NOTES

Preface

1. See, Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York, 1988); John Hope Franklin, Reconstruction After the Civil War (Chicago, 1961); Kenneth M. Stampp, The Era of Reconstruction, 1865–1877 (New York, 1965); Robert Cruden, The Negro in Reconstruction (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1969); Rembert W. Patrick, The Reconstruction of the Nation (New York, 1967); Allen W. Trelease, Reconstruction: The Great Experiment (New York, 1971); W. R. Brock, An American Crisis (New York, 1963). W.E.B. DuBois’s classic revisionist study, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Blacks Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (New York, 1935), likewise makes only brief reference to northern blacks.

2. Foner, Reconstruction; 192; Franklin, Reconstruction After the Civil War, 43, 74, 109–10, 140–41, 172; Stampp, The Era of Reconstruction, 47n, 141.

3. Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York, 2008), xiii-xlv; Robert O. Self, Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, 2003) 1, 10–11, 331–32; Matthew J. Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 2006), 1–4. See also Jeanne F. Theoharis and Komozi Woodward, eds., Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, 1940–1980 (New York, 2003).

4. Leslie A. Schwalm, Emancipation’s Diaspora: Race and Reconstruction in the Upper Midwest (Chapel Hill, 2009), 5, 115, 266.

5. Andrew Deimer, “Reconstructing Philadelphia: African Americans and Politics in the Post-Civil War North,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 133 (January 2009): 29–58; David Quigley, Second Founding: New York City: Reconstruction, and the Making of American Democracy (New York, 2004).

6. In addition to works by Schwalm, Deimer, and Quigley, see, for example, David A. Gerber, Black Ohio and the Color Line, 1860–1915 (Urbana, 1976); Ira V. Brown, The Negro in Pennsylvania History (University Park, Pa., 1970); Davison M. Douglas, Jim Crow Moves North: The Battle over Northern School Segregation, 1865–1954 (Cambridge, Eng., 2005); Elmer R. Rusco, “Good Time Coming?” Black Nevadans in the Nineteenth Century (Westport, Ct., 1975); Emma Lou Thornbrough, The Negro in Indiana (Indianapolis, 1957); Eugene H. Berwanger, The West and Reconstruction (Urbana, 1981); Roger D. Bridges, “Equality Deferred: Civil Rights for Illinois Blacks, 1865–1885,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 74 (Summer 1981): 82–108; Edward R. Price, Jr., “Let the Law be Just: The Quest for Racial Equality in Pennsylvania 1780–1915” (Ph.D. diss., Pennsylvania State University, 1973); Arthur O. White, “The Black Movement Against Jim Crow Education in Buffalo, New York, 1800–1900,” Phylon 30 (Winter 1969): 375–93; Marion Thompson Wright, “Negro Suffrage in New Jersey, 1776–1875,” Journal of Negro History 33 (April 1948): 168–224.

7. Schwalm, Emancipation’s Diaspora, 317n2.

8. See Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, Mass., 2003); Ira Berlin, ed., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, series 2, vol. 1 (Cambridge, Eng., 1982); Steven Hahn, Steven F. Miller, Susan E. O’Donovan, John C. Rodrique, and Leslie S. Rowland, eds., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, series 3, vol. 1 (Chapel Hill, 2008).

Chapter 1

1. See, for example, Vincent Harding, There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America (New York, 1982), 117–19; Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease, They Who Would Be Free: Blacks’ Search for Freedom, 1830–1861 (New York, 1974), 144–45, 174–92, 284–85; Leon Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790–1861 (Chicago, 1961), 66–77, 903–95; and James Oliver Horton, Free People of Color: Inside the African American Community (Washington, D.C., 1993), 151–52.

2. See, for example, Howard Holman Bell, ed., Minutes of the Proceedings of the National Negro Conventions, 1830–1864 (New York, 1969), 11–15; James Brewer Stewart, Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery, 2d ed. (New York, 1996), 134–38; Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease, “Negro Conventions and the Problem of Black Leadership,” Journal of Black Studies 2 (September 1971): 29–30; Pease and Pease, They Who Would Be Free, 144–49, 152–53, 156–57, 164–68, 192–93; David E. Swift, Black Prophets of Justice: Activist Clergy before the Civil War (Baton Rouge, La., 1989), 276–79; Thomas A. Sanelli, “The Struggle for Black Suffrage in Pennsylvania, 1838–1870” (Ph.D. diss., Temple University, 1977), 102–3, 118–20; James Adolphus Fisher, “A History of the Political and Social Development of the Black Community in California, 1850–1950” (Ph.D. diss., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1972), 32–56; and Phyllis F. Field, The Politics of Race in New York: The Struggle for Black Suffrage in the Civil War Era (Ithaca, N.Y., 1982), 91–97.

3. See John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge, Mass., 2002); Leon Litwack, “The Emancipation of the Negro Abolitionist,” in The Antislavery Vanguard: New Essays on the Abolitionists, ed. Martin Duberman (Princeton, N.J., 1965), 137–38; and James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, “The Affirmation of Manhood: Black Garrisonians in Antebellum Boston,” in Courage and Conscience: Black and White Abolitionists in Boston, ed. Donald M. Jacobs (Bloomington, Ind., 1993), 142.

4. Harding, There Is a River, 125–26.

5. See Stewart, Holy Warriors, 128–31; and Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists (New York, 1969), 47–51.

6. Stewart, Holy Warriors, 131–32; Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease, “Antislavery Ambivalence: Immediatism, Expediency, Race,” American Quarterly 17 (Winter 1965): 682–95; and Litwack, “The Emancipation of the Negro Abolitionist,” 139–40.

7. Litwack, “The Emancipation of the Negro Abolitionist,” 149 (quotation); Stanley Harrold, The Rise of Aggressive Abolitionism: Addresses to the Slaves (Lexington, Ky., 2004), 17, 93–95; and Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease, “Ends, Means, and Attitudes: Black-White Conflict in the Antislavery Movement,” Civil War History 18 (June 1972): 117–28.

8. See, for example, Julie Winch, Philadelphia’s Black Elite: Activism, Accommodation, and the Struggle for Autonomy, 1787–1848 (Philadelphia, 1988), 109–29; Dorothy Parker Wesley, “Integration versus Separatism: William Cooper Nell’s Role in the Struggle for Equality,” in Courage and Conscience, ed. Jacobs, 214; Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease, Bound with Them in Chains: A Biographical History of the Antislavery Movement (Westport, 1972), 178–79; and Waldo Martin, The Mind of Frederick Douglass (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1984), 165–67, 172–85, 219–20, 281–82. On northern blacks’ attachment to middle-class values, see Patrick Rael, Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2002), 52–53, 119–20, 125–38, 198–99.

9. Litwack, “The Emancipation of the Negro Abolitionist,” 155 (quotation); and Pease and Pease, Bound with Them in Chains, 175–83.

10. Bell, ed., Minutes of the Proceedings of the National Negro Conventions, 1830–1864; Stewart, Holy Warriors, 134–38; and Pease and Pease, They Who Would Be Free, 144–49.

11. See, for example, Sanelli, “The Struggle for Black Suffrage in Pennsylvania, 1838–1870,” 38–90, 100–103, 118–20; Pease and Pease, They Who Would Be Free, 144–49, 152–53, 164–68, 174–92; and Swift, Black Prophets of Justice, 273–79.

12. Pease and Pease, They Who Would Be Free, 255–57, 264–67, 270. On the black rights organizations, see Horton and Horton, Free People of Color, 61–62; Litwack, North of Slavery, 260–67; and Robert J. Chandler, “Friends in Time of Need: Republicans and Black Civil Rights in California during the Civil War Era,” Arizona and the West 24 (Winter 1982): 320–22. On the rights that were available to northern blacks, see Paul Finkleman, “Prelude to the Fourteenth Amendment: Black Legal Rights in the Antebellum North,” Rutgers Law Journal 17 (Spring and Summer 1986): 417, 450–51; see also Kenneth C. Kusmer, A Ghetto Takes Shape: Black Cleveland, 1870–1930 (Urbana, Ill., 1976), 28, 30–31; Robert J. Cottrol, The Afro-Yankees: Providence’s Black Community in the Antebellum Era (Westport, Conn., 1982), 78–79; John Roy Squibb, “Roads to Plessy: Blacks and the Law in the Old Northwest: 1860–1896” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1992), 14–15; and David A. Gerber, “Education, Expediency, and Ideology: Race and Politics in the Desegregation of the Ohio Public Schools in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Ethnic Studies 1 (1973): 3–4.

13. For treatments of the developing sectional crisis during the first half of the 1850s, see Holman Hamilton, Prologue to Conflict: The Crisis and Compromise of 1850 (Lexington, Ky., 1964); Don E. Fehrenbacher, The South and Three Sectional Crises (New York, 1980); Stanley Campbell, The Slavecatchers: The Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1970); James Rawley, Race and Politics: “Bleeding Kansas” and the Coming of the Civil War (Philadelphia, 1969); William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776–1854 (New York, 1990); and Robert W. Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas (New York, 1973).

14. See Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics (New York, 1978); and Robert W. Johannsen, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861 (New York, 1976).

15. See Eric Walther, The Shattering of the Union: America in the 1850s (Wilmington, 2004); Kenneth M. Stampp, America in 1857: A Nation on the Brink (New York, 1990); Walter Ehrlich, They Have No Rights: Dred Scott’s Struggle for Freedom (Westport, Conn., 1979); Litwack, North of Slavery, 261–67; and David W. Blight, “They Knew What Time It Was: African-Americans and the Coming of the Civil War,” in Why the Civil War Came, ed. Gabor S. Boritt (New York, 1996), 57–66.

16. See Floyd J. Miller, The Search for a Black Nationality: Black Emigration and Colonization, 1787–1863 (Urbana, Ill., 1975), 93, 127–28, 134; and Harding, There Is a River, 134, 151, 172–76. For studies of the African Civilization Society, see Joel Schor, “The Rivalry Between Frederick Douglass and Henry Highland Garnet,” Journal of Negro History 64 (Winter 1979): 34–35; Earl Ofari, “Let Your Motto Be Resistance”: The Life and Thought of Henry Highland Garnet (Boston, 1972), 80–83; and Richard MacMaster, “Henry Highland Garnet and the African Civilization Society,” Journal of Presbyterian Church History 48 (Summer 1970); 90–112. V. P. Franklin argues that the emigrationists appealed especially to the black masses and the black culture of resistance as a viable alternative to the black elite’s desire for equal rights. Franklin, Black Self-Determination: A Cultural History of African American Resistance (Brooklyn, N.Y., 1984), 100–102. But Harry Reed points out that most northern blacks could not afford to emigrate. Reed, Platform for Change, 165. See also Litwack, North of Slavery; Leonard P. Curry, The Free Black in Urban America, 1800–1850: The Shadow of the Dream (Chicago, 1981); and V. Jacques Voegeli, Free But Not Equal: The Midwest and the Negro during the Civil War (Chicago, 1967).

17. Winch, Philadelphia’s Black Elite, 4–5, 129; Harding, There Is a River, 121, 158–67; Swift, Black Prophets of Justice, 260–65; and Pease and Pease, They Who Would Be Free, 206–32, 245, 251–52.

18. Weekly Anglo-African, 30 March 1861. Debra Jackson notes that the paper enjoyed considerable influence in New York City’s black community. Jackson, “A Cultural Stronghold: The Anglo-African Newspaper and the Black Community in New York,” New York History 85 (Fall 2004): 331–36.

19. Christian Recorder, 20 April 1861. For similar sentiments, see Weekly Anglo-African, 27 April, 24 August 1861.

20. Weekly Anglo-African, 14 September 1861; also 5 October, 28 December 1861.

21. David W. Blight, “‘For Something beyond the Battlefield’: Frederick Douglass and the Struggle for the Memory of the Civil War,” Journal of American History 75 (March 1989): 1156–78; and Weekly Anglo-African, 3 January 1863.

22. Weekly Anglo-African, 28 February 1863; Swift, Black Prophets of Justice, 321–22; Miller, The Search for a Black Nationality, 262–64; and Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, eds., African American National Biography, vol. 3 (New York, 2008), 55.

23. Weekly Anglo-African, 17 January, 7 March 1863; see also Gates and Higginbotham, eds., African American National Biography, 7:414–15; minutes of the executive committee, February 1863, Records of the Social, Civic, and Statistical Association of the Colored People of Pennsylvania, Leon Gardiner Collection on Negro History, Historical Society of Pennsylvania; E. R. Williams to Richard Yates Sr., 9 February 1863, Yates Family Collection, Illinois State Historical Library; Sumner to (unknown), 26 July 1863, Leo Julian to Gen. Augur, 19 January 1864, George T. Downing Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University; Weekly Anglo-African, 17 January 1863; Ofari, “Let Your Motto Be Resistance,” 110–11; J. Harlan Buzby, John Stewart Rock: Teacher, Healer, Counselor (Salem, N.J., 2002), 55–56; and Allen C. Guelzo, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (New York, 2004), 246–47. For a treatment of the connection between military service and citizenship rights for African Americans, see Christian G. Samito, Becoming American under Fire: Irish Americans, African Americans, and the Politics of Citizenship during the Civil War Era (Ithaca, N.Y., 2009), 45–76.

24. Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the Civil War (New York, 1953), 184–94; and Harding, There Is a River, 239–40.

25. George T. Downing to Charles Sumner, 19 February 1863, Charles Sumner Papers, Harvard University; Weekly Anglo-African, 13 February 1864; and Edwin S. Redkey, ed., A Grand Army of Black Men: Letters from African-American Soldiers in the Union Army, 1861–1865 (Cambridge, Eng., 1992), 208–9 (quotation); see also Jim Cullen, “‘I’s a Man Now’: Gender and African American Men,” in Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War, ed. Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber (New York, 1992), 82–84; David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass’s Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (Baton Rouge, La., 1989), 157–66, 181–82; and Herman Belz, “Law, Politics, and Race in the Struggle for Equal Pay during the Civil War,” Civil War History 22 (September 1976): 197–222.

26. Weekly Anglo-African, 21 March 1863.

27. Michael Vorenberg, Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment (Cambridge, Eng., 2001), 82–85; Weekly Anglo-African, 26 September 1863 (quotation); and Guelzo, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, 180.

28. James M. McPherson, The Negro’s Civil War: How American Negroes Felt and Acted during the War for the Union (New York, 1965), 249–50.

29. See, for example, James Fisher, “The Struggle for Negro Testimony in California, 1851–1863,” Southern California Quarterly 51 (December 1969); 313–24; Chandler, “Friends in Time of Need,” 326–29; J. William Snorgrass, “The Black Press in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1856–1900,” California History 60 (Winter 1981/82): 307–8; and Quintard Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528–1990 (New York, 1998), 91–92.

30. Chandler, “Friends in Time of Need,” 332–34; also Sacramento Union, 5 October 1864; National Anti-Slavery Standard, 24 December 1864; and Ella Forbes, African American Women during the Civil War (New York, 1998), 150.

31. Christian Recorder, 9 July 1864; National Anti-Slavery Standard, 2 July 1864; Weekly Anglo-African, 2 July 1864; Andrew Diemer, “Reconstructing Philadelphia: African Americans and Politics in the Post–Civil War North,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 133 (January 2009): 37, 41; Jane E. Dabel, A Respectable Woman: The Public Roles of African American Women in Nineteenth-Century New York (New York, 2008), 142–43; Leslie A. Schwalm, Emancipation’s Diaspora: Race and Reconstruction in the Upper Midwest (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2009) 193, 203–4; and Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier, 92–93. For black protest in New York City, see Forbes, African American Women during the Civil War, 151–53; in Boston and Cincinnati, see Liberator, 17 February 1865; in Chicago and Indianapolis, see John Roy Squibb, “Roads to Plessy: Blacks and the Law in the Old Northwest: 1860–1896” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1992), 47–54. See also Margaret Hope Bacon, “‘One Great Bundle of Humanity’: Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825–1911),” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 113 (January 1989): 21–43.

32. John Jones, The Black Laws of Illinois and a Few Reasons Why They Should be Repealed (Chicago, 1864), 3, 5; Illinois State Register, 14 January 1865; Weekly Anglo-African, 14 January 1865; Charles A. Gliozzo, John Jones and the Repeal of the Illinois Black Laws (Duluth, Minn., 1975), 1–8. For Republican support for repeal, see Illinois State Journal, 2, 23 January 1865; and “The Illinois Black Laws,” Chicago History 8 (Spring 1967), 65–75.

33. Weekly Anglo-African, 7 March 1863 (quotation); and McPherson, The Negro’s Civil War, 274. On blacks’ efforts to amend the constitution in New Jersey, see Marion Thompson Wright, “Negro Suffrage in New Jersey, 1776–1875,” Journal of Negro History 33 (April 1948): 198–99, 202; in Michigan, Weekly Anglo-African, 7 March 1863, 23 January 1864; in New York, Journal of the Assembly of the State of New-York: At Their 87th Session (Albany, N.Y., 1864), 32 (6 January 1864), 487 (12 March 1864); in Connecticut, Journal of the Senate of the State of Connecticut, May Session, 1864 (New Haven, Conn., 1864), 25 May 1864, 130, 526; Journal of the Senate of the State of Connecticut, May Session, 1865 (Hartford, 1865), 22 May 1865, 152, 197.

34. Robert Purvis, Speeches and Letters (1898), 3–4 (quotation); Proceedings of the National Convention of Colored Men, Held in the City of Syracuse, October 4, 5, 6, and 7, 1864; with the Bill of Wrongs and Rights, and the Address to the American People (1864), 24; see also Margaret Hope Bacon, But One Race: The Life of Robert Purvis (Albany, N.Y., 2007); and Buzby, John Stewart Rock, 56.

35. See, for example, Catherine M. Hanchett, “George Boyer Vashon, 1824–1878: Black Educator, Poet, Fighter for Equal Rights: Part Two,” Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine 68 (October 1985): 335; William Edward Farrison, William Wells Brown: Author and Reformer (Chicago, 1969), 394; and Vorenberg, Final Freedom, 157–58.

36. William Cheek and Aimee Lee Cheek, John Mercer Langston and the Fight for Black Freedom, 1829–65 (Urbana, Ill., 1989), 425–26; Joel Schor, Henry Highland Garnet: A Voice of Black Radicalism in the Nineteenth Century (Westport, Conn., 1977), 202; and John S. Rock to Charles Remond and George T. Downing, 19 April, 15 July 1864, Ruffin Family Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.

37. John S. Rock to Henry Highland Garnet, 15 July 1864, Ruffin Family Papers. Opposition to Garnet’s African Civilization Society among blacks in the District of Columbia was sufficiently strong to deny him election as a delegate to the Syracuse Convention, thus forcing him, at the last minute, to attend as a representative of the society in New York City. Cheek and Cheek, John Mercer Langston and the Fight for Black Freedom, 1829–65, 426–27.

38. John S. Rock to Henry Highland Garnet, 23 July 1864, Ruffin Family Papers; and Weekly Anglo-African, 20 August 1864.

39. Christian Recorder, 15 October 1864.

40. George Ruffin’s Report, 1864, Box 81-1, Folder 58, Ruffin Family Papers; Weekly Anglo-African, 1 October 1864 (quotation); and Christian Recorder, 15 October 1864.

41. Proceedings of the National Convention of Colored Men, Held in the City of Syracuse, October 4, 5, 6, and 7, 1864, 4; Weekly Anglo-African, 15 October 1864; National Anti-Slavery Standard, 15 October 1864; Cheek and Cheek, John Mercer Langston and the Fight for Black Freedom, 1829–1865, 428–29; Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet, 106–7; and Gates and Higginbotham, eds., African American National Biography, 2:217.

42. Proceedings of the National Convention of Colored Men, Held in the City of Syracuse, October 4, 5, 6, and 7, 1864, 2–4.

43. Ibid., 9.

44. Ibid., 23–24, 58.

45. Ibid., 61, 36.

46. Ibid., 41–42, 46–51, 59; and National Anti-Slavery Standard, 15 October 1864.

47. Proceedings of the National Convention of Colored Men, Held in the City of Syracuse, October 6, 5, 6, and 7, 1864; and Harding, There Is a River, 247–48.

48. Proceedings of the National Convention of Colored Men, Held in the City of Syracuse, October 4, 5, 6, and 7, 1864, 33–34. On manhood during the Civil War, see E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York, 1993), 232–33; Cullen, “‘I’s a Man Now,’” 85; and Michael Kimmell, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York, 1996), 73–75, 77–90. Unfortunately, many whites did not consider the military contributions of black soldiers proof of black manhood. Mia Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind: African American Ideas about White People, 1830–1925 (New York, 2000), 88.

49. Schor, Henry Highland Garnet, 205; Proceedings of the National Convention of Colored Men, Held in the City of Syracuse, October 4, 5, 6, and 7, 1864, 37–38; and National Anti-Slavery Standard, 15 October 1864.

50. Weekly Anglo-African, 29 October 1864; see also National Anti-Slavery Standard, 15 October 1864.

51. Weekly Anglo-African, 29 October 1864; George Ruffin’s Report, 1864, Ruffin Family Papers; and Lois Brown, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: Black Daughter of the Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2008), 181.

52. Weekly Anglo-African, 19 November 1864.

53. Schor, Henry Highland Garnet, 167, 178, 182, 202–4.

54. Proceedings of the National Convention of Colored Men, Held in the City of Syracuse, October 4, 5, 6, and 7, 1864, 26–27; and Weekly Anglo-African, 29 October 1864.

55. Proceedings of the National Convention of Colored Men, Held in the City of Syracuse, October 4, 5, 6, and 7, 1864, 27–28; and Weekly Anglo-African, 29 October 1864.

56. Proceedings of the National Convention of Colored Men, Held in the City of Syracuse, October 4, 5, 6, and 7, 1864, 28.

57. Ibid., 18–19.

58. Cheek and Cheek, John Mercer Langston and the Fight for Black Freedom, 1829–65, 434; Christian Recorder, 15 October (quotation), 3 December 1864; and Weekly Anglo-African, 26 November 1864.

59. William Cheek and Aimee Lee Cheek, “John Mercer Langston: Principle and Politics,” in Black Leaders of the Nineteenth Century, ed. Leon Litwack and August Meier (Urbana, Ill., 1988), 114; C. Peter Ripley et al., eds., The Black Abolitionist Papers. Volume V. The United States, 1859–1865 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1992), 304. In his autobiography, which he wrote many years later, Langston made no mention of his work as president of the National Equal Rights League. From the Virginia Plantation to the National Capitol: An Autobiography (Reprint, New York, 1969). On the creation of the state organization in Ohio, see Weekly Anglo-African, 1 February 1865; in Massachusetts, see Weekly Anglo-African, 4 February 1865; in New Jersey, see Proceedings of the State Convention of Colored Men of the State of New Jersey, Held in the City of Trenton, New Jersey, July 13th and 14th, 1865 (Bridgeton, N.J., 1865), 4, 13–14; in New York, see Weekly Anglo-African, 8 April 1865; in Indiana, see Indianapolis Daily Journal, 9 November 1866; in Michigan, see Philip S. Foner and George E. Walker, eds., Proceedings of the Black State Conventions, 1840–1865. Volume I: New York, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio (Philadelphia, 1979), 209–10; in the southern states, see Eric Foner, Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction (New York, 2005), 89; and Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet, 108–9.

60. For a study of the Pennsylvania State Equal Rights League during the Reconstruction Era, see Hugh Davis, “The Pennsylvania State Equal Rights League and the Northern Black Struggle for Legal Equality, 1864–1877,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 126 (October 2002): 611–34. On White, see Gates and Higginbotham, eds., African American National Biography, 8:250. According to the 1870 census, Pennsylvania’s sixty-five thousand blacks represented only 1.9% of the state’s total population. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Negro Population, 1790–1915 (Washington, D.C., 1918), 51. The PSERL records include the minutes of its executive board’s meetings and the correspondence of its Recording Secretary, Jacob C. White Jr. In addition, the columns of the Christian Recorder, a Philadelphia African Methodist Episcopal Church newspaper that served as the PSERL’s official organ from 1865 to 1868, include valuable information on the organization’s activities.

61. Minutes of the executive board, 14 October 1864, 1–3, 5–6, 19–20, Records of the Pennsylvania State Equal Rights League (hereafter, Records of the PSERL), Leon Gardiner Collection on Negro History, Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

62. Christian Recorder, 4, 18 February 1865.

63. Christian Recorder, 7 January 1865. On the formation of local auxiliaries, see Christian Recorder, 8 February, 15 April, 18 November 1865, 20 January 1866; minutes of the executive board, 6 September 1865, 7 January, 13 March 1866, Records of the PSERL, Jacob C. White Collection, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University; Christian Recorder, 4, 18 February 1865, 124–35. On the first annual meeting of the PSERL, see Christian Recorder, 31 March 1865; and Liberator, 3 March 1865.

64. For such claims, see Fishel, “Repercussions of Reconstruction,” 332–35; and Heather Cox Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction, 133–34. Steven Hahn and other historians of southern Reconstruction have shown that the freed people responded assertively to Reconstruction by playing a major role in the new state governments, voting in large numbers, building new political relationships and institutions in their communities, and resisting Democratic threats and overtures. Moreover, black veterans—many of whom had been slaves—played important roles in the postwar southern black community. Although a majority of the delegates to the freedmen’s conventions were from the bourgeoisie, they came to see their destinies as inextricably linked to those of the rural masses. See Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet, 121–23, 164–65, 177–85, 193–98, 207, 210; Hahn et al., eds., Freedom, 59–60, 67, 190, 455–57; Howard N. Rabinowitz, ed., Southern Black Leaders of the Reconstruction Era (Urbana, Ill., 1982); Joel Williamson, After Slavery: The Negro in South Carolina during Reconstruction, 1861–1877 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1965); Edmund L. Drago, Black Politicians and Reconstruction in Georgia: A Splendid Failure (Baton Rouge, La., 1982); and Donald R. Shaffer, After the Glory: The Struggles of Black Civil War Veterans (Lawrence, Kans., 2004), 32.

65. See, for example, Carlson, “The Black Community in the Rural North,” 86; David M. Katzman, Before the Ghetto: Black Detroit in the Nineteenth Century (Urbana, Ill., 1973), 147–51; David Quigley, Second Founding: New York City, Reconstruction, and the Making of American Democracy (New York, 2004), 73–74; Richard M. Valelly, The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement (Chicago, 2004), 34–35; and Samito, Becoming American under Fire, 45–76.

66. W. H. Messick to Jacob C. White Jr., 14 December 1868, Jacob C. White Collection; and Christian Recorder, 4 November 1865. On the membership of the PSERL, see minutes of the executive board, 14 March 1866, Records of the PSERL.

67. See, for example, minutes of the executive committee, 5 September, 3 December 1860, February 1863, 18 February 1867, Records of the Social, Civic, and Statistical Association of the Colored People of Pennsylvania; minutes of the executive board, 20 January 1865, 29 May, 5 June 1866, Records of the PSERL; Christian Recorder, 1, 29 September 1866; and National Anti-Slavery Standard, 3 June 1865, 31 March 1866. Black protest against Philadelphia’s streetcar companies is studied in Philip S. Foner, “The Battle to End Discrimination against Negroes on Philadelphia’s Streetcars: (Part I) Background and Beginning of the Battle,” Pennsylvania History 40 (July 1973): 261–91; and “The Battle to End Discrimination against Negroes on Philadelphia’s Streetcars: (Part II) The Victory,” Pennsylvania History 40 (October 1973): 355–79; and Edward J. Price Jr., “Let the Law Be Just: The Quest for Racial Equality in Pennsylvania, 1780–1915” (Ph.D., diss., Pennsylvania State University, 1973), 56–83. Unfettered access to public transportation in San Francisco was not achieved until 1893. Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier, 93. On the pervasive racism in Philadelphia, see Sam Bass Warner, The Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of Its Growth (Philadelphia, 1968), 125–26.

68. See Christian Recorder, 1 September 1866; minutes of the executive board, 20 January, 1865, 29 May, 5 June 1866, Records of the PSERL; Philadelphia Press, 30–31 January, 31 May 1865; Ira V. Brown, The Negro in Pennsylvania History (University Park, Pa., 1970), 46–47; Foner, “The Battle to End Discrimination against Negroes on Philadelphia’s Streetcars: (Part I) Background and Beginning of the Battle,” 281–82; “The Battle to End Discrimination against Negroes on Philadelphia’s Streetcars: (Part II) The Victory,” 361–71; William D. Kelley, Why Colored People in Philadelphia Are Excluded from the Streetcars (Philadelphia, 1866), 3–5; and Janice Sumler-Edmond, “The Quest for Justice: African American Women Litigants, 1867–1890,” in African American Women and the Vote, 1837–1965, ed. Ann D. Gordon et al. (Amherst, 1997), 101–3. Soon after the enactment of the 1867 law, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court upheld separate railroad cars for blacks. But since the action being considered in this case occurred before 1867, the court was not ruling on the law’s constitutionality. Price, “Let the Law Be Just,” 86.

69. See W. M. Strother to Jacob C. White Jr., 5 November 1866, minutes of the executive board, Records of the PSERL; and E. N. Reynolds to Jacob C. White Jr., 15 February 1866, W. H. Robinson to Jacob C. White Jr., 25 July 1867, Oliver Reynolds to Jacob C. White Jr., 27 December 1869, Jacob C. White Collection.

70. B. J. Wilson to Jacob C. White, 11 February 1866, William E. Welch to Jacob C. White, 6 December 1868; I. Franchetti to Jacob C. White, 10 November 1868, Records of the PSERL.

71. See Foner, “The Battle to End Discrimination against Negroes on Philadelphia’s Streetcars: (Part II) The Victory,” 374–75 (quotation); and William Still, A Brief Narrative of the Struggle for the Rights of the Colored People of Philadelphia in the City Railway Cars; and a Defence of William Still, Relating to His Agency Touching the Passage of the Late Bill, etc. Read Before a Large Public Meeting Held in Liberty Hall, April 8, 1867 (Reprint, New York, 1969), 1–2 17–23. See David A. Gerber, Black Ohio and the Color Line, 1860–1915 (Urbana, Ill., 1976), 136–37.

72. Elevator, 22 November 1867; and Pacific Appeal, 26 October 1867. On the Bell-Anderson dispute, see Snorgrass, “The Black Press in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1856–1900,” 308, 311; Leigh Dana Johnsen, “Equal Rights and the ‘Heathen Chinee’: Black Activism in San Francisco,” Western Historical Quarterly 11 (January 1980): 59; Fisher, “A History of the Political and Social Development of the Black Community in California, 1850–1950,” 135–41; and Frank N. Lortie Jr., “San Francisco’s Black Community, 1870–1890: Dilemmas in the Struggle for Equality” (San Francisco, 1973), 35. In a rather similar vein, when some of Frederick Douglass’s admirers in the Indiana Equal Rights League offered a resolution complimenting him in 1867, other members, recalling that Douglass had once refused to lecture for the league, managed to table the resolution, “really shouting and giving praise to God” as they voted. Indianapolis Daily Journal, 8 October 1867.

73. Proceedings of the Colored Men’s Convention of the State of Michigan, Held in the City of Detroit, Tuesday and Wednesday, September 12th and 13th, ‘65 (Adrian, Mich., 1865), 6–12, 17–18; Foner and Walker, eds., Proceedings of the Black State Conventions, 1840–1865, 198–207; and First Annual Meeting of the National Equal Rights League, Held in Cleveland, Ohio, October 19th, 20th, and 21st, 1865, 11–12, 16.

74. Weekly Anglo-African, 1 July 1865.

75. Christian Recorder, 18 August, 1 September, 15 December 1866, 2 February 1867; and First Annual Meeting of the National Equal Rights League, Held in Cleveland, Ohio, October 19th, 20th, and 21st, 1865, 15, 22–28.

76. Cheek and Cheek, John Mercer Langston and the Fight for Black Freedom, 1829–65, 434–35; Christian Recorder, 19 January 1867; and William Nesbit to Thaddeus Stevens, 7 February 1868, Thaddeus Stevens Papers, Library of Congress.

77. Cheek and Cheek, “John Mercer Langston,” in Black Leaders of the Nineteenth Century, ed. Litwack and Meier, 115.

78. Parker Smith to the Social, Civic, and Statistical Association of the Colored People of Pennsylvania, 22 February 1867, Leon Gardiner Collection on Negro History; Weekly Anglo-African, 26 August 1865; First Annual Meeting of the National Equal Rights League, Held in Cleveland, Ohio, October 19th, 20th, and 21st, 1865 (Philadelphia, 1865), 17; and Sanelli, “The Struggle for Black Suffrage in Pennsylvania, 1838–1870,” 243; see also Elevator, 7 April 1865.

79. Christian Recorder, 25 November 1865. A similar debate occurred at black conventions in Indiana in 1866 and 1867. Indianapolis Daily Journal, 9 November 1866; and Emma Lou Thornbrough, The Negro in Indiana (Indianapolis, 1957), 256.

80. Christian Recorder, 25 November 1865, 23 February 1867; and First Annual Meeting of the National Equal Rights League, Held in Cleveland, Ohio, October 19th, 20th, and 21st, 1865, 17.

81. First Annual Meeting of the National Equal Rights League, Held in Cleveland, Ohio, October 19th, 20th, and 21st, 1865, 42; and Christian Recorder, 2 September, 26 August, 25 November, 2 December 1865.

82. Christian Recorder, 25 March 1865.

83. Clarence Walker, Deromanticizing Black History: Critical Essays and Reappraisals (Knoxville, Tenn., 1991), xvi. Likewise, John C. Rodrigue points out that much of Reconstruction scholarship since the appearance of Eric Foner’s Reconstruction in 1989 has emphasized divisions within the southern black community. Rodrigue, “Black Agency after Slavery,” in Reconstructions: New Perspectives on the Postbellum United States, ed. Thomas J. Brown (New York, 2006), 40–65.

Chapter 2

1. The Equality of All Men before the Law, Claimed and Defended: In Speeches by Hon. William D. Kelley, Wendell Phillips, and Frederick Douglass, and Letters From Elizur Wright and William Heighton (Boston, 1865), 36–37.

2. Philip S. Foner, Frederick Douglass (New York, 1964), 2236–37; Liberator, 26 May 1865; Christian Recorder, 2 November 1867; and Elevator, 20 September 1867.

3. Christian Recorder, 26 October 1867 (quotation); Foner and Walker, eds., Proceedings of the Black State Conventions, 1840–1865, 147; David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (Baton Rouge, 1989), 194; and Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of Michigan, 18 January 1865.

4. Blacks challenged laws in Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio that prohibited interracial marriage. The most significant Reconstruction-era legal challenges to miscegenation statutes occurred in Indiana, where in the early 1870s the state supreme court upheld the ban on interracial marriage. But during much of this period, northern African Americans devoted little attention to this issue, perhaps because they realized that to do so might play into the hands of racist whites. See Squibb, “Roads to Plessy,” 75–77; and Indianapolis Daily Journal, 31 August, 22 September 1875.

5. Newark Evening Courier, 13 August 1867; Christian Recorder, 3 February 1866; and Elevator, 7 April 1865.

6. Proceedings of a Convention of Colored Citizens, Held in the City of Lawrence, October 17, 1866 (Lawrence, Kans., 1866), 4. For a similar view, see Elevator, 7 April 1865.

7. Christian Recorder, 3 November 1866.

8. See Detroit Advertiser and Tribune, 3 February 1868; and Christian Recorder, 24 March, 9, 16 December 1865, 24 March 1866 (quotation); see also Gary Libman, “Minnesota and the Struggle for Black Suffrage: 1849–1870 A Study in Party Motivation” (Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 1972), 54; Janice Sumler Lewis, “The Fortens of Philadelphia: An Afro-American Family and Nineteenth-Century Reform” (Ph.D. diss., Georgetown University, 1978), 214; and William Toll, The Resurgence of Race: Black Social Theory from Reconstruction to the Pan-African Conferences (Philadelphia, 1979), 11–14.

9. Indianapolis Daily Journal, 8 November 1866; Hon. John Mercer Langston, Freedom and Citizenship. Selected Lectures and Addresses of Hon. John Mercer Langston, LL.D. (Washington, D.C., 1883), 105; and Detroit Advertiser and Tribune, 3 February 1868.

10. Christian Recorder, 9 November 1867; and Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of Michigan, 18 January 1865.

11. Elevator, 16 June 1865; and Newark Evening Courier, 13 August 1867; Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of Michigan, 18 January 1865.

12. Elevator, 19 January 1866; see also 30 August 1867.

13. Weekly Anglo-African, 24 June (quotation), 18 November 1865 (quotation); and Elevator, 17 November 1865. For similar sentiments, see Christian Recorder, 10 June, 2 September 1865; and Indianapolis Daily Journal, 3 December 1866. For a discussion of the role of black veterans in the North and South, see Shaffer, After the Glory, 32, 67–70.

14. See Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago, 1995), 13, 20; George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (New York, 1971), 11; Cullen, “‘I’s a Man Now,’” 77–86; Shaffer, After the Glory, 1, 3–4; Schwalm, Emancipation’s Diaspora, 108–9, 113; and Proceedings of a Convention of Colored Citizens, Held in the City of Lawrence, October 17, 1866, 4–5.

15. Christian Recorder, 1 July 1865; and Proceedings of the Illinois State Convention of Colored Men, Assembled at Galesburg, October 16th, 17th, and 18th, Containing the State and National Addresses Promulgated by It, With a List of Delegates Composing It (Chicago, 1867), 27; see also Christian Recorder, 2 September 1865, 19 January 1867; and Philip D. Swenson, “Illinois: Disillusionment with State Activism,” in Radical Republicans in the North, ed. James C. Mohr (Baltimore, 1976), 15.

16. Elevator, 29 December 1865; see also Christian Times and Witness, 25 October 1865; William D. Green, “Minnesota’s Long Road to Black Suffrage, 1849–1868,” Minnesota History 56 (Summer 1998): 79; Christian Recorder, 10 December 1864; and Elevator, 24 November 1865.

17. Weekly Anglo-African, 23 December 1865. For similar sentiments, see Proceedings of a Convention of Colored Citizens, Held in the City of Lawrence, October 17, 1866, 7; Indianapolis Daily Journal, 8 August 1867; and Christian Recorder, 14 July, 3 November 1866.

18. Edwin S. Redkey, ed., A Grand Army of Black Men: Letters from African-American Soldiers in the Union Army, 1861–1865 (Cambridge, Eng., 1992), 292.

19. See Pacific Appeal, 10 (quotation), 24 October 1867; and Elevator, 18 October, 1, 22 November 1867.

20. See Elevator, 2 June (quotation), 4 August 1865; see also Lortie, “San Francisco’s Black Community, 1870–1890,” 8, 32; and Fisher, “A History of the Political and Social Development of the Black Community in California, 1850–1950,” 93, 96–99. For a similar organizational structure in Kansas, see Christian Recorder, 28 October 1865; Eugene Berwanger, “Hardin and Langston: Western Black Spokesmen of the Reconstruction Era,” Journal of Negro History 64 (Spring 1979): 105; in New York, Christian Recorder, 4 May 1867; and Weekly Anglo-African, 1 July 1865; in New Jersey, Newark Evening Courier, 24 July 1867; in Nevada, Elevator, 4 August 1865; in Indiana, Christian Recorder, 6 January 1866; and Indianapolis Daily Journal, 4 November 1866.

21. Proceedings of the Illinois State Convention of Colored Men, Assembled at Galesburg, October 16th, 17th, and 18th, 16–19; Carbondale New Era, 19 October 1869; Christian Recorder, 5 January 1867; and Chicago Tribune, 17 January 1867.

22. See, for example, Minutes of Votes and Proceedings of the Ninetieth General Assembly of the State of New Jersey. Convened at Trenton, January 9th, 1866 (Woodbury, N.J., 1866), 18, 30 January, February 1866, 56, 140, 170; Minutes of Votes and Proceedings of the Ninety-First General Assembly of the State of New Jersey (Camden, N.J., 1867), 26, 28 March, 1, 4 April 1867, 793, 855, 860, 881, 971; Journal of the Twenty-Third Senate of New Jersey, Being the Ninety-First Session of the Legislature (Newark, N.J., 1867), 6, 7, 12, 21 March 1867, 357, 377, 391, 504; Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of Ohio, For the Regular Session of the Fifty-Seventh General Assembly, Commencing on Monday, January 1, 1866. Vol. LXII (Columbus, 1866), 17, 19, 30 January 1866, 44, 62, 97, 121; Journal of the Senate of the State of Ohio, for the Regular Session of the Fifty-Eighth General Assembly, Commencing on January 2, 1867. Vol. LXIII (Columbus, 1867), 12 March 1867, 310; Journal of the Senate of the Twenty-Fourth General Assembly of the State of Illinois (Springfield, 1865), 5, 6 January 1865, 72, 79; Journal of the Senate of the Twenty-Fifth General Assembly of the State of Illinois (Springfield, 1867), 11 January 1867, 76; Journal of the Convention of the State of New York (Albany, N.Y., 1867), 19 June, 24, 31 July 1867, 83, 282, 361; Journal of the Senate, during the Sixteenth Session of the Legislature of the State of California, 1865–6 (Sacramento, 1866), 5 January 1866, 127; and Petitions to the California Legislature, 1863–1866 (7, 10, 12 January 1866), California State Archives, Sacramento, Calif.

23. See, for example, Newark Evening Courier, 15 August 1867; and Russell H. Davis, Black Americans in Cleveland from George Peake to Carl B. Stokes, 1796–1969 (Washington, D.C., 1972), 84.

24. New York Times, 4 February 1866; and Liberator, 24 March 1865.

25. Wright, “Negro Suffrage in New Jersey, 1776–1875,” 208–11; Sanelli, “The Struggle for Black Suffrage in Pennsylvania, 1838–1870,” 228–30; Minutes of the Executive Board of the Pennsylvania State Equal Rights League, 4 September, 10 November 1866, Leon Gardiner Collection on Negro History; and Christian Recorder, 15 September 1866. A lawsuit sponsored by the New York Equal Rights League, which challenged a state law declaring that no person could be placed on the register of voters in New York City and Brooklyn—where most black New Yorkers lived—unless he appeared personally before the Board of Registrars during the registration period, appears to have suffered the same fate. Block, The Circle of Discrimination: An Economic and Social Study of the Black Man in New York (New York, 1969), 182–83.

26. John Godby Gregory, “Negro Suffrage in Wisconsin,” Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters 2 (1896–97): 94–101; and Richard N. Current, The History of Wisconsin. Vol. II: The Civil War Era, 1848–1873 (Madison, Wisc., 1976), 570–71.

27. For studies of developments in Minnesota and Iowa, see Green, “Minnesota’s Long Road to Black Suffrage, 1849–1868,” 80–81; Libman, “Minnesota and the Struggle for Black Suffrage: 1849–1870,” 57–60, 197–99; G. Galin Berrier, “The Negro Suffrage Issue in Iowa—1865–1868,” Annals of Iowa 39 (Spring 1968): 253–54; American Annual Cyclopedia of Important Events of the Year 1866 (New York, 1867), 406–7; Schwalm, Emancipation’s Diaspora, 183–88; and Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York, 2000), 89.

28. For treatments of the setbacks suffered by black suffrage advocates across the North, see Gillette, The Right to Vote, 25–27; and Eugene H. Berwanger, The West and Reconstruction (Urbana, Ill., 1981), 156–59. For discussions of this issue in California, see Chandler, “Friends in Time of Need,” 336–37; and Fisher, “A History of the Political and Social Development of the Black Community in California, 1850–1950,” 100–102; in Illinois, see Chicago Tribune, 17 January 1867; Journal of the House of Representatives of the Twenty-fifth General Assembly of the State of Illinois (Springfield, 1867), I, 12 January 1867, 48; and Roger D. Bridges, “Equality Deferred: Civil Rights for Illinois Blacks, 1865–1885,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 74 (Summer 1981): 90–95; in New York, see Journal of the Convention of the State of New York, 19 June 1867, 91; Ena Lunette Farley, “The Issue of Black Equality in New York State, 1865–1873” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1973), 27–33; and James C. Mohr, The Radical Republicans and Reform in New York during Reconstruction (Ithaca, N.Y., 1973), 234–35; in Pennsylvania, see Sanelli, “The Struggle for Black Suffrage in Pennsylvania, 1838–1870,” 202–5, 215–16, 250–60; Robert Mittrick, “A History of Negro Voting in Pennsylvania during the Nineteenth Century” (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, 1985), 51–53; and Brown, The Negro in Pennsylvania History, 48–50; in Kansas, see Martha Belle Caldwell, “The Attitude of Kansas toward Reconstruction” (Ph.D. diss., Kansas University, 1933), 51–62; and Berwanger, The West and Reconstruction, 105–7; in Michigan, see George M. Blackburn, “Michigan: Quickening Government in a Developing State,” in Radical Republicans in the North, ed. Mohr, 126, 130–31; in Connecticut, see Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of Connecticut, May Session, 1865 (Hartford, 1865), 93, 132–40; and John Niven, “Connecticut: Poor Progress in the Land of Steady Habits,” in Radical Republicans in the North, ed. Mohr, 28; in Oregon, see K. Keith Richard, “Unwelcome Settlers: Black and Mulatto Oregon Pioneers,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 84 (Spring 1983): 47; in Nevada, see Elmer R. Rusco, “Good Time Coming?” Black Nevadans in the Nineteenth Century (Westport, Conn., 1975), 29; and William Hanchett, “Yankee Law and the Negro in Nevada, 1861–1869,” Western Humanities Review 10 (Summer 1956): 243; in New Jersey, see Journal of the Twenty-second Senate of the State of New Jersey, Being the Nineteenth Session of the Legislature (Salem, N.J., 1866), 6 March 1866, 384.

29. Leslie J. Fishel Jr., “Northern Prejudice and Negro Suffrage, 1865–1870,” Journal of Negro History 39 (January 1954): 9–10 (quotation); and Committee on Constitutional Amendments, Connecticut General Assembly, African Americans, 1821–1869, RG002, Box 1, 99–139, 25 May 1865, General Assembly Papers, Connecticut Historical Library, Hartford. For similar sentiments, see Detroit Free Press, 26 January 1865; Herbert H. Wubben, “The Uncertain Trumpet: Iowa Republicans and Black Suffrage, 1860–1868,” Annals of Iowa 47 (Summer 1984): 419–20; and Berwanger, The West and Reconstruction, 107–8. On the Democrats’ anti-suffrage arguments, see Lawrence Grossman, The Democratic Party and the Negro: Northern and National Politics, 1868–92 (Urbana, Ill., 1976), 1–4, 14–22; Jerome Mushkat, The Reconstruction of the New York Democracy, 1861–1874 (East Brunswick, N.J., 1981), 118–27; Forrest G. Wood, Black Scare: The Racist Response to Emancipation and Reconstruction (Berkeley, Calif., 1968), 80–102; and Louis B. Moore, “Response to Reconstruction: Change and Continuity in New Jersey Politics, 1866–1874” (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, 1999), 73–74.

30. Christian Recorder, 12 October 1867. For similar views, see Cincinnati Colored Citizen, 18 January 1868; and entry for 16 March 1869, Jacob C. White Collection.

31. For evidence of Radical Republican support for black suffrage, see Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of Ohio, for the Regular Session of the Fifty-seventh General Assembly, Commencing on Monday, January 6, 1866. Vol. LXII (Columbus, Ohio, 1866), 24 January 1866, 9, 24, 31 January 1866, 126, 8 February 1866, 155–56, 17 February 1866, 220, 20 February 1866, 234, 21 February 1866, 244, 28 February 1866, 266, 2 April 1866, 521; Morrow B. Lowry to Isaiah C. Wears, 12 March 1869, Isaiah C. Wears Papers, Leon Gardiner Collection on Negro History, Historical Society of Pennsylvania; Richard J. Oglesby to Union Republicans of New York, 14 October 1867, Richard J. Oglesby Papers, Illinois State Historical Library, Springfield; House, Resolutions of the Legislature of Vermont, on the Subject of Equal Suffrage, 39th Cong., 2d Sess., 1866, H. Misc. Doc. 4; and Detroit Advertiser and Tribune, 22 February 1868.

32. See LaWanda Cox and John H. Cox, “Negro Suffrage and Republican Politics: The Problem of Motivation in Reconstruction Historiography,” Journal of Southern History 33 (August 1967): 303–30; and Field, The Politics of Race in New York, 159–60, 218.

33. Ira V. Brown, “Pennsylvania and the Rights of the Negro, 1865–1887,” Pennsylvania History 28 (January 1961): 51–52; Hans L. Trefousse, Thaddeus Stevens: Nineteenth-Century Egalitarian (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997), 155 (quotation); and George W. Julian, Political Recollections, 1840–1872 (Chicago, 1884), 263.

34. See, for example, Felice Bonadio, North of Reconstruction: Ohio Politics, 1865–1870 (New York, 1970), 80, 86–87, 94–95; see also James M. McPherson, The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Princeton, N.J., 1964), 33–34, 351–52; Sanelli, “The Struggle for Black Suffrage in Pennsylvania, 1838–1870,” 203–16, 250–60; Robert D. Sawrey, Dubious Victory: The Reconstruction Debate in Ohio (Lexington, Ky., 1992), 17–19, 30–31, 33–37; Berwanger, “Hardin and Langston,” 105–7; Rusco, “Good Time Coming?” 21–22, 46; Moore, “Response to Reconstruction,” 88–90, 114–18; and Xi Wang, The Trial of Democracy: Black Suffrage and Northern Republicans, 1860–1910 (Athens, Ga., 1997), 24–27.

35. For the debate on this matter, see Harding, There Is a River, 243–45; and Rael, Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North, 10.

36. First Annual Meeting of the National Equal Rights League, Held in Cleveland, Ohio, October 19th, 20th, and 21st, 1865, 39, 45–46 (quotation); and Christian Recorder, 21 October 1865 (quotation); see also Pacific Appeal, 23 November 1867. On the Reconstruction Act of 1867 and black suffrage, see Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction, 1863–1877 (New York, 1990), 120–22.

37. Liberator, 26 May 1865. For similar views by northern blacks, see First Annual Meeting of the National Equal Rights League, Held in Cleveland, Ohio, October 19th, 20th and 21st, 1865, 39; and Newark Evening Courier, 13 August 1867. For abolitionists’ support for black suffrage following the Civil War, see Independent, 28 September, 26 October, 16 November 1865, 21 March, 21 April, 14 November 1867; New York Tribune, 12 September, 3 October 1865, 12 February 1866; National Anti-Slavery Standard, 19 August 1865; Philadelphia Press, 14 February 1865, 14 January 1866; and The Right Way, 20, 27 January, 28 April, 5 May 1866.

38. Christian Recorder, 20 March 1869; see also Newark Evening Courier, 13 August 1867; Pacific Appeal, 17 August 1867; Elevator, 3 August 1867; and Cincinnati Commercial, 23 February 1867.

39. See, for example, minutes of 22 April 1867, Records of the Social, Civic, and Statistical Association of the Colored People of Pennsylvania; and Pacific Appeal, 14 September 1867.

40. See, for example, Sawrey, Dubious Victory, 115; Michael Les Benedict, “The Rout of Radicalism: Republicans and the Elections of 1867,” Civil War History 18 (December 1972): 340–44; Gillette, The Right to Vote, 26, 30–37; and Earl M. Maltz, Civil Rights, the Constitution, and Congress, 1863–1869 (Lawrence, Kans., 1990), 136–37.

41. Christian Recorder, 24 February, 30 September, 2 December 1865; First Annual Meeting of the National Equal Rights League, Held in Cleveland, Ohio, October 19th, 29th, and 21st, 1865, 47; and William Nesbit to executive board of the PSERL, 27 September 1865, Leon Gardiner Collection on Negro History. Lewis Tappan and Gerrit Smith—two pioneer abolitionists who strongly supported political and civil rights for African Americans—were among those who contributed to sustaining a black lobby in Washington. Lewis Tappan to Frederick Douglass, 11 January 1866, George T. Downing Papers, Moorland—Spingarn Research Center; and Lewis Tappan to Gerrit Smith, 3 January 1866, Gerrit Smith Miller Collection, Syracuse University.

42. Weekly Anglo-African, 11 November 1865; and National Anti-Slavery Standard, 13 January 1866.

43. George T. Downing to Frederick Douglass, 18 January 1866, Frederick Douglass Papers, Library of Congress; George T. Downing and John Jones to Charles Sumner, 1 February 1866, Charles Sumner Papers; Christian Recorder, 17 February 1866; and Chicago Tribune, 7 February 1866.

44. George T. Downing to Frederick Douglass, 18 January 1866, Frederick Douglass Papers; and John Mercer Langston, From the Virginia Plantation to the National Capitol: An Autobiography (Reprint, New York, 1969), 230–31.

45. Christian Recorder, 12 August 1865; and Proceedings of the Colored Men’s Convention of the State of Michigan, Held in the City of Detroit, Tuesday and Wednesday, September 12th and 13th, ’65, 13.

46. Christian Recorder, 17 February 1866.

47. LaWanda Cox and John H. Cox, Politics, Principle, and Prejudice, 1865–1866: Dilemma of Reconstruction America (New York, 1963), 163.

48. Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (New York, 1994), 820–22; and Christian Recorder, 17 February 1866.

49. James Lynch to George T. Downing, 13 February 1866, DeGrasse-Howard Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston; William Nesbit to Charles Sumner, 17 March 1866, George T. Downing and John Jones to Charles Sumner, 13 February 1866, Charles Sumner Papers; George T. Downing to Thaddeus Stevens, 8 March 1866, Thaddeus Stevens Papers; George T. Downing to Frederick Douglass, 18 January 1866, Frederick Douglass Papers; and Chicago Tribune, 1 February 1866.

50. William Nesbit to Charles Sumner, 17 March 1866, Charles Sumner Papers; William Nesbit to Jacob C. White Jr., 5 March 1866, Jacob C. White Papers, American Negro Historical Society Collection.

51. Senate, Memorial of a Delegation Representing the Colored People of the Several States, remonstrating against the passage of joint resolution, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 1866, S. Doc. 56, serial 1239; and Memorial to Congress, February 12, 1866, Pennsylvania State Equal Rights League, 2–3, Leon Gardiner Collection on Negro History.

52. See, for example, Charles Sumner to John Mercer Langston, 2 December 1866, Charles Sumner Papers; Trefousse, Thaddeus Stevens, 155, 167, 199; George W. Julian to son, 8 February 1866, Julian to wife, 10, 20 February 1866, George W. Julian Papers, Indiana State Library, Indianapolis; Julian, Political Recollections, 1840–1872, 263–66; Elsa Holderried, “The Public Life of Jacob Merritt Howard” (Master’s thesis, Wayne State University, 1950), 145–46; Indianapolis Daily Journal, 28 August 1867; Chicago Tribune, 1 February 1866; Independent, 16 March 1865; Ira V. Brown, “William D. Kelley and Radical Reconstruction,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 85 (July 1961): 321–23; and Schuyler Colfax to Cresswell, 28 September 1867, Schuyler Colfax Papers, Hayes Historical Library, Fremont, Ohio.

53. Douglass to Wilson, 12 September 1866, Frederick Douglass Papers; Henry Highland Garnet to Charles Sumner, 17 February 1866, Charles Sumner Papers; also George T. Downing to Sumner, 31 January 1865, 5 May 1866, John Jones, Downing, and others to Sumner, 13 February 1866, Frederick Douglass to Sumner, 29 April 1865, Charles Sumner Papers; and Joseph C. Bustill to Thaddeus Stevens, 22 December 1865, Thaddeus Stevens Papers.

54. House, Address of the Colored Citizens of Chicago to the Congress of the United States, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., H. Doc. 109, serial 1271, 1–2; Weekly Anglo-African, 29 July 1865; New York Times, 4 February 1866; Liberator, 11 August 1865; Charles Sumner to John Mercer Langston, 2 December 1866, Charles Sumner Papers; and Christian Recorder, 19 January 1867.

55. Numerous petitions calling for black manhood suffrage rights are found in Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, 40th Cong., 1st Sess., RG46; Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, 41st Cong., 1st Sess., RG46; Senate, Joint Committee on Reconstruction, 39th–41st Cong., RG128, National Archives; and 17 December 1866 meeting, Records of the Social, Civic and Statistical Association of the Colored People of Pennsylvania. David Quigley shows that many working-class black men and women agitated for suffrage rights. Quigley, Second Founding, 67–68.

56. See Voegeli, Free but Not Equal, 160–64; Maltz, Civil Rights, The Constitution, and Congress, 1863–1869, 8–11, 122; and Robert J. Kaczorowski, “To Begin the Nation Anew: Congress, Citizenship, and Civil Rights after the Civil War,” American Historical Review 92 (February 1987): 49–50.

57. Kaczorowski, “To Begin The Nation Anew,” 49; Kaczorowski, “Revolutionary Constitutionalism in the Era of the Civil War and Reconstruction,” New York University Law Review 61 (November 1986): 881–82; Xi Wang, The Trial of Democracy, 24–25; and Independent, 7 June 1866.

58. See William E. Nelson, The Fourteenth Amendment: From Political Principle to Judicial Doctrine (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 125–33; Xi Wang, The Trial of Democracy, 27–28; Kaczorowski, “Revolutionary Constitutionalism in the Era of the Civil War and Reconstruction,” 882–83. A number of historians have argued that moderate Republicans, who shaped much of Reconstruction policy, were constitutional conservatives who believed that the major responsibility for protecting the rights of citizens should remain in the hands of the states. See, for example, Michael Les Benedict, A Compromise of Principle: Congressional Republicans and Reconstruction, 1863–1869 (New York, 1974); Herman Belz, A New Battle of Freedom: Freedmen’s Rights, 1861–1866 (Westport, Conn., 1976); Harold M. Hyman, A More Perfect Union: The Impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction on the Constitution (New York, 1973); and Phillip S. Paludan, A Covenant with Death: The Constitution, Law, and Equality in the Civil War Era (Urbana, Ill., 1975). Other scholars, however, have asserted that Republicans in fact shifted authority, in some significant ways, from the states to the federal government. See especially Robert J. Kaczorowski, The Politics of Judicial Interpretation: The Federal Courts, the Department of Justice, and Civil Rights, 1866–1876 (New York, 1985); and LaWanda Cox and John H. Cox, Politics, Principle, and Prejudice, 1865–1866.

59. National Anti-Slavery Standard, 7 July 1866; and Christian Recorder, 19 January 1867. For similar sentiments, see Senate, Memorial of a Delegation Representing the People of the Several States, remonstrating against the passage of joint resolution, H.R. No. 57, proposing to amend the Constitution of the United States, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., S. Doc. 56, serial 1239; and Christian Recorder, 19 May 1866.

60. George T. Downing to Charles Sumner, 31 January 1867, Charles Sumner Papers. On black activists’ agitation in Colorado, see Lewis Douglass to Frederick Douglass, 29 October 1866, Frederick Douglass Papers; also Eugene H. Berwanger, “William J. Hardin: Colorado Spokesman for Racial Justice, 1863–1873,” Colorado Magazine 52 (Winter 1975): 54–58; and Berwanger, “Reconstruction on the Frontier: The Equal Rights Struggle in Colorado, 1865–1867,” Pacific Historical Review 44 (August 1975): 313–19, 323–25.

61. Xi Wang, The Trial of Democracy, 29–34, 150–53; Independent, 14 February 1867; and Maltz, Civil Rights, the Constitution, and Congress, 1863–1869, 123–30, 133–34.

62. Christian Recorder, 26 January, 9 March 1967.

63. See Brooks D. Simpson, The Reconstruction Presidents (Lawrence, Kans., 1998), 143; Gillette, The Right to Vote, 32–39; and Richard H. Abbott, The Republican Party and the South, 1855–1877: The First Southern Strategy (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1986), 200.

64. See Hanchett, “Yankee Law and the Negro in Nevada, 1861–1869,” 244; and Russell R. Elliott, Servant of Power: A Political Biography of William M. Stewart (Reno, Nev., 1983), 32, 57–58, 62–63.

65. A number of historians have argued that the Republicans above all believed that the black vote would more than offset the effects of a white backlash, thus providing the margin of victory in a number of crucial northern states. See, for example, Gillette, The Right to Vote, 166–90; Squibb, “Roads to Plessy,” 64–70; Abbott, The Republican Party and the South, 1855–1877, 205–6; Moore, “Response to Reconstruction,” 56–58; Bonadio, North of Reconstruction, 92–97, 106; and Wubben, “The Uncertain Trumpet,” 420–22. Other scholars, however, have concluded that most Republicans were committed to black manhood suffrage despite the political risks involved and that in several northern states the black vote would make little difference in the outcome of elections. See Cox and Cox, “Negro Suffrage and Republican Politics,” 303–30; Field, The Politics of Race in New York, 159–60, 169–70, 181–83; McPherson, The Struggle for Equality, 333–34; Libman, “Minnesota and the Struggle for Black Suffrage,” 1–5, 132–33; Berrier, “The Negro Suffrage Issue in Iowa—1865–1868,” 245–46; and Current, The History of Wisconsin: Vol. II, 572. Still others have noted a more complex blend of pragmatism and idealism among Republicans. See William Gillette, Retreat from Reconstruction, 1869–1879 (Baton Rouge, La., 1979), 18–19; Robert M. Goldman, Reconstruction and Black Suffrage: Losing the Vote in Reese and Cruikshank (Lawrence, Kans., 2001), 16–17; Simpson, The Reconstruction Presidents, 143; Sawrey, Dubious Victory, 114; Maltz, Civil Rights, the Constitution, and Congress, 1863–1869, 144–45; and Berwanger, The West and Reconstruction, 174.

66. National Anti-Slavery Standard, 23 January 1869; and Christian Recorder, 23 January 1869.

67. National Anti-Slavery Standard, 30 January 1869.

68. (Unknown) to Schuyler Colfax, 18 January 1869, John Mercer Langston Papers, Fisk University (microfilm); National Anti-Slavery Standard, 30 January 1869; and Christian Recorder, 23, 30 January 1869.

69. Senate, Memorial of the Executive Committee of the Late National Convention of the Colored Men of the Country, praying the right of suffrage to be granted to all citizens without regard to race, color, or previous condition, 40th Cong., 3d Sess., S. Doc. 44, serial 1361 (quotation); William A. Lavalette to Jacob C. White Jr., 20 July 1869, Jacob C. White Papers, American Negro Historical Society Collection.

70. Elevator, 15 September 1865; also 23 March 1867, 21 February 1868; Weekly Anglo-African, 1 July 1865; George T. Downing to Frederick Douglass, 18 January 1866, Frederick Douglass Papers; and Liberator, 17 February 1865.

71. Christian Recorder, 25 November 1865; Weekly Anglo-African, 1 July 1865; and Elevator, 15 September 1865. Douglass argued that a literacy test should be applied equally to all males. Liberator, 17 February 1865. See also Rael, Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North, 295–96; and David Gerber, “A Politics of Limited Options: Northern Black Politics and the Problem of Change and Continuity in Race Relations Historiography,” Journal of Social History 14 (Winter 1980): 241.

72. William Nesbit to Jacob C. White Jr., 25 November 1868, Jacob C. White Papers, American Negro Historical Society Collection; petitions of 1 December 1868, 5 January 1869, House Committee on the Judiciary, 40th Cong., 3d Sess., RG46, National Archives; and Newark Evening Courier, 13 August 1867.

73. William D. Forten to Charles Sumner, 1 February 1869, Charles Sumner Papers.

74. Dable, A Respectable Woman, 129–31, 139, 156; and Schwalm, Emancipation’s Diaspora, 5–6. On the continuing debate among historians on southern women’s role in the political culture during Reconstruction, see Martha S. Jones, All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830–1900 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2007), 142; Foner, Forever Free, 131; Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet, 227, 230–34; Michael W. Fitzgerald, “Reconstruction Politics and the Politics of Reconstruction,” in Reconstructions, ed. Brown, 102; Elsa Barkley Brown, “Race Identity and Political Activism: The Shifting Contours of the African American Public Sphere,” in The Black Public Sphere: A Public Culture Book (Chicago, 1995), 111–50; and Julie Saville, “Rites and Power: Reflections on Slavery, Freedom, and Political Ritual,” Slavery and Abolition 20 (January 1999): 81–102.

75. Elevator, 15 September 1865; and Jones, All Bound Up Together, 142–43.

76. Lewis, “The Fortens of Philadelphia,” 208–9.

77. Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920 (Bloomington, Ind., 1998), 19–21, 24; Marianna W. Davis, ed., Contributions of Black Women to America, Vol. II: Civil Rights, Politics and Government, Education, Medicine, Sciences (Columbia, S.C., 1982), 144, 147; and Paul Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (Toronto, 1984), 67.

78. See National Anti-Antislavery Standard, 1 June 1867, 6 February 1869; Lewis, “The Struggle for Black Suffrage in Pennsylvania, 1838–1870,” 232; Elizabeth Cady Stanton et al., eds., History of Woman Suffrage (New York, 1882), II, 183; Rosalyn M. Terborg-Penn, “Afro-Americans in the Struggle for Woman Suffrage” (Ph.D. diss., Howard University, 1977), 79; and Martin, The Mind of Frederick Douglass, 156. For similar views of other African American men, see Farrison, William Wells Brown, 409; William E. Ward, “Charles Lenox Remond: Black Abolitionist, 1838–1873” (Ph.D. diss., Clark University, 1977), 256–57; Stanton et al., eds., History of Woman Suffrage, II:182–86.

79. Nell Irvin Painter, “Voices of Suffrage: Sojourner Truth, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and the Struggle for Woman Suffrage,” in Votes for Women: The Struggle for Suffrage Revisited, ed. Jean H. Baker (Oxford, 2002), 49; Darlene Clark Hine, ed., Black Women in America, 2d ed. (Oxford, 2005), III:36–37; Giddings, When and Where I Enter, 67; and Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920, 32.

80. Lori D. Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life (New York, 2009), 116–24; and Ellen Carol DuBois, Woman Suffrage and Women’s Rights (New York, 1998), 89–90, 93–96.

81. Giddings, When and Where I Enter, 65; Painter, “Voices of Suffrage,” 46–50; and Jones, All Bound Up Together, 142–44.

82. Stanton et al., eds., History of Woman Suffrage, I:72–73. On Truth’s views, see Giddings, When and Where I Enter, 65; Painter, “Voices of Suffrage,” 45–47; Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920, 31; and Gerda Lerner, Black Women in White America: A Documentary History (New York, 1972), 569.

83. Giddings, When and Where I Enter, 66; and Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920, 32.

84. Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol (New York, 1996), 224–25; Hine, ed., Black Women in America, III:37; Giddings, When and Where I Enter, 68; Stanton et al., eds., History of Woman Suffrage, II:391–92; Carleton Mabee, Sojourner Truth: Slave, Prophet, Legend (New York, 1993), 176–80; and Ella Forbes, African American Women during the Civil War (New York, 1998), 216. Margaret Hope Bacon “‘One Great Bundle of Humanity,’” 35, 39; and Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1849–1869 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1978), 67–70.

85. See Gillette, The Right to Vote, 175–76; Patricia Lucie, “The Enduring Significance of the Civil War Constitutional Amendments,” in Legacy of Disunion: The Enduring Significance of the American Civil War, ed. Susan-Mary Grant and Peter J. Parish (Baton Rouge, La., 2003), 179–80: Elliott, Servant of Power, 63; Xi Wang, The Trial of Democracy, 46–48; and Goldman, Reconstruction and Black Suffrage, 15–16.

86. See, for example, Gillette, The Right to Vote, 113–26, 156–57; Xi Wang, The Trial of Democracy, 49–50; Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of Indiana, during the Forty-sixth Regular Session of the General Assembly (Indianapolis, 1869), 13 April 1869; Ena L. Farley, “The Denial of Black Equality Under the States Rights Dictum: New York, 1865–1877,” Afro-Americans in New York Life and History (January 1977): 18; Sawrey, Dubious Victory, 143; Blackburn, “Michigan,” 130; Senate, Resolution of the Legislature of Pennsylvania, ratifying the amendment to the Constitution of the United States known as Article XV, 41st Cong., 1st Sess., S. Doc. 20, serial 1399, 172–79; Rutherford B. Hayes to Schuyler Colfax, 22 October 1869, Schuyler Colfax Papers; Berwanger, The West and Reconstruction, 177–80; and Simpson, The Reconstruction Presidents, 143–44.

87. Elevator, 12 November 1869; and Christian Recorder, 11 September 1869.

88. Elevator, 11 February 1870; Christian Recorder, 9 April 1870; and Florence Ray, Sketch of the Life of Rev. Charles B. Ray (New York, 1887), 53–54. Northern blacks held numerous public celebrations, often with Radical Republicans in attendance. See, for example, entry for 14 April 1870, Ruffin Family Papers; and Katzman, Before the Ghetto, 3–4.

Chapter 3

1. National Antislavery Standard, 15 October 1864.

2. On the desegregation of the public schools in Massachusetts, see Jacobs, “The Nineteenth-Century Struggle over Segregated Education in the Boston Schools,” 80–82; George A. Levesque, “Before Integration: The Forgotten Years of Jim Crow Education in Boston,” Journal of Negro Education 48 (1979): 113, 116–25. In the early 1850s, the Ohio legislature created a black school system in Cincinnati that would be managed largely by African Americans. Moreover, in California and Pennsylvania laws were enacted that allowed black schools to be established in districts where a sufficient number of school-age black children resided; this represented an improvement over policies that had excluded all African American children from the public schools. On the Cincinnati black schools, see David L. Calkins, “Black Education and the Nineteenth-Century City: An Institutional Analysis of Cincinnati’s Colored Schools, 1850–1887,” Cincinnati Historical Society Bulletin 33 (Fall 1975): 161–62. On developments in California and Pennsylvania, see William Warren Ferrier, Ninety Years of Education in California, 1846–1936: A Presentation of Education Movements and Their Outcome in Education Today (Berkeley, Calif., 1937), 17–18; and Brown, “Pennsylvania and the Rights of the Negro, 1865–1877,” 46. Where black children were denied access to northern public schools—and even in some places where a public education was available—African Americans, often working through their churches, also founded private schools. Although frequently underfunded and limited to providing an elementary education, these schools were a source of pride and respect within the black community. See Carlson, “The Black Community in the Rural North,” 92; Swift, Black Prophets of Justice, 280; Thornbrough, The Negro in Indiana, 167, 170, 181; Rael, Black Identity and Protest in the Antebellum North, 210–36; Reed, Platform for Change, 163–75, 198–201; Horton and Horton, Free People of Color, 17–25; and Pease and Pease, “Ends, Means, and Attitudes,” 117–26. V. P. Franklin argues that these schools were rooted in black nationalist principles such as freedom, resistance, and self-determination. Franklin, Black Self-Determination, 99–101, 167, 170.

3. See, for example, Litwack, North of Slavery, 143–50; and Stanley K. Schultz, The Culture Factory: The Boston Public Schools, 1789–1860 (New York, 1973), 205.

4. Christian Recorder, 27 January 1865; and Elevator, 9 June 1865.

5. On the deep-seated racism among northern whites, see Grossman, The Democratic Party and the Negro, 1–14; and Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind, 165–97.

6. Finkleman, “Prelude to the Fourteenth Amendment,” 463–64; Thornbrough, The Negro in Indiana, 481–82; and Fourteenth Report of the Superintendant of Public Instruction for the State of Indiana (Indianapolis, 1866), 49.

7. See Rusco, “Good Time Coming?” 29–34; Wollenberg, All Deliberate Speed, 13–15; Brown, The Negro in Pennsylvania History, 52; and Edward T. Price Jr., “School Segregation in Nineteenth-Century Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania History 43 (1976), 124–25.

8. McCaul, The Black Struggle for Public Schooling in Nineteenth-Century Illinois, 44–46; Chicago Tribune, 6 October 1864; Sixth Biennial Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction of the State of Illinois. 1865–1866 (Springfield, 1866), 28–29; and Philip T. K. Daniel, “A History of the Segregation-Discrimination Dilemma: The Chicago Experience,” Phylon 41 (June 1980): 127.

9. Clark Waggoner, History of the City of Toledo and Lucas County (Toledo, Ohio, 1888), 628; Gerber, “Education, Expediency, and Ideology,” 3; and Kusmer, A Ghetto Takes Shape, 16–17.

10. On the patterns in New Jersey, see Marion M. Thompson Wright, The Education of Negroes in New Jersey (New York, 1941), 151; and Herbert James Foster, “The Urban Experience of Blacks in Atlantic City: 1850–1915” (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, 1981), 214–16.

11. On Michigan, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, see Leslie H. Fishel Jr., “The North and the Negro, 1865–1900: A Study in Race Discrimination” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1953), 179; McPherson, The Struggle for Equality, 228; and Liberator, 24 March 1865. On New York, see Farley, “The Issue of Black Equality in New York State, 1865–1873,” 152, 162; and Thirteenth Annual Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction of the State of New York (Albany, N.Y., 1867), 196.

12. On African Americans’ defense of all-black schools during the antebellum era, see Levesque, “Before Integration,” 115–20; Cottrol, The Afro-Yankees, 99–101; Robert Austin Warner, New Haven Negroes: A Social History (New Haven, Conn., 1940), 77; Swift, Black Prophets of Justice, 280; Douglas, Jim Crow Moves North, 48–50; Pease and Pease, “Negro Conventions and the Problem of Black Leadership,” 35–36; and Bell, ed., Minutes of the Proceedings of the National Negro Conventions, 1830–1864, 22–23.

13. Harold X. Connolly, A Ghetto Grows in Brooklyn (New York, 1977), 27; Twenty-Eighth Annual Report of the Board of Education of the City of Detroit, for the Year Ending December 31, 1870 (Detroit, 1871), 12; Leonard Ernest Erickson, “The Color Line in Ohio Public Schools, 1829–1890” (Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 1959), 254; and Daily Ohio State Journal, 18 February 1878.

14. See David P. Thelan and Leslie H. Fishel Jr., “Reconstruction in the North: The World Looks at New York Negroes, March 16, 1867,” New York History 49 (October 1968): 407; Rose Juanita Jackson, “The Black Educational Experience in a Northern City: Albany, New York, 1830–1870” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1976), 53–54; Gerber, “Education, Expediency, and Ideology,” 12; and Spencer R. Crew, Black Life in Secondary Cities: A Comparative Analysis of the Black Communities of Camden and Elizabeth, New Jersey, 1860–1920 (New York, 1993), 130.

15. Harold N. Rabinowitz notes that southern blacks made similar demands during and after the Reconstruction era. Race Relations in the Urban South, 1865–1890 (Athens, Ga., 1996), 172–75.

16. See Mabee, Black Education in New York State, 100–101; and Seth M. Scheiner, Negro Mecca: A History of the Negro in New York City, 1865–1920 (New York, 1965), 160–61; see also Carlson, “The Black Community in the Rural North,” 95, 100–101; and Jackson, “The Black Educational Experience in a Northern City,” 48–52.

17. Elevator, 9 June 1865; and Reid, “Race, Class, Gender, and the Teaching Profession,” 82.

18. Proceedings of the State Equal Rights Convention of the Colored People of Pennsylvania, Held in the City of Harrisburg, February 8th, 9th, and 10th, 1865, 19–20.

19. See ibid., 21; and Liberator, 3 March 1865; see also Shirley Turpin-Parham, “A History of Black Public Education in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1864–1914” (Ed.D. diss., Temple University, 1986), 47–48.

20. Proceedings of the State Equal Rights Convention of the Colored People of Pennsylvania, Held in the City of Harrisburg, February 8th, 9th, and 10th, 1865 . . . , 21.

21. See, for example, Harry C. Silcox, “Nineteenth Century Philadelphia Black Militant: Octavius V. Catto (1839–1871),” Pennsylvania History 44 (January 1977): 64; and Parham, “A History of Black Public Education in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1864–1914,” 48.

22. Carlson, “The Black Community in the Rural North,” 103–6; Reid, “Race, Class, Gender and the Teaching Profession,” 67; and Spencer R. Crew, Black Life in Secondary Cities: A Comparative Analysis of the Black Communities of Camden and Elizabeth, New Jersey, 1860–1920 (New York, 1993), 130–31; see also Jackson, “The Black Educational Experience in a Northern City,” 53–54; and Ann Greenwood Wilmoth, “Pittsburgh and the Blacks: A Short History, 1780–1875” (Ph.D. diss., Pennsylvania State University, 1975), 185.

23. Elevator, 2 December 1870; Eighth Biennial Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction of the State of Illinois, 1869–1870 (Springfield, 187), 27; and Jackson, “The Black Educational Experience in a Northern City,” 53–54.

24. See Connolly, A Ghetto Grows in Brooklyn, 27.

25. See, for example, ibid.; Scheiner, Negro Mecca, 160–61; Jackson, “The Black Educational Experience in a Northern City,” 48–52; Fishel, “The North and the Negro, 1865–1900,” 207–8; Conner, “A Comparative Study of Black and White Public Education in New Brunswick, New Jersey,” 271; Mabee, Black Education in New York State, 208, 212; John B. Reid, “Race, Class, Gender, and the Teaching Profession: African American Schoolteachers in the Urban Midwest, 1865–1950” (Ph.D. diss., Michigan State University, 1996), 67; Schwalm, Emancipation’s Diaspora, 201–3; and Dabel, A Respectable Woman, 147.

26. Carlson, “The Black Community in the Rural North,” 97; Robert S. Dixon, “The Education of the Negro in the City of New York, 1853 to 1900” (Master’s thesis, College of the City of New York, 1935), 51–52; Roger Lane, The Roots of Violence in Black Philadelphia, 1860–1900 (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 55; and Schwalm, Emancipation’s Diaspora, 201–2. Black teachers generally were paid less than their white counterparts, and black men earned more than black women in the teaching profession. Reid, “Race, Class, Gender, and the Teaching Profession,” 69–70.

27. Mabee, Black Education in New York State, 210.

28. Daily Ohio State Journal, 9 February 1878.

29. Ibid., 11, 14 February 1878; also 18, 20 February 1878.

30. Elevator, 9 June 1865, 2 December 1870.

31. See David A. Gerber, “Peter Humphries Clark: The Dialogue of Hope and Despair,” in Black Leaders of the Nineteenth Century, ed. Litwack and Meier, 179; Calkins, “Black Education and the Nineteenth-Century City,” 164–65; Samuel Matthews, “The Black Educational Experience in Nineteenth-Century Cincinnati, 1817–1874” (Ed.D. diss., University of Cincinnati, 1985), viii, 98–100; and John B. Shotwell, A History of the Schools of Cincinnati (Cincinnati, 1902), 458. The situation in Camden, New Jersey, was similar to that in Cincinnati after 1856. Crew, Black Life in Secondary Cities, 130.

32. Calkins, “Black Education and the Nineteenth-Century City,” 165.

33. Matthews, “The Black Educational Experience in Nineteenth-Century Cincinnati, 1817–1874,” viii–ix, 60, 109–13; and Calkins, “Black Education and the Nineteenth-Century City,” 165.

34. Matthews, “The Black Educational Experience in Nineteenth-Century Cincinnati, 1817–1874,” 58, 75, 95–96; Gerber, “Peter Humphries Clark,” 179; Lawrence Grossman, “In His Veins Coursed No Bootlicking Blood: The Career of Peter H. Clark,” Ohio History 86 (Spring 1977): 82; and Gerber, “Education, Expediency, and Ideology,” 4.

35. Journal of the Senate of the State of Ohio, for the Regular Session of the Fifty-Eighth General Assembly, Commencing November 23, 1868. Vol. LXV (Columbus, 1869), 94, 107, 183, 185, 207, 254, 267.

36. Indianapolis Daily Journal, 9 November 1866.

37. Matthews, “The Black Educational Experience in Nineteenth-Century Cincinnati, 1817–1874,” 75, 98–99, 108, 124–32.

38. Ibid., 133–39; and Gerber, “Education, Expediency, and Ideology,” 4–5.

39. Matthews, “The Black Educational Experience in Nineteenth-Century Cincinnati, 1817–1874,” 125, 129–32; Gerber, “Peter Humphries Clark,” 180–81; and Daily Ohio State Journal, 11 February 1878.

40. Christian Recorder, 9 April 1870.

41. Pacific Appeal, 20 June 1874; and Christian Recorder, 9 July 1870. Frederick Douglass made much the same point. Foner, Frederick Douglass, IV:288.

42. See, for example, Pacific Appeal, 25 November 1871; see also Memorial to Congress, 12 February 1866, Records of the Pennsylvania State Equal Rights League, 1–3, Leon Gardiner Collection on Negro History; and Elevator, 29 December 1871, 27 April 1872, 26 July 1873.

43. See Proceedings of the Illinois Convention of Colored Men, Assembled at Galesburg, October 16th, 17th, and 18th (Chicago, 1867), 6; Christian Recorder, 5 January 1867, 5 May 1870; Gerber, “Education, Expediency, and Ideology,” 8–9; Pacific Appeal, 25 November 1871; and Elevator, 9 June 1865.

44. Pacific Appeal, 25 November 1871.

45. Elevator, 16 February 1866.

46. Indianapolis Daily Journal, 8, 9 November 1866, 8 October 1867.

47. Indianapolis Daily Journal, 8 October 1867. There is no evidence that this plan was ever implemented.

48. Pacific Appeal, 20 January 1872; also 17 April 1875; Arthur O. White, “The Black Movement against Jim Crow Education in Lockport, New York, 1835–1876,” New York History 50 (July 1969): 282.

49. Tenth Biennial Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction of the State of Illinois. 1873–1874 (Springfield, 1875), 46–47. Indeed, four white men in Illinois sued to prevent a local school board from erecting a building and hiring a teacher to educate two black students. In Chase v. Stephenson, the Illinois Supreme Court declared in 1874 that the white school directors could not maintain a separate school for a few black children when they could, at a much lower cost, be accommodated at a white school. Had the school board “in good faith” provided a separate room for each race where facilities were “entirely equal,” it would have been acceptable. But, in a ruling that sought above all to protect whites’ economic interests and in no way challenged the state’s policy mandating separate schools, the court declared that the school board’s conduct “can only be regarded as a fraud upon the tax-payers of the district,” who had the right to prevent public funds from being “squandered in such a reckless, unauthorized manner.” Chase v. Stephenson, 71 Ill. 383 (1874).

50. See Katzman, Before the Ghetto, 85; Wollenberg, All Deliberate Speed, 16–17; Gerber, “Education, Expediency, and Ideology,” 4–5; and Turpin-Parham, “A History of Black Public Education in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1864–1914,” 57–58.

51. Voegeli, Free But Not Equal, 172–73; Erickson, “The Color Line in the Ohio Public Schools, 1829–1890,” 225–27, 235–40; Johnsen, “Equal Rights and the ‘Heathen Chinee,’” 64; and Wollenberg, All Deliberate Speed, 16–17.

52. See Horace Mann Bond, The Education of the Negro in the American Social Order (New York, 1934), 384–85; and Charles A. Lofgren, The Plessy Case: A Legal Historical Interpretation (New York, 1987).

53. Turpin-Parham, “A History of Black Public Education in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1864–1914,” 244; Erickson, “The Color Line in Ohio Public Schools, 1829–1890,” 235; and Toledo Daily Commercial, 21 January 1870.

54. Jackson, “The Black Educational Experience in a Northern City,” 46–47; Conner, “A Comparative Study of Black and White Education in New Brunswick, New Jersey,” 164–90, 214–21; and White, “The Black Movement against Jim Crow Education in Lockport, New York, 1835–1876,” 272–76.

55. Pacific Appeal, 10 February 1872; Elevator, 9 June, 24 November 1865, 4 May 1872; and Christian Recorder, 27 February 1869.

56. See Detroit Advertiser and Tribune, 3 September 1867; Journal of the Senate of the State of Ohio, for the Regular Session of the Fifty-Eighth General Assembly, Commencing on November 23, 1868, Vol. LXV, 94, 107; Christian Recorder, 27 January 1865, 21 July 1866; Toledo Daily Commercial, 15 February 1870; Liberator, 11, 18 March 1864; Journal of the House of Representatives of the Twenty-Fifth General Assembly of the State of Illinois. Vol. II (Springfield, 1867), 231; and Pacific Appeal, 25 November 1871, 20 January 1872.

57. See Detroit Advertiser and Tribune, 11 January 1869; Chicago Tribune, 6 October 1864; Indianapolis Daily Journal, 8 January 1869; and Pacific Appeal, 31 September 1870, 7 January, 18 November, 16 December 1871, 4, 11 May 1872.

58. See, for example, Detroit Advertiser and Tribune, 2 February 1869; Arthur O. White, “The Black Movement against Jim Crow Education in Buffalo, New York, 1860–1900,” Phylon 30 (1969): 385, and “The Black Movement against Jim Crow Education in Lockport, New York, 1835–1876,” 279–80; Illinois State Register, 31 March 1871; Wollenberg, All Deliberate Speed, 16; Warner, New Haven Negroes, 117–19; Price, “School Segregation in Nineteenth-Century Pennsylvania,” 126–27; Harmon Mothershead, “Negro Rights in the Colorado Territory (1859–1867),” Colorado Magazine 40 (July 1963): 59; Daniel, “A History of the Segregation Discrimination Dilemma,” 127; Squibb, “Roads to Plessy,” 138–39; and Berwanger, “Hardin and Langston,” 105.

59. J. Morgan Kousser, Dead End: The Development of Nineteenth-Century Litigation on Racial Discrimination in Schools (Oxford, 1986), 14–15, 18–19.

60. Ibid., 16–17; and Schwalm, Emancipation’s Diaspora, 197–98.

61. Finkleman, “Prelude to the Fourteenth Amendment,” 464; Jonathan Lurie, “The Fourteenth Amendment: Use and Application in Selected State Court Civil Liberty Cases, 1870–1890—A Preliminary Assessment,” American Journal of Legal History 28 (October 1984): 304; and Robert R. Dykstra, Bright Radical Star: Black Freedom on the Hawkeye Frontier (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 229.

62. Detroit Free Press, 27 January 1865, 3 January 1867.

63. Detroit Advertiser and Tribune, 3 January, 3 September 1867 (quotation); also Kousser, Dead End, 18; and William Stephenson, “Integration of the Detroit Public School System during the Period 1839–1869,” Negro History Bulletin 26 (October 1962): 27.

64. Detroit Advertiser and Tribune, 17 December 1867. For a discussion of the Detroit school issue between 1867–1869, see Katzman, Before the Ghetto, 85–87.

65. Robin S. Peebles, “Fanny Richards and the Integration of the Detroit Public Schools,” Michigan History 65 (January/ February 1981): 31.

66. On Workman’s lawsuit, see Paludan, A Covenant with Death, 266; and Stephenson, “Integration of the Detroit Public School System during the Period 1839–1869,” 27.

67. Detroit Advertiser and Tribune, 11 January 1869. Among those who helped to finance Workman’s lawsuit were Fanny Richards, a black teacher, and members of the Second Baptist Church, where Richards taught Sunday School, as well as John Bagley, a wealthy Republican, tobacco manufacturer, and member of the Detroit Board of Education, who later was elected governor of Michigan. Peebles, “Fanny Richards and the Integration of the Detroit Public Schools,” 30–31.

68. Detroit Advertiser and Tribune, 2 February, 6 April 1869; Thirty-Third Annual Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction of the State of Michigan, with Accompanying Documents, for the Year 1869 (Lansing, Mich., 1869), 23.

69. Thirty-Third Annual Report of the Superintendant of Public Instruction of the State of Michigan, with Accompanying Documents, for the Year 1869, 26–29; and Squibb, “Roads to Plessy,” 119–21. Kousser has speculated that if Cooley had sought to apply the Fourteenth Amendment to the issue of segregated schools, he would have found that they violated the Constitution. Kousser, Dead End, 19. But Douglas and Squibb have contended that Cooley consciously cited Michigan law and avoided any mention of federal questions. Douglas, Jim Crow Moves North, 114; and Squibb, “Roads to Plessy,” 121–22.

70. Detroit Advertiser and Tribune, 12 October 1869. The Democratic Detroit Free Press echoed these sentiments, 13 October 1869.

71. See Twenty-Eighth Annual Report of the Board of Education of the City of Detroit, for the Year Ending December 31, 1870 (Detroit, 1871), 12; and Detroit Advertiser and Tribune, 14 July 1871.

72. Detroit Advertiser and Tribune, 12 November 1872; and Katzman, Before the Ghetto, 87–88.

73. On school integration in Rhode Island, see Lawrence Grossman, “George T. Downing and the Desegregation of the Rhode Island Public Schools, 1855–1866,” Rhode Island History 36 (November 1977): 104–5; and Charles Carroll, Public Education in Rhode Island (Providence, 1918), 158; on Connecticut, see Warner, New Haven Negroes, 118–19; in Minnesota, see William D. Green, “‘Critical is Fifteen Coloreds!’: De Facto and De Jure Policies of Racial Isolation in St. Paul’s Schools and Housing Patterns during the Nineteenth Century, and Beyond,” Journal of Public Law and Policy 17 (1996): 313.

74. On the Iowa situation, see Douglas, Jim Crow Moves North, 77; Schwalm, Emancipation’s Diaspora, 198–99; on Indiana, see Thornbrough, The Negro in Indiana, 323–25; on California, see Elevator, 10, 17 July, 6 November 1868; and Chandler, “Friends in Time of Need,” 331–32; on Illinois, see Vincent P. Franklin, “The Persistence of School Segregation in the Urban North: An Historical Perspective,” Journal of Ethnic Studies 1 (1974): 57; on Pennsylvania, see Christian Recorder, 21 July 1866; and Brown, The Negro in Pennsylvania History, 52–53.

75. See, for example, Detroit Advertiser and Tribune, 6 April 1869; Toledo Daily Commercial, 14 July 1869; Davis, “The Pennsylvania State Equal Rights League and the Northern Black Struggle for Legal Equality,” 625–26; and Indianapolis Daily Journal, 9 November 1866.

76. See, for example, Price, “School Segregation in Nineteenth-Century Pennsylvania,” 128–32; White, “The Black Movement against Jim Crow Education in Buffalo, New York, 1800–1900,” 385–86; Elevator, 20 December 1867, 15 January 1869, 4 July 1873; and William Hanchett, “Yankee Law and the Negro in Nevada, 1861–1868,” 246.

Chapter 4

1. Goldman, Reconstruction and Black Suffrage, 16; and Louis Hayden to Wendell Phillips, 28 February 1870, Crawford Blagden Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University; see also Daily Ohio State Journal, 13 January 1870.

2. Elevator, 10 June 1870.

3. Davis, ed., Contributions of Black Women to America, II:67–68; and Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920, 36, 56.

4. Painter, “Voices of Suffrage,” 52; and Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920, 34, 38–39, 48, 52. For an analysis of the AWSA-NWSA split, see DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage, 188–200. Harriet Purvis, a prominent Philadelphia activist for universal suffrage, was more active in the NWSA than Truth, becoming in 1876 the first black woman to be elected a vice president of the organization. Davis, ed., Contributions of Black Women to America, II:68.

5. Painter, “Voices of Suffrage,” 52; and Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920, 47–48.

6. New National Era, 24 November 1870; and Frederick Douglass to Charles Sumner, 6 July 1872, Charles Sumner Papers (quotation). For an analysis of blacks’ concerns regarding the lessons that many whites drew from hundreds of years of slavery, see Blight, Race and Reunion, 98–139. Leslie Fishel’s claim that northern black men’s “euphoria” in response to the ratification of the amendment made them especially vulnerable to despair and regret as the 1870s unfolded does not hold up under close scrutiny. See Fishel, “Repercussions of Reconstruction,” 326.

7. Daily Ohio State Journal, 14 April 1870. An Ohio black convention held on the eve of ratification expressed similar concerns. Daily Ohio State Journal, 17 November 1869.

8. Charles Lenox Remond 1872 speech, Box 87-1, Folder 51, Ruffin Family Papers.

9. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, 9 April 1870 petition, 41st Cong., 2d Sess. (quotation); and Daily Ohio State Journal, 4 April 1870.

10. See Johnsen, “Equal Rights and the ‘Heathen Chinee,’” 63; New National Era, 29 December 1870; Farley, “The Denial of Black Equality under the States Rights Dictum,” 17; Katzman, Before the Ghetto, 101–2; and Moore, “Response to Reconstruction,” 151.

11. Newark Daily Journal, 7 April 1870; and Thornbrough, The Negro in Indiana, 293.

12. Christian Recorder, 25 November 1871; Price, “Let the Law be Just,” 189–95; Harry C. Silcox, “The Black ‘Better Class’ Political Dilemma: Philadelphia Prototype Isaiah C. Wears,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 113 (January 1989): 49; and Silcox, “Nineteenth Century Philadelphia Black Militant,” 75–76.

13. Wright, “Negro Suffrage in New Jersey, 1776–1875,” 219–20; also Cincinnati Commercial, 20 February 1870. The evidence does not support claims by Edward J. Price, Leslie H. Fishel Jr., and Roger Lane that, once the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, naive northern blacks, unschooled in the intricacies of the political process, blindly supported the Republican Party as the result of empty rhetoric and token gestures by the party’s leadership. See Price, “Let the Law be Just,” 201–2; Fishel, “Repercussions of Reconstruction,” 326; and Lane, Roots of Violence in Black Philadelphia, 1860–1900, 124–30.

14. Pacific Appeal, 13 July 1872.

15. See, for example, Christian Recorder, 12, 19 November 1870; and Silcox, “The Black ‘Better Class’ Political Dilemma,” 58.

16. Christian Recorder, 5 November 1870; and 1872 speech, John Jones Collection; see also Pacific Appeal, 22 July 1871.

17. Rusco, “Good Time Coming?” 92–93; and New National Era, 16 February 1872. For similar sentiments, see New National Era, 21 July 1870, 23 March 1871; Christian Recorder, 4 May, 5 October 1872; Newark Daily Journal, 7 April 1870; John Hope Franklin, George Washington Williams: A Biography (Chicago, 1985), 18; and Pacific Appeal, 23 January 1875.

18. See, for example, Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War, 212; and Martin, The Mind of Frederick Douglass, 86.

19. Christian Recorder, 31 August 1872; and Frederick Douglass to Cassius Clay, 26 July 1871, Frederick Douglass Papers; see also Elevator, 1, 15 June, 14 September 1872; Pacific Appeal, 25 May, 15 June 1872; New Brunswick Daily Times, 4 June 1872; and New National Era, 10, 31 August 1871, 23 May, 10, 24 October 1872.

20. Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction, 124–25; Ronald B. Jager, “Charles Sumner, the Constitution, and the Civil Rights Act of 1875,” New England Quarterly 42 (1969): 359, 366; James M. McPherson, “The Abolitionists and the Civil Rights Act of 1875,” Journal of American History 52 (December 1965): 500–506; and Alfred H. Kelley, “The Congressional Controversy over School Segregation, 1867–1875,” American Historical Review 64 (April 1959): 537, 546.

21. See Joseph C. Bustill to Charles Sumner, 10 January 1872, Charles Sumner Papers; see also Frederick Douglass to Charles Sumner, 19 July 1872, Henry Highland Garnet to Charles Sumner, 23 December 1871, William Nesbit to Charles Sumner, 19 January 1872, George T. Downing to Charles Sumner, 20 January, 12 December 1871, 1 August 1873, William D. Forten to Charles Sumner, 18 January 1872, Charles Sumner Papers; Frederick Douglass to Theodore Freylinghuysen, 23 May 1874, Frederick Douglass Papers; Journal of the Senate of the United States of America, 42nd Cong., 2d Sess., 1872, 104, 105, 120, 305; Senate Committee on the Judiciary, 4 April 1870 petition, 41st Cong., 2d Sess., 30; and Pacific Appeal, 27 March 1875.

22. See, for example, Pacific Appeal, 13, 20, 27 April 1872; U.S. House, Memorial of Colored Citizens. 42nd Cong., 3d Sess., 1873, H. Misc. Doc. 58, 1–2. On the 1873 national convention, see Elevator, 22 November, 27 December 1873; Pacific Appeal, 3 January 1874; and Memorial of the National Convention of Colored Persons, Praying to be Protected in their Civil Rights, 1–5. On the 1875 national convention, see Washington National Republican, 27 January 1875; Pacific Appeal, 6 February 1875; and Christian Recorder, 4 February 1875.

23. Pacific Appeal, 12 September 1874 (quotation); see also Christian Recorder, 16 October 1874; Pacific Appeal, 26 July 1873, 20 February 1875; Our National Progress, 11 October 1873; and Inter-Ocean, 2 April 1872.

24. On the opposition to Sumner’s bill, see Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction, 124–26, 131–40.

25. See ibid., 138–39; Annual Report of the Board of Education of the State of Connecticut, Presented to the General Assembly, May Session, 1874 (New Haven, 1874), 70; Bertram Wyatt-Brown, “The Civil Rights Act of 1875,” Western Political Quarterly 18 (December 1965): 765–66; William Preston Vaughn, Schools for All: The Blacks and Public Education in the South, 1865–1877 (Lexington, Ky., 1974), 123–38; and Nation, 17 September 1874.

26. Elevator, 3 October 1874; U.S. Senate, Resolutions Adopted at a Public Meeting, 42nd Cong., 2d Sess., 1872 S. Misc. Doc. 29, 3. For similar sentiments, see Daily Ohio State Journal, 25 February 1875; and Pacific Appeal, 8 March 1873.

27. Heather Cox Richardson, Leslie H. Fishel Jr., and David A. Gerber argue that northern black protest leaders were driven to agitate for equal rights primarily by considerations of what would best serve their class interests. The evidence, however, does not support this assertion. See Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction, 133–34; Gerber, Black Ohio and the Color Line, 1860–1915, 186–87; and Fishel, Repercussions of Reconstruction, 336–38.

28. U.S. Senate, Resolutions Adopted at a Public Meeting. 42nd Cong., 2d Sess., 1872, S. Misc. Doc. 29, 1–2; Pacific Appeal, 15 February 1873; and Daily Ohio State Journal, 25 February 1873.

29. See Pacific Appeal, 18 July 1874; and Inter-Ocean, 2 April 1872. For similar sentiments, see U.S. House, Memorial of Colored Citizens. 42nd Cong., 3d Sess., 1873, H. Misc. Doc. 58; Elevator, 22 November 1873; and Pacific Appeal, 18 October 1873. Bess Beatty criticizes Nell Irvin Painter, in her Exodusters, for exaggerating class divisions among southern blacks. Beatty, A Revolution Gone Backward: The Black Response to National Politics, 1876–1896 (Westport, Conn., 1987), x–xi.

30. U.S. Senate, Resolutions Adopted at a Public Meeting. 42nd Cong., 2d Sess., 1872, S. Misc. Doc. 29, 1–2 (quotation); U.S. House, Memorial of National Convention of Colored Persons. 43rd Cong., 1st Sess., 1873 H. Misc. Doc. 44, 1; and Pacific Appeal, 18 October 1874 (quotation).

31. Pacific Appeal, 18 October 1874; U.S. House, Memorial of National Convention of Colored Persons. 43rd Cong., 1st Sess., 1873, H. Misc. Doc. 44, 4; and U.S. Senate, Petition of the National Executive Committee of the Colored People. 41st Cong., 2d Sess., 1870. S. Misc. Doc. 130, 1.

32. U.S. Senate, Resolutions Adopted at a Public Meeting. 42nd Cong., 2d Sess., 1872, S. Misc. Doc. 29, 2; and U.S. House, Memorial of National Convention of Colored Persons. 43rd Cong., 1st Sess., 1873, H. Misc. Doc. 44, 2. Their belief that school integration must be national in scope led them to dismiss the dire prediction that such a policy would destroy the southern public schools. If that occurred, a Massachusetts black wrote in the Pacific Appeal, “so be it.” Pacific Appeal, 20 June 1874. Southern blacks gave some support for the school clause in Sumner’s bill, but it appears that much of the lobbying was done by northern blacks. William Preston Vaughn argues that many southern blacks were more interested in equal educational opportunities than in encouraging integration, especially on the elementary level. Those who espoused racially integrated public schools encountered formidable white opposition, and a final reckoning on the issue was often avoided through legislative maneuvers. Most of the southern state constitutional convention delegates were whites who rejected school integration. Vaughn agrees with the critics of Sumner’s proposal that, if the public schools had been integrated, funding for education for blacks probably would have been impossible in most southern states. Moreover, even many southern white Radicals sanctioned racially segregated public schools. Schools for All, 56–57, 77.

33. Pacific Appeal, 15 March 1873.

34. New National Era, 24 February 1870; and Pacific Appeal, 27 May 1871.

35. See William Seraile, “The Civil War’s Impact on Race Relations in New York State, 1865–1875,” Afro-Americans in New York Life and History 25 (January 2001): 70; Mabee, Black Education in New York State, 205; Jackson, “The Black Educational Experience in a Northern City,” 72; and Dixon, “Education of the Negro in the City of New York, 1853 to 1900,” 56–57.

36. Toledo Daily Commercial, 6 July 1869 (quotation), 21 January, 15 February 1870; and Leonard Ernest Erickson, “Toledo Desegregates, 1871,” Northwest Ohio Quarterly 41 (Winter 1968–1969): 5–7. The Christian Recorder lauded the city for doing “the handsome thing in abolishing her negative Ku-Kluxism,” 29 July 1871.

37. See Wilmoth, “Pittsburgh and the Blacks,” 169–70, 180–81; and Warner, New Haven Negroes, 119, 174.

38. Eighth Biennial Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction of the State of Illinois. 1871–1872 (Springfield, 1873), 115–16.

39. See, for example, Elevator, 10 June 1870; Moore, “Response to Reconstruction,” 158; Squibb, “Roads to Plessy,” 85; Sanelli, “The Struggle for Black Suffrage in Pennsylvania, 1838–1870,” 310–11; Wright, “Negro Suffrage in New Jersey, 1776–1875,” 220–22; William Gillette, Jersey Blue: Civil War Politics in New Jersey, 1854–1865 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1995), 8; Dykstra, Bright Radical Star, 230–37; and Thornbrough, The Negro in Indiana, 249–50.

40. Pacific Appeal, 15, 29 March 1873; and New York Times, 6 March 1873.

41. New National Era, 24 February 1870.

42. In his study on the Fifteenth Amendment, William Gillette has argued that the northern black vote during the 1870s had an impact on elections that was out of proportion to its numbers. Several historians have charged that Gillette exaggerated the significance of the northern African American vote. But even David Gerber and LaWanda and John H. Cox, who have vigorously challenged his claim, acknowledge that, especially in some urban centers, blacks were able to affect the outcome of elections. For this debate, see Gillette, The Right to Vote, 182–84. Among those who have challenged his assertion are Grossman, The Democratic Party and the Negro, 99–100; Farley, “The Issue of Black Equality in New York State, 1865–1873,” 85–87; Crew, Black Life in Secondary Cities, 169–70; Gerber, “A Politics of Limited Options,” 237–40; and Cox and Cox, “Negro Suffrage and Republican Politics,” 321–30.

43. Pacific Appeal, 10 September 1870, 9 November 1872; and Gerald G. Eggert, “‘Two Steps Forward, A Step and a Half Back’: Harrisburg’s African American Community in the Nineteenth Century,” in African Americans in Pennsylvania: Shifting Historical Perspectives, ed. Joe William Trotter Jr. and Eric Ledell Smith (University Park, Pa., 1997), 236, 244.

44. Mittrick, “A History of Negro Voting in Pennsylvania during the Nineteenth Century,” 81, 90, 93–95, 100; and Frank B. Evans, Pennsylvania Politics, 1872–1877: A Study in Political Leadership (Harrisburg, Pa., 1966), 198–99.

45. On the black vote’s impact in New Jersey elections, see Moore, “Response to Reconstruction,” 151–53; and Crew, Black Life in Secondary Cities, 170–71; in Connecticut, see Gillette, The Right to Vote, 130, 182; in Ohio, see Gerber, “Education, Expediency, and Ideology,” 17; in Cairo, Illinois, see Christopher K. Hays, “The African American Struggle for Equality and Justice in Cairo, Illinois, 1865–1900,” Illinois Historical Journal 90 (Winter 1997): 274–75. Hays also shows that black voters enabled Chicago Republicans to win a number of races by small margins during the 1870s, p. 75. Although most African American voters resided in the South, Peter Anderson pointedly reminded white Republicans that, while Grant won the presidency in 1872 by 700,000 votes, the national black vote totaled 880,000 in that election. Pacific Appeal, 9, 16 November 1872.

46. National Anti-Slavery Standard, 25 September 1869. Several delegates at an Ohio convention in 1871 expressed similar reservations about disbanding black rights organizations. Daily Ohio State Journal, 19 January 1871.

47. National Anti-Slavery Standard, 25 September 1869; and Christian Recorder, 5 May 1870, 31 August 1872.

48. New York Times, 25 July 1873 (quotation); and Daily Ohio State Journal, 19 January 1871 (quotation). For further evidence of such separate black Republican clubs, see Carlson, “The Black Community in the Rural North,” 117–18; Katzman, Before the Ghetto, 178; and Gerber, Black Ohio and the Color Line, 213–15.

49. Elevator, 6 December 1873; and New York Sun, 29 September 1873.

50. Davis, Black Americans in Cleveland from George Peake to Carl B. Stokes, 1796–1969, 89, 92; and Grossman, “In His Veins Coursed No Bootlicking Blood,” 87–88.

51. Hays, “The African American Struggle for Equality and Justice in Cairo, Illinois, 1865–1900,” 275; Carlson, “The Black Community in the Rural North,” 117–18, 123–26; Illinois Times, 20–26 January 2000; Bridges, “Equality Deferred,” 98–99; and John H. Keiser, Building for the Centuries: Illinois, 1865 to 1898 (Urbana, Ill., 1977), 15–44.

52. Katzman, Before the Ghetto, 178–80; and June Babar Woodson, “A Century with the Negroes of Detroit, 1830–1930” (Master’s thesis, Wayne State University, 1949), 54.

53. See, for example, Charles A. Porter to Jacob C. White Jr., 5 October 1870, Jacob C. White Papers; Christian Recorder, 31 August 1872, 1 April 1875; Crew, Black Life in Secondary Cities, 172–73; and Warner, New Haven Negroes, 178.

54. See Gerber, “A Politics of Limited Options,” 237–38.

55. See Elevator, 28 June 1873; New National Era, 24 November 1870; and Cincinnati Commercial, 23 August 1873.

56. Philadelphia Press, 3 February 1870; and New National Era, 24 November 1870. For similar sentiments, see Pacific Appeal, 30 September 1871, 13 April 1872, 1 February, 1 March 1873; Elevator, 21 February 1874; and Detroit Free Press, 19 August 1876. Martin E. Dann notes that southern blacks, including the freed people, likewise demanded equal treatment within the party. Dann, ed., The Black Press, 1827–1900: The Quest for National Identity (New York, 1971), 52; see also Foner, Reconstruction, 137, 142, 150–51.

57. Elevator, 21 February 1874; and Pacific Appeal, 12 August 1871.

58. Cincinnati Commercial, 23 August 1873.

59. See, for example, Foner, Reconstruction, 122–62; and Franklin, Reconstruction after the Civil War, 104–16, 154–63.

60. See, for example, Foner, Reconstruction, 180–84, 232–50; and Allen W. Trelease, White Terror: The KKK Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction (Westport, Conn., 1971). On the Colfax massacre, see Charles Lane, The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction (New York, 2008); and Lee Anna Keith, The Colfax Massacre: The Untold Story of Black Power, White Terror, and the Death of Reconstruction (New York, 2008). On the southern Democrats’ rise to power, see Michael Perman, The Road to Redemption: Southern Politics, 1869–1879 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1984).

61. On Grant’s Reconstruction policy, see William S. McFeely, Grant: A Biography (New York, 1980), 416–25; and Brooks Simpson, The Reconstruction Presidents (Lawrence, Kans., 1983), 133–96.

62. Christian Recorder, 1 April 1871; and Indianapolis Daily Journal, 22 September 1875.

63 Christian Recorder, 21 August 1873.

64. Christian Recorder, 29 June, 19 October 1876. For similar sentiments, see Pacific Appeal, 13, 27 May, 10 June 1873, 18 September 1875; Christian Recorder, 21 August 1873; and Elevator, 10 October 1874.

65. On the slow pace of removing restrictive suffrage clauses from many state constitutions, see New National Era, 7 July 1870; Sanelli, “The Struggle for Black Suffrage in Pennsylvania, 1838–1870,” 310–11; Wright, “Negro Suffrage in New Jersey, 1776–1875,” 220–22; Dykstra, Bright Radical Star, 230–37; and Thornbrough, The Negro in Indiana, 249–50.

66. See New National Era, 1, 22 May 1873; Farley, “The Issue of Black Equality in New York State, 1865–1873,” 258, 260–61; and Mabee, Black Education in New York State, 203.

67. Brown, The Negro in Pennsylvania History, 52; Thomas C. Cox, Blacks in Topeka, Kansas, 1865–1915: A Social History (Baton Rouge, La., 1982), 28–29; and K. Keith Richard, “Unwelcome Settlers: Black and Mulatto Oregon Pioneers,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 85 (Spring 1983): 29–55.

68. Crew, Black Life in Secondary Cities, 133–34.

69. On the Illinois situation, see Ninth Biennial Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction of the State of Illinois. 1871–1872, 115–16; and Tenth Biennial Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction of the State of Illinois. 1873–1874, 49–50; on California, see Elevator, 4 May 1872; on Indiana, see Heller, “Negro Education in Indiana From 1816 to 1869,” 111–12, 117; and Twenty-third Annual Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction for the State of Indiana (Indianapolis, 1875), 23–24.

70. See, for example, Nelson, The Fourteenth Amendment, 195–96; and Squibb, “Roads to Plessy,” 24–25. J. Morgan Kousser has challenged those historians who question the efficacy of legal action and blacks’ faith in, and use of, the courts, pointing out that these efforts proved worthwhile more often than not. Yet Kousser focuses especially on the post-1880 record and acknowledges that black plaintiffs were generally unsuccessful when they based their claims on the Fourteenth Amendment. Dead End, 15–16, 30.

71. See Squibb, “Roads to Plessy,” 158–62; and Erickson, “The Color Line in Ohio Public Schools, 1829–1890,” 241–42.

72. Austin Abbott, Reports of Practice Cases Determined in the Courts of the State of New-York, new series, vol. 13 (New York, 1886), 160–65.

73. Lurie, “The Fourteenth Amendment,” 305; and Rusco, “Good Time Coming?” 89 (quotation).

74. Pacific Appeal, 7 October 1871; and Elevator, 29 December 1871.

75. John W. Dwinelle, Argument of John W. Dwinelle on the Right of Colored Children to be Admitted to the Public Schools, 1–6, 15–16; and Wollenberg, All Deliberate Speed, 21–22.

76. Elevator, 23 November 1872.

77. Wollenberg, All Deliberate Speed, 23; and Kaczorowski, The Politics of Judicial Interpretation, 191–92.

78. Elevator, 28 February, 7 March 1874; and Pacific Appeal, 28 February 1874.

79. Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Judicature of the State of Indiana (Indianapolis, 1875), vol. 48, 328–30, 349–50, 362–63.

80. Cleveland Leader, 15 December 1874; and Kousser, Dead End, 21.

81. Tenth Biennial Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction of the State of Illinois. 1873–1874, 45–46. For a treatment of Republican and Democratic judges on the school issue, see Kousser, Dead End, 14–15.

82. For analyses of this retreat, see Gillette, Retreat from Reconstruction, 1869–1879, 367–71; Blight, Race and Reunion, 105–7; and Adam I. P. Smith and Peter J. Parish, “A Contested Legacy: The Civil War and Party Politics in the North,” in Legacy of Disunion, ed. Grant and Parish, 92–93.

83. Cleveland Leader, 28 August 1873. On the role of sympathetic whites in the equal rights cause during the 1870s, see McPherson, The Struggle for Equality, 428–32.

84. Pacific Appeal, 20 June 1874, 6 April 1872.

85. George T. Downing to Charles Sumner, 7 July 1871, Charles Sumner Papers; and New National Era, 8 July 1871.

86. Grossman, “In His Veins Coursed No Bootlicking Blood,” 85–86; The Democratic Party and the Negro, 38 (quotation); and Cleveland Leader, 23 August 1873.

87. Grossman, The Democratic Party and the Negro, 72–73; Silcox, “The Black ‘Better Class’ Political Dilemma,” 52; and Bacon, But One Race, 177–78. For Still’s remarks, see William Still, An Address on Voting and Laboring, Delivered at Concert Hall, Tuesday Evening, March 10th, 1874 (Philadelphia, 1874), 6.

88. 10 March 1874 speech, William Still Papers, Leon Gardiner Collection on Negro History, Historical Society of Pennsylvania; Daily Ohio State Journal, 5 August 1873; and Pacific Appeal, 6, 20 April 1872.

89. New Brunswick Daily Times, 4 June 1873; and Pacific Appeal, 13 April 1872.

90. On efforts by “New Departure” Democrats to appeal to black voters, see Cincinnati Commercial, 1 April 1870; Moore, “Response to Reconstruction,” 141–42; Katzman, Before the Ghetto, 181–83; and Grossman, The Democratic Party and the Negro, 63–64.

91. New York Sun, 8 July, 29 September 1873; and Block, The Circle of Discrimination, 187–88.

92. See Katzman, Before the Ghetto, 183; Cleveland Leader, 31 March 1871; Pacific Appeal, 4 November 1871; Farley, “The Issue of Black Equality in New York State,” 252n39; Davis, Black Americans in Cleveland from George Peake to Carl B. Stokes, 1796–1969, 94; John Daniels, In Freedom’s Birthplace: A Study of the Boston Negroes (Boston, 1914), 98; and Elevator, 19 October 1872. A small minority of southern blacks voted Democratic. Beatty, A Revolution Gone Backward, 7.

93. Pacific Appeal, 26 July 1873; see also Scheiner, Negro Mecca, 174; Cleveland Leader, 31 March, 25 August 1873; Cincinnati Commercial, 23 August 1873; and Christian Recorder, 31 December 1874.

94. Foner, Frederick Douglass, 27; Silcox, “The Black ‘Better Class’ Political Dilemma,” 49–50; and New National Era, 3 November 1870 (quotation).

95. New National Era, 8 July 1871.

96. Pacific Appeal, 20 December 1873; Elevator, 8 July 1874; and Fisher, “A History of the Political and Social Development of the Black Community in California, 1850–1950,” 140–41.

97. Washington National Republican, 24 January 1874. See also Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction, 134–36; and Vaughn, Schools for All, 56–70, 77.

98. Daily Ohio State Journal, 25 February 1875; and Pacific Appeal, 27 February 1875.

99. Christian Recorder, 21 May 1874; and Pacific Appeal, 6, 20 February 1874.

100. George T. Downing to Philip B. and Peter John Downing, 10 March 1875, DeGrasse-Howard Papers; and Christian Recorder, 11 March 1875.

101. Pacific Appeal, 27 March, 24 April 1875.

Chapter 5

1. New York Times, 6 February 1875.

2. Ibid. For Northern blacks’ lawsuits filed under the provisions of the civil rights law, see, for example, The Nation, 8 August 1875; Indianapolis Daily Journal, 1, 3 September 1877; and Stephen J. Riegel, “The Persistent Career of Jim Crow: Lower Federal Courts and the ‘Separate but Equal’ Doctrine, 1865–1896,” American Journal of Legal History 28 (January 1984): 23, 29. Gillette incorrectly claims that blacks did not demand that the law’s provisions be strictly enforced. Retreat from Reconstruction, 1869–1879, 277.

3. See Gerber, Black Ohio and the Color Line, 1869–1915, 48–49; Valeria Weaver, “The Failure of Civil Rights, 1875–1883, and Its Repercussions,” Journal of Negro History 54 (October 1969): 368–69; and Franklin, “The Enforcement of the Civil Rights Act of 1875,” 230.

4. Kaczorowski, The Politics of Judicial Interpretation, 191–93.

5. Weaver, “The Failure of Civil Rights, 1875–1883, and Its Repercussions,” 368; Pacific Appeal, 3 June 1876; and Riegel, “The Persistent Career of Jim Crow,” 35–37.

6. Alessandra Lorini, Rituals of Race: American Public Culture and the Search for Racial Democracy (Charlottesville, Va., 1999), 30.

7. See, for example, New York Times, 3 November 1876 (quotation); and Detroit Free Press, 16, 29 August 1876 (quotation); also Detroit Free Press, 19 September 1876.

8. On the Nashville Convention, see Pacific Appeal, 15 April, 20 May 1876 (quotation).

9. Boston Journal, 16 October 1876; and Christian Recorder, 11 November 1875. For views similar to those expressed by the Christian Recorder, see New York Times, 22 October 1876; Colored Radical, 24 August 1876; and Franklin, George Washington Williams, 43–44.

10. Beatty, A Revolution Gone Backward, 10; and Rutherford B. Hayes to Peter H. Clark, 30 March 1876, Rutherford B. Hayes Papers, Hayes Historical Library.

11. Beatty, A Revolution Gone Backward, 10; and Foner, Reconstruction, 558, 567.

12. John D. Bagwell to Rutherford B. Hayes, 2 July 1876, Rutherford B. Hayes Papers.

13. Christian Recorder, 26 October 1876; Merline Pitre, “Frederick Douglass: Party Loyalist, 1870–1895” (Ph.D. diss., Temple University, 1976), 55; and John Mercer Langston to Rutherford B. Hayes, 19 June 1876, Rutherford B. Hayes Papers.

14. Keith Ian Polakoff effectively challenges C. Vann Woodward’s contention that economic issues were at the heart of the 1877 bargain and that a nearly secret deal was struck by which southern Democrats of “Old Whig” antecedents agreed to support Hayes in the electoral crisis in return for various economic and political concessions by the Hayes administration. Polakoff counters that there was in fact no grand compromise, for the parties provided little central direction in the crisis and Samuel J. Tilden, the Democratic candidate, quickly conceded defeat. Keith Ian Polakoff, The Politics of Inertia: The Election of 1876 and the End of Reconstruction (Baton Rouge, La., 1973), ix–xi, 313, 314n.

15. Meeting with African Methodist Episcopal Church delegation, 23 March 1877, Rutherford B. Hayes Papers. For similar assurances by Hayes, see speech at Jeffersonville, Indiana, 18 September 1877, Rutherford B. Hayes Papers.

16. Diary entry for 18 February 1877, Rutherford B. Hayes Papers; McPherson, The Abolitionist Legacy, 92; Frederick Douglass to John Sherman, 13 March 1877, Frederick Douglass to F. S. Stebbins, 26 March 1877 (quotation), Rutherford B. Hayes Papers; Pacific Appeal, 17 March 1877; Pitre, “Frederick Douglass,” 79–80; and Beatty, A Revolution Gone Backward, 23–24.

17. Pacific Appeal, 16 June 1877; and L. C. Mitchell to Rutherford B. Hayes, 8 March 1877, Rutherford B. Hayes Papers. In 1878, Downing complained bitterly to Hayes that other “persons who, as it has been known, are in all respects far less worthy than me,” had received appointments while he had not. George T. Downing to Rutherford B. Hayes, 1 July 1878, Rutherford B. Hayes Papers. In a self-serving letter to Carl Schurz, Hayes’s secretary of the interior, Downing requested that he be considered for a government position on the grounds of “national reputation and of merit” as well as the fact that, unlike many other equal rights activists, he had labored in the cause without compensation and against the wishes of many of his white clients. As a consequence of his agitation for equal rights he confessed to John Jay, his business interests had suffered, and he was saddled with enormous debts. Thus, he desperately needed a loan and a government job. See George T. Downing to Carl Schurz, 14 April 1877, Rutherford B. Hayes Papers; and George T. Downing to John Jay, 5 March 1877, Jay Family Papers, Butler Library, Columbia University.

18. Nashville speech, 19 September 1877, Rutherford B. Hayes Papers.

19. Kenneth E. Davison, The Presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes (Westport, Conn., 1972), 138, 140–42; also Ari Hoogenboom, Rutherford B. Hayes: Warrior and President (Lawrence, Kans., 1995), 304–8, 314–18, 375–76.

20. See Foner, Reconstruction, 247–53; Franklin, Reconstruction after the Civil War, 219–27; Gillette, Retreat from Reconstruction, 300–345; and J. Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880–1910 (New Haven, Conn., 1974), 11–14.

21. Gillette, Retreat from Reconstruction, 335–62; and Simpson, The Reconstruction Presidents, 199–228.

22. George T. Downing to Frederick Douglass, 19 March 1877, Frederick Douglass Papers; and Christian Recorder, 8 March 1877.

23. See New York Times, 23 August 1877; Christian Recorder, 5, 19 April, 9 August 1877; Erickson, “The Color Line in Ohio Public Schools, 1829–1890,” 348; and John Mercer Langston to Rutherford B. Hayes, 9 November 1876, Rutherford B. Hayes Papers. For similar condemnation of Republicans for betraying African Americans that included threats of leaving the party, see Christian Recorder, 1 March, 9 August 1877.

24. George T. Downing, Rev. M. Van-horn, Rev. Jonathan Yeiser, Rev. J. N. Jeter, and Benjamin Burton to William Lloyd Garrison, 5 December 1876, Antislavery Papers, Boston Public Library.

25. George T. Downing to Frederick Douglass, 19 March 1877, Frederick Douglass Papers.

26. Sanelli, “The Struggle for Black Suffrage in Pennsylvania, 1838–1870,” 305; also Philadelphia Press, 16 February 1877.

27. Silcox, “The Black ‘Better Class’ Political Dilemma,” 56; and Grossman, The Democratic Party and the Negro, 76–77.

28. Lortie, “San Francisco’s Black Community, 1870–1890,” 15; and Fisher, “A History of the Social and Political Development of the Black Community in California, 1850–1950,” 132–34.

29. Irving G. Hendrick, “Approaching Equality of Educational Opportunity in California: The Successful Struggle of Black Citizens, 1880–1920,” Pacific Historian 25 (Winter 1981): 25.

30. Fisher, “A History of the Social and Political Development of the Black Community in California, 1850–1950,” 134–35.

31. Erickson, “The Color Line in Ohio Public Schools, 1829–1890,” 350; Douglas, Jim Crow Moves North, 89; and Colored Radical, 24 August 1876.

32. See Franklin, “The Persistence of School Segregation in the Urban North,” 57; Weinberg, A Chance to Learn, 75; and Douglas, Jim Crow Moves North, 94–95. Indiana did not desegregate its public schools until 1949. Thornbrough, Indiana in the Civil War Ear, 482–83.

33. See Brown, “Pennsylvania and the Rights of the Negro, 1865–1877,” 54–55; and Price, “School Segregation in Nineteenth-Century Pennsylvania,” 132.

34. Brown, The Negro in Pennsylvania History, 53–54; and Price, “School Segregation in Nineteenth-Century Pennsylvania,” 133–35.

35. See Douglas, Jim Crow Moves North, 83n38.

36. Erickson, “The Color Line in Ohio Public Schools, 1829–1890,” 339–53; Squibb, “Roads to Plessy,” 173–75; and Gerber, Black Ohio and the Color Line, 1860–1915, 234–44.

37. Martin, The Mind of Frederick Douglass, 84–85.

38. See Weaver, “The Failure of Civil Rights, 1875–1883, and Its Repercussions,” 373–80; Katzman, Before the Ghetto, 90–91; Kirt H. Wilson, The Reconstruction Desegregation Debate: The Politics of Equality and the Rhetoric of Place, 1870–1875 (East Lansing, Mich., 2002), 43; Gerber, Black Ohio and the Color Line, 1860–1915, 234–36; Schwalm, Emancipation’s Diaspora, 207; and Douglas, Jim Crow Moves North, 94–95.

39. See, for example, Marsha Hurst, “Integration, Freedom of Choice, and Community Control in Nineteenth Century Brooklyn,” Journal of Ethnic Studies 3 (Fall 1975): 33–34, 39–40, 47–48; and Douglas, Jim Crow Moves North, 107–8.

40. For a treatment of the Ohio law, see Erickson, “The Color Line in Ohio Public Schools, 1829–1890,” 350. On the situation in Kansas, see Colored Radical, 24 August, 15 September 1876. For examples of gerrymandering and intimidation, see Douglas, Jim Crow Moves North, 100–105, 112–13.

41. See, for example, Weaver, “The Failure of Civil Rights, 1875–1883, and Its Repercussions,” 375–81; Gerber, Black Ohio and the Color Line, 1860–1915, 236–37; Wilson, The Reconstruction Desegregation Debate, 43; Katzman, Before the Ghetto, 93; and Schwalm, Emancipation’s Diaspora, 207, 324n143.

Epilogue

1. See, for example, August Meier, Negro Thought in America, 1880–1915: Racial Ideologies in the Age of Booker T. Washington (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1969), 29–34, 69–73, 128–30; Mary Frances Berry, Black Resistance, White Law (New York, 1971), 95–96; Charles F. Kellogg, NAACP: A History of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (Baltimore, 1967); and David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. DuBois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (New York, 1993).

2. On race relations during these decades, see Michael J. Klarman, Unfinished Business: Racial Equality in American History 309–30. On the Plessy decision, see Lofgren, The Plessy Case, 100–101, 174–75. On the rapid pace of racial ghettoization, see Stanley Liberson, A Piece of the Pie: Blacks and White Immigrants since 1880 (Berkeley, Calif., 1980), 266–88; and Kuzmer, A Ghetto Takes Shape, 61–64, 175.

3. Philip A. Klinkner and Rogers M. Smith, The Unsteady March: The Rise and Decline of Racial Equality in America (Chicago, 1999), 105–8; McPherson, The Abolitionist Legacy, 386–90; and Meier, Negro Thought in America, 1880–1915, 164–66.

4. For treatments of the modern civil rights movement, see Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty; Self, American Babylon; Countryman, Up South; Sitkoff, The Struggle for Black Equality, 1854–1992, rev. ed. (New York, 1993); Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 (New York, 1988), Pillar of Fire, 1963–65: America in the King Years, 1963–65 (New York, 1998), and At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–68 (New York, 2006).