1. Stephen Middleton, The Black Laws: Race and the Legal Process in Early Ohio (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005), 9.
2. Nathan Dane to Rufus King, 16 July 1787, in The Letters of Members of the Continental Congress, ed. Edmund Burnett, vol. 8 (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institute of Washington, 1936), 621–22.
3. Ibid., 11, 17.
4. Robert R. Dykstra, Bright Radical Star: Black Freedom and White Supremacy on the Hawkeye Frontier (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); James Edward Davis, Frontier Illinois, A History of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 280. The Old Northwest is a fascinating place to pursue the puzzle of antebellum ideas about race, as these recent studies have shown: Middleton, The Black Laws: Ohio; H. Robert Baker, The Rescue of Joshua Glover: A Fugitive Slave, the Constitution, and the Coming of the Civil War, Ohio University Press Series on Law, Society, and Politics in the Midwest (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006); Stacey Robertson, Hearts Beating for Liberty: Women Abolitionists in the Old Northwest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). While this volume shares a number of common intellectual interests with those books, it is based on my own reading and interpretations of the original sources. See also Dana Elizabeth Weiner, “Racial Radicals: The Antislavery Movement in the Old Northwest, 1830–1861” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 2007). Regions within the Old Northwest have become the subject of renewed interest, as Leslie Schwalm exemplifies for the upper Midwest and Stanley Harrold does for the lower North. Leslie A. Schwalm, Emancipation’s Diaspora: Race and Reconstruction in the Upper Midwest, John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Stanley Harrold, Border War: Fighting over Slavery before the Civil War, Civil War America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). For an older perspective on the Old Northwest antislavery movement, see Gilbert Hobbs Barnes, The Antislavery Impulse, 1830–1844 (New York: Harcourt, 1964).
5. This approach draws on Barbara Fields, David Roediger, Joanne Pope Melish, and Leslie Schwalm, among other historians. Barbara Fields, “Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America,” New Left Review 181 (1990); David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, rev. ed. (New York: Verso, 1999); Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780–1860 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998); Joanne Pope Melish, “The ‘Condition’ Debate and Racial Discourse in the Antebellum North,” Journal of the Early Republic 19, no. 4 (1999); Schwalm, Emancipation’s Diaspora, 3.
6. Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 12.
7. James Brewer Stewart, Abolitionist Politics and the Coming of the Civil War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), xi.
8. Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America, New ed., Race and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Schwalm, Emancipation’s Diaspora, 3, 15.
9. Free Labor Advocate, February 4, 1843; June 30, 1848; October 6, 1843; October 13, 1843; Arthur Raymond Kooker, “The Anti-Slavery Movement in Michigan, 1796–1840: A Study in Humanitarianism” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1941), 106, 108.
10. Following Roy Finkenbine’s definition, the “Black Laws” are “the body of scattered state statutes and constitutional provisions that discriminated against Blacks.” Ray E. Finkenbine, “A Beacon of Liberty on the Great Lakes: Race, Slavery, and the Law in Antebellum Michigan,” in The History of Michigan Law, ed. Paul Finkelman and Martin J. Hershock (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006), 104.
11. Eugene H. Berwanger, The Frontier against Slavery: Western Anti-Negro Prejudice and the Slavery Extension Controversy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1967), 1, 4.
12. Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence, (New York: Knopf, 1997), 206–7.
13. Daniel T. Rodgers, “Rights Consciousness in American History,” in The Bill of Rights in Modern America after 200 Years, ed. David J. Bodenhamer and James W. Ely (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 16, 8–9.
14. For related views on Iowa, see Dykstra, Bright Radical Star, viii.
15. John W. Quist, Restless Visionaries: The Social Roots of Antebellum Reform in Alabama and Michigan (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998), 4. Cincinnati, for example, while a place with substantial racial tension and activism, was nonetheless an anomalously large and established city that stood apart from the region as a whole: Nikki Marie Taylor, Frontiers of Freedom: Cincinnati’s Black Community, 1802–1868, Ohio University Press Series on Law, Society, and Politics in the Midwest (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005).
16. Robertson, Hearts Beating for Liberty, 157.
17. Richard Franklin Nation, At Home in the Hoosier Hills: Agriculture, Politics, and Religion in Southern Indiana, 1810–1870, Midwestern History and Culture Series. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 3; Jacquelyn S. Nelson, Indiana Quakers Confront the Civil War (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1991), 4–5; Ruth Ketring Nuermberger, The Free Produce Movement: A Quaker Protest against Slavery, Historical Papers of the Trinity College Historical Society. Series 25 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1942), 33–34.
18. Stanley Harrold developed a related framework in his 2003 book about border regions—particularly the area around Washington, DC—that fostered direct action against slavery. While the Old Northwest was quite different, it was similarly unstable. Stanley Harrold, “John Brown’s Forerunners: Slave Rescue Attempts and the Abolitionists, 1841–51,” Radical History Review 55 (1992): 94; Stanley Harrold, The Rise of Aggressive Abolitionism: Addresses to the Slaves (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004), 115; Stanley Harrold, Subversives: Antislavery Community in Washington, D.C., 1828–1865, Antislavery, Abolition, and the Atlantic World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003), 37–38, 12; Harrold, Border War; Mary P. Ryan, “Civil Society as Democratic Practice: North American Cities During the Nineteenth Century,” in Patterns of Social Capital: Stability and Change in Historical Perspective, ed. Robert I. Rotberg (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 234; Craig J. Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere, Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992).
19. Leonard L. Richards, “Gentlemen of Property and Standing”; Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 3, 76–77, 15; Russel Blaine Nye, Fettered Freedom: Civil Liberties and the Slavery Controversy, 1830–1860 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1964), 175.