2 / Scrubbing at the “Bloody Stain of Oppression”:

A Human Rights Movement against Unjust Laws, 1830–1849

In February 1843, the New Garden, Indiana, Free Labor Advocate and Anti-Slavery Chronicle announced the Ohio Supreme Court’s ruling that the Ohio Constitution permitted men who officials could identify as “nearer white than mulattoes” to vote. While white abolitionist editor Benjamin Stanton recognized the revised interpretation as progress, he mocked the “discriminatory” powers that enforcing this would require. Stanton worked as a merchant, editor, and publisher while helping fugitive slaves and the free produce movement. With Henry H. Way, a fellow Quaker and a doctor, he edited the Free Labor Advocate from 1841 to 1848. The mainstream Friends in town expelled him in the 1840s, and he was very active thereafter in the Indiana Yearly Meeting of Anti-Slavery Friends.1 In his article, Stanton argued that Ohio’s election judges would need a new appliance to carry out these machinations: “[w]ill it not be necessary for some genius to invent a colorometer, by which to determine the claims of applicants to the right of suffrage? But to be serious; when will enlightened men become ashamed of these absurd and odious distinctions?”2 With this effort to quantify and clarify the fuzzy divisions the Ohio Supreme Court drew among people, Stanton revealed his disdain for legislation such as the “Black Laws” that aimed to fix the arbitrary color line in a particular location.

Both friends and foes of the “Black Laws” recognized that with the two 1842 cases Stanton mentioned, Parker Jeffries v. John Ankeny and Edwill Thacker v. John Hawk, the Ohio Supreme Court undermined race-based legislation. The court, using precedents from two 1830s cases, argued that election judges had been in error when they denied voting rights to men of mixed race ancestry. Stanton’s criticisms hit close to the mark, since even the language of the decisions is itself vague, calling these men “nearer white than black” or closer to white than “mulatto,” or in the case of Jeffries, nearer white than “Indian,” even as they affirmed their right to vote.3 The editor’s critique of these divisions as having little basis in reality very much resembles the laws’ own confusing content.

In vigorous dissents to both of these decisions, Ohio Justice Nathaniel C. Reed argued they set dangerous precedents about the meaning of the word “white,” which in his view was far from ambiguous. He said of the Thacker decision that it “violates the spirit of the [Ohio] constitution” which defined the voter as white. To Reed, whiteness was neither a subjective category nor a visual matter; “It is not the shade of color, but the purity of the blood, which determines the stock or race to which the individual belongs.” Reed, a strong supporter of the “Black Laws,” saw this distinction as crucial. He dissented because he believed the court had begun to dismantle the basis of these laws. Under Ohio law, in his view, nonwhites had “no political rights.” He argued that the “Black Laws” were deliberately exclusionary, and that they encouraged African Americans to leave Ohio by denying them rights. In fact, he claimed that the laws’ very purpose was to keep those who remained in the state “miserable and degraded.” The “Black Laws,” he readily acknowledged, were the product of calculated policy choices. To grant any degree of rights to nonwhites, as these decisions had done by “conferring political rights upon all [who had] less than half black [ancestry],” undermined the “Black Laws” and their exclusionary logic. The law thus illegitimately bestowed rights on people whose African heritage, regardless of its proportion, justified their exclusion.4

As likely pleased Reed, the “Black Laws” remained entrenched, and in the Advocate in June 1848, Stanton and his coeditor, Henry Way, revisited the idea of a “colorometer” to measure race for the purpose of establishing rights. This description was more fully realized than that of 1844, and the imaginary machine churned with internal tensions. The editors envisioned a conglomeration of “white superiority—Black inferiority—slaveholding logic and southern intelligence,” melded with slavery’s immorality in the “furnace of misrepresentation.” These factors vied for space in a medium composed of “southern arrogance, proslavery patriotism, the . . . Black laws, southern chivalry, a northern doughface’s integrity, and a political demagogue’s moral honesty.” The editors added other ingredients to the contraption, including “Calhoun’s nullification,” mobocracy, and theology.

This whole poisonous concoction was encased in the lofty documents of the Bible, the Declaration of Independence, and the US Constitution. The editors cited religion, ideas about liberty, and the laws of the land as all complicit with slavery’s sins, and thus linked. Susceptible to pressures from the South, subjectivity, and lies, this machine could read race in people’s “skin, lips, hair, and heel.”5 In this satirical piece, Stanton and Way divulged the forces that contributed to the Old Northwest’s strained racial environment. White abolitionists like themselves, their African American neighbors, and their foes—all lived in this veritable pressure cooker.

* * *

These Ohio disputes over African Americans’ status and racial definitions confirm that in the antebellum United States it was the states, not the federal government, that set civil rights. In this portion of the Old Northwest, legislators introduced discrimination with their “Black Laws,” beginning in 1803 in Ohio, the oldest of the four states. Indiana and Illinois modeled their “Black Laws” on those of Ohio, as did Michigan to a lesser degree. Even as the Old Northwest states influenced each other and crafted similar laws, many of them also drew upon southern slave codes as they limited African Americans’ local rights, and excluded and degraded them as ineligible for full citizenship. By 1830, each state had racially biased laws of varying severity in place. While this legislation differed in scope, effectiveness of enforcement, and duration, the “Black Laws” all enforced inequity and impeded both the legal rights and daily individual freedoms of all Old Northwest African Americans.

The sweeping “Black Laws” set the tone for and grew out of the region’s racial climate, which varied but was nonetheless unusually inhospitable. While many older states in the North had introduced discriminatory provisions as they abolished slavery, the newer states of the Old Northwest brought them in with their statehood and constitutions, establishing inequality in their founding documents. While the region innovated in the development of racialized law, inequity was a national trend. Between 1800 and 1860, of all of the existing states, only Rhode Island granted African American men suffrage. Among all of the new states admitted in that period, solely in Maine could they vote at statehood.6 While the national picture was bleak, the Old Northwest was worse, and indeed, it was a particularly unfriendly place to be African American.

Under the “Black Laws,” through the 1870s, Old Northwest African Americans lacked most legal rights of public personhood, and the restrictions grew worse over time. Their small communities suffered from extensive de jure and de facto discrimination.7 These laws kept African Americans out of the franchise, denied them political representation, prevented them from holding office, and excluded them from the militia. It also fettered them with bond laws, restrictions on marriage choice, court testimony, property ownership, education, immigration, and their right to work. These harsh laws circumscribed African Americans’ mobility, and required them to carry freedom papers, as in Illinois, where such documents either proved people’s freedom or gave them license to travel farther than ten miles from their place of residence.8 De facto forms of discrimination, including segregation, were also endemic in the biased Old Northwest. The region was rife with racial and political tension, and African Americans encountered bigotry there that extended well beyond the Civil War. This prevalent oppression inspired substantial opposition.

* * *

Old Northwest antislavery and anti-prejudice activists found the racial basis of rights unacceptable, and refused to permit biased legislation to stand uncontested. They thus fought not only to abolish the national problem of slavery but also the local “Black Laws.” The tiny African American populations and their white allies wielded abundant weapons, even in this racist region. From the 1830s through Reconstruction, at the height of the antislavery movement and in debates over racial justice in the region, they made equal rights claims that exceeded opposition to the national scourge of slavery and included full citizenship for African Americans. As neighbors to that institution, African Americans and their allies keenly felt its impact. They especially experienced it in the fugitive slave laws, and in the way that northerners supported prejudice by keeping the “Black Laws” on the books.

These reformers employed many methods to convert local and national laws from instruments used against African Americans to tools to secure equal human rights. Whether their weapons for equality were defiant residency, aid to fugitive slaves, the pen, the press, petitions, lobbying, court cases, or the Black Convention Movement, Old Northwest activists proclaimed their human rights vision with their reform work. They constantly pushed for political and social change and resisted race-based legislation, despite the challenges that their isolated location presented. The obstacles they confronted were both substantial and deep-rooted.

The “Black Laws” imposed severe hardships, for at their worst, they contradicted the term “free state” by permitting slavery and indentured servitude, as was legal in the region at least until the late 1840s.9 Rather than observing the term limits the law mandated, some individuals kept people in bonds after their terms had expired, in a status that closely resembled southern slavery.10 This was a clear target for activists, who used Article VI of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 to argue that slavery should have no foothold in these states, and that its framers intended the territory to be entirely free of the institution. While the article stated that “there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory,” the ordinance had actually made no provisions for enforcing this federal measure within the Old Northwest.11

Indeed, while the ordinance appeared to exclude slavery from the region, the new states interpreted it very loosely. It left the institution untouched in the South and enabled Old Northwest people to keep slaves in much of the region for many years. This loophole existed due to lax enforcement provisions and the legal interpretation that the ordinance permitted retaining slaves who had that status at the time of its passage; people thus remained enslaved and indentured there.12 The censuses from 1810 through 1840 also recorded a few enslaved people in these four Old Northwest states.13 While by the 1830 census the number of slaves recorded in the region had become very small, the clandestine nature of some of their labor terms means that it is difficult to ascertain how many lived as indentured servants or in de facto slavery. The numbers were probably actually higher than recorded, but given the marginal legality of Old Northwest slaveholding, underreporting was likely. These covert, forced-labor arrangements varied from state to state and even within the states; in somewhat problematic places like Ohio and Michigan, slavery was more clearly outlawed than in the more racist neighboring states of Illinois and Indiana.14 The new laws that Old Northwesterners wrote as they joined the union demonstrate slavery’s influence, too.

In the territorial period, at statehood, and in constitutional conventions as late as the 1830s, proponents of slavery sought to introduce the institution into Old Northwest constitutions and skirt the Northwest Ordinance. In the territorial period, Ohioans evaded the ordinance with the complicity of Governor Arthur St. Clair.15 Nonetheless, later in Ohio the Constitutional Convention of 1802 made only a weak effort to include slavery, and the resultant constitution explicitly barred indentures from thus binding African Americans.16 Still, the state’s “Black Laws” were onerous, and a handful of slaves remained there through 1840.17

Pro-slavery people in Indiana and Illinois each made forceful, ongoing attempts to legitimate slavery in their early years. These included resident slaveholders’ petitions to the United States Congress to abolish Article VI of the Northwest Ordinance. In Indiana Territory, which initially included what later became Illinois, slavery dated back as early as the 1730s under the French. There, attempts to legalize the institution, including a petition to Congress to permit slave importation, began in 1800 and continued through statehood in 1816. Many slave owners in the territory claimed that the Northwest Ordinance did not apply to them, and kept people in bondage regardless. The effort to include permanent servitude in the Indiana Constitution failed, but it instituted harsh and coercive indentures, which resembled slavery under another name. Laws there originally permitted holding indentured people for life, but eventually the legal codes mandated freeing women at age 28 and men at 35.18 The Indiana Supreme Court ruled against indentured servitude and slavery in the early 1820s, and the numbers of slaves subsequently sharply dropped.19

Slavery was a long-standing institution in the land that became Illinois, for the French had held slaves who worked primarily in agriculture and in salt production there. Slavery continued under the British and subsequently the Americans.20 Illinois became a territory in 1809, but as early as 1803, it followed Indiana’s model of using indentured servitude as a euphemism for slavery, and in other ways closely emulated southern racial law.21 At statehood in 1818, the new Illinois Constitution protected extant relationships between “master and slave or servant” and permitted incoming southern migrants to bring their slaves with them, but forbade contracting further such relationships. This constitution also kept indentured servitude in place, with the pretext that the servants had consented to their contracts. While the law required owners to grant indentured servants a choice between “freedom” and servitude, these choices were not of equal plausibility or desirability, since those African Americans who chose freedom had to leave the state in sixty days or face being sold as fugitives.22 Slaveholders who wished to preserve their cheap or unpaid labor force would very likely have coerced them to stay in bondage.

Illinoisans long debated slavery and race relations, and the institution remained in place and had strong supporters in the state for quite some time. For example, a fevered legal battle ensued in 1823 and 1824 over introducing slavery there, and the contest was close. While the antislavery faction prevailed, their victory was far from absolute or immediate.23 The United States Census of 1840 recorded 331 slaves and over 400 indentured servants as resident in Illinois—the largest number in the region then—and bills of sale indicate that slaveholders in the state continued to sell and transfer African Americans as late as 1848.24

In Michigan, African Americans had the highest status out of these four states, but they still faced substantial issues. Michigan had the smallest African American population in the region, but slaves had also been present there since the colonial era, and the institution retained support as it became a territory and subsequently a state. In 1807 in Michigan, as elsewhere, the territorial court ruled that the Northwest Ordinance’s antislavery provisions did not apply to people already enslaved in the region before the territorial period began in 1805.25 Even more obvious proof of the protection of slavery there lies in the fact that children born to slaves in Michigan only gradually won their freedom. Nonetheless, slavery was uncommon, and lawmakers there made less effort to evade the ordinance than did those of Illinois or Indiana. This is evident in the wording of the state’s 1835 constitution, which overtly outlawed slavery. Michigan’s residents may have felt a smaller economic motive to keep the institution than did those of Indiana and Illinois, but they were far from egalitarian, since they nonetheless still imposed devastating “Black Laws” and segregation, and made few efforts to help African American migrants from elsewhere.26 In Michigan and the other states in the region, the debates over rights illuminate the deeply rooted local racism.

* * *

Resistance to an expanded and equal African American population in the Old Northwest continued in the early nineteenth century; it was present at these states’ founding moments, when they codified the “Black Laws” in their state constitutions. These were moments of immense political and economic transformation that included shifts in republican ideology, the concurrent expansion of the franchise, and the continual equation of white manhood with full citizenship. These changes all inspired and amplified opposition to African American immigration and equality. The debates in state constitutional conventions in the Old Northwest showed the stakes that many of their participants—and by extension their constituents—had in keeping African Americans excluded. Each of the states revisited their constitutions over the years, and for decades opted to keep African American rights limited.27

The race-based constitutional provisions attempted to designate an individual’s proper social place. While a few of the founders held more egalitarian views, the majority of participating delegates defined citizenship narrowly, and cited landholding, self-sufficiency, and white manhood as necessary ingredients for it.28 The region’s history of slavery and proximity to the institution gave it a tense racial climate. As delegates sought to use their constitutions to create racially homogeneous states, their efforts salved the consciences of men disturbed by the market revolution’s social and economic shifts. By excluding African Americans, these men displaced onto others the fears the new market economy inspired with its increasing instability and dependency. They believed that only a society of white men would be sufficiently virtuous to face the challenges of their modernizing times. Delegates’ arguments against African American rights centered on concerns that their alleged lack of independence would render them susceptible to the influence of others, and neither qualified nor able to participate in the polity on an equal basis.29 Ideas about race’s meaning thus had far-reaching effects on African Americans’ political and social rights.

In seeking to restrict rights on the basis of race, states that crafted “Black Laws” also had to create some means to define racial distinctions in law. Who merited the designation “white” was inconsistent, and changed from state to state as well as over time.30 Indiana law grew more stringent, as the 1818 law defined people as African American when they had one Black grandparent, and by 1840 the law required only one such great-grandparent.31 In the 1853 Illinois anti-immigration statute, the General Assembly used the latter standard.32 Ohio law tried to determine racial identity based on perceptible skin tone, and the legislature originated the term “visible admixture” to articulate this method. As Benjamin Stanton had noted, in 1842 the Ohio Supreme Court weighed in and settled the definition of whiteness as a visual issue, not one of blood. This subjective label meant that the Ohio government treated people of mixed racial ancestry with ambiguity, even as late as 1859, when the state legislature again affirmed the visible admixture rule.33

In Michigan, too, the courts weighed in on the definition of race. State law initially allowed for no gradations between African American and white, but some men passed for white (or white enough) in order to vote there.34 Courts in Michigan also embraced the visible admixture test in 1847 and again in 1866. In the 1847 case of Douglass v. Farrar, a Michigan man’s preponderance of white over African American ancestry meant that the county court deemed him entitled to vote.35 Since jurists defined race as a visible marker, the outcomes of their decisions were not always predictable.36 These subjective standards of racial difference remained legally valid for decades, betraying their supporters’ determination to use the legal system to subjugate African Americans. The “Black Laws” had a number of important consequences, and one of the most serious was the impact on the region’s demographics.

* * *

When Old Northwest people implemented these staggering legal and social obstacles to racial equality, they aimed to, as Justice Reed had argued, render the region unwelcoming to people of African descent. The “Black Laws” officially designated these states as communities for whites, using exclusionary and discriminatory provisions to maintain African American subordination and keep their local numbers low. Across the region, with these laws legislators intended to minimize interracial interactions, either by forcing African Americans to relocate or by making life so uncomfortable that any of their settlements would be small. Supporters of these laws claimed that incorporating more African Americans into the northern population would diminish the alleged superiority of the white race by exposing it to an “inferior” race.37

State legislatures in Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana erected formidable legal obstacles to free African Americans’ immigration, and while Michigan lacked an exclusion law, it had its fair share of other discriminatory laws with similar effects. Proponents of the “Black Laws” argued that without these restrictions, unscrupulous owners would bring elderly former slaves to the region. They feared that these freedmen and freedwomen would be unable to work for their keep, and thus become a burden on the community.38 One “Black Law” that exemplified these concerns forbade slaveholders to transport African Americans into Illinois to liberate them there. With these regulations, legislatures also tried to encourage resident African Americans to emigrate to Africa.39 Adding to the matrix of discrimination, some wage workers feared labor competition from African Americans, who could only command reduced wages due to racist hiring policies. From the beginning, debates over the “Black Laws” thus used early versions of free labor ideology, often to the detriment of African Americans.

Panic over African Americans’ immigration to the Old Northwest inspired specific efforts to control their population growth in the region. These are evident in the earliest “Black Laws,” for Ohio passed its first such laws, those aimed at immigration restriction, in 1804 and 1806, and later affirmed them. They required African Americans to provide proof of freedom to enter the state and in order to work, and a $500 bond against becoming a public charge.40 The bond provision compelled African Americans to have two people willing to pay a bond of $500 to prevent them from becoming a community responsibility. It was not a demand for an immediate cash bond, for the money would need to be paid only if the African American migrant violated any laws.41 The Illinois “Black Laws,” beginning in 1813, restricted immigration and the right to work to proven free men, and appointed “overseers of the poor” to force poor African Americans to move elsewhere.42 The exclusionary sentiments were of long duration, for Illinois also held a referendum on immigration in 1848, where in a ringing endorsement, 70 percent of voters favored continuing the restrictions.43

Indiana had similar laws, for after 1831 African Americans had to provide proof of freedom and to post bond upon entering the state to settle or work there. Quakers and other sympathetic whites joined them in fighting this provision and later such laws. The Indiana Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the bond law on three separate occasions.44 The Indiana Constitutional Convention of 1850 passed a provision that outright banned African Americans from the state. Advocates of equality protested against these provisions, as they had with previous measures. In the 1851 popular referendum on immigration, 83 percent of Indiana voters favored retaining extant immigration restrictions, and to persist in restricting the vote to white men.45 The 1851 constitution that convention created had a few potentially liberating provisions for African Americans: it reaffirmed slavery’s prohibition and banned all forms of indentured servitude from Indiana.46 Nonetheless, the exclusion message found reinforcement in substantial support for colonization that went as high as the governor’s mansion in the 1850s.47

While Michigan had no prohibition on African American immigration, its certification and bond laws were themselves stringent, at least on paper. Prior to statehood, the Michigan legislature mandated that each African American prove his or her freedom prior to settlement, register with the county clerk, and pay a $500 bond, for good behavior and to ensure “that he would not become a public charge.” As the African American population grew, other Michigan residents expressed their desire to curb this expansion through segregation and colonization.48 These discriminatory laws had notable, measurable effects on the region’s populations.

In one sense, the exclusionary provisions of the “Black Laws” were a success, in that they achieved their aim of keeping the number of African Americans in the Old Northwest from becoming substantial, even as the region’s overall population grew between 1830 and 1870. Their small local numbers nevertheless remained a source of concern for some hostile Old Northwest residents. The United States censuses reveal that Ohio’s African American population grew slowly over the decades, from 1.1 percent to 1.6 percent, only slightly exceeding the overall population growth rate. By 1870, it had grown to 2.3 percent. In proportion to the white population, that of African Americans in Indiana remained very small, for it decreased slightly, from 1.1 percent to .8 percent by 1860, but had risen slightly to 1.5 percent by 1870. In Illinois, there was a larger decrease from 1.5 percent to .4 percent in 1860. The number there had rebounded to 1.1 percent by 1870. In Michigan, the number was .9 percent in 1830 and returned there in 1860, with a dip in the intervening decades. It had risen to 1 percent by 1870.49

That same data can give a different perspective on the region’s population and the effects of the “Black Laws,” and indeed demonstrates African Americans’ persistence in moving to the region. To take the turbulent 1850s as an example, Illinois, Michigan, and Ohio each experienced substantial African American population growth between 1850 and 1860. In Indiana, where the Supreme Court forbade Black immigration in 1851, the total population grew by 37 percent between 1850 and 1860, and its African American population only expanded by 1.5 percent in that same era. Elsewhere, while the aggregate population of Illinois more than doubled from 1850 to 1860, the African American population increased by 40 percent in that same decade. Michigan’s overall population grew by 188 percent in that decade, while its African American population proliferated at nearly twice that rate. In Ohio, the already large populations grew at slower rates than in the other, newer states. Nevertheless, while the overall population grew by 18 percent in the 1850s, the African American population growth rate was much faster at 45 percent. Despite these small numbers and the region’s overwhelming hostility and whiteness, the data indicates that African Americans refused to stay away, and indeed, established communities.

This issue is even more complicated, for residents across the Old Northwest often showed little will to enforce immigration provisions scrupulously. The African American population thus continued to grow throughout the antebellum period.50 It was evident to some of the opponents of the “Black Laws” that these legal decrees failed to suppress African American populations and movement. White itinerant lecturer Dr. Erasmus Hudson mocked the difficulties of the laws’ enforcement while opining that they simply did not work. Connecticut native Hudson was an agent for the Garrisonian organizations, the Connecticut and the American Anti-Slavery Societies, from 1838 to 1849.51 He wrote from Delaware, Ohio, in February 1842, that the convoluted “Black Laws” made no sense and were difficult to enforce. Hudson credited Ohio’s extensive fugitive traffic in part to the ineffectiveness of these laws.52 In 1843, the Ohio American Society echoed him, claiming that in most situations, Ohioans would not implement the “Black Laws.”53 A similar situation existed in early Michigan, where the “Black Laws” had little support, the required bond was particularly unpopular, and many whites helped protect African Americans against kidnapping.54 Many African Americans, though well aware of the problems with the “Black Laws” in the Old Northwest and their communities’ inconsistent reactions to them, still preferred to move there rather than remain in slavery or its vicinity. They sought to change the region for the better, and used pointed critiques to fight to improve their local status.

* * *

Chief among Old Northwest African Americans’ grievances were the ways in which the “Black Laws” deprived them of their right to vote, of political representation, and of participation in civic defense. The facts are clear: the vast majority of African American men in the Old Northwest lacked the franchise until the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, and this bar remained in place even longer in many areas.55 While African American men in Ohio could vote in elections prior to statehood, they lost this right with the ratification of the state constitution in 1803. With Indiana’s statehood in 1816 and Illinois’ in 1818, their new constitutions excluded African Americans from the vote, population count, and the militia.56

Michigan did not reach statehood until 1837, and implemented somewhat less punitive laws than the other states after debating even more permissive alternatives—including the vote for all men. In May of 1835, as Michigan prepared for this transition, delegates met in Detroit to frame a constitution. John Norvell, the Detroit postmaster and a Wayne County delegate, called for a ban on slavery in the state, which the convention unanimously adopted. Judge Ross Wilkins from Lenawee County tried to take African American rights one large step further. He asked that the convention grant universal male suffrage, but found much antipathy. Norvell asked whether Wilkins intended to permit all men, including “Indians and negroes,” to vote. Wilkins replied with a claim that racial identity was ambiguous:

the term white is not specific...There are men of every shade and complexion, white, sallow, brown, olive, yellow; how will you regulate the shade of him which shall entitle an individual to the privilege of a freeman?...[there were those] who were American born, who were neither Indian, negro, nor of any connexion in color with either of these races, and yet who could not be called white.

As had Benjamin Stanton with his colorometer, Wilkins displayed an early understanding of race as a constructed category, which he used to argue that qualified African American men deserved the franchise. He was not alone in this desire, for Quaker Darius Comstock, also of Lenawee, then the home of the strongest support for progressive racial views in Michigan, agreed with these principles. Despite these efforts, the “Black Laws” took hold in Michigan, with particularly strong support in Wayne County (the home of Detroit).57 As passed, the legislation reserved the vote and the jury box for white men.58 By 1860, African American men had the right to vote in only five states in the North—and none in the Old Northwest.59

* * *

Despite the substantial hardships the “Black Laws” imposed, many Old Northwest citizens actually were divided about the laws’ justice; this mattered, since the legislation relied upon an array of citizens for enforcement. In addition to justices of the peace, community members who included the overseers of the poor, public school teachers, and employers all became potential informants to turn in African Americans who lacked the proof of freedom that entitled them to work.60 Some communities and counties even created their own local level “Black Laws,” which added to the burden of those on the state level. In one such case in 1843, African Americans faced expulsion from Peoria County if they did not “enter into bond with security.”61 Since ordinary people performed most of the work of upholding these laws, activists focused their energy on changing both public opinion and the laws at their source.

While many Old Northwest people ignored the “Black Laws” and sometimes even challenged them, this did not diminish the laws’ importance or their demoralizing effect. On the infrequent occasions when people did try to prosecute under the “Black Laws,” the impetus often originated in personal disputes.62 While in most places enforcement of these laws was weak, they nevertheless symbolized white supremacy for many Old Northwest African Americans and their allies for equal rights. They also gave hostile whites a universally applicable rationale to oppress African Americans, commit mob violence, and otherwise badger them.63 The “Black Laws” created a permissive attitude toward racialized violence; at times African Americans’ foes took advantage of their lack of legal status and attacked them, knowing their governments were unlikely to prosecute them. When activists called for repeal, pro-“Black Law” mobs also acted against them.64

The provision of the “Black Laws” that ruled African Americans could not testify against whites in court led to a sense of license to exploit and assault them. While Michigan did allow African American testimony, in 1807 the Ohio legislature—and later, Illinois—barred such testimony in court cases involving whites.65 Indiana’s 1816 constitution prohibited African Americans from testifying in court, and their lack of this right exposed them to abuses from unscrupulous whites. On occasion this had serious, even deadly, consequences.

Proof of the extent of these dangers for Indiana’s African Americans lies in the 1845 murder of John Tucker in downtown Indianapolis. A drunken crowd attacked Tucker on July 4 and beat him to death. The men in this crowd, which the Ohio Anti-Slavery Bugle claimed had 200 members, made numerous bloodthirsty proclamations about their racial motivations for this murder. A mob subsequently chased the antislavery publisher of the Indianapolis Freeman, Henry De Puy, for hours, and authorities only arrested one man for the murder.66 The lack of justice for Old Northwest African Americans living under the “Black Laws” is starkly revealed in the refusal of many witnesses to intervene and in the paltry retribution for Tucker’s death. The picture in Indianapolis might have been rather different had African Americans had the right to testify.

Foes of the “Black Laws” acknowledged that the testimony provisions imposed specific problems for African Americans. The lack of this right—as seen in Illinois where the prohibition applied to any people with at least one African American grandparent—was a substantial legal disability.67 The clause that confined the right to testify against whites to whites gave African Americans little recourse to the legal system. Similarly, Ohio abolitionists also claimed that the testimony law allowed criminals to abuse African Americans. Whether accused of fugitive status or directly attacked, they lacked this right when they faced white opponents in court, unless they had a cooperative white witness who could testify for them.68 The overt racial basis of Tucker’s murder reveals that people’s lives could even be at stake with these laws. Despite such incidents and the “Black Laws,” many thousands of African Americans came to the region and remained there, flouting registration laws and legal proscriptions, and inciting debate over their place in the Old Northwest.

* * *

The Old Northwest’s location and the consequent fugitive slave traffic also inspired the “Black Laws.” Many people in the region believed they needed stringent laws to prevent large numbers of African Americans from migrating from the South, across their weak borders. Ohio shared state lines with Kentucky and Virginia (now West Virginia), while Illinois and Indiana bordered Missouri and Kentucky, and Michigan contained several well-known fugitive slave routes from the southern states. The Old Northwest was a way station between slavery and freedom, and the site of both hospitality to runaways and struggles over fugitives. As slaves decided to escape, they educated themselves about their environment and plotted their flight, which often took them through the region.69 Traveling north, many newly freed and self-liberated people passed through on their journey to Canada from as far as Tennessee and North Carolina, creating significant fugitive traffic, and local people aided them.70

The Old Northwest’s location meant that race substantially affected individual rights, for even African Americans with freedom papers found that these documents protected them only minimally against the threat of being kidnapped into slavery. This ever-present reality kept many free African Americans anxious and socially subordinated; the combined effects of the “Black Laws” and the federal fugitive slave laws of 1793 and 1850—which forbade aid to runaways or interference with owners’ effort to repossess their human property—proved onerous indeed.71 In addition to their legal challenges, African Americans had to live with the advertisements for runaway slaves and servants that regularly appeared in Whig and Democratic newspapers in the region, and which demonstrated an aggressive presence protecting slavery in nearby states.72 Clearly, even African Americans who were formally free encountered imposing barriers to recognition of their civil status in the Old Northwest, including the opinions of their many pro-southern neighbors.

Many Old Northwesterners had southern origins or sympathies, especially among those who settled on the riverfronts and along major roads. Southern nativity did not necessarily determine views on slavery, since people had a variety of reasons to leave the South, including antislavery views. Numerous former southern residents nonetheless did engage in economic exchange with their native region and were hostile to African Americans, most likely out of a deeply ingrained bias as well as an interest in preserving these trade relations.73

Slavery and transportation had an uneasy relationship in the Old Northwest, particularly since Indiana, Illinois, and Ohio bordered the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers and hosted the national road that extended as far as Vandalia, Illinois, by 1839. From the perspective of slaveholders and their sympathizers, national concord depended on them being able to move through the North with ease—even with their slaves. Article IV of the Northwest Ordinance guaranteed the right of unfettered water travel, and many southerners interpreted this to mean that they and their slaves could pass through the Old Northwest, as many did on their river journeys to the new western slave states.74 As slaveholders and slave hunters traversed these borders, they demanded local fealty to their property rights. Whether or not Old Northwest people agreed that they should protect slaves as property, these slaveholders’ actions gave further proof to “Black Laws” opponents that restrictions on African American rights were no mere southern sectional issue, and in fact were widespread in the North.

* * *

In the face of these many deprivations of legal protection for African Americans, resistance to the “Black Laws” became central to the Old Northwest antislavery and anti-prejudice mission. The majority of these states’ residents greeted the prospect and reality of African American neighbors with a hearty rejection of equal rights. Consequently, combating the “Black Laws” was an essential element of activists’ broader commitment to racial transformation, and of their refusal to accept the bias infused throughout their political culture and social mores. Their work against the “Black Laws” extended from the local to the statewide level, and from everyday activities to overt political protest.

The story of the “Black Laws” is not one of unremitting oppression, for racial progressives contested their enactment and enforcement from their earliest days. Through both individual and collective means, activists pushed against this legislation and revealed their larger human rights vision of a nation free of both slavery and discriminatory law. From the late 1830s, the movement took in diverse people from across these four states, including white and African American abolitionists, northern states’ rights advocates, and African American participants in the Black Convention Movement.

The simplest form of resistance to the “Black Laws” lay in the very presence of African American communities in the Old Northwest, and their refusal to obey efforts to drive them out and uproot their settlements. While there were few incentives and many impediments to forming a large local population of African Americans in this time period, some did establish small free communities. These stalwart African American populations proved that the “Black Laws” failed to exclude them, and over time, thousands moved to the region. Whether enslaved or free, African Americans demanded admission to these young states, and defiantly lived where the “Black Laws” tried to bar them. The hard battle they fought to stay there and create northern African American communities enabled fugitives to blend in more readily. This free presence, so physically close to slavery, flouted the “Black Laws,” the fugitive slave laws, and the claim that the only place for African Americans was a servile one.75 Their local populations and the biased laws they lived under inspired Old Northwest people to help them, but some indirectly resisted these laws by thriving, in spite of the laws’ punishing character.

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When African Americans achieved success in the Old Northwest, they gave the lie to common antebellum ideas about their incapacity and dependency. Frank McWhorter and his family exemplify one such victory over adversity. They came to Illinois and founded New Philadelphia in Pike County in 1835. This town, along with other small African American communities in western Illinois, claimed a secure place in the state despite the Illinois “Black Laws.” The McWhorters, beyond their economic achievements, also took up community building efforts to ameliorate the worst of the problems the laws caused African Americans.76 Like this pioneering family, other African Americans and their white allies refused to bow before racism in the Old Northwest borderland, and organized “Black Law” resistance built on the foundation of such bold residency choices. These success stories proved that biased laws not only failed to keep African Americans out, but that African Americans, in fact, led communities. In their own towns and beyond, both Old Northwest African Americans and their white allies offered fugitive aid that also directly opposed race-based law.77

From the Old Northwest states’ earliest days, activists there frequently helped fugitives and resisted their recapture. Reaching out to slaves in need closely complemented these reformers’ other activities throughout the antebellum era, and this was one of the most direct ways they defied racialized law. Also, even though the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 was legally a federal concern, activists believed that the same fears of African American mobility catalyzed it and the state-level “Black Laws.” Indeed, the local laws increased the fugitive slave law’s burden and inspired intense resistance.

Fugitive slave support took a number of forms, including shelter and transportation; antislavery women concretely contributed support through their hours of labor with needle and thread. They formed antislavery sewing circles that made and gave goods—especially clothing—directly to fugitives. As fugitives passed through, and stayed in Old Northwest communities temporarily, many local women became aware of their desperate need for clothing as they were fleeing. Most enslaved people were destitute, for few had accumulated possessions, and the circumstances of flight usually made it impossible to carry much.78 Former slaves’ clothing deficit, and this aid in response, continued past the Civil War.79 They also sold such items at antislavery fairs and used the proceeds to support individuals and societies. This work was essential both to fugitives who relied on their goods and to the variety of antislavery enterprises that the fairs funded.80 In its recognition that African Americans had rights to succor and stability, this labor affirmed antislavery women’s commitment to honoring fugitives’ humanity, and to meeting their immediate needs, regardless of the law’s dictates. They, along with their fellows, followed the higher law doctrine, the religious conception that God’s law was superior to that of men.

Underlying Old Northwest reformers’ opposition to the “Black Laws” was a shared belief in Christian duty toward their fellow man, one that also contributed to their objections to fugitive slave laws. According to the opponents of the “Black Laws,” these laws defied not only earthly rights but also Christian morality. In 1840, an antislavery group from Will County, Illinois, argued that the provision in the Illinois statute of 1833 that barred Illinoisans from providing aid to people in need was an effort to “nullify the law of God.”81 This law forbade concealing or caring for fugitives, the assistance that fulfilled the basic principles of Christian charity.82 Ohio’s equivalent laws also dismayed Anne Thomas of New Garden, Ohio, who in April 1839 noted that the “Black Laws” clause that outlawed granting aid to runaway slaves, under penalty of a fine, particularly disturbed her. This was, she believed, a policy of exceptional cruelty.83 By violating activists’ sense of justice, the laws incited these people’s opposition. In the view of such reformers, the laws created unwarranted separations between people, which their religion would not countenance.

Religious convictions about the laws’ injustice inspired many antislavery churches to also publicly work for the repeal of the “Black Laws.” This included the Society of Friends, and some in their faith had already been arguing over abolition and fugitive slaves. The Indiana Yearly Meeting of Friends (which had many members who lived in Ohio and Illinois) published an address in 1843 to the Ohio citizens against their “Black Laws.”84 As did the Will County Society, they believed they had secular, “moral and religious obligations” to oppose slavery and race-based laws. Their central argument was that distinctions drawn upon lines of race displeased God and disobeyed the Golden Rule.85 Along with their fellow anti-discrimination activists, they used religion to claim that all people were entitled to the same rights.86 Beyond the Friends, by the mid-1840s, the Congregational Church in Illinois also opposed that state’s requirement that they deny aid to slaves.87 Their church activities aside, Old Northwest foes of the “Black Laws” shared a longstanding willingness to use state laws against anti-fugitive legislation.

The antebellum Old Northwest felt like an increasingly perilous environment for African American rights, so antislavery and egalitarian activists implemented every strategy in their repertoire to protect them, including personal liberty laws and anti-kidnapping statutes. As early as 1804, various states passed such measures. Most northern states had some version of these laws that aimed, at minimum, at protecting free African Americans. Sometimes they also extended to accused fugitive slaves. Pennsylvania had passed the first personal liberty law in 1826, inaugurating the practice of subjecting fugitive removal to a judicial review process, rather than allowing alleged slaveholders to take people to the South with no trial.88

Indiana and Michigan both passed early anti-kidnapping laws, if not explicit personal liberty laws. From 1816, Indiana allowed judges to call for a jury trial to determine whether claims for certificates of removal—needed for people to take alleged slaves with them out of the state—were valid.89 Later, an 1824 law allowed fugitives trial by jury in appeals for cases where judges had ruled against them. Both of these provisions could at least slow the return of slave catchers to the South with people they claimed as fugitives. In Michigan the 1827 anti-kidnapping statutes sent a mixed message, for they were part of a body of “Black Laws” that also mandated that African Americans register and post bond upon moving to the state.90 The following year, Michigan strengthened its anti-kidnapping laws, and from the 1840s on, it saw major public displays of aid to fugitive slaves.91

Abolitionist and state sovereignty arguments both increased hostility to fugitive slave capture, beginning in the 1830s. Even where personal liberty laws were not in operation, many Old Northwest residents refused to comply with fugitive slave laws, but this did not necessarily indicate that they had egalitarian views. Some Old Northwest whites merely saw anti-kidnapping laws as a means to prevent southerners from trampling on their state autonomy.92 Over time, fears escalated that residents of the region, Black and white, might have to use force to defend their interests against southern interlopers. These concerns grew after the passage of the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and as the Kansas situation degenerated later that decade, but such defensive sentiments existed even earlier.93 Ohio had short-lived laws in 1819 and 1831 that were intended to protect African Americans from kidnapping. The 1831 Ohio law required slaveholders to bring accused fugitives before a judge and prove ownership. Also in 1831, Indiana passed an anti-kidnapping statute, as did Michigan in 1838.94 In Ohio in 1837, activists petitioned for jury trial for all African Americans accused of being fugitives.95 In the latter two states, some Whigs provided personal liberty laws with essential support, proving that some joined their more radical contemporaries in the opinion that anti-fugitive laws posed grave dangers to the Old Northwest.96

Among the Old Northwest states, Illinois had the weakest provisions for fugitive protection. This is not surprising, for the state was also unique in the North in largely subscribing to the southern idea that African Americans were, by default, slaves, and thus lacked due process rights to protect their freedom. While in northern Illinois it became difficult to return escaped slaves to the South, this was not the case in the southern part of the state.97 Illinois laws tended to hurt rather than help runaways, as in an 1829 law that enshrined the perception that all African Americans were runaways until they produced a certificate that proved otherwise. The only relevant law there that aided African Americans accused of being fugitives passed in 1833, and it limited slaveholder autonomy only slightly. The law provided penalties when people captured suspected slaves with the goal of removing them from Illinois without first following proper federal procedures.98 However, the state Supreme Court was willing to convict Illinois residents for fugitive slave aid, which was also unusual for a northern state. The Illinois lawmakers had very conflicted positions through the 1840s, even as the state developed a corps of antislavery lawyers.99 In Illinois the longstanding notions in the region about African Americans’ low status had unusually strong consequences, but this was not a consistent position across the region, or even in the state.

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In Old Northwest governments, fugitives met with occasional but valuable allies who worked against the fugitive slave clause of 1793. Activists as early as 1837 found opposition to fugitive persecution from the bench; lawyer Salmon P. Chase claimed that the federal fugitive slave clause was invalid since it clashed with the US Constitution and with the spirit of the Northwest Ordinance.100 From 1839 to 1843, Ohio had a state fugitive slave law, one that also mandated proof of legitimate ownership prior to removing accused fugitives from the state. although the aggressiveness of slave catchers made it unpopular.101 In 1843, the Ohio legislature repealed most of the pro–African American statutes of the 1831 law that had granted accused fugitive slaves some legal rights, but kept the anti-kidnapping statute.102 The Ohio state government was thus an unreliable ally, but even Illinois was not universally hostile to African American rights.

The national fugitive slave law and the “Black Laws” could, on occasion, come into conflict with each other, with libratory consequences. In 1849, the Illinois Supreme Court v. Thornton represented an attempt to use the “Black Laws” to regulate fugitives; the case revealed that jurisdictional squabbling could actually benefit fugitives. In that incident, the Sangamon County constable captured Missouri fugitive Hempstead Thornton, despite his protestations of illegal restraint. In this case, the “Black Laws” overreached their bounds and thus served to Thornton’s advantage. A provision in the revised Illinois statutes of 1845 aimed at aiding in the retrieval of fugitives within the state. Under this law, Illinois officials automatically presumed all African Americans who entered Illinois without free papers were fugitives, and thus subject to arrest and jailing. The county sheriff had to “advertise” the captives’ presence in a newspaper for six weeks. If still unclaimed, the sheriff could sell the labor of these people for twelve months if no stated “owner” came forward.

The Supreme Court decision in the Thornton case changed this practice, as it argued that the Illinois legal system had no right to interfere in an area of federal jurisdiction. The logic followed that since fugitive regulation was an area of United States congressional purview, “the arrest of the prisoner was without authority of law, and he must be discharged from custody.”103 In this instance, while the Illinois Supreme Court claimed to uphold federal fugitive slave legislation, it simultaneously undermined pro-slavery claims by removing one of the tools for the recapture of fugitives in the state.104 The courts and laws could thus be tools activists might use against the “Black Laws,” but they pushed for the law to do much more.

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Activists’ direct resistance to the “Black Laws” also encompassed civil rights arguments. As many of the same reformers also did with abolition, they drew on rights language in a period when they innovated in this area.105 Their basic principle was that discriminatory laws that made illegitimate distinctions among people had no place on the books. These laws were no instrument of order or justice, but rather a bludgeon to remind all Old Northwest people of African Americans’ tenuous political and social position.

Radical activists of both sexes and across racial lines overtly resisted the “Black Laws” and drew much support from the broader Old Northwest antislavery struggle. In Michigan, the fight began with statehood, for by 1837, the antislavery society there already was contributing to the effort to oppose the “Black Laws.” They and other Michigan antislavery people, including those in the Liberty Party after its foundation, fought for the African American vote.106 In 1837 and 1838, the abolitionists asked the Michigan legislature for jury trial for all accused fugitive slaves, and to amend the state constitution to grant “the colored man” the vote.107 The outspoken opposition of Michigan abolitionists to the “Black Laws” continued through the Civil War and after.

The many antislavery foes of the “Black Laws” saw working against such legislation as a necessary part of their broader mission. They made sweeping public claims about the laws’ injustice and about the unity of all people.108 The Ohio Anti-Slavery Society’s work against the “Black Laws” dated back to its foundation in 1835.109 They collected data about the laws and their effects, and about African Americans’ lives in general.110 Their affiliate, the Cuyahoga County Anti-Slavery Society in the Western Reserve, argued in 1838 that their legislators must do away with the “Black Laws.” Austinburg, Ohio abolitionist Betsy Mix Cowles joined in, publishing papers in 1846 and 1847 that demanded the repeal of the Ohio “Black Laws.” While Cowles remained a staunch immediatist, she asked abolitionists of all stripes to join her in this effort.111 This determination to enact repeal was common, for in 1841 in Indiana, the Henry County Female Society also resolved to take direct action against prejudice and to fight racism in their communities. They deployed the frequently cited antislavery trope that all were equal and of the same ancestry, “all nations of the earth are of the same blood.”112 In Illinois in 1843, the Putnam County Female Society adopted opposition to discrimination as its objective, equal with that of fighting slavery, for equal rights convictions motivated their activism. They wrote, “the equality and brotherhood of man is the foundation of abolitionism.”113 The cross-reform ties common throughout the region demonstrate reformers’ sweeping, long-term commitments to fighting racial prejudice.

No shy violets themselves, Old Northwest activists wielded other weapons in the battle for public opinion: they used the printed word to broadcast their efforts against the “Black Laws,” both to register their disgust with these laws and to provide a rationale for their eradication. Across the region, they advertised their campaign against the “Black Laws” and demanded policy change. In Illinois in 1840, the Galesburg Anti-Slavery Society passed resolutions against the laws, and the Will County Anti-Slavery Society published a pamphlet entitled The Slave Code of the State of Illinois, Being an Abstract of Those Laws Now in Force in This State, Which Affect the Rights of Colored People, as Such, Both Bond and Free.114 With this title the Will County Society overtly equated Illinois’ unjust laws with those that governed slaves. In this pamphlet, the Illinois abolitionists excerpted and critiqued the race-based portions of the state constitution in order to prove the need for reform.

Publications like this became central tools against the “Black Laws.” The Will County Society had previously resolved that they needed to publicize in northern Illinois the “Revised Laws” and their many discriminatory provisions. This inspired the pamphlet, wherein these abolitionists reproduced the legal code in lay terms to arouse their fellow citizens to act. Such analysis, they argued, would elicit among their peers “astonishment” that their government permitted what they saw as such approximations of slavery. They expected their readers to feel “disgust” at northerners’ acts that rendered them mere “tools and panders of southern patriarchs.” Also in 1840, the Ohio Yearly Meeting of Friends denounced what they saw as the nefarious practice of hiding the truth from the public concerning slavery’s wide-ranging effects, including the “Black Laws.” They argued that it was their duty to overcome these silencing efforts, and to spread the truth about slavery and these laws’ oppressions to “our fellow citizens.”115 For similar reasons, the Indiana Free Labor Advocate printed the “Black Laws” of Indiana in its pages in 1841—with a critique of them from the Henry County Society—and in 1848.116

As antislavery people argued against the “Black Laws,” they frequently critiqued pro-slavery southerners and their laws. To draw attention to the “Black Laws” and illustrate white self-interest in opposing them, they argued that Old Northwest people were weak, and conformed to southern mores. The Will County Society promoted its underlying goal of removing biased legislation by proving that the “Black Laws” had no place in their free state. They showed how these laws violated constitutional law and egalitarian ideas, and differed little from those of slave states in phrasing and intent.117 Similarly, in 1843 the Ohio American Society argued that the “Black Laws” proved that slavery was not a sectional institution confined to the South, for it infected the entire nation with its influence.118

Antislavery observers in both the Old Northwest and the East saw in the “Black Laws” complicity with slavery and a direct effort to appease neighboring slave states. In 1840, the Will County Society claimed that the ways their state laws obligated individuals and the government to aid slave catchers showed “a servility unequalled by any of her sister states.”119 A New York Whig paper, the Rochester Democrat, too, agreed in 1848 that these laws meant that Old Northwest states submitted to the will of the slave states, and that they preyed upon people who lacked the means to defend themselves. Citing the notorious prejudice in Illinois, they strongly argued against this inequality and for universal citizenship.120 The “Black Laws” certainly became infamous outside the region, but most practical resistance against them arose from within. Like their eastern allies, many Old Northwest activists believed fighting the racial prejudice of the “Black Laws” was essential to achieving their antislavery goals. This was, in the words of New York editor Samuel E. Cornish, the deeper struggle, the “real battleground” they faced, since slavery’s effects were wide-reaching in this hostile climate, and inspired African Americans and their white allies to fight them.121 These effects included warping the nation’s laws in directions that reformers could not justify.

The Old Northwest opponents of the “Black Laws” saw extensive proof of their unconstitutionality, and lamented this. The Will County Society claimed the “Black Laws” imposed penalties that violated the constitutional provision that the punishment should fit the crime. These laws set African Americans apart from the rest of the US population by levying excessive punishments and by treating them as criminals for acts that other people could perform with impunity, including the ability to move freely.122 They also asserted that the laws did not meet the United States constitutional standard wherein “citizens of each state” are “guarantee[d] . . . all the privileges and immunities of the citizens in the several states.”123 Specifically, Illinois’ requirement that African Americans who were citizens of other states post bond upon their entry—against becoming a public burden on society—violated this universal right.124 In 1842, Ohio lawyer John Joliffe made a similar argument, claiming the Ohio laws also breached that same clause of the constitution. He argued that African Americans were citizens, and aimed to prove the inconsistencies of the “Black Laws”: “Admit free negroes to be men, and to be born free in the United States, and it is impossible to frame even a plausible argument against their citizenship.”125 This claim would not have persuaded everyone, certainly, since many of their fellow citizens disagreed with him on even the most basic claims about African American rights.

Antislavery foes of the “Black Laws” extended their arguments about constitutionality even further. The Will County Society found the laws “violated numerous other provisions of the Illinois State Constitution. These included the right to a jury trial and protection against “unreasonable” and unfounded arrests.126 The Indiana Friends (writing about Ohio) echoed these claims in 1848 by arguing that the discriminatory “Black Laws” contradicted the “spirit and principles” of the United States government’s foundation, and violated the terms of both the Northwest Ordinance and the US Constitution. They asserted that all people were entitled to their freedom, both under the terms of the Bill of Rights and of the Ohio Constitution.127 Activists’ concerns with the laws’ inequities extended into the hardships they caused African American children.

Anti-“Black Law” activists targeted the provisions that imposed school inequities on the African American population. As their numbers in the Old Northwest grew slowly, they made only minimal progress in the area of schooling. Segregation and race-based limitations on educational rights were the norm. As was the case across the North, getting even limited access required a hard fight.128 Prior to 1829, there were no laws formally barring African Americans from Ohio’s schools, but with the establishment of public schools that year, such exclusion became formalized.129 Under the new legislation, private schools could still educate African Americans, but public schools could not. In 1849 the Ohio legislature established a formally segregated school system that allowed mixed classrooms in areas with small African American populations.130 African American children had gained the right to an education, but not one of equal standing or location. Illinois law also excluded African Americans from schools, even where they paid taxes equal to those that whites paid.131 The first Michigan constitution barred African Americans from the schools, and later the degree of segregation varied by place. In some areas, it led to African American children’s complete exclusion. Public sentiment in Indiana also kept them out of schools.132 From the perspective of African Americans and their allies, this segregation substantially impeded the path to full equality of opportunity, and they fought hard against it.

Old Northwest anti-prejudice activists resisted these laws and expanded African Americans’ educational rights by founding schools and teaching in them.133 The Indiana Friends, most notably those from eastern Indiana, were major opponents of the “Black Laws” who established integrated schools and opposed the creation of segregated ones.134 These reformers also took their grievances directly to the courts and the legislatures whenever they could.

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Some opponents of the “Black Laws” worked from within the legal system, as did early Ohio state attorney and judge Francis Dunlavy. He pushed antislavery and pro–African American positions from the bench in the 1830s. In 1836 he used a legal opinion to proclaim slaves brought into Ohio—with the consent of their owners or in their company—free and secure from court prosecution. He believed that those who fled against their masters’ will were not entitled to their freedom, but those whose masters brought them to the state under legitimate circumstances had the right to resist unjust capture.135 By 1840, antislavery organizations had taken up this argument and used states’ rights to claim that slaves became free when they entered Ohio. This rationale had gained traction by the 1850s when officials presumed African Americans that entered Ohio were free, unless they were fugitives.136

The courts helped activists in another respect when they were unwilling to enforce the “Black Laws”; reformers used this to publicize their cause. While African Americans lacked the right to testimony under the “Black Laws,” the Ohio Supreme Court granted them the right to submit “affidavits,” which gave them some limited say in the court.137 In the fall of 1842 an Ohio judge spoke out against the legality of the “Black Laws,” claiming the legislature lacked the power to stop African Americans from settling in the state.138 In addition, when in 1843 William Logan of Richland County, Ohio, went on trial for providing food to a fugitive, the County Court dismissed the case. They did so on the grounds that this provision of the “Black Laws” was “unconstitutional.”139 Interestingly, the Court refused to make this judgment known openly—as the National Anti-Slavery Standard wrote—for they feared offending Ohioans who favored stringent punishment for this act.140 It was up to antislavery people to bring to light such judicial opposition to the “Black Laws.”141 These legal victories notwithstanding, some Old Northwest activists directly experienced the impact of the “Black Laws” and concretely resisted them.

A wide range of Old Northwesterners—both African American and white—had to fight the effects of the “Black Laws” in the courts. Alabama-born abolitionist William T. Allan wrote in June 1846 to the Western Citizen about his misadventures in attempting to travel across Illinois with one of his family’s former slaves, an older man named Richmond. Allan’s father had freed his slaves upon his death, and they had moved to Illinois, where Allan and four of his five siblings lived. When the two men were in Peoria, Richmond was working in a stable when a man observed him and forced him to the magistrate’s office, and subsequently, to the sheriff’s. The man claimed Richmond was a runaway, and despite Allan’s intimate knowledge of Richmond’s true free status, the court refused to admit him as a witness, claiming he was a “party interested.” The judge put Richmond in jail and arrested Allan for aiding a runaway. Allan was, in accordance with the “Black Laws,” forced to pay $500 for this act and, as of the time of his writing, was scheduled for a trial the following October. The judiciary imposed this strict punishment for what Allan described as “the crime of riding in a buggy with an old friend!”142

While Allan had quickly obtained evidence proving the elderly man’s freedom, including his father’s will, the judge claimed this was insufficient. In his letter, Allan argued that this proved the “Black Laws” were unjust in violating Richmond’s rights—and his own. The Illinois government, in his view, obsequiously followed the dictates of the slave states. He argued that Illinois was in fact a “mere appendage” to the states where slavery itself was legal. For him, this wrongful treatment exemplified the disgrace Illinois sustained on account of the “Black Laws.”143 In Allan’s view, the court exhibited substantial bias in such cases, which influenced his determination to combat these laws in their entirety.

Beyond Allan, other Old Northwest “Black Laws” foes criticized this legislation for its effects on African Americans as both potential perpetrators and victims of crimes. The Will County activists injected a note of sly wit into their critique of the Illinois laws with a summary of section 24. This clause enabled the government to levy a fine upon people who allowed “slaves or servants of color” to gather in groups “for the purposes of reveling” in buildings or spaces they owned. The authors claimed that they could not tell if the lawmakers intended this measure to protect whites against African American uprisings, or the latter group against immorality. If virtue or fear of riot were at issue, the abolitionists argued that a better course would have been to “have prohibited intercourse with the whites.”144 They thus insinuated that the white population was the source of debauchery for African Americans. On a more serious note, they also argued that the present law insufficiently protected African Americans in Illinois from abuse. Under the revised laws of 1833, certificates of freedom were sometimes inadequate evidence against slaveholder claims, which carried more weight in the court.

These laws permitted slaveholders to fraudulently take people into slavery and even sell African Americans, or the owner of their labor could assign them to work for someone else. They supposedly had the right to refuse employment they did not desire, but in the view of the Will County authors, they would be unlikely to exercise this right, given the “arbitrary and irresponsible power” masters exerted over them.145 This wide-ranging critique demonstrates the willingness of anti-“Black Laws” activists to draw on the evident parallels with slavery that the laws created. This also explains the inextricable nature of reformers’ opposition to the “Black Laws” and slavery. They knew that the laws’ effects extended well beyond formal legal discrimination, and could affect the most private aspects of African Americans’ lives.

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Opponents of the “Black Laws” across the Old Northwest extended their egalitarian convictions to the laws’ controversial efforts to regulate interracial marriage. They opposed marriage restrictions despite the fact that unions across racial lines had been unpopular nationally since the mid-eighteenth century. Legislatures outlawed such marriages, revealing a preoccupation with interracial sex at both the state and national levels. Lawmakers barred these pairings to preserve white privilege and social stratification.146 Indiana’s long history of regulating interracial relationships dated back to 1818.147 In Illinois, an 1829 law forbade interracial marriage outright with significant potential penalties that included fines, whipping, or imprisonment.148 In relatively permissive Michigan, the legislature nonetheless outlawed interracial marriage in 1838, deeming such marriages invalid, and the resultant children to be without legitimacy. Initially, this law went unenforced, but the legislature subsequently stipulated a $500 fine for officiants, and fines and jail time for couples. In the late 1850s, anxieties about such marriages grew, as the press in Michigan evidenced.149 While many of its other laws were stringent, Ohio came very late to the official banning of interracial marriage, for it only passed its first such law in 1861.150

“Black Laws” opponents frequently discussed interracial relationships, despite that this was a treacherous topic. Support for them potentially risked playing into the hands of proslavery people who used this contentious issue to discredit reformers by claiming they advocated it. In 1841, the Philanthropist railed against laws regulating marriage choice.151 They called them “a disgrace” and an “impertinent interference with individual liberty.” While the author argued that the government had no business interfering with marriage, they also implicitly denied that abolitionists and other foes of the “Black Laws” favored interracial matches, and insinuated with disdain that legislators did: “If our legislature chose to pass resolutions binding themselves never to marry colored women, they are at liberty to do so—probably some such pledge may be needed to restrain an erratic choice. But, the people require no legislative enactment to regulate their taste,” since this was a private matter, and not one of government’s “legitimate functions.”152 The author may have intended this reference to “erratic choice” to distance him or herself from association with interracial marriage, an accusation antislavery people often faced from their foes.153 This could have been either a concession to Ohio’s racist society, or another example of activists mocking the bias of others.

In the antislavery press, writers linked their opposition to marriage restrictions to the larger burden that “Black Laws” discrimination imposed. In February 1842, the Free Labor Advocate denounced the state legislature for forbidding interracial marriage. The editor of the Advocate denied that he promoted such marriages, but decried laws on this issue as beneath the “dignity” of the legislature. They were “tyrannical,” and could increase the load Old Northwest African Americans shouldered—the “prejudice which is crushing to the earth the free people of color in the professedly free states.” The Indiana law included draconian provisions to create a “board of inspections” to ascertain the race of people who wanted to marry.154 Despite the shaky footing on which support for these controversial unions put them, antislavery activists engaged with the debate over racial categories and boundaries in order to advance their fight for a more equal society. While some areas in the North acted more quickly to permit interracial marriage, both the former Old Northwest and the South left most of their anti-miscegenation laws in place long after the Civil War, and indeed, these restrictions continued through the 1960s.155

Old Northwest activists’ discussions of interracial relationships occasionally ventured beyond consensual marriage to recognizing that the “Black Laws” could contribute to whites’ attacks on African American women. The Will County Society decried how the Illinois “Black Laws” facilitated white sexual license and denied African Americans legal recourse for sexual assault. With this, they tapped into a wider concern at the time about how slavery and biased laws led to the sexual exploitation of women. While the Illinois legislature had forbidden interracial marriage, it placed “illicit intercourse” under minimal sanction. Old Northwest agitators claimed that the result was white immorality and tyranny; the testimony law meant that “any pale faced scoundrel” could invade the home of “a colored man” and attack “his family” with impunity. They constructed this crime as an offense against men and the family unit, not one against the individual women or girls who would be the likely victims of such a “scoundrel.”156

Thus while they addressed the delicate subject of interracial sexual abuse—and implicitly protected women—the Will County authors did so using language that invoked African American men’s right to an intact family unit. In effect, they presented this safe family as a gender protection men deserved. A privilege of manhood was the right to have the household undisturbed by other men, and the “Black Laws” violated this by denying African American men this defensive right. These activists drew upon the rhetoric of domesticity and the sanctity of the family to enhance their anti-discrimination claims. With such arguments they would doubtless have aimed at persuading their readers to see the flaws in the legislation.

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Beyond publications like the Will County pamphlet, opponents of the “Black Laws” used petitions extensively to capture their legislatures’ attention and demand action. The Quakers were among the pioneers of this effort, and those in Indiana petitioned their state legislature each year calling for repeal of these laws.157 Petitions against the Ohio “Black Laws” began in 1829.158 The Ohio legislature greeted African Americans’ petitions with a controversy in 1839 when they debated whether recognizing them would acknowledge African American citizenship.159 In 1843, the Ohio American Society also petitioned for repeal.160 Eventually both the Ohio general assembly and the state senate, under Liberty Party pressure, acknowledged the anti-“Black Laws” petitions by appointing a committee to review them in the 1840s, although repeal came slowly.161

Antislavery societies from across the region and throughout the decades often used petitions to protest against the “Black Laws,” especially the women among them. The Putnam County (Illinois) Female Society resolved to send one such petition to the Illinois legislature in January 1843, along with another that was against Texas annexation. They claimed that free states must remove the local “Black Laws,” all national discriminatory legislation, and provisions that forced free state citizens to prop up slavery. Their own duty, as they saw it, was to make their views known to Congress and the Illinois legislature.162 In 1846, the Galesburg Anti-Slavery Society followed suit, and that same year in Michigan, the 46 members of the Female Benevolent and Antislavery Society of Lenawee petitioned their legislature to remove the word “white” from the state constitution’s limitations on rights.163 They asked other women throughout Michigan to join their effort, and thus exemplified the links between the work against slavery and the “Black Laws.”164 “Black Laws” opponents provided further evidence of their diverse strategies with their willingness to seek aid even in unlikely places, such as in the usually cautious political parties.

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The harsh critics of the “Black Laws” were not confined to African American activists and immediate antislavery organizers, for their work was both affected by and influenced all politics in the Old Northwest. At times more radical activists collaborated with politicians from third party as well as mainstream factions. Among the political antislavery men who took on the “Black Laws” was the Whig, Benjamin Wade, who served in the Ohio Senate beginning in 1837. He rapidly took a stand against these laws, but this early effort failed. The Democrats, there—as ever—stalwart opponents of African American rights, quickly regained control of the legislature in 1838, but Wade and his law partner Joshua Giddings continued to represent African American rights in the antislavery wing of the Whig Party while it lasted.165 In 1846, Asahel Lewis, the Whig candidate for the Ohio Senate from the Western Reserve, also made “Black Laws” repeal a priority. Democrats tried to portray this as radical abolitionism to undermine him, but Lewis ultimately won the closely contested election.166 Outside of Ohio, some Michigan Whigs also worked to obtain the vote for African American men.167 These men were fairly unusual in their vocal opposition to the “Black Laws,” for among Whigs the willingness to work for rights, regardless of race, was rare. In the Old Northwest, they faced substantial competition, including from the antislavery third parties that influenced most of them usually to oppose African American rights.

The Liberty Party was less cautious, and repeatedly proclaimed a belief in equality, notably in the major party platform of 1844. Especially in Illinois, Ohio, and Michigan, it fought against the “Black Laws” and for Black suffrage and personal liberty laws. The Illinois Liberty Party passed resolutions against the “Black Laws” in May 1842, a position that local organizations in the state echoed.168 This included the 1842 Bureau County Liberty Convention which resolved that such “unjust” laws delimited by skin color were “absurd, and consequently of no moral force or obligation.”169 Similar claims came from Knox County that same year.170 Since the Liberty Party took a stronger stance for African American rights in the Old Northwest than did other parties, they gave it some support in return. African Americans were active participants in the Michigan Liberty Party, and in Ohio, biracial schoolteacher Charles Langston, among others, joined in. Langston, a Virginia-born Oberlin alumnus, was an outspoken foe of the Ohio “Black Laws” and a frequent participant in Ohio antislavery societies.171 Across the region, African American speakers often addressed Liberty conventions, and the 1843 Black National Convention at Buffalo endorsed the Liberty Party.172 That year, Liberty Party candidates placed “Black Laws” repeal on their platforms, including Dr. Demming of Jefferson County, Indiana, who advocated cleansing the Indiana legal code of such laws.173

The actions of white political antislavery activists in the Old Northwest stretch extant knowledge about this group’s racial views and reform practices. Previous scholars have revealed white antislavery reformers’ failure to push for sufficient social change and combat their own deeply imbedded racism. While evidence of prejudice is widespread, the claim that white activists’ racial visions were inevitably limited remains open to question.174 Race certainly affected social and political relations nationally, but in the Old Northwest it was impossible for activists to ignore its local effects on rights. White political abolitionists’ actions there against the “Black Laws” belie arguments that they were largely ignorant of African American problems. Avowing rights and resisting white privilege, both in their region and nationally, they operated in a period of shifting and solidifying racial categories.175

In the tense racial environment of the Old Northwest, some unusually egalitarian people pushed the boundaries of the expected, even for Liberty Party adherents who were already outside of the mainstream for their time. In one such case, the views of Illinois antislavery women of the Liberty Party in the 1840s mark them as radicals for their gender and their party. Their willingness to address equal rights for African Americans counters other claims that most white antislavery women were indifferent to the post-emancipation fate of former slaves, for these Old Northwesterners actually displayed more interest in egalitarianism than historians have previously noted.176 The views on race they articulated as they fought the “Black Laws” were so groundbreaking that they placed these reformers beyond the typical understanding of the Liberty Party platform.

While some political antislavery people’s racial justice convictions were weakening by 1842, this was not universally the case. At that point the Liberty Party had begun to shift its rhetorical emphasis away from immediate emancipation and equal rights for African Americans and toward expounding fears that a southern conspiracy, the “slave power,” would subvert the northern economy and its political independence.177 Despite this trend, some Liberty men and women continued to advocate race equality in ways that resemble those usually associated with Garrisonian abolitionists, writing both anti-racist and pointedly radical public proclamations and newspaper articles.178 Some of them, like Illinois antislavery activist Mary Brown Davis, argued that African Americans’ mental and emotional capabilities justified abolishing slavery and removing laws like the “Black Laws” that impeded equal rights. In 1844, Davis explicitly disputed claims of African American mental deficiency as she wrote, “The colored race, so far from being inferior to the white, would with the same advantages, not only equal, but surpass them in intellectual acquirements.” She claimed that her fellow Illinois activists needed to uncover and root out inequality and slavery.179 The Liberty Party was decentralized enough to permit a spectrum of political activity within its boundaries. These positions on African American rights and capabilities were actually even on the fringes of immediatism for their awareness of the wide-ranging effects of discrimination, and thus also particularly unusual for the relatively more moderate Liberty Party.

While the Liberty Party typically opposed the “Black Laws,” it did not support the African American vote across the board.180 While its national strength was waning by 1848, nonetheless that year in Illinois the party still included African Americans and was going strong against the “Black Laws.” It passed equal rights resolutions and rallied against the 1848 state constitution that enhanced race-based discrimination. Despite activists’ concerted efforts, the new constitution passed.181 For all of the diversity of these methods, the ever-resourceful anti-”Black Laws” activists had still more; they pushed for justice with other levers, since the local struggle for legal equity had strong connections with the Black Convention Movement.

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Along with white lawyers, editors, and abolitionists, African Americans who fought the “Black Laws” interracially, alone, and through organizations proved their mettle in working for their own rights. Many, including a pioneering corps of college-educated men and tradesmen, joined a local and national movement for racial advancement.182 From the 1830s through the 1860s, the Black Convention Movement had a broad agenda that fought numerous political and social ills, but chiefly of interest here are the ways it advanced rights by pushing to overturn the Old Northwest “Black Laws” and fugitive slave laws. It was a key method African Americans used to promote a broad human rights agenda they shared with their white allies like Benjamin Stanton.

Both the National and the State Black Convention Movements were expansive tools in the fight for the equality that Old Northwest African Americans demanded. A lull followed a brief stint of national activity in the early 1830s, and state-level meetings ensued. The first National Negro Convention met at Philadelphia in 1830, and these assemblies came together annually through 1834, before merging in 1835 with white activists to form the American Moral Reform Society, which had a broader agenda. Old Northwest African American leaders had initially only minimally participated in the national conventions. They had two delegates at the conventions from 1832 to 1834, but there is no evidence of their representation in 1831 or 1835.183

Later, as they founded local organizations, Old Northwest African Americans became much more active. They began to organize state meetings as early as 1835 in Ohio.184 In 1841 they started more thoroughly publicizing their efforts, as the Ohio State Committee of Colored Men worked for “Black Laws” repeal.185 In Cleveland, the local African American population and their white allies actively combatted against these laws; they petitioned their state legislature and hired several itinerant lecturers.186 Another early meeting was in January of 1842, when a group of African American men in Detroit rallied to enfranchise the men of their state. They proposed a petition to their state legislature for that purpose, but despite an enthusiastic response from the state legislative committee that received the petitions, they did not achieve this goal quickly. The government’s stance on the issue wavered, and they only took decisive action on this right in 1870.187 The Convention movement fought a drawn-out battle for equality there, as elsewhere.

As the locations of these meetings indicate, some anti-”Black Laws” activism was urban in nature. In this era, the battle against the “Black Laws” in the Old Northwest’s few burgeoning cities relied upon a critical mass of African American people that at times drew the ire of racist whites. Cities not only threatened oppression, however, for their larger populations enabled African Americans to develop a centralized leadership corps.188 The majority of the population of the Old Northwest was outside of the cities, and rural regions and smaller towns also had their fiery leaders and rank-and-file activists, especially before the 1850s. The cities, nonetheless, were the logical location for such large-scale meetings.

The Black National Convention Movement revived as a separate movement in Buffalo, New York, in 1843. Leaders of the Black Convention Movement in their home states participated in these national meetings, but most men who planned the 1843 convention were easterners. Ohio was the only Old Northwest state represented in the organization process, although the attendees included representatives from Illinois, Ohio, and Michigan.189 The adherents met irregularly, with the next national meeting following at Cleveland in 1848.190 After the movement’s national rebirth, organization of state Black conventions proceeded apace.191

The national conventions of the 1840s had wide-ranging agendas, but particularly focused on the “Black Laws” and the right to vote. The attendees at these meetings also worked to overturn the social and economic barriers their fellow citizens had erected, including colonization.192 At the 1843 convention, the assembled men stated that they would fight any laws that impeded their mobility, settlement, and educational rights. They called for egalitarian rule, and “laws, just and equal for all the people.”193 In terms of methods, while the convention displayed little faith in political parties, calling them “the slaves of slavery too,” the men there remained hopeful that the reform work of societies such as theirs could reveal the errors of the biased laws in the otherwise promising Old Northwest. The Old Northwesterners at the convention used this platform to publicize the problems with the “Black Laws.” Their compatriots understood these challenges, but at these conventions they nevertheless created numerous arguments that this region would be an auspicious place for African Americans to relocate. While they had few illusions about the Old Northwest’s flaws, the attendees argued that the region’s people suffered from mere redeemable human errors, and would eventually replace these faulty laws as the people acquired “a better understanding of the great laws of humanity.”194 According to these men, their conventions’ actions would be central to enacting the necessary change.

The presenters at the 1843 convention believed their course was clear, for they argued that self-organization held the key to equality. Despite the interracial, egalitarian work of white activists, the Convention movement’s participants also argued they must take separate action in their own behalf. While they appreciated white abolitionists’ good intentions and refrained from directly criticizing them, African American activists refused to wait and expect others to take care of their rights. They wrote that in addition to interracial activity, they must pursue the “rich boon of freedom and equal rights” for themselves.195 From their perspective, whites’ principled efforts had created insufficient change in African American people’s lives, and thus interracial activism may not have been working quickly enough, by their standards.

Independent African American activism may not have grown out of a desire to supersede biracial methods, but instead found its motivation in ideas of autonomy and in the desire to continue with a multifaceted strategy. To the “Black Convention Movement” attendees, both integrated and independent activism appeared appealing and necessary. Also in 1843, the Michigan Black Convention admired their allies’ persistent efforts. While whites in Michigan had fought on their behalf for “fourteen years,” they remained under attack. To attain full citizenship, African Americans thus had to augment the efforts of these “warm white friends” with their own work for rights. This self-determination, as the delegates to that Michigan convention saw it in gendered terms, could demonstrate that they deserved equality, as they could prove by their “upright, correct, and manly stand in the defence of our Liberty.”196 By this logic, self-determination and manliness were linked.

Some of their peers saw disadvantages to separate activism, including Old Northwest antislavery groups like the Ohio Society that were mainly white. They opposed holding separate Black Conventions in 1850, for while they did support a convention, they thought that it should be integrated, because segregation had contributed to prejudice. They wrote, “every thing that tends to separate the colored people from the whites, aids in building up an impassible barrier to their progress.” In effect, they regarded separate action as implicitly condoning segregating measures like the “Black Laws.”197 Nevertheless, their African American peers felt differently, and proceeded with their convention. Given the extent of the discrimination they faced, they required aid from all available sources.

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Across the Old Northwest, the Black Conventions targeted the “Black Laws” by deploying classic antebellum universal rights arguments and tactics. The 1843 Michigan Convention used what its attendees called universal justice principles to argue against their state legislature’s refusal to grant them citizenship rights, the franchise, and education, and to denounce their “taxation without representation.” Using the Declaration of Independence, they claimed citizens’ right to form, modify, or depose governments that violated their founding principles. To claim this right, all men should have the vote—in their terms, “a natural right belonging to man”—due to both his humanity and his ability to take responsibility for his actions. Since they claimed these rights were universal, the provisions in the second clause of the Michigan Constitution reserving the right to vote for white men conflicted with the first clause, “which expressly declares that no man or set of men are entitled to exclusive or separate privileges.”198 They called for Michigan’s African Americans to petition their legislature continually until they obtained equal rights and the vote, and did so at least six times between 1843 and 1859. In addition to conventions and petitions, these men also used referenda and the legal system to fight their deprivation of rights.199 The 1844 Ohio Convention used similar arguments concerning the “almost insurmountable barriers” to equality the “Black Laws” imposed.200

The Black Conventions subjected what they saw as racist whites’ flawed logic to sharp scrutiny to prove the “Black Laws’” weak and unjust foundations. The men at the Michigan meeting published an address by William Lambert to publicize the cause among their fellow citizens. This address argued that African Americans’ treatment ought to elicit compassion from those who blocked their progress by ascribing their low status to innate character and intellectual defects. While Lambert’s critique, as a whole, encompassed a range of original arguments, one passage clearly proves that activists forged strong intellectual links between national and state Black conventions. Lambert drew directly on an 1835 national address by William Whipper, Alfred Niger, and Augustus Price for a section of his Michigan address of 1843.201 Lambert gave no indication of the borrowed origin of these words and ideas. The speech attacked notions of African American inferiority by noting that the weight of injustice lay so heavily upon their shoulders that any of their achievements that appeared to parallel those of whites actually by far surpassed them:

If then, amidst all of the[se] difficulties . . . we present an equal amount of intelligence with that class of our fellow citizens that have been so peculiarly favored; a very grave and dangerous question presents itself to the world, on the natural equality of man: and the best rule of logic, would place those who have oppressed us, in the scale of inferiority.202

This critique brought the obstacles preventing African American rights into sharp focus, and mocked their antagonists. These men, “the oppressed of this state,” proclaimed their determination to work tirelessly against this discrimination, with their words and in their private and public writings, until they saw justice served.203 They had many strong leaders in that cause.

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A notable anti-racist organizer from Illinois was John Jones, a major player in the Black Convention Movement and that group’s work for the repeal of the Illinois “Black Laws.” His actions, and the situation in Illinois, provide a case study of the struggle for rights in the Old Northwest, and how confronting the “Black Laws” head on remained a necessity as African Americans’ neighbors sought to reinforce these laws. This freeborn biracial man began his public life in 1847, two years after he and his wife Mary Jane had moved to Chicago, when that city was still in its infancy. John opened a tailoring shop on Clark Street, one of the pioneering African American–owned businesses in that city, which at the time had fewer than 300 African American residents.204 In those early years, Jones met two white abolitionist allies, Charles V. Dyer, a doctor, and Lemanuel Covell Paine Freer, a well-known lawyer. They maintained friendships for the rest of his life. Freer aided Jones in his correspondence and subsequently taught him to read and write.205

John Jones began to formally fight the “Black Laws” in 1847 by joining the debate about that year’s Constitutional Convention. Many delegates there claimed that an African American influx into Illinois would imperil white labor. In response, Jones wrote a series of articles in the Western Citizen that argued for African American rights and legal equality. Among his chief points against the “Black Laws” were that the definition of free citizens omitted the word “white,” the Enlightenment’s ideals, the principles of republican government, and African Americans’ patriotic efforts in the Revolutionary War.206 Jones argued that the “Black Laws” bore primary responsibility for African Americans’ poverty in Illinois, and that they restricted all aspects of their lives, from economic to civil to personal.

He knew this from his own direct experience. In accordance with these laws, both John and Mary Jane had obtained certificates of freedom from the clerk in Madison County prior to their move to Chicago. As they had traveled through Illinois, local authorities used the “Black Laws” to detain them, claiming they might be fugitives. With the good word of their stagecoach driver, the Joneses acquired their freedom once more, and continued along their way.207

Jones was in good company in opposing the laws: there were scores of concerned people within the Illinois antislavery movement. Many of them submitted anti-“Black Laws” petitions in 1847. The Illinois Senate responded to these petitions with claims that no laws could ever match such unequal parties, “no acts of legislation will or can ever raise the African in the country above the level in which the petitions find him.”208 This blunt refutation helps clarify why, in January of 1848, the Reverend Levi Spencer feared that the Illinois legislature would add to the “Black Laws,” which they did later that year. Spencer, born in New York, moved in 1839 to Galesburg, Illinois, and thereafter to Bloomington.209 He argued that the legislature’s 1848 act proved the extent of political and moral corruption prevalent in Illinois, which “cruel prejudice” had created.210

Despite these vehement objections, the Illinois legislature indeed passed the anti-immigration provision, Article XIV of the 1848 Constitution. A popular vote overwhelmingly confirmed it. Jones wrote to the Western Citizen in July of 1848 about this measure, claiming that it deprived Americans of their rights: “I view it with regret and alarm, because it attempts to prohibit natural-born citizens of the United States from settling in this state on account of the color of their skin.”211 While this was dire news to the foes of the “Black Laws,” the Constitution of 1848 did contain one measure they applauded, which was that it finally and explicitly outlawed slavery in Illinois.212

This overall setback failed to dissuade African American activists in Illinois, for they made increasingly outspoken protests against discrimination through formal organizations. In August 1848, African American Chicagoans met and chose John Jones and the Reverend Abraham T. Hall as the delegates to that year’s Colored National Convention in Cleveland, where the main subject was repeal of the Old Northwest’s discriminatory laws.213 The fifty to seventy delegates who met there on September 6 included more westerners than attended the 1843 meeting. They elected Frederick Douglass president and Jones vice president. Among other topics, the participants discussed repeal of the “Black Laws” and how they could improve African Americans’ living conditions and status.214 Jones’s solution was that they needed to replace menial labor with skilled and professional jobs. Upon his return to Chicago in September, Jones united with other local African American activists in a correspondence committee aimed at political organization, including continuing to petition the legislature for repeal of the “Black Laws.”215

The Old Northwest saw some positive changes in the late 1840s, thanks to the Black Convention Movement’s lobbying and the aid of political abolitionists. The partial repeal of Ohio’s “Black Laws” in 1849 was, to a degree, an outcome of political antislavery efforts as well as negotiations among the political parties in Ohio. In addition to finally addressing the series of petitions against the “Black Laws” that began in 1829, this change also drew strength from a deal between the Democrats and the Free Soil Party in which the Free Soil legislators from the Western Reserve were instrumental. Even though the Free Soil Party had quite moderate attitudes, including containment of slavery rather than its immediate abolition, and a preference for southern African Americans staying in the South, it nonetheless fought for “Black Laws” repeal.216 In Indiana, the Free Soil politicians also unsuccessfully opposed the provisions of their state’s 1850 constitution that shored up their own racialized laws.217 Political antislavery people, then as earlier, were unpredictable but occasionally useful allies.

Partisanship influenced the outcome of the 1849 Ohio repeal. Then the legislators abolished the registration requirement and the bond payment, testimony, and job restrictions, but the state kept its remaining “Black Laws,” since the Democrats refused to support egalitarianism. Even the progress that this repeal exemplified was thus highly qualified, and the fight for the laws’ full abolition continued for decades.218 In fact, the Ohio Democrats espoused increasingly strong anti–African American views and support for the “Black Laws” as the Republican Party emerged and gained in strength.219

While the 1849 repeal removed some of the Ohio “Black Laws,” legalized discrimination remained strong. African Americans remained disfranchised, without jury rights, subject to the poor relief law, and faced new inequities in the schools. “Black Laws” repeal consequently stayed at the top of the Ohio Convention’s agenda, as well as in the other states. In 1849 and 1850, they composed and disseminated petitions against the remaining laws. The 1850 Black Convention attendees targeted both the Ohio “Black Laws” and national unequal laws, for in their resolutions, they acknowledged that they had no obligation to obey unjust legislation. This language approached nullification, the radical political strategy that nineteenth-century Americans usually associated with southern states’ rights theories.220 In 1850, the Ohio Convention reiterated the essential nature of their right to vote, but they and their compatriots in other states retained wider-ranging concerns, which in their hostile area began to more frequently include efforts to aid fugitives.221 The longstanding connections activists drew between the “Black Laws” and federal fugitive slave legislation also eventually informed their responses to the worsening legal ambiance when the Fugitive Slave Act passed in 1850.

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The racial climate of the Old Northwest, and resistance to it, set the context for struggles not only against the “Black Laws” but also against slavery there. Advocates of abolition, too, found significantly enhanced resistance in the region due to their neighbors’ racial views, which made it all the more difficult to change the local social and political environment.

These struggles over the “Black Laws” prove that in the antebellum Old Northwest, people hotly contested community and ideological boundaries, and activists frequently faced both hostile words and weapons. Many of the residents of these newly settled polities were exceptionally unsympathetic to antislavery and egalitarian ideas. Their pervasive public resistance to activism—which extended well past the few previously studied incidents—demonstrates that recently founded communities sought social cohesion. In the face of this intense local opposition, Old Northwest antislavery people sought support elsewhere, uniting with national reformers and forming networks across vast western distances. While their experience as activists differed from that of their peers in northeastern states, they were unusually connected with one another over the miles. Whether mobile or stationary, they became hardened to opposition and resolute in their determination to gather publicly and shape their region’s political culture.