PROLOGUE

The 145 delegates who assembled for the National Convention of Colored Men in Syracuse, New York, in October 1864 were motivated by a complex mix of optimism and anxiety. Now emboldened to act above all by the emancipation unfolding across the South as well as the enlistment of black troops in the Union Army, they aimed to launch an equal rights movement. In addition, the rise to power of the Republican Party held out the hope of improved race relations. Yet these men and women also faced a very uncertain future. The Lincoln administration had acted cautiously against slavery, and the national elections that lay but a month ahead might conceivably place a Democrat in the White House. If George McClellan were to defeat Abraham Lincoln, there was good reason to expect the subsequent revocation of the Emancipation Proclamation and the resurrection of the Dred Scott decision, which had ruled that, because African Americans were not citizens, they deserved no rights. To make matters worse, in order to ensure its passage, congressional Republicans had recently removed any mention of black suffrage rights from the Wade-Davis Bill. Finally, while some black rights activists considered New York City the logical place for a national convention, painful memories of the horrifying draft riots a year earlier, which had resulted in the death of large numbers of African Americans, led the convention’s organizers to choose Syracuse as the site because of its central location and the active role its residents had played in the Underground Railroad. This combination of factors convinced the delegates—most of whom were Northerners—that this was a singular moment when they must organize and agitate for the full citizenship rights that had repeatedly been denied by northern whites during the past several decades.

When the delegates arrived in Syracuse, they were once again reminded of the depths of northern white racism when local toughs shouted racist slogans and physically assaulted a few of them. But the delegates were not to be deterred. The Syracuse Convention brought together a broader spectrum of northern black activists than had any previous African American meeting. Among the delegates were Frederick Douglass, George T. Downing, Henry Highland Garnet, and other prominent figures from the antebellum northern protest movement; a younger generation of African Americans, including Octavius V. Catto, George B. Vashon, and John Mercer Langston, who would occupy positions of power and influence in the postwar equal rights cause; soldiers from both the North and South; influential women such as Frances Ellen Watkins Harper; and the editors of several northern black newspapers. Although African Americans who lived west of the Mississippi River did not send delegates, and relatively few from the Midwest were present, they were fully aware of the convention’s proceedings and supported its objectives. Preparations for the convention and discussion of the major issues it would address had filled the columns of black newspapers for many weeks.

The Syracuse Convention launched the northern black struggle for equal rights. Undertaken in the face of widespread white opposition and indifference, this movement stands as the most important African American crusade for full citizenship rights prior to the modern civil rights cause of the 1950s and 1960s. In order to understand the national debate on the merits of interracial democracy during the post–Civil War years as well as the national scope of Reconstruction, it is necessary to bring northern blacks into the very center of the Reconstruction narrative as significant agents of change rather than as passive recipients of rights granted by sympathetic whites. Indeed, the equal rights cause African Americans initiated and sustained should be viewed as an early, and very important, chapter in the story of Reconstruction. At the time of the Syracuse Convention and the subsequent construction of a full-fledged northern black equal rights movement, the president and Congress had scarcely begun to develop a coherent blueprint for Reconstruction in the South, and the congressional debate on a civil rights bill lay more than a year in the future. By contrast, northern blacks were already establishing an agenda and a political strategy.

The northern black struggle for equal rights during the Reconstruction era sought to harness and direct the powerful forces unleashed by the Civil War toward the creation of a more just and equitable society. Unlike the short-lived National Council established by the 1853 Rochester Convention, the National Equal Rights League, which the Syracuse Convention created to coordinate the cause, became truly national in scope, with a network of state and local auxiliaries in every northern state from New England to the West Coast and in most of the southern states. Those who founded and guided the NERL and its numerous auxiliaries, as well as the thousands of African American men, women, and children who participated in the cause at the grassroots level, at times were divided along ideological, regional, class, cultural, and gender lines, and they often focused on repealing discriminatory laws in their own states and communities. Yet they had much in common, and they were keenly aware that they were part of a broad-based movement that extended across the country.

In the broadest sense, African Americans shared the conviction that they deserved full rights and privileges as citizens. They also generally agreed that suffrage rights for black males and equal access to public schools should be the central objectives of the movement. Virtually no African American doubted that justice, morality, and the protection of their vital interests required the attainment of the franchise. Even most black women and men who favored universal suffrage ultimately decided that, for strategic and other reasons, black manhood suffrage should take precedence over woman suffrage. There was even considerable agreement on the school issue. Whatever their misgivings about school integration, most northern blacks concluded that the reality of inferior black public schools—and the stigma whites attached to them—outweighed their concerns about the potentially negative effects of integration on black students and teachers as well as the black community’s already limited control over their own public schools. Further, even though their support for blacks-only (or racially exclusive) rights organizations and Republican political clubs seemed to clash with their insistence on integration and inclusion, most northern African Americans endorsed them for very practical reasons, including the desire to minimize their dependence on white allies—whom they did not entirely trust—to act on behalf of blacks’ fundamental interests.

Northern blacks’ relationship with white Republicans was often problematic. However, because only the Republicans were willing to support fundamental legal rights for African Americans, most northern blacks remained loyal to the party throughout the Reconstruction era. The ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, which the Democrats overwhelmingly opposed, was perhaps the most decisive moment in the Reconstruction-era northern black struggle for equal rights. Once black males secured political rights in the U.S. Constitution, they had an opportunity to employ the franchise as leverage to gain unfettered access to public schools and other public institutions and to carve out a meaningful place within the Republican Party. Thus, to understand the nature of northern black politics during the 1870s, it is necessary to examine their wide-ranging efforts to translate the Fifteenth Amendment into tangible political results, including their campaign to expand and clarify those rights articulated in the Fourteenth Amendment. Northern African Americans brought to this campaign a mix of pragmatism, idealism, tenacity, and creativity. An important facet of this endeavor was their effort between 1870 and 1875, in concert with southern blacks, to pressure white Republicans in Congress to pass Charles Sumner’s Civil Rights Bill, which called for a ban on segregation in many areas of the public sphere, especially the nation’s public schools. In addition, throughout the 1870s they continued their multifaceted assault—which they had begun in earnest in the mid-1860s—on northern state and local laws that mandated the segregation of African Americans within, or exclusion from, public schools.

Northern African Americans were neither naive about how they could best protect their political interests and advance their rights nor rendered passive by their dependence on white Republicans for the achievement of their objectives. The evidence indicates that their experience as an oppressed and despised minority shaped a realistic appraisal of the northern political landscape. Most of them fully realized that, because the vast majority of Democrats were their sworn enemy, there was no viable alternative to working with white Republicans. Notwithstanding this stark reality—and their gratitude for Republican-sponsored abolition and civil rights—during the 1870s they were often outspoken in their criticism of white Republicans for failing to act on their stated principles and for taking the black vote for granted. They showed themselves to be politically astute, employing a balance-of-power strategy in elections that were closely contested by voting for independent candidates instead of those Republicans they believed had betrayed their trust or occasionally even by defecting to the Democratic ranks. In pursuing their vision of equal rights for all citizens, these activists presented cogent arguments, creatively and flexibly employed a variety of tactics, and mobilized and energized large numbers of northern blacks. That the impact of the black vote during the 1870s fell short of their hopes owed far less to a faulty political strategy or a deficient grasp of political realities than to their relatively small numbers and, above all, the persistence of white racial prejudice.