When I drew up the Ordinance, I had no idea the states would agree to the article prohibiting slavery.
—Nathan Dane to rufus king, July 16, 1787
From the moment the Continental Congress created the Northwest Territory in 1787, the region was at the front lines of debate over the meaning of race and rights in the new nation. After over a year of squabbling between northern and southern delegates in the Congress, Nathan Dane of Massachusetts took over as leader of the Committee on the Western Territory and pushed through the Northwest Ordinance. A compromise measure, Article VI of the ordinance stated, “there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory.” As an inducement to the southern delegates, it only applied to the lands east of the Mississippi River, south of the Great Lakes, and west of the Ohio River, and contained a fugitive slave clause permitting southerners to retrieve escaped slaves from the territory. The Congress approved the measure on July 13, 1787.1
While many of the delegates regarded the ordinance as having settled the issue of slavery in this new Northwest Territory, they may not have realized either the extent to which slavery already existed there, or, as Dane suggested, quite what they were getting into.2 In reality, the ordinance left the way open for considerable debate over slavery’s status in this region. Subsequent residents and lawmakers of the Old Northwest struggled to mold the provisions of the ordinance to their own purposes. Many people who already owned slaves retained them and claimed the law only forbade them from bringing more slaves into the region.3 They clashed with abolitionists, advocates of African American rights, and the Free-Soilers who wished to keep slavery out of future new states. With the Northwest Ordinance, the Continental Congress introduced rather than settled a struggle over slavery and race relations in a region whose national prominence would only increase over the next century. In the process, they set the precedent for continued disputes about the relationship between the growth of the nation’s territory and the future of slavery, including that institution’s ability to expand to the west. This quarrel escalated with the extension of the abolition movement into the Old Northwest in the 1830s.
Map 1. The Northwest Territory. Map by Pam Schaus.
In the Old Northwest from 1830–1870, a bold set of activists fought against local and distant racial prejudice. These reformers ranged from antislavery lecturers and journalists to African American leaders of the Black Convention Movement. This book is about these women’s and men’s expansive efforts to eradicate southern slavery and its local influence in the racist milieu of four new states carved out of the Northwest Territory: Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio. These states comprised the central battleground over race and rights in antebellum America, in a time when the social meaning of race was deeply infused into all aspects of Americans’ lives, and when people struggled to establish political consensus. The Old Northwest in its entirety encompassed those four states, as well as Wisconsin and a portion of Minnesota. This study omits the youngest states in the region, Wisconsin and Minnesota, for in the other four states in this period activism was more vibrant and violence against reformers was widespread.4
Antislavery and anti-prejudice activists from a range of institutional bases crossed racial lines as they battled to expand African American rights in this region, one with its own bleak history of limiting civil liberties by race. They formed associations, wrote publicly about their local racial climate, and gave or hosted controversial lectures. In the process, they discovered that they had to fight for their own right to advocate for others.
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As race is a central concept in this book and one that scholars often debate, it is essential to define how it is used here. This book treats race as an ideological construction, particular to place and time, as do many scholars today. Race in the early United States was the product of deliberate human efforts to shore up white supremacy in law.5 Racial categories are formed through historical processes, through laws and human action, and are social creations rather than immutable facts.6 This historical understanding of race as constructed underlies the book’s analysis, but nonetheless, throughout the text, the term race and references to racial categories will not be written in intrusive quotation marks, except in cases of actual quotations.7 Quoted material retains its original format, including spelling.
In contrast to historians’ current understanding, the majority of antebellum Americans considered race a problematic fact, and one that they should apply to others to evaluate their rights. When most of them read in an individual the signs of blackness, the meaning they assigned to African ancestry justified discriminatory treatment. This is racism, a national problem, and also one that was particularly pervasive in the Old Northwest. It underlay support for the “Black Laws” and opposition to abolition in this disputed area. In its most extreme form, racist logic utterly dehumanized African Americans in their contemporaries’ eyes, and justified holding them as property, as chattel slaves.8
Among most of the activists in this study, race was no less real than it was to their foes. The important distinction they made related to its meaning, for they thought individuals merited equal rights regardless of their race, not because the category of race itself was without concrete reality. When they opposed prejudicial treatment, most did so because they believed such distinctions were immoral, not because they thought that race was a fiction. A few of them, both those who identified as white and African American, advocated perspectives that, to modern eyes, appeared to foreshadow the view of race as a social construction.9 Regardless of their perspectives on race, all of these reformers faced substantial obstacles to their efforts for change.
The racist character of the Old Northwest meant that the fight against slavery there became but one facet of a larger rights struggle. While this is a history of activism, in a broader sense it is also a history of how reformers in the region understood the law and shaped new conceptions of justice. The ideas of civil liberties these agitators developed represented a key shift in Americans’ views of rights, an expansion that to date historians have overlooked. By the 1830s, the law was an instrument of oppression in the Old Northwest, as seen in the “Black Laws” that limited African Americans’ status there. Race-based legislation was well entrenched at the state level across the region, and federal law provided no relief.10 While “Black Laws” existed elsewhere in the North, here they were at their most extreme.11 In these four states, white supremacy penetrated politics and public life, as did the local and national history of slavery.
Looking at these states as a region reveals the impact of bias that these stalwart reformers—white as well as African American—faced when they disturbed the deep-rooted racial order. In the legal debates their bold actions catalyzed, Old Northwest activists claimed they deserved freedom from the violence their activities, including violations of gender and racial norms, elicited. In the process, they developed innovative strategies that pitted state and federal rights against one another.
Old Northwest activists drew on the language of rights in a period when people questioned and changed the very meaning of the term. They and their contemporaries developed many new ideas of rights, and interpreted older sources such as the Declaration of Independence in new, egalitarian ways.12 Antislavery and anti-prejudice reformers adopted the term “inalienable rights” for slaves’ claim to the fruits of their labor, for African Americans’ entitlement to rights more generally, and for their own right to express their grievances.13 These arguments were essential in the Old Northwest, where the region’s ambiguous relationship to slavery and to African American freedom contributed to local turmoil. There, people fiercely debated the racial limitations of rights.
Map 2. Old Northwest towns and cities, with dates of statehood. Map by Pam Schaus.
While the Old Northwest was notably hostile to African Americans, they still had many allies in these new territories and states; indeed the region had a dedicated, active cadre of advocates against slavery and for racial equality. The Old Northwest environment shaped the nature and local efficacy of their activism, organizing principles, beliefs, and goals. Although communities throughout the region fostered outspoken foes of slavery and proponents of African American rights from 1830 to 1870, their struggle is a little-understood aspect of activist history. In Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio, reformers pressed their antislavery and anti-racist agenda in the face of intense opposition.
In the Old Northwest, networks of activists across dispersed communities took controversial direct action against prejudice and slavery. The focal towns of this study are mostly small, like Noblesville, Indiana, and Pontiac, Michigan. In these places, free African Americans represented a tiny, beleaguered minority that often worked with sympathetic whites across racial lines to improve their circumstances.14 Many community studies of reformers focus on the Northeast, especially its cities, but this did not reflect the experience of most Americans, who resided in “rural settings or small villages until the Civil War.”15 While African Americans faced discrimination, and anti-abolitionists lived throughout the region, the ever-growing and increasingly diverse populations in the cities meant that activism there had a much different dynamic than in smaller places. Instead of focusing on the growing cities that disproved the Old Northwest rule, this is a study of reform as it affected most people at the local level. Activists sought to influence the small communities of this region that they believed would define the future of the young nation as it grew. For these reasons, the oft-neglected Old Northwest states, so vital in the eyes of antislavery organizers, are essential to understanding the history of racial politics in antebellum America. The extraordinary agitators of the region were determined to face down slavery in its hostile borderlands.
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Both local and national reformers used antislavery and egalitarian policies to pursue racial liberation in the Old Northwest, despite the antagonistic environment there. Local women and men who embraced the battle against slavery and for African American rights encountered formidable, often violent, resistance. The fight in this region differed from contemporary northeastern struggles, and even in recent accounts of reform there historians have minimized the extent to which its marginalized, dispersed combatants boldly faced community opposition for decades.16 Other scholars of antislavery, in treating the Old Northwest as a remote, fragmented outpost of the northeastern agenda, have missed the fundamental fact that the trials of transforming this region shaped local activists into unusually dedicated reformers. Whether as newspaper editors or meeting attendees, for decades Old Northwest agitators displayed an extraordinary commitment to social and political change, regardless of the personal cost.
The region had become a stronghold of political antislavery by the 1850s, and increased in prominence as the nation approached the final battle over slavery in the political and ultimately the martial realms. The region’s activists found that rising national tensions brought their reform activities even more opposition, for the political parties feared anything that increased sectional divides. What Old Northwest activists had been facing for decades—intense and inescapable clashes over slavery—became the national experience. As sectionalism increased, the political universe shifted, and the whole country confronted difficulties in establishing political consensus similar to those with which Old Northwest people had long struggled. Out of these conflicts, the Republican Party rose to prominence, and the Civil War began.
The status of African Americans in the Old Northwest remained precarious even after the nation’s four years of bloody civil war. Indeed, even into the era of the Reconstruction amendments, many people there only reluctantly accepted the race-neutral extension of political and social rights. While all four states had ratified the Fifteenth Amendment by February 3, 1870, African American men subsequently had trouble exercising their right to vote there. In the Old Northwest, they could not always implement the privileges the law guaranteed them on paper. African Americans nonetheless tried to do so, and did not do this alone. While Old Northwest reformers who sought to improve African American rights were always a tiny minority, their actions prove that racial politics and antiracist activism in the region deserve a closer look.
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Who were these Old Northwest activists? They were a diverse group that represented a range of occupations, religions, and backgrounds, from Quaker entrepreneurs to fugitive slave farmers. Local firebrands were not necessarily professional rabble-rousers, and many in fact were homegrown grassroots agitators who lacked simple, cohesive identities. Whether they were from southern pro- or anti-slavery communities, reform-rich western New York, or New England, as they forged their communities, Old Northwest rights promoters attempted to blend their ancestral cultures with those of their fellow citizens.17
These activists’ agenda—to abolish slavery and the “Black Laws”—was bound up with the central problem of the Old Northwest in that era: building community in a region undergoing dramatic transformation. Agitators and their foes fought over who would mold and who could participate in local politics, culture, and public life, in a time when none of these questions were settled. They crafted reform communities and alliances that linked their distant towns. These networks arose out of the mutual values and risks of activism in these activists’ unreceptive climate.18
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This book has a thematic structure that also follows a rough chronology. It opens with the context essential to understanding the challenges of activism in the region, but quickly moves in focus to the 1830s when reform began to take root in the Old Northwest. The necessary background of agitation there includes both the early activist history and the many obstacles to racial equality in the region.
Activists’ strategies to improve the status of African Americans in the Old Northwest were broad and shifting, for the region’s reform climate in many respects worsened over time, and these advocates needed to accommodate its changes. As neighbors to the institution of slavery who lived under restrictive “Black Laws,” these champions of equality claimed that they must combat what they saw as slavery’s local influence. Beginning in the 1830s and continuing through the 1850s, these activists put fighting the “Black Laws” and the fugitive slave laws at the center of their project to transform the region. They paralleled the national antislavery effort by opposing local racial prejudice, and matched its most radical claims. These stalwarts fought biased laws with a range of integrated and African American-only strategies, and used tactics that included direct action, the press, and petitions. In their critiques, Old Northwest activists refused to embrace binary racial categories, and they questioned the significance of subjective differences between races that most of their contemporaries took for granted. Concurrently, local African American advocates articulated an independent vision of a more just nation as they used the Black Conventions to fight the “Black Laws” and prejudice more generally. The movement against racist laws was an integral component of the larger rights movement in the Old Northwest.
Indeed, Old Northwest antislavery and anti-prejudice activists fought a protracted struggle to secure the liberties they needed to reform the region. Americans’ conceptions of rights were in transition in the antebellum period, and Old Northwest reformers stretched and molded them to fit their needs. They sought new interpretations of federal and state law to protect themselves from levels of violent opposition unusual even in the turbulent antebellum era. The anti-abolition violence they encountered lasted into the 1860s, substantially longer (and more frequent and severe in nature) than other historians have previously argued.19 Local activists invoked the freedoms of assembly, press, and speech to defend their vital political tools of meetings, newspapers, and lectures.
Old Northwest antislavery organizations strove to secure freedom of assembly, a right that people closely contested at the local level. As they gathered in their communities, they catalyzed conflicts over social control. Both women and men were central to this work, and they created mixed-sex and women’s organizations that held meetings, petitioned, and published articles and tracts that argued against slavery and prejudice. In their towns, women formed a significant, outspoken activist subset. Antislavery societies in the region remained viable through the Civil War, and their operations encompassed still more sweeping efforts for rights.
Freedom of the press in the Old Northwest had a troubled history. Reformers in the 1830s and 1840s found that as they strove for change, this inserted them into controversies over publishing about slavery and race. Newspapers built the antislavery and anti-prejudice community in the Old Northwest, for organizing in these sparsely populated states would have been impossible without press freedom. Champions of this right thus articulated broad and compelling arguments about its merits. Women in the region regarded press freedom as essential, and were unusually active advocates of it and journalists. Both female and male reformers expanded contemporary understanding of press freedom as a guaranteed right, and debated the anti-abolitionists who used violence and economic pressure to suppress them. Their persistence in transforming this especially difficult activist region—and their demand to use newspapers to join together across the miles—meant that their claims enlarged extant definitions of freedom of the press. Old Northwest reformers’ public struggles showed rights advocates across the nation their particular local obstacles to activism and the antislavery message, and exemplified for their peers the dedication that they needed to change the country’s picture of race and rights.
Itinerant lecturers who traversed the Old Northwest from 1830–1861 were essential to local activists’ struggles for rights, particularly freedom of speech. These traveling women and men fought against formidable resistance in order to expand and secure the liberty to speak. Many communities emphatically rejected lecturers whose gender or racial identities compounded the provocation of their unpopular message. Despite this, with both large-scale lecture tours and brief local jaunts, people such as Josephine S. Griffing worked to build an antislavery public sphere for a diffuse population. Itinerant lecturers, both local and from the East, worked symbiotically with local supporters, and both were necessary to spreading the abolitionist message over these four challenging states. For their part, local supporting activists willingly gave them aid. They also violated gender norms with such actions as women’s physical defense of male speakers, as in 1856 in Pontiac, Michigan, when a group of women protected Aaron M. Powell and Richard Glazier after a contentious lecture. Particular flashpoints in this free speech battle included the growth of political abolition and sectionalism, both of which led to increasing threats to lecturers’ freedom of speech and often their personal safety. The actions of Old Northwest antislavery speakers, and the responses they elicited, unmask the consequences of rights struggles in this hotly contested region. Since theirs was an exceedingly unpopular cause, reformers experienced serious repercussions for their meetings, including violence and ostracism. Such consequences were of long duration in the Old Northwest, for its culture strongly resisted change to its racial mores.
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By the 1850s, African Americans in the Old Northwest had gained few of the rights that they and their allies sought. Improving the region’s racially discriminatory legislation remained a major focus of reformers’ energy, and the increasingly harsh nature of fugitive slave legislation outraged them. They denounced the laws as unjust and vowed to continually resist them, along with slavery, which they still fought ferociously. While aid to fugitive slaves had formed an essential part of the local reform mission since at least the 1830s, its importance intensified with the passage of an enhanced fugitive slave law in September 1850. The new Fugitive Slave Law piled additional legal repressions onto the extant local “Black Laws.” Activists fought back with a range of tactics; African Americans continued to meet in Black Conventions, and they and their white allies also used direct resistance, vigilance committees, and state personal liberty laws to weaken the law’s new federal muscle. African Americans in the Old Northwest felt in the 1850s that their rights were increasingly precarious, and they and their collaborators realized that their fight for equality was far from over.
For Old Northwest activists, the Civil War ushered in an exciting sense of potential change. Debate over the “Black Laws” grew ever louder during the war years, as reformers sought to seize this moment to improve the lives of African Americans, and their opponents fought such developments with equal passion. The war escalated local fears of partisan discord, and party and sectional loyalties became reactionary bludgeons to stifle social and political transformation. Activists fought on, and secured some expanded rights in the war era, although the long sought-after emancipation failed to guarantee equality for northern African Americans, any more than it did for their southern brethren and sisters. White supremacy remained entrenched in these states, as exemplified in their residents’ foot-dragging over ratifying and enforcing federal laws that expanded African Americans’ rights. The uneven history of the Fifteenth Amendment’s ratification in 1870 concluded an era of struggle for the rights of both free and enslaved African Americans in the Old Northwest. Nevertheless, African American men in these four states continued to have extensive difficulties in securing the vote, even after the ratification of that amendment. This is just one sign that many people in the region consistently lacked the will for equal rights, even when the letter of the law so dictated.
Old Northwest activists, whether African American or white, sought to eradicate both slavery and racial prejudice through their quotidian conduct and their reform activity. As progressive agents, they collaborated for the full racial, social, and political equality of African Americans, and aimed to create a more just society through the interconnection of ideas and social practice. They demonstrated this uncompromising devotion as they faced ostracism, financial ruin, and physical danger, but remained singularly committed to enacting egalitarian principles. Even as activists’ opponents sought to destroy them, they found solace in their ideals of transcendent morality and universal human rights.