Race and Rights

Fighting Slavery and Prejudice in the Old Northwest, 1830–1870

Dana Elizabeth Weiner

• Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781609090722
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In the Old Northwest from 1830 to 1870, a bold set of activists battled slavery and racial prejudice. This book is about their expansive efforts to eradicate southern slavery and its local influence in the contentious milieu of four new states carved out of the Northwest Territory: Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio. While the Northwest Ordinance outlawed slavery in the region in 1787, in reality both it and racism continued to exert strong influence in the Old Northwest, as seen in the race-based limitations of civil liberties there. Indeed, these states comprised the central battleground over race and rights in antebellum America, in a time when race's social meaning was deeply infused into all aspects of Americans' lives, and when people struggled to establish political consensus.

Antislavery and anti-prejudice activists from a range of institutional bases crossed racial lines as they battled to expand African American rights in this region. Whether they were antislavery lecturers, journalists, or African American leaders of the Black Convention Movement, women or men, they formed associations, wrote publicly to denounce their local racial climate, and gave controversial lectures. In the process, they discovered that they had to fight for their own right to advocate for others. This bracing new history by Dana Elizabeth Weiner is thus not only a history of activism, but also a history of how Old Northwest reformers understood the law and shaped new conceptions of justice and civil liberties. The newest addition to the Mellon-sponsored Early American Places Series, Race and Rights will be a much-welcomed contribution to the study of race and social activism in nineteenth-century America.

1 / Activist Taproots: Place, Reform, and the Quest for Unity

Antislavery and anti-prejudice activists believed they must mold the Old Northwest according to their ideals of a virtuous community. This was an immensely difficult mission. When he toured the region in 1841, antislavery lecturer Dr. Erasmus Hudson faced down abundant challenges. These included numerous anti-abolitionists who tried to silence his meetings, but he remained determined to continue. In a letter at the time, Hudson asserted that he must work on in the region, and claimed that the nation’s “hopes . . . are in this great Western Valley; and if they are disappointed, our country will be filled with sorrow and confusion.” To him, only diligent reform organization could save these deeply flawed “great western States.”1 Collaboration among activists thus held the key to changing their society and their nation.

* * *

From the 1830s, the Old Northwest grew in importance in many reformers’ eyes as their desire to clean up the nation expanded. Passionate advocates increasingly spread ideas about the region’s potential influence and the need to remove its substantial problems regarding slavery and race. The Old Northwest was far from isolated, and over time reform there moved toward the center of the broader movements against slavery and prejudice. Local activists’ efforts to change the region were thus a subset of their larger struggles. While it was evident to Old Northwest rights promoters that their locality was critical, eastern abolitionists also saw this area as significant beginning in the 1830s, well before its growing economic importance and centrality to national politics converted more Americans to that opinion in the 1850s and 1860s. In Hudson’s vision and that of many like-minded people, they undertook a crucial struggle to determine the culture of the Old Northwest.2 This quest motivated agitators there for decades.

Reform shoots in the region sprung from rocky yet fertile soil, and their conditions of growth are vital to understanding these movements’ struggles and successes. It is essential to learn more about the people, the debates over race and rights they incited in reform and politics, and the initial development of organizations in the region. The place of the Old Northwest and its rights climate both shaped the struggle for change there and made it necessary, because the racism endemic there necessitated strong efforts to fight it. Many of the obstacles Old Northwest activists faced actually brought reformers together, and people with different approaches often collaborated.

The Old Northwest context explains much of the diversity of the movement there, for bold antislavery and anti-prejudice activists faced a largely antagonistic population in the region, and one that had a great deal at stake in excluding both African Americans and abolition. The ratio of slavery’s opponents to its supporters minimized institutional competition. In effect, local antislavery people often proved willing to collaborate with allies of any stripe, even when their creeds differed, and their societies had more harmonious operations there relative to the East.3 Even as they sought out the unity required to organize effectively, these activists nonetheless fought forces of division in this fractious region.

The people of the Old Northwest offered substantial resistance to reformers’ goals. In many ways, at the same time as these agitators broadened their base, hostile forces in their communities continually undermined and divided them. Chief among these obstacles was local opposition to advocates’ message. This had several sources, but most important among them were the political parties and people who depended on slavery economically. The region’s racism and its dispersed settlements also increased the challenges of activism. All of these hardships—resistance to reformers’ and African Americans’ freedom generally, racism, and the logistics of antislavery organizing in this difficult place—are developed throughout the remainder of the book. Exploring the place and the forces that unified and separated these tenacious Old Northwest activists provides context for understanding their efforts and the culture they sought to transform.

* * *

When early nineteenth-century white Americans viewed the varied landscape of the Old Northwest, they beheld its potential for financial opportunity, and perhaps even riches. The land appeared to them ideal for profitable agriculture, and appropriately linked by water (and later canal and rail) to southern and eastern markets. There, fortune seemed to await the industrious, and the region’s incoming prospectors and settlers refused to allow people they viewed as racially inferior to interfere with this vision. This economic orientation shaped the settlers’ interactions with the indigenous inhabitants there, and by the 1830s the white migrants had legally and militarily driven most of them out to secure these territories and later states for westward expansion.

The settling process was a labor intensive one, and for some migrants to the Old Northwest, particularly in Indiana and Illinois, slaves seemed the ideal solution to their various work needs, the Northwest Ordinance’s prohibitions be damned. Others believed local slavery would diminish the value of white men’s toil. Overwhelmingly they agreed, however, that as white men their claim on the Old Northwest was paramount, and they had little interest in sharing its potential and actual bounties with African Americans or others at all, and certainly not on equal terms. This perspective, along with their diverse origins, contributed to widespread aversion to reforming the Old Northwest and its race relations.

The people who settled the Old Northwest presented activists with both support and challenges. These relatively new states—populated by migrants from across the East and the South with disparate views on race relations—lacked regional cohesion about slavery and civil rights, and even consensus within each state. To take Ohio as one example, by the late eighteenth century its residents originated in such varied places as Virginia, New England, the middle states, and France.4 A majority of the initial settlers of southern Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, and some Michiganders had southern origins and exclusionary (and often proslavery) opinions, while New Englanders and New Yorkers made up the plurality of those who migrated to the central and northern portions of the first three states and to Michigan.5 Not all former New Englanders and New Yorkers held antislavery views, however. Over time, the population became even less homogenous, including larger numbers of immigrants and more easterners who often lacked interest in sharing the region’s economic opportunities with African Americans.6 Activists’ organizing efforts in this unsettled climate catalyzed debates about slavery and over the racial boundaries of social and political rights. These accompanied and expanded the nationwide movements to address those issues.

* * *

Anti-racist and antislavery activism in the Old Northwest grew out of a national reform context that dated back to the eighteenth century. Then, African American easterners like Richard Allen and Prince Hall were among the first to advocate immediate abolition and to inspire activists across the nation. Free African Americans saw and decried the indisputable connection between the obstacles to their own full citizenship and their enslaved brethren’s condition. They protested against the colonization movement that sought to send them out of the United States; claimed full American citizenship; and directly demanded civil rights, including the vote. These calls paved the way for later egalitarian arguments, including those that Old Northwest activists made.

Beginning in the 1820s, African American militancy, accelerated by the anticolonization struggle, grew in intensity. The writings of David Walker, Maria Stewart, and later, Henry Highland Garnet provided important intellectual and rhetorical background for the awakening to radicalism.7 In the early 1830s, a new cohort of white reformers with a growing interest in opposing slavery and racism emerged, as a result of several factors: egalitarianism; the Second Great Awakening’s religious revivals and moral reform crusades; and the print, market, and democratic revolutions. They began to perceive the limitations of colonization and early abolition strategies, and to take up immediate abolition along with their African American allies.8 An expanding corps of activists fought slavery even as, over time, the institution itself gained ever more vocal supporters, who themselves built on a long-standing intellectual heritage that justified slavery and its associated discrimination.

As the movement against slavery expanded, ideological divisions increasingly cleaved eastern organizations. These tensions transformed the first major American abolitionist association, the American Anti-Slavery Society. Founded in 1833, it provided the chief northern antislavery voice until its schism in 1840, which resulted partially from disagreement over women’s right to vote and to take leadership positions in the society. The antislavery movement then split into what historians usually describe as three factions: the Garrisonians/immediatists, the evangelicals, and the political abolitionists.

The fiery Liberator editor William Lloyd Garrison led the innovative Boston-based American Anti-Slavery Society. Contemporaries also called this group the immediatists, and eventually, the “Old Organization.” Beginning in the early 1830s, their peers deemed them radical for their opposition to electoral politics and their advocacy of controversial causes: immediate abolition, racial equality, women’s suffrage, and anticlericalism. They promoted a “come-outer” position, wherein they argued people should resign from corrupt churches, political parties, and other associations and only join groups that had become “purified,” as they said they had done.9 They eschewed violent means by advocating nonresistance, argued that partisan politics was necessarily corrupt, and espoused the indirect means of moral suasion as the only true met...

Table of contents

• Cover
• EAP Advisory Board
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 / Activist Taproots
• 2 / Scrubbing at the “Bloody Stain of Oppression”
• 3 / “Stand Firm on the Platform of Truth”
• 4 / “The Palladium of Our Liberties”
• 5 / “An Odd Place for Navigation”
• 6 / Itinerant Lecturers in a Fracturing Nation, 1850–1861
• 7 / The Potential for Radical Change
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Notes to Introduction
• Notes to Chapter 1
• Notes to Chapter 2
• Notes to Chapter 3
• Notes to Chapter 4
• Notes to Chapter 5
• Notes to Chapter 6
• Notes to Chapter 7
• Notes to Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index