PREFACE

My decision to write this book was prompted in part by the fact that the most important general accounts of Reconstruction published since 1960 have focused almost entirely on the South. Studies by Eric Foner, John Hope Franklin, Kenneth M. Stampp, Robert Cruden, Rembert W. Patrick, Allen W. Trelease, and W. R. Brock have provided valuable insights into the broad social, economic, and political changes that occurred in southern life and how southern blacks helped to shape the contours of change during the Reconstruction era.1 Yet these works have largely ignored the northern racial climate and especially African Americans’ struggle for equal rights throughout the North. For example, Foner’s Reconstruction, which remains the best treatment of this period, does not even mention the role of northern blacks in the crusade for full citizenship rights. Likewise, Franklin’s Reconstruction after the Civil War and Stampp’s The Era of Reconstruction, 1865–1877, which dominated the field of Reconstruction studies until the appearance of Foner’s book in 1988, briefly note that most northern states had long maintained discriminatory laws against African Americans but make only passing reference to northern blacks’ agitation for black manhood suffrage and desegregation of the public schools following the Civil War.2

A few scholars have recently argued that, because the historical literature on the modern civil rights movement in the mid-twentieth century has likewise tended to focus on the southern crusade against the Jim Crow system, it fails to reflect the national scope of racial inequality or the geographical breadth of the challenges to it. In his Sweet Land of Liberty, Thomas Sugrue notes that most studies continue to concentrate on the epic struggle in the South and turn northward only in the mid-late 1960s, when the urban riots erupted and the black power movement emerged. Sugrue, as well as Robert O. Self and Matthew J. Countryman, in their studies of the civil rights cause in Oakland and Philadelphia, respectively, call for historical accounts that recognize the important role that northern activists played in what was truly a national movement. While acknowledging that the southern cause richly deserves attention, they insist that to concentrate so heavily on the southern movement as the paradigmatic post–World War II black struggle is a serious distortion.3

Much as Sugrue, Self, and Countryman have argued that the narrative of the mid-twentieth century civil rights cause needs to be reframed, I believe that historians must similarly expand the geographical reach of their studies of Reconstruction to include, in a substantive manner, northern racism and the northern black struggle to eradicate racial segregation and inequality. In her 2009 work on race and reconstruction in the Upper Midwest, Leslie A. Schwalm has articulated this conviction that the Reconstruction-era black quest for equal rights—and Reconstruction itself—was in fact national in scope. Because so little attention has been devoted to Reconstruction in the North and so much of the historical literature that has taken northern society into account has concentrated on how northern whites viewed and participated in the reconstruction of the South, Schwalm argues, the history of how black freedom and citizenship were understood and defended in the post–Civil War years is still only partially chronicled.4

Recent studies by Andrew Deimer and David Quigley have further clarified my understanding that the northern black equal rights movement must be placed in a broader national context.5 While warning that one should not push the parallel between Reconstruction Philadelphia and the South too far, Deimer calls for a reassessment of traditional North-South boundaries in Reconstruction historiography. In concluding that the retreat from Radical Republican politics in Philadelphia was largely the result of local political conflict over racial equality, he elucidates the relationship between events in the South and the North. In his Second Founding, a study of Reconstruction politics in New York City, Quigley addresses this issue from a slightly different angle. He maintains that the intense debate as to who would be part of the democratic process and on whose terms involved black and white men and women in both the North and South. By emphasizing the northern black contributions to the debate on interracial democracy and identifying links between events in the North and the South, my book helps to meet the need for positing a national, not just a southern, vision of what Reconstruction could accomplish and for connecting local and state agitation for equal rights to a national Reconstruction.

A fairly substantial body of work on the northern black struggle for equal rights during the Reconstruction era does indeed exist. Studies by scholars such as David A. Gerber, Ira Brown, Davison M. Douglas, Elmer R. Rusco, Emma Lou Thornbrough, Eugene H. Berwanger, Roger D. Bridges, Edward R. Price, Arthur O. White, and Marion Thompson Wright have deepened our understanding of the northern movement.6 However, these studies have almost invariably examined the northern black quest in a particular state, territory, or community. Even the few works that transcend these geographical limits are rather restricted in scope. For example, Schwalm studies Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, while Berwanger examines only the states and territories that lay west of the Mississippi River. Likewise, though Douglas explores the school integration issue as it unfolded from New England to the West Coast, his study focuses largely on the legal dimensions after 1880, analyzes this struggle primarily from the northern white perspective, and does not investigate the suffrage issue. Moreover, Leslie H. Fishel’s 1953 dissertation on “The North and the Negro, 1865–1900,” which Schwalm cites as the most comprehensive survey of northern blacks and the race issue during the Reconstruction era, is dated and focuses primarily on the views of northern whites on racial discrimination in northern society.7

In researching this subject, I encountered several problems. One was the paucity of newspapers owned and edited by northern blacks. The limited number of northern black papers published during these years can be explained in part by the widespread poverty in black communities and the relatively small black population, which comprised only 2 percent of the northern population. Likewise, that few manuscript collections of black leaders are available can be attributed partly to the lack of interest among white archivists in collecting and preserving African American sources. Similarly, with the significant exception of the Pennsylvania State Equal Rights League, the records of black equal rights organizations either do not exist or are quite limited in scope.

Further, though northern black women attended and spoke at public meetings, collected signatures for petitions, filed lawsuits, engaged in acts of civil disobedience in defense of their children’s right to an equal education, and at times espoused universal suffrage, black men, whose views on gender roles were often similar to those of white males, tended to dominate the equal rights organizations, edit the newspapers, and lobby public officials. Consequently, while I have sought to take the views and actions of African American women into account wherever possible, it has been difficult to give them the voice they deserve.

Likewise, the extent to which the black non-elites were involved in the equal rights cause is not easily discerned. Steven Hahn’s A Nation under Our Feet, as well as documents in the series on the history of emancipation, edited by Hahn, Ira Berlin, and others, provide valuable insights into the role that freed people played in shaping their world following the end of slavery.8 Research in similar sources pertaining to the North—such as records of public meetings and local equal rights organizations, petitions, lawsuits, voting data, and reports of acts of civil disobedience—indicate that the crusade for full citizenship rights elicited broad support within northern black communities. One must, however, be careful not to overstate the role of northern black non-elites in the movement, for the documents of black elites—including newspaper editorials, reports, memorials, and personal correspondence—are much more available and tend to provide the most weighty evidence. The elites, after all, generally had the requisite money, time, and influence to be active within, and shape the agenda of, the equal rights cause.

Despite these archival limitations, my research in a broad array of primary sources sheds new and valuable light on the northern black struggle for equal rights during the post–Civil War era. Thorough research in all of the northern black newspapers and several white newspapers, government documents, proceedings of local black meetings and state and national conventions, petitions, and correspondence in the manuscript collections of both black and white leaders deepens our understanding of the role that black women and non-elites, as well as the black male leadership, played in the movement. In addition, these sources show, more clearly than any previous study, that Reconstruction began in the North and that African Americans relentlessly pressured often-reluctant white Republicans to live up to their stated ideals. At the same time, a close examination of the historical literature on the equal rights movement as it developed in specific northern states and communities breaks new ground in illuminating broad patterns of shared experience among its members as well as the diverse realities they encountered and the arguments and tactics they employed on behalf of racial justice.

This book is organized thematically, for the most part. It concentrates on the two issues that northern blacks considered most essential: black male suffrage and equal access to the public schools. Following an examination of their struggle, which culminated in the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, the focus shifts to their efforts to use the vote especially for the purpose of integrating the public schools. The Republican Party’s retreat from Reconstruction—and the response of northern African Americans to this development—is the central theme of the last portion of the book. However, these broad themes are explored in a partially chronological order. The narrative moves forward from the launching of the equal rights cause in 1864 to the “end” of Reconstruction in the North approximately two decades later. While the male suffrage issue was the centerpiece of the movement during the 1860s, the school issue remained a major objective throughout the period. During the 1870s, northern blacks were forced to assess their place within the Republican Party and to determine how they could most effectively employ the franchise as white Republicans inexorably retreated from their commitment to protect the rights of all citizens.

This book is divided into five chapters. The first chapter examines the factors that motivated northern African Americans to launch the equal rights movement and establish the National Equal Rights League late in the Civil War. It also investigates the broad areas of agreement among these activists as well as the issues that divided them. The Pennsylvania State Equal Rights League—one of the most active and influential of the state equal rights organizations—serves as a case study of the cause.

Chapter 2 concentrates on northern African Americans’ struggle to attain manhood suffrage rights. It investigates the varied arguments and tactics they marshaled on behalf of the franchise and their complex and often problematic interaction with northern white Republicans prior to the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment.

Chapter 3 studies the drive of northern blacks to end racial segregation within and, in some states, exclusion from, the public schools across the North during the mid- and late 1860s. It analyzes divisions within the movement over whether, and to what degree, the desegregation of public schools would serve the best interests of African Americans and explains how and why most northern blacks sought to gain equal educational opportunities.

Chapter 4 concentrates on the first half of the 1870s. It examines how, following the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, northern blacks sought to work within the Republican Party at the state level to gain equal access to public schools and, at the federal level, to pressure congressional Republicans to pass Charles Sumner’s Civil Rights Bill—especially its school integration clause. This chapter also analyzes the impact of the northern black vote on the outcome of elections and the growing frustration of northern blacks with their treatment by white Republicans.

Chapter 5 investigates the response by northern blacks to the collapse of Reconstruction in the South and tells the story of their ongoing efforts to gain equal rights into the 1880s.