Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion in the Early American West

John Craig Hammond

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780813946047
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

Most treatments of slavery, politics, and expansion in the early American republic focus narrowly on congressional debates and the inaction of elite "founding fathers" such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. In Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion in the Early American West, John Craig Hammond looks beyond elite leadership and examines how the demands of western settlers, the potential of western disunion, and local, popular politics determined the fate of slavery and freedom in the West between 1790 and 1820.

By shifting focus away from high politics in Philadelphia and Washington, Hammond demonstrates that local political contests and geopolitical realities were more responsible for determining slavery's fate in the West than were the clashing proslavery and antislavery proclivities of Founding Fathers and politicians in the East. When efforts to prohibit slavery revived in 1819 with the Missouri Controversy it was not because of a sudden awakening to the problem on the part of northern Republicans, but because the threat of western secession no longer seemed credible.

Including detailed studies of popular political contests in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Missouri that shed light on the western and popular character of conflicts over slavery, Hammond also provides a thorough analysis of the Missouri Controversy, revealing how the problem of slavery expansion shifted from a local and western problem to a sectional and national dilemma that would ultimately lead to disunion and civil war.

1
Ordinances, Limits, and Precedents, 1784–1796

In 1783 the fledgling United States won both independence and Britain’s former claim of sovereignty over the trans-Appalachian West. The following year the Confederation Congress began work on a series of proposals to establish some type of American government for the region. The first proposal, introduced by a committee headed by Thomas Jefferson, contained the provision that after 1800, there would be “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of the said states” that the United States would create in its western possessions. Due to matters unrelated to slavery, Congress failed to adopt the 1784 proposal and its prospective ban on slavery in the entire early American West. Over the next three years, it would entertain but fail to pass several more such bans. Finally, in 1787 the Confederation Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance. Its Article VI provided that “there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory” and prohibited slavery’s future expansion into all federal territories “north and west of the River Ohio.” When the new federal Congress met in New York for the first time in 1789, creating viable territorial governments for the West was among the many pressing issues it confronted. As one of its first orders of business, Congress reauthorized the Northwest Ordinance of 1787.¹

Congress next began work on a territorial government for what would become the Southwest Territory and ultimately the state of Tennessee in 1796. Circumstances there made it unlikely that Congress would attempt to apply Article VI. First, North Carolina claimed the territory, governed it as its own, and was under no obligation to cede either its jurisdiction or the land to the new federal government. In addition, while few white Americans lived in the Northwest, large numbers of slaveholders had already settled in the Southwest under North Carolina law, which permitted slavery. The 3,400 slaves and numerous slaveholders in the region made slavery an established fact rather than an institution that might be permitted or excluded at the discretion of Congress. Moreover, thousands of North Carolinians already possessed warrants for lands in Tennessee. They had acquired their claims under the assumption that slavery would be permitted, and they fully expected to settle those lands with the benefits of slave labor. Given these realities, Congress was already averse to apply Article VI to the Southwest; North Carolina made sure that it would not. The North Carolina Cession Act of 1789, which ceded North Carolina’s claims to the new federal government, “provided always that no regulations made or to be made by Congress shall tend to emancipate slaves.”²

Congress might have pressed North Carolina to drop its conditions, but that promised to exacerbate an entirely different set of problems centering on the federal government’s limited power and authority. North Carolina was one of the last states to ratify the Constitution of 1787, it was a bastion of anti-Federalism, and it surely would have protested any federal demands that seemed at odds with its state interests. Equally important, Congress already found itself facing the disunion threats that would hamper future efforts to restrict western slavery in the early republic. Any demand that North Carolina drop its conditions would have delayed passage of the Southwest Ordinance, a situation the government strongly wanted to avoid. Leading men and land speculators in Tennessee had already grown frustrated with the government’s weaknesses in the West. North Carolina senator William Blount and others possessed immense land claims in the Southwest. In order to cash in on their claims, they desperately wanted the new federal government to, among other things, encourage commerce and provide protection from the Creeks and Cherokees, measures that were needed to encourage white settlement. In order to speed passage of the Southwest Ordinance, and with it federal assistance, they deliberately spread rumors that settlers were plotting with the Spanish to break away from the United States; they even named (but misspelled) the main area of settlement around Nashville the “Mero District,” after the Spanish governor of Louisiana.³

Lacking effective power to coerce North Carolina, and fearful of disunion schemes in the West, the federal government quickly acceded to North Carolina’s demands. The Southwest Ordinance of 1790 permitted slavery in the Southwest Territory even as it deliberately avoided any mention of the institution or of Article VI of the Northwest Ordinance. The ordinance neither explicitly sanctioned slavery nor specifically exempted the Southwest from Article VI, as would be done in later ordinances. Instead, the Southwest Ordinance of 1790 merely stated that the government of the Southwest Territory would be the same as that for the Northwest, “except so far as is provided” in the North Carolina Cession Act.⁴

The interests of southern slaveholders and their representatives in Congress of course prevailed in 1790. But it is doubtful that the antislavery sentiments that permitted re-passage of the Northwest Ordinance in 1789 had disappeared by 1790. Instead, Congress’s willingness to accept North Carolina’s conditions and quickly establish a government for the Southwest reflected the weaknesses of the federal government in its western borderlands, weaknesses that greatly amplified the influence that westerners could exercise over the federal government.⁵ Despite constant pleas and complaints, the national government had done little to address the concerns of white settlers in the Southwest, including access to the Spanish-controlled Mississippi River and protection from Indian attacks. Banning slavery would only increase the contempt many white settlers in the Southwest felt toward the far-off federal government. Congress knew better than to ban slavery in a region where the federal government lacked power, authority, and popular support. Pressing North Carolina or settlers in the Southwest to accept Article VI seemed futile at best, pernicious at worst.

If it was unlikely that Congress could have implemented Article VI in the Southwest Territory, it was impossible to do so in Kentucky. Through 1792, Virginia governed Kentucky as its westernmost counties, and Kentucky never was a territory of the United States. Virginia law and slaveholding settlers established slavery in Kentucky beginning in the 1770s. Slavery could be restricted or abolished only by Virginia, or by the people of Kentucky once Virginia permitted Kentucky to become its own state in 1792. Twice in the 1790s Kentucky held constitutional conventions where gradual abolition proposals were entertained. Both times, slaveholders and voters overwhelmed small antislavery coalitions led by evangelicals.⁶

In 1796 Congress admitted Tennessee with a constitution protecting slavery. Federalists, fearful that the new state’s electoral votes would go to Thomas Jefferson in the upcoming election, used numerous tricks to try and delay its admission. Tellingly, they abstained from making an issue out of slavery.⁷ If Tennessee’s and Kentucky’s passage to statehood with slavery was unproblematic, it was because the federal government lacked the power to challenge slavery there. Equally important, the failure of Kentucky’s antislavery evangelicals demonstrated the severe limits on local, popular antislavery movements where slavery had already gained a foothold. The lessons from both pointed to the difficulties opponents of slavery expansion would face in the very near future. As the United States acquired, organized, and incorporated new western territories into the Union, the same problems that had bedeviled efforts to restrict slavery in Kentucky and Tennessee—weak federal power going up against popular, local support for slavery—would appear in new, far more menacing forms.

2
“That Species of Property Already Exists”

Natchez, Mississippi, 1795–1800

Responding to an urgent message from Secretary of State Timothy Pickering, the House of Representatives spent much of March 1798 framing a government for the immense stretch of land that would become the Mississippi Territory. As the end of the session neared, the House resolved a long-standing dispute over Georgia’s claims to the territory. Immediately after the House voted to deny Georgia jurisdiction over the territory, George Thatcher rose and introduced a motion “touching the rights of man.” Thatcher, a four-term Federalist from the District of Maine, had spent the better part of his congressional career inciting the ire of slaveholders. This time would be no different. At Pickering’s request, the bill under consideration created a government identical to that “established for the Northwestern Territory … with the exception respecting slaves.” Thatcher moved to apply Article VI of the Northwest Ordinance to the Mississippi Territory, which would have prevented American slaveholders from expanding their institution into the future states of Mississippi and Alabama. His proposal stood little chance of passage. A day’s worth of angry debate winnowed away already meager support. In the end, only eleven other congressmen voted with him to prohibit slavery in the Mississippi Territory.¹

The House’s defeat of Thatcher’s motion seems decisive enough. And as historians have argued, it seemed inevitable that Congress would permit slavery expansion into the Mississippi Territory. Yet the decision to sanction slavery there involved more than a coalition of interested Upper South politicians, disunion-threatening Deep Southerners, and weak-willed northern Republicans defeating a New England Federalist’s antislavery proposal.² When it came to deciding slavery’s future in Mississippi, the most crucial decisions were made not in the halls of Congress, or on Chesapeake and Carolina plantations, but in the lower Mississippi Valley itself. It was there, too, that the more serious peril of disunion lay. Slavery had long existed in what would become the Mississippi Territory. Under the Spanish regime that preceded the Americans, it was thriving. Ultimately, Congress permitted slavery in Mississippi because settlers who were already there demanded it as the cost of union. Months before George Thatcher reminded his colleagues that “the existence of slavery” was “an evil in direct hostility to the principles of our government,” events and circumstances in Mississippi had already determined that Congress would sanction slavery there.³

I

The lower Mississippi Valley had long troubled American officials. A contested area coveted by the fledgling United States and European empires, in the 1790s this region was inhabited by powerful Indian nations, slaveholder speculators of ever-shifting loyalties, potentially rebellious slaves, and “men of no country.” American and Spanish officials, British and French imperialists, and the inhabitants of the region all recognized that Spain was a decaying power whose hold on its colonial possessions was slipping. American officials remained cautiously optimistic that they could secure American possessions in the Old Southwest. This would require checking the imperial ambitions of Britain and France, and, more importantly, convincing the white inhabitants of the lower Mississippi Valley that American control of the region best served their interests.⁴

In the 1783 Treaty of Paris, American negotiators gained from the British terms favorable to American expansion into the Southwest. The Treaty of Paris drew the southern boundary of the newly independent United States along the 31st parallel (the present-day northern border of Florida) in the south, and the Mississippi River in the west. The treaty also granted American citizens access to the Mississippi River, providing western settlers with needed access to world markets through New Orleans. But Spain, seeking to protect the northern edge of its American empire, frequently denied American settlers navigation rights on the Mississippi. It also sought to move the border between Spanish West Florida and the United States northward, as additional protection against American encroachment into Spanish territory. From 1785 through 1794, American diplomats made scant progress in convincing their Spanish counterparts to sign a new treaty recognizing the terms of the Treaty of Paris. Finally, with war in Europe intensifying, Spain agreed to the 1795 Treaty of San Lorenzo, granting Americans rights to the Mississippi River and recognizing American claims to land that would form the Mississippi Territory.⁵

The United States now had to secure the territory gained in the treaty; this would prove no easy task. The Choctaws, Creeks, Cherokees, and Chickasaws controlled the bulk of land between the Mississippi River and Georgia. In the 1790s, they confined European American settlement to a few posts along the Mississippi River and some settlements in the interior. The “Natchez Country”—the town of Natchez and its hinterlands—was home to the majority of slaves and settlers: a diverse mixture of British Loyalists, expatriated Americans, slaveholding planter-speculators, and “men of no country,” all governed by an English-speaking Spanish governor whose main task was to minimize American influence in the region, and stall, if not prevent, implementation of the Treaty of San Lorenzo.⁶

For better or for worse, federal officials believed they could best secure the southwest frontier by cultivating the loyalties of the settlers in and around Natchez. The “present inhabitants” of the Natchez Country—the white ones, at least—had three main concerns. Any government seeking to command their allegiance had to provide peace and security by reigning in the region’s “banditti,” organized bands of criminals who harassed settlers and stole slaves. Government also had to placate the Creeks and Choctaws, who increasingly resented encroachment on their lands. A stable government was also needed to provide good titles for land claims, which were entangled in a morass of overlapping British, Spanish, and Georgian grants. Finally, an acceptable government had to protect the inhabitants’ property in slaves. American officials could secure the region by demonstrating to white settlers that the United States would best address these concerns. On all three counts, however, the Spanish, “habitually dexterious” in the art of borderland “intrigue,” or the British, hoping to seize the lower Mississippi Valley, or the French, interested in regaining its lower Mississippi Valley possessions, might well offer better terms to the white settlers of the Natchez Country. Complicating matters further still, the Indian nations, slaves, and banditti in the region all had their own interests that conflicted with an American-controlled Natchez Country.⁷

With so many parties competing for control of the lower Mississippi Valley, and with so many different interests to satisfy, the United States found itself negotiating with the inhabitants of Natchez from a position of profound weakness. The single American official charged with securing Natchez for the United States in 1797 soon discovered that slavery could assume an important place at the intersection of interest, intrigue, and empire in the Southwest borderlands. The United States had gained possession of a region in the midst of intense change. A crucial transition to a plantation society had begun under Spanish rule in the 1780s, and the United States had acquired far more than an outpost in the lower Mississippi Valley.

II

The lower Mississippi Valley remained on the far fringes of the colonial plantation world for most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Around Natchez, slavery was only of marginal importance until the 1770s. French officials attempted to bring Natchez into the plantation world in the late 1720s, but uncooperative Indians and Africans quickly destroyed those efforts. In November 1729 a party of Natchez Indians arrived at the French fort, ostensibly to pay tribute to the French official who had warned them off lands marked for French tobacco plantations. The Natchez instead rebelled; at day’s end, over two hundred French settlers lay dead, and three hundred African slaves had been carried off. The Natchez Indian Rebel...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion in the Overextended Republic, 1787–1820
• 1. Ordinances, Limits, and Precedents, 1784–1796
• 2. “That Species of Property Already Exists”: Natchez, Mississippi, 1795–1800
• 3. “Grant Us to Make Slaves of Others”: The Louisiana Purchase, 1802–1805
• 4. Slaveholders’ Democracy, the Union, and the Nation: Missouri, 1805–1820
• 5. “Hot Times about Slavery and Republicanism”: Ohio, 1799–1802
• 6. Slaveholding Nationalism and Popular Antislavery Politics: Indiana and Illinois, 1801–1818
• 7. Making the “Free Northwest”: Slavery and Freedom in Ohio and Indiana, 1790–1818 124
• 8. “The States or Territories which May Hereafter Be Admitted into the Union”: The Missouri Crisis and the West 150
• Epilogue: Empire for Slavery, Empire for Freedom 169
• Notes
• Index