscar and Mary Handlin, eds., The Popular Sources of Political Authority: Documents on the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 (Cambridge, MA, 1966), 217, 231, 232, 248, 249, 263, 282, 283, 302, 312, 324. 19.  Quoted in Edward Needles, An Historical Memoir of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery; The Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, and for Improving the Condition of the African Race. Compiled from the Minutes of the Society and Other Official Documents, by Edward Needles, and Published by Authority of the Society (1848; repr. New York, 1969), 25. Further, in its 1790 constitution, Pennsylvania enacted a nonracial taxpayer suffrage, rejecting calls to insert the word “white” at Albert Gallatin’s personal behest—the “swarthy” Swiss immigrant insisted that if white skin was made a condition, he might be barred from voting. Although the contemporary record does not show this proceeding, at Pennsylvania’s 1837–1838 “Reform Convention,” delegate William Darlington prefaced his reading of a December 21, 1837 letter from Gallatin by saying he had talked with “a gentleman of high respectability, the father of a member of this body, he informed me that he recollects the fact being publicly talked of the next day . . . that an effort was made to introduce the word ‘white,’ and that it was struck out on the motion of Mr. Gallatin”; see Proceedings and Debates of the Convention of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, to Propose Amendments to the Constitution, Commenced and Held at Harrisburg, on the Second of May, 1837, Reported by John Agg (Harrisburg, PA, 1837–1838), Volume X, 45. Another delegate vividly recollected Gallatin (“his complexion sallow”) stating “that if the word were so introduced, he did not know but he himself might be excluded from voting” (ibid., X, 123). 20.  See Alfred Billings Street, The Council of Revision (Albany, 1859), 268–69, “City of New York, March 21, 1785 . . . A bill entitled `An act for the gradual abolition of slavery within this State,’ was before the Council, which adopted the following objections, reported by Chancellor Livingston,” suggesting he was their principal author.

Notes to Pages 72–74

253

21.  Kentucky’s 1792 constitution provided for a convention in seven years to revise the existing document, and at that meeting, the word “white” was inserted. I can find no record of debate before or during this latter meeting as to why it was considered necessary to do so, although it is worth noting the undeviating Jeffersonianism dominating the state from its founding and well into the next century. 22. Albert Edward McKinley, The Suffrage Franchise in the Thirteen English Colonies in America (Philadelphia, 1905), 81–5, 91, 100–1. Also very useful on the colonial and early republican period is Chilton Williamson, American Suffrage from Property to Democracy, 1760–1860 (Princeton, NJ, 1960). 23. As McKinley explains, the term “freeman” had largely lost its original, more specific meaning (specifying a man given the freedom or “freemanship” of a particular municipality in England) and, in most cases, was simply synonymous with “free man”; see McKinley, Suffrage Franchise in the Thirteen English Colonies, 10 (“Borough or Corporation Franchises”), 13, 29, 53. 24. A white North Carolinian, writing from personal knowledge, described the antebellum free people of color as mainly populating desolate hill counties bordering Virginia, from which most had migrated circa 1800 because of “cheaper lands, and laws, in their execution at least, more lenient, as well as a social attitude less hostile than in aristocratic Virginia.” In his memory, they were “almost wholly a hybrid race” of mulattoes with a “considerable infusion of Indian blood generally diffused,” who, even postbellum, “In their habits, manner, and dress” resembled “the poorest class of whites much closer than they do the freedmen.” If accurate, this suggests that North Carolina contained a notably complex color-­caste structure, which may explain the long survival of nonracial suffrage; David Dodge, “The Free Negroes of North Carolina,” Atlantic Monthly (January 1886): 23, 29. 25.  See Harry L. Watson, Jacksonian Politics and Community Conflict: The Emergence of the Second American Party System in Cumberland County, North Carolina (Baton Rouge, LA, 1981), 84, on how, during the Revolution, the state split, with the “lower Cape Fear region and the plantation counties of the central coastal plain” going with the rebels while “the towns and the northeast sound region [centered on New Bern and Craven County], which drew their livelihoods from the export of naval stores harbored many friends of the Empire.” In the western backcountry both pietists and some Regulators were Tories, especially the Highland Scots centered in Cumberland, part of the “upper Cape Fear.” 26. Ibid., 92–95, describing the 1810 contest between the Republican Harry Branson and the Federalist John A. Cameron. Branson challenged the outcome, alleging that “British subjects,” men who avoided their militia service and would not sign the required “oath of Allegiance” to North Carolina had voted for his opponent, and that “ballots were taken from non-­resident and underage persons and even from slaves.” Cameron prevailed, and while his supporters admitted their efforts to ensure the “low or poor classes of people” voted as directed, “The only effective case of coercion Belden [the Federalist witness] admitted seeing on election day concerned a free black man who wanted to vote for Cameron but did not after being threatened by his landlord and employer, Captain Alexander McDonald.” They freely acknowledged that a “significant bloc” of their support “came from the free blacks and mulattoes who gathered behind Mallett’s Mill on election day to enjoy spirits and roast pig at merchant John McLerran’s expense and who then marched to the polls under white supervision to vote for John Cameron.” 27. Intriguingly, the politician John C. Stanly was closely associated with William Gaston, a Federalist who even in the 1830s, as North Carolina’s chief justice, was an outspoken defender of black citizenship and critic of slavery (see the New Bern True Republican, July 25, 1810, denouncing

254

Notes to Pages 74–75

Gaston, then campaigning for Congress, as “the dupe of Mr. S[tanly]”). One notes that on a crucial House vote in January 1802, on a bill to fine any “person harboring, concealing, or employing runaway slaves” $500, and require all free people of color to carry certificates proving their freedom, Stanly and another North Carolina Federalist, Archibald Henderson, provided two of the “no” votes in the measure’s defeat 46–43; see Annals of Congress, 7th Cong., 1st Sess., , 423–25. 28.  John Hope Franklin, The Free Negro in North Carolina, 1790–1860 (1943; repr. Chapel Hill, NC, 1995), 17, 76, 126, 128, 140, 158, 160–62. Perhaps the greatest irony of the Stanly family saga is that the white John C. Stanly fathered a mixed-­race slave, John R. Green, who in turn had a son, John P. Green, born in New Bern in 1845 and taken to Ohio by his mother before the war, where he became a leading black Republican postbellum, eventually a state senator (as late as 1928 he addressed the Republican National Convention). 29. Ibid., 144, 207–8. 30.  Rayford W. Logan and Michael Winston, eds., Dictionary of American Negro Biography (New York, 1983), 101–2; G. C. Shaw, John Chavis, 1763–1838 (Binghamton, NY, 1931). 31.  Edward T. Sanford, The Constitutional Convention of Tennessee in 1796, Reprinted from the Proceedings of the Bar Association of Tennessee, for 1896 (Nashville, TN, 1896), 22, 31. This document specified, in language almost identical to North Carolina’s, that “Every free man of the age of twenty-­one years and upwards, possessing a freehold in the county wherein he may vote, and being an inhabitant of this State, and every free man, being an inhabitant of any one county in the State six months immediately preceding the day of election, shall be entitled to vote for members of the general assembly, for the county in which he shall reside.” On East Tennessee’s deep-­seated antislavery, see James W. Patton, “The Progress of Emancipation in Tennessee, 1796–1860,” Journal of Negro History 17/1 (January 1932): 68; also J. Merton England, “The Free Negro in Ante-­Bellum Tennessee,” Journal of Southern History, IX/1 (February 1943): 37–58; Chase C. Mooney, Slavery in Tennessee (Bloomington, IN, 1957), 65, describes eastern Tennessee as “one of the antislavery strongholds of the country” in the 1810s and ’20s, with the Tennessee Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves founded in 1815 and peaking at twenty-­five local societies in 1827. Benjamin Lundy began his career here, taking over Elihu Embree’s Manumission Intelligencer in 1822. 32.  Patton, “Progress of Emancipation,” 73–4, “From 1810 to 1820 there was an increase of 108 per cent in their number. . . . And 266 per cent increase during the period from 1820 to 1830,” by which time five counties had more than 200, four included 250, and Davidson reached almost 500. The best evidence for his claim about black political influence is that twenty years later, two prominent Tennessee Democrats, Cave Johnson and John Bell, “said they were elected to Congress [in the late 1820s] by the aid of colored men’s votes, the latter boasting that he owed his election of 1828 to one hundred and forty-­four free negroes who worked in his mills”; see Olbrich, Development of Sentiment on Negro Suffrage, 40. 33.  National Banner (Nashville), July 15, 1834, “Speech of Mr. Loving.” 34.  Presumably this referred to Isaac Walton of Sumner County, a delegate in 1796; see Chase C. Mooney, “The Question of Slavery and the Free Negro in the Tennessee Constitutional Convention of 1834,” Journal of Southern History 12 (1946): 503. 35. Olbrich, Development of Sentiment on Negro Suffrage, 40. 36. Lacy K. Ford Jr., “Making the `White Man’s Country’ White: Race, Slavery, and State-­ Building in the Jacksonian South,” Journal of the Early Republic 19 (1999): 713–37. 37.  Joshua D. Rothman, Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families Across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787–1861 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2003), 211–12 for Virginia’s 1833 law defining

Notes to Pages 76–77

255

persons of less than one-­quarter black ancestry as not-­black and “legally raceless. . . . a third racial category without . . . any distinct content” other than “not a negro.” 38.  Patience Essah, A House Divided: Slavery and Emancipation in Delaware, 1638–1865 (Charlottesville, VA, 1996); William Henry Williams, Slavery and Freedom in Delaware, 1639– 1865 (Wilmington, DE, 1996) 39. Olbrich, Development of Sentiment on Negro Suffrage, 10. The earliest Delaware elections law was promulgated in 1734 and required the voter to be a British subject, male, 21, and a freeholder possessing acres or 40 pounds worth of property (McKinley, The Suffrage Franchise in the Thirteen English Colonies, 270). 40.  Census for 1820, Published by Authority of an Act of Congress, Under the Direction of the Secretary of State (Washington, DC, 1821), 95. White males were grouped 16–25, 26–44, 45 and over, producing an estimated 11,626 males of voting age. Free black males were grouped 14–25, 26–44, 45 and over, producing an estimated 2,903 males of voting age. 41.  Delaware Gazette, September 19, 1789. 42. David Bogen, “The Annapolis Poll Books of 1800 and 1804,” Maryland Historical Magazine 86 (1991): 58. Following the words disfranchising slaves “manumitted agreeably to the laws of the state,” the assembly inserted “since the passage of the act, entitled, an act to prohibit the bringing slaves into the state.” 43. As with John Carruthers Stanly, the apparent mixed-­racedness of voters we now denominate as “black” may have been a factor in why white men accepted their enfranchisement, but it was never raised in the constitutional convention debates over racializing suffrage (New Jersey in 1807; Connecticut in 1818; New York in 1821; Tennessee in 1834; North Carolina in 1835; Pennsylvania in 1837–1838). At no point did the defenders of black suffrage suggest that “mulattoes” should be enfranchised versus “negroes.” 44. David Skillen Bogen, “The Maryland Context of Dred Scott: The Decline in the Legal Status of Maryland Free Blacks, 1776–1810,” American Journal of Legal History 34 (1990): 383, 389, also 390, on the 1783 law: “the legislature believed blacks who were then free had vested interests that must be respected, including the right that their children succeed to those rights,” adding in a footnote that “one reason for respecting the rights of the free black was that the proslavery argument was based on the sanctity of vested rights. . . . If historically free blacks were deprived of the rights they had under existing law, it would undermine the justification for slavery itself.” 45. Further confusing matters, when the legislature passed “An Act to Incorporate Baltimore-­Town, in Baltimore County” in 1786, it specified that “all free white persons, being inhabitants of Baltimore-­Town [are now] one body corporate and politic [below] all free white persons of age, and having assessed property in the Town to the value of One Hundred Pounds and having resided therein two whole years . . . shall have the right to vote”; Maryland Journal (Baltimore), March 7, 1786. 46.  Maryland Gazette, February 16, 1792; Bogen, “Maryland Context of Dred Scott,” 396. 47.  The Mail; or, Claypoole’s Daily Advertiser, October 2, 1792. Brown evoked revolutionary fervor in grandiose language, how “the illuminative rays of Liberty have burst with such floods of glory over this highly favored land, whereby all unjust and arbitrary distinctions are laid aside.” He referred to having “never deserted my country’s interest in the time of danger and distress,” suggesting Loyalist sympathies among other candidates, perhaps, and boasted that “I have already been honored with public offices and places of trust.” Finally, he promised “to have all Tories and Anti’s [anti-­Federalists] turned out of office, until they show evident signs of repentance, and attachment to the new government.”

256

Notes to Pages 77–78

48.  Bogen, “Annapolis Poll Books,” 62. In 1797, Michael Taney, father of the future chief justice, proposed a different bill, enfranchising “all free born men above the age of twenty-­one years,” which “substituted status at birth for status in 1783. The extension of the vote to `all free born men excluded those Historically Free Blacks emancipated prior to 1783, but it would have extended the vote to the freeborn children of Newly Free Blacks. . . . the racial impact of the statute did not seem central to objections, and the bill passed the house 30–21. The Senate, unready for universal suffrage, rejected the bill” (Bogen, “Maryland Context of Dred Scott,” 397). 49. Ibid., 61, “Butler, Short, and Thomas were family names particularly identified with free blacks. . . . The Butler clan was descended from Eleanor Butler (`Irish Nell’), an Irish servant to Lord Baltimore [she had married a slave in 1681]. . . . After the 1791 decision, scores of Butlers were able to claim their freedom. The Shorter family won its freedom in another famous case. Elizabeth Shorter, a white woman, married a black man named Little Robin in 1681, when both were servants to William Roswell. Elizabeth’s descendants were held in slavery, but in 1794 her great-­grandson prevailed in a petition for freedom,” and various others followed on that basis; see also page 64 for how Ralph Joice, descendant of Ann Joice, a slave of Lord Baltimore, tried to vote but since his family had not won their case, he was denied. 50.  Bogen, “Maryland Context of Dred Scott,” 410. Jerrold G. Rusk, A Statistical History of the American Electorate (Washington, DC, 2000), 171 (his table of the “Raw Popular Vote for President”) documents that Maryland’s electorate was 13,469 in 1796 and 20,647 in 1800, meaning that a few hundred voters of color could have influence. 51.  James J. Gigantino II, The Ragged Road to Abolition: Slavery and Freedom in New Jersey, 1775–1865 (Philadelphia, 2015) documents the state’s political and juridical stasis, which permitted bound labor or “term slavery” to persist through and even after final emancipation in 1846. In his words, “Slaves in the state therefore never participated in a true emancipation or the decisive release from a system of control” and “faced insurmountable odds in the early nineteenth century, perhaps greater than anywhere else in the North. They had no white allies as the state abolition society quickly disbanded after gradual abolition began [and] lived under a legal system that was firmly controlled by slaveholders OR those supportive of their interests” (5, 11). New Jersey “looked not unlike areas of the Upper South,” and its de facto slavery “functioned as the institution did in the Upper South . . . through its coexistence with manumission” (102, 117). 52.  Judith Apter Klinghoffer and Lois Elkis, “ `The Petticoat Electors’: Women’s Suffrage in New Jersey, 1776–1807,” Journal of the Early Republic 12 (1992): 159–93. 53.  See, for instance, Samuel Young, a Bucktail “radical,” opposing black suffrage at the 1821 Constitutional Convention in New York, that “If there is that natural, inherent right to vote, which some gentlemen have urged, it ought to be further extended. In New-­Jersey, females were formerly allowed to vote; and on that principle, you must admit negresses as well as negroes to participate in the right of suffrage. Minors, too, and aliens must no longer be excluded, but the ‘era of good feelings’ be commenced in earnest”; see Nathaniel H. Carter and William L. Stone, Reporters, Reports of the Proceedings and Debates of the Convention of 1821, Assembled for the Purpose of Amending the Constitution of the State of New-­York (Albany, NY, 1821), 191. A Philadelphia Democrat justified racial disfranchisement at the 1837–1838 Pennsylvania convention as follows: “Would any man place the poorest white man, who goes to the polls with the highest, and deposits his vote as fearlessly, on the same footing with the negro? . . . He had no prejudices against the negro on account of his colour. He had eaten and drunken with them. He was willing to take the hand of a coloured man—an honest wood sawyer, but we have to look to the

Notes to Pages 78–80

257

coloured race, as one marked by God and nature as distinct from that to which we belong. We do not degrade them by acting on this distinction. Did it degrade the females, when the state of New Jersey took from the ladies the right to vote?”; Proceedings and Debates of the Convention of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, to Propose Amendments to the Constitution, Commenced and Held at Harrisburg, on the Second of May, 1837, Reported by John Agg, (Harrisburg, PA, 1837–1838), Volume IX, 389–90. 54.  Edward R. Turner, “Women’s Suffrage in New Jersey, 1790–1807,” Smith College Studies in History (July 1916), 167. This is the 1783 election law’s text, repeating the language of the 1776 constitution, using the words “proclamation money” rather than “declaration money.” See also Carl E. Prince, New Jersey’s Jeffersonian Republicans: The Genesis of an Early Party Machine, 1789–1817 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1964), 4–5, “The theoretically exclusive fifty pound or one hundred acre freehold requirement . . . an uncertain and unevenly enforced provision dating back more than sixty years—was clarified and lowered to a simple requirement of fifty pounds of real or personal property.” Valuing that property in state-­issued “proclamation money” that had lost value drastically due to Revolutionary-­era inflation made it much easier to vote. 55. Olbrich, Development of Sentiment on Negro Suffrage, 19–20. 56.  Quoted in ibid., 23. The state’s election law was revised in 1790 and 1797, but no objection was raised to enfranchising all “inhabitants” who met the property qualification; see Carl E. Prince, New Jersey’s Jeffersonian Republicans, 8–9. 57.  Centinel of Freedom (Newark), November 11, 1800. One notes that a prominent Federalist, William Griffiths, noted that even the minimal property qualification was generally ignored, either because “inspectors imagine it unjust or because popular opinion is against the regulation” (quoted in Klinghoffer and Elkis, “Petticoat Electors,” 178). 58. Prince, New Jersey’s Jeffersonian Republicans, effectively traces the tangled politics of 1800–1802, prior to the consolidation of Republican hegemony; the Federalists did not offer tickets in either 1803 or 1804, although they revived in 1806 and after because of Jefferson’s embargo. Gigantino, Ragged Road to Abolition, clarifies the regional division between the Quakerish West, where slavery had rapidly declined by 1790, and the East, originally settled by Dutch and Barbadian immigrants, where the slave population increased in the 1790s, reaching 30 percent in Essex County during that decade (14–17, 67). 59.  Centinel of Freedom, December 16, 1800. 60.  Maryland Herald (Easton), January 27, 1801. 61.  Centinel of Freedom (Newark), November 2, 1802. 62.  True American, December 6, 1802. This paper was founded by James J. Wilson, brought in from out of state in 1800 to reach “the farmers of rural New Jersey” who “stubbornly continue[d] to vote Federalist.” Presumably its racial drumbeat was part of that appeal. Wilson “became the dominant force in the state’s politics while still in his 20s, with influence sufficient to make him the first printer ever elected to the United States Senate”; see Jeffrey L. Pasley, “The Tyranny of Printers”: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (Charlottesville, VA, 2001), 321, 325. The verse is in the Centinel of Freedom, January 11, 1803. 63.  Klinghoffer and Elkis, “Petticoat Electors,” 183–84, 186. 64. On Sloan, see Padraig Riley, “Slavery and the Problem of Democracy in Jeffersonian America,” in Hammond and Mason, Contesting Slavery, 237. Gigantino, Ragged Road to Abolition, 6, 65, 93, stresses that “gradual abolition began in 1804 for political purposes born in the partisan battle between Federalists and Democratic Republicans”; the latter “advanced abolitionism to showcase their political suitability as adherents of the true spirit of 1776,” attacking

258

Notes to Pages 80–86

Federalists as proslavery and “uniting East and West Jersey in spite of their long antagonism” through bipartisan support for their antislavery initiatives in that and subsequent years. 65. Ibid., 187–88. 66.  True American, November 23, 1807. See Prince, New Jersey’s Jeffersonian Republicans, 19, 31, on “Condit” as a founder of the party in Essex, the first in the state elected as a “Republican” in 1796, and then to Congress in 1798. 67. Ibid., 192. 68. Smith, Civic Ideals, 17. 69.  James Oakes, “Conflict vs. Racial Consensus in the History of Antislavery Politics,” in Hammond and Mason, Contesting Slavery, 299. 70.  James Brewer Stewart, “Modernizing `Difference’: The Political Meanings of Color in the Free States, 1776–1840,” Journal of the Early Republic (Winter 1999): 691–712. Chapter 4 1.  “Petition of Judith Hope, presented December 21, 1819,” Legislative Petitions of the General Assembly, 1776–1865, box 278, folder 18, Library of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia (hereafter LVA); “Petition of Judith Hope, December 11, 1820,” Legislative Petitions of the General Assembly, 1776–1865, box 278, folder 20, LVA; “Petition of Judith Hope, December 14, 1821,” Legislative Petitions of the General Assembly, 1776–1865, box 285, folder 70, LVA; Douglas Walter Bristol Jr., Knights of the Razor: Black Barbers in Slavery and Freedom (Baltimore, 2010), 8–12, 24–25, 31–32; Michael L. Nicholls, “Aspects of the African American Experience in Eighteenth-­Century Williamsburg and Norfolk,” Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Library Research Report Series-­330 (Williamsburg, VA, 1991), 144–45. 2.  For general works on the “first emancipation” see for example Arthur Zilversmit, The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North (Chicago, 1967); Gary Nash, Race and Revolution (New York, 1990); Richard Newman, The Transformation of American Abolitionism (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002); Patrick Rael, Eighty-­Eight Years: The Long Death of Slavery in the United States, 1777–1865 (Athens, GA, 2015), 29–161; Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven, CT, 2016), 9–159. 3.  For migration out of slavery during and after the Civil War, see Tera W. Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War (Cambridge, MA, 1997), 20–30; Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women & Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004), 117–38; Susan Eva O’Donovan, Becoming Free in the Cotton South (Cambridge, MA, 2007); Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (New York, 2008); Steven Hahn, The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom (Cambridge, MA, 2009), 55–114; Yael Sternhell, Routes of War: The World of Movement in the Confederate South (Cambridge, MA, 2012), 93–154. 4.  For colonization in the Upper South before the founding of the American Colonization Society, see Winthrop Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1968), 542–69; Peter Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood (Charlottesville, VA, 2000), 147–88; David Kazanjian, The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America (Minneapolis, MN, 2003), 89–138; Eva Sheppard Wolf, Race and Liberty in the New Nation: Emancipation in Virginia from the Revolution to Nat Turner’s Rebellion (Baton Rouge, LA, 2006), 85–129; Lacy K. Ford, Deliver Us from Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South (New York, 2009), 299–328, 361–89; Christa Dierksheide, Amelioration and Empire: Progress & Slavery in the Plantation Americas (Charlottesville, VA, 2014).

Notes to Pages 86–87

259

5.  Van Gosse, David Waldstreicher, and Laura Edwards make this point in their introduction and afterword to this volume. Kunal Parker also argues that the states attempted to render free African Americans “foreign” in this period so that they could not be “legally visible subjects of claims.” See Kunal M. Parker, “Making Blacks Foreigners: The Legal Construction of Former Slaves in Post-­Revolutionary Massachusetts,” Utah Law Review 75 (2001): 75–124. 6.  The geographer Mathew Carey depicted “the middle states” as a single region in his 1814 atlas. That choice was not typical of early American geographers. Nonetheless, the unity of the region would have been clear to early Americans because of the way that the Ohio River linked these spaces. Thank you to Jim Akerman for this insight. Mathew Carey, A General Atlas, being a Collection of Maps of the World and Quarters . . . (Philadelphia, 1814), Collections of the Newberry Library, Chicago, IL. 7.  The Articles of Confederation guaranteed “free ingress and regress” between the states and extended the “privileges and immunities of free citizens in the several States” to all inhabitants, regardless of race. The “privileges and immunities” clause in Article IV, Section 2 of the Constitution repeated that language. Douglas Bradburn has noted that in 1778 during the debate over the Articles of Confederation, delegates explicitly voted not to limit the “privileges and immunities” language by race. Bradburn writes that “the Articles of Confederation provided U.S. citizenship to free blacks in numerous states. In the midst of war, free black Americans who pledged allegiance to the cause were more fully citizens of the United States than they would be by 1800.” Bradburn, The Citizenship Revolution: Politics & the Creation of the American Union 1774–1804 (Charlottesville, VA, 2009), 246. 8.  Annals of the Congress of the United States, 16th Congr., 2nd Sess. (Washington, DC, 1855), 37: 570–1. 9.  For citizenship, belonging, and movement, see John Torpey, “Coming and Going: On the State Monopolization of the Legitimate ‘Means of Movement,’ ” Sociological Theory 16 (1998), 239–59; Martha S. Jones, “Leave of Court: African American Claims-­Making in the Era of Dred Scott v. Sandford,” in Contested Democracy: Politics, Ideology and Race in American History, ed. Manisha Sinha and Penny Von Eschen (New York, 2007); Edlie Wong, Neither Fugitive nor Free: Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits, and the Legal Culture of Travel (New York, 2009); Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, Colored Travelers: Mobility and the Fight for Citizenship Before the Civil War (Chapel Hill, NC, 2016). 10. T. H. Breen, Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of Revolution (Princeton, NJ, 1985), 30–31; Lorena Walsh, Motives of Honor, Pleasure, & Profit: Plantation Management in the Colonial Chesapeake, 1607–1763 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2010), 526–30, 624, 633. 11. Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty (Boston, 2006); Sylvia R. Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton, NJ, 1991); Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772–1832 (New York, 2013), 23–28. For a refutation of abolition as the inevitable product of natural rights discourse, see Eric Slauter, The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution (Chicago, 2009), 181. 12. Wolf, Race and Liberty in the New Nation, 3, 28, 29; James Martin Wright, The Free Negro in Maryland, 1634–1860 (New York, 1971), 58; Patience Essah, A House Divided: Slavery and Emancipation in Delaware, 1638–1865 (Charlottesville, VA, 1996), 39–41. 13.  Peter Joseph Albert, “The Protean Institution: The Geography, Economy, and Ideology of Slavery in Post-­Revolutionary Virginia” (PhD diss., University of Maryland, 1976), 168–69.

260

Notes to Pages 87–89

Some Quakers deeded enslaved people to their meetings, and they lived as if they were emancipated. See, for example, Robert Pleasants to Samuel Pleasants, July 8, 1776, Robert Pleasants Letterbook, LVA, 39. 14.  “Petition of Quakers,” November 29, 1780, Virginia Legislative Petitions, LVA (hereafter VLP); “Petition of Committee of Quakers,” May 29, 1782, VLP. John Parrish, “Notes on a Journey to Virginia” [1782], folder 6, Parrish Family Papers, Swarthmore Friends Historical Library, Swarthmore, PA. Thank you to Nicholas Wood for sharing this source with me. William Waller Hening, Statues at Large: Being a Collection of all the Laws of Virginia from the first session of the Legislature, in the Year 1619 (Richmond, VA, 1819–1823), 4: 132; Taylor, The Internal Enemy, 37. 15.  “Petition of Wilmington Monthly Meeting of Friends,” December 27, 1785/December 28, 1786, Loose Petitions, Delaware Historical Society, Wilmington, DE; “Petition of the Society of Quakers in favor of the Negro slaves,” January 9, 1786, Delaware Legislative Papers, Delaware Public Archives, Dover, DE (hereafter DLP). Laws of the State of Delaware (New-­Castle, DE, 1796), II: 884–88. 16.  Parrish, “Notes on a Journey to Virginia” [1782]. Robert Pleasants similarly believed that his conversations with Virginia assemblymen had good effects in the assembly. See Robert Pleasants to John Townshend, January 25, 1788, Robert Pleasants Letterbook, LVA, 142–43. 17.  “Petition of Electors,” November 8, 1785, VLP; Albert, “The Protean Institution,” 185–87. 18. “Petition of Freeholders & Inhabitants of Henrico,” November 16, 1784, VLP; “Petition of Freeholders & Inhabitants of Hanover,” November 16, 1784, VLP; “Petition of Electors of Frederick,” November 8, 1785, VLP; “Petition of Inhabitants of Mecklenburg,” November 8, 1785, VLP; “Petition of Inhabitants of Pittsylvania,” November 10, 1785, VLP; “Petition of Inhabitants of Brunswick,” November 10, 1785, VLP; “Petition of Inhabitants of Halifax,” November 10, 1785, VLP; “Petition of Citizens of Amelia,” November 10, 1785, VLP; “Petition of Inhabitants of Lunenberg,” November 10, 1785, VLP. See also Frederika Teute Schmidt and Barbara Ripel Wilhelm, eds., “Early Proslavery Petitions in Virginia,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., XXX (1973), 133–46; Alan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680–1800 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1988), 432; Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-­Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, NC, 1998), 659. 19.  “Chapter CXLV: An act to prevent the exportation of slaves, and for other purposes,” February 3, 1787, and “Chapter CXCIV: An additional supplementary act to an act, intitled, An act to prevent the exportation of slaves, and for other purposes,” February 3, 1789, Laws of the State of Delaware, Vol. II (New-­Castle, DE, 1796), 884–88. 20.  “Constitution of the Delaware Abolition Society,” Abolition Society of Delaware Minute Book, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, 2–3, 64; Essah, A House Divided, 59–61. 21.  “Minutes of the Delaware Abolition Society, Acting Committee, 1802–1807,” Delaware Historical Society; “Petition in relation to negroes petitioning for freedom, January 22, 1810,” DLP; Essah, A House Divided, 36–38, 60. 22.  For “a city of refuge” and vagrancy docket numbers, see Gary Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720–1840 (Cambridge, MA, 1988), 134–71. For migration to Pennsylvania from other states see Jean Soderlund, “Black Importation and Migration into Southeastern Pennsylvania, 1682–1810,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 33 (1989), 150; Richard Newman, “ ‘Lucky to be born in Pennsylvania:’ Free Soil, Fugitive Slaves and the Making of Pennsylvania’s Anti-­Slavery Borderland,” Slavery & Abolition 32 (2011): 413–30.

Notes to Pages 90–92

261

23.  “Pennsylvania Report to the American Convention Society, 1809,” reel 28, Pennsylvania Abolition Society Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA. 24.  For African American politics in Philadelphia, see Richard Newman and James Mueller, eds., Antislavery and Abolition in Philadelphia: Emancipation and the Long Struggle for Racial Justice in the City of Brotherly Love (Baton Rouge, LA, 2011); Richard Newman, Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers (New York, 2009); Erica Armstrong Dunbar, A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City (New Haven, CT, 2008); Julie Winch, A Gentleman of Color: The Life of James Forten (New York, 2003); Julie Winch, Philadelphia’s Black Elite: Activism, Accommodation, and the Struggle for Autonomy, 1787–1848 (Philadelphia, 1988). 25.  Suzanne Lebsock, The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784–1860 (New York, 1984), 96; Albert, “The Protean Institution,” 279. 26.  James Sidbury, Ploughshares into Swords: Race, Rebellion, and Identity in Gabriel’s Virginia, 1730–1810 (New York, 1997), 184–219. 27. Essah, A House Divided, 78–80; T. Stephen Whitman, The Price of Freedom: Slavery and Manumission in Baltimore and Early National Maryland (Lexington, KY, 1997), 140. 28.  See, for example, advertisements for Dick in Virginia Journal and Alexandria Advertiser, May 26, 1785; for Bob in Virginia Independent Chronicle, June 3, 1789; for Ben and Amherst in Virginia Gazette and General Advertiser, August 24, 1791; or for Jedel, Virginia Gazette and General Advertiser, Richmond, August 20, 1794. 29. For the importance of freedom of movement to expressions of self-­possession see Camp, Closer to Freedom; Wong, Neither Fugitive nor Free; Pryor, Colored Travelers. 30.  For Virginia towns and black mobility see Sidbury, Ploughshares into Swords, 184–219; Michael L. Nicholls, “Strangers Setting Among Us: The Sources and Challenge of the Urban Free Black Population of Early Virginia,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 108 (2000): 155–79. 31. Torpey, “Coming and Going.” 32.  Acts Passed at a General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia Begun and held at the capitol, in the city of Richmond, on Monday, the twenty-­first day of October, one thousand seven hundred and ninety-­three (Richmond, VA, 1794), 27–28, 46. 33. Mosby Sheppard to Governor James Monroe, August 30, 1800, James Monroe Executive Papers, LVA; James Monroe to Mayor of Richmond James McClurg, Richmond, Monday, September 1, 1800; Douglas R. Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1993); James Sidbury, Ploughshares into Swords; Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy, 94–97. 34.  Governor Monroe to Speaker of the House, December 7, 1801, Office of the Speaker Executive Communications, LVA (hereafter OSEC). 35.  Richmond Common Council Minutes, 1796–1807, 31, 33, LVA. 36.  Rashauna Johnson writes about how the “proper management of people in space was a marker of modernity.” For recent work on movement and slavery see, for example, Johnson, Slavery’s Metropolis: Unfree Labor in New Orleans During the Age of Revolutions (New York, 2016), 2–3, 13; Monroe to Legislature, Richmond, December 7, 1801, box 8, folder 17; Acts Passed at a General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia Begun and held at the capitol, in the city of Richmond, on Monday, the first day of December, one thousand eight hundred (Richmond, VA, 1800), 24, 34; “Petition of Inhabitants of Petersburg,” December 22, 1800, VLP; “Petition of Citizens of King and Queen County,” December 2, 1800, VLP.

262

Notes to Pages 92–94

37. Most of these resolutions were put into law except for the law prohibiting free black people from residing in the towns. Discussion on that resolution was put off until the third Wednesday of the following April, but the session never occurred. Journal of the House of Delegates of the Commonwealth of Virginia Begun and Held at the Capitol, in the city of Richmond, on Monday the first day of December one thousand eight hundred (Richmond, 1800), 43, 47–48, 70; Monroe to Mayor of the City of Richmond, Richmond, December 27, 1800. 38.  Acts Passed at a General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia . . . one thousand eight hundred, 57. 39.  Resolution of the House, December 31, 1800, OSEC; Journal of the House of Delegates . . . one thousand eight hundred, 47–48; James Monroe to Thomas Jefferson, June 15, 1801, ed. Barbara B. Oberg, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Princeton, NJ, 2007), 34:345–47. 40.  The most famous of these were penned by Thomas Jefferson and St. George Tucker. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill, NC, 1982), 138; St. George Tucker, A Dissertation on Slavery: With a Proposal for the Gradual Abolition of it, in the State of Virginia (Philadelphia, 1796). 41.  Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe, November 24, 1801, in Oberg, ed., Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 35: 718–22; James Monroe to Speaker of the House of Delegates, December 9, 1802, OSEC; “Extract of a Letter from the President of the United States to the Governor,” December 23, 1803, OSEC; John Page to the Speaker of the House of Delegates, January 23, 1804, OSEC; John Page to Thomas Jefferson, October 29, 1804, John Page Executive Papers, LVA; Thomas Jefferson to John Page, December 27, 1804, OSEC; “Committee to whom it was referred the correspondence between the Governor of this state and the president of the United States . . . ,” January 28 1803, OSEC; John Page to Speaker of the House of Delegates, January 12, 1805, OSEC. 42.  “Enclosure B: Letter of Virginia Delegation, March 2, 1805,” John Page to the Speaker of the House of Delegates, December 10, 1805, OSEC. 43.  John Page to the Speaker of the House of Delegates, December 10, 1805, OSEC. 44.  Petersburg Common Council Minutes, Petersburg County Courthouse, Petersburg, VA, 2:1–2; “Mayor, Recorder, Aldermen, & Commonalty: Petition,” Legislative Petitions of the General Assembly, 1776–1865, box 360, folder 9, VLP. 45.  “Mayor, Recorder, Aldermen, & Commonalty: Petition,” Legislative Petitions of the General Assembly, 1776–1865, box 360, folder 9, VLP; Lebsock, Free Women of Petersburg, 91. 46.  See the introduction to this volume. 47.  Acts Passed at a General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia Begun and held at the capitol, in the city of Richmond, on Monday, the second day of December, one thousand eight hundred and five (Richmond, VA, 1806), 35–36. For discussion of the bill see Journal of the House of Delegates of the Commonwealth of Virginia Begun and Held at the Capitol, in the city of Richmond, on Monday the Second day of December one thousand eight hundred and five (Richmond, VA, 1806), 22, 66, 77, 87. In 1785, 1803, 1804, and 1805 there were serious attempts in the legislature to outlaw black freedom. In 1805, the ban on manumission was barely defeated with a vote of 73 to 75. Most support for the bill came from the Tidewater and Southside counties closer to the North Carolina border. Journal of the House of Delegates, 22, 66, 77, 87. 48. David Skillen Bogen, “The Maryland Context of Dred Scott: The Decline in the Legal Status of Maryland Free Blacks, 1776–1810,” American Journal of Legal History 34 (1990): 406; Barbara Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland During the Nineteenth Century (New Haven, CT, 1985), 9–12.

Notes to Pages 95–97

263

49.  Virgil Maxcy, The Laws of Maryland . . . with a general index, in three volumes (Baltimore, 1811), II: 351–66; Bogen, “The Maryland Context of Dred Scott,” 394; Wright, The Free Negro in Maryland, 81. 50.  “Governor’s Address in the House of Representatives,” January 8, 1807, DLP, 14. 51.  Laws of the State of Delaware, from the seventh day of January one thousand eight hundred and six, to the third day of February, one thousand eight hundred and thirteen (Wilmington, DE, 1816), IV: 108–13. For more connections between poor law and the policing of belonging, see Kristin O’Brassil Kulfan, Vagrants and Vagabonds: Poverty and Mobility in the Early American Republic (New York, forthcoming); Kunal M. Parker, Making Foreigners: Immigration and Citizenship Law in America, 1600–2000 (New York, 2015). On warning out, see also Ruth Wallis Herndon, Unwelcome Americans: Living on the Margin in Early New England (Philadelphia, 2001); Cornelia Hughes Dayton and Sharon Salinger, Robert Love’s Warnings: Searching for Strangers in Colonial Boston (Philadelphia, 2014). 52.  Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of Delaware, At a Session of the General Assembly (Dover, DE, 1808), 83, 89; Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of Delaware, At a Session of the General Assembly (Dover, DE, 1811), 69; Laws of the State of Delaware (Wilmington, DE), IV: 400–404. 53. Essah, A House Divided, 81. 54.  “Petition of Sundry Inhabitants of Sussex County,” June 1786, DLP. 55.  “Bill for Authorising the Emancipation of Slaves,” January–February 1786, DLP. 56.  “Petition in Relation to Negroes Petitioning for Freedom,” January 22, 1810, DLP. 57.  “Governor’s Address in the House of Representatives,” January 8, 1807, DLP. 58.  Acts of the State of Ohio second session of the General Assembly, Held under the Constitution of the State, A.D. One Thousand Eight Hundred and Three, and of the Independence of the United States the Twenty-­eighth. Also, an Appendix, containing a Report of the Auditor and Treasurer (repr. Norwalk, OH, 1901), II: 63–66. For early Ohio migrants, see R. Douglass Hurt, The Ohio Frontier: Crucible of the Old Northwest, 1720–1830 (Bloomington, IN, 1996), 249. For race and legal traditions that moved with Virginians, see Joshua D. Rothman, Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families Across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787–1861 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2003), 7. The Ordinance of 1787 required that the new western territories adapt their laws from those on the books in the eastern states before their legislature was organized, presumably beginning a tradition of adaptation and borrowing from the East. Robert M. Taylor, ed., The Northwest Ordinance 1787: A Bicentennial Handbook (Bloomington, IN, 1987), 36–38. 59.  For Ohio law see Acts passed at the first session of the fifth General Assembly of the State of Ohio, Begun and held at the town of Chillicothe, December 1st, 1806, and in the fifth year of the said State. Also, the Constitution of the State of Ohio, report of the Auditor and Treasurer, Etc. (Chillicothe, OH, 1807), V: 53–54; William P. Quincey, “The Quicksands of the Poor Law: Poor Relief Legislation in a Growing Nation, 1790–1820,” Northern Illinois University Law Review 18 (1997): 79–81; Simon Middleton, The Black Laws: Race and the Legal Process in Early Ohio (Athens, OH, 2005); Nikki M. Taylor, Frontiers of Freedom: Cincinnati’s Black Community, 1802–1868 (Athens, OH, 2005), 32–37; Ellen Eslinger, “The Evolution of Racial Politics in Early Ohio,” in The Center of a Great Empire: The Ohio Country in the Early Republic, ed. Andrew R. L. Cayton and Stuart R. Hobbs (Athens, OH, 2005), 81–104. For Illinois laws, see Francis S. Philbrick, The Laws of Illinois Territory, 1809–1818 (Springfield, IL, 1950), 91–92, 354–60. For Indiana law of 1831, see Journal of the Senate of the State of Indiana; During the Fifteenth Session of the General Assembly; Commenced at Indianapolis, on Monday the Sixth of December, 1830 (Indianapolis, IN,

264

Notes to Pages 97–100

1830), 460. Indiana governor James Brown Ray called explicitly for “corresponding measures” that would counter African American travelers from other states with restrictive measures on the books. Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, and Oregon also eventually restricted black immigration. See James O. Horton and Lois E. Horton, In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community and Protest Among Northern Free Blacks, 1700–1860 (New York, 1998), 103. 60. Nash, Forging Freedom, 172–83; Winch, A Gentleman of Color, 160–63. 61. Nash, Forging Freedom, 180–82; Winch, A Gentleman of Color, 168–74. 62. Nicholas P. Wood, “ ‘A Class of Citizens’: The Earliest Black Petitioners to Congress and Their Quaker Allies,” William and Mary Quarterly 74 (January 2017): 143; Richard Newman, Transformation of American Abolitionism, 43; Winch, A Gentleman of Color, 169. 63.  James Forten, Letters From a Man of Colour, on a late Bill before the Senate of Pennsylvania (1813), 11. 64. For recent work on the control of enslaved mobility, see, e.g., Johnson, Slavery’s Metropolis; Camp, Closer to Freedom; Anthony E. Kaye, Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South (Chapel Hill, NC, 2009). For claims to belonging in response to colonization see Martha S. Jones, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (New York, 2018), 1. 65.  Prince Hall, A Charge, Delivered to the African Lodge, June 24, 1797, at Menotomi (Boston, 1797), 10. Rosalind Cobb Wiggins, ed., Captain Paul Cuffe’s Logs and Letters, 1808–1817: A Black Quaker’s “voice from within the veil” (Washington, DC, 1996). For northern racism in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, see Horton and Horton, In Hope of Liberty, 101–102, 163–66; Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780–1860 (Ithaca, NY, 1998), 190–209; Patrick Rael, Black Identity & Black Protest in the Antebellum North (Chapel Hill, NC, 2009), 159–73. 66. Several recent works have engaged with the enforcement of this law in Virginia. See, e.g., Wolf, Race and Liberty, 121–23; Ted Maris-­Wolf, Family Bonds: Free Blacks and Re-­ enslavement Law in Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill, NC, 2015); Eva Sheppard Wolf, Almost Free: A Story About Family and Race in Antebellum Virginia (Athens, GA, 2012); Emily West, “Free People of Color: Expulsion and Enslavement in the Antebellum South,” in Creating Citizenship in the Nineteenth-­Century South, ed. W. A. Link, D. Brown, B. Ward, and M. Bone (Gainesville, FL, 2013), 64–83. For local law-­making, see Laura F. Edwards, The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-­Revolutionary South (Chapel Hill, NC, 2009); “Petition of Nansy,” 1813, box 61, folder 78, VLP. 67.  “Petition of Judith Hope, presented December 21, 1819,” Legislative Petitions of the General Assembly, 1776–1865, box 278, folder 18, LVA; “Petition of Judith Hope, December 11, 1820,” Legislative Petitions of the General Assembly, 1776–1865, box 278, folder 20, LVA; “Petition of Judith Hope, December 14, 1821,” Legislative Petitions of the General Assembly, 1776– 1865, box 285, folder 70, LVA. 68.  Francis Newton Thorpe, ed., The Federal and State Constitutions, Colonial Charters, and Other Organic Laws of the States, Territories, and Colonies Now or Heretofore Forming the United States of America (Washington, DC, 1909), 4: 2154. 69.  Annals of Congress, 37: 530, 570. 70.  Annals of Congress, 37: 557, 548–49. 71.  Robert Pierce Forbes, The Missouri Compromise and Its Aftermath: Slavery and the Meaning of America (Chapel Hill, NC, 2007), 119; Bradburn, Citizenship Revolution, 255–6; Jones, Birthright Citizens.

Notes to Pages 100–103

265

72.  For a “politics of the feet” see Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA, 2005), 3. See also Christopher Bonner’s essay in this volume. 73. Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom, 20–30; Camp, Closer to Freedom; O’Donovan, Becoming Free in the Cotton South; Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage, 7; Sternhell, Routes of War, 93–104. 74.  Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution (New York, 1988), 50–60, 198–205, 372, 519; Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Era of Slave Emancipation (New York, 1998), 98–137. Chapter 5 1.  Sundiata Keita Cha-­Jua, America’s First Black Town: Brooklyn Illinois, 1830–1915 (Champaign, IL, 2002), esp. 31–76. On the specific formulation of freedom villages see Cha-­Jua, America’s First Black Town, ix–xi. 2. Alison Mileo Gorsuch, “To Indent Oneself: Ownership, Contracts, and Consent in Antebellum Illinois,” in The Legal Understanding of Slavery: From the Historical to the Contemporary, ed. Jean Allain (New York, 2012), 135–51. See also Gorsuch, “Race and Labour Contracts in the Upper Mississippi Valley,” in Legal Histories of the British Empire: Laws, Engagements and Legacies, ed. Shaunnagh Dorsett and John McLaren (New York, 2014), 189–202. 3.  For Randolph County in 1820 see Margaret Cross Norton, Illinois Census Returns, 1820, 252. The census reports 342 African American and 3,191 free white inhabitants. The census does not distinguish between free, enslaved, and people in servitude. In Gallatin County, the 1818 census records 321 slaves and 3,348 free inhabitants, meaning slaves amounted to 8.3 percent of the population. For these census returns see, ibid., 102. See also Paul Finkelman, “Evading the Ordinance: The Persistence of Bondage in Indiana and Illinois,” Journal of the Early Republic 9 (1989): 21–51; and Finkelman, “Slavery and the Northwest Ordinance: A Study in Ambiguity,” Journal of the Early Republic 6 (1986): 343–70. 4.  For this comparative data see Wendy Warren, New England Bound: Slavery and Colonialism in Early New England (New York, 2016) 10–11; Gary Nash and Jean Soderland, Freedom by Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its Aftermath (New York, 1991), 7; Shane White, Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New York City (Athens, GA, 1991), 16–17; Max Grivno, Gleanings of Freedom: Free and Slave Labor Along the Mason Dixon Line (Urbana, IL, 2011), 11; Guion Griffis Johnson, Ante-­Bellum North Carolina: A Social History (Chapel Hill, NC, 1937), 53–58. 5.  The concept of legal culture and “legality” recognizes that the law had social and cultural dimensions that shaped how it functioned. On this point see Kelly Kennington, In the Shadow of Dred Scott: St. Louis Freedom Suits and the Legal Culture of Slavery in Antebellum America (Athens, GA, 2016), esp. 4–6; Laura Edwards, The People and Their Peace: Local Legal Culture and the Politics of the Post-­Revolutionary South (Chapel Hill, NC, 2009); Ariela J. Gross, Double Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern Courtroom (Princeton, NJ, 2000); Christopher L. Tomlins and Bruce H. Mann, eds., The Many Legalities of Early America (Chapel Hill, NC, 2001). On the importance of courtrooms and space in African Americans’ politics generally see Scott Hancock, “Claiming the Courtroom: Space, Race and Law, 1808–1865,” in “We Shall Be Independent”: African American Place Making and the Struggle to Claim Space in the United States, ed. Angel Davis Nieves and Leslie M. Alexander (Boulder: CO, 2008), 137–66; Martha Jones, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (New York, 2018): 59–70.

266

Notes to Pages 103–105

6.  This builds on the observation that slavery often acted as a set of coercive “practices that needed to be interpreted.” In this sense, “slave status, in effect, could be based on something that looked rather like simple present possession, deflecting inconvenient inquiry into the (perhaps altogether absent) root of the alleged title.” Rebecca Scott, “Social Facts, Legal Fictions, and the Attribution of Slave Status,” Law and History Review 35 (2017): 11, 17. 7. On similar tactics elsewhere see Hancock, “Claiming the Courtroom,” 143–44; Kimberly Welch, Black Litigants in the Antebellum South (Chapel Hill, 2018), esp. 161–67; Kenneth Aslakson, Making Race in the Courtroom: The Legal Construction of Three Races in Early New Orleans (New York, 2014). 8. Cha-­Jua, America’s First Black Town; Cheryl Janifer LaRoche, Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad: The Geography of Resistance (Urbana, IL, 2013). 9. Across the North, black migrants adopted a similar strategy. For the study of one such town in Michigan see Anna Lisa Cox, A Stronger Kinship: One Town’s Extraordinary Story of Hope and Faith (New York, 2006). See also Nikki M. Taylor, Frontiers of Freedom: Cincinnati’s Black Community, 1802–1868 (Athens, OH, 2005), 69–79. 10. This elaborates on the dynamic that “restrictive and narrow conceptions of liberty derived from bourgeois constructions of the market, the atomizing and individualizing character of rights,” undermined the promise of liberty for freed slaves after the Civil War. Saidiya A. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-­Making in Nineteenth-­Century America (New York, 1997), 122. 11.  For studies of slavery in other borderlands regions see Stacy Smith, Freedom’s Frontier: California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction (Chapel Hill, NC, 2013); Matthew Salafia, Slavery’s Borderland: Freedom and Bondage along the Ohio River (Philadelphia, 2013); Tiya Miles, The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of Straights (New York, 2017); Grivno, Gleanings of Freedom; Stephen Aron, American Confluence: The Missouri Frontier from Borderland to Border State (Bloomington, IN, 2006); and Stanley Harrold, Border War: Fighting over Slavery Before the Civil War (Chapel Hill, NC, 2010). On the specific notion that African Americans advocated for more limited, specific, and circumscribed rights in these borderland regions see Andrew Diemer, The Politics of Black Citizenship: Free African Americans in the Mid-­Atlantic Borderland, 1817–1863 (Athens, GA, 2017), esp. 6–7, 49–51, 58–59. 12.  For treatment of the towns as maroon communities see Thomas P. Slaughter, Bloody Dawn: The Christiana Riot and Racial Violence in the Antebellum North (New York, 1991), 49; Manisha Sinha, “Coming of Age: The Historiography of Black Abolitionism,” in Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism, ed. Timothy Patrick McCarthy and John Stauffer (New York, 2006), 23–38; Steven Hahn, The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom (Cambridge, MA, 2009), 22–40. 13. Scholarship has commonly made distinctions between different forms of maroons. The classic division was between “petit” and “grand” maroons, which saw the length of time away from slavery as the key factor. Whereas “petit” maroons left for only a few days or weeks, “grand” maroons built villages and societies on the margins of societies. This division comes from Richard Price, ed.,  Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, 3rd ed. (Baltimore, 1996). More recently scholars have questioned this division and used the tactic of flight as the organizing principle in marronage. In this framework “borderland” maroons resided near plantations and relied on theft and raiding to survive, while “hinterland” maroons lived far from settled land in caves, swamps, and forests. On this framework see Sylviane A.

Notes to Pages 105–108

267

Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons (New York, 2014). A useful overview of marronage in the New World appears in Manolo Florentio and Marcia Amatino, “Runaways and Quilombolas in the Americas,” in The Cambridge World History of Slavery, vol. 3, ed. David Eltis and Stanley L. Engerman (Cambridge, Eng., 2011), 708–40. 14. As one scholar summarizes the argument all free African Americans “were literally besieged by slavery and the many debilities that slavery carried with it” and that “any black man, woman, or child anywhere was presumed to be a slave.” Steven Hahn, A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830–1910 (New York, 2016), 75. See also the claim “even the free born were living under the shadow of racial slavery.” Sinha, “Coming of Age,” 34. 15.  See, for instance, the case of Elija Morris, Shawneetown Illinois Republican, October 8, 1842, ALPLM; People v. Peyton Gordon, William G. W. Fitch, Caleb Slankard, Joshua Hanly, John Simpkins, and Joseph Lynn, 1844—CC—065, Office of the Circuit Clerk, Pope County, Golconda, Illinois. 16.  See Patrick Rael, Eighty Eight Years: The Long Death of Slavery in the United States, 1777–1865 (Athens, GA, 2015); and Ira Berlin, The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States (Cambridge, MA, 2015). 17. Dana Elizabeth Weiner, Race and Rights: Fighting Slavery and Prejudice in the Old Northwest, 1830–1870 (Urbana, IL, 2013), esp. 60–61, 71–73; and Cheryl LaRoche, “On the Edge of Freedom: Free Black Communities, Archeology, and the Underground Railroad” (PhD diss., University of Maryland, 2004), chap. 1. 18.  Bob and Lydia v. Jincy Mitchel, 1810, Case 1754, St. Clair Circuit Court Records, ISA. 19.  For other cases of freedom suits see Alaisire, a girl of color v. Ferdinand Maxwell filed September 15, 1835, Office of the Circuit Clerk, Randolph County, Illinois; Registry of Negroes 1809–1863, p. 218, Office of the County Clerk, Randolph County, Chester, Illinois; St. Clair County Servitude Register, 1805–1832, p. 73, ISA. 20.  Rebecca Schmook, ed., Gallatin County Slave Register, p. 63. 21. Ibid., 65. 22. In addition to those cited above see also Edwards County Slave Register, 1815–1860, p. 13, ISA; Union County Deed Book 3, p. 440, Office of the County Clerk, Jonesboro, Illinois; and Union County Record Book D, p. 196, Office of the Circuit Clerk, Jonesboro, Illinois; Jon Musgrave, ed., Gallatin County Slave and Emancipation Records, 79; Schmook, ed., Gallatin County Slave Register, p. 63; Johnson County Circuit Court Book Record No. 5, April 1836– May 1843, p. 185. 23.  Johnson County Circuit Court Book Record No. 5, April 1836–May 1843, p.354. 24.  This was not unique to Illinois; as one scholar aptly notes, in Maryland “the state might regulate its African American residents, but such regulations could be turned into assertions of rights.” Jones, Birthright Citizens, 91. 25. On the broad reaction to the Turner rebellion, see Lacy Ford, Deliver Us from Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South (New York, 2011), 269–98. 26. Cha-­Jua, America’s First Black Town, 32. 27.  Pope County Deed Book E, p. 53, Office of the County Clerk, Golconda, Illinois. 28.  Firm census data does not exist. The Pope County Courthouse has evidence of 215 free African Americans posting emancipation bonds after 1840. It is not known how many of those people relocated to the Grove. 29. LaRoche, “On the Edge of Freedom,” 186.

268

Notes to Pages 108–110

30.  These estates appear on the 1860 U.S. Census, Township 12S, Range 5E, Pope County, Illinois, s.v. 31. See, for instance, the indictments for selling alcohol: People v. Moses Lewis 1840— CC—444; People v. Moses Lewis 1852—CC—32; People v. Moses Lewis 1852—CC—35; and People v. Moses Lewis 1853—CC—76. 32. One black resident of Pope County, Elijah Morris, had $600 in cash stolen from him, indicating at least some modest prosperity. See Shawneetown Illinois Republican, October 8, 1842. 33. LaRoche, Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad, ix. On this point more generally, T. K. Hunter sees “the location of the law as essential to the operation of the law. Liberty, in other words, was determined by geography.” T. K. Hunter, “Geographies of Liberty: A Brief Look at Two Cases,” in Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism, ed. Timothy Patrick McCarty and John Stauffer (New York, 2006), 43. 34.  Shawneetown Illinois Republican, November 26, 1842. 35.  See, for example, Edwards County Slave Register, 1815–1860, p. 13, ISA; Union County Deed Book 3, p. 440, Office of the County Clerk, Jonesboro, Illinois; and Union County Record Book D, p. 196, Office of the Circuit Clerk, Jonesboro, Illinois; Musgrave, ed., Gallatin County Slave and Emancipation Records, 79; Schmook, ed., Gallatin County Slave Register, 63. Fewer than twenty of these petitions survive. 36. Cha-­Jua, America’s First Black Town, 33. For a similar evaluation in other locations see Hahn, The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom, 31. 37. Cha-­Jua, America’s First Black Town, 40. See also LaRoche, Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad, 23. On the underground railroad more generally see R. J. M. Blackett, Making Freedom: The Underground Railroad and the Politics of Slavery (Chapel Hill, NC, 2017); and Eric Foner, Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (New York, 2016). 38. LaRoche, Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad, 50. 39. On these early suits see M. Scott Heerman, “In a State of Slavery: Black Servitude in Illinois, 1800–1830,” Early American Studies 14 (2016): 130–49. 40.  Heather Andrea Williams, Self Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom (Chapel Hill, NC, 2005), esp. 9–29. See also Anthony Kaye, Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South (Chapel Hill, NC, 2009), esp. 14, 150, 180; and Hahn, A Nation Without Borders, 204–10. 41. In Gallatin County between 1815 and 1840, 34 servitude contracts contain signatures of African Americans. All of the servants in these 34 contracts signed with a mark, and did not sign their name, which implies their illiteracy. In neighboring Pope County between 1817 and 1840, 19 servitude contracts or emancipation bonds contain African American signatures. All 19 signatures are made with a mark. Idiosyncrasies in the ways in which these documents are recorded at the courthouse made these statistics unreliable and impressionistic. Still, they suggest a widespread illiteracy. 42.  Some masters relied on servitude contracts or other legal instruments to keep African Americans in bondage, despite their inability to sign their name. See, e.g., William Wilson using a mark on a servitude contract or Hugh Robertson and Alexander Blouin manumission deed, Deed Book A, pp. 34, 589, Office of the Pope County Clerk, Golconda, Illinois. On enslaved people’s knowledge of the law in this region more generally see Anne Twitty, Before Dred Scott: Slavery and Legal Culture in the American Confluence, 1787–1857 (New York, 2016), esp. 71–88.

Notes to Pages 110–112

269

43.  St. Clair County Emancipation Book, 1822–1832, p. 16, ISA. 44.  St. Clair County Emancipation Book, 1822–1832, p. 12, ISA. 45.  St. Clair County Negro Book, 1805–1832, p. 73, ISA. 46.  Pope County Deed Book D, p. 32, Office of the County Clerk, Golconda, Illinois. 47.  Pope County Deed Book C, pp. 339–44, Office of the County Clerk, Golconda, Illinois. 48.  The 1849 case is at Pope County Deed Book D, p. 435, Office of the County Clerk, Golconda, Illinois. For other instances see emancipation bonds for Dolly Sides and Mary, December 1847; Sally Fryer, April 1, 1848; and John Averett, July 31, 1850, bin 317, Office of the County Clerk, Pope County, Golconda, Illinois. 49.  Shawneetown Illinois Republican, November 26, 1842. On the movement of runaways into freedom villages more generally see Edwards County Slave Register, 1815–1860, p. 13, ISA; Union County Deed Book 3, p. 440, Office of the County Clerk, Jonesboro, Illinois; and Union County Record Book D, p. 196, Office of the Circuit Clerk, Jonesboro, Illinois; Musgrave, ed., Gallatin County Slave and Emancipation Records, 79; Schmook, ed., Gallatin County Slave Register, 63. Fewer than twenty of these petitions survive. 50.  For his criminal indictments see People v. Moses Lewis 1840—CC—444; People v. Moses Lewis 1852—CC—32; People v. Moses Lewis 1852—CC—35; and People v. Moses Lewis 1853— CC—76, Office of the Circuit Clerk, Pope County, Golconda, Illinois. 51.  For selling in quantities that were too small see People v. Moses Lewis 1856—CC—26; People v. Moses Lewis 1856—CC—68; People v. Moses Lewis 1864—CC—016, Office of the Circuit Clerk, Pope County, Golconda, Illinois. 52.  These bonds appear at: Pope County Deed Book D, p. 394, Pope County Deed Book E, p. 447, and Emancipation Bond, July 31, 1850, bin 317, Office of the County Clerk, Golconda, Illinois. 53.  Schmook, ed., Gallatin County Slave Register, 47. This case comes from neighboring Gallatin County and is suggestive of the kinds of legal processes residents in Pope County would have gone through. 54.  Solomon Wills to Henry Eddy, August 25, 1828, box 1, Henry Eddy Papers, ALPLM. The judgments for these cases are nonextant. 55. Ibid. 56.  Solomon Willis to Henry Eddy, August 25, 1829, box 1, Henry Eddy Papers, ALPLM. 57. On the role of lawyers elsewhere see Welch, Black Litigants in the Antebellum American South, esp. 90–99; Kennington, In the Shadow of Dred Scott, esp. 71–78; Twitty, Before Dred Scott, esp. 96–124. 58. Notably, Abraham Lincoln took a slaveholder as a client. On this episode, see Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York, 2010), 48–50. See also Mark E. Steiner, An Honest Calling: The Law Practice of Abraham Lincoln (DeKalb, IL, 2006), esp. 103–109. 59. On this point see Welch, Black Litigants in the Antebellum American South, 85. For the important conclusions of moving the story beyond the politics of lawyers and judges see ibid., 110–11. 60.  Matthew Chambers v. People of the State of Illinois, 1843, Case 1465, p. 6, Supreme Court Case Files, ISA; Randolph County Circuit Court Book B, p. 104, Office of the Circuit Clerk, Chester, Illinois. 61.  Randolph County Circuit Court Book B, p. 104, Office of the Circuit Clerk, Chester, Illinois.

270

Notes to Pages 113–114

62.  Matthew Chambers v. People of the State of Illinois, 1843, Case 1465, p. 6, Supreme Court Case Files, ISA. 63. Ibid., 5. 64. Nathaniel Wickliffe to Brown and Yates, November 17, 1849, Nathaniel Wickliffe Papers, Filson Historical Society, Louisville, Kentucky. 65. These cases are David Bailey v. William Cromwell et. al., 1841, [no case number], Supreme Court Case Files, Illinois State Archives, Springfield, Illinois; and Petition for Writ of Habeas Corpus, June 1845, Office of the Menard County Circuit Clerk, Petersburg, Illinois. It must also be noted that Lincoln once argued on behalf of slaveholders. For a discussion of this case see Foner, The Fiery Trial, 48–50. See also Steiner, An Honest Calling, esp. 103–109. 66. A useful summary of this historiography is found in James L. Huston, “The Illinois Political Realignment of 1844–1860: Revisiting the Analysis,” Journal of the Civil War Era 1 (2011): 506–35. Many scholars have followed Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York, 1970). For other expositions of the rise of antislavery politics in Illinois see William E. Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852–1856 (New York, 1987); Richard Sewell, Ballots for Freedom: Antislavery Politics in the United States, 1837–1860 (New York, 1980), 45–47; and Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York, 2006), 602–33. 67.  See the claim that the “most striking omission from the standard historical treatments of abolitionism’s origins” was “the near absence of African Americans and their role” in advancing the cause. Paul Goodman, Of One Blood: Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial Equality (Berkeley, CA, 1998), xiv. See also the observation that “until recently, the standard narratives of abolitionism—both celebratory and critical—have emphasized the evangelical impulses of white middle-­class and elite male reformers,” McCarthy and Staffer, eds., Prophets of Protest, xx. 68.  For treatments of this narrative see Goodman, Of One Blood; David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (New York, 2014), esp. 193–225; Diemer, The Politics of Black Citizenship; Stephen Kantrowitz, More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic (New York, 2013); Leslie Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863 (Chicago, 2002); Richard Newman, Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers (New York, 2009); Julie Winch, A Gentleman of Color: The Life of James Forten (New York, 2002). For a broad overview see Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), esp. 66–85, 130–59. 69.  Richard Newman, The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002), esp. 60–106, 131–51. 70. On African Americans’ use of the law and courts in the North see Martha Jones, “Time, Space, and Jurisdiction in Atlantic World Slavery: The Volunbrun Household in Gradual Emancipation New York,” Law and History Review 29 (2011): 1031–60; Sarah L. H. Gronningsater, “ ‘On Behalf of His Race and the Lemmon Slaves’: Louis Napoleon, Northern Black Legal Culture, and the Politics of Sectional Crisis,” Journal of the Civil War Era 6 (2017); Nicholas P. Wood, “A ‘Class of Citizens’: The Earliest Black Petitioners to Congress and Their Quaker Allies,” William and Mary Quarterly 74 (2017): 109–44; Graham Russel Gao Hodges, David Ruggles: A Radical Black Abolitionist and the Underground Railroad in New York City (Chapel Hill, NC, 2012); Robert M. Cover, Justice Accused: Antislavery and the Judicial Process (New Haven, CT, 1975).

Notes to Pages 114–117

271

71.  Stephen Hansen and Paul Nygard, “Stephen A. Douglas, the Know-­Nothings, and the Democratic Party in Illinois, 1854–1858,” Illinois Historical Journal 87 (1994): 110–16. See also Huston, “Illinois Political Realignment of 1844–1860.” Chapter 6 I would like to thank Amber Armstrong, Lori Ginzberg, Van Gosse, Scott Heerman, Kellie Carter Jackson, Maggie (McKinley) Blackhawk, David Waldstreicher, and the Penn Law School Writers’ Bloc(k) for their generous feedback on earlier drafts of this chapter. Marjory Allen Perez, the former Wayne County historian, was an invaluable interlocutor as I worked to trace the Ray family’s movements and politics in western New York. 1.  “Board of Education,” Rochester Daily Democrat, February 21, 1846; “Board of Education,” Rochester Daily Democrat, March 5, 1846; Second Annual Report of the Superintendent of Common Schools of the City of Rochester (Rochester, 1844), 6, 31; Fourth Annual Report of the Superintendent of Common Schools of the City of Rochester (Rochester, 1845), 3, 6; Canfield and Warren’s Directory of the City of Rochester, for 1845–46 (Rochester, 1845), 14; Daily American Directory of the City of Rochester, for 1847–48 (Rochester, 1847), 230; Daily American Directory of the City of Rochester, for 1849–50 (Rochester, 1849), 256. 2.  Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey passed gradual abolition laws in 1780, 1799, and 1804, respectively. These laws freed children born to slave mothers while simultaneously requiring them to work as servants until adulthood. For more on the gradualist political environment in the early U.S. North, see Padraig Riley’s chapter in this volume. Samantha Seeley’s chapter, also in this volume, examines black movement across states and within states. Her work sheds light on the Ray family’s relocations; the Rays’ ability to move into New York affected their ability to craft decent lives for themselves, which in turned affected their political capacities and priorities. 3.  1820 United States Census, Fayette, Seneca County, New York, s.v. “Isaac Ray”; Rochester Directory for 1847, 230; 1850 United States Census, Rochester Ward 6, Monroe County, New York, s.v. “David Ray”; 1850 United States Census, Rochester Ward 5, Monroe County, New York, s.v. “Phebe Ray”; 1880 United States Census, Rochester, Monroe County, New York, s.v. “Phebe Ray”; 1880 United States Census, Palmyra, Wayne County, New York, s.v. “David Ray”; 1880 United States Federal Census, Plattsburgh, Steuben County, New York, s.v. “Mary A. Johnson”; Rochester Directory for the Year Beginning July 1, 1880 (Rochester, 1880), 310; David H. Ray Death Certificate, Register #172, August 19, 1884, Town Clerk, Palmyra, New York. In the late 1830s, both Phebe and David were living in Canandaigua, Ontario County, thirty miles south of Rochester. “Pastry, Fruits” and “Ontario Hair Dressing Room,” Ontario Repository and Freeman, May 10, 1837. The Rays moved to Rochester sometime around 1843–44. Isaac Ray appears to have died sometime in the late 1830s. In 1847, Phebe and David were listed separately—she as a cook, he as a barber—in the Rochester directory, but they lived at the same address on Mechanic Alley. The birth years for David Ray and Mary Johnson (née Ray) are estimates; census data conflicts. 4.  “Board of Education,” Rochester Daily Democrat, April 20, 1846; Fourth Annual Report of the Superintendent of Public Schools of the City of Rochester (Rochester, 1845), 3; Sixth Annual Report of the Superintendent of Public Schools of the City of Rochester (Rochester, 1847), 4. 5.  Sarah L. H. Gronningsater, “ ‘Expressly Recognized by Our Election Laws’: Certificates of Freedom and the Multiple Fates of Black Citizenship in the Early Republic,” William and Mary Quarterly (July 2018): 465–506; Riley in this volume. New York’s 1821 constitution declared that

272

Notes to Page 117

“no man of colour, unless he shall have been for three years a citizen of this state . . . possessed of a freehold estate of the value of two hundred and fifty dollars . . . shall be entitled to vote.” The constitution was ratified by the state electorate in January 1822. For the underrecognized persistence of black voting in New York after 1821, see Van Gosse, Native Sons: Black Politics in America, From the Revolution to the Civil War (Chapel Hill, NC, 2020). 6. New York, for most of the early nineteenth century, was home to the region’s largest number of free blacks (50,000 people by 1840). Because of New York’s overall wealth and population, the state’s politics—high, low, and in-­between—bear special importance to nineteenth-­ century history. For a historiographical overview of black politics in the free states, see the introduction to this volume and Van Gosse’s chapter; for more on how vital local and state citizenship was in this period, see Laura Edwards’s afterword. 7.  Historians of women, in particular, have written persuasively about ordinary and disfranchised people’s political practices; we could do more to apply their insights to the history of black northerners and to synthetic accounts of the First and Second Party Systems. See Kabria Baumgartner, “Building the Future: White Women, Black Education, and Civic Inclusion in Antebellum Ohio,” Journal of the Early Republic (Spring 2017): 117–45; Mia Bay, Farah J. Griffin, Martha S. Jones, and Barbara D. Savage, Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (Chapel Hill, NC, 2015); Laura F. Edwards, “Sarah Allingham’s Sheet and Other Lessons from Legal History,” Journal of the Early Republic (Spring 2018): 121–47; Lori D. Ginzberg, Untidy Origins: A Story of Woman’s Rights in Antebellum New York (Chapel Hill, NC, 2005); Martha S. Jones, All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture (Chapel Hill, NC, 2007); Barbara Clark Smith, The Freedoms We Lost: Consent and Resistance in Revolutionary America (New York, 2010); Susan Zaeske, Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery, and Women’s Political Identity (Chapel Hill, NC, 2003); Rosemarie Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia, 2007). For a call to learn more about “the overwhelming mass of black inhabitants who were laborers and domestics, often on the move, and prone to distinctive forms of militancy and public politics,” see Steven Hahn, The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom (Cambridge, MA, 2009), 44. Scott Heerman’s chapter in this volume—on rural black politics in southern Illinois—provides one example of a rich answer to Hahn’s call. 8. A note on definitions of “petitioning” and “lobbying.” A petition (or a “memorial”) was a document, addressed to a governmental body, that expressed a declaration of a grievance and a prayer for a specific remedy or policy. A petition included a list of signatories who supported the contents; it could be signed or presented by one person or thousands. One did not need be a voter, or even a citizen (in certain cases), to sign or present a petition. There was a general expectation that the petitioned body would respond, though not necessarily with the reply the petitioner(s) wanted. Lobbying, by contrast, involved meeting directly with politicians to persuade them to support certain legislation or policies. Petitioning was a more public and formal method of asking for change; councils, legislatures, and executives regularly recorded the reception of petitions in their formal minutes. Early American constitutions and statutes were explicit about the right to petition. Phebe Ray’s appearance before the school board was a form of individual, in-­person petitioning. This chapter explores black New Yorkers’ petitioning and lobbying, with an emphasis on the former. For more on these practices, see Raymond Bailey, Popular Influence on Public Policy: Petitioning in Eighteenth-­Century Virginia (Westport, 1979); William C. diGiacomantonio, “ ‘For the Gratification of a Volunteering Society’: Antislavery and Pressure Group Politics in the First Federal Congress,” Journal of the Early Republic (Summer

Notes to Page 118

273

1995): 169–97; Edmund S. Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (New York, 1988), esp. 223–33; Ruth Bogin, “Petitioning and the New Moral Economy of Post-­Revolutionary America,” William and Mary Quarterly (July 1988): 391– 425; Daniel Carpenter, “Recruitment by Petition: American Antislavery, French Protestantism, English Suppression,” Perspectives on Politics (September 2016): 700–23; Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill, NC, 1980), esp. 93-­ 95; Gregory A. Mark, “The Vestigial Constitution: The History and Significance of the Right to Petition,” Fordham Law Review (1998): 2153–231; Maggie McKinley, “Lobbying and the Petition Clause,” Stanford Law Review (May 2016): 1131–2105; Jeffrey L. Pasley, “Private Access and Public Power: Gentility and Lobbying in the Early Congress,” in The House and Senate in the 1790s: Petitioning, Lobbying, and Institutional Development, ed. Kenneth R. Bowling and Donald  R. Kennon (Athens, OH, 2002): 57–99; Daniel Peart, Lobbyists and the Making of U.S. Tariff Policy, 1816–1861 (Baltimore, 2018); Zaeske, Signatures of Citizenship, ch. 1. 9. Daniel Carpenter and Colin D. Moore, “When Canvassers Became Activists: Antislavery Petitioning and the Political Mobilization of American Women,” American Political Science Review (August 2014): 479–98; Daniel Carpenter and Benjamin Schneer, “Party Formation Through Petitions: The Whigs and the Bank War of 1832–1834,” Studies in American Political Development (October 2015): 213–34; Maggie McKinley, “Petitioning and the Making of the Administrative State,” Yale Law Journal (April 2018): 1448–741; recent work in note 8. Nicholas P. Wood’s recent article highlights and reinterprets an important early moment in black petitioning at the national level. Wood, “A ‘class of Citizens’: The Early Black Petitioners to Congress and Their Quaker Allies,” William and Mary Quarterly (January 2017): 109–44. 10.  The majority of the 1830s congressional petitions focused on issues the federal government might constitutionally address, such as the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. Although black citizens (and even slaves) certainly signed some of these petitions, most of the signatories were white. My aim is to turn our view to the equally intense petitioning that occurred at the local and state levels, where black petitioners prayed for actions that local and state authorities could address. On the national petitions, see Corey M. Brooks, Liberty Power: Antislavery Third Parties and the Transformation of American Politics (Chicago, 2016), chs. 1–2. For a study that focuses on black and white abolitionism in New York but makes no mention of black petitioning at all, see Milton C. Sernett, North Star Country: Upstate New York and Crusade for African American Freedom (Syracuse, NY, 2001). 11.  The literature on citizenship is vast. Examples include: Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics (Oxford, Eng., 1978); Martha S. Jones, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (Cambridge, Eng., 2018); James H. Kettner, The Development of American Citizenship, 1608–1870 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1978); Rogers Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven, CT, 1997); Barbara Welke, Law and the Borders of Belonging in the Long Nineteenth Century (New York, 2010). On “white male democracy,” see Lacy Ford, “Making the ‘White Man’s Country’ White: Race, Slavery and State-­Building in the Jacksonian South,” Journal of the Early Republic (Winter 1999): 713–37; Andrew W. Robertson, “Jeffersonian Parties, Politics, and Participation: The Tortuous Trajectory of American Democracy,” in Practicing Democracy: Popular Politics in the United States from the Constitution to the Civil War, ed. Daniel Peart and Adam I. P. Smith (Charlottesville, VA, 2015), 99–122. 12.  New York Laws, 10th Sess. (1787), ch. 1 (state bill of rights); N.Y. Constitution of 1821, art. II (outlining that a “man of colour” who was a “citizen of the state” for at least three years could

274

Notes to Pages 118–119

vote in certain cases); William Yates, Rights of Colored Men to Suffrage, Citizenship, and Trial by Jury (Philadelphia, 1837); “Public Meeting of the Political Association,” Colored American, October 20, 1838; New York Laws, 63rd Sess. (1840), ch. 375 (“An Act More Effectually to Protect the Free Citizens of this State from Being Kidnapped, or Reduced to Slavery”). New York’s bill of rights guaranteed “the right of the citizens of this State to Petition the person administering the government of this State.” The U.S. Constitution protected “the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” For discussions of whether free black or enslaved petitioners, as either “citizens” or “people,” were allowed to petition the U.S. Congress, see Mark, “The Vestigial Constitution,” 2221–26; Wood, “A ‘class of Citizens’,” 109–44. Even when local and state bodies in New York denied black petitioners’ wishes, they rarely if ever questioned black people’s right to petition. 13.  Judith Wellman, for example, argues that black New Yorkers were “less tied to the formal political system” than white abolitionists. Wellman, Grassroots Reform in the Burned-­Over District of Upstate New York: Religion, Abolitionism and Democracy (New York, 2011), ix. Leslie M. Alexander, emphasizing black citizens’ failure to regain equal suffrage through their petition campaigns, overlooks their success in achieving two other major goals (the 1840 jury trial law and 1841 nine-­months repeal). Alexander, African or American? Black Identity and Political Activism in New York City, 1784–1861 (Champaign, IL, 2008), 94–96, 110, 118. Other important studies that do not delve into formal or state politics are Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863 (Chicago, 2003); Craig Steven Wilder, In the Company of Black Men: The African Influence on African American Culture in New York City (New York, 2001); Graham Russell Hodges, Root and Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613–1863 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1999), esp. 253. Wilder argues that “limitations on black suffrage muffled antislavery agitation in politics”—this overstates the case. Wilder, A Covenant with Color: Race and Social Power in Brooklyn (New York, 2000), 67, 70 (quotation). 14. Arnold J. F. Van Laer, trans., New York Historical Manuscripts Dutch, vol. 4, Council Minutes, 1638–1649 (Baltimore, 1974), 212–13. 15.  “Petition of Quamino, a free negro, to be released from imprisonment” (1699); “Petition of Mando, a negro woman, for the freedom of herself and Hagar, her child”; and other examples, Calendar of Historical Manuscripts in the Office of the Secretary of State, Albany, N.Y., English Manuscripts, 1664–1776, ed. E. B. O’Callahan, (Albany, 1866), 268, 285, passim; “Petition of Juan Miranda” (1758), box 5, folder 12; “The Case of Simon Moore” (1753), box 11, folder 10; “Case of Susannah West and her Brother and Sister” [1750s?], box 12, folder 2; “Petition of Juaquin Beneto” (1755), box 12, folder 5; John Tabor Kempe Papers, New-­York Historical Society; “Sara, Free Negro Wench of Cortland Mannor, Writt of Homine Replegiando out of the High Court of Chancery, for Boy called Prince” (1767), Goshen Public Library, Goshen, New York. On the practice of petitioning and legislative adjudication more broadly in colonial New York, see Christine A. Desan, “The Constitutional Commitment to Legislative Adjudication in the Early American Tradition,” Harvard Law Review (April 1998): 1381–1503. 16. I do not, however, want to create too stark a line between “public” and “private” grievances, or between “general” and “personal”/“specific” remedies. As Gregory Mark has noted, “highly individualized grievances carried with them seeds of legislation—legislation that would extend beyond immediate relief for the petitioner.” Mark, “The Vestigial Constitution,” 2182. Moreover, there were occasional instances when groups of black petitioners sought general relief during the colonial era. In Virginia in 1769, for example, “People called Mulattoes and free Negroes” successfully petitioned the House of Burgesses for a change in the tax code. Journals

Notes to Pages 119–120

275

of the House of Burgesses of Virginia, 1766–1769 (Richmond, 1906), 198, 251; Ch. 37, “An Act for Exempting Free Negro, Mulatto, and Indian women, from the Payment of Levies” (1769), in Statutes at Large; Being a Collection of all the Laws of Virginia, vol. 8 (Richmond, VA, 1821), 393. Most of the Province of New York’s colonial records burned in the 1911 State Capitol Fire. There may have been collective black petitions praying for forms of general relief among the ashes, although O’Callaghan’s extensive Calendar of Historical Manuscripts, 1664–1776, published in 1866, does not list any. Such petitions to local authorities in the English colonial period may be extant; I am keeping an eye out. 17.  Journal of the Assembly of the State of New York (Albany, 1809), 67 (hereafter cited as JASNY) [petition of William Hamilton and others of New-­York praying to incorporate African Society for Mutual Relief]; JASNY (Albany, 1810), 118 [petition of New-­York African Society]; “Memorial of the Committee of Grievances Appointed by the People of Color, of the City & County of N York,” December 27, 1813, Records of the Common Council, New York Municipal Archives; JASNY (Albany, 1820), 26 [Peter Williams and others, of the city of New-­York, for aid to assist in building an African free school]; JASNY (Albany, 1821), 201 [petitioners of African descent to incorporate Brooklyn African Woolman Benevolent Society]; Nathanial H. Carter and William L. Stone, Report on the Proceedings and Debates of the Convention of 1821 (Albany, 1821),134– 35; JASNY (Albany, 1822), 49, 189 [petition to incorporate Albany Benezett [sic] Philanthropic Society; Henry C. Thompson and others to incorporate Brooklyn African Woolman Benevolent Society]; JASNY (Albany, 1826), part 1, pp. 169, 426, 990–91 [Mark I. Jordan and others to incorporate the Union Society of Young Men of Colour, of the city of New-­York]; JASNY (Albany, 1828), 673, 694 [to incorporate the Union Society]; JASNY (Albany, 1829), 167, 308, 655, 857, 863, 907 [Alexander Elston, William Hamilton and others to incorporate New-­York African Clarkson association; to incorporate the Union Society]; JASNY (Albany, 1830), 270, 294–95, 476, 599 [to incorporate Albany African Clarkson Society]; JASNY (Albany, 1830), 118, 165, 270, 294, 476, 599, 175, 739 [to incorporate Union Society; to incorporate Brooklyn African Woolman Benevolent Society; Rev. Nathanial Paul and others to incorporate Albany African Clarkson Society]; JASNY (Albany, 1831), 51, 90, 166 [petition from Brooklyn African Woolman Society to hold real estate]; Paul A. Gilje and Howard B. Rock, “Sweep-­O! Sweep-­O!: African American Chimney Sweeps and Citizenship in the New Nation,” William and Mary Quarterly (July 1994): 507–38. On incorporation in the early republic, see Sarah Barringer Gordon, “The African Supplement: Religion, Race, and Corporate Law in Early National America,” William and Mary Quarterly 72 (July 2015): 385– 422. My reading of the extant sources suggests that, in the early national period, individual slaves seeking freedom turned more often to courts rather than to the legislature for remedy. The white lawyers and politicians of the New-­York Manumission Society, founded in 1785, often worked on behalf of these petitioners while simultaneously petitioning the state legislature for general abolition and antislavery laws. By virtue of this dynamic, individual black petitioners seeking freedom inspired white elites to seek systematic legislative changes. Minutes of the Standing Committee in the New-­York Manumission Society Records, 1785–1849, New-­York Historical Society. 18. Carleton Mabee’s Black Education in New York State: From Colonial to Modern Times (Syracuse, NY, 1979) and Carter G. Woodson’s The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861 (New York, 1915) remain invaluable. See also Hilary J. Moss, Schooling Citizens: The Struggle for African American Education in Antebellum America (Chicago, 2009). 19.  New York Laws, 35th Sess. (1812), ch. 242; New York Laws, 37th Sess. (1814), ch. 192; New York Laws, 42nd Sess. (1819), ch. 161; New York Laws, 45th Sess. (1822), ch. 256; Ch. 15, “Of Public Instruction,” Revised Statutes of the State of New-­York, Passed During the Years 1827 and

276

Notes to Pages 120–122

1828, vol. 1 (Albany, 1829); Revised Statutes of the State of New York . . . for the Use of Schools and Families (New York, 1844); Walter John Gifford, Historical Development of New York State High School System (Albany, 1922), 29–33. For a description of how school laws were implemented at the local level, see “Communication: District School Meeting,” Long-­Island Star, May 8, 1816. By the time these school laws passed, the state was already funding the African Free School in New York City. There was no suggestion that common school funds would be denied to black students. Minutes of the Common Council of the City of New York, vol. 3, 1801–1805 (New York, 1917), 628; New York Laws, 33rd Sess. (1810), ch. 192. 20.  George E. Haynes, The Negro at Work in New York City (New York, 1912), 47. 21.  “African School,” Long-­Island Star, January 18, 1815; “Communication,” Long-­Island Star, April 22, 1824; “White Washing,” Long-­Island Star, April 10, 1834. See also “African Celebration,” Long-­Island Star, July 19, 1827. In 1831, the Crogers and Joseph Smith achieved the incorporation of the Woolman Society after repeatedly petitioning the legislature. New York Laws, 54th Sess. (1831), ch. 17. See note 17. 22.  Spooner’s Brooklyn Directory (Brooklyn, 1822), 10, 44; “Communication,” Long Island Star, April 22, 1824; “White Washing,” Long Island Star, April 10, 1834; see also page XXX in this chapter. 23.  For more examples of schools as town squares, see “At a numerous and respectable meeting of the Africans,” New-­York Gazette, December 17, 1807; “Dorcas Association,” Freedom’s Journal, November 21, 1828; “Colored School in Utica,” Colored American, April 1, 1837; “Public Meeting,” Colored American, August 22, 1840. 24.  “District School,” Long-­Island Star, April 22, 1818. 25. “Communication,” Long-­Island Star, April 22, 1824; “Exhibition in the African Church,” Long-­Island Star, May 19, 1825. See also “African Schools,” Long-­Island Star, October 30, 1830; “For the Long Island Star,” Long-­Island Star, April 3, 1833; William J. Wilson to Henry Reed Stiles, “Public Schools for Colored Children,” late 1862 (?), Henry Reed Stiles Papers, Brooklyn Historical Society. 26.  “To the Public,” Long-­Island Star, October 4, 1827. 27.  “For the Long Island Star,” Long-­Island Star, April 3, 1833. 28.  “The Liberator,” Long Island Star, November 9, 1831; “Exhibition,” Long-­Island Star, December 19, 1839; Brooklyn Alphabetical and Street Directory for 1843 & 4 (Brooklyn, 1843), 33, 164; “A Competent Colored Male Teacher,” Colored American, August 7, 1841. 29.  “The Committee on Common Schools,” Brooklyn Evening Star, February 4, 1841. See also “Colored School,” Brooklyn Evening Star, August 13, 1841. In 1843, the legislature placed the Brooklyn common schools under the direct control of the Common Council, abolishing the district trustees. Hogarth, Smith, and Brown lost their positions. Two years later, black Brooklynites “agitated,” sending petitions to the legislature in an effort to ensure that the colored schools would “receive the same support as other Public Schools.” After the legislature agreed, William J. Wilson, principal of the colored school, “was sent to Albany to obtain a copy of the Act, that steps might be immediately taken to purchase a site and erect a suitable building.” Wilson, “Public Schools for Colored Children”; JASNY (Albany, 1845), 621; New York Laws, 66th Sess. (1845), ch. 306. 30.  New York Laws, 49th Sess. (1826), ch. 25; Public School Society of New-­York Records, Minutes of the Trustees, August 1, 1834, New-­York Historical Society. On the the PSS, see Carl F. Kaestle, The Evolution of an Urban School System: New York City, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, MA, 1973), 80–88, passim.

Notes to Pages 122–123

277

31. Minutes of the Trustees, May 6, 1836, May 13, 1836. 32. Minutes of the Trustees, May 13, 1836, August 5, 1836. 33. Minutes of the Trustees, August 5, 1836. In monitorial schools, older students were tasked with teaching younger students, under the supervision of adult teachers. Proponents saw this system as an inexpensive way to ensure that poor children received schooling. 34. American Convention of Abolition Societies, Minutes of the Adjourned Session of the Twentieth Biennial American Convention for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery (Philadelphia, 1828), 39; “African Dorcas Association,” Freedom’s Journal, February 15, 1828; “Dorcas Association,” Freedom’s Journal, November 21, 1828. On black women’s roles protecting children in northern cities, see Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery; Erica Armstrong Dunbar, A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City (New Haven, 2008). These books, along with David Waldstreicher’s gender-­focused analysis of Phillis Wheatley’s political potency in this volume, inspire interesting questions about women’s political participation in various New York school campaigns. For reasons both practical and ideological, women may have felt they had a particular role to play in children’s education and hoped to appeal to local officials as both mothers and citizens. 35. In 1829, Dix was a founding member of an Otsego County auxiliary of the national Society for Colonizing the Free People of Color. Morgan Dix, comp., Memoirs of John Adams Dix, vol. 1, (New York, 1883), 115–19; John A. Dix, Decisions of the Superintendent of Common Schools of the State of New York (Albany, 1837), 139. 36.  Autobiography of William Seward, from 1801 to 1834 (New York, 1877), 28; Marjory Allen Perez, “The Bradington Family” (unpublished paper on Wayne County slaves); Wayne E. Morrison Sr., History of Monroe County, New York (Philadelphia, 1877), 235; Kettleborough School District Minutes and Records, 1827–1927, Historic Huguenot Street, New Paltz; Samuel Sidwell Randall, The Common School System of the State of New York (Troy, 1851), 70; JASNY (Albany, 1835), 326 (implying Newburgh schools had been integrated until that date). In 1845, James McCune Smith noted that “there are 22 colored schools supported by the State, independently of the colored children who attend white schools.” “Extending the Right of Suffrage,” Albany Argus, April 25, 1845. 37. Dix, Decisions of the Superintendent of Common Schools, 318. 38. Ibid., iii–v. For black citizens’ voting in a school district, see “The Public School” and “Our School Trustees,” Williamsburgh Gazette, March 9, 1842; “The Public School,” Williamsburgh Gazette, March 16, 1842. In 1837, a white abolitionist New Yorker named William Yates published Rights of Colored Men to Suffrage, Citizenship, and Trial by Jury, which relied in part on Dix’s Decisions to explain black citizenship in New York (p. vi.). The Colored American newspaper promoted Yates’s book. 39.  For a sampling of black school politics in other areas across the state (Albany, Auburn, Bath, Flushing, Geneva, Jamaica, Lockport, Poughkeepsie, Troy, Utica) in the 1830s and ’40s, see “Colored School in Albany,” Emancipator, December 23, 1834; “A Card,” Auburn Journal and Advertiser, April 10, 1839; “Editorial Correspondence,” North Star, April 14, 1848; “Bath School,” North Star, July 28, 1848; “Sabbath School Celebration,” Geneva Courier, July 3, 1833; “Progress in Geneva,” North Star, April 13, 1849; JASNY (Albany, 1849), v. 1, p. 508 [petitions of the Flushing Female Association and sundry citizens for support for school for colored children]; “The Colored School,” Long Island Farmer and Queens County Advertiser, August 7, 1839; “For the Long Island Farmer,” Long Island Farmer and Queens County Advertiser, August 11, 1840; “For the Colored American,” Colored American, November 4, 1837 (hereafter CA); “For

278

Notes to Pages 124–125

the Poughkeepsie Eagle,” Poughkeepsie Eagle, April 18, 1839; “The Colored School Stampede,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, September 21, 1855; “Proceedings of the Common Council: Petitions,” Oneida Whig, May 5, 1840. 40.  “Notice is Hereby Given,” Schenectady Cabinet, February 13, 1833; “Corporation Proceedings,” Schenectady Cabinet, June 12, 1833; “The First Quarterly Examination,” Schenectady Cabinet, September 2, 1835; “Facts Touching the Condition of the People of Colour, in this City,” Schenectady Cabinet, March 8, 1837; “Colored Fair,” Schenectady Cabinet, November 23, 1841; “Annual Report of the City Treasurer,” Schenectady Cabinet, March 12, 1844; “Fair,” Schenectady Cabinet, April 8, 1845; “Proceedings of the Common Council,” Schenectady Cabinet, March 18, 1845; “Annual Report of the City Treasurer,” Schenectady Cabinet, April 7, 1846; “Proceedings of the Common Council,” Schenectady Cabinet, August 4, 1846; “Proceedings of the Common Council,” Schenectady Cabinet, June 13, 1848; “Proceedings of the Common Council,” Schenectady Cabinet, June 27, 1848; “Proceedings of the Common Council,” Schenectady Cabinet, January 8, 1850. It is tantalizing to wonder if Phebe Ray or her family knew personally any of the black Schenectadians who agitated for school rights. David Ray’s wife, Betsey, was from Schenectady, and David himself spent time in the city in the mid-­1830s. “List of Letters,” Schenectady Cabinet, July 30, 1836; 1855 NY State Census, Watertown, Jefferson County, s.v. “David H. Ray.” 41.  New York Laws, 55th Session (1832), ch. 136; Documents of the Assembly of the State of New-­York, Fifty-­Fifth Session, 1832, vol. 2 (Albany, 1832), no. 77. (Rochester was incorporated as a village in 1817); Records of the Proceedings of the Common Council of the City of Rochester, December 3, 1839 to June 28, 1842, p. 248 (January 13, 1841); p. 257 (January 26,, 1841); p. 412 (June 29, 1841), Municipal Archives, 414 Andrews Street, Rochester; “Office of the Superintendent of Common Schools,” Rochester Daily Democrat, February 20, 1841. John H. Bishop lived with his wife and son in Rochester’s First Ward. 1840 United States Census, Rochester Ward 1, Monroe, New York, s.v. “John H. Bishop”; King’s Rochester City Directory and Register, 1841 (Rochester, 1840), 165. 42. Mabee, for example, writes that the “campaign in Rochester began in 1847 after two leading black abolitionists,” Frederick Douglass and William C. Nell, “arrived from Massachusetts.” See also Maurice S. Lee, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Frederick Douglass (Cambridge, Eng., 2009), xv; John R. McKivigan, ed., The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series 3, Vol. 1, 1842–1852 (New Haven, CT, 2009), 1. For an article that credits the longer school campaign, see Judith Polgar Ruchkin, “The Abolition of ‘Colored Schools’ in Rochester, New York: 1832–1856,” New York History 51 (July 1970): 376–93. 43.  Rochester Directory for 1847, 229; Rochester City Directory, 1845, 182; Rochester Directory, July 1, 1885 (Rochester, 1885), 256. “Example of a Colored Boy,” Troy Daily Times, January 10, 1866; “Celebration at Rochester,” North Star, July 14, 1848; “First of August Celebration,” North Star, August 8, 1848; “First of August Celebration,” North Star, August 11, 1848. (It is possible that Elza Johnson and Henry Johnson were related.) 44.  “Equal School Privileges,” North Star, November 2, 1849; “Meeting Against Colored Schools,” North Star, December 21, 1849; Rochester City Directory, 1849, 256 (for Sharp’s and Patterson’s occupations). Note: The North Star listed “B. D. Pattison” as the meeting secretary, but I am nearly certain this was “Z. D. Patterson,” a black hairdresser who was also an eventual subscriber to the North Star. I have found no “Pattisons” in Rochester. “Receipts,” North Star, March 20, 1851. 45.  “Meeting of the Colored Citizens,” CA, July 27, 1849. 46.  “Board of Education,” Rochester Daily Democrat, August 11, 1849.

Notes to Pages 126–129

279

47.  “Board of Education,” Rochester Daily Democrat, March 29, 1850. 48.  “The Re-­Opening of Our City Schools,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, September 8, 1854. 49.  Dewey’s Rochester City Directory, for 1855–56 (Rochester, 1855), 256; 1855 New York Census, Rochester City, Ward 10, Monroe County, s.v. “Phebe Ray.” 50.  The Constitution of the American Anti-­Slavery Society . . . (New York, 1838), 12. 51.  “Report of the Minority of the Committee on the Judiciary, on Various Petitions Relating to Slavery and the Slave Trade,” Documents of the Assembly of the State of New York (Albany, 1838), vol. 6, no. 359. This report is useful not only for explaining what the petitioners hoped to accomplish in Congress, but for elucidating how lawmakers spoke about the purpose of petitioning more generally. 52.  Scholars have noted white abolitionists’ embrace of these three policy goals in the late 1830s; we should recognize that ordinary black citizens’ work was both foundational and instrumental to the successes of the campaign. See Richard H. Sewell, Ballots for Freedom: Antislavery Politics in the United States (New York, 1976), 16–20; Brooks, Liberty Power, 28–31. I am a fan of both Sewell’s and Brooks’s books, but I reach a different conclusion about the success of the 1838 interrogation gambit. Both Sewell and Brooks cite white abolitionists’ view in the aftermath of the 1838 election that their strategy had not worked. But if we follow the story through to 1841 and focus on the perspective of black petitioners, the outcome looks different. 53. “African Free School,” Freedom’s Journal, January 11, 1828; “New York African Free School,” Freedom’s Journal, March 7, 1828; “George W. Moore’s Essay,” Freedom’s Journal, March 14, 1829. 54.  “New York Petitions to the Legislature,” CA, March 11, 1837. 55.  JASNY (Albany, 1837), 210, 414, 416. 56.  Judith Wellman, et al., Discovering the Underground Railroad, Abolitionism and African American Life in Seneca County, New York, 1820–1880 (Fulton, New York, 2006), esp. 18–19; “To the Editor of the Colored American,” CA, August 19, 1837. 57. Of course, there may have been instances when black citizens just presented themselves as “citizens” (with no racial designation), in part to make the point that their citizenship should not be qualified by race. Many of the state legislature’s historical documents burned in the Albany Capitol Building Fire of 1911, so I have not been able to locate the original petitions that are cited in the assembly’s journals and cross-­reference names in census records. 58.  JASNY (Albany, 1837), 314. 59. Jones, All Bound Up Together; Gerda Lerner, “The Political Activities of Antislavery Women,” in The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History (New York, 1979), 88–101; Zaeske, Signatures of Citizenship. 60.  JASNY (Albany, 1837), 1232. 61.  N.B. As black petitioners knew, it would be particularly difficult to restore equal suffrage. In order to change the state constitution, the state legislature would have to pass a recommendation in favor of the change two years in a row. After that, the proposed amendment would need to be presented to the state’s electorate for final approval. As arduous a process as this was, black petitioners were hoping to initiate momentum by convincing the legislature, as a first step, to pass a measure supporting equal suffrage. The other way to change the constitution was to call a state constitutional convention, also a significant undertaking. 62.  JASNY (Albany, 1837), 312, 355, 414, 416, 573. 63.  “To the Editor of the Colored American,” CA, August 19, 1837. See also “Reception of Our Petition,” CA, March 11, 1837; “Petition for a Jury Trial from Brooklyn,” CA, March 11, 1837;

280

Notes to Pages 129–132

“Adjourned Meeting,” CA, March 11, 1837; “From the Friend of Man,” CA, March 18, 1837; JASNY (Albany, 1843), 491. 64.  “Important Meeting,” CA, August 19, 1837. See also “Important Meeting,” CA, August 12, 1837. 65.  “Important Meeting,” CA, September 2, 1837. 66. Charles B. Ray was born free in Massachusetts. It is unlikely he was related to Phebe Ray and her family. 67. “Notice,” CA, August 26, 1837; “Right of Suffrage,” CA, September 23, 1837; “Dear Brother Cornish,” CA, September 30, 1837; “Right of Suffrage,” CA, November 25, 1837; “Important Meeting,” CA, December 2, 1837; “Petitions,” CA, December 9, 1837; “To the Hon. The Legislatures of the State of New York,” CA, December 16, 1837; “Right of Suffrage,” CA, December 30, 1837. 68.  “West India Emancipation,” CA, August 5, 1837. “Very Important Subject,” CA, August 12, 1837; “Albany, September 9th, 1837,” CA, September 30, 1837; “New York Committee of Vigilance,” CA, December 9, 1837; “Unequal Laws,” CA, January 13, 1838. 69.  JASNY (Albany, 1838), 140, 143–44, 171, 208, 228, 248, 250, 252, 280, 288, 292, 298, 305, 312–13, 317, 326, 342, 348, 370, 382, 387, 392–93, 399–400, 405, 414, 430, 443–44, 469, 490, 503, 516–17, 647, 672, 759–60, 1101. N.B. Traditionally, if not exclusively, petitioners sent their petitions to the lower house of any legislative body. 70.  “Public Meeting,” CA, June 16, 1838; “The Following are the Preamble . . . ,” CA, June 23, 1838; “For the Colored American,” CA, August 25, 1838. 71.  “New Agents,” CA, November 3, 1838. 72.  “Our heart was with them,” CA, October 6, 1838; “The Annual Meeting,” Friend of Man, September 26, 1838. 73.  “The Annual Meeting,” Friend of Man, September 26, 1838; “Resolutions: On Political Action,” Union Herald, October 12, 1838. On this era in the history of the NYASS, see Alice Hatcher Henderson, “History of the New York State Anti-­Slavery Society” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1963), chs. 4–5; Ripley et al., BAP, vol. 3, 188; “For the Colored American,” CA, October 6, 1838. 74.  Smith and Jay to Seward, October 1, 1838, Papers of William H. Seward (microfilm), Firestone Library, Princeton University (hereafter cited as WHS). 75.  “Mr. Bradish’s Answer,” CA, November 3, 1838; Thurlow Weed to Luther Bradish, October 28, 1838, Luther Bradish Papers. 76.  “Answer of Mr. Seward,” Commercial Advertiser, October 25, 1838. Seward initially told Weed that he wanted to respond in favor to the first two queries, and “no” to black voting. Seward to Weed, Thurlow Weed Papers, Manuscripts and Special Collections, University of Rochester (hereafter cited as TWP). 77.  “Gov. Marcy’s Reply,” Evening Post, October 10, 1838, “Lieut. Gov. Tracy’s Letter,” Union Herald, November 3, 1838. On Democratic tendencies to capitulate to proslavery interests in both national and state contexts, see Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (Oxford, Eng., 2007), 508–24, 544–45, 584–88; William G. Shade, “ ‘The Most Delicate and Exciting Topics’: Martin Van Buren, Slavery, and the Election of 1836,” Journal of the Early Republic 18 (Fall 1998), 459–84. 78.  Stephen B. Tompkins to Seward, WHS, November 12, 1838. 79.  “Abolition Victory,” CA, November 17, 1838; “Official Return of Votes,” Evening Post, November 30, 1838. 80.  New York Laws, 63rd Sess. (1840), ch. 225, ch. 375.

Notes to Pages 132–136

281

81.  Frederick William Seward, William H. Seward: An Autobiography (New York, 1877), 464–65. 82.  “New York,” CA, May 30, 1840. 83.  “New York State Convention,” CA, August 29, 1840. 84.  “Convention of the Colored Inhabitants of the State of New York,” CA, September 12, 1840; “Address of the New York State Convention,” CA, December 19, 1840. 85.  “Convention of the Colored Inhabitants of the State of New York,” CA, September 12, 1840. 86.  “Brooklyn Mass Meeting,” CA, January 23, 1841. 87.  JASNY (Albany, 1841), 30, 118. 88.  “Send in the Petitions,” CA, January 23, 1841; “Reception of Petitions,” CA, February 13, 1841. 89.  “Reception of Petitions,” CA, February 13, 1841. 90.  “To Messrs. John J. Zuille and P. H. Reason,” CA, March 13, 1841. 91.  When Garnet died at the age of 66 in 1882, his appearance before the legislature was among the accomplishments noted in his obituaries. “Obituary,” New-­York Tribune, March 11, 1882. This source mistakes the date. 92.  JASNY (Albany, 1841), 400–401. 93. JASNY (Albany, 1841), 440–41; “New York Legislature,” CA, March 6, 1841; “Movement at Albany,” CA, March 13, 1841. On the importance of “witnesses” in the legislative gallery during a petition effort, see diGiacomantonio, “ ‘For the Gratification of a Volunteering Society’,” 183. 94.  Documents of the Assembly . . . 1841 (Albany, 1841), vol. 5, no. 183, p. 4. 95.  Documents of the Assembly . . . 1841 (Albany, 1841), vol. 6, no. 239, pp. 6–8. 96.  New York Laws, 64th Sess. (1841), ch. 247. 97.  “Nine Months Law,” CA, April 10, 1841; “Nine Months’ Law,” CA, May 8, 1841; “New York a Free State,” CA, May 29, 1841; “Vigilance Committee,” CA, June 12, 1841; “A State Convention,” CA, June 26, 1841; “Public Meeting,” CA, July 24, 1841. 98.  “Vigilance Committee,” CA, June 12, 1841. See also “A State Convention,” CA, June 26, 1841; “Public Meeting,” CA, July 24, 1841; “First of August Celebration,” CA, July 24, 1841. 99.  “First of August Celebration,” CA, July 24, 1841. 100.  “For the Colored American: A State Convention,” CA, June 26, 1841. 101.  “Proceedings of the New York State Convention,” CA, September 11, 1841. 102. In fall 1841, the editors of the Colored American addressed the question of whether or not women should sign petitions for (male) black equal suffrage, and determined that yes, they should, because the women had a legitimate interest in their male relatives’ equal political rights. “Shall Women Sign Our Petitions?” CA, November 13, 1841. Although of course welcoming female petitioners to pray for equality for men did not exactly signal support of female equality, it did signal an increasingly awareness that women had a role to play in the formal politics of their state. 103.  Part of what this entire story suggests is that legislatures could sometimes be more radical than their electorates; in the 1840s and ’50s, there were instances when a majority or a near-­majority of New York lawmakers agreed to support equal suffrage, even when the majority of voters did not. Had suffrage not required constitutional alteration or a ballot initiative, legislators may well have succeeded in reinstating equal suffrage via legislative statute. 104.  Phyllis F. Field, The Politics of Race in New York: The Struggle for Black Suffrage in the Civil War Era (Ithaca, NY, 1982).

282

Notes to Pages 136–140

105.  Paul Finkelman, An Imperfect Union: Slavery, Federalism, and Comity (Chapel Hill, NC, 1981); Sarah L. H. Gronningsater, “ ‘On Behalf of His Race and the Lemmon Slaves’: Louis Napoleon, Northern Black Legal Culture, and the Politics of Sectional Crisis,” Journal of the Civil War Era (June 2017). On the continued importance of the jury trial in black politics, especially after the Compromise of 1850, see Andrew Diemer’s chapter in this volume. 106. As this chapter indicates, a range of black New Yorkers conducted robust, statewide discussions about citizenship in the 1830s and ’40s; this history helps explain why they were particularly prepared to protest the 1857 Dred Scott opinion. See Christopher Bonner’s “Black Politics and the ‘Foul and Infamous Lie’ of Dred Scott” in this volume. 107.  “Suffrage Meeting,” Rochester Daily Democrat, March 28, 1846. Chapter 7 1.  Recent work on this sort of resistance among African Americans is voluminous. See, for example, Eric Foner, Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (New York, 2015); Angela Murphy, The Jerry Rescue: The Fugitive Slave Law, Northern Rights, and the American Sectional Crisis (New York, 2016); Earl M. Maltz, Fugitive Slave on Trial: The Anthony Burns Case and Abolitionist Outrage (Lawrence, KS, 2010); Steven Lubet, Fugitive Justice: Runaways, Rescuers, and Slavery on Trial (Cambridge, Eng., 2010); Cheryl Janifer LaRoche, The Geography of Resistance: Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad (Urbana, IL, 2014); Kellie Carter Jackson, Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence (Philadelphia, PA, 2019). 2. On Canadian emigration among African Americans, see Robin W. Winks, The Blacks in Canada: A History (New Haven, CT, 1971); Floyd Miller, The Search for a Black Nationality: Black Emigration and Colonization, 1787–1863 (Urbana, IL, 1975); Gerald Horne, Negro Comrades of the Crown: African Americans and the British Empire Fight the US Before Emancipation (New York, 2013). 3.  Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York, 2005), 652–53. Wilentz’s work is only the most prominent of many that depict this as period in which political moderation triumphs. See also Jonathan H. Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824–1854 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004); Robert V. Remini, At the Edge of the Precipice: Henry Clay and the Compromise That Saved the Union  (New York, 2010). For many historians, Stanley Campbell’s assertion that northern public opinion on the Fugitive Slave Law in this period was “ambiguous, but on the whole it was acquiescent” still holds. Stanley W. Campbell, The Slave Catchers: Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, 1850–1860 (New York, 1968), 49. For an account of the period following the passage of the Compromise measures more in line with the argument I make here, see William W. Freehling,  The Road to Disunion, vol. I: Secessionists at Bay, 1776–1854 (New York, 1991); Elizabeth R. Varon, Disunion! The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789–1859 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2008); James Oakes, The Scorpion’s Sting: Antislavery and the Coming of the Civil War (New York, 2014); Adam I. P. Smith, The Stormy Present: Conservatism and the Problem of Slavery in Northern Politics, 1846– 1865 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2017). 4. It is worth noting that of the personal liberty laws passed in the wake of the Compromise, only Vermont’s was passed before the Kansas Crisis. Campbell, Slave Catchers, 87. 5.  Here I am distinguishing the eastern portion of the Lower North from, on one hand, the western Lower North, which Christopher Phillips demonstrates was far less sympathetic to arguments about the rights of free African Americans, and on the other hand to New England,

Notes to Pages 140–145

283

where Bruce Laurie and others have argued that antislavery sentiment, including sympathy for free black rights, was much stronger. Phillips, The Rivers Ran Backward: The Civil War and the Remaking of the American Middle Border (New York, 2016); Laurie, Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform (New York, 2005). 6.  This is distinct from the sympathy that many white northerners felt for fugitive slaves, and from the resentment that even more northerners felt at being forced to do the bidding of the “slave power.” Both were crucial elements of the struggle over the Fugitive Slave Law, and both feature prominently in the literature on the coming of the Civil War. I deal more extensively with the issue of black citizenship rights in Andrew K. Diemer, The Politics of Black Citizenship: Free African Americans in the Mid-­Atlantic Borderland, 1817–1863 (Athens, GA, 2016). 7. David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis: America Before the Civil War, 1848–1861 (New York, 1976), 113. 8.  National Era, November 14, 1850. 9. Potter, Impending Crisis, 112–13. 10. Potter, Impending Crisis, 127–28. 11.  Report of the committee of the Maryland reform convention, on the late acts of Congress forming the compromise, etc. (Annapolis, MD, 1850). 12. Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven, CT, 2016), 95. 13.  Freedom’s Journal, July 27, 1827. For a broad account of the kidnapping of free African Americans, see Carol Wilson, Freedom at Risk: The Kidnapping of Free Blacks, 1776–1865 (Lexington, KY, 1994). 14.  Appeal of Forty Thousand Citizens, threatened with disfranchisement, to the people of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1838), 18. 15.  North Star, Feb. 22, 1850. 16.  Freehling goes so far as to call this law “Mason’s juryless Fugitive Slave Law.” Freeling, Road to Disunion, 536. Oakes notes that moderate Whigs like Lincoln admitted that it was the federal government’s responsibility to aid the recovery of fugitive slaves but insisted that this also meant the federal government had the responsibility to ensure free blacks the kind of protections granted by the state personal liberty laws. Oakes, Scorpion’s Sting, 97–98. 17.  Cong. Globe, 31st Cong., 1st Sess. (1850), January 28, 1850, 235–36. 18. Campbell, Slave Catchers, 19–21; Globe, Appendix, June 12, 1850, 816–17. 19.  Globe, July 16, 1850, 1390. 20.  Globe, March 14, 1850, 524–26. 21. Campbell, Slave Catchers, 23–24. 22.  Globe, August 26, 1850, 1659–60. 23. Potter, Impending Crisis, 113. 24.  These public performances bear more than a little resemblance to the anti-­abolition mobs of previous decades. See Leonard Richards, Gentlemen of Property and Standing: Anti-­ Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America (New York, 1970). 25.  The published account of the New York City meeting referred to can be found in Proceedings of the Union Meeting: held at Castle Garden, October 30, 1850 (New York, NY, 1850). Quote on 9. For other expressions of similar sentiment, see Henry A. Boardman, American union: A discourse delivered on Thursday, December 12, 1850 . . . (Philadelphia, 1851); Selections from the speeches and writings of prominent men in the United States, on the subject of abolition and agitation: and in favor of the compromise measures of the last session of Congress, addressed to the people of the state of New-­York (New-­York, 1851).

284

Notes to Pages 145–152

26.  Proceedings of the Great Union Meeting (Philadelphia, 1850), 3–4; Philadelphia Inquirer, November 16, 1850. On Sergeant’s involvement in an earlier “compromise,” see Robert Pierce Forbes, The Missouri Compromise and Its Aftermath: Slavery and the Meaning of America (Chapel Hill, NC, 2009), 122–23. 27.  Proceedings of the Union Meeting: held at Castle Garden, October 30, 1850 (New York, NY, 1850), 9. 28.  Frederick Douglass’s Paper, August 20, 1852. 29.  Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (Boston, 1845), 99. 30.  Edward Baptist, “ ‘Stol’ and Fetched Here’: Enslaved Migration, Ex-­Slave Narratives, and Vernacular History,” in New Studies in the History of American Slavery, ed. Baptist and Stephanie Camp (Athens, GA, 2006), 243–74. 31.  North Star, March 1, 1850. 32.  North Star, April 12, 1850. 33. Marlene Daut, “James Hamlet,” in African American National Biography, ed. Henry Louis Gates and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (New York, 2008). For a good overview of the anti-­abolition sentiment in New York City and the general willingness of white New Yorkers to return fugitive slaves, see Eric Foner, Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (New York, 2015), 119–50. 34.  North Star, October 24, 1850. 35.  Ezra Greenspan, ed., William Wells Brown: A Reader (Athens, GA, 2010), 170; North Star, October 31, 1850. The context of the Brown quote is that he is insisting “colorphobia” is even worse in Philadelphia! 36.  North Star, October 24, 1850; January 16, 1851. 37.  Stanley Harrold, Border War: Fighting over Slavery Before the Civil War (Chapel Hill, NC, 2010). The definitive account of the entire Christiana affair is Thomas Slaughter, Bloody Dawn: The Christiana Riot and Racial Violence in the Antebellum North New York, 1991). 38. Diemer, Politics of Black Citizenship, 149–50. Historians have offered different interpretations of the nature of this border region. Christopher Phillips, The Rivers Ran Backward, and Matthew Salafia, Slavery’s Borderland: Freedom and Bondage Along the Ohio River (Philadelphia, 2013), have depicted the border region as a place where (white) residents identified themselves as moderates between sectional extremes. Others, among them Harrold, Diemer, and John David Smith, On the Edge of Freedom: The Fugitive Slave Issue in South Central Pennsylvania, 1820–1870 (New York, 2013), have emphasized the extent to which the border generated conflict, violent or otherwise. 39. Diemer, Politics of Black Citizenship, 151; Frederick Douglass’s Paper, November 15, 1851. 40. Angela F. Murphy, The Jerry Rescue: The Fugitive Slave Law, Northern Rights, and the American Sectional Crisis (New York, 2016), esp. 130–32. 41. Murphy, The Jerry Rescue, 147–54; Frederick Douglass’s Paper, September 17, October 15, 1852. 42.  Public celebrations, along with the printed accounts of and debates about those celebrations, had long presented opportunities for political engagement for those who found themselves pushed out of other sorts of political activity. See David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1997). 43.  Proceedings of the State Convention of Colored People: held at Albany, New-­York, on the 22d, 23d and 24th of July, 1851 (Albany, NY, 1851); Minutes of the State Convention of the Colored Citizens of Ohio, Convened at Columbus, Jan. 15th, 16th, 17th and 18, 1851 (Columbus, OH, 1851).

Notes to Pages 153–158

285

44.  North Star, April 5, 1850. 45.  For some examples of the resolutions passed by these meetings, see The National Era, November 14, 1850. 46.  Public Ledger, January 6, 1851; Pennsylvania Freeman, January 9, January 16, 1851; Peter A. Browne, A review of the trial, conviction, and sentence, of George F. Alberti, for kidnapping (Philadelphia?, 1851), 1; Wilson, Freedom at Risk, 52–53. 47.  National Era, January 16, 1851; February 5, 1852; Frederick Douglass’s Paper, December 24, 1852; Diemer, Politics of Black Citizenship, 159. For more on Alberti, see Elliott Drago, “Neither Northern nor Southern: The Politics of Slavery and Freedom in Philadelphia, 1820–1847” (PhD diss., Temple University, 2017). 48.  James Buchanan to William Bigler, March 24, 1852, Bigler Papers, box 1 (Historical Society of Pennsylvania); Boston Atlas quoted in Frederick Douglass’s Paper, November 6, 1851. 49.  Proceedings of the Colored national convention, held in Rochester, July 6th, 7th, and 8th, 1853 (Rochester, NY, 1853), 7–10. 50.  National Anti-­Slavery Standard, July 15, 1854. Chapter 8 1. On the Dred Scott case generally see Donald E. Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics (New York, 1978); and Austin Allen, Origins of the Dred Scott Case: Jacksonian Jurisprudence and the Supreme Court, 1837–1857 (Athens, GA, 2006). Fehrenbacher’s analysis of Taney’s ruling shows how central sectional interests—chiefly desires to expand slavery and preserve white supremacy—were to the chief justice. Among his key insights is that Taney was building an argument to support his political ends, rather than reading law to understand the questions before the court. Allen seeks to complicate the work of scholars like Fehrenbacher who place sectional politics at the heart of Dred Scott. He explores court decisions and personal writings from the justices to show that the decision also reflected desires to balance federal and state power, foster the developing national economy, and secure legal protections for corporations. While Taney’s ruling certainly did more than simply promote sectional interests, Fehrenbacher observes that the justices were keenly aware of the stakes of their decisions amidst an urgent sectional crisis. The urgency of that concern took precedence among a range of other projects of their jurisprudence, and some of the justices were especially interested in solving the problem of the future of slavery in the nation’s law. See Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case, 305–7. 2.  “Suffrage Convention of the Colored Citizens of New York,” in Proceedings of the Black State Conventions, 1840–1865, vol. I, ed. Philip S. Foner and George E. Walker (Philadelphia, 1979). In 1857, the state legislature had agreed on an equal male suffrage amendment, but due to procedural errors and, according to one observer, the Republican Party’s uncertain racial politics, lawmakers did not send the resolutions to the public for a vote. Phyllis F. Field, The Politics of Race in New York: The Struggle for Black Suffrage in the Civil War Era (Ithaca, NY, 1982), 104–8; David Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (Baton Rouge, LA, 1989), 59–61. On race and the Republican Party, see Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (1970; repr. New York, 1995). 3. C. Peter Ripley, ed., The Black Abolitionist Papers, vol. IV (Chapel Hill, NC, 1991). 4.  “Suffrage Convention of the Colored Citizens of New York, Troy, September 14, 1858,” in Proceedings of the Black State Conventions, vol. I, ed. Philip S. Foner and George E. Walker, 99. 5.  Dred Scott loomed large for black activists in the late 1850s, and historians have illuminated much of the complexity of reactions to the ruling. Steven Kantrowitz emphasizes the

286

Notes to Pages 159–161

ways black Bostonians used their fraught relationships with the Republican Party to challenge the decision, and in particular emphasizes that activists were increasingly willing “to contemplate bloody, violent upheaval” as a political solution. Elizabeth Pryor notes similarly that the decision was an “inspiration for radicalism.” Andrew Diemer shows that activists questioned whether they should persist in their loyalty to the nation, citing Robert Purvis’s claim that “no allegiance is due from any man, or any class of men, to a Government founded and administered in iniquity.” That language threatened that black people might decline loyalty to the government, but it also demanded change in the nation’s legal structures, a public claim characteristic of black politics before Dred Scott. Activists understood that Taney’s ruling had not “resolved . . . the question of black citizenship.” After the decision, if they wondered “what reasons were there for hope,” they could have reflected on their own political history and their knowledge of the pliable nature of law in the republic. These historians underscore that Dred Scott led black people to a profound questioning of their relationship with the United States, that it could inspire rage and despair and fatalism. I am interested here in exploring the reasons black people continued presenting themselves as Americans and the ways their responses to Dred Scott reflected not only emotional distress but also a strategic, persistent effort to define their legal position in the country. Taney tried to push black people out of American legal communities, and a key part of many activists’ response was to ground themselves more firmly within those communities and continue to demand change in the law by pushing Taney to the margins. See Kantrowitz, More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic (New York, 2013), 224–62, quotations from 224 and 262; Pryor, Colored Travelers: Mobility and the Fight for Citizenship Before the Civil War (Chapel Hill, NC 2016), 123–24; Diemer, The Politics of Black Citizenship: Free African Americans in the Mid-­Atlantic Borderland, 1817–1863 (Athens, GA, 2016), 170–74. 6.  “Suffrage Convention of the Colored Citizens of New York, Troy, September 14, 1858,” in Proceedings of the Black State Conventions, vol. I, ed. Philip S. Foner and George E. Walker, 99. 7.  For more details on Dred Scott’s cases, see Paul Finkelman, “Scott v. Sandford: The Court’s Most Dreadful Case and How It Changed History,” Chicago-­Kent Law Review 82 (2007): 13–24. 8.  Harriet Scott’s marriage and her being gifted to Dr. Emerson were two legal facts at the center of her neglected role as Dred Scott’s co-­plaintiff. Lea S. Vandervelde and Sandhya Subramanian, “Mrs. Dred Scott,” Yale Law Journal 106 (1997): 1033–123. 9.  Quotation from Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case, 264. 10. Dred and Harriet Scott sued for freedom in a federal court by claiming state citizenship. If successful, they might have set a precedent for fugitive slaves, real or alleged, to claim they were citizens of the state in which they were seized and seek a federal hearing against the person who claimed them, skirting the legal infrastructure that the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law had created. Allen, Origins of the Dred Scott Case, 161. 11.  The policy of popular sovereignty had had led to dozens of murders in 1854 as settlers struggled over the future of Kansas, part of the contentious political context of Dred Scott’s suit. See David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861 (New York, 1976), 199–224. 12.  Dred Scott, Plaintiff in Error, v. John F. A. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857), in LexisNexis Academic, http://​www​.lexisnexis​.com​/us​/lnacademic/ (accessed February 13, 2017). 13.  Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857), in LexisNexis Academic, http://​ www​ .lexisnexis​.com​/us​/lnacademic/ (accessed February 13, 2017). On Taney’s construction of a false consensus, see David Thomas Konig, “Constitutional Law and the Legitimation of History: The

Notes to Pages 161–164

287

Enduring Force of Roger Taney’s ‘Opinion of the Court,’ ” in The Dred Scott Case: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Race and Law, ed. Konig (Athens, OH, 2010), 10. 14.  Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857), in LexisNexis Academic, http://​ www​ .lexisnexis​.com​/us​/lnacademic/ (accessed February 13, 2017). 15. On the uncertainties and inconsistencies in Taney’s ruling on black people and citizenship, see Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case, 335–64. 16.  Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857). 17. On lawmakers’ efforts to secure legal protections for black people, see for instance Thomas Morris, Free Men All: The Personal Liberty Laws of the North, 1780–1861 (Baltimore, 1974), 71–93; Robert P. Forbes, The Missouri Compromise and Its Aftermath: Slavery and the Meaning of America (Chapel Hill, NC, 2007), 108–18. 18.  Dred Scott v. Sandford. 19. David Thomas Konig writes that Taney’s historical interpretation “must be read as a carefully selective response to an ever louder assertion of black citizenship, which was presenting its own powerfully articulated historical counternarrative.” Konig, “Constitutional Law and the Legitimation of History,” 12–13. Fehrenbacher suggests that the decision conveyed such inconsistencies because it was an argument on behalf of southern institutions rather than an interpretation of constitutional questions. Taney’s ruling against black citizenship was a legal statement designed to leave states “in complete control of black men, whether free or slave.” Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case, esp. 341–46. 20. Anne Twitty, Before Dred Scott: Slavery and Legal Culture in the American Confluence, 1787–1857 (New York, 2016), esp. 1–16; Kelly Kennington, In the Shadow of Dred Scott: St. Louis Freedom Suits and the Legal Culture of Slavery in Antebellum America (Athens, GA, 2017); David Thomas Konig, “The Long Road to Dred Scott: Personhood and the Rule of Law in the Trial Court Records of St. Louis Freedom Suits,” University of Missouri Kansas City Law Review 75 (Fall 2006): 53–79. 21. Pryor, Colored Travelers, 121–25. As Pryor notes, “The Department of State’s practice of passport rejections helped build the foundation of Dred Scott.” By extension, black people’s passport applications as claims to legal protections showed Taney that Dred Scott was an avenue to curtail black politics. 22.  Some of Taney’s supporters embraced his ruling for its potential to suppress black people beyond controlling the enslaved. William H. Welsh, a Democrat in Pennsylvania’s state senate, agreed with Taney that the Constitution had created “a government of white men.” Legalizing black citizenship, he warned, might displace white people from their jobs, their land, and their homes. Dr. John H. Van Evrie of New York saw Taney’s ruling as a boon for his own scientific racism and felt it had aligned the nation’s laws with those of nature. “The white man was superior—the negro was inferior—and in juxtaposition, society could only exist, and can only exist, by placing them in natural relation to each other, or by the social subordination, or so-­called slavery of the negro.” Pennsylvania General Assembly, Senate, The Dred Scott Case. Report of Hon. William H. Welsh, in the Senate of Pennsylvania, May 11, 1857. From the Select Committee to which was referred the Resolutions relative to the Decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in the Dred Scott Case. For similar arguments and a digest of lawmakers’ statements in favor of Dred Scott, see “The Rendition of Fugitive Slaves. The Acts of 1793 and 1850, And the Decisions of the Supreme Court Sustaining Them. The Dred Scott Case—What the Court Decided,” National Democratic Campaign Committee (1860); Van Evrie, The Dred Scott Decision: Opinion of Chief Justice Taney, with an Introduction (New York, 1859), iv.

288

Notes to Pages 164–167

23.  “Suffrage Convention of the Colored Citizens of New York,” 99–100. 24.  “Proceedings of a Convention of the Colored Men of Ohio. Held in the City of Cincinnati, on the 23rd, 24th, 25th, and 26th Days of November, 1858,” in Proceedings of the Black State Conventions, vol. I, ed. Philip S. Foner and George E. Walker, 336. 25.  “Greatly Pleased,” The National Era (Washington, DC), May 7, 1857. The Era excerpted those comments from the Boston Watchman and Reflector. 26. Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case, 314–17. 27.  “Rights of Free Negroes in Maine,” The National Era (Washington, DC), August 27, 1857. Similarly, Whig state senators in Pennsylvania said that because of the proslavery decision, the court had “forfeited that confidence and respect due to their exalted station.” See Pennsylvania General Assembly, Senate, Journal of the Senate of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania of the Session Begun at Harrisburg, On the Sixth Day of January, A.D. 1857, Vol. 67, 908. 28.  Political party affiliation largely determined white lawmakers’ responses to Dred Scott. Northern Democrats hoped Dred Scott could relieve sectional tensions with decisive answers to urgent questions about slavery. Southern Democrats were pleased with federal sanction for slavery’s expansion. Democrats North and South called for obedience to the decision because they believed it would serve their interests. Republican newspapers and lawmakers denounced the opinion as a partisan stain on the Supreme Court’s reputation. For instance in 1858, Abraham Lincoln said the decision was the culmination of a Democratic Party conspiracy to spread slavery to all parts of the nation. “To meet and overthrow that dynasty,” he announced, “is the work now before all those who would prevent that consummation.” He presented Dred Scott as an existential threat to American freedom. Despite their impassioned opposition to the ruling, partisan concerns also discouraged Republicans from addressing the thorny issue of black people’s legal status. Many accepted Taney’s denial of black citizenship when they argued that because the court ruled Scott’s suit invalid, the subsequent statement that slavery was legal in all territories was unnecessary and lacked legal force. Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case, 417–43, 559; Michael P. Johnson, ed., Abraham Lincoln, Slavery, and the Civil War, 2nd ed. (Boston, 2011), 32–38, quotations from 36 and 37. On anxieties and realities about conspiratorial southern power, see Leonard L. Richards, Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination (Baton Rouge, LA, 2000). Taney’s ruling gave legal sanction to the proslavery imperialism emanating from southern Democrats. See Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA, 2013), 303–422. 29.  “Convention of the Colored Citizens of Massachusetts,” in Proceedings of the Black State Conventions, vol. II, ed. Philip S. Foner and George E. Walker, 96–97. 30.  William J. Watkins had petitioned unsuccessfully in 1853 for the state to permit black men to join extant militias. See Watkins, Our Rights as Men: An Address Delivered in Boston, Before the Legislative Committee on the Militia (1853). On black militias, especially in emancipation day celebrations, see Jeffrey Kerr-­Ritchie, Rites of August First: Emancipation Day in the Black Atlantic World (Baton Rouge, LA, 2007). 31.  “Convention of the Colored Citizens of Massachusetts” (1858), 96. The account of the parade comes from Liberator (Boston, MA), August 13, 1858. The Liberty Guard had in 1857 been the center of a race riot in Boston on the day of their first public parade. See “Miscellany, From the Boston Herald. First Public Parade of the Liberty Guard,” from Liberator, November 27, 1857. For more on antebellum black militias, see Kerr-­Ritchie’s Rites of August First, esp. ch. 6. 32. On lying, region, honor, and status in early American political culture, see Joanne Freeman, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (New Haven, CT, 2001), esp. ch. 2.

Notes to Pages 167–173

289

33.  Jean Barth Toll and Mildred S. Gilliam, eds., Invisible Philadelphia: Community Through Voluntary Organizations (Philadelphia, 1995), 660, 1010; “Philadelphia Negro Educator: Jacob C. White, Jr., 1837–1902,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 97 (1973): 75–98; Tony Martin, “The Banneker Literary Institute of Philadelphia: African American Intellectual Activism Before the War of the Slaveholders’ Rebellion,” Journal of African American History 87 (2002): 303–22. 34.  The Celebration of the Eighty-­Third Anniversary of the Declaration of American Independence, by the Baneker Institute. Philadelphia, July 4th, 1859 (Philadelphia, 1859), 6–9. 35.  The Celebration of the Eighty-­Third Anniversary, 6–9. 36.  The Celebration of the Eighty-­Third Anniversary, 11–13, 21. 37.  The Celebration of the Eighty-­Third Anniversary, 8. 38.  “Convention of the Colored Citizens of Massachusetts” (1858), 98–99. 39.  The collection of items is described in “The Boston Massacre,” Liberator, March 13, 1858, and has been analyzed in Elizabeth Rauh Bethel, The Roots of African-­American Identity: Memory and History in the Antebellum Free Communities (New York, 1997). Frequent reference was made to the fact that Attucks, along with one of his white comrades in the mob who lacked local family connections, was “buried from Faneuil Hall.” Black leaders felt it very important that a black patriot had been celebrated with a funeral that began at one of the city’s most important centers of protest, government, and business. See, for instance, National Anti-­Slavery Standard, March 13, 1858, and Nell’s speech in “The Boston Massacre,” Liberator, March 12, 1858. 40.  “The Boston Massacre,” Liberator, March 12, 1858. 41. On the invocation of Attucks, see Mitch Kachun, “From Forgotten Founder to Indispensable Icon: Crispus Attucks, Black Citizenship, and Collective Memory, 1770–1865,” Journal of the Early Republic 29 (2009): 249–86; and Steven Kantrowitz, “A Place for Colored Patriots: Crispus Attucks Among the Abolitionists, 1842–1863,” Massachusetts Historical Review 11 (2009): 96–117. 42.  “William J. Watkins at Albany,” Douglass’s Monthly, February 1859. 43. “Speech by Robert Purvis delivered at the City Assembly Rooms,” National Anti-­ Slavery Standard, May 23, 1857. Black Abolitionist Papers, http://​bap​.chadwyck​.com, accessed April 24, 2018. 44. “From our Philadelphia Correspondent,” Provincial Freeman (Chatham, Canada), March 28, 1857; “Mary Ann Shadd Cary to Frederick Douglass, 25 January 1849,” Black Abolitionist Papers, http://​bap​.chadwyck​.com, accessed May 11, 2018. 45.  “Republicanism of William H. Seward,” Provincial Freeman, May 16, 1857. On Seward and his party’s politics, see Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men. 46. “Letter from William Still to James Miller McKim,” Ripley, ed., Black Abolitionist Papers, vol. IV. 47.  “Anglo African Nationality,” New-­York Daily Tribune, August 11, 1858; “African Civilization Society,” New-­York Daily Tribune, December 10, 1858. Frederick Douglass wrote disparagingly, and perhaps without total accuracy, of Garnet’s society in “African Civilization Society,” Douglass’s Monthly, February 1859. https://​teachingamericanhistory​.org​/library​/document​ /african​-­civilization​-­society/, accessed September 27, 2019. 48.  “Convention of the Colored Citizens of Massachusetts” (1858), 97. 49. On black Garrisonians and their politics, see Caleb McDaniel, The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery (Baton Rouge, LA, 2013), esp. 66–86. 50.  “Convention of the Colored Citizens of Massachusetts” (1858), 97–99.

290

Notes to Pages 174–178

51.  “The Dred Scott Decision,” in Two Speeches, by Frederick Douglass; One on West India Emancipation, Delivered at Canandiaigua, Aug. 4th, And the Other on the Dred Scott Decision, Delivered in New York, on the Occasion of the Anniversary of the American Abolition Society, May, 1857 (Rochester, NY, n.d.). 52.  Since the late eighteenth century, when Absalom Jones established St. Thomas’s Episcopal, black churches had been centers for people to gather and worship as well as organize political ideas and activities. On local politics and Bethel AME, see Richard Newman, Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers (New York, 2008), 130–36. In addition to Newman, on the intersections between black religion and politics, see Sylvia Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton, NJ, 1991); Winston James, The Struggles of John Brown Russwurm: Life and Writings of a Pan-­ Africanist Pioneer, 1799–1851 (New York, 2010). 53. Douglass, “The Dred Scott Decision,” 35–36, 39–40, 45–46. 54.  “Suffrage Convention of the Colored Citizens of New York, Troy, September 14, 1858,” in Proceedings of the Black State Conventions, vol. I, ed. Philip S. Foner and George E. Walker, 99. Chapter 9 1.  The classic synthetic account of the Ten Years’ War is Ramiro Guerra y Sanchez, Guerra de los Diez Años 1868–1878, 2 vols. (Havana, 1950–52). On wartime emancipation and racial politics, see Ada Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868–1898 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1999), 15–69; David Sartorius, Ever Faithful: Race, Loyalty, and the Ends of Empire in Spanish Cuba (Durham, NC, 2014), 94–127; and Rebecca J. Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860–1899 (Princeton, NJ, 1985), 45–126. 2. “Oration,” Elevator (San Francisco, CA), April 5, 1873. 3. I have found evidence of at least fourteen public meetings between 1869 and 1873 devoted solely or primarily to Free Cuba. See “Local Department,” National Republican (Washington, DC), April 22, 1869; “Colored Cuban Sympathizers,” National Anti-­Slavery Standard (New York, NY), May 15, 1869; Slavery in Cuba. A Report of the Meeting, Held at the Cooper Institute, New York City, December 13, 1872 (New York, 1872); “The Colored Men’s Sympathy for Cuba,” Sun (New York, NY), February 8, 1873; “Local Matters,” Sun (Baltimore, MD), February 14, 1873; “Sympathy for Cuba in Philadelphia,” Christian Recorder (Philadelphia, PA), February 16, 1873; “Freedom in Cuba,” Republican (New Orleans, LA), February 25, 1873; “Cuban Emancipation and Civil Rights,” Morning Chronicle (Washington, DC), March 7, 1873; “Cuba and Civil Rights,” National Republican (Washington, DC), March 8, 1873; “A Demand for Free Cuba,” Sun (New York, NY), March 11, 1873; “Cuba,” New National Era (Washington, DC), March 20, 1873; “Anti-­Slavery Mass Meeting in Wyandotte,” New National Era (Washington, DC), April 3, 1873; Henry McNeal Turner et al. to Ulysses S. Grant, November 25, 1873, Ulysses S. Grant Papers, reel 1, Library of Congress (hereafter LC). 4. Almira Lincoln Phelps to Nathaniel P. Banks, February 28, 1870, Nathaniel P. Banks Papers, box 47, LC; “No Title,” Elevator (San Francisco, CA), May 7, 1869. 5.  For the South Carolina resolution, see “From the State Capital,” Daily Courier (Charleston, SC), December 3, 1869. For Louisiana, see “Untitled,” Republican (New Orleans, LA), January 22, 1873. For Massachusetts, see “Untitled,” Daily Citizen and News (Lowell, MA), February 15, 1873. 6.  “Pittsburgh, PA,” Christian Recorder (Philadelphia, PA), January 30, 1869; Proceedings of the Colored National Labor Convention Held in Washington, D.C., on December 6th, 7th, 8th,

Notes to Pages 178–181

291

9th, and 10th, 1869 (Washington, DC, 1870); “The State Convention,” Elevator (San Francisco, CA), November 23, 1873; Robert W. Stokes to Benjamin F. Butler, January 13, 1874, Benjamin F. Butler Papers, box 72, LC. 7.  See, for example, “Local Department,” Republican (Washington, DC), March 31, 1869; “Address of Aaron L. Jackson, President of the Celebration of the Ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, at Sacramento, April 5, 1870,” Elevator (San Francisco, CA), April 15, 1870; “The Fifteenth Amendment,” New Era (Washington, DC), May 26, 1870; “Celebration by the Colored People,” Republican (New Orleans, LA), August 8, 1873. 8.  “Sauntering on the Rail,” Christian Recorder (Philadelphia, PA), August 28, 1873. 9.  “Douglass’ Studio,” Christian Recorder (Philadelphia, PA), April 2, 1870. 10.  For interpretations of the Free Cuba campaign as internationalist and politically radical, see Johnetta B. Cole, “Afro-­American Solidarity with Cuba,” The Black Scholar 8, no. 8–10 (1977): 73–88; R. J. Boutelle, “Manifest Diaspora: Black Transamerican Politics and Autoarchiving in Slavery in Cuba,” Melus 40 (2015): 110–33; and Paul Ortiz, “Washington, Toussaint, and Bolivar, ‘The Glorious Advocates of Liberty’: Black Internationalism and Reimagining Emancipation,” in Rethinking American Emancipation: Legacies of Slavery and the Quest for Black Freedom, ed. William A. Link and James J. Broomall (Cambridge, Eng., 2016), 187–216. The quote is from Boutelle, “Manifest Diaspora,” 124. 11. Although Paul Ortiz acknowledges the role of U.S. nationalism in African Americans’ interest in Free Cuba, he understates its importance. See Ortiz, “Washington, Toussaint, and Bolivar,” 192. 12.  “Thirty-­Sixth Anniversary of the American Anti-­Slavery Society,” National Anti-­Slavery Standard (New York, NY), May 29, 1869. 13. Josiah T. Walls, “Cuban Belligerency,” Appendix to the Congressional Record, 43rd Cong., 1st Sess. (January 24, 1874): H. 28. On the foreign policy views of Walls and other Reconstruction-­era black congressmen, see Luis-­Alejandro Dinnella-­Borrego, The Risen Phoenix: Black Politics in the Post–Civil War South (Charlottesville, VA, 2016), 96–106. 14.  “Freedom in Cuba,” Republican (New Orleans, LA), February 25, 1873. 15.  “The Work Before Us. Lecture by Mrs. F. E. W. Harper,” National Anti-­Slavery Standard (New York, NY), February 13, 1869. 16.  “Oration Delivered by Rev. J. B. Sanderson January 1st, 1868,” Elevator (San Francisco, CA), January 24, 1868. 17.  John Mercer Langston, “Equality Before the Law: The Treatment of the American Man of Color Before and Since the Adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment,” in Langston, Freedom and Citizenship. Selected Lectures and Addresses of Hon. John Mercer Langston, LL.D. (Washington, DC, 1883), 159–60. 18. It should be noted that freedom for emancipated Cuban slaves was not unconditional; libertos were subject to stringent labor regulations after emancipation. See Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba, 47–48. 19.  “Freedom in Cuba,” Christian Recorder (Philadelphia, PA), February 6, 1869. 20.  “Sympathy for Cuba in Philadelphia,” Christian Recorder (Philadelphia, PA), February 16, 1873. 21.  “The Revolution in Spain,” Christian Recorder (Philadelphia, PA), October 17, 1868. 22.  “Freedom in Cuba,” Republican (New Orleans, LA), February 25, 1873. 23.  “Cuba and Civil Rights,” National Republican (Washington, DC), March 11, 1873. 24.  “Local Matters,” Sun (Baltimore, MD), February 14, 1873.

292

Notes to Pages 182–185

25. “Correspondence,” Elevator (San Francisco, CA), July 19, 1873. 26.  “Freedom in Cuba,” Republican (New Orleans, LA), February 25, 1873. 27.  “Our Duty to Cuba,” Tribune (New Orleans, LA), May 8, 1869. 28.  See “Meeting of Cuban Sympathizers,” Republican (Washington, DC), April 22, 1869; “War on Spain,” Herald (New York, NY), February 10, 1873; and Francisco Victor Valdez to Manuel Quesada et al., November 24, 1873, Moses Taylor Papers, box 305, New York Public Library (hereafter NYPL). 29. Leopoldo Turla to Carlos del Castillo, July 31, 1873, Moses Taylor Papers, box 305, NYPL. On Hewlett, see “Ernest Hewlett (Union),” in The American Civil War Research Database, Alexander Street Press, 2012, accessed April 28, 2018. https://​asp6new​.alexanderstreet​.com​ /cwdb​/cwdb​.object​.details​.aspx​?handle​=​person​&​id​=​102755832 30. On the political activities of Cuban exiles in the United States during this period, see Gerald E. Poyo, “With All, and for the Good of All’: The Emergence of Popular Nationalism in the Cuban Communities of the United States, 1848–1898 (Durham, NC, 1989), 20–50; and Juan J. E. Casasús, La emigración cubana y la independencia de la patria (Havana, 1953), 67–153. 31. On the concept of belligerency in the nineteenth century, see Jorge L. Esquirol, “Latin America,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law, ed. Bardo Fassbender and Anne Peters (Oxford, Eng., 2012), 554–57. For an influential contemporary discussion, see Henry Wheaton, Elements of International Law. Eighth Edition, edited, with notes, by Richard Henry Dana, Jr. (Boston, 1866), footnote 15. 32.  “Our Acquisitions,” Elevator (San Francisco, CA), January 4, 1873. 33. “Cuba,” Christian Recorder (Philadelphia, PA), March 20, 1869. As Brandon R. Byrd points out, African Americans’ claims that they would make good missionaries in the Caribbean amounted to an argument that “middle-­class and elite African-­Americans had already placed their fitness for citizenship as well as their quintessential ‘Americanness’ beyond any reasonable doubt.” See Byrd, “Black Republicans, Black Republic: African Americans, Haiti, and the Promise of Reconstruction,” Slavery & Abolition 36 (2015): 556. 34.  “Freedom in Cuba,” Christian Recorder (Philadelphia, PA), February 6, 1869. 35.  “The American Negro,” Christian Recorder (Philadelphia, PA), November 21, 1868. 36. “Cuba,” Christian Recorder (Philadelphia, PA), November 14, 1868. 37.  “Slavery in Cuba,” New National Era (Washington, DC), January 9, 1872. For further examples of annexationist sentiment at black Free Cuba meetings, see “Our Duty to Cuba,” Tribune (New Orleans, LA), May 8, 1869; “Celebration of the Colored Citizens of White Pine,” Elevator (San Francisco, CA), April 15, 1870; “Cuba,” New National Era (Washington, DC), February 20, 1873; and “Untitled,” New National Era (Washington, DC), August 6, 1874. 38.  Frederick Douglass, “Santo Domingo,” Frederick Douglass Papers, reel 18, LC. 39.  “Meeting of Cuban Sympathizers,” National Republican (Washington, D.C.), April 22, 1869. 40.  “Our Acquisitions,” Elevator (San Francisco, CA), January 4, 1873. 41.  Frederick Douglass, “Santo Domingo,” Frederick Douglass Papers, reel 18, LC. 42.  Hiram Revels to Charles Sumner, March 30, 1870, Sumner Papers, reel 50, Houghton Library, Harvard University. On African Americans and Dominican annexation, see Millery Polyné, From Douglass to Duvalier: U.S. African Americans, Haiti, and Pan Americanism, 1870– 1964 (Gainesville, FL, 2010), 25–43. 43.  Quoted in Heather Cox Richardson, To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party (New York, 2014), 105.

Notes to Pages 186–190

293

44. On the Alabama Claims controversy, see Adrian Cook, The Alabama Claims: American Politics and Anglo-­American Relations, 1865–1872 (Ithaca, NY, 1975); and Allan Nevins, Hamilton Fish: The Inner History of the Grant Administration (New York, 1936). 45.  “Bleeding Cuba,” New National Era (Washington, DC), January 30, 1873. 46.  “Our Acquisitions,” Elevator (San Francisco, CA), January 4, 1873. 47.  “The Cuban Republic,” New National Era (Washington, DC), February 13, 1873. 48. Incidentally, the diplomatic service was one area in which African Americans were especially hopeful of receiving Republican patronage. See, for example, “Colored Diplomatists,” Elevator (San Francisco, CA), April 30, 1869. 49.  Frederick Douglass to Charles Sumner, July 6, 1870, in The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, Vol. 4: Reconstruction and After, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York, 1955), 222–23. 50. Cassius M. Clay to Frederick Douglass, July 15, 1871, Frederick Douglass Papers, reel 2, LC. 51.  Frederick Douglass to Cassius M. Clay, July 26, 1871, Frederick Douglass Papers, reel 2, LC. 52.  “Colored Man” to Charles Sumner, December 7, 1869, Charles Sumner Papers, reel 48, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 53.  Slavery in Cuba, 5. 54.  “Spain and Cuba—The Freedmen of the United States Rising to the Main Question,” Herald (New York, NY), December 15, 1872; see also “Cuba,” Evening Express (New York, NY), December 13, 1872. Although Cuban exile organizations in the United States devoted considerable effort and money to stoking pro-­Cuba sentiment among the American people as a whole, I have seen no evidence that they targeted African Americans in particular. 55.  Slavery in Cuba, 16. 56.  Proceedings of the National Convention of Colored Men, Held in the City of Syracuse, N.Y., October 4, 5, 6, and 7, 1864 . . . (Boston, 1864), 11. 57. On Scottron, see Booker T. Washington, The Negro in Business (Boston, 1907), 150– 58; and “The Mystery of Samuel R. Scottron,” The Campbell House Museum (blog), February 27, 2017, https://​campbellhousemuseum​.wordpress​.com​/2017​/02​/27​/the​-­mystery​-­of​-­samuel​-­r​ -­scottron/. For Scottron’s involvement with the Liberal Republican movement, see W. U. Saunders to Charles Sumner, November 22, 1872, Charles Sumner Papers, reel 60, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 58.  “The Colored Men for Cuba,” Herald (New York, NY), December 14, 1869; see also “The World for Free Cuba,” Sun (New York, NY), December 14, 1869. 59.  The other organizers of the December 13 meeting were Peter W. Downing, J. C. Morel, John Peterson, Philip A. White, Peter W. Ray, John J. Zuille, David Rosell, and T. S. W. Titus. See Slavery in Cuba, 4. 60.  Slavery in Cuba, 4–9. 61.  Slavery in Cuba, 4–9. 62. Ibid., 7–9. 63. Ibid., 6–12. 64. Ibid., 23–25. See also “Slavery in Cuba,” Herald (New York, NY), December 19, 1872; and “Sympathy for Cuba,” Traveller (Boston, MA), December 24, 1872. 65.  “Sympathy for Cuba in Philadelphia,” Christian Recorder (Philadelphia, PA), February 13, 1873. 66.  “Local Matters,” Sun (Baltimore, MD), February 14, 1873.

294

Notes to Pages 190–193

67.  Slavery in Cuba, 9; “A Delegation of Colored Men Pleading with the President on Behalf of Cuba,” Herald (New York, NY), February 20, 1873. 68. “Washington,” Times (New York, NY), February 20, 1873; “Telegraph to the Herald,” Herald (Boston, MA), February 20, 1873; “Cuba,” New National Era (Washington, DC), February 27, 1873. 69.  “The Colored People Moving for Free Cuba,” Herald, (New York, NY), February 8, 1873; “Washington,” Times (New York, NY), February 8, 1873; “Cuba,” New National Era (Washington, DC), February 6, 1873. Unlike previous meetings in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, Free Cuba meetings in Washington, D.C. were not held under the auspices of the Cuban Anti-­Slavery Committee. However, there was clearly some degree of coordination with the CASC, as Downing attended the reception at which Scottron and Garnet presented their petitions to President Grant. Downing and Scottron may have known each other from the 1865 National Convention of Colored Men, where both served as delegates. See Proceedings of the National Convention of Colored Men, 11. 70. Attendees at the meeting included Downing, Richard T. Greener, J. Sella Martin, Joseph H. Rainey, Josiah T. Walls, and P. B. S. Pinchback. It is not clear how many of the delegates to the “national convention” traveled to Washington, D.C. expressly for that purpose, versus how many were already present in the city for other reasons. Free Cuba activists in New Orleans held a meeting on February 24 to select delegates to attend the convention, but it appears that Pinchback (who was already in Washington) was the only one who attended. “Freedom in Cuba,” Republican (New Orleans, LA), February 25, 1873. 71.  “The Cuban Conference,” New National Era (Washington, DC), March 13, 1873. It is perhaps not surprising that Downing was reluctant to criticize Republican foreign policy, given his close friendship with Charles Sumner. Downing was at the Massachusetts senator’s bedside when he died in 1874. See David Donald, Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man (New York, 1970), 586. 72.  “Africa and Cuba. Convention of the Colored Men in Washington,” Herald (New York, NY), March 11, 1873. 73.  “Cuba and Civil Rights,” National Republican (Washington, DC), March 11, 1873. 74. Ibid. 75.  “The Cuban Conference.” New National Era (Washington, DC), March 13, 1873. 76. Ibid. 77.  Frederick Douglass to S. R. Scottron, March 29, 1873, in Philip S. Foner, ed., The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, Vol. 4, 303. Note that Scottron’s name is misspelled “Scottern.” 78. “Cuba,” New National Era, (Washington, DC), March 20, 1873. 79. “Anti-­Slavery Mass Meeting in Wyandotte,” New National Era (Washington, D.C.), April 3, 1873. 80.  “The State Convention,” Elevator (San Francisco, CA), November 23, 1873. 81.  Robert W. Stokes to Benjamin F. Butler, January 13, 1874, Benjamin F. Butler Papers, box 72, LC. 82.  “No Title,” Elevator (San Francisco, CA), December 13, 1873. 83.  Samuel Scottron to Carlos del Castillo, July 21, 1873, Moses Taylor Papers, box 305, NYPL. Actually, Scottron wrote that he had amassed “3000 . . . petitions,” but as this seems extremely unlikely I have concluded that he in fact meant signatures. 84.  Samuel R. Scottron to Nathaniel P. Banks, June 1873, Nathaniel P. Banks Papers, box 52, LC.

Notes to Pages 193–198

295

85.  Enclosure in Scottron to Banks, June 1873, Nathaniel P. Banks Papers, box 52, LC. 86. Scottron’s sweeping case for humanitarian intervention makes John Stuart Mill’s roughly contemporaneous argument look conservative by comparison. See Mill, “A Few Words on Non-­Intervention” (1859), in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Vol. XXI: Essays on Equality, Law, and Education (Toronto, 1984), 109–24. 87.  Enclosure in Scottron to Banks, June 1873, Nathaniel P. Banks Papers, box 52, LC. 88.  Samuel Scottron to Carlos del Castillo, July 21, 1873, Moses Taylor Papers, box 305, NYPL. 89. On the Cuban exile community in New Orleans in the 1860s and 1870s, see Casasús, La emigración Cubana y la independencia de la patria, 82–84. 90. On political violence in post–Civil War New Orleans, see James K. Hogue, Uncivil War: Five New Orleans Street Battles and the Rise and Fall of Radical Reconstruction (Baton Rouge, LA, 2006). 91. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York, 1988), 437. 92. In 1877, Scottron, Garnet, Richard T. Greener, and others founded a new organization called the “American Foreign Anti-­Slavery Society,” which hosted at least one meeting. See S. R. Scottron et al. to Nathaniel P. Banks, October 11, 1877, Nathaniel P. Banks Papers, box 57, LC. 93. Quoted in Kenneth C. Barnes, Journey of Hope: The Back-­to-­Africa Movement in Arkansas in the Late 1800s (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004), 13, 126. On the pro-­Western chauvinism implicit in much late nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­century Pan Africanist thought, see Wilson J. Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850–1925 (Hamden, CT, 1978); and Michele Mitchell, Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny After Reconstruction (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004). 94.  Quoted in Willard B. Gatewood Jr., “Black Americans and the Quest for Empire, 1898– 1903,” Journal of Southern History 38 (1972): 546, 561. 95.  The scholarly literature on twentieth-­century African American internationalism is vast, but some recent highlights include Frank Andre Guridy, Forging Diaspora: Afro-­Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow (Chapel Hill, NC, 2010); Minkah Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917–1939 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2011); and Nico Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India (Cambridge, MA, 2012). 96.  For an analogous argument about how historians have overlooked the broad, trans­ racial character of nineteenth-­century African American internationalism, see Mitch Kachun, “ ‘Our Platform Is as Broad as Humanity’: Transatlantic Freedom Movements and the Idea of Progress in Nineteenth-­Century African American Thought and Activism,” Slavery & Abolition 24 (2003): 20. Chapter 10 1.  For important works, see Gregory P. Downs, After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War (Cambridge, MA, 2015); Carole Emberton, Beyond Redemption: Race, Violence, and the American South after the Civil War (Chicago, 2015); Shawn Leigh Alexander, An Army of Lions: The Civil Rights Struggle Before the NAACP (Philadelphia, 2012); Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA, 2005); Heather Cox Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post–Civil War North, 1865–1901 (Cambridge, MA, 2004); Nancy Cohen, The Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865–1914 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002).

296

Notes to Pages 198–199

2. In addition to the electoral politics of freedpeople, the relationship between African Americans and the U.S. court system in the nineteenth century has received far more attention than their relationship with the federal administrative state. For excellent studies exploring the legal landscape confronted and shaped by African Americans, see Melissa Milewski, Litigating Across the Color Line: Civil Cases Between Black and White Southerners from the End of Slavery to Civil Rights (New York, 2018); Ariela J. Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America (Cambridge, MA, 2010); Laura F. Edwards, “Status Without Rights: African Americans and the Tangled History of Law and Governance in the Nineteenth-­Century U.S. South,” American Historical Review 112 (2007): 365–93; Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the 19th-­Century South (New Haven, CT, 1997); Mary Frances Berry, Black Resistance/ White Law: A History of Constitutional Racism in America (New York, 1995); Edwards, Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction (Urbana, IL, 1997). 3. Chandra Manning, Troubled Refuge: Struggling for Freedom in the Civil War (New York, 2016), 26–27. 4. Although black engagement with the federal government was not confined to the Pension Bureau in the decades after the Civil War, it was by far the most widespread and most enduring relationship, involving many tens of thousands of freedpeople and stretching well beyond the 1870s, by which time other federal agencies such as the Freedmen’s Bureau, the Southern Claims Commission, and the privately owned but federally supported Freedmen’s Bank closed their doors. See Jim Downs, Sick from Freedom: African-­American Illness and Suffering During the Civil War and Reconstruction (New York, 2012); Dylan C. Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-­Century South (Chapel Hill, NC, 2003); Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap (Cambridge, MA, 2017), 10–39; Barbara P. Josiah, “Providing for the Future: The World of the African American Depositors of Washington, DC’s Freedmen’s Savings Bank, 1865–1874,” Journal of African American History 89 (2004): 1–16; Desmond King, “The Racial Bureaucracy: African Americans and the Federal Government in the Era of Segregated Race Relations,” Governance: An International Journal of Policy and Administration 12 (1999): 345–77. 5.  For many decades after the work of early pension scholar William Henry Glasson, the Pension Bureau received comparatively little attention from scholars of the nineteenth century. Surprisingly, even works on the nineteenth-­century American state only mention military pensions in passing and often ignore the Pension Bureau altogether. Those historians and scholars who have focused on the Pension Bureau offer top-­down narratives of how the bureau functioned within an increasingly modernizing central state. William Henry Glasson, Federal Military Pensions in the United States (New York, 1918); Glasson, History of Military Pension Legislation in the United States (New York, 1900); Richard Franklin Bensel, Sectionalism and American Political Development, 1880–1980 (Madison, WI, 1984), 63–66; Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877 (New York, 1990), 9, 111, 161, 164–65, 181, 187, 311, 426; Bensel, The Political Economy of American Industrialization, 1877–1900 (New York, 2000), xix, 9, 10, 246, 457, 462–63, 467, 489–90, 493, 500–506; Brian Balough, A Government out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-­Century America (New York, 2009), 367, 384; William E. Nelson, The Roots of American Bureaucracy, 1830–1900 (Cambridge, MA, 1982), 124–25; Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (New York, 1982), 50, 93. Exceptions include Peter Zavodnyik, The Rise of the Federal Colossus: The Growth of Federal Power from Lincoln to F.D.R. (Santa Barbara, CA, 2011); Jerry L. Mashaw, Creating the Administrative

Notes to Page 200

297

Constitution: The Lost One Hundred Years of American Administrative Law (New Haven, CT, 2012); Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA, 1992). Following Theda Skocpol, historians have explored military pensions in the context of white Union veterans and widows. James Marten, Sing Not War: The Lives of Union and Confederate Veterans in Gilded Age America (Chapel Hill, NC, 2011), 17; Russell L. Johnson, “ ‘Great Injustice’: Social Status and the Distribution of Military Pensions After the Civil War,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 10 (2011): 137–60; Peter David Blanck and Michael Millender, “Before Disability Civil Rights: Civil War Pensions and the Politics of Disability in America,” Alabama Law Review 52 (2000): 1–50; Megan J. McClintock, “Civil War Pensions and the Reconstruction of Union Families,” Journal of American History 83 (1996): 456–80; Stuart McConnell, Glorious Contentment: The Grand Army of the Republic, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1992). Only in the past two decades have historians dealt with the experiences of African American veterans and widows in the pension system. My previous article on the subject outlines the challenges faced by ex-­slave claimants with special attention to differences in applications to the general law and the new law systems. The present study examines national and sectional pension politics. It explores in detail the federal administrative state in the post–Civil War South via the Southern Division, and how the activities of formerly enslaved pension claimants contributed to its making and remaking. Dale Kretz, “Pensions and Protest: Former Slaves and the Reconstructed American State,” Journal of the Civil War Era (September 2017): 425–45. See also Larry M. Logue and Peter Blanck, Race, Ethnicity, and Disability: Veterans and Benefits in Post–Civil War America (New York, 2010); Elizabeth A. Regosin and Donald R. Shaffer, Voices of Emancipation: Understanding Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction Through the U.S. Pension Bureau Files (New York, 2008); Logue and Blanck, “ ‘Benefit of the Doubt’: African-­American Civil War Veterans and Pensions,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 38 (2008): 377–99; Anthony E. Kaye, Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South (Chapel Hill, NC, 2007); Shaffer, After the Glory: The Struggles of Black Civil War Veterans (Lawrence, KS, 2004); Regosin, Freedom’s Promise: Ex-­Slave Families and Citizenship in the Age of Emancipation (Charlottesville, VA, 2002); Shaffer, “ ‘I Do Not Suppose Uncle Sam Looks at the Skin’: African Americans and the Civil War Pension System, 1865–1934,” Civil War History 46 (2000): 132–47. 6.  H. Clay Evans, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Pensions to the Secretary of the Interior for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1899 (Washington, DC, 1899), 41–42. Callie House and others drew the idea for legislating reparations from one Walter R. Vaughn, a white Democrat with duplicitous motives who had migrated from Alabama to Nebraska. In 1891 he began circulating his pamphlet “Freedmen’s Pension Bill: A Plea for American Freedmen.” Mary Frances Berry, My Face Is Black Is True: Callie House and the Struggle for Ex-­Slave Reparations (New York, 2005), 7, 34–35, 37, 69; Walter R. Vaughn, Vaughan’s “Freedmen’s Pension Bill.” Being an Appeal on Behalf of Men Released from Slavery (Omaha, NE, 1890). 7. Noah Andre Trudeau, Like Men of War: Black Troops in the Civil War, 1862–1865 (Boston, 1998), 18, 455–69; Joseph T. Glatthaar, Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance of Black Soldiers and White Officers (Baton Rouge, LA, 1990), 231–64; Ira Berlin, Joseph Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland, eds., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, Series 2: The Black Military Experience (New York, 1982); Shaffer, After the Glory, 169–93. 8.  H.R. 11119, Congressional Record, 51st Cong., 1st Sess. (1889–1890); S. 1389, Congressional Record, 53d Cong., 2d Sess. (1894–1895); S. 1978, Congressional Record, 54th Cong., 1st Sess.

298

Notes to Pages 200–203

(1895–1896); S. 4718, Congressional Record, 55th Cong., 2d Sess. (1897–1898); S. 1176, Congressional Record, 56th Cong., 1st Sess. (1899–1900); “The Slave Pension Bill,” Atlanta Constitution, February 14, 1903; “The Ex-­Slave Pension,” Colored American, February 28, 1903. 9.  “Ex-­Slaves Pay Out Big Sums of Money,” Atlanta Constitution, January 6, 1900. 10. L. J. Taylor to Henry Clay Evans, May 30, 1897, roll 1, frames 6–10, Correspondence and Case Files of the Bureau of Pensions Pertaining to the Ex-­Slave Pension Movement, 1892–1922, M2110, National Archives and Record Administration, Washington, DC [hereafter ESPM]. 11.  J. L. Davenport to various, November 20, 1897, roll 1, frames 22–58; Agent List, roll 1, frame 59; both in ESPM. See also Henry Clay Evans to various, December 10, 1897, roll 1, frames 105–117, ESPM. 12.  See also William Gentry to Henry Clay Evans, February 19, 1898, roll 1, frames 206–207; Owen Simmons to Henry Clay Evans, March 24, 1898, roll 1, frames 230–31; John J. Ranson to Chief of Police, October 8, 1900, roll 1, frame 356; J. L. Davenport to John J. Ranson, October 9, 1900, roll 1, frames 358–61; Rainey Badger, Deposition G, November 13, 1899, roll 1, frames 306– 308; Henry Gearing to J. L. Davenport, December 8, 1897, roll 1, frames 95–96; Rev. E. C. Clark to Henry Clay Evans, March 20, 1898, roll 1, frames 224–25; J. L. Davenport to Rev. T. Parker, September 7, 1899, roll 1, frames 299–300; all in ESPM. 13.  R. J. Lowry to Henry Clay Evans, January 14, 1898, roll 1, frames 168-­169, ESPM. 14.  Evans claimed to have uncovered “a well-­organized gang of pension swindlers . . . in one of the Southern cities.” Henry Clay Evans, Annual Report (1899), 73. After investigating the Ex-­Slave Association’s headquarters in Nashville, special investigator Thomas R. Hardwick wrote to Henry Clay Evans: “I have had my attention called to these meetings for several months and I have questioned a good many negroes about it, at different times, but I have not found anything to justify the belief that a federal law has been violated.” Thomas R. Hardwick to Henry Clay Evans, January 22, 1898, roll 1, frames 180–81, ESPM; Berry, My Face Is Black Is True, 83. 15.  “Negro Pension Scheme Again,” Atlanta Constitution, January 10, 1898; “Vain Efforts to Swindle the Pension Bureau,” Evening Star, January 6, 1898, 11; “Ex-­Slaves Are Being Fleeced by Promises of Big Pensions,” Atlanta Constitution, May 15, 1899. 16.  “After the Swindlers,” Atlanta Constitution, August 12, 1899. 17.  “Negro Pensioners in Georgia,” Daily Constitution, May 30, 1880. No follow-­up piece was printed after July 1880. 18. Although laws and practices conflict on this point, enslaved men who enlisted in the army and appeared as “slaves” on the rolls apparently would have been ineligible for full bounties; instead, those bounties would have gone to their masters, provided they could prove their loyalty. See George W. Raff, The War Claimant’s Guide: A Manual of Laws, Regulations, Instructions, Forms and Official Decisions, Relating to Pensions, Bounty, Pay, Prize Money, Salvage, Applications for Artificial Limbs, Compensation for Steamboats, Cars, Horses, Clothing, Slaves, and Other Property Lost or Destroyed, Commutation of Rations, Travel, etc. and the Prosecution of All Claims Against the Government, Growing Out of The War of 1861–1865 (Cincinnati, OH, 1866), 144–45, 205, 305–306, 335–36. 19.  Congressional Globe, 42d Cong., 2d Sess. (1872), 3562; U.S. Statutes at Large, 42d Cong., 3d Sess. (1873), 601; “Sec. 4723,” Revised Statutes of the United States, Passed at the First Session of the Forty-­third Congress, 1873–’74 (Washington, DC, 1878), 920; Charles Devens, “Bounty to Colored Soldiers,” in Official Opinions of the Attorneys General of the United States, Advising the President and Heads of Departments, in Relation to their Official Duties, vol. 15, ed. A. J. Bentley (Washington, DC, 1880), 474–75; “Pension Bureau’s Revised Statutes,” Section 4723, in

Notes to Pages 203–206

299

John C. Black, Laws of the United States Governing the Granting of Army and Navy Pensions . . . (Washington, DC, 1886), 15; “Speech of Hon. Thomas Boles,” Appendix to the Congressional Globe, 42d Cong., 3d Sess. (1873), 158–59. Boles did not seek reelection in 1872. After he left Congress he resumed his law practice but soon held a series of federal appointments. In 1878, President Rutherford B. Hayes made him receiver of the land office at Dardanelle, Arkansas. Boles later served as a United States marshal for the western district of Arkansas from 1881 to 1889 and, from 1897 to his death in 1905, as a clerk of the U.S. Circuit Court for the Eighth Judicial Circuit. Boles also ran unsuccessfully for governor of Arkansas on the Republican ticket in 1884. “Boles, Thomas (1837–1905),” Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, http://​ bioguide​.congress​.gov​/scripts​/biodisplay​.pl​?index​=​B000603. 20.  New National Era, July 17, 1873. 21. Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction, 131–44, 206–209; Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York, 1988), 553–56; Barbara Young Welke, Recasting American Liberty: Gender, Race, Law, and the Railroad Revolution, 1865–1920 (New York, 2001), 336–42; Michael Perman, The Road to Redemption: Southern Politics, 1869–1879 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1985); Nicholas Lemann, Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War (New York, 2007); Douglas R. Egerton, The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era (New York, 2015), 311–12; Steven Hahn, A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830–1910 (New York, 2016), 355; Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865–1896 (New York, 2017), 282–86. 22. Evans, Annual Report (1899), 56. 23.  Indianapolis Journal, April 20, 1889; Glasson, Federal Military Pensions, 225–26. 24.  Heywood T. Sanders, “Paying for the ‘Bloody Shirt’: The Politics of Civil War Pensions,” in Political Benefits: Empirical Studies of American Public Programs, ed. Barry S. Rundquist (Lexington, MA, 1980), 139–44; Marten, Sing Not War, 215–19. 25.  “The Pension Office,” Bee, June 29, 1889. 26. “Promotions,” Bee, July 27, 1889. 27.  “Commissioner Tanner,” Bee, April 20, 1889. 28.  “Twenty Thousand New Colored Pensioners,” Atlanta Constitution, April 17, 1889. 29.  For more on the New South, see esp. C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge, LA, 1951); Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (New York, 2007); Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York, 1999). 30. M. B. Morton, “Federal and Confederate Pensions Contrasted,” Forum 16 (1893): 68–74; William H. Glasson, “The South’s Care for Her Confederate Veterans,” American Monthly Review of Reviews (July 1907), 40–47; Glasson, “Federal and Confederate Pensions in the South,” South Atlantic Quarterly 9 (1910): 280–85; Peter David Blanck and Michael Millender, “Before Disability Civil Rights,” 33–37; Kathleen Gorman, “Confederate Pensions as Southern Social Welfare,” in Before the New Deal: Social Welfare in the South, 1830–1930, ed. Elna C. Green (Athens, GA, 1999), 24–39; Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, 139–40. 31. Logue and Blanck, Race, Ethnicity, and Disability, 48–49; Robert W. Fogel et al., Aging Veterans of the Union Army: Military, Pension, and Medical Records, 1820–1940 (Chicago, 2006). 32.  The Southern Division was officially organized by Order 58 on August 16, 1881. The division’s first formal report came in the Pension Bureau’s Annual Report of 1883. Wm. W. Dudley, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Pensions to the Secretary of the Interior for the Fiscal

300

Notes to Pages 207–209

Year Ended June 30, 1881 (Washington, DC, 1881), 5–6; Calvin B. Walker, A Digest of the Laws of the United States Governing the Granting of Army and Navy Pensions and Bounty-­Land Warrants: Decisions of the Secretary of the Interior and Rulings and Orders of the Commissioner of Pensions Thereunder: Compiled By Order of the Commissioner of Pensions Under the Authority of the Secretary of the Interior (Washington, DC, 1882), 281; Dudley, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Pensions to the Secretary of the Interior for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1883 (Washington, DC, 1883), 52–55. 33.  Jerry L. Mashaw, “Federal Administration and Administrative Law in the Gilded Age,” Yale Law Journal 119, no. 7 (May 2010): 1422–24; Dudley, Annual Report (1883). Widows’ pensions followed the same general pattern; however, because widows had to prove “dependency” rather than disability, they did not undergo medical examinations. 34. Abram Haywood, Claim for Abram Haywood, August 2, 1912, Abram Haywood file, Co. B, 33d, USCT, Invalid App. no. 686146, Invalid Cert. no. 498602, Civil War and Later Pension Files, 1861–1942, Records of the Veterans Administration, Record Group 15, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC [hereafter CWPF]. 35. L. E. Dickey to William W. Dudley, August 15, 1883, in Dudley, Annual Report (1883), 53–54; D. W. Wear to John C. Black, July 5, 1887, in John C. Black, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Pensions to the Secretary of the Interior for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1887 (Washington, DC, 1887), 75–76. 36.  John C. Black, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Pensions to the Secretary of the Interior for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1888 (Washington, DC, 1888), 81. 37.  John C. Black, Annual Report (1888), 81; Green B. Raum, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Pensions to the Secretary of the Interior for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1891 (Washington, DC, 1891), 40–41. Although the Southern Division did not exclusively handle USCT claims, much of its caseload involved claims by African Americans. From July 1888 to July 1889, for example, the division sent to the Board of Review applications from only five white veterans from Georgia, six from Mississippi, and one from South Carolina. Total claims filed of all classes: Alabama, 128; Arkansas, 359; Delaware, 173; Florida, 64; Georgia, 5; Kentucky, 2,980; Louisiana, 61; Maryland, 528; Mississippi, 16; Missouri, 3,352; North Carolina, 169; South Carolina, 1; Tennessee, 1,346; Texas, 19; Virginia, 14. Total southern white applications, 9,215; total USCT, 6,035. The total southern white applications admitted was 4,964, a 54 percent admittance rate; the total USCT claims admitted was 1,217, a 20 percent acceptance rate. John C. Black, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Pensions to the Secretary of the Interior for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1889 (Washington, DC, 1889), 34. 38.  Jeff Forret, “ ‘Deaf, Dumb, Blind, Insane, or Idiotic’: The Census, Slaves, and Disability in the Late Antebellum South,” Journal of Southern History 82 (2016): 503–48; Horace Brown file, Co. D, 33d, USCT, Invalid App. no. 493764, CWPF. 39.  G. M. Saltzgaber to J. P. Waring, September 24, 1914, Abram Haywood file, CWPF. For histories of race and social welfare, see Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-­Century America (New York, 2006); Michael B. Katz, The Price of Citizenship: Redefining the American Welfare State (New York, 2001); Walter I. Trattner, From Poor Law to Welfare State, 6th ed. (New York, 1998); Michael B. Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America (New York, 1996); Linda Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (New York, 1994); Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon, “A Genealogy of Dependency: Tracing a Keyword of the U.S. Welfare State,” Signs 19 (1994): 309–36.

Notes to Pages 209–212

301

40.  Steven M. Stowe, Doctoring the South: Southern Physicians and Everyday Medicine in the Mid-­Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004), 265; Lynn Marie Pohl, “African American Southerners and White Physicians: Medical Care at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 86 (2012): 182–93. For documented violence against African Americans in this period, see for example Hannah Rosen, Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South (Chapel Hill, NC, 2009); Paula J. Giddings, Ida: A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching (New York, 2008); Kidada E. Williams, They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I (New York, 2012); Crystal N. Feimster, Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (Cambridge, MA, 2011); Shawn Leigh Alexander, Reconstruction Violence and the Ku Klux Klan Hearings: A Brief History with Documents (Boston, 2015). 41.  Ellen Bird, General Affidavit, February 2, 1897, Ellen Bird file, Co. C, 33d, USCT, Invalid App. no. 587764, Invalid Cert. no. 474661, Widow App. no. 628112, Widow Cert. no. 446216, CWPF. For black women and issues of labor in the postwar period, see Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family, from Slavery to the Present (New York, 2009); Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (New York, 2008); Tera W. Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge, MA, 1997); Laura F. Edwards, “The Problem of Dependency: African Americans, Labor Relations, and the Law in the Nineteenth-­Century South,” Agricultural History 72 (1998): 313–40. For African American widows and the Pension Bureau, see Tera W. Hunter, Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA, 2017), 214–82; Brandi C. Brimmer, “Black Women’s Politics, Narratives of Sexual Immorality, and Pension Bureaucracy in Mary Lee’s North Carolina Neighborhood,” Journal of Southern History 80 (2014): 827–58; Brandi C. Brimmer, “ ‘Her Claim for Pension Is Lawful and Just’: Representing Black Union Widows in Late-­Nineteenth-­Century North Carolina,” Journal of the Civil War Era 1 (June 2011): 207–36; Regosin, Freedom’s Promise. 42.  Sampson Cuthbert, General Affidavit, May 5, 1892, Sampson Cuthbert file, Co. D, 33d, USCT, Invalid App. no. 920342, Invalid Cert. no. 690548, Widow App. no. 822951, CWPF. 43.  Sampson Cuthbert, General Affidavit, February 21, 1895; E. M. Pinckney, Physician’s Affidavit, February 21, 1895, both in Sampson Cuthbert file, CWPF. 44.  Gregory P. Downs, Declarations of Dependence: The Long Reconstruction of Popular Politics in the South, 1861–1908 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2011), 1–14. Unlike Downs, most scholars regard dependency as a political liability, particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. See Susan J. Pearson, The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Animals and Children in Gilded Age America (Chicago, 2011); Barbara Young Welke, Law and the Borders of Belonging in the Long Nineteenth Century (New York, 2010). 45.  Vespasian Warner, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Pensions to the Secretary of the Interior for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1905 (Washington, DC, 1905), 29. For a list of all the examining surgeons in the year 1902, see The Standard Medical Directory of North America, 1902 (Chicago, 1902), 707–15. 46.  J. A. Bentley, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Pensions to the Secretary of the Interior for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1877 (Washington, DC, 1877), 5–6. 47. Marten, Sing Not War, 17; Richard Dargan to Commissioner of Pensions, September 30, 1899; Richard Dargan to Secretary of the Interior, October 21, 1899; Richard Dargan

302

Notes to Pages 212–221

to Secretary of the Interior, December 5, 1899; all in Richard Dargan file, Co. B, 104th, USCT, Invalid App. no. 582807, Invalid Cert. no. 600682, CWPF. 48. Logue and Blanck, Race, Ethnicity, and Disability, 62–63; Dudley, Annual Report (1883), 23–24. 49.  Richard Dargan to Secretary of the Interior, October 21, 1899; Richard Dargan to Secretary of the Interior, December 5, 1899, both in Richard Dargan file, CWPF; Kretz, “Pensions and Protest,” 434–37. 50. For slaves and freedpeople imagining a distant leader, see Downs, Declarations of Dependence; Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet; Hahn, “But What Did the Slaves Think of Lincoln?” in Lincoln’s Proclamation: Emancipation Reconsidered, eds. William A. Blair and Karen Fisher Younger (Chapel Hill, NC, 2012), 102–19. See also Erik Mathisen, The Loyal Republic: Traitors, Slaves, and the Remaking of Citizenship (Chapel Hill, NC, 2018). 51.  Robert Green, Affidavit, February 19, 1891, Robert Green file, CWPF; Downs, After Appomattox, 108–109. 52.  Blanck and Millender, “Before Disability Civil Rights,” 30–31; Calvin B. Walker, A Treatise on the Practice of the Pension Bureau, Governing the Adjudication of the Army and Navy Pensions, Being the Unwritten Practice Formulated (Washington, DC, 1882), 6–7; Mashaw, “Federal Administration and Administrative Law in the Gilded Age,” 1422–24. 53.  William Wallace, Declaration for Increase of Pension, December 3, 1898; William Wallace file, Co. K, 93d, USCT, Invalid App. no. 912022, Invalid Cert. no. 928790, CWPF. 54. Isaiah Taylor, Declaration for Re-­Rating of an Invalid Pension, February 3, 1898; Isaiah Taylor file, Co. K, 84th, USCT, App. no. 877583, Invalid Cert. no. 748262, CWPF. 55.  Blanck and Millender, “Before Disability Civil Rights,” 14. 56. Downs, After Appomattox, 40; Manning, Troubled Refuge, 9–15. 57. In the last two decades scholars have begun pushing back against the longstanding myth of the “weak” American state. A growing literature is beginning to appreciate Reconstruction as an important phase in state building. See esp. William J. Novak, “The Myth of the ‘Weak’ American State,” American Historical Review 113 (2008): 752–72; Novak, The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-­Century America (Chapel Hill, NC, 1996); Balough, A Government out of Sight; Gregory P. Downs and Kate Masur, eds., The World the Civil War Made (Chapel Hill, NC, 2015). 58.  See also Martha S. Jones, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (New York, 2018). 59.  “Speech of Hon. Thomas Boles,” Appendix to the Congressional Globe, 42d Cong., 3d Sess. (1873), 159. 60.  “Scraps and Notes,” Bee, April 7, 1883. Epilogue 1. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “The Danger of a Single Story,” TED Global, July 2009, https://​www​.ted​.com​/talks​/chimamanda​_adichie​_the​_danger​_of​_a​_single​_story. 2.  See Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank, Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged and Profited from Slavery (New York, 2005). 3.  See Kellie Carter Jackson, Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence (Philadelphia, 2019). 4.  Stephanie Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004), 3.

Notes to Pages 221–227

303

5.  For more on this see Arlette Frund, “Phillis Wheatley, a Public Intellectual” in Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women, ed. Mia Bay, Farah J. Griffen, Martha S. Jones, and Barbara D. Savage (Chapel Hill, NC, 2015), 35–52. 6.  See Malcolm X, “The Ballot or the Bullet,” delivered April 3, 1964, at Cory Methodist Church in Cleveland, Ohio. See also Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements, ed. George Breitman (New York, 1990), 23. 7.  “Free Speech Outrage. An Anti-­Slavery Meeting Broken Up by a Mob in Boston,” Douglass’s Monthly, January 1861. Afterword 1.  For a compelling summary of the state of the field, see Mia Bay, Farah J. Griffin, Martha S. Jones, and Barbara D. Savage, Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (Chapel Hill, NC, 2015). 2. Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (New York, 2002). Also see Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ, 2010); Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy, Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500–1820 (New York, 2002); Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, 1788– 1836 (Cambridge, MA, 2010). 3. Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (New York, 2011). For Native American history, see, for instance, Susan Sleeper-­ Smith, Juliana Barr, Jean M. O’Brien, Nancy Shoemaker, and Scott Manning Stevens, eds., Why You Can’t Teach United States History Without American Indians (Chapel Hill, NC, 2015). This discussion draws on two recent articles: Laura F. Edwards, “Sarah Allingham’s Sheet and Other Lessons from Legal History,” Journal of the Early Republic 38 (2018): 121–47; Edwards, “The Legal World of Elizabeth Bagby’s Commonplace Book: Federalism, Women, and Governance,” Journal of the Civil War Era 9 (2019): 504-­23. 4.  Stanley N. Katz, “Explaining the Law in Early American History: Introduction,” William and Mary Quarterly, Law and Society in Early America, 50 (January 1993): 6. Also see David Thomas Konig’s insightful summary of the field, “A Summary View of the Law of British America,” in the same special edition, 42–50. Edwards, “Sarah Allingham’s Sheet” and “The Legal World of Elizabeth Bagby’s Commonplace Book.” 5.  Edwards, “Sarah Allingham’s Sheet” and “The Legal World of Elizabeth Bagby’s Commonplace Book.” 6.  There is a considerable amount of work that emphasizes African Americans’ familiarity with law. Ariela J. Gross set the pace with her pathbreaking book, Double Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern Courtroom (Princeton, NJ, 2000). In this regard, also see Laura F. Edwards, The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-­Revolutionary South (Chapel Hill, NC, 2009); Sarah Barringer Gordon, “The African Supplement: Religion, Race, and Corporate Law in Early National America,” William and Mary Quarterly 72 (2015): 385–422; Gordon, “The First Disestablishment: Limits on Church Power and Property Before the Civil War,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 162 (2014): 307–72; Martha Jones, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (New York, 2018); Kelly Kennington, In the Shadow of Dred Scott: St. Louis Freedom Suits and the Legal Culture of Slavery in Antebellum America (Athens, GA, 2017); Kate Masur, An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle over Equality in Washington, D.C. (Chapel

304

Notes to Pages 227–229

Hill, NC, 2010); Dylan C. Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-­Century South (Chapel Hill, NC, 2003); Anne Twitty, Before Dred Scott: Slavery and Legal Culture in America’s Confluence, 1787–1857 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Kimberly Welch, Black Litigants in the Antebellum South (Chapel Hill, NC, 2018); and Welch, “William Johnson’s Hypothesis: A Free Black Man and the Problem of Legal Knowledge in the Antebellum United States South,” Law and History Review 37 (2019): 89–124. 7. Jones, Birthright Citizens. Also see the work in note 5, above. See Christopher Michael Curtis, Jefferson’s Freeholders and the Politics of Ownership in the Old Dominion (New York, 2012), for the importance of property, particularly real estate, to political participation and the vote. 8. New York included the right to petition in its 1846 constitution. Daniel Carpenter, “Recruitment by Petition: American Antislavery, French Protestantism, English Suppression,” Perspectives on Politics (September 2016): 700–23; Carpenter and Colin D. Moore, “When Canvassers Became Activists: Antislavery Petitioning and the Political Mobilization of American Women,” American Political Science Review (August 2014): 479–98; Carpenter and Benjamin Schneer, “Party Formation Through Petitions: The Whigs and the Bank War of 1832–1834,” Studies in American Political Development (October 2015): 213–34; Maggie McKinley, “Lobbying and the Petitioning Clause,” Stanford Law Review (May 2016): 1131–1205; and McKinley, “Petitioning and the Making of the Administrative State,” Yale Law Journal 127 (April 2018): 1538–1637. 9.  William J. Novak, “The Legal Transformation of Citizenship in Nineteenth-­Century America,” in The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History, ed. Meg Jacobs, William J. Novak, and Julian Zelizer (Princeton, NJ, 2003), 85–119. Also see Laura F. Edwards, A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction: A Nation of Rights (New York, 2015); Gautham Rao, National Duties: Custom Houses and the Making of the American State (Chicago, 2016); Barbara Young Welke, Law and the Borders of Belonging in the Long Nineteenth Century United States (New York, 2010). Also Priscilla Wald, Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form (Durham, NC, 1995). 10.  Laws and Ordinances . . . of the City of New York (New York, 1817). Cornelia H. Dayton and Sharon V. Salinger, Robert Love’s Warnings: Searching for Strangers in Colonial Boston (Philadelphia, 2014); Jones, Birthright Citizens; Kunal Parker, Making Foreigners: Immigration and Citizenship Law in America, 1600–2000 (New York, 2015); Kate Masur, Equal Before the Law: Race, Politics, and the Making of an American Promise, manuscript in progress; Edlie L. Wong, Neither Fugitive nor Free: Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits, and the Legal Culture of Travel (New York, 2009). 11.  Bonner’s analysis echoes points made by legal historians that Taney’s rendering of the past did not describe the actual practice of citizenship in the United States between the Revolution and the Civil War: Edwards, A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction; Jones, Birthright Citizens; Kennington, In the Shadow of Dred Scott; Twitty, Before Dred Scott; Masur, An Example for All the Land; Novak, “The Legal Transformation of Citizenship”; Welke, Law and the Borders of Belonging.

List of Contributors

Christopher James Bonner teaches African American History at the University of Maryland, College Park. In 2020, he will publish his first book, A New Republic: Black Protest and the Creation of American Citizenship. Andrew Diemer teaches African American History at Towson University. He is the author of The Politics of Black Citizenship: Free African Americans in the Mid-­Atlantic Borderland, 1817–1863, and is currently working on a biography of the black abolitionist William Still. Laura F. Edwards is the Peabody Family Professor of History and Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Duke University as well as an affiliated scholar with the American Bar Foundation. She works on the nineteenth-­ century United States with a focus on law, gender, and race. Her most recent book is A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction: A Nation of Rights. Van Gosse is a Professor of History at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He is the author of numerous articles and books on post-­1945 politics and social movements, including Where the Boys Are: Cuba, Cold War America, and the Making of a New Left. More recently, he has written on African American politics in the antebellum era. Sarah L. H. Gronningsater is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. She focuses on the legal, political, social, and constitutional history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the United States, with a particular interest in antislavery. M. Scott Heerman is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Miami. He is the author of  The Alchemy of Slavery: Human Bondage and Emancipation in the Illinois Country 1730–1865, which was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2018. 

306

List of Contributors

Kellie Carter Jackson is the Kanfel Assistant Professor of the Humanities in the Department of Africana Studies at Wellesley College. Her book, Force & Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence, examines the conditions that led some black abolitionists to believe slavery might only be abolished by violent force. Carter Jackson is also co-editor of Reconsidering Roots: Race, Politics, & Memory (University of Georgia Press). Dale Kretz is an Assistant Professor of African American History at Texas Tech University. He is currently working on a book manuscript about freedpeople and the administration of federal military benefits in the half century after wartime emancipation. Padraig Riley is a Visiting Associate Professor of History and Humanities at Reed College. He is the author of Slavery and the Democratic Conscience: Political Life in Jeffersonian America. Samantha Seeley is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Richmond. Her book, Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain in the Early American Republic, is forthcoming from the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture/University of North Carolina Press. She is the co-­editor of “The Question of Recovery: Slavery, Freedom, and the Archive,” a special issue of Social Text. She holds a BA in History from Brown University and a PhD in History from New York University. James M. Shinn Jr. is a PhD candidate in History at Yale University. His dissertation, “The Cuban Question: The Ten Years’ War and the Reconstruction of U.S. Foreign Policy, 1865–1878,” uses an important but little-­studied debate about U.S. intervention in the Cuban independence struggle as a point of departure for exploring how post–Civil War Americans thought about international politics and their country’s place in the global order. Shinn has published book reviews in Slavery & Abolition, Civil War Monitor, and other publications. David Waldstreicher is Distinguished Professor of History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and author of In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (1997), Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution  (2004), and Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (2009).

Index

Abolitionists, 2, 10, 26, 45, 65, 114, 127–28, 130–32, 147, 222. See also black abolitionists Abrahams, Roger D., 28 Adams, James Truslow, 4 Adams, John Quincy, 68 Adelman, Jeremy, 20 Africa, 27–28, 32, 33–36, 172, 195 African Free School (New York City), 121–23, 127, 275n17, 276n19; graduates of, 130–31, 133 African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, 101, 121, 183 Africanisms, 12, 27–29, 31, 32–33, 37 “Alabama” claims, 185–86 Alberti, George, 153–54 Alexander, Leslie M., 274n13 Allen, Richard, 48–49 American Anti-­Slavery Society, 126, 170 American Colonization Society, 46, 61, 63, 64, 98, 172. See also colonization American Revolution, 14, 20–21, 24–26, 34–35, 39–40, 41–42, 67, 71, 223–24; as civil war, 20–21; revolutionary settlement of, 66–68. See also Revolutionary era Antiabolitionism, 218–19 Antiracism, 12, 18, 25, 33 Antislavery, 2, 4, 24–26, 32, 34, 38, 45, 65, 88, 127, 180–81, 222. See also abolitionism Aptheker, Herbert, 4 Articles of Confederation, 67–68, 78, 225–26, 259n7 Attcuks, Crispus, 168, 169–70, 216 Backlash, 2, 14, 24, 25, 91–94, 98–99, 101 Bailey, Anne, 28 Bailyn, Bernard, 29 Banneker, Benjamin, 71, 77, 168 Banneker Institute (Philadelphia), 167–68 Baptist, Edward, 7, 14, 147

Barbour, Philip P., 58, 61–62, 100 Bay, Mia, 250n1 Bell, Phillip A., 127, 129 Benton, Lauren, 225 Bird, Ellen, 209–11 Birney, James G., 68 Black Abolitionist Papers, 5, 233n17 Black abolitionists, 2, 4, 8, 9, 130–32, 151, 152, 180, 187–88, 219 Black codes, 105–6 Black writing, 12–13 Blackett, R. J. M., 13–14 Blackface minstrelsy, 16 Blassingame, John, 7 Bloomfield, Joseph, 80 Bogen, David, 77–78 Boles, Thomas, 202–3, 215 Bonner, Christopher, 18, 100, 229 Borderlands: of slavery, 13, 104, 109, 113, 150, 266n11 Boston, 9, 15, 25–26, 28, 36, 37, 83, 99, 114, 165–66, 169–70, 177, 189, 192, 219 Bradburn, Douglas, 72, 249n61, 250n2, 259n7 Bradish, Luther, 131–32 Brooke, John L., 66 Brown, John, 70 Brown, Vincent, 28 Brown, William G., 182 Brown, William Wells, 149, 173 Bruce, Jeffrey, 28 Buffon, Comte de, 37 Camp, Stephanie, 101, 221 Carman, Adam, 65 Cary, Mary Ann Shadd, 171–72 Cavitch, Max, 28 Chase, Salmin P., 68 Chavis, John, 74 Cheek, William and Aimee, 9, 11 Christiana Resistance (1851), 150–51, 220

308

Index

Citizenship: of African Americans, 18–19, 43, 45, 49, 59, 60–65, 66, 68, 86, 100, 118, 121–22, 133, 155, 157, 162–63, 168, 175, 198, 218, 228–29, 249n61, 250n2; as politics, 18–19, 64–65, 157–59, 163, 167, 173–75 Civil Rights Act of 1875, 203 Civil rights: legislation, 59, 127, 136, 203–4; movements, 11, 18, 22 Civil War, 2, 14, 85, 101, 177, 200, 211, 213, 215 Classics (Greek and Roman), 26, 29–33, 35, 37–39 Clay, Henry, 63, 70, 143, 147 Cleveland, Grover, 211–12 Clinton, DeWitt, 57–58 Colfax Massacre, 195 Colonization, 13, 85, 92–94 Colored American, The, 128–29, 130, 131, 134 Colored Conventions, 15–16, 139–40, 152, 155, 158, 165–66, 192, 203 Comity, 59–60, 94, 161 Compromise of 1850, 18, 139–56, 219 Condict, Joseph, 80–81 Connecticut, 54 Constitution, United States, 46, 49, 50, 57, 59, 68, 69–70, 149, 152, 158–61, 170, 173, 174–75, 226, 228; due process clause, 149; Fifteenth Amendment, 5, 21, 136, 184–85, 219; Fifth Amendment, 160; Fourteenth Amendment, 177, 184–85, 219; fugitive slave clause, 144, 164; privileges and immunities clause, 173; proposed amendments to, 135, 151; Thirteenth Amendment, 113, 219. See also comity Congress, United States, 47–52, 54, 58, 60–61, 100, 115, 126, 202, 204 Consolidation Act (1873), 202–3 Conventions. See Colored Conventions Cornish, Samuel, 127 Cottrol, Robert, 5, 11 Courts, 11, 17, 48, 52, 103, 106, 109–10, 226–27 Croger, Benjamin, 120, 133 Croger, Peter, 120 Crummell, Alexander, 130, 133 Cuba. See Free Cuba Campaign Cuffe, Paul, 99 Cultural politics, 8, 11–13, 15–17 Curtis, Benjamin, 165–66 Cuthbert, Samson, 210–11 Dargan, Richard, 211–13 Dartmouth, Lord, 24, 26, 32, 35 Davis, David Brion, 21, 239n62

Day, Thomas, 37 Declaration of Independence, 78, 149, 152, 164, 168, 193 Delaware, 45–46, 76, 85–89, 95–96 Democratic Party, 54, 56, 59, 63, 114, 131, 145, 185, 204–6, 288n28 Democratic-­Republican Party, 53–58, 63, 79–80 Democrats. See Democratic-­Republican Party; Democratic Party Diemer, Andrew, 13, 18, 219, 220, 229, 286n5 Disability Act (1890), 206 Disfranchisement, 10–11, 43, 53–55, 66, 71–73, 76–78, 82, 137, 142, 198, 227, 246n33, 256n53 Dix, John A., 122 Dominican Republic, 184 Douglas, Stephen, 139 Douglass, Frederick, 2, 4, 16, 68, 109, 124–26, 142, 146–48, 151–53, 158, 174–75, 179, 183– 84, 185–87, 190, 192, 196–97, 216, 219–22 Downing, George T., 190, 294n71 Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60, 62, 100, 157–75, 229 DuBois, Shirley Graham, 25 DuBois, W. E. B., 4, 14, 20, 21 Early Republic, 1–2 Edwards, Laura F., 17 Electoral politics, 2–4, 8, 13, 66–83, 131. See also party politics; voting Emancipation, 11, 14–15, 20–22, 38, 41–43, 44–45, 54, 65, 67, 69, 71–72, 85–87, 91–94, 101–15, 179–80, 198; gradual, 49, 54, 80, 85, 105, 117, 120 Emigration, 170–73, 195–96. See also colonization; migration Empire, 183–84 Ernest, John, 15–16, 17 Evans, Henry Clay, 199–200, 215 Ex-­Slave Association, 199–201 Federalist Party, 53–56, 57–58, 63, 68, 77, 79; antislavery in, 56–57 Field, Phyllis, 5, 11 Foner, Eric, 14, 195, 231n3, 251n10 Foner, Phillip, 4 Ford, Lacy K., 75 Foreman, P. Gabrielle, 15–16 Forten, James, 50–51, 98 Fox, Dixon Ryan, 4 Franklin, John Hope, 3–4, 74

Index Free Cuba Campaign, 19, 176–97 Freedom’s Journal, 74, 141 Freedman’s Bureau, 198, 214 Freedpeople, 14, 42–43, 73–76, 85–101, 104–5, 198–215; after the American Revolution, 42–60; politics of, 42–44 Fugitive Slave Act (1793), 46, 47–50, 52 Fugitive Slave Act, Pennsylvania (1826), 53 Fugitive Slave Act (1850), 44, 139, 140–41, 144–45, 150, 151–56, 157, 220 Fugitive slaves, 7, 13–14, 43, 44–53, 56, 64, 103, 104, 107–9, 110, 136, 141–54, 219–20; advertisements for, 46–47, 108; jury trials for, 129–30, 136–37, 141–43, 147, 152, 153, 154; kidnapping of, 44–46, 50–53, 103, 105, 132, 141, 146–49, 220 Gabriel’s Rebellion, 92, 94 Garfield, James A., 67–68, 70–71, 219 Garnet, Henry Highland, 133, 134, 172, 177, 188, 190 Garrison, William Lloyd, 4, 170, 173, 174 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 25, 33, 240n12 Gellman, David, 5 Genovese, Eugene D., 6, 7, 8 Georgia, 49 Gibson, Adam, 153–54 Giddings, Joshua, 148 Glymph, Thavolia, 101 Gosse, Van 14, 219, 227 Grant, Ulysses S., 177, 185–87, 189, 190, 192 Grimke, Archibald H., 196 Gronningsater, Sarah L. M., 17–18, 55, 220, 221, 227–28 Gross, Ariela J., 303n6 Gutman, Herbert, 7 Hahn, Steven, 6–7 Haitian Revolution, 8, 20, 91, 181 Hale, John P., 143 Hall, Prince, 99 Hamlet, James, 148 Hanchard, Michael, 15 Handlin, Oscar and Mary Handlin, 72 Harding, Vincent, 213n1 Harper, Frances E. W., 180 Harrison, Benjamin, 204 Harrold, Stanley, 13, 44, 150 Heerman, D. Scott, 13, 14, 18, 226 Hewlett, Ernest, 182 Hogarth, George, 121, 133 Homer, 29–32, 36, 37, 38

309

Hope, Caesar (John), 83–84, 99–100 Hope, Judith, 99–100 Horne, Gerald, 19 Horton, James Oliver, 71 House, Callie, 199 House of Representatives, U.S. See Congress Hunter, Tera, 101 Illinois, 13, 46, 97, 101–15 Imperialism. See empire Indiana, 46, 97 Internationalism, 179, 184, 193–94, 196–97 Jackson, Andrew, 53 Jarrett, Gene Andrew, 16, 17 Jay, Peter, 59–60 Jay, William, 68, 131 Jefferson, Thomas, 16, 24, 25, 37–40, 53, 57, 62, 83, 92 Jerry rescue, 151–52 Jim Crow, 10 Johnson, Walter, 14 Johnson, William H., 168–69 Jones, Absalom, 48 Jones, James, 49 Jones, Martha, 100, 227 Jury trials: struggle for, 118, 142–43, 147, 152–55, 219–20, 282n105; in New York, 127–29, 131–32, 136 Kantrowitz, Stephen, 5 Katz, Stanley N., 225 Kelley, Robin D. G., 11 Kentucky, 72–73, 107 Klinghoffer, Judith and Lois Elkis, 78, 81 Kretz, Dale, 297n5 Ku Klux Klan, 16 Ladd, Benjamin, 97 Langston, John Mercer, 5, 152, 180, 197 Law, 17–18, 42, 51, 106–7, 147, 174–75, 224–27. See also Black codes; comity; courts; legal culture; specific statutes Legal culture, 103, 109–12, 223–27 Leib, Michael, 50 Levine, Lawrence, 11 Liberia, 195–96 Liberty Party, 151 Lincoln, Abraham, 113, 288n28 Litwack, Leon, 5, 9, 14, 233n15 Livingston, Robert, 72 Lobbying, 117–18, 272n8

310

Index

Logan, Rayford, 23 Louisiana Territory, 93 Lynd, Staughton, 71

Nicholson, Joseph, 50 North Carolina, 48, 61, 73–75 Northwest Ordinance, 96, 101–2, 113, 160

Maine, 72, 165–66 Manning, Chandra, 198 Manumission, 45, 48, 76, 78, 83, 84–89, 91; papers of, 105–6 Maroon communities, freedpeople as, 104–5, 266–67n13 Maryland, 46, 49–50, 71, 75, 76–78, 85–87, 94–95, 141 Massachusetts, 42, 48, 72, 169. See also Boston McKinley, Albert, 73 McLane, Louis, 62–63 Melish, Joanne Pope, 83 Methodists, 88, 89. See also African Methodist Episcopal Church Migration, 13–14, 45–46, 61, 83–101, 106–7, 139 Militias, blacks in, 167 Miller, Joseph C., 35 Missouri, 63, 86, 160–61. See also Missouri Crisis Missouri Crisis, 46, 52, 58, 59–63, 64, 67,100, 160 Missouri Compromise. See Missouri Crisis Mitchell, Jacob, 50 Mitchell, Nathaniel, 95–96 Mobility, 13–15, 83–101, 218, 228. See also migration Monroe, James, 91 Morton, Greenbury, 71 Movement politics, 3, 8–11, 22 Murphy, Angela, 152

Oakes, James, 7, 82 Occom, Samson, 35 Ohio, 46, 54, 83, 96–97

Nash, Gary B., 9, 10, 25, 71, 89 Nationalism (U.S.), 11, 19, 104, 177, 196–97, 238–39n61; black nationalism, 11, 19; white nationalism, 53–54, 63–64 New England, 82–83 New Jersey, 42, 45, 49, 54, 78–81 New Orleans, 194–95 New York, 4–5, 11, 42, 45, 46, 54, 58, 63, 72, 83, 116–38, 140–56, 158, 219, 228; Constitutional Convention (1821), 54–55, 56, 58, 59, 60, 68, 117, 118, 135 New York Manumission Society, 57, 122, 275n17 Newman, Richard S., 10, 12, 13, 47, 231n1, 234–35n29

Page, John, 93 Partisanship, 2, 204 Passports, 163 Pennsylvania 42, 46, 47–48, 50, 52, 54, 64, 72, 89–90, 96, 97–98, 140, 150–51, 155; abolition in, 46. See also Philadelphia Pennsylvania Abolition Society, 47, 50, 51–53, 89–90, 98 Pension Bureau, U.S., 198–215 Personal liberty laws, 152–55, 157, 282n4, 283n16 Petitioning, 17, 117–19, 126–38, 227–28, 272n8, 273n10 Philadelphia, 10, 45, 47, 48, 50, 54, 89–90, 97–98, 153–54, 171, 245n11 Phillips, Ulrich B., 6 Piersen, William D., 12 Pinchback, P. B. S., 177, 180, 190–91, 294n70 Pinckney, Charles, 62, 64, 70 Polgar, Paul, 55, 231n1 Political parties, 2 Pope, Alexander, 30, 31, 34, 37, 38, 241n19 Porter, Samuel D., 125 Potter, David, 140, 220 Proslavery, 2, 88 Prosser, Gabriel, 91. See also Gabriel’s Rebellion Pryor, Elizabeth, 286n5 Purvis, Robert, 142, 170–71, 190, 286n5 Quarles, Benjamin, 4–5, 9, 71, 231n1 Quakers, 47–48, 53, 87–88, 89 Quigley, David, 5 Quinn, William Paul, 109 Race. See racism racism, 2, 11, 16, 18, 33, 36–37, 41–64, 98, 162, 164, 171–72, 213, 218, 229, 264n65, 287n22. See also Jim Crow Rael, Patrick, 10, 11 Rainey, Joseph H., 190–91 Ray, Charles B., 129, 130, 133, 280n66 Ray, David H., 116, 125, 130, 133, 137–38 Ray, Isaac, 116

Index Ray, Phebe, 116–17, 119, 124–26, 130, 133, 137–38, 221 Read, John, 52–53 Rebellion, 2, 8, 12 Reconstruction, 1–2, 4, 14, 20–22, 66–67, 83, 87, 101, 179, 185, 195–96, 198, 205, 214 Religion (African American), 7, 28, 183; churches, 9, 10, 101, 290n52. See also African Methodist Episcopal Church Remond, Charles Lenox, 166, 173 Republican Party, 69, 70, 113, 140, 155, 171, 177–78, 185–86, 189, 191–92, 194–5, 204–5 Republicans. See Democratic-­Republican Party; Republican Party Resistance, 2, 6–8, 12, 16, 22. See also violence Revels, Hiram, 184 Revolutionary era, 1, 66–67, 69–71 Revolutionary war, 25, 42, 83–84, 168 Rhode Island, 42, 82–83 Riley, Padraig, 2, 13, 14, 18, 68–69, 229 Roediger, David, 82 Rucker, Walter, 12 Ruggles, David, 136 Rutledge, John, Jr., 49, 244n10 Saint Domingue. See Haitian Revolution Salafia, Matthew, 13 Sanderson, Jeremiah B., 180 Saxton, Alexander, 2, 82 Schools, 4, 18, 116, 119–26 Scott, Dred, and Harriet Scott, 158–61, 163. See also Dred Scott v. Sandford Scottron, Samuel R., 181, 188–90, 192, 194–95, 197, 295n86 Seeley, Samantha, 13–14, 218, 228 Sergeant, John, 52, 62, 100, 145 Seward, William H., 68, 69–71, 131–34, 136, 142–43, 151, 153, 172, 179, 251n10, 251n12 Shadow politics, 10–11 Sharp, Granville, 26 Sheridan, Lewis, 74 Shields, David, 28 Shinn, James M., Jr., 19, 20, 229 Sidney, Joseph, 55, 57 Slave narratives, 7, 12 Slave politics, 6–8, 25 Slave revolts, 8 Slave trade, domestic, 51, 89 international, 61 Slaveholders, 42–64 Slavery, 24–25, 33–37. See also abolitionists; antislavery; proslavery Sloan, James, 80

311

Smith, Gerrit, 68, 130–31 Smith, James McCune, 4 Smith, Rogers, 82, 252n15 Smith, William Loughton, 48, 49, 244n10 Somerset v. Steuart, 26, 39, 42, 71 South Carolina, 49, 61, 67, 79, 209–10 Spooner, Alden, 121–22 Stampp, Kenneth, 3, 6 Stanly, John Carruthers, 74 Stauffer, John, 11 Stevens, Thaddeus, 151 Stewart, James Brewer, 10, 82 Still, Wiliam Grant, 171–72 Stuckey, Sterling, 4, 12 Suffrage, black, 4, 43, 53–56, 58, 65–83, 104, 127, 134–35, 136–37, 158, 166, 220–21, 227, 279n61. See also disfranchisement; voting Sumner, Charles, 184, 185–87, 189, 191, 203 Taney, Roger, 18, 62, 67, 157–59, 160–67, 169–75, 229–30, 285n1, 288n28 Tanner, Benjamin T., 183 Tanner, James, 204–5 Taylor, John W., 58 Teasman, John, 248n43 Tennessee, 72, 74–75, 107 Terence, 29, 38 Thatcher, George, 48, 49, 50 Thirteenth Amendment, 113 Transnational politics, 19–20 Trumbull, Lyman, 112–13 Trump, Donald J., 41 Truth, Sojourner, 11 Underground Railroad, 109 Van Buren, Martin, 58, 59 Vermont, 72 Violence, in resistance, 15, 146, 158, 220 Virgil, 29, 32 Virginia, 14, 38, 45, 75, 78, 83–97, 99–100 Voting, 4–5, 9, 10–11, 16, 22, 54–59, 66–83, 117–18, 219, 220, 227, 228. See also suffrage Waldstreicher, David, 15, 16, 54, 221, 223–24, 237n46 Walker, David, 16, 109 War, 20. See also Civil War; Revolutionary war; War of 1812 War of 1812, 42, 53, 58, 169 Ward, Samuel Ringgold, 4 Washington, George, 24, 25, 49

312

Index

Watkins, William J., 158, 159, 164–65, 167, 170 Watson, Harry, 74 Webster, Daniel, 70, 83 Wesley, Charles, 3, 4, 66 West Indian Emancipation celebrations, 125, 136, 166–67 Wheatley, Phillis, 15, 19, 24–40, 216, 223–25 Whig Party, 68, 69, 70, 117, 129, 131–34, 145–46, 154–55 White, Jacob, 167–68 White, Shane, 9, 11, 71 White supremacy, 41–65, 108, 164, 172, 218

Whiteness. See white supremacy Wiencek, Henry, 25 Wilder, Craig Steven, 12, 274n13 Wilentz, Sean, 82, 139–40 Williams, Thomas Scott, 52 Wilson, James J., 257n62 Winch, Julie, 9, 11 Women, 24, 34, 121, 122, 124, 126, 128–29, 133, 205, 221, 277n34 Wood, Nicholas, 49 Woolman African Benevolent Society (Brooklyn), 120–22, 276n21

Acknowledgments

This volume presents essays revised from a conference supported by the McNeil Center for Early American Studies and the Advanced Research Collaborative of CUNY Graduate Center. We owe special thanks to Daniel K. Richter of MCEAS and Donald Robotham of the ARC for funding the conference and for their steadfast support, and to Joseph Murphy of CUNY and Amy Baxter-­Bellamy of MCEAS for support and advice of so many kinds. David’s colleagues James Oakes and Herman Bennett inspired us to think bigger about the conference—and in other ways —and showed how this could be done. A phenomenal group of scholars helped us fashion the call for papers and sifted through proposals: Mia Bay, Laura Edwards, Steven Hahn, Graham Russell Gao Hodges, Gerald Horne, Kellie Carter Jackson, Steven Kantrowitz, James Oakes, Adolph Reed, Nikhil Pal Singh, Rogers Smith, and James Brewer Stewart. The participants braved winter weather and made the event itself memorably stimulating and challenging: in addition to those whose essays appear here, we would like to thank Mia Bay, Rabia Belt, Millington Bergeson-­Lockwood, Claire Corbould, Julie Davidow, Luis-­Alejandro Dinnella-­Borrego, Laura F. Edwards, Paul Finkelman, Liette Gidlow, Graham Hodges, Kellie Carter Jackson, Martha S. Jones, Anna O. Law, Kate Masur, Michael McDonnell, Angela Murphy, Joseph Murphy, James Oakes, and Timothy Roberts. Bob Lockhart shepherded the volume through the press with his customary enthusiasm, efficiency, and dedication to quality. Rich Newman and Jim Oakes provided especially helpful readings of the introduction.