7 / The Potential for Radical Change: The Turbulent 1850s, the Civil War, and Resilient Racism

The universe possesses no power that can elevate error into the dignity of right.

—The Illinois State Convention of Colored mMn, Galesburg, October 1866

The Old Northwest’s racialized laws were the “error[s]” the Illinois Convention noted, which remained unresolved when they met, and indeed continued beyond 1870. Much as this history opened with an examination of the context of race and law in the Old Northwest, so in closing it explores how these same problems remained formidable from the 1850s through 1870, while slavery disintegrated. From the 1850s on, Old Northwest activists combated the “Black Laws” and other racially biased laws with an expanded set of tools, including fugitive slave aid, vigilance committees, and personal liberty laws. They also carried on using the pen, the press, petitions, lobbying, court cases, and the Black Convention Movement as they sought to create a more egalitarian world. The latter movement had its own limitations, however, as African American women found when they joined it.

While anti-prejudice activism had been continual since the 1830s, the changes in the nation and the region presented reformers with new challenges. Partisan politics held the key to many of these shifts. Although plenty of people had opposed African American rights (much as they objected to abolition) for partisan reasons since at least the 1830s, over time these pressures had grown. The country’s increasing threat to fracture along sectional lines held the key for many who sought to maintain the Old Northwest’s racial status quo. The pressure to contain political change and shifts in rights was substantial, especially as the debate over slavery’s expansion heated up in the mid-1850s, and afterward. Even following the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, Old Northwest activists faced down persistent legal bias against African Americans in the region.

Across numerous northern communities, abolition and racial equality were unpopular ideas, to be sure, but the racial attitudes toward African Americans and the legal obstacles to their rights in the Old Northwest made activism all the more difficult there. The actions that framed reform activities in the Old Northwest—the “Black Laws,” the constraints they imposed, and action against them—reveal how and why people so strongly resisted change in this region.

While race relations in the Old Northwest—and their interactions with partisan politics—have generally not received as much attention as other areas, when they have been studied the historical pendulum has swung widely. Recent efforts to refute the region’s racism, which historians had established in older works, go too far. Specifically, while Ohio repealed some of its “Black Laws” in the 1840s and some Republican politicians may have gained ground in the 1850s, the changes were largely superficial, and conditions were at least as inequitable for African Americans later. Thus the claim that the region was “against slavery” in a way that entailed reduced hostility to African Americans falls apart under closer investigation. Republican politicians—among whom there were few race radicals in the Old Northwest—did not represent the tenor of opinion on race in Ohio or the region. While such politicians occasionally took progressive racial positions, they were but a small subset of the region’s population, and one with only a tenuous hold on political power.1 The Old Northwest may have become the birthplace of many a subsequent president and of a number of important Republican politicians, but the majority of white residents of these four states continued their strong commitment to racial distinctions through Reconstruction and even after.2

In fact, more continuity characterizes the situation of race and rights in Ohio and in the region as a whole. Activists actually only somewhat eroded the “Black Laws” in wartime. Even as the Civil War’s inception helped Old Northwest African Americans make some slow progress, they seldom found welcome, and had to persevere in the fight for the basic rights that the federal government had newly guaranteed them. Reformers faced the increasing threats of the 1860s with an accelerating tone of militancy among both African American and whites.3 During the war and after, they expanded their efforts to repeal northern “Black Laws” and improve their status, even as most of the citizens of the Old Northwest held tight to racial stratification.

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Anti-”Black Law” activism continued to rely on a range of local citizens to fight for the cause. The biracial but African American–identifying Langston brothers of Ohio exemplify connections reformers drew as they combated slavery and the “Black Laws.” Schoolteacher and activist Charles Langston saw the Black Convention Movement as an essential tool to use against the Ohio “Black Laws,” for at their meetings, he and his compatriots continually attacked such legislation. His younger brother John Mercer Langston became a famed lawyer with a long political career, including being the first African American man elected to office as the clerk of Brownhelm Township in 1855. He was eligible to run because he could be called white under one reading of the Ohio “Black Laws,” although he consistently self-identified as African American. He took advantage of the laws to claim a right he thought all men deserved. As the younger Langston wrote to Frederick Douglass in 1855, he believed that protecting African American interests required both African American and white “Anti-Slavery persons” to do more to get them the vote. He pushed for greater change throughout his life, and was one of the most outspoken foes of the “Black Laws.” In the 1880s he became the first African American to represent Virginia in Congress.4 The Langstons illustrate how African Americans took an ongoing, active role in fighting for racial justice by the 1850s, but they did not do this alone.

The activists who campaigned against the “Black Laws” in the 1850s and after remained a diverse group with a large-scale vision of the need to change their society. While African Americans were the most vocal opponents of this legislation, white northern reformers had not—as previous scholars argued—abandoned the broader struggle for racial justice by the 1850s to focus only on the distant issue of slavery. This contention does not fit Old Northwest activists’ perspective, nor does it reflect the conditions in which they labored. It did apply to moderate political abolitionists like the Free Soil partisans of the 1850s, but local radical activists maintained a broader agenda through the Reconstruction era.5 While many bold African Americans like the Langstons confronted white racism, even within reform movements, they did not fight this battle on their own. Unlike the majority of their contemporaries, their white allies in the Old Northwest controverted the conventional wisdom of African American inferiority and necessary segregation. All foes of the “Black Laws” did their best to turn the legal system to their advantage, but this proved difficult as other Old Northwest people used the courts to uphold racialized laws.

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The “Black Laws” and fugitive slave legislation infringed on African American rights in overlapping ways, and this relationship was evident in Old Northwest activists’ efforts to remove both kinds of problematic laws. Fugitives had many foes, including in the Illinois state government. In 1851, Governor Augustus C. French proclaimed to Illinois’ General Assembly that the state would enforce the Fugitive Slave Act. He deemed adherence to it a necessary component of national unity, and called it “the only means of restoring and preserving harmony.”6 French’s views reflected the increasing concerns at the time with preserving sectional concord, if not an element of outright hostility to African Americans.

This pressure to hold the nation together contributed to state laws that dealt harshly with fugitives, and thus compounded the legal disabilities the federal fugitive slave law imposed. Activists in Illinois also fought against another way in which the “Black Laws” entrapped African Americans in slavery: the 1845 provision that permitted the sale of people who could not prove their freedom.7 Antislavery editor and “Black Laws” opponent Zebina Eastman recalled one such slave sale in Chicago in 1852, which abolitionists thwarted. Officials had originally brought Edwin Heathcock to court for refusing to heed the orders of a white man who had not hired his labor—someone whom he had no obligation to obey, but they still prosecuted him under the “Black Laws” for lacking proof of his freedom. While the court scheduled Heathcock to be auctioned as a slave for lacking such proof, the Chicago antislavery population took action, publicizing the auction and ultimately controlling the bidding so that the sheriff could only command a price of twenty-five cents in the sale. Heathcock’s new owner let him go free on the spot. The Chicago abolitionists thus outwitted the system.8

Where African Americans lacked the support Heathcock found, these sales could ensnare them in long-term servitude. In January 1854 the Galesburg Free Democrat reprinted an account of an African American man whom the local sheriff sold at auction in Quincy, Illinois. The author voiced his outrage that slave sales could happen in Illinois, arguing that the winning bidder clearly intended to take the captive man south and permanently enslave him. The victor offered to pay $600. This high sum indicated that he would likely seek some profit from the transaction, one unlikely in the mere month of service to which the auction entitled him. The extant law did not obligate sheriffs to inquire about buyers’ future plans for their “purchase,” which left African Americans open to the abuse of already biased laws.9 In cases where Old Northwest residents cooperated or turned a blind eye, this provision of the “Black Laws” could mire African Americans in dire circumstances well into the 1850s.

Much as they countered sales under the “Black Laws,” African Americans and their allies across the Old Northwest carried on their related battle against the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Some chose public organization as their strategy. Fugitive slave laws placed all northern African Americans in danger of kidnapping. They also rendered activism against them in the region inextricable from work against the “Black Laws” and the Black Convention Movement. John and Mary Jane Jones, who extensively aided fugitives, regarded the new law as both unconstitutional and discriminatory, as did their fellow Chicago activists. On September 30, 1850, over 300 African American Chicagoans met at the African Methodist Church on Wells Street to determine their course of action. They argued that the Fugitive Slave Act violated both the Constitution and the Bible. Their protests continued, for John Jones wrote to the Western Citizen that December that it was “inconsistent with the view that all men are created equal.” He saw it as purely illegal pandering to southern interests.10

The Fugitive Slave Act had sweeping effects, and even economic prosperity could not protect against the coercive power of the newly strengthened law. This was evident in 1853 in Indianapolis, where the courts used the law to charge a very well-to-do African American man named John Freeman as a slave. He ultimately won affirmation of his freedom, but it was obvious to his peers that only his money and network of friends had guaranteed his liberty. He decided Indiana offered him insufficient protection, and departed for Canada soon thereafter.11 Despite their tenuous position, many other Old Northwest African Americans opted to stay in the region.

The question of their local safety and slavery’s reach into the Old Northwest came directly to activists with the notorious Supreme Court decision of Dred Scott v. Sanford in 1857, which struck a crushing blow to African American rights all across the North. Abolitionist Marius Robinson, for one, decried the Scott decision’s broad impact on the region. He saw it, as did many of his compatriots, as a clear sign that slavery was a national menace and that the government intended to use the courts to oppose African American rights. He believed it dismantled the separation of powers necessary for “liberty,” and that it made “the Constitution an absurd and miserably conflicting document.”12 While northern courts and legislatures remained generally unsympathetic to pleas for equity, some did counter the Scott decision with their local rulings.13

Indeed, the courts could prove valuable allies to African Americans, as in Illinois in the early 1850s, where some treated fugitives as if they were free once they were in Illinois.14 The judiciary then was increasingly willing to protect African American rights, at least those of fugitive slaves.15 Much as some Illinois courts shifted to becoming allies for fugitives, so did some in Ohio.

Even before the courts determined Dred Scott’s fate, the Ohio Supreme Court had taken a different approach to similar issues in Anderson v. Poindexter in 1856. The trial courts led Ohio in the direction of refusing to protect slaves as property on state soil. In 1857 Marius Robinson wrote of the Ohio court case that it considered whether a slave taken by a slaveholder into Ohio (or “going there with his consent”) became free once there. The court ruled that slaves were “automatically free” when they entered the state with their owners’ permission. Writing after the Scott decision, Robinson saw in this case a “clear departure” from the federal Supreme Court’s view, but believed that this precedent was still insecure. Indeed, he saw the Ohio case as but a mere stopgap measure, since in his regard, the federal court could still interfere.16

Old Northwest activists’ direct action against the Fugitive Slave Act and its increase in threats to African American freedom in the 1850s also took the form of vigilance committees, citizen police forces to stop slave catchers and protect accused fugitive slaves. At their September 1850 meeting, the Chicagoans planned strong resistance to the law, including shielding African Americans from capture into slavery. They claimed they would take direct action regardless of the consequences: “[w]e are determined to defend ourselves at all hazards, even if it should be to the shedding of human blood.”17 The vigilance committee they created to enforce this conviction joined in African Americans’ long tradition of self-defense.18 While historians often consider such committees to be African American dominated, whites also took part in protecting universal rights.19 The Chicago men obtained the support of the Chicago Common Council—the city council—that publicly countenanced their resolutions. The next month, the council went further when nine of its ten members voted to “nullify” the Fugitive Slave Act.20

Beyond vigilance committees, Old Northwest activists aimed to use new laws to formally protect fugitives in the 1850s. Ohio African Americans had tried for years to obtain a personal liberty law after losing such protections in 1843. As early as 1851, the Ohio legislature passed resolutions that deemed the Fugitive Slave Act unconstitutional and called for states to continue to allow writs of habeas corpus for runaways.21 They finally obtained an enforceable measure in 1857 when the Republicans gained control of the assembly. Antislavery politician and former “One Hundred Conventions” lecturer James Monroe of Oberlin was a key player in the passage of this short-lived Ohio personal liberty law. He had long labored against slavery and the “Black Laws” from within the Free Soil and Republican Parties. While in the state legislature from 1855 to 1862, he campaigned to persuade his fellow legislators that African Americans deserved equal rights.22 When the Democrats regained power in 1858 they repealed the personal liberty law’s most sweeping provisions and tried to pass a statute mandating enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act.23 Party rivalries, too, could substantially influence fugitive rights in Old Northwest states.

Ohio was not alone, for Michigan, too, had a late but strong personal liberty law in 1855 that constrained the legal process for fugitive recovery. It imposed provisions that slave catchers had to take African Americans and biracial people before a judge and accuse them of being slaves before they could be detained.24 These legal efforts were part of the larger, ongoing strategy to overturn the region’s discriminatory laws.

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In the increasingly strained Old Northwest and in the nation in the early 1850s, African Americans persisted in their organized work to secure full citizenship. John Jones and his allies circulated another petition to the Illinois state legislature for “Black Laws” repeal in December 1850.25 Elsewhere, in Indiana, the Black State Convention met in 1851 to resist the new discriminatory constitution of that year. In July 1853, after a few quiet years, the Black National Convention Movement revived with a meeting at Rochester, New York. Jones and Frederick Douglass both participated as vice-presidents, and 140 delegates from nine states met there.26 This convention aimed at justice for African Americans and presented a comprehensive agenda, including work against the colonization movement.

The national convention technique of a broad, rights-based strategy came to the Prairie State that October, for the first Illinois Black State Convention met then in Chicago. This meeting’s main focus was repeal of the “Black Laws,” although the participants also discussed other issues, including education and colonization. The members elected Jones president and chair of the anticolonization committee. Delegates argued that colonization led to proslavery sentiment and depressed the morale of the African American population. In their view, the “Black Laws” were against the state and national constitutions, unjust, unequal, and even “repugnant to the principles of humanity.” These laws impeded both the “moral and the mental development” of Illinois’ African Americans, and they were determined to push against them. They formed a state repeal association for this purpose.27 Despite such efforts, African Americans in the Old Northwest still lacked equal rights and opportunities, especially the women among them.

For all of these conventions’ talk of equality and demand for parity of opportunity, this did not readily extend to women; the Black conventions were a male-dominated space. In keeping with the domestic ideology prevalent at the time, state and national Black conventions frequently resisted women’s efforts to join their ranks, although women won this right on a handful of occasions.28 The reception that met these women varied. Some men treated their female compatriots as mere tokens or as fulfilling a more decorative than substantive role in these conventions. At the 1857 Ohio Convention, the minutes noted of them, the “ladies, God bless them! cheered us with their smiles, and wishes, and approbation.”29 This vague praise leaves unanswered the question of what role the women took at that convention, but it was not limited to window dressing elsewhere.

African American women made their first formal request for inclusion in the 1848 national convention at Cleveland. This move, which historian Shirley Yee links in timing to the Seneca Falls Convention of that year, met with debate, but the business committee ultimately opted to redefine voters as “persons,” rather than men, allowing women the right to vote there.30 After adopting this definition, the assembled people gave “three cheers for women’s rights.” They also passed another resolution noting that they “fully believe in the equality of the sexes,” and that women should join their future meetings. Despite this victory, a year later, at the state convention at Cleveland, the men again excluded women from participation. In response, they vowed to boycott. Mrs. Jane P. Merritt argued that it was “wrong and shameful” for the men of the meeting to invite women to attend, only to refuse them permission to speak. They won this right.31 At the first Illinois Black Convention in October of 1853, while it was a male-only meeting, the attendees also asked for equal opportunities. They included women in their reform strategy, albeit in a limited way as the “God-given helpmeet of man.” Even as women gained a role there, they did so in a very moderate way—at least in the words of their male contemporaries.

While women’s participation in conventions was at times controversial, their male allies were more receptive to accepting them as witnesses to the conventions and as financial benefactors. At the 1850 Ohio convention, the women in the audience offered to fund the costs of the hall rental. Their fellow attendees gratefully accepted, as they did the following year when the women pledged to pay for the Ohio convention’s publication of their proceedings in 1851.32 Women were there, even if they did not always take an active role.

African American female leaders also joined in the conventions, with mixed results. In the 1855 national convention at Philadelphia, three women delegates attempted to join the proceedings. One was Mary Ann Shadd Cary, who represented Canada there. Her admission was very controversial, and her residence outside of the United States likely did not help. Nonetheless, the convention eventually voted to admit her as a delegate.33 In 1858 in Ohio, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper attended the national convention, which openly “requested” that she “take part.” She eventually served on the fundraising committee, and the other attendees embraced her with less controversy than Shadd had found earlier.34 In the 1860s, the conventions became slightly more willing to recognize women, although still in very small numbers. At the 1864 national convention in Syracuse, Miss Edmonia Highgate of Syracuse spoke, as did Harper.35 Cary also remained interested in the Black conventions, for she attended the Michigan state convention in 1865.36

Despite these qualified and small triumphs, women had a long fight for equality among African American activists. Much as it did in other antebellum reform struggles, conflict arose from prioritizing race over gender equality. As was the case elsewhere, the male leaders of the Black Convention Movement used gendered language of natural rights and human rights to deny women parity.37 Even if they were not always unified, African Americans in the Old Northwest persisted in their wide-ranging campaign for rights.

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In terms of results, in the 1850s the governments of these four states clearly dismissed the egalitarian claims of their African American residents. In an 1850 referendum, Michigan citizens again strongly rejected African American suffrage.38 A common fear among whites there was that allowing them the vote would make the state attractive to Black migrants.39 In two discouraging cases, Ohio’s 1851 constitution affirmed the restriction of the right to vote to whites, and in February 1853 the Illinois legislature enacted another anti-immigration article that forbade African American or biracial people from settling there, under threat of fines. This created another form of virtual enslavement in Illinois, for local sheriffs could sell individuals who could not pay such fees to cover court costs.40 With this decision, the Illinois legislature sought to promote harmony with nearby slave states, and keep African American populations small.

Indiana also maintained its exclusionary provisions, much to the dismay of the Indiana Friends, who vehemently protested against the “Black Laws.” In 1850, Elijah Coffin wrote in his journal about his fellow Friends’ efforts to use their Meeting for Sufferings to oppose that year’s anti-immigration amendment to the state constitution. Since the Friends “felt low” about the positive reception that this race-based legislation had obtained at the constitutional convention, they assembled a committee and wrote a memorial to present there.41 While ineffective in this instance—the measure passed—this direct action indicates Old Northwest reformers’ capacity to rally in defense of their human rights principles in crisis situations.

Throughout the 1850s, African Americans and their allies tried to repeal these racialized laws and found occasional signs that their activism had paid off. While their efforts generally failed, activists still steadily organized against the “Black Laws,” and especially for entitlement to public education, the vote, and legal rights.42 They had some small victories to tide them over, including in 1853 when Ohio ruled that its counties must give African Americans public education, but this was usually still segregated. There was substantial variation within the state concerning education; some areas integrated by choice before the law required it, while others were recalcitrant to educate African Americans even after they had to do so.43 In Michigan, after 1855 they won the right to vote in most school district elections.44 Their obstacles remained formidable nonetheless.

The Black Convention Movement and other public activist measures raised the profile of the debate over Old Northwest race and rights and the “Black Laws” in national African American leadership circles. Old Northwest activists sought attention across the country for their struggles, and the fiery speech delivered at the 1854 August 1 celebration in Columbus, Ohio, and reprinted in Frederick Douglass’ Paper aided with this publicity. There, the speaker called the United States “this seemingly Godforsaken country,” and declared no interest in celebrating the Fourth of July until the nation had been cleansed of its substantial sins: “When it shall be resurrected from the hell of infamy into which it has been plunged by the damnable degeneracy of the sons of the Pilgrims, we shall celebrate it with heartfelt hallelujahs; until then we shall trample it underfoot as an unholy thing.” This vehement language, continuing in the tradition of Frederick Douglass’s fiery speech from July 5, 1852, accompanied an otherwise tranquil celebration for all ages, with food, music, and a partial recitation of the Declaration of Independence by Charles Langston.45

As this newspaper coverage implies, national African American leaders derided the Old Northwest for its “Black Laws.” This derision was not confined to Ohio, for by 1855 Illinois’ dire reputation on racial issues had reached the ears of famed African American activist James McCune Smith of New York City. In a speech that he delivered at the First Colored Presbyterian Church in that city, he claimed that Illinois had “hitherto [been] covered with deeper infamy in caste than any other state.” The serious legal obstacles African Americans faced in Illinois were evident to this eastern leader. Nevertheless, he saw some indications that efforts for equality there had been showing results.46 The local fighters, too, knew that the battle was not yet won, and carried on with their organizing efforts.

For the remainder of the decade, the Ohio Black Conventions joined others in the region in making powerful arguments against their governments’ “Black Laws.” For them, there was no justification for disparities in rights.47 Also in 1854, John Mercer Langston wrote a memorial to the Ohio General Assembly to counter race-based discrimination, with a particular focus on African American disfranchisement. He argued that they had more than earned the right to vote, and used as evidence their common humanity, natural rights, nativity, patriotism (including extensive evidence of military valor), tax paying, intelligence, and virtue.48 Again in 1856, the Ohio Convention addressed their senate and house about the “Black Laws,” and disseminated petitions to submit to that body in their meeting’s minutes.49

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Despite these persistent efforts, African American citizenship was far from assured in the late 1850s across the region, as the ongoing enforcement of exclusionary laws demonstrates. In 1856, the Indiana Supreme Court demonstrated its commitment to race-based exclusion with a court decision that deemed Arthur Berkshire guilty of bringing Elizabeth Keith into Indiana from Ohio. Both were African American, and they wished to marry. The court charged him as an offender against the state’s anti-immigration provisions, and nullified their marriage.50 With this decision, Indiana continued in its longstanding pattern of “exceptionally punitive” marriage prohibitions.51

Regardless of such blatant limitations on their rights, African Americans and their allies tenaciously fought the Old Northwest “Black Laws” at mid-decade. The 1856 Illinois State Black Convention at Alton demanded equality and took more decisive action against these laws. It aimed to recruit more members among Illinois African Americans. Their chief complaint about the laws’ injustice remained their denial of the right to vote. At this convention, the attendees extensively debated whether they should assert themselves by using strong, demanding language as they called for removing their legal disabilities, “neither asking nor giving quarter, spurning all compromises.” Some said they should behave thus, while others argued for a more moderate approach. They put it to a vote and retained the forthright language, but the vote was very close.52 Even as the “Black Laws” inspired substantial anger, activists differed in their views on how best to express their frustration with the injustice they witnessed, and to push for change.

In Ohio, efforts against the “Black Laws” proceeded through the end of the decade and beyond, and shared the outspoken tactics of that Illinois faction. In 1858, the state convention demanded repeal of the “Black Laws” and resolved to send petitions and memorials to the legislature until they got it. That year, the threats African American Ohioans experienced seemed so dire that they also formed a new association, the Ohio State Anti-Slavery Society. It was open to women and men, and worked against the “Black Laws” and slavery through the Civil War.53 This new society showed that Ohio African Americans were intensifying their efforts, even as they faced many barriers.

Obtaining rights remained an uphill battle in the Old Northwest, and a discouraging one at times. In 1858, the Indiana Black State Convention petitioned the legislature to lift the limits on their testimony. This fell on deaf ears, for that same year, the Indiana General Assembly proposed resolutions that supported the “Black Laws” and claimed that “inferior” African Americans had no right to “freedom and equality.” While the resolutions failed, since the General Assembly had seriously considered them, the proposals nonetheless show the ominous tone of Indiana race relations at that time. As motions that the Democratic Party sponsored, they were also highly partisan.54 That same year, the Michigan Supreme Court deemed discrimination and segregated accommodations legal, affirming that African Americans could be “excluded from ordinary social and familiar intercourse with white persons.” African American activists were strapped for funds, and their liberties stagnated as racial violence intensified. These setbacks radicalized many, and some increased their fugitive aid, while others debated emigration to Canada.55 Still, the convention movement persuaded many people to oppose colonization ventures, and African Americans’ articulate presence belied claims of their inferiority.

While a range of activists fought on against racial distinctions, the 1850s closed on a low note. Support for the “Black Laws” remained extensive in Ohio, where in 1859 the Supreme Court again strengthened them. They disfranchised biracial people, and argued that election judges still must reject voters with a “visible admixture” of African American ancestry. The battle there carried on, with African American activist John Mercer Langston and the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society leading the way with speeches and petition campaigns that also called for the passage of “personal liberty laws” and the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law and the “Black Laws.”56 Some, their patience wearing thin, took more direct action and seized their rights.

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On April 4, 1859, a 25–year-old man who lived in Charleston Township, Ohio, went to the polls to defy and test the “Black Laws.” He saw that he met the citizenship, residency, and age requirements for voting, but the men in charge of the polls disagreed, and refused to let him vote. Why? He was African American, and according to the Ohio “Black Laws,” thus disfranchised. This young man, William J. Whipper, claimed the right to vote nonetheless. Whipper, a Charleston resident, wrote to Salem, Ohio, abolitionist Benjamin S. Jones that he thought himself entitled to the franchise, “notwithstanding my dark complexion,” so he attempted to vote. He fought his subsequent rejection and inspired a fiery local debate. Whipper argued that the statute did not explicitly exclude him, for he quoted it as saying “that all white male citizens over the age of twenty-one may vote, but does not say that colored ones may not.” This persuaded the election judge, Mr. Loomis, who let him vote. A local man, Dr. Heath, then sued Loomis for allowing this “illegal vote.” Two local townships refused to try Loomis, which proves some Ohioans’ indifference to the “Black Laws.” Paris Township agreed to do so.

The judge arraigned Loomis for $300, and told Whipper to keep quiet and stay out of the legal battle. As a second-generation abolitionist, the Pennsylvania-born son of abolitionist William Whipper would not be swayed, for he saw the law on his side and “established custom” as clearly in the wrong. He wrote defiantly, “so come on with your forces, for being quiet is no part of my mission.” Whipper argued that rights did not depend on race, and he was glad to see the bias of men like Dr. Heath brought to public attention. The county court acquitted Loomis the next month, vindicating Whipper, although some Ohio “Black Laws” remained in force until the 1880s, as did many in other states in the region.57 Whipper remained an active opponent of slavery and the “Black Laws,” both in the Old Northwest and nationally. He moved to Detroit during the Civil War, and later became a prominent Republican lawyer and politician in South Carolina.58 Before he did that, he and his compatriots fought ongoing rights debates that the increasing instability in the Old Northwest accelerated.

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Apart from the continual voting rights issues, as the decade drew to a close the battle for protections for fugitives raged on. Michigan weighed in on the side of fugitives, strengthening its anti-kidnapping protections in 1859, as did Ohio.59 In 1859 and 1860 both Ohio Governor Salmon P. Chase and the state Supreme Court adhered to a strong pro–habeas corpus position, as the Oberlin-Wellington rescue case exemplified, where the state only reluctantly prosecuted fugitive slave rescuers.60 Old Northwest people’s efforts to use local laws to defeat national ones they perceived as unjust indicate that grassroots activists had a comprehensive vision for transforming race and rights in the region, and had won important allies by then.

Nevertheless, the position of fugitives was very insecure. For example, in Ohio opponents of African American rights tried to repeal the remaining anti-kidnapping provision from 1857, but were unsuccessful. This effort to take away protections demonstrates ongoing hostility to African Americans, despite scholars’ claims that Ohioans were becoming more welcoming to them.61

Partisan politics, African American rights, and fugitive rights had a tense relationship in the Old Northwest. The political parties frequently tried to avoid becoming enmeshed in these debates. Republican Party supporters were often reluctant to ally themselves with either the antislavery movement or northern egalitarianism. In 1859 and 1860, the Republicans—a northern sectional party—refused to take a strong stance against the pervasive racism of the “Black Laws.”62 In places such as Ohio, Republicans did decry the Fugitive Slave Act and its infringements on runaways’ rights and those of their helpers.63 Nevertheless, the expansion of the antislavery agenda to include the Republican Party was costly for the anti-prejudice movement’s larger goals. Their lack of commitment to fighting racism is evident in the Indiana Republicans’ attempts to appear as the “true ‘white man’s party,’” including their willingness to engage in race-baiting, as they did in 1860 when they denounced Democrats as proponents of interracial sex.64 Over time, the dominance of that moderate strain of opposition to slavery led to a less firm stance against it and racism, for the Republicans largely abandoned the egalitarian principles found earlier in Old Northwest political abolition.

Among those who retained interest in African American rights, some former Illinois Liberty Party activists later supported the Radical Republican position over Lincoln’s more moderate stance.65 Racial prejudice still exerted significant sway over many northerners, and many politicians tried to reassure their constituents with public, gradualist proclamations that the end of slavery would not affect the stratified structure of their local society.66 These moderate positions were unsatisfactory to reformers who sought more comprehensive change in Old Northwest race and rights.

By 1860 over thirty years of slow-paced progress had stretched thin the patience of many Old Northwest activists. That September, Illinois abolitionist H. Ford Douglas offered a strong critique of the progress of racial equality in the region and the nation. Douglas was born into slavery in Virginia, but escaped in 1846 and lived in Cleveland before moving to Chicago in 1856. He began lecturing for the Massachusetts Society in 1860. At the meeting of the Western Anti-Slavery Society in Salem, Ohio, that year, Douglas made a fiery and memorable speech, rife with the language of immediatism and opposition to the Constitution. He denounced the government, the major political parties, and the antislavery politicians, for he saw them all as tainted by servitude’s influence. Scolding his mostly white audience for upholding these institutions, Douglas claimed that the political parties, beholden as they both were to slavery, would persist in refusing African Americans their due. They were too willing to compromise to secure election results, he thundered, but “to elevate men to office is not an object for which a man should barter away his manhood.” In his view, all had the “right of self-defence,” and should protect their “liberty” even at the expense of the political parties and the government, if necessary.

Douglas continued his critique of the state and the nation, arguing that governments impeded African Americans’ full citizenship by acknowledging only white men’s rights. Douglas maintained that the United States truly needed to honor universal human rights. Indeed, activists must teach all to “recognize the white man, the black man, the red man, all men, to all the rights of manhood.” Thus he, as an African American, was not asking for “any special favor” but that he receive his “manhood . . . before the law,” which was only his due. This required the repeal of the “Black Laws.” Even as he demanded equality, Douglas’s words reveal how the language of political rights in his era split along gendered lines. The phrasing of his desired goal as “the rights of manhood” conflated citizenship and gender.67 As Douglas used these words, he likely aimed at the political principles of the enfranchised portion of his Ohio audience, the white men, to show them the rights African American men lacked but nonetheless claimed. The former, of course, held the power to vote and change the region’s governments. To them and the disfranchised in the audience, Douglas proclaimed that the equation of whiteness, manhood, and citizenship could no longer suffice, and that Old Northwest African Americans and their allies in the human rights cause would continue to fight until they had achieved their objective. He exemplifies the passionate Old Northwest arguments and actions that persisted in that new decade.

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In the 1860s, Old Northwest human rights activists retained the fire Douglas displayed, and when the Civil War arrived it brought some of them a new optimism. This conflict followed a turbulent and disappointing decade, for many northern African Americans had become disheartened by the stagnation of their rights in the 1850s and the intensification of violence over slavery, sectionalism, and discrimination. They had come to view achieving full citizenship as a remote possibility, and in consequence many had considered emigration and colonization potential solutions to intractable American racism. The immediate abolitionists continued their lecturing and writing for the cause, but some of the antislavery forces had dispersed into compromised forms of political abolition by the 1860s. For the small, beleaguered African American population and its white allies, the Civil War and the constitutional change that followed presented new possibilities for overcoming southern slavery and the racialized laws of the Old Northwest. Quite a few of them became more sanguine about the potential for change. Nonetheless, they still faced extensive obstacles to their full citizenship, including the limitations of partisan politics, but even more painfully and directly, the “Black Laws” that remained in force in wartime and after.68 In the Old Northwest they soon found their circumstances remained disadvantaged in most respects, and that the rights they had gained in law were often quite different from those that they could actually exercise in daily life.69

As the Civil War began in distant South Carolina, the “Black Laws” and Old Northwest racism both remained strong. When formal hostilities commenced in 1861 after years of brinksmanship, most white Americans believed in their own superiority and African American inferiority. They hardly intended the war as a stab against white domination, particularly in the Old Northwest, the region—aside from the South—with the deepest investment in racial hierarchy. These white Americans did not see the war as aiming to help African Americans, especially in its early years.70 Indeed, those northerners who feared increased immigration by former slaves tried to put up new impediments to African American mobility. They called for strengthened exclusionary provisions once they realized the war was undermining slavery. In one such instance in Michigan, many whites proclaimed that emancipation would result in African Americans flooding the state. They even petitioned to have the personal liberty laws then in place repealed, although this petition failed. Michigan and other Old Northwest states reinforced their “Black Laws” during the war with the aim of keeping their African American populations small.71

These restrictive efforts aside, the Civil War and its aftermath had telling consequences for trends in Old Northwest populations: all four states saw higher rates of growth in their African American populations from 1860 to 1870 than in their overall populations in that decade. Even using the best demographic source available, the admittedly limited decadal census, makes it challenging to chart precisely when in the decade this increase occurred, but the upward movement is clear. Nevertheless, African Americans’ absolute numbers in the region remained small. In Illinois, the total population grew by 48 percent, while the African American population skyrocketed by 277 percent in that same decade. In Indiana, the overall population growth rate slowed in those years to 58 percent, but that of African Americans substantially increased—by 115 percent—in that same era. In Michigan, the overall population grew by 58 percent, while that of African Americans grew faster, by 78 percent. In Ohio in the 1860s, the overall growth rate further slowed to 14 percent, while African Americans’ rate leapt to 72 percent. Over time, more and more African Americans lived in the Old Northwest, and even while by 1870 they remained a small minority relative to the overall population, their growth rate was nonetheless higher. This demonstrates their refusal to permit restrictive legislation to exclude them, and their persistence in claiming a place in the Old Northwest.

This migration to the region was but one direct way that the stalwart fighters for African American equality in the Old Northwest kept to their agenda, even as the beginning of the war ushered in shifting priorities. Some activists saw that the war might fail to secure racial justice, which remained a very important priority for them. “A western abolitionist” wrote to the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1861 calling on them to constantly work against the Old Northwest “Black Law[s].” He argued that the American Society should continue to address these laws, and to aim for substantive legal changes. Presciently, he saw that despite the war’s likely impact on slavery, it might be insufficient to bring about “Legislation of a just character” for the Old Northwest. He declared bluntly, “It will not answer to trust these reforms to this war.”72 While the conflict presented unparalleled opportunities for change, the sheer magnitude of the obstacles egalitarian activists faced was evident even in the first year of the war.

* * *

Throughout the Civil War, Old Northwest African Americans and their allies maintained steady pressure on their states and the nation for equal rights, but garnered minimal results in the face of substantial resistance. Despite such efforts as the 1861 Michigan Black Convention that argued for parity of rights and for suffrage, the region remained deeply racialized in law and in action.73 This belies other historian’s claims that local citizens’ racial views had mellowed by this time.74 During the war, Old Northwest citizens and legislatures struck repeated blows to the cause of equal treatment, encompassing exclusion, marriage laws, the franchise, and schooling.

African Americans faced revitalized obstacles, as in Ohio, where the General Assembly passed new “Black Laws,” demonstrating that bias actually increased during the war. It was in part responding to having been inundated in late 1861 and early 1862 with petitions from more than thirty thousand constituents asking for an exclusionary amendment.75 The next year these residents continued to petition the Ohio legislature to remove African Americans from their terrain, but the state Supreme Court denied the constitutionality of such petitions.76 While Ohio residents tried to limit or expel them, the number of local African Americans continued to increase regardless. The racialized nature of rights in Ohio was evident in other ways as well. During the war, the General Assembly debated the entitlement of men of mixed race descent to the vote, from which they and African American men remained excluded across the region, along with most militias until the war’s midpoint. These new difficulties also extended into the personal lives of Old Northwest individuals, as laws related to marriage clearly indicate.

The Old Northwest’s marriage laws exemplified the retention and expansion of strong racialized laws in the region in wartime. The Ohio legislature declared its ongoing opposition to interracial relationships with a new antimiscegenation law in 1861, the first statute of its kind in Ohio. It criminalized both interracial sex and marriage and kept in place the visual standard to determine racial boundaries.77 This evinces an increase in race-based limitations on rights in the region. In wartime, the other three states, too, implemented or retained laws barring interracial marriage.

* * *

This growth in rights limitations was only the beginning, for the Old Northwest also remained the scene of substantial anti–African American incidents throughout 1862 and 1863. These conflicts ranged from disturbing rumors to outright attacks, and were common especially in Indiana and Illinois, but also present in Michigan and Ohio. In areas of the former states, citizens more stringently enforced the anti-immigration laws and the fugitive slave laws than before the war. During and after the Civil War, Indiana remained a dangerous place to advocate racial egalitarianism, but the effort nonetheless continued in both political and activist circles.

Government policies during the war altered Old Northwest populations in ways that both hurt and aided African Americans. At Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois border and river crossings, and even at a distance from the state lines, local authorities appointed guards to stop fugitive traffic from the South.78 African Americans’ presence thus became hotly contested. Despite lacking direct southern borders, Michigan also had its share of anti–African American violence, including a devastating riot in Detroit in 1863. Even as the states tried to impede migration, the Union Army transported many slaves—formerly owned by Confederate supporters—to the Old Northwest, including large numbers to Illinois via Cairo.79

Nevertheless, in wartime many of these state governments actually expended minimal effort in enforcing the “Black Laws.” In some cases this inaction also extended to the citizenry, for in 1864 the Chicago Tribune reported that across most Illinois counties, people were ignoring the 1853 statute forbidding immigration. While these de facto changes slightly improved African Americans’ ability to live in the Old Northwest, they still faced formidable legal and partisan obstacles. Even as they found ways to help themselves and others, activists saw that much work remained since race still strongly affected people’s status in the region.80

* * *

The war only augmented partisan disagreements over slavery and the racial basis of rights. In particular, white supremacy also served as the bond holding together the various factions of the Democratic Party through the Reconstruction era and beyond.81 Most opponents of the war and the draft were Democrats, as were many of the most outspoken foes of African American rights. Ohio was polarized during the Civil War, and had a strong “peace Democrat” or “Copperhead” faction. Clement L. Vallandigham led this group from his position in the US House until 1862. In wartime Indiana and Ohio, the federal government prosecuted and convicted men for anti-government organizing, including Vallandigham for his support of the Confederacy.82

“Peace Democrats” held power in the largest numbers in the Old Northwest relative to the rest of the nation, a fact that contributed to discrimination against African Americans during the war. Illinois was a major stronghold of theirs, for they held significant sway over the Constitutional Convention of 1862, and also at the 1864 Democratic National Convention.83 In Indiana, the legislature abolished none of the “Black Laws” in the war years, despite the fact that African Americans’ sometime allies, the Republicans, dominated the body and activists persisted in their repeal efforts. In 1864, the Indiana Democrats used race-baiting in their campaign, and asked for even greater enforcement of the exclusion law. This proved too much for some Indiana African Americans on top of their ongoing concerns, so they chose to leave for Canada. These Democrats fought against emancipation and against allowing African Americans to become soldiers.84 Antiwar northerners were also often involved in attacks on African Americans during the war.

Nonetheless, over the course of the 1860s, Old Northwest activists found limited and shifting support for African American suffrage and political equality in mainstream politics. On the national political scene, Republicans’ extreme moderation on African American rights made for a conservative agenda. Some party men remained strong proponents of colonization in April 1862, and many moderate Republicans feared endorsing African American suffrage or other rights, even in the North, for they believed this would entail loss of political support there.85

In the 1862 election, it became clear in the Old Northwest that while partisan arguments that slavery was immoral could elicit support for the war, and even persuade Congress and the President to accept abolition as a general rule, these claims had failed to alter many people’s views on egalitarianism or ending slavery.86 In electoral terms, such lobbying by progressive newspapers, churches, and Black State Conventions eventually drove the Radical Republicans toward advocating African American civil rights.87 While the Republican politicians of the Old Northwest had done little to advance the cause of equality since the beginning of the war, some, including Radicals from the Western Reserve, gave their votes to congressional efforts aimed against discrimination.88

A complicating factor that limited politicians’ willingness to address the “Black Laws” was that in wartime, the Republican Party sustained substantial electoral losses in the Old Northwest. In the 1863 midterm election, they lost control of the Indiana and Illinois state legislatures and the Ohio congressional delegation.89 Nevertheless, by the fall of 1863, some congressional Republicans began to work in earnest to improve the nation’s race issues. For most Republicans in the Old Northwest, this was a change in policy, for they had not previously been committed to measures that would drastically alter the racial structure at home, other than some acceptance of antislavery measures.90 While this was a moderate shift in direction, much local resistance remained. The egalitarian activists of the region remained determined to pursue more sweeping reforms.

* * *

Partisan machinations aside, African Americans saw actual combat in the war as one potential solution for their lack of status in the Old Northwest. They fought for and eventually won the right to join the war effort. From the start of the conflict, many northerners opposed allowing African American men to become Union soldiers, since this implied acknowledging their equal standing as men. Many of the opponents of their enlistment were also threatened by the notion of arming African American men. The activists in the Old Northwest who sought the right to fight agreed with them about the implications military service could have for African Americans’ roles in society, and this contributed to their demands.91 The Union Army eventually was willing to exploit the militia experience of men from the self-defense organizations African Americans had founded in response to the Fugitive Slave Act, but would not permit them to lend their manpower at the beginning of the war. In 1861 activists made passionate arguments to join in the fight in Michigan and Ohio, but the Union command refused at that time.92

When some Old Northwest citizens and leaders balked at their admission locally, African American men from the region enlisted in units from other states. From spring 1863 on, the War Department recruited across the North for the 54th Massachusetts Colored Infantry. They hired African American leaders—including Old Northwest activists John Jones and John Mercer Langston—as agents for that regiment and those of Rhode Island and Connecticut. Northern African American men clamored for the right to fight, and by 1863 the governors of these four Old Northwest states had asked the federal government to allow induction of these residents as soldiers. Richard Yates of Illinois led the way with a vehement letter in July 1862, claiming that the crisis required “greater efforts and sterner measures,” including the dire need to “accept the services of all loyal men.”93 The War Department advanced this agenda in May 1863 with General Order 143, which created the United States Colored Troops.94 For the remainder of 1863 and into 1864, African American men, including many former slaves recently arrived in the North, entered the new Black Union Army regiments in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio.95

Soldiers were not the only Old Northwest African Americans to join the war effort in order to improve their rights. In September 1863, African American women in Chicago formed the Colored Ladies Freedmen’s Aid Society that sent supplies to freed people in the camps to the south and west. Mary Jane Jones and Sattira Douglas, married to H. Ford Douglas, were among their leaders, and they also employed Mary Ann Shadd Cary to travel and raise money.96 This activity was widespread among African American female leaders in wartime; in Cleveland, the Colored Ladies Auxiliary of the Soldiers’ Aid Society of Northern Ohio prepared supplies, engaged in fundraising, and visited the wounded. They obtained much assistance from Cleveland’s African American population.97 Later, some African American leaders in the region also went south to provide aid during Reconstruction, and became politicians there.98 African Americans seized the opportunities the war provided to advance their rights cause.

Activists across the region saw that discrimination against African Americans persisted into the war years, and continued to present arguments against the “Black Laws.” John Jones of Illinois was central to this fight, for on November 4, 1864 he published a pamphlet, “The Black Laws of Illinois and a Few Reasons Why They Should Be Repealed.” Addressing his fellow Illinoisans and their legislators, his wide-ranging argument encompassed “moral, economic, legal, and constitutional principles.” He believed that African Americans had already proven their worth, and pointed out that they could and should claim United States citizenship on the basis of their Revolutionary and now Civil War military experience. In his view, whites could also use “self-interest” as a motive to repeal the “Black Laws” as they interfered with interracial business transactions, and they needed African Americans to be able to testify to protect their property in court cases. Jones and his allies pushed on against the “Black Laws” with petitions, correspondence committees, and repeal associations.99 The activism of like-minded people during the war continued the pressure that created incremental change in the Old Northwest racial milieu.

In the war’s final months and later, the Black Conventions remained a valuable weapon in the human rights fight. In January 1865, the Ohio Black Convention attacked the “Black Laws” with new vigor, and began to shift to an equal rights league, with a wider agenda that included education and soldiers’ rights. They hired a man to “labor with the General Assembly” and lobby it for their rights. Even the privileges that they had already gained—especially those of education—were little known among the general population, so they vowed to write a “circular” to publicize them. Finally, they also used the meetings to express concern with the large numbers of African American soldiers who faced unequal treatment by both the Union command and the enemy.100 They rallied substantial support for their goals, for one thousand of their members petitioned their legislature against the “Black Laws” that same month.101 Their concerns with equity continued even as the war ended in April 1865, and Lincoln’s assassination soon followed.

Later that year, the National Black Convention Movement began to transform into the National Equal Rights League, which held its first meeting in Cleveland that October. The new name reflected the goals of these meetings of maintaining the quest for full citizenship, and to eradicate all racialized laws and residue of slavery. Illinois, Michigan, and Ohio sent representatives. They argued that nowhere in the United States were legal limitations “on account of race or color” welcome, and indeed, such laws were “void.” The Illinois representative, D. B. F. Price from Cairo, noted that his state’s racial climate remained oppressive. He spoke of how he and his neighbors suffered greatly from racialized violence. In his southern Illinois town, the “rebel sympathizers” had an overpowering presence, and their attacks had left him physically scarred. At this first meeting of the new association the attendees had trouble agreeing on many issues, including their funding structure, who should be recognized as a member, and other minor governance concerns. This organization nonetheless became a major national proponent of African American legal protections at least through the end of Reconstruction.102 Perhaps the most long-lasting effect of the convention movement was that it developed both local and national leaders that served the African American community for decades.

* * *

Reconstruction inaugurated a new phase in the ongoing struggle for racial equality. Old Northwest activists could not merely look back on their past greatness, glory, and success in implementing egalitarian values against an oppositional culture, for much work remained. The end of slavery wrought transformations that in turn altered radical arguments, fundamentally reconfiguring them and destabilizing the justification that the institution of bondage had provided for racial stratification. While thorny problems of race and rights remained, and worsened in some areas, the terms of debate in the region had indeed changed.

While the abolition of slavery pleased activists, their larger human rights task was incomplete. They thus continued to push for African American legal equity, which was far from a foregone conclusion in 1865, or in 1870. These reformers had longstanding disagreements about whether the Thirteenth Amendment and abolition were sufficient to improve African Americans’ status in the nation. Some sought further steps toward more general equality.103 Then and thereafter, Old Northwest activists struggled for “Black Laws” repeal and to put Reconstruction-era legislation to their own uses. This illustrates two facts about the Old Northwest: first, that its culture remained deeply racist, as the longevity of the “Black Laws” shows; and second, that activists there were unusually persistent in their quest to acquire equal rights, despite overwhelming odds.

* * *

After the smoke had settled, fighters for equality in the Old Northwest found that their major battle for African American rights remained. After emancipation, arguments for African American subordination could no longer rest on claims of their natural servility, which had relied on the fiction of the compliant slave, a myth no longer plausible when so many former slaves had quickly seized their freedom. This strengthened the case for equality. Nevertheless, the problem of racial prejudice remained, and in fact grew more complex and required new oppositional strategies.104 While the federal government had shunted aside the overt obstacle of legal servitude, white supremacy remained entrenched in the developing postwar culture of the Old Northwest. Across the region, efforts to maintain stratification and racial bias in the law constrained African Americans’ lives even as the law offered some new protections for them.

In the early years of Reconstruction in the Old Northwest, African American rights were an open question. In this region, these discussions drew particular complexity from their dual nature, for the states’ residents debated race’s role in both local and national laws. States amended their existing “Black Laws” (or refused to do so) even as the federal government also asserted new concepts of national citizenship and voting rights for all men regardless of race. From 1865 to 1870, legislating race and rights thus proceeded on two tracks that occasionally intersected. The people and these states’ legislatures and supreme courts all tried to say their piece.

In the era when people were rebuilding the nation, African Americans reaped some results for their ongoing activism. They won some small victories over racialized laws both in the Old Northwest and across the country. These included the integration of streetcars in Cincinnati and Cleveland.105 More overtly, in 1865 Indiana repealed its testimony law and Illinois its anti-immigration provisions.106 In January 1865, Richard Yates, the outgoing Republican governor of Illinois, responded to relentless activist pressure and strongly encouraged his legislators to remove these laws. Inspired by Yates and by large numbers of petitions from their constituents that flooded in from all parts of the state, the Illinois lawmakers laid the groundwork for repeal. The federal government sent the Thirteenth Amendment to the states for ratification on February 1, 1865, and Illinois was the first to do so in combination with its repeal of the anti-immigration statute. Springfield African Americans commemorated the occasion by firing a sixty-two-gun salute, one for each legislator who had voted for the bill. They chose John Jones to light the cannon fuse, the symbolic end of the “Black Laws.”107 This was only a qualified victory, however, for discrimination remained widespread there and across the Old Northwest.

Testimony as to the resiliency of anti-Black sentiment existed even at the moment of that 1865 partial repeal in Illinois. Then, Governor Yates affirmed that his focus was on Illinois’ “free, white citizens,” even as he simultaneously felt concern for African Americans. He deemed them “that unfortunate class of our fellow beings whom Providence, in its wise and inscrutable plans, has placed in our care.”108 This was hardly a resounding egalitarian argument, and this attitude helps explain the many inequities that remained in the Old Northwest even as the laws began to change.

Despite the limited nature of these victories, Old Northwest activists possessed some new federal legal tools to advance their arguments. They put Reconstruction-era legislation to their own uses, and tried to apply the Civil Rights Act of 1866, as well as the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, to invalidate laws that had formerly limited African Americans’ legal status and rights of mobility. This proved to be a substantial challenge, for while in many Old Northwest communities African Americans rallied for suffrage in public meetings and faced down widespread opposition to their rights, these amendments were not universally acclaimed. The amendments did receive sufficient approval to pass, for the states ratified the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, and the Fifteenth in 1870. Nonetheless, despite the Radical Republicans’ efforts and some small victories, Old Northwest society was hardly transformed. Even as the laws began to shift in less biased directions, both partisan tendencies and cultural beliefs remained formidable obstacles there.

The Republican and Democratic parties continued to influence the Old Northwest states through their recalcitrance in adopting African American rights and the vote at the beginning of Reconstruction. As had been true since the 1830s, the political parties restricted the extent of change to civil liberties that Old Northwest people considered. Many local politicians retained contempt for African American rights. These limitations were most overt in reference to suffrage, but also held true for a number of other elements of the “Black Laws.”

In 1865 and 1866, political leaders across the four states remained opposed to African American suffrage at the state level, and prevented the people of their states from voting on it. Many Republican leaders and northern voters who supported Black suffrage in the South opposed it in the North in these years, for they favored the rights of distant people over those of local African Americans with whom they shared space. Ohio’s senators had resisted the national civil rights provisions because they saw this as a way to keep southern African Americans out of the state.109 Democrats refuted these egalitarian ideas even more strongly, as the Ohioans of that party proved with their race-baiting in the 1865 state election. White Ohioans continued to resist the African American vote into 1866.110

This political push against African American rights met its countervailing force from ongoing collective activism in the Old Northwest. In Illinois, the third State Convention of Colored Men met at Galesburg in October 1866 to fight the remaining “Black Laws.” After the partial repeal in 1865, the African American population of Illinois had increased rapidly, allowing some progressive change. By 1870 their numbers there exceeded 28,000. The 1866 meeting convened in Edward Beecher’s church, and its attendees claimed equal citizenship on the basis of their labor and birthright. African Americans in Illinois still faced significant restrictions: taxation without representation, exclusion from juries, disfranchisement, and being barred from holding political office as well as from the “free public schools.” These men intended to address those grievances, affirming that their children deserved better. “We appeal to you,” they wrote, “in behalf of eight thousand colored boys and girls, with expansive minds, ready and willing to drink from the fountain of literature and learning.” To work toward removing their remaining legal obstacles, they hired a general agent to travel the state rallying support for their rights.111 Lecture tours still were a viable reform method in the Old Northwest, even after the war.

Indiana’s African Americans and their allies also contended for their full rights against substantial odds. In 1865 the Indiana State Convention of Colored People convened for this purpose at Indianapolis. Convention attendees acknowledged the problems with their current condition, and asserted that they would work tenaciously to improve it. They demanded abolition of the state’s “Black Laws,” including its limitations on schooling and testifying in court. They obtained the right of testimony in 1865, and in 1866, the Indiana Supreme Court invalidated but did not remove the exclusion clause of the 1851 Indiana Constitution.112 The vote, for the moment, was out of reach.

The franchise also remained elusive for Michigan’s African Americans after the war. That state continued to use the “visible admixture” rule. After an 1866 state Supreme Court case, William Dean, a biracial man from Nankin Township near Detroit, won the right to vote in Michigan on the basis of partial white descent, “less than one fourth” African ancestry. The court claimed since he appeared more white than African, he could exercise the franchise.113 In his majority opinion Justice James V. Campbell argued that pigment was useless in determining race since people varied, and so he used “ancestry” as the benchmark. In this case, men with less than that fraction of African ancestry could vote. Partisanship was also a key factor in this case, for the Democrats were instrumental in Dean’s prosecution for illegal voting. The Dean case did not definitively settle the issue, however, for local officials still drew the color line arbitrarily, and excluded people who had no white ancestors. Even under this decision, the law denied the vote to men with more than that fraction, and they had to sue to secure this right.114

Even when the Republicans lent them some assistance, Michigan’s African Americans found that acquiring the right to vote remained difficult. While Republicans called for universal manhood suffrage at the 1867 Michigan Constitutional Convention, they had a hard battle to fight.115 This issue elicited strong debate, but the convention ultimately rejected it. In 1868 the state’s voters also refused to approve a new constitution that granted African American men the vote.116 This mixed picture is reflected across the region, even though it was the home of one of the most important legislative changes to federal rights.

* * *

While the US Representative from Ohio, John Bingham, authored the Fourteenth Amendment, the Old Northwest states treated it with relative reluctance, and they took some time to ratify it after the first northeastern states did so in the latter half of 1866. They all did ratify it early in 1867. The cautious Ohio Republicans appreciated its moderation, particularly the fact that it stopped short of guaranteeing the African American vote. During the decline of Presidential Reconstruction and as the Radical Republicans gathered steam in 1867, more Republicans became willing to accept African American suffrage. The national Republican Party then became more receptive to African American rights, but this did not always translate to the local level. Some white Ohio Republicans did support the African American vote that year, but when it went to a popular referendum they failed to persuade their fellow Ohioans to follow their lead, and they voted it down.117 The Republicans were not operating from a position of strength, for the Democrats won more seats in that election.118 In January 1868 these Ohio Democrats used their new domination of the state legislature to rescind their state’s ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Republicans objected, and much disputation ensued. Despite Ohio having withdrawn its endorsement, that July the US Congress nonetheless counted the state as a party to the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification.119

The ongoing rights struggles Old Northwest people faced were evident to activists across the nation. As had been the case with earlier National Black Conventions, some distant allies knew of their problems, as the Colored Men’s Border State Convention made clear in 1868 with a plea on behalf of men in all of the many states who still then lacked the vote. They called for Congress to implement the provision of the Fourteenth Amendment that mandated reducing the representation of discriminating states proportional to the numbers of men to whom they denied the franchise. They also saw that they needed another law, declaring “[i]f nothing better give us a Constitutional Amendment to secure the right of suffrage--and give it to us now.”120 Reconstructing the North and guaranteeing rights were thus vital issues for African Americans in this era of civil liberties disputes; the Old Northwest conflicts were closely linked with the national racial problems of their era.

While regional differences and disparities within regions still mattered in 1870, nonetheless it is evident that these Old Northwest states, the mid-Atlantic, and the upper South then shared strong commitments to unequal, racialized rights. In contrast, the New England states (apart from Connecticut), were relatively accepting, and had been the first to embrace the African American vote, even before the Fifteenth Amendment.121 In 1870, they were solidly Republican and many of their schools were integrated. These states were the most open to African American rights, but they only appear so in contrast to the other regions of the country.122 They, too, were hardly egalitarian.

While, broadly speaking, discrimination and segregation tied to partisan politics existed elsewhere in the North and in the upper South, these biases emerged differently in these various regions. In the Old Northwest, even where Republicans held power, African American rights remained divisive in 1870. This shows the true caution of Old Northwest Republicans, which they exhibited with their unwillingness to grant African Americans their rights even when the law had already guaranteed them. By 1870, the Democrats had made some inroads, mostly in Ohio and to a degree also in Illinois and Indiana. This corresponded with a weak commitment to African American rights.

Continual efforts to subordinate African Americans after the Fifteenth Amendment extended out of the Old Northwest, including to the mid-Atlantic states and the upper South. In the mid-Atlantic region, citizens’ attempts to suppress African American voting and keep schools segregated indicate that the national culture of racism had spread to an area formerly more hospitable to African Americans than the antebellum Old Northwest had been. The political precariousness also contributed to this hostility, particularly in the Democrats’ northern stronghold of New Jersey, but also in New York and to a degree in Pennsylvania. African Americans encountered more substantial problems in the upper South, where even as by 1870 some among them held political offices as Republicans, the Democrats had begun to retake power and to introduce extensive anti–African American policies, including segregation and evasions of the Fifteenth Amendment.123 In the upper South, this transition in rights was thus closely tied to the Democrats’ resurgence, as was also true in nearby Ohio to a lesser extent.

African American’s status in Ohio remained much debated even after the Fourteenth Amendment controversy, for the Democrats soon tried to erect further obstacles to their voting rights. The Democrats led opposition to ratifying the Fifteenth Amendment, and spearheaded the state legislature’s re-imposition of the “visible admixture” rule as grounds for denying the right to vote there in 1867. Later that year in the case of Monroe v. Collins the Ohio Supreme Court nullified it, deemed it unconstitutional, and acknowledged its arbitrary nature and the difficulties in enforcing it.124 The court’s wording still denied the franchise to men with over half African American ancestry, for it protected the right to vote of men “in whom the white blood predominates” by deeming them “white male citizens within the meaning of the Ohio constitution.” The court did not deny that some men nonetheless lacked these rights because of their race. Ohio African Americans also lost some allies, for the state’s Republicans abandoned their support of the vote for all men.125 It took the federal government to overrule these state measures, using the Fifteenth Amendment once it had become law, but even then the process was hardly simple, there as across the region.

Despite these problems, Ohio did ratify the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, but it faced ongoing challenges. These are clear from a court case in southern Ohio where a judge convicted a man of intimidating Stuart and Jupiter Wilson, two African American men who by then were legally entitled to vote. The remaining Ohio “Black Laws” stayed on the books until 1886, and the word “white” persisted in the state constitution as the definition of a voter until 1923.126 Even as so many states revised their constitutions in more inclusive directions in the Reconstruction era, Ohio would not.127 It is surprising that postwar Ohio proved to be more hostile to African American rights than did Illinois and Indiana, the Old Northwest states that formerly appeared to be harsher in this respect.

The picture was moderately less bleak in Illinois, where African Americans first voted in 1870, but only after ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment. Opportunities continued to expand there, including in 1869 when African Americans gained the right to serve in political office. John Jones took advantage of this and served as the first man of his race in two public offices in Illinois. He became a notary public in 1869 with the Governor’s appointment, and in 1871 the Republicans elected him to the Cook County Board of Commissioners. He followed the egalitarian demands of his early public career with a new commitment to working within party structures, which meant that he rejected radical solutions to racial and class problems. Jones’s moderate course was not the only option, for among his contemporaries, some still retained the desire for more militant transformation in the face of ongoing legal bias.128

Under the law, African American men could also vote in Indiana beginning in 1870, but some vestiges of discrimination remained on the books for over a decade there. Indiana Democrats returned to dominance in the 1870s, ahead of most northern states, which led to deterioration in local African American power. The Democrats pushed for white supremacy with weakening resistance from Republicans during the Jim Crow era. The state kept its race-based laws regarding the vote in its constitution until 1881, but some African Americans were nonetheless voting by then.129

Even in Michigan, the voters only barely ratified the Fifteenth Amendment in 1869 since the Democrats strongly opposed it. In other respects, that same year Michigan became more egalitarian, for it amended its constitution to delete the need to be “white” from the franchise, office, jury, and militia requirements.130 These were important victories over the “Black Laws.” In November 1870, a strong push from within the African American community finally reinforced universal male suffrage in Michigan with a state constitutional amendment. Although this was after the Fifteenth Amendment had been ratified, which in theory had guaranteed that right to all men nationally, it was still a close contest, and the small margin of victory demonstrates the extensive racial bias at the time, even in that most moderate of these four states.131

This prejudice emerged undiluted in the ongoing efforts to bar interracial marriages in the Old Northwest states during Reconstruction. Indiana led the way, and the other states also subsequently adopted bans on these marriages. Indiana upheld its marriage restrictions even after the Fourteenth Amendment and the 1866 Civil Rights Act, and used the logic that the federal government had no right to regulate marriage in the state to justify doing so.132 As late as 1871, in State v. Gibson the Indiana Supreme Court voided a marriage between a biracial man and a white woman, and maintained the ban through 1965.133 Interracial marriage remained illegal in Michigan for decades, and only in the 1880s did the state ultimately repeal this ban and overturn segregation.134 The General Assembly of Ohio revisited the issue of interracial marriage in 1877, reinforced the prohibitions on it, and retained the fine.135 The extant laws remained in force in Illinois then, too.136 All four of these states shared a commitment to racial disparities in marriage rights, because most of their residents continued to believe that the races ought to remain separate, in the household and in public life. This view also contributed to obstacles to the ability of future generations to thrive in the region, including laws that directly infringed on children’s opportunities.

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It was obvious to many old Northwest African Americans that their children required equal access to education in order to attain parity of status in society. This necessitated ongoing activism during Reconstruction, and educational equity regardless of race remained elusive for years, since segregated schools were widespread across the region. Illinois provided African American children with no guarantee of education at all, and segregation remained common in public schools there well into the 1870s.137

For their part, Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan had segregated schools in most places, and the problem of educational inequity for African American children worsened in this era. It, too, remained severe well after Reconstruction. In 1869, the Indiana General Assembly required separate schools in communities with “sufficient numbers” of African American children, but in 1877, the Indiana Supreme Court integrated schools in cases where school districts would not create such segregated schools. Neither circumstance was ideal for the children attempting to obtain an education. Regulations in that state kept African American children out of the public schools and in segregated schools well into the twentieth century.138 Ohio’s schools clearly demonstrated the disjuncture between the law and reality; the state’s General Assembly outlawed segregated schools in 1888, but practical implementation was halting in places until after Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.139

Michigan’s progress on educational discrimination remained slow, although relatively more rapid than in the other states. The Black State Convention and other African American activists fought an extended battle against segregated schools, and in 1867 the legislature finally recognized their complaints by outlawing school segregation. Mary Ann Shadd Cary found this discrimination still persisted beyond that point when she attempted to teach in Detroit. It took a state Supreme Court decision to bring the Detroit schools in line.140 Well into the 1870s and beyond, many white people in the Old Northwest felt they could still deny this fundamental right of citizenship—the right to acquire an education—to African Americans.

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Even with the Union victory in the Civil War and some limited signs of local progress, the recognition of African American equality in the North was hardly a foregone conclusion. The war had brought immense economic prosperity to the region, and the entire nation had seen its effects and those of the ensuing Reconstruction. The destruction of slavery and its tumultuous aftermath intensified Old Northwest African Americans’ demands for improved status. They saw their region thrive in this era, and yet they shared in few of the benefits. Despite their diligent efforts, African Americans reaped minimal results, for even small steps to improve their station elicited substantial reactions from white supremacists.

Old Northwest activists possessed some limited leverage from the 1850s through 1870 to push for shifts in race and rights in the region. A split arose, nonetheless, between those reformers who deemed emancipation and voting rights satisfactory measures of a transformed racial order, and those who found these wanting. The disjuncture between legal rights and actual practice was substantial, for the national voting right for all men—among other rights—had only been partially implemented, and much segregation remained there, too. The reformers who saw their work as incomplete retained an agenda of political and social change oriented around principle and moral right, but found that the biases deeply entrenched in the culture of the Old Northwest endured as substantial obstacles to equality. The legacy of the “Black Laws” in the region, and the aggressive resistance to abolition that activists had faced since the 1830s, remained strong, even as the law offered them some new protections.