1 / Activist Taproots: Place, Reform, and the Quest for Unity

Antislavery and anti-prejudice activists believed they must mold the Old Northwest according to their ideals of a virtuous community. This was an immensely difficult mission. When he toured the region in 1841, antislavery lecturer Dr. Erasmus Hudson faced down abundant challenges. These included numerous anti-abolitionists who tried to silence his meetings, but he remained determined to continue. In a letter at the time, Hudson asserted that he must work on in the region, and claimed that the nation’s “hopes . . . are in this great Western Valley; and if they are disappointed, our country will be filled with sorrow and confusion.” To him, only diligent reform organization could save these deeply flawed “great western States.”1 Collaboration among activists thus held the key to changing their society and their nation.

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From the 1830s, the Old Northwest grew in importance in many reformers’ eyes as their desire to clean up the nation expanded. Passionate advocates increasingly spread ideas about the region’s potential influence and the need to remove its substantial problems regarding slavery and race. The Old Northwest was far from isolated, and over time reform there moved toward the center of the broader movements against slavery and prejudice. Local activists’ efforts to change the region were thus a subset of their larger struggles. While it was evident to Old Northwest rights promoters that their locality was critical, eastern abolitionists also saw this area as significant beginning in the 1830s, well before its growing economic importance and centrality to national politics converted more Americans to that opinion in the 1850s and 1860s. In Hudson’s vision and that of many like-minded people, they undertook a crucial struggle to determine the culture of the Old Northwest.2 This quest motivated agitators there for decades.

Reform shoots in the region sprung from rocky yet fertile soil, and their conditions of growth are vital to understanding these movements’ struggles and successes. It is essential to learn more about the people, the debates over race and rights they incited in reform and politics, and the initial development of organizations in the region. The place of the Old Northwest and its rights climate both shaped the struggle for change there and made it necessary, because the racism endemic there necessitated strong efforts to fight it. Many of the obstacles Old Northwest activists faced actually brought reformers together, and people with different approaches often collaborated.

The Old Northwest context explains much of the diversity of the movement there, for bold antislavery and anti-prejudice activists faced a largely antagonistic population in the region, and one that had a great deal at stake in excluding both African Americans and abolition. The ratio of slavery’s opponents to its supporters minimized institutional competition. In effect, local antislavery people often proved willing to collaborate with allies of any stripe, even when their creeds differed, and their societies had more harmonious operations there relative to the East.3 Even as they sought out the unity required to organize effectively, these activists nonetheless fought forces of division in this fractious region.

The people of the Old Northwest offered substantial resistance to reformers’ goals. In many ways, at the same time as these agitators broadened their base, hostile forces in their communities continually undermined and divided them. Chief among these obstacles was local opposition to advocates’ message. This had several sources, but most important among them were the political parties and people who depended on slavery economically. The region’s racism and its dispersed settlements also increased the challenges of activism. All of these hardships—resistance to reformers’ and African Americans’ freedom generally, racism, and the logistics of antislavery organizing in this difficult place—are developed throughout the remainder of the book. Exploring the place and the forces that unified and separated these tenacious Old Northwest activists provides context for understanding their efforts and the culture they sought to transform.

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When early nineteenth-century white Americans viewed the varied landscape of the Old Northwest, they beheld its potential for financial opportunity, and perhaps even riches. The land appeared to them ideal for profitable agriculture, and appropriately linked by water (and later canal and rail) to southern and eastern markets. There, fortune seemed to await the industrious, and the region’s incoming prospectors and settlers refused to allow people they viewed as racially inferior to interfere with this vision. This economic orientation shaped the settlers’ interactions with the indigenous inhabitants there, and by the 1830s the white migrants had legally and militarily driven most of them out to secure these territories and later states for westward expansion.

The settling process was a labor intensive one, and for some migrants to the Old Northwest, particularly in Indiana and Illinois, slaves seemed the ideal solution to their various work needs, the Northwest Ordinance’s prohibitions be damned. Others believed local slavery would diminish the value of white men’s toil. Overwhelmingly they agreed, however, that as white men their claim on the Old Northwest was paramount, and they had little interest in sharing its potential and actual bounties with African Americans or others at all, and certainly not on equal terms. This perspective, along with their diverse origins, contributed to widespread aversion to reforming the Old Northwest and its race relations.

The people who settled the Old Northwest presented activists with both support and challenges. These relatively new states—populated by migrants from across the East and the South with disparate views on race relations—lacked regional cohesion about slavery and civil rights, and even consensus within each state. To take Ohio as one example, by the late eighteenth century its residents originated in such varied places as Virginia, New England, the middle states, and France.4 A majority of the initial settlers of southern Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, and some Michiganders had southern origins and exclusionary (and often proslavery) opinions, while New Englanders and New Yorkers made up the plurality of those who migrated to the central and northern portions of the first three states and to Michigan.5 Not all former New Englanders and New Yorkers held antislavery views, however. Over time, the population became even less homogenous, including larger numbers of immigrants and more easterners who often lacked interest in sharing the region’s economic opportunities with African Americans.6 Activists’ organizing efforts in this unsettled climate catalyzed debates about slavery and over the racial boundaries of social and political rights. These accompanied and expanded the nationwide movements to address those issues.

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Anti-racist and antislavery activism in the Old Northwest grew out of a national reform context that dated back to the eighteenth century. Then, African American easterners like Richard Allen and Prince Hall were among the first to advocate immediate abolition and to inspire activists across the nation. Free African Americans saw and decried the indisputable connection between the obstacles to their own full citizenship and their enslaved brethren’s condition. They protested against the colonization movement that sought to send them out of the United States; claimed full American citizenship; and directly demanded civil rights, including the vote. These calls paved the way for later egalitarian arguments, including those that Old Northwest activists made.

Beginning in the 1820s, African American militancy, accelerated by the anticolonization struggle, grew in intensity. The writings of David Walker, Maria Stewart, and later, Henry Highland Garnet provided important intellectual and rhetorical background for the awakening to radicalism.7 In the early 1830s, a new cohort of white reformers with a growing interest in opposing slavery and racism emerged, as a result of several factors: egalitarianism; the Second Great Awakening’s religious revivals and moral reform crusades; and the print, market, and democratic revolutions. They began to perceive the limitations of colonization and early abolition strategies, and to take up immediate abolition along with their African American allies.8 An expanding corps of activists fought slavery even as, over time, the institution itself gained ever more vocal supporters, who themselves built on a long-standing intellectual heritage that justified slavery and its associated discrimination.

As the movement against slavery expanded, ideological divisions increasingly cleaved eastern organizations. These tensions transformed the first major American abolitionist association, the American Anti-Slavery Society. Founded in 1833, it provided the chief northern antislavery voice until its schism in 1840, which resulted partially from disagreement over women’s right to vote and to take leadership positions in the society. The antislavery movement then split into what historians usually describe as three factions: the Garrisonians/immediatists, the evangelicals, and the political abolitionists.

The fiery Liberator editor William Lloyd Garrison led the innovative Boston-based American Anti-Slavery Society. Contemporaries also called this group the immediatists, and eventually, the “Old Organization.” Beginning in the early 1830s, their peers deemed them radical for their opposition to electoral politics and their advocacy of controversial causes: immediate abolition, racial equality, women’s suffrage, and anticlericalism. They promoted a “come-outer” position, wherein they argued people should resign from corrupt churches, political parties, and other associations and only join groups that had become “purified,” as they said they had done.9 They eschewed violent means by advocating nonresistance, argued that partisan politics was necessarily corrupt, and espoused the indirect means of moral suasion as the only true method to fight slavery.

The second main antislavery faction was the smaller, moderate evangelical one. Frustrated with the immediatists’ anticlericalism, the evangelicals founded the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, colloquially known as the “New Organization.”10 These people worked within established religious and political institutions, and kept moral suasion as their fundamental principle. They disdained the other causes the American Society took up, and never obtained much of a foothold in the Old Northwest. They overlap somewhat with the third faction, the political abolitionists (themselves often religiously motivated), and over time, the distinctions between them blurred even more.11

Old Northwest reformers, like other antislavery people, operated in a world where politics and debate about affairs of state deeply infused all aspects of life. Even those activists who favored anti-political immediate abolition found that they could not avoid the reach of politics and disputes over reform techniques. Antislavery struggles and those for rights in the Old Northwest were inescapably linked with partisan politics. Whether they debated the appropriateness of immediatism versus political abolitionism, or fought to promulgate a particular antislavery agenda, politics permeated the Old Northwest and influenced activists’ freedom to advocate for slaves and free African Americans.

This was of course particularly true for political antislavery advocates, who beginning in 1840 successively organized through the Liberty, Free Soil, and Republican Parties, and used direct electoral means to combat slavery. Each of these political parties found substantial support in the Old Northwest (relative to the region’s population).12 While that was true, the area’s tendencies toward unity influenced its reform structure, in that the political/immediatist division, as well as those between African American and white abolitionists, women and men, often did not apply in the Old Northwest.13 Local organizers took the movement’s larger national disputes in new directions and were less factionalized. This rendered them all the more threatening to their antagonistic contemporaries.

The major parties, reflecting the general opposition to abolition in the population, viewed the antislavery third parties with fear. While the Liberty and Free Soil Parties were minor players in antebellum politics, they nonetheless raised the specter of disorder for mainstream politicians as they, to varying degrees, insisted on discussing abolition, slavery, and race. The Liberty Party in its early years shared many of the immediate abolitionists’ anti-racist goals and was outspoken on these issues. By 1842, most of its members had shifted their emphasis away from rapid emancipation and equal rights and toward an argument that slavery hurt whites.14 In contrast, some individual Liberty activists, male as well as female, bucked this trend and advocated racial equality.15

For their part, the main political parties had ample reason to avoid debating touchy, divisive subjects related to race, and unsuccessfully sought to avoid them. Mainstream partisans delicately balanced upon the blurry line between the North and the South even as, over time, that task neared impossibility and as the political parties became increasingly sectional. Many Old Northwest Democrats and Whigs tried to prevent third parties like the Liberty Party from wooing antislavery voters.16 This explains much of their hostility toward any racialized discussions in the region. In the 1830s and into the 1840s, the Democratic Party’s main agenda was national unity, with a pro-southern slant. It was moderately permissive on slavery in order to court voters in the South, which perpetually risked antagonizing its northern supporters.17 Northern Democrats’ views on race were complex, for while they often had racially biased views, these differed in many cases from actual pro-slavery positions. They opposed “social equality” and resisted offending southerners, but this did not mean they necessarily favored slavery.18 By the late 1830s, southern Democrats increasingly influenced national policy formation, and over time the fragile alliance between the party’s northern and southern members broke down even more.19

The national Whig Party, while less permissive toward slavery, nonetheless had a firmly entrenched ideology of white racial superiority, and most of its members attempted to evade antislavery ideas and their potential for discord. Formed in 1833, the Party remained viable only as long as it convinced voters that its agenda substantially differed from that of the Democrats.20

Clearly, while some political antislavery people were willing to engage with slavery and race to a degree, the major parties proved recalcitrant. Both parties exploited opposition to abolition and African American rights to expand their share of the electorate.21 This made activists’ fight for these causes all the more difficult in the Old Northwest, for as they sought to reform the nation’s racial mores, they directly confronted a political system stacked against them. Importantly, this balancing act also helps explain both Democrats’ and Whigs’ willingness to use violence to stop activists from organizing, as was particularly common in this region, whether they had political affiliations or not.

Throughout this turbulent era, as the political antislavery parties gained in strength, all of the major political parties fought hard to maintain dominance over the Old Northwest, which fed anti-abolitionism there. Many partisans could not get past the view of abolitionists and antislavery political parties as posing a divisive threat. While these four states differed, in all, the major parties feared losing power, even in places where no one disputed their dominance. The turmoil in these states helps explain why some Whigs joined the more overtly anti-abolition Democrats in suppressing Old Northwest activists, since their electoral position was particularly vulnerable. Reforming activists and politicians offered not only competition to the mainstream parties, but they also stirred up polarizing topics that the latter wished to keep quiet.

The Whigs were particularly strong in Ohio, while the Democrats were more successful in Illinois as well as in Michigan and Indiana in most years before the mid-1850s. The Democrats had a firm hold over the Michigan presidential elections from statehood in 1837 until 1856—except in 1840—and over the governorship (except in 1839) until 1855, when the Republicans took over. Liberty and Free Soil strength there also cost local Whigs some of the small ground they had gained.22 In Illinois, the Democrats exercised overwhelming political control from the 1830s until the 1850s.23 The Indiana Democrats steered the presidency and governorship for most years between 1828 and 1869, with a brief period of Whig strength in the mid-1830s. After 1860, the Republicans took the reins there, too. In Ohio, the Whigs obtained the majority, for the Democrats only maintained sway from 1828 until 1832 and from 1848 until 1852. After 1856, the Republicans predominated across the region, and by 1860, all gubernatorial and presidential elections in these states went Republican.24 In this period, these rivalries and shifts in local politics mean that the major parties, accordingly, had substantial motivation to oppose antislavery activists of all stripes, and many were comfortable using violence to do so.

At the same time that the major parties aimed to avoid the glaring issues slavery and race raised in the Old Northwest, the antislavery political parties grew increasingly moderate. Beginning in 1848, at varying paces across the Old Northwest, the Liberty Party—with its stronger antislavery stance—dissolved, and the Free Soil Party arose in its place. This party and its successor, the Free Democrats, united former Liberty Party advocates with ex-Whigs and Democrats, along with other previously apolitical foes of slavery.

Despite some significant overlap in leadership with the Liberty Party, this new party had a less racially progressive agenda; it mainly opposed the extension of slavery. It neither pushed tenaciously for emancipation nor fought the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 with much vigor. Some abolitionists strongly opposed the Free Soil Party’s weaker racial justice mission.25 While its vision of racial change was limited, the party nonetheless argued that slavery was a “moral evil,” a position that differed markedly from both the Democrats and the Whigs.26 The Free Soil Party did far better at the polls than its predecessor, earning 12 percent of the total vote in 1848. Its disruptive impact in that election reaffirmed for the Democrats and Whigs the need to avoid stirring up these sensitive subjects; if anything, the diminished radicalism of antislavery politicians made them more threatening to the party faithful, rather than less so.27

Over the course of the late 1840s and early 1850s, the positions of the Democrats and Whigs converged to a degree, most notably as they sought to hold the nation together with measures like the Compromise of 1850. This compromise further polarized American political discussion, and its fugitive slave provisions proved incredibly divisive in the Old Northwest.28 For the next few years, the Free Soil Party retained varying degrees of popularity across the region, but had lost most of its limited support by 1851.

In the remarkably roiling 1850s, the arguments that activists made against slavery, and increasingly against slaveholder power, began to exert some sway over politics. The Whigs and Democrats failed to maintain national unity in the face of immense sectional pressures. The Kansas-Nebraska Act and the fatal conflicts over sovereignty and slavery that ensued in Kansas proved too much for the already fracturing parties to handle, and the Whigs collapsed.29 The Republicans, the most effective of the antislavery political parties, emerged in 1854, and the Democrats began to divide even more along sectional lines. This new party continued in the Free Soil Party’s moderate trajectory.30

The birth of the Republican Party was closely tied to the Kansas-Nebraska Act and sectionalism more generally, both of which had persuaded many northerners that they must take more aggressive action to defend their interests against the extension of slavery.31 The Republicans argued for free labor’s economic and social superiority over slave labor, and emphasized slavery’s threats to white privileges. This brought the institution’s indisputable relevance to the attention of the northern public. Free labor ideology’s perspective that slavery’s territorial expansion endangered white northern workers’ fundamental right to “economic independence” contributed to escalating sectional conflict in the 1850s.32 In the Old Northwest this was a persuasive argument for a varied constituency, and one which pro-southern government decisions, like that in the Dred Scott case, also affirmed.33 The Republicans’ distinctive—and moderate—ideology so effectively melded personal and sectional interest with morality that the party overcame its numerous political obstacles and rose to electoral triumph in 1860.34

The political situation in the Old Northwest enormously influenced this complex society, for there, antislavery and anti-prejudice reformers had their friends as well as their foes, their allies as well as their opponents. They drew upon a range of organizing methods, including both the sacred and the secular, to build their own following. Churches led the way into reform work for the myriad activists who were religious and had spiritual motivations.

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Religion added to Old Northwest activists’ tools and tensions, for both local and national churches also helped shape the landscape of reform there. As residents of a highly religious milieu and moment, antislavery people commonly believed that their faith meant they had a duty to change their society. The Second Great Awakening had converted many; these people had embraced its message that they must remove the nation’s sins before Judgment Day.35

Old Northwest abolitionists tended to cluster in several religious traditions nationally known for opposition to slavery. Quakers, or the Society of Friends, were prominent reformers in all four states, but especially in Indiana. The Presbyterians and Congregationalists had particular support in Illinois, Michigan, and Ohio. The Methodists especially found many supporters among the antislavery people in Illinois and Ohio, and the Free Will Baptists did so in Michigan and Ohio.36

Even as sections of particular evangelical strength within each of these states were more receptive to abolition, nonetheless for many devout Old Northwesterners, the road to publicly opposing slavery was rough.37 While religious ideology could motivate antislavery work, churches could hamper activism. The Friends of Indiana, among others, encountered serious obstacles to their reform actions. Beginning in 1841, their state leaders refused to allow antislavery lecturers into their meetinghouses. The orthodox national leadership of the Society of Friends argued that abolition was divisive, and that their members should not mix in organizations with people outside of the faith or with non-Friend leadership. For over a decade, they had experienced splits both nationally and locally, including the departure of the so-called Hicksites in 1827 and 1828.38

Some in the Society of Friends took a strong stance against their religious body’s refusal to work directly against slavery. Consequently, in Indiana approximately one hundred antislavery Friends left the denomination to form a new Yearly Meeting of Anti-Slavery Friends, at Newport in February 1843. The split there was at least in part motivated by events during the Society of Friends’ Yearly meeting in nearby Richmond, Indiana, in 1842. A group of antislavery Friends led by Hiram Mendenhall had presented a petition to visiting Whig politician Henry Clay, asking him to free his slaves. Mendenhall was a Quaker who had migrated from North Carolina, and a Whig at the time.39 Clay refused the petition, outraged that Mendenhall dared to publicly approach him about this controversial issue.40 Local immediate abolitionists believed that many of Clay’s Richmond supporters proved they were excessively moderate on slavery, and too willing to follow the Whig party line. Other events aided that impression, for at that same 1842 meeting, the Society expelled four Friends—Benjamin Stanton, Jacob Grave, William Locke, and Charles Osborn—for their abolitionist activities. This was but the latest development in an evolving controversy among Friends concerning the appropriateness of uniting with other causes.41

As late as 1847, Richmond’s orthodox Quakers treated the visiting Hicksite lecturers, Lucretia and James Mott, as pariahs.42 Pennsylvania reform powerhouse Lucretia Mott had previously visited the town in 1841 with her fellow lecturer, Vermont-born Oliver Johnson. Her visit there in 1847 was part of a larger tour; she also lectured in several Ohio towns, along with African American speakers Dr. David J. Peck (of Philadelphia) and Frederick Douglass.43 Even if Richmond did not welcome the Motts, other Friends eagerly embraced the fight against slavery, and the membership of the Anti-Slavery Friends ultimately grew to about two thousand, roughly 10 percent of the total number of Indiana Friends. The orthodox Friends eventually took up a stronger antislavery position, and the denomination consequently reunited in 1857.44

Old Northwest activists belonged to and tried to clear a number of other Protestant denominations of their association with slavery. Many chose to work within their existing religious bodies, but others called for separatism, as was common among immediatists. The Illinois State Anti-Slavery Society made a “come outer” statement on October 24, 1843. They argued that duty obligated antislavery people to leave the “Episcopal, Baptist, Methodist, [and] Presbyterian” denominations due to their stance on slavery.45 By the mid-1840s, the Congregational Church in Illinois opposed slavery, and demanded that its ministers share this stance.46

In the Old Northwest, antislavery organizations also frequently encompassed members of multiple churches. In the antislavery convention at Granville, Ohio, in 1838, Quaker, Baptist, and Methodist clergymen all addressed the crowd.47 The Michigan Anti-Slavery Society combined strong Quaker, Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian influences in the 1830s and 1840s.48 On the national level and in the region, Congregationalists had an easier time condemning slavery than did Presbyterians and Methodists; the former church had little presence in the South and its leaders usually governed it locally. When the Methodists divided in 1844, the Wesleyan Methodist faction emerged and took on slavery, as did some of the Baptists the following year.49 This denominational diversity continued in later years, and many of these reformers had sweeping visions of how they must change their society, which extended to its consumer products.50

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Much as activists tried to reform churches they saw as sinful, they also sought to eradicate what they saw as the immoral aspects of the economy. Old Northwest direct action against slavery included the free produce movement, the effort to replace slave-tainted goods with ethical products. Since abolitionists knew that southern ties contributed to racism and anti-abolition, they tried to separate themselves economically from the institution, from the 1820s through the 1860s. These reformers claimed that they must combat the slave economy, and sought to deny slaveholders financial support by refusing to buy the products of unfree labor. Cajoling others to join them, the organizers of a free labor convention for Ohioans and Indianans in 1842 argued that they must take action to create change: “It is not sufficient for us to develop correct principles; we must endeavor to put them in practice. We must be willing to do as well as say, or we shall effect nothing.”51 Despite the movement’s financial failure, this practical antislavery method proved that activists in the Old Northwest went to considerable lengths to avoid worsening the situation of slaves.52

These advocates’ moral choices were enmeshed in the new market economy’s economic developments and depended upon its exchange of commodities. The free produce movement was an effort to mold the market to fit the conviction that all workers had a right to be paid for their labor.53 Its champions politicized economic behavior by making purchases the basis of an argument about free labor and universal rights. While the movement failed, such abstention did incremental good, both for slaves and for the people who bought free produce.54 Free produce supporters learned they could use consumer movements to transform the context and the nature of discussions of the economy; they further claimed that purchases could create social change and advance an egalitarian agenda. Many individuals closely linked such activism to their work with antislavery societies.

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Whether directed outward at visitors or inward at transforming their own towns, Old Northwest activists enthusiastically participated in abolitionist and anti-prejudice institution-building, beginning in the early 1830s. The region soon witnessed an explosion of action against slavery, the varied and visible fruits of local organizers’ labor. The daily work to overturn slavery and prejudice presented reformers with physical, intellectual, and logistical challenges that they faced together, sharing their strength. Linked by their travels, letters, and newspapers, women and men in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio relied upon each other and upon their eastern compatriots to build their activist base. Their actions demonstrate that the region’s antislavery struggle, while different, was inseparable from national battles. The Old Northwest was both central to the larger antislavery cause, and important for how it changed the national picture of abolition. The massive opposition and adverse legal climate they found gave local organizers a unique stance on activism, and focusing on the Old Northwest made the antislavery enterprise appear all the more daunting. These activists, from ordinary residents to leaders, from individuals to organizations, typically hitched their star to larger national bodies and agendas, but also differed from them.

While fighting slavery was difficult for reformers across the nation, it was particularly so in the Old Northwest, where the environment presented them unusual challenges that warrant closer investigation. The context in which Old Northwest antislavery reformers worked made them stand apart from those of the East in the duration of their activism, in the work they did, and in the possession of fewer rigid distinctions between antislavery groups. While largely overlooked by previous scholars, local and state organizations (including those that advocated immediatism) remained robust in some areas as late as the 1840s, and some even until the Civil War, in the very era when nationally oriented political abolition was on the ascent.55 The growth in political abolition did not necessarily entail immediatists abandoning their former organizational techniques, at least in the Old Northwest. Despite political abolitionists’ presence and increasing strength in the region over time, they did not, as historians have argued, monopolize the activist scene in the Old Northwest from the 1840s onward.56 Antislavery people used a variety of strategies to push their agendas in this tense environment. Old Northwest women and men formed societies that advocated both political and immediate antislavery, with widely varying levels of interest even within individual states. This diversity contributed to the strength of the larger national antislavery movement. The immediatists’ most obvious stronghold (relatively speaking) in the region in the 1840s was Ohio, but nonpolitical strategies remained viable elsewhere, even as the Liberty Party gained ground.57 Both male and female activists made substantial contributions to this burgeoning, vibrant Old Northwest antislavery movement from 1830 to 1861.

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Old Northwest people who opposed slavery and prejudice felt compelled to ally for change, and this was a mixed-sex endeavor from the beginning. As the region began to organize, women were the abolition pioneers. Their activism is an essential piece of the larger puzzle of Old Northwest opposition to slavery and prejudice. In early October 1832, five years prior to Michigan’s statehood, the women of Lenawee County organized the first antislavery society in the Michigan Territory, and the first female society in the Old Northwest, the Logan Female Anti-Slavery Society. Antislavery propagandist Elizabeth Margaret Chandler was the main catalyst for this development. This devout Quaker activist dedicated her short life to slave liberation and other reforms, using both newspapers and organizations. Raised in Philadelphia, Chandler was active in the local Female Anti-Slavery Society. In 1826 she began writing acclaimed articles on a range of rights issues for the Genius of Universal Emancipation, a newspaper in Mount Pleasant, Ohio.58 In 1830, Elizabeth and her brother Thomas moved to Lenawee County, where she pursued her activism and editing from her remote location, and contributed to the Liberator beginning in 1832.59

Chandler argued that antislavery labor was a Christian necessity, regardless of where people lived. To take proper action, all people, but especially women, needed to form societies and directly combat slavery. She took as a given that women opposed “sin” and favored moral reform.60 Chandler enacted her convictions in 1832 when she co-founded the pioneering Logan Female Society, which affiliated with the American Society upon the latter’s formation in December 1833.61 Chandler died after a brief illness on November 2, 1834, at the age of 27.62

Chandler was but one of many Old Northwest propagandists for the cause. With their writings, meetings, and actions, she and a cohort of less famous people in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio led the way into social reform for legions, but women found her particularly inspiring. From 1832 to 1855, women’s participation in the antislavery and anti-prejudice movement blossomed nationally, as the movement itself grew. In those years, women organized more than 200 female antislavery societies in the northern states, and in no place were they so closely linked with broader organizations as in Michigan.63

After Chandler, both women and men took up abolition; in her own state, antislavery organization experienced its first of two peaks in the late 1830s. The Michigan State Anti-Slavery Society (Michigan State Society), a mixed-sex society, formed in the autumn of 1836. This group and the lecturers they hired organized 17 societies across the state in their first year, and favored immediate abolition as their main strategy at least through 1839.64

While each state soon debated antislavery tactics, Ohio’s activists were particularly outspoken and prolific. The history of Ohio antislavery organizations reveals a stratified fate superficially similar to their eastern counterparts, although still less factionalized. The Ohio Anti-Slavery Society (Ohio Society) first met at Zanesville in 1835, and initially followed the tenets of the American Society, including avoiding the vote. However, some Ohio activists took up politically oriented activism soon after the society’s formation, and this foreshadowed later local debate.65 This society exemplifies how Old Northwest organizations were willing to consider multiple reform methods. In 1837 they promoted newspapers, and raised money for their own operations, the American Society, and African American schools.66 Concurrently, from 1835 to 1836 women organized twenty female societies across Ohio.67 The founding of new societies continued throughout the 1830s and went on for decades.

As is logical given the greater extent of racism there, Indiana—Ohio’s western neighbor—had a more troubled history of antislavery organizing. Despite the presence in the early 1830s of antislavery pioneers Levi Coffin and Charles Osborn, reform proceeded slowly in Indiana, with the first society against slavery forming in 1836.68 In September 1838, the Indiana Society held its founding meeting, where it initially resolved to take a politically independent course. At that time, there were still only eight societies in Indiana.69

Farther north and west, Illinois activists both witnessed and created turbulence when they moved into antislavery organizations, but nonetheless participated actively. In October 1837 they founded their State Anti-Slavery Society at Alton, amidst bloodshed and turmoil; an anti-abolition mob shot Maine-born editor and minister Elijah Parish Lovejoy the following month, after a period of intense conflict there.70 By the end of the decade, the Illinois Society encompassed both the political and immediatist strands of abolition, and had come to include at least eight county societies and sixteen local ones.71

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In the Old Northwest, the drive toward unity included personnel; activists welcomed all to aid the antislavery cause, as women exemplified when they claimed a substantial role. As antislavery societies organized in this region, most of them displayed a strong interest in women’s participation in both mixed organizations and separate female societies, despite the fact that, if anything, it increased their unpopularity among their neighbors. Women enthusiastically and vocally joined both the western Garrisonian movement and the local and regional Liberty Party.72

Publicity for new mixed antislavery societies in the Old Northwest often explicitly appealed to women and called for their participation with arguments that all could contribute to reforming the region. On February 26, 1839, the editor of the Genius of Universal Emancipation wrote, “Every one—the aged and the young, male and female—may do something to aid in pushing forward the good work.”73 In Illinois, mixed and women’s antislavery societies cited ideals of women’s special abilities that they grounded in a tradition of female activism.74 In 1840, the Economy Society in Wayne County, Indiana, also opened its membership and leadership positions to both sexes.75 This pattern continued into Ohio, where at a June 1841 Ohio Society meeting held at Mount Pleasant, the leaders hailed all to join them in membership, and one speaker, Thomas Morris, an antislavery Democrat and former Ohio senator, emphasized the importance of women’s action in the struggle.76 These organizations’ willingness to accept women’s political aid and identity suggests that the cause was so crucial to its advocates that they sought out support from all available sources.

The unifying tendencies in the Old Northwest antislavery movement also appear in the efforts of planners to facilitate women’s activism in the region, for they scheduled meetings in close succession, with audiences that varied by ideology and sex. The Indiana Society met in February in 1840 and 1841, and had concurrent meetings with the Liberty Party.77 Women were not active as officers in either meeting. This incident aside, women sometimes took leadership roles at the offshoot political meetings that accompanied antislavery conventions. Many women participated in the Indiana Society gathering on November 22, 1841, where both men and women had the same voting rights. The women also held a separate gathering “for their own special action.78 Women commonly worked in mixed associations throughout the decade, although they rarely attained parity.79

Indeed, lest the vision of inclusiveness be overstated, the reality was that in the 1830s and 1840s, in most cases men retained the influential positions in mixed organizations. Among other instances, both women and men attended the Ohio Society’s second anniversary in April 1837 in significant numbers, although men had a substantial majority. In leadership positions there, women were only on the ladies’ petition to Congress committee, for men held all of the officer, manager, and executive positions.80 In addition, the Chicago Western Citizen never listed women as officers or speakers in Illinois antislavery societies, except in female ones.81 Despite this limited inclusion, Old Northwest women pressed for involvement throughout the abolitionist movement—including its political strata—and in their own organizations.

This enthusiasm for abolition was evident in the Illinois women’s societies as they grew in the early 1840s and played a substantial role in the state’s antislavery movement during that decade. In 1843, their expansion began with the founding of the Putnam County Female Anti-Slavery Society on January 30, 1843, and six others soon followed. All but one, Jerseyville, were located in mid-sized towns in the northern half of the state.82 Women’s prominence in the Old Northwest antislavery movement was uneven but notable, and exemplified the diverse cohort of reformers there.

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As Old Northwest abolitionists organized their societies, they worked toward unity by bridging boundaries among different factions. With notable recent exceptions, historians have attempted to divide antislavery people by categories such as “immediate abolition” or “moderate political abolition,” by organizational affiliation, or along racial and gender lines.83 In the process, they have overlooked the Old Northwest, where borders between different types of activism were fluid. Telling evidence of historians’ limitations lies in the fact that individuals often changed their allegiances over their life course, and had multiple motivations for their activism.84 This, along with the violence that they risked and experienced, demands a reconsideration of the abolition movement that recognizes their singularity. Many Old Northwesterners did not neatly conform to either the political or the immediatist abolition faction as defined in eastern terms.85 The inelastic categories prevalent in many antislavery histories mask activists’ openness, which grew out of the Old Northwest reform environment.86 While political antislavery had obtained a significant foothold by the early 1840s, neither it nor immediate abolition absolutely ruled the Old Northwest. Old Northwest women and men had more options for organization—and for opposition—in their strife-filled realm than did their counterparts elsewhere. They willingly sought allies to enhance their movement’s strength.

While many western abolitionists attempted to steer clear of factional squabbling and to ignore the antislavery schism of 1840, this proved challenging. As the national movement split, the Ohio and Illinois state societies became independent, while Michigan affiliated with the American and Foreign Society in 1841.87 Dr. Abraham Brooke, a prolific Ohio abolitionist, shed some light on local events in a series of letters to the National Anti-Slavery Standard. Maryland-born Brooke took up Garrisonian abolitionism in the 1830s, and headed the Garrisonian exodus from the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society. He aided fugitives extensively, worked to form the Western Anti-Slavery Society from his base in Clinton County, Ohio, and hosted abolition meetings on his land.88 In September 1840, Brooke wrote that the Clinton County Society supported the American Society, and claimed Ohio had an exceptional perspective on “political action,” one that was “very much mixed up.” There, even people who called themselves “new organizationists” still did not necessarily advocate third party abolition.89 The next year, Brooke continued to argue that western differences existed, but noted that a number of locals found political antislavery increasingly relevant.90

Brooke was correct, in that some Old Northwest activists joined the political fray and made notable efforts to elect Liberty Party candidates in the 1840s. The fairly decentralized Liberty Party made its first foray into elections in 1840. That year, its national candidates, Birney and Earle, found their only substantial support in the Old Northwest in Michigan. On the state level, Whigs, who also still retained much support in Ohio’s Western Reserve, dominated the antislavery society there. In Illinois, while a few pioneers advocated the electoral approach against slavery the previous year, the state Liberty Party did not organize until 1840.91 There and in Ohio, there was little state-level Liberty organization for the election that fall, but the party still won some local offices in both of those states and in southern Michigan.92

After 1840, Indiana saw a flowering of both political and immediate antislavery action that welcomed both men and women. In 1840, the Indiana Society voted against supporting the Liberty ticket, but that party’s local organization nonetheless had already begun.93 Opposition to slavery in that anti–African American state remained behind the rest of the Old Northwest, but accelerated in the early 1840s with the founding of the antislavery newspapers the Protectionist and the Free Labor Advocate.94 The number of local female antislavery societies also grew there from 1840 to 1842, with the establishment of at least four.95 By February 1841, the Liberty Party controlled the Indiana State Society, but the possibility of boundary crossing remained, as the 1842 annual meeting of the state society—with its 1,500 to 2,000 attendees—revealed. This meeting harmoniously used both political and non-political abolition approaches.96 Old Northwest societies, like the one in Indiana, permitted an unusual level of combination of resources across ideological boundaries at their large annual meetings.

Despite such expressions of unity, the Ohio abolitionists nonetheless soon became more divided. Among other issues, the Ohio American Anti-slavery Society (Ohio American Society) split from the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society in 1842, due to dissatisfaction with its moderate focus on political abolition. The new Ohio American Society first met on June 8, 1842, and was predominantly composed of Hicksite Quakers. It affiliated with the American Society and allied itself with many of that group’s potentially divisive stances, including its opposition to voting and advocacy of moral suasion, the free produce movement, women’s public action, churches opposing slavery, and nonresistance.97 At that meeting the attendees also requested that some of the American Society’s lecturers visit them.98

Interestingly, even after the split, the Ohio American Society was not entirely opposed to voting, and remained congenial, exemplifying unity even in the face of growing discord. Brooke, ever willing to be controversial, alluded to this in October 1842, when he anticipated that Ohio American Society members would vote Liberty and eschew Whigs and Democrats. Unlike members of the American Society, they would vote, he predicted, and vote in favor of political abolition.99 Brooke’s was not an isolated opinion, as became apparent when the Ohio American Society met at Cadiz that same month. This was the site of an assault on an early antislavery meeting in 1836, when local residents met immediatist lecturer James A. Thome with an eggy reception. By 1842, Cadiz had changed, for abolitionists had earned the right to hold a meeting there. They resolved that while they were responsible for voting their consciences on abolition, their members had no obligation to take a stance on the Liberty Party, any more than on the major parties.100 Voting was actually on the table, even for the Ohio abolitionists most like the Garrisonians. Some eventually switched entirely to political abolition.101 The Ohio American Society retained its overall immediatist orientation when it adopted the more general name of the Western Society in 1846. This change reflected the longtime participation of Indiana and Michigan activists in its reform work.102 The allegiances of Old Northwest antislavery people varied from place to place and shifted over time.

In Illinois, the Liberty Party began making significant progress in terms of publicity and votes only after 1842, even though a small contingent in northern Illinois had supported it since the party’s founding two years earlier.103 The Illinois Society contained a substantial Liberty Party faction that year, but some members also adhered to immediatism. The umbrella of the Illinois State Society contained both groups, but by 1843, the political abolitionists outnumbered the immediatists.104 However, as elsewhere in the Old Northwest, in Illinois the division between the two groups was rarely clear-cut. Chicago political abolition editor Zebina Eastman claimed his state was unified, “Antislavery men here were never divided or troubled with the divisions that characterized the East. . . . ”105 The Illinois State Society further demonstrates this boundary blurring. Even as that organization became auxiliary to the Liberty Party in 1843, immediate abolitionists still retained their membership.106 Over the next two years, the Illinois Liberty Party gained some small measure of support, polling 3 percent of the vote in the 1844 election. In that state, the party was interracial, and to a larger degree than most, open to both sexes. It grew in strength from 1843 until its peak in 1847, a year before its dissolution.107

Until 1844, Michigan remained Liberty’s most supportive state in the Old Northwest, but it also retained an immediatist faction throughout the decades. Many who favored moral strategies had little institutional foothold for a time, because the Michigan State Society had formalized its support for political abolition by endorsing it in 1843.108 Their views were at times puzzling, as in 1844, when the Michigan State Society debated whether third or main parties were their best option. Both sides of this dispute denounced voting, calling into question how locals defined political abolition.109 The Michigan State Society remained loyal to the Liberty Party while it lasted. Michigan’s female abolitionists underwent another upswing in organizational fervor in 1846, when they formed four new societies.110 This exemplifies how Old Northwest activists maintained breadth in their approaches and diversity in their ranks, for decades.

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Slavery’s Old Northwest opponents showed with their quotidian actions that they were quite willing to compromise as they collaborated. For many Old Northwest citizens, the eastern antislavery movement’s tendency toward separation and rigid bifurcation had met its limits. They were creatures of their time, nevertheless, and could not entirely escape the moment’s tensions. As Old Northwest political abolitionists gained strength, over the course of the 1840s, this eventually shrunk the space available to the immediatists in public discussion, even if it did not directly silence their efforts or stop them. Immediate abolitionists still retained a presence in some places, such as Michigan, until 1861.111

In fact, a second peak of immediatist organization appeared as early as the 1850s in Michigan, and the antislavery movement there returned to its former heterogeneity.112 This contravenes other historians’ claims that the Garrisonians had vanished from the region (apart from Ohio) after the rise of political abolition. While the Michigan State Society had fallen apart in the late 1840s and early 1850s, as it followed the Liberty and Free Soil Parties into obscurity and electoral compromise, another state organization had risen in its place. Revived statewide in October 1852 by Lenawee County Garrisonians and the Michigan Central Committee as the Michigan Anti-Slavery Society, it allied with the American and Western Societies.113 They met monthly and supported the latter’s paper, the Anti-Slavery Bugle.

Pressure for this new organization came from longtime local immediatists like Thomas Chandler and traveling organizers including Garrison himself, who came to Michigan in 1853 to push the Michigan Society into being.114 This is but one example of how Old Northwest activists enjoyed the infusion of experienced antislavery leadership easterners provided, while the eastern old guard simultaneously benefited from the movement’s expansion into western terrain.

As this Michigan case confirms, from 1832 and continuing into the Civil War, the Old Northwest had diverse antislavery advocates—both women and men—although their respective public presences varied. The Michigan Society held to its immediatist views, for in 1855 it denounced Republicans for being complicit with slavery, and at its October 1856 meeting, the attendees radically disavowed national and local governments for appeasing slavery.115 The broad approach to reform notable in Michigan characterized this ideologically heterogeneous region through the Civil War. Elsewhere, from 1856 on, the creeds of the Western and American societies increasingly diverged, even as the Western Society remained active until the war began.116

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In this region of fiery opposition to abolition, Old Northwest activists heeded their own conception of antislavery factions, and their environment influenced their reform activities. They chose to bond together as they labored in a new universe of possibilities, challenging white supremacy as it became increasingly politically entrenched, and refusing to grant it the appearance of natural fact. This environment was rife with racialized laws and their consequences, and thus the straightforward antislavery fight there also encompassed a struggle against this pervasive legislation.

African Americans and their stalwart allies strongly resisted the northward-reaching tentacles of the slave system. In this seemingly free but very racist place directly north of the slave region, slavery’s influence was everywhere in law and social behavior, but its actual presence was limited. As these four states grew rapidly from the 1830s through the 1860s, they became sites of acrimonious and often violent debate over slavery and the rights of their residents. Despite the states’ free status and their small African American populations, racial discrimination ran rife, along with anti-abolitionism. The activism of the tenacious grassroots fighters for political and social rights uncovered here reveals that this difficult region always had a counter-narrative to the race riot, the “Black Laws,” and the manipulation of racism for political gain.