Chapter One
“We Are Americans”: The Ideology of Black Republicanism Before the Civil War
We are Americans. We were born in no foreign clime….
We have not been brought up under the influence of other, strange, aristocratic, and uncongenial political
relations. In this respect, we profess to be American and republican. With the nature, features and
operations of our government, we have been familiarized from youth; and its democratic character is
accordant with the flow of our feelings, and the current of our thoughts….
We call upon you to return to the pure faith of your republican fathers. We lift up our voices for the
restored spirit of the first days of the republic—for the great principles then maintained, and that regard
for man which revered the characteristic features of his nature, as of more honor and worth than the form
and color of the body in which they dwell. For no vested rights, for no peculiar privileges, for no
extraordinary prerogatives, do we ask. We merely put forth our appeal for a republican birthright.
Convention of the Colored Inhabitants of the State of New York, To Consider Their Political
Disabilities, “Address to the People of the State of New York,” 18401
This manifesto, issued by 134 delegates representing 33 of New York’s 58 counties, was the exemplary
black political text of the antebellum era. The gathering itself was without precedent, held at a moment of
maximum urgency in the nation’s premier electoral battleground. Almost certainly authored by the
Reverend Henry Highland Garnet, a 24-year-old fugitive slave who was now a highly-educated
Presbyterian minister, the “Address to the People of the State of New York” set the terms of black
discourse for the next generation.2 Its tropes of ardent patriotism mixed with nativist disdain, evoking a
decline from “the pure faith of your republican fathers,” spoke directly to white voters and politicians. Its
insistence on “a republican birthright” reminded them of something most New Yorkers knew then—that
free black men had voted in the Empire State, sometimes with a direct effect, from the 1790s until 1821,
when most of them were disfranchised. Yet this first Convention of the Colored Inhabitants of the State of
New York, the dozens of similar conclaves it inspired over the next twenty years (at least 44 state
conventions from Maine to California, including ten in New York), and the larger political movement
represented at those conventions, are now unknown, eclipsed by stories of slave resistance and the heroism
of the Underground Railroad.
Consider what is today the most famous speech by a black American from this period, Frederick Douglass’
1852 oration “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”:
What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? …. I am not included
within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the
immeasurable distance between us….The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and
independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought
life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine.
Since the renaissance of black history began in the 1960s, this anti-patriotic excoriation has been reprinted
again and again, affirming the authentic voice of antebellum black Americans as “the immeasurable
distance between us.” How could it be otherwise, how could any group of black people claim “we are
Americans,” as long as slavery was at the center of the nation’s economy, laws, and politics? From that
perspective, the 1840 Address from New York’s “colored inhabitants” seems irrelevant, even obtuse. What
kind of “republican birthright” could a slave hope to share?
1
Colored American, December 19, 1840.
The “Address” was signed by Austin Steward as President of the Convention, Charles L. Reason and
Garnet, its Secretaries, and William H. Topp. While the other three were well-known, its intellectualism
and literary qualities, as well as Garnet’s subsequent dominant role in New York state’s annual conventions
through 1845, strongly suggest that he was its principal author.
2
1 But in defiance of this seeming logic—in defiance of the notion that slavery defined African Americans-the free people of color, including fugitives like Douglass, made the claim that “We are Americans” over
and over. Douglass’ “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” was a polemic, meant to provoke, one of
the things he did best. By 1852, he was an international celebrity whom even ardent Negrophobes flocked
to see because of his spectacular ability to outrage and amuse. Speaking on that July 5 to a sympathetic
white audience in Rochester, his adopted hometown, he pressed upon them the republic’s inevitable
damnation as long as slavery persisted. They wanted his lash, and they got it, in high style. But his political
views, when speaking to his peers among free men of color, conformed to the terms set out in the 1840
address, and claimed “the Fourth of July” for all black men. How do we know this? Just a few months later,
in 1853, Douglass presided over a Colored National Convention in Syracuse, and chaired the committee
that drafted its address “to the People of the United States,” which repeated the claims made in 1840,
verbatim:
We are Americans, and as Americans, we would speak to Americans. We address you not as aliens
or exiles…[but] as American citizens asserting their rights on their own native soil…We ask that
in our native land, we shall not be treated as strangers…..
We ask that, speaking the same language and being of the same religion, worshipping the same
God, owing our redemption to the same Savior, and learning our duties from the same Bible, we
shall not be treated as barbarians.3
Given the audience--dozens of local black leaders from cities across the North, the constituency whom
Douglass claimed to represent--and the ways in which this manifesto repeated what black men had
proclaimed since at least 1817, it is far more representative than any claim of anti-patriotic alienation. But
to make sense of the 1840 and 1853 addresses, we have to leave behind our understanding of men like
Douglass as defiant fugitives and firebrand agitators—the way they portrayed themselves for popular
consumption, on the lecture circuit in countless small towns and in dozens of “slave narratives.” We
should see them instead as they understood themselves: as an embryonic political class, several thousand
strong, ambitious for office, practical men focused on issues of organization, program, alliances, and
advancement, on politics, in sum.
But what does one mean by politics, anyway? Over the past generation, the meaning of that word has
expanded in every direction, often with useful results. Regarding just African Americans before the Civil
War, it now encompasses clothing and hair, dance and music, sexuality, preaching, varieties of religious
worship, the nuances of holiday celebrations and rural commerce between slaves and masters. But by
encompassing everything, however, “politics” becomes just another word for the struggles of daily life.
We now have a dense, nuanced history of black Americans before the Civil War that ignores their
organized political activity, as if their votes, their efforts to vote, their relationship to the major parties and
political leaders, amounted to very little. Our students know a lot about Nat Turner, a political man for a
few months, and nothing at all about John Mercer Langston, the black Ohioan who held elected and
appointed office from the 1850s to the 1890s, collaborating with white political leaders on his own terms
for four decades. We hold up Douglass as the apotheosis of the “heroic slave,” tracing his speaking tours
and polemics with other abolitionists, but Douglass’ biographers ignore his long efforts to position himself
as an editor and spokesman hoping for high office. Truly, we have missed the larger forest for the trees, if
we want to take free and freed black people seriously on their own terms, in which “politics” understood in
the most traditional sense of votes and parties, figured very largely.
Most of the time, politics consists of two interlocking activities: speaking--in person and via printed texts;
doing—assembling to act together. This chapter focuses on the former, on the texts specific to African
Americans’ political speech, for two reasons: first, because the study of discourse (what people say to or
about their political friends and enemies) is usually the quickest way to get at the premises of political
practice; second, because a common discourse was the only truly national element characterizing black
political culture.
I call their discourse black republicanism, by which I mean the version of American republicanism—the
3
Frederick Douglass’ Paper, July 15, 1853.
2 lingua franca of everyday political speech—that they could claim and project out to potential friends and
actual enemies. Without that, they had nothing. To position themselves within the national family, the free
people of color needed to prove that they were, in all respects save a minor aspect of phenotype, identical to
other Americans; they could not afford the separateness of the Quakers or the Jews, the nation’s two
recognized minorities. The only possible vehicle for their claim was a republicanism incorporating the
distinctly American notion of birthright, meaning citizenship defined by the simple fact of nativity, and
thus common ownership in a country. But birthright alone was hardly enough, so black men added on an
ascriptive Americanism, a quasi-ethnicity made up of orthodox Protestantism, speaking English, and
military service in American’s wars, the attributes that marked them off from recent Irish and German
immigrants. Together, these premises of inclusion based on native birth, nativism, and “colored patriotism”
constituted the positive ideology of black republicanism. This chapter will examine how each of these
tropes operated, over time forging a reliable synthesis that was available to all as a vernacular citizenship
politics.
But there was something else, considerably harder to understand after many generations in which race has
mattered so much; we are used to putting it first, confronting it, even while we insist on equal citizenship.
Antebellum black men did not share our overriding focus on race. They made a much more radical claim.
When they declared “we are Americans,” they meant it without qualification or modification, mounting an
unremitting assault on the assertion of a difference between them and other native-born citizens. African
Americans and their white allies confronted the new, pseudo-scientific racism of the nineteenth century by
deriding the notion of race itself as no more than a foolish obsession with “complexion.” Their
republicanism may have been black, but it was emphatically non-racial, in ways that confound our
understanding of blackness--or whiteness. As we shall see at the chapter’s conclusion, noting, judging, if
necessary deriding all the possible permutations of a man’s complexion, whether “yellow” or “black,”
“tawny” or “dark,” was a key aspect of black republicanism’s vernacular appeal.
“Our Appeal for a Republican Birthright”
Black republicanism began with the uniquely American concept of birthright citizenship, and the special
authority conferred on the native-born in the new republic. Birthright citizenship has a complex history,
although Americans have taken it for granted for two centuries. It stemmed from distinctly feudal roots, in
the equal subjectship assigned to all the subjects of His or Her Britannic Majesty, as famously defined by
William Blackstone in 1765:
The first and most obvious division of the people is into aliens and natural-born subjects. Naturalborn subjects are such as are born within the dominions of the crown of England, that is, within
the ligeance, or as it is generally called, the allegiance of the king; and aliens, such as are born out
of it.4
In unintended but entirely logical ways, the free people of color gained certain advantages from
subjectship’s basis in English law, how that legal category evolved in America, and the emergence of a
distinctly new conception of citizenship during and after the Revolution. At each point in this process,
juridically-recognized and widely-accepted precedents ignored race, emphasizing either religious
affiliation--the transnational categories of Protestant, Catholic, and Jew--or the centrality of jus soli, the
birthright of the native-born. Taken together, these precedents pointed towards citizenship for free black
men, as Protestants born in America, no matter how much that logic simultaneously offended the deepest
social, cultural, and political sensitivities of the majority of white men.
The original law of subjectship, as codified in Calvin’s Case (1608), asserted a permanent, irrevocable
4
William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England: A Facsimile of the First Edition of 17651769 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 357. Equally famous, was his assertion that the “spirit
of liberty is so deeply implanted in our constitution, and rooted even in our very soil, that a slave or a
negro, the moment he lands in England, falls under the protection of the laws; and so far becomes a
freeman” (127). This passage is usually cited for its antislavery content, but is also notable for its
affirmation of the absolute civil equality of subjects.
3 relationship between anyone born under the King’s authority and the monarch (the jus soli), mandating
both obedience (“ligeance”) and an entitlement to protection, in all instances. Crucial here is not just the
concept of birthright, but that in England the native-born remained distinctly privileged over everyone else,
well into the nineteenth century. For centuries, English law recognized a hierarchy of legal rights and
privileges “between natural-born subjects, naturalized subjects, and ‘denizens,’ all of whom were members
of the community in some sense” (a denizen being “a sort of halfway member who ranked above the alien
yet somewhat below the native-born or naturalized subject”).5
In this legal system, free black men born in the United States could only have been subjects at the time of
the revolutionary separation from the Empire. They had no other possible civic and legal identity, however
much slave-state (and sometimes free-state) jurists in the nineteenth century strained to create another one
out of nothing. Therefore—and this was the crucial leap of both logic and republican faith--they became
citizens at the same time as all the other “Americans” who had heretofore been British subjects.
What gave this argument special force was how subjectship was radically simplified in the tiny settler
colonies along the Atlantic Coast during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Through a squatters’
rights articulation of local law, colonial assemblies promulgated much looser definitions of subjectship than
ever allowed in England itself. Desperate to attract new members, especially young men, these precarious
statelets routinely granted political rights to foreigners, even Catholics and Jews. Every one of Britain’s
North American colonies, in one fashion or another, voided those distinctions between the native-born,
denizens, and naturalized persons which remained central to British law and politics. In British North
America, immigrants made an easy transition from aliens with full property rights to naturalized subjects
with full political rights. Periodically, one or another colony enfranchised whole groups of Protestant
foreigners (such as Huguenots or German Moravians), and, on occasion, men of foreign birth held high
political offices out of reach in England. British authorities tolerated these colonial innovations, just as they
accepted that a much higher proportion of men voted in the North American colonies than at home. The
Board of Trade, which regulated the colonies, finally attempted to ban the promiscuous granting of equal
rights to immigrants in 1746, but by then “England’s hierarchical ranking of natives, naturalized aliens, and
denizens [had] collapsed in America [as] subjectship in the New World tended in practice to become a
simplified and more uniform status.”6
The second instance of black men benefiting from white men’s politics came during the Revolution. As the
American colonies defined themselves as separate from, rather than adjuncts of, Great Britain, they
necessarily avoided making distinctions between different groups of subjects. All Americans should
transfer their “ligeance” as subjects, thus all Americans (other than slaves, that is) would become citizens,
whether born in England, or creoles born of English parentage, or people who had arrived freely (or not-sofreely, as indentured servants) from somewhere other than England. It was not in the interest of America’s
creole nationalists to admit that anyone under their fragile political dominion could opt out of this new
category of “Americans.”7
This assertion of an inclusive and thus nonracial nationality was stated clearly on June 24, 1776, when
Congress effectively created American citizenship by revoking the allegiance of all subjects in British
North America to the King, legislating “That all persons [evidently including free black persons] residing
within any of the United Colonies, and deriving protection from the laws of the same, owe allegiance to the
said laws, and are members of such colony.”8 Underlining the inclusive character of the new citizenship, in
1781 Congress welcomed “all such foreigners” deserting from the British forces, and specified in Article
Four of the Articles of Confederation that “the free inhabitants of each of these states (paupers, vagabonds,
5
James H. Kettner, The Development of American Citizenship, 1608-1870 (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1978), 5, 29.
6
Ibid.,106. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), for a discussion of “creole nationalism” in the Americas, a most
fruitful perspective on understanding its British North American variant.
7
Ketter, Development of American Citizenship, 173.
8
Quoted in ibid., 179.
4 and fugitives from justice excepted) shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of free citizens in the
several states.”
Various writers at various times, either for political purposes or from sheer caution, have asserted that these
refusals to exclude free people of color by inserting the word “white” were simply accidents, unintended
omissions. But that argument was easily disposed at the time of Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857). As any
number of leading Republicans pointed out, there was incontrovertible evidence that during the 1770s and
80s (but not the 1790s, one notes) the Founders deliberately rejected attempts to racialize American
citizenship. In February 1859, the Ohio Republican Congressman John A. Bingham asked the rhetorical
question “Who, sir, are citizens of the United States?” during a House debate, and quickly answered with
then-familiar facts, that
First, all free persons born and domiciled within the United States--not all free white persons, but
all free persons. You will search in vain, in the Constitution of the United States, for that word
white; it is not there. You will look for it in the first form of National Government--the Articles of
Confederation; it is not there. The omission of this word--this phrase of caste--from our national
charter, was not accidental, but intentional. I beg leave to refer gentlemen to the Journal of the
Continental Congress, volume 2, page 606. By this reference it will be seen in that Congress, on
the 25th June, 1778, the Articles of Confederation being under consideration, it was moved by
delegates of South Carolina to amend the fourth article, by inserting after the word "free," and
before the word "inhabitants," the word "white," so that "the privileges and immunities of citizens
in the several States should be limited exclusively to white inhabitants." and the vote on this
amendment was taken by States, and stood two States for and eight against it, and one equally
divided. This action of the Congress of 1778 was a clear and direct avowal that all free inhabitants,
white and black, except "paupers, vagabonds, and fugitives from justice," (which were expressly
accepted,) were “entitled to all the privileges and immunities of free citizens in the several
States."9
Bingham was hardly alone in this assertion. Repeatedly, over many decades, prominent men—Federalists
like John Jay and his sons, Whigs like William Henry Seward, and Republicans like Abraham Lincoln—
noted that most of the original thirteen states defined voters without regard to race, that in some of them
black men had participated in the ratification of the Constitution, and that, in the words of the leading legal
theorist of the early republic
Citizens, under our Constitution and laws, mean free inhabitants, born within the United States, or
naturalized under the laws of Congress. If a slave born in the United States be manumitted, or
otherwise lawfully discharged from bondage, or if a black man be born within the United States
and born free, he becomes thenceforward a citizen….10
This reasoning was similar to that of North Carolina’s Chief Justice, William Gaston, another old
Federalist, who declared in 1838 that
Before our Revolution, all free persons born within the dominions of the King of Great Britain,
whatever their color or complexion, were native-born British subjects….Upon the
Revolution….British subjects in North Carolina became North Carolina freemen…..Slaves
9
National Era, March 3, 1859.
Lecture 25, “Of Aliens and Natives,” in James Kent, Commentaries on American Law, Volume * (Sixth
Edition, 1841, the first time Kent used this language), page ?. Usually referred to as “Chancellor Kent,” his
New York judicial title, Kent was a pillar of the Federalist party in the post-revolutionary decades. When
the Federalists collapsed after 1820, they were replaced by the Whigs in the 1830s and 40s; in turn, most
Whigs became Republicans in the 1850s. All of these parties stood for the sanctity of the common law
inherited from England, which defined citizenship in ways open to black citizenship, if not absolute
equality. The other major partisan alignment, Thomas Jefferson’s Republicans and their successors in
Andrew Jackson’s “Democracy,” derided the common law (and often law in general), and defined
“American” as “white,” denying the possibility of black citizenship, a tradition which reached its apogee in
Chief Justice Roger’s Taney’s notorious Dred Scott opinion declaring black people “had no rights which
any white man need respect.”
10
5 manumitted here became freemen - and therefore, if born within North Carolina, are citizens of
North Carolina.11
With just as much certitude, however, Bingham’s Democratic opponents in the late 1850s and their
predecessors noted the ample precedents for denying black citizenship: that in the very first Congress in
1790, Congress had limited the right of naturalization to “white” people, and had followed that up with the
Militia Act in 1792 excluding persons of color from military service, later followed by their banishment
from the postal service, and sundry rulings denying them passports. Certainly, these precedents were as
valid as those invoked by black and white abolitionists and their friends, and if one looked at the record of
state legislation and constitution-making, their argument was even stronger. Across the Upper South and
the Lower North, in every new state but Maine between 1790 and 1860, the vote was reserved for whites,
and in most of the existing states founded earlier, it was taken away from black men—effectually declaring
them something less than citizens. Finally, in defiance of common-law definitions of Anglo-American
“subjectship,” any number of state judges, including various state supreme courts, resurrected the old
category of “denizenship,” or invented new categories of citizenship, finding that the very fact of prejudice
against people of African descent exempted them from the rights attaching to native birth.
During these seventy years, therefore, Americans lived with a profound contradiction. The Constitution
may have avoided using the word “white” and any direct mention of slavery, but it also nationalized and
guaranteed the peculiar institution.12 Yet this same Constitution ratified a nonracial birthright definition of
citizenship via the “implicit assumption that birth within the United States conferred citizenship” as
specified in the qualifications for the presidency, which did “encompass all persons born within the states
and territories of the new nation.”13 And to make matters even more muddled, Article Four specified that
“The citizens of each state shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several states,”
which on its face asserted that any individual state could decide who was a citizen within its borders,
including persons of color, and confer at least some form of national citizenship “in the several states” by
doing so.
Congress and the Founders had all, in fact, punted. They had left open, or put on hold, the nature of
individual citizenship, in large part because of the ambiguity about from whence it derived: the state of
one’s birth or the nation. Americans, whether jurists or ordinary voters, were left with a radically simplified
version of English subjectship as the common sense of America, so that the colonies-turned-states of the
1780s had no lower rung to which they could assign free blacks, just then emerging as a visible social
group. By the time that jurists and legislators began to notice the darker-complexioned Americans among
them as a problem, thousands of black men from North Carolina to Vermont had long exercised the rights
of citizenship, including voting, in full view of white men. And a significant minority of politicians,
judges, and legal theorists were ready to affirm what they believed to be a settled truth: that there was only
one class of “freemen” in the United States, and there never had been any other.
How then do we get from a de facto black citizenship recognized in some of the States in 1790, when the
11 Quoted
in “Rights of Free Negroes in Maine. Can They Vote? Opinion of the Supreme Judicial Court,”
National Era, August 25, 1857. 12
David Waldstreicher, Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (New York: Hill & Wang,
2009).
13
Kettner, Development of American Citizenship, 230. Legal rulings affirming black citizenship relied on a
third premise inherent in the post-revolutionary settlement. State citizenship laws quickly gave the
naturalized equal status with the native-born, in the right to vote, hold elective office, and participate in
judicial processes. Despite periodic nativism, that premise has guided American citizenship law ever since.
What is the connection between the status of naturalized citizens and native-born free people of color?
First, the latter made this comparison constantly, pointing out that as naturalized citizens gained equality
with the native-born, no distinctions were posited regarding who those “natives” were, whether religious,
racial, or ethnic. Second, the absolute equality of naturalized citizens (Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and
otherwise) pointed to the presumed equality of all “freemen,” the archaic term used as a synonym for
citizens, yet another measure militating against distinguishing between the native-born, on the grounds of
“complexion.”
6 free black population was not quite sixty thousand people, to half-a-century later, when it had reached
386,000, and included a host of men like Garnet insisting “We are Americans,” and reminding his readers
that “We were born in no foreign clime”? For the first quarter century, the historical record is largely
empty. Although we know that black men voted and paraded in the 1790s, we have little access to their
thoughts, other than a handful of petitions to Congress, and occasional pamphlets and sermons. There is no
documentation of their claiming themselves as freeborn Americans, thus citizens, until 1817, the pivotal
moment in their emergence as a self-conscious political constituency.
To understand black citizenship politics requires understanding the formidable enemy against whom they
posed themselves, an enemy all the more dangerous in that it claimed to care about black people, and
promised to aid them. In 1816, a cross-section of the nation’s white leaders (including Andrew Jackson,
Henry Clay, and key figures in the network of Protestant charitable groups representing the new urban
commercial bourgeoisie) met in the Capitol to found the American Colonization Society (ACS), one of the
most powerful, long-lasting, well-funded philanthropies in American history. The society’s purpose was to
solve the problem of slavery, and the larger presence of African Americans as a disruptive, potentially
insurrectionary group, by encouraging, funding, and perhaps mandating, their return to Africa. Over the
next forty years, right up to the Civil War, colonization remained the respectable alternative to any form of
emancipation. It was endorsed repeatedly by state legislatures and Presidents, and consumed vast amounts
of time and money; the ACS even convinced Congress in 1819 to endow the quasi-colony of Liberia in
West Africa with $100,000. Yet colonization was all a great humbug, a vicious nostrum in fact, since the
number of slaves grew from about 600,000 in 1790 to almost four million in 1860, while the ACS managed
to send no more than thirteen thousand people of color to Liberia and similar poverty- and disease-stricken
settlements by the end of the Civil War, where many died of disease and the survivors created their own
racial dictatorship to rule over the Africans they found.
The ACS’s significance for black politics was evident. To the extent that white people accepted the
argument that black and white were irredeemably antagonistic, as the ACS claimed, black men’s birthright
citizenship became irrelevant; race and custom overruled the law in ways that augured the rise of Jim Crow
and the language of Plessy v. Ferguson, that “Legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts or to
abolish distinctions based upon physical differences.” One would think that the North’s post-revolutionary
black leadership would have immediately recognized the threat posed by the colonizationism, but the
ACS’s apparently sincere, respectful approaches to certain men of color, and offers to share leadership in
the scheme of emigration, drew in a considerable portion of the North’s tiny black mercantile elite. In
January 1817, Philadelphia’s colored people, the most prosperous community of African descent in the
U.S., met to consider a proposal for large-scale emigration to West Africa under ACS auspices. The plan
was drafted by their own leaders, including the wealthy sailmaker James Forten and Bishop Richard Allen
of the newly-founded African Methodist Episcopal denomination, in conjunction with the New England
merchant-trader Paul Cuffe. To these men’s shock, they were vehemently repudiated by the crowd of 3,000
meeting in Allen’s Bethel church. That decision, and how it was articulated in later decades, became the
seminal event in forging a black politics that was neither deferential nor ambivalent about whether the
people of color were “Americans.” The Philadelphia meeting voted unanimously to denounce the ACS’s
plan “to exile us from the land of our nativity,” declaring that
WHEREAS our ancestors (not of choice) were the first cultivators of the wilds of America, we
their descendents feel ourselves entitled to participate in the blessings of her luxuriant soil, which
their blood and sweat manured; and that any measure, or system of measures, having a tendency to
banish us from her bosom, whould [sic] not only be cruel but in direct violations of those
principles, which have been the boast of the republic.14
14
Quoted in Gary B. Nash, The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2006), 147-148. This repudiation was not restricted to Philadelphia. A writer in
1833, disgusted by the assertions of ACS supporters that the free people of color had found colonization
“beautiful, inspiring and elevating” until “corrupt and designing men” like William Lloyd Garrison misled
them, quoted Boston’s leading black minister, the Reverend Thomas Paul, telling an ACS agent in late
summer 1817 that “Your plan…will never succeed. If you wish to benefit my colored brethren, you must
elevate them here, and never will I consent to leave my country, or try to persuade my poor brethren to go
7 From that point on, the central way that black men confronted colonizationism, with its rhetorical
denaturalization, was to insist on their birthright, and a loyalty grounded in the soil itself. The official
“Address” from the first national convention of colored men in 1830, also in Philadelphia, denounced
colonization in nearly identical language to the 1817 resolution, that “we who have been born and nurtured
on this soil, we, whose habits, manners, and customs are the same in common with other Americans, can
never consent to take our lives in our hands” and accept voluntary deportation.15
Few whites heard of the 1817 Philadelphia meeting, but three years later, free African Americans’ status as
native-born citizens entered American politics in a dramatic fashion, during the Missouri Crisis. The
second stage of the crisis, in early 1820, revolved around a provision of Missouri’s constitution “to prevent
free Negroes and mulattoes from coming to and settling in this State, under any pretext whatsoever.”
Missouri thus excluded as many as 92,273 citizens of certain Northern states in clear violation of the
“privileges and immunities” that the Constitution required each state to guarantee to citizens of every other
state, and various Northern political leaders made this provision a rallying cry for their own state’s nativity
conferring national citizenship.16 Pennsylvania Representative Joseph Hemphill, one of the few remaining
Federalists, stated it plainly: “If being a native, and free born, and of parents belonging to no other nation or
tribe, does not constitute a citizen of this country, I am at a loss to know in which manner citizenship is
acquired by birth.”17 Senator David Morril of New Hampshire used the same logic, that if we “take from
the inhabitants slaves and aliens…the remainder are citizens. Colour, does not come into consideration, and
it has no share in characterizing an inhabitant or a citizen,” citing distinguished colored New Englanders
who were unquestionably citizens of their states.18
This attempt at proscription provoked more than constitutional and legal objections; some prominent white
men were disgusted at the intrusion of what they deemed anti-republican attitudes, and the presumption of
instructing Northerners about who was, or was not, a citizen of their states. The notoriously nativist
Massachusetts Federalist Harrison Gray Otis told the Senate that he would “strenuously and forever
oppose…all measures which should subject a freeman, of whatever color, to the degradation of a slave….
[and] divest him of his property and rights, and interdict him from even passing into a country of which he
was a legitimate co-proprietor with” Otis.19 Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, while maintaining a
discreet public silence, told Pennsylvania Representative Henry Baldwin that the odious clause’s “purpose
is to disfranchise all the people of color who were citizens of the free states”; in retaliation he would, if he
could, vote to make Missourians “aliens within the Commonwealth of Massachusetts…[and] until that
portion of the citizens of Massachusetts whose rights were violated…should be reintegrated in the full
enjoyment and possession of those rights,” he would “prohibit by law the delivery of any fugitive upon the
claim of his master,” even if the result would be “a dissolution de facto of the Union.”20
The 1820s further underlined how birthright was an entering wedge for black citizenship. The Missouri
Crisis was barely over before a debate erupted at the New York Constitutional Convention in 1821, in
to Africa, in order to obtain those advantages and privileges which are our birthright, in this our native
land”; see The Liberator, August 3, 1833.
15
Constitution of the American Society of Free Persons of Colour, For Improving Their Condition in the
United States; for Purchasing Lands; and for the Establishment of a Settlement in Upper Canada, also The
Proceedings of the Convention, with their Address to the Free Persons of Colour in the United States
(Philadelphia: J.W. Allen, 1831), 10, in Howard Holman Bell, ed., Minutes of the Proceedings of the
National Negro Conventions,1830-1864 (New York: Arno Press, 1969).
16
This figure is drawn from the 1820 census, and counts only the free persons of color in the New England
and Mid-Atlantic states (Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut,
New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey) where they were generally recognized as citizens, if not always
as voters, excluding the new states carved out of the Northwest Territory where their status was less clear
[http://mapserver.lib.virginia.edu/php/state.php, accessed October 18, 2011].
17
Quoted in ibid., 153.
18
City of Washington Gazette, December 18, 1820.
19
Columbian Centinel, January 24, 1821.
20
Quoted in Josiah Quincy, Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams (Boston: Phillips, Sampson and
Company, 1856), 112-114.
8 which Federalists and Clintonian Republicans dissented from the move by Martin Van Buren’s Bucktail
faction to disfranchise black voters. A series of prominent conservatives connected to the republic’s
founding asserted the inviolable linkage of nativity and suffrage. John Jay’s son Peter declared that “No
man, no body of men, however powerful, have the right to do wrong” by “excluding” from New York’s
elections “free born natives of its soil” simply because of their “complexion.” Senator Rufus King, the last
Federalist presidential candidate in 1816, and sole signer of the U.S. Constitution present, stated plainly
that, “As certainly as the children of any white man are citizens, so certainly the children of the black men
are citizens.”21 Their arguments reverberated for decades, as did the ardent racial populism of the Van
Burenites, a prototype for Jacksonian Democracy across the North.
Once the potential for black men’s citizenship disrupting relations between the states was introduced, it
could not be ignored. The “privileges and immunities” clause exposed a fundamental contradiction, as it
was central to the equality of “the States,” but also profoundly at odds with the slave states’ everintensifying need to police all people of color. It posed a political impasse for the South—to recognize any
free black man as juridically equal was politically impossible, yet to deny the rights of certain black men
once recognized by their own state constituted a standing insult to the North.
The most lasting of these battles ensued over the thousands of black seamen circumnavigating the Atlantic
littoral, most of them citizens of Northern states or Great Britain. Black mariners had long been the most
visible group of free black workers, constituting a fifth or more of the crews in the American merchant
marine.22 Their status as Americans was accepted even by politicians loyal to slavery. During the crisis
with Great Britain leading to a second war, black sailors and soldiers repeatedly featured in prominent
roles; that crisis began when a Royal Navy ship seized an American merchantman, the Chesapeake, in
1807, and impressed four American seamen—two of whom were black, which scarcely bothered the
Jeffersonian “war hawks” who denounced this invasion of America’s rights.
This tolerance for black mariners as Americans ended after the supposed “Negro Plot” to seize Charleson,
South Carolina in 1822, led by the former mariner Denmark Vesey. Suddenly vigilant to possible
conspiracies, South Carolina, Georgia, North Carolina, Alabama, and Louisiana all passed laws requiring
the jailing of black sailors as soon as they entered port—regardless of whose citizens they were. The
British protested vehemently, and Secretary of State John Quincy Adams attempted to resolve their
concerns.23 In response, the South Carolina legislature voted to ignore the federal judge who ordered the
sailors’ release. Over subsequent decades, neither Great Britain nor any Northern state could enforce their
citizens’ rights.24
Similar incidents multiplied. In 1826, a black New Yorker, Gilbert Horton, was imprisoned as a fugitive
slave in the District of Columbia, and Judge William Jay, another son of John and a pillar of the evangelical
philanthropic establishment, led a successful campaign lobbying Governor DeWitt Clinton “to demand
21
Reports of the Proceedings and Debates of the Convention of 1821, Assembled for the Purpose of
Amending the Constitution of the State of New-York, quoted in David N. Gellman and David Quigley, eds.,
Jim Crow New York: A Documentary History of Race And Citizenship, 1777-1877 (New York: New York
University Press, 2003), 140, 127.
22
Back this up, get Bolster book
23
See Philip M. Hamer, “Great Britain, the United States, and the Negro Seamen Acts, 1822-1848,”
Journal of Southern History 1 (January 1835), 3-28.
24
Bruce Laurie, Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005), 15; George Levesque, Black Boston: African American Life and Culture in Urban America,
1750-1860 (New York: Garland, 1994), 238, on how this fight pushed Massachusetts to “dramatize… its
acknowledgement of the citizenship rights of its black population.” As late as 1844, Samuel Hoar, an
eminent Whig chosen as Massachusetts’ official representative, went to South Carolina to protest the
treatment of colored Bay State citizens. The legislature declared him an “emissary of a foreign
government” and he had to flee.
9 from the proper authorities the instant liberation of Horton, as a free citizen of the State of New York.”25 As
anti-slavery politics became a significant force in the North from the late 1830s on, governors with
abolitionist sympathies, such as New York’s Seward in 1839-42 and Ohio’s Salmon P. Chase in 1856-60
defied the “Slave Power” (their epithet for the South) by refusing requests for extradition, overruling
warrants granted slave-catchers, and in numerous other ways defending the rights of their colored citizens.
The equation of native birth and U.S. citizenship thus helped a new generation of radicals to define African
Americans not as injured victims or suppliant fugitives, but as citizens unjustly deprived of their rights. In
his first public speech as an abolitionist, at Boston’s Park Street Church in 1829, William Lloyd Garrison
insisted that almost all of “our colored population were born on our soil and are therefore entitled to all the
privileges of American citizens.”26 Three years later, in Thoughts on African Colonization, he announced
that the “sacred duty of the nation” included not merely emancipation but “to recognize the people of color
as brethren and countrymen.” Similarly, the 1832 constitution of the New England Anti-Slavery Society
called for “instant recognition of EVERY American-born citizen, as a countryman and brother!”27 By middecade, the discourse of fellow-Americanism was second nature to Garrisonians; in 1835, when Theodore
Weld drafted a petition for Ohio’s female abolitionists, asking for emancipation in the District of Columbia,
he had them “plead…on behalf of a long oppressed and deeply injured class of native Americans.”28
Black men echoed this demand. The Reverend Peter Williams, Jr., pastor of New York’s St. Philip’s
Church, declaimed in an 1830 address “for the benefit of the colored community in Wilberforce, in Upper
Canada” that “We are NATIVES of this country; we ask only to be treated as well as FOREIGNERS,”
adding that “Not a few of our fathers suffered and bled to purchase its independence; we ask only to be
treated as well as well as those who fought against it.”29 The following year, an “Address of the Free
People of Colour of the Borough of Wilmington, Delaware” declared “We are natives of the United States;
our ancestors were brought to this country by means over which they had no control; we have our
attachments to the soil, and we feel that we have rights in common with other Americans.”30
By the late 1830s, therefore, a united front encompassing the “fanatical” Garrisonians, increasingly
assertive black leaders, and some Northern politicians, usually Whigs, affirmed that black people were
“natives and thus countrymen,” possessed of equal rights with other Americans. This was a startling shift,
unnoticed in abolitionist scholarship, which focuses on black Americans as slaves rather than as unjustly
imprisoned Americans, thus quite innocently repeating the insistence on absolute difference favored by
colonizationists and slaveholders. Some of this rhetoric supporting the principle of jus soli shocks even
today. We think of abolitionists as principled advocates of inter-racial equality, but their protestations were
polite compared to the vitriolic scorn for racialism expressed by John Quincy Adams, the former President,
now a Massachusetts Representative to Congress. In 1837, he provoked Southern representatives by
presenting a petition purportedly from Virginia slaves, which reinforced the determination of members
from the slave states to “gag” antislavery Whigs like Adams. His response, a widely-reprinted letter “To
the Inhabitants of the Twelfth Congressional District of Massachusetts,” asserted that anyone born in
America was a “countryman”:
25
William C. Nell, The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution, with Sketches of Several
Distinguished Colored Persons, to Which is Added a Brief Survey of the Condition and Prospects of
Colored Americans (Boston: Robert F. Wallcut, 1855), 331-332.
26
Quoted in Paul Goodman, Of One Blood: Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial Equality (Berkeley:
University of California, 1998), 41.
27
Quoted in Richard H. Newman, The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the
Early Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002?), 114, 130.
28
Quoted in William Lee Miller, Arguing Over Slavery: John Quincy Adams and the Great Battle Over
Slavery in the United States Congress (New York: Vintage, 1998), 110.
29
Williams’ address was included in the section “Sentiments of the People of Color,” in William Lloyd
Garrison, Thoughts on African Colonization (New York: Arno Press, 1969, originally published 1832), 6667.
30
Abraham Shadd, Peter Spencer, William S. Thomas, “Address of the Free People of Colour of the
Borough of Wilmington, Delaware,” July 12, 1831, at the African Union Church, in C. Peter Ripley, ed.,
The Black Abolitionist Papers, Volume III: The United States, 1830-1846 (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1991), 103.
10 The sentiment in the bosom of any free American that one sixth part of its countrymen, are by
accident of their birth deprived even of the natural right of prayer is degrading enough to human
nature, but because in one portion of this Union the Native American [italics added], becomes by
descent from African Ancestry an outcast of human nature, classed with the brute creation, within
the boundaries of the State in which he was born, therefore it is beneath the dignity of the general
Legislative Assembly of a Nation founding its existence upon the natural and inalienable rights of
man to listen to his prayer or even receive his petitions is an opinion to which I trust your
judgments will never assent...31
Adams drew upon the arguments made by his friend William Jay. In 1834, Jay agreed to lend his name and
legal expertise to the new American Anti-Slavery Society (as George Washington’s nephew Bushrod had
done for the American Colonization Society), publishing a comprehensive Inquiry Into the Character and
Tendency of the American Colonization and American Anti-Slavery Societies to vindicate the latter. For the
first time, a credentialed expert surveyed the evidence for or against black citizenship. Much of his
reasoning was inductive: that in an 1803 law barring the entrance of people of color from St. Domingue,
attempts to exclude free persons of African descent from the category of “citizens” were defeated. His
conclusion was unequivocal: that if white Americans “Admit free negroes to be men, and to be born free in
the United States…it is impossible to frame even a plausible argument against their citizenship,” quoting
his father from 1785: “I wish to see all unjust and unnecessary discriminations every where abolished, and
that time may soon come, when all our inhabitants, of every COLOR and denomination, shall be free and
EQUAL PARTAKERS OF OUR POLITICAL LIBERTY.”32
“Drunken Irishmen and Ignorant Dutchmen”
Outside of the minority of Anglophile Federalists and their “Moral Whig” descendants, however, most
Northern whites found the idea of “black freemen” repugnant.33 The notion that some weight of legal
opinion or judicial precedent was sufficient to prove black men were citizens and voters entirely misses the
populistic, Anglophobic, sometimes savage tenor of the “Age of Jackson,” so-called. Rougher medicine
was needed, and in the 1840s, black rhetoric turned steadily harsher. The assertion of a superior status as
natives, of a “we” versus “they,” became a routine drumbeat against the “naygur”-hating Irish and other
immigrants. White men in power were no longer implored, but mocked. A perfect example of this sharper
edge can be seen in a speech by Dr. John Swett Rock in February 1850, supporting New Jersey’s suffrage
campaign, which was briefly successful with Whig legislators:
If we, who have always been with you, do not understand something of the regulations of this
country, how miserably ignorant are the thousands of voters who arrive in the country annually,
who know nothing of this government, and but little of any government!....
They say ‘this is not our country.’ We would ask, Whom does it belong to? If this country is
yours, and was gained by conquest, then we are particeps criminis, and are equally entitled to the
spoil.
Africa is urged upon us as the country of our forefathers!....This sophistry is not designed to
aggrandize any but the descendants of European nations: Africa is the country for the Africans,
their descendants and mongrels of various colors; Asia is the country of the Asiatics; the East
Indies the place for Malays; Patagonia the country for the Indian; and any place the white man
chooses to go. HIS country! The country a man is born in, is his country; and the humanity that
would oppress a colored man for a white man’s sake, is not humanity for us….34
31
Quoted in William Jerry MacLean, “Othello Scorned: The Racial Thought of John Quincy Adams,”
Journal of the Early Republic (Summer 1984), 154.
32
William Jay, An Inquiry Into the Character and Tendency of the American Colonization and American
Anti-Slavery Societies, Third Edition (New York: Leavitt, Lord and Co., 1835), 42, 43, 45, 148.
33
I am indebted to John L. Brooke, The Heart of the Commonwealth: Society and Political Culture in
Worcester County, Massachusetts, 1713-1861 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) for the
concept of the Moral Whiggery, which does much to explain Northern political culture.
34
North Star, February 8, 1950.
11 The dentist, physician, and lawyer Rock (the first African American admitted to practice before the
Supreme Court, in 1865) was a new type—an educated, flagrantly insolent black man. He was joined by a
whole crew of prominent polemicists and campaigners, including the historian William Cooper Nell, the
professional lecturer William Wells Brown, the lawyer and judge Robert Morris, the travelling political
organizer William Watkins, the Glasglow-trained doctor James McCune Smith, and many more. Together,
they gave as good as they got, baiting “ruffians,” “Democrats,” and “Irishmen,” often the same person, as
less “American” than they were.
There is no point in listing, for effect, very many of the instances of black men denouncing the absurdity of
favoring “miserably ignorant” immigrants over natives, because they did so almost continuously. This
routine but effective juxtaposition is illustrated by William Wells Brown telling a Philadelphia audience in
1853 about his return from a successful English tour. He had encountered two “foreigners” on the boat
home, who “when they landed in this country…were boasting that they had arrived at a land of liberty
where they could enjoy religious and political freedom.” They walked into Philadelphia together and
hailed an omnibus; the two foreigners got in; I was told that ‘niggers’ were not allowed to ride.
Foreigners, mere adventurers, perhaps, in this country, are treated as equals, while I, an American
born, whose grandfather fought in the revolution, am not permitted to ride in one of your fourthrate omnibuses.35
Rather than the fact of black nativism, however, what bears mentioning is the dignified, indeed principled
form it usually took. Black men refused both the hysterical conspiracy-mongering of the anti-Catholic
Know-Nothings, and the sneering Hibernophobia of their Yankee allies. Nor was their disdain for
immigrants rooted in competition between fractions of the working-class, as some scholars suggest,
pointing to a `race-to-the-bottom’ between unskilled laborers, especially the Irish. Focusing on black anger
at being pushed off the docks by Irish gangs, or their disgust with the pro-slavery sympathies of figures like
New York’s Catholic Bishop John Hughes, misses their central complaint--that these new arrivals had
immediately been awarded the rights and privileges of citizenship denied to “native-born Americans”
whose skin happened to be “tawny.”36
Nativism thus had specific political uses, which black men learned from white men, and employed to
cement their alliances with those white men, riding partisan coattails from the Whigs to the Know-Nothings
to the Republicans. Well before the Famine drove over a million Irish to America in 1845-1852, eminent
figures in the American establishment compared the welcome accorded to poor whites just off the boat with
the ill treatment of black Americans. In 1837, New York’s newly-elected Whig mayor, Aaron Clark,
gratified the Colored American’s editors by telling the Common Council that
Several thousands of colored people also remain among us, entitled to the protection of our
laws….the increasing influx of needy emigrants has deprived them, from time to time of
patronage, until, in many cases, they are thereby turned into the foulest conditions in life - driven
into corners, cellars, and dens, where virtue cannot breathe….Idle male pauper emigrants have
35
William Wells Brown, speech in Philadelphia, October 23, 1854, in ibid., 248.
For the general history of Irish Negrophobia, see Carl Wittke, The Irish in America (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1970). John Wertheimer, “The Green and the Black: Irish Nationalism
and the Dilemmas of Abolitionism,” New York Irish History III (1990-1991), 5-15, stresses that the Irish
saw abolitionism as “a spurious pretext through which intolerant Yankee reformers hoped to use to gain
national power in order to stamp out the rights of the foreign-born” (5). Their “bitter attitudes towards
England” generated anger at “the zealot, the fanatic, the morose and gloomy Puritan” who was “seeking to
exalt the Negro and debase the Irishman…seeking to give the vote to the negro and take it away from the
Irishman” (9-10, quoting different sources). David J. Hellwig’s “Black Attitudes Toward Irish
Immigrants,” Mid-America LIX (January 1977), 39-49, and “Strangers in Their Own Land: Patterns of
Black Nativism, 1830-1930,” [get cite], underscores that “black Americans reacted differently to
immigrants than did white natives,” seeing them from the perspective of both “insiders and
outsiders…strangers in their own country,” wherein “the presence of immigrants and the preference they
received over black citizens fostered the feeling of apartness” (86).
36
12 been furnished with food and fuel, whilst both have been denied to sober colored widows, with
small children, in extreme necessity.37
In the 1840s, the invidious contrast between immigrant voters and disfranchised Americans became a staple
of anti-slavery rhetoric. Anticipating the defeat of a referendum on restoring black suffrage in 1846, New
York’s Whiggish Albany Herald asked “is it just, is it democratic, to admit the drunken white bondman,
fresh from every foreign lordling on the globe, to the right of ruling us, through the ballot box, if we at the
same time deny that right to those born free among us and reared in the same cradle of liberty with
ourselves?” That Election Day, after watching the evident failure on “Equal Suffrage for Negroes,”
Horace Greeley, editor of the Whiggery’s flagship New York Tribune, linked native birthright, black
patriotism, and Democratic thuggery in a single pungent paragraph:
The polls were given up almost wholly to the Adopted Citizens of German or Irish birth….. called
out by skillful appeals to their hatred of the unfortunate African race. It was mournful to see
hundreds who have not been six years in the country earnestly and abusively clamorone [sic] for
the disfranchisement of men whose fathers’ fathers were born here, and many of them shed their
blood for our liberties in the war of the Revolution. To see a man who enjoys political rights
among us by Naturalization voting to disfranchise those who have for forty years been voters, is
indeed a melancholy spectacle.
As the immigrant vote grew by leaps and bounds, the invective grew nastier. In November 1860, just
before the second New York referendum on black men’s voting rights, the North’s leading Protestant
magazine, The Independent, put the choice directly:
The question to be submitted to the Christian people of this State next Tuesday…..[is] whether this
State shall continue to exact of its native colored citizens a money qualification for voting, which
it does not demand of the ignorant, foul, priest-ridden Paddy just landed upon the dock at Castle
Garden. We say, away with a restriction so senseless, so mean, so unjust.
The state went for Lincoln, but black suffrage lost again, and Frederick Douglass knew who was
responsible: “drunken Irishmen and ignorant Dutchmen, controlled by sham Democrats.”38
As these slurs indicate, the insistence on native birth as the primary basis of citizenship led easily to
positing a true Americanism shared by all “natives,” black and white together. This assertion of an
ethnocultural fraternity transcending race sprang from larger societal processes of convergence, bringing
the free black community together with certain groups in northern white society, during the prewar decades
when that society experienced unprecedented social, religious, and ethnic tensions.
Beginning in the 1790s, Northern black leaders worked with enormous resolve to create their own
institutions comparable to those run by whites, to comport themselves as self-respecting and respectable, as
“Americans” rather than “Africans,” citizens rather than servants.39 By the 1830s, they had built a solidly
rooted civil society in dozens of northern cities and towns, made visible by an array of voluntary
associations and the bricks and mortar of their many churches, with funds carefully banked for mutual
assistance. As William Lloyd Garrison reported to an English audience in 1833, “They have flourishing
churches…public and private libraries…They have their temperance societies, their debating societies, their
moral societies, their literary societies, their benevolent societies, their savings societies, and a multitude of
kindred associations.”40
37
Colored American, June 17, 1837.
Phyllis F. Field, The Politics Of Race In New York: The Struggle For Black Suffrage In The Civil War
Era (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 60, 59, 71, 123, 135; also Frederick Douglass’ Monthly,
December 1860.
39
James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community, and Protest Among
Northern Free Blacks, 1700-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) synthesizes the extensive
social history of the Northern free people of color. A key study is Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom: The
Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720-1840 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988).
40
Quoted in William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879, The Story of His Life, Told By His Children, Volume I,
1805-1835 (Negro Universities Press Reprint), 374.
38
13 The counterpoint to free black people seeking to blend into the new America was the profound partisan
divisions of the early republic, driving white Americans apart. The decades following Jefferson’s defeat of
Adams in 1800 saw the rise of a regional nationalism deeply hostile to the South throughout Greater New
England, extending across upstate New York and the upper Midwest. This anti-Southernism was asserted
first by arch-Federalists in the era of the Hartford Convention, and then echoed in the 1830s by anti-slavery
Whigs and radical abolitionists, the political descendants of those Federalists.41 Finally, in the 1840s and
50s, as the Democratic Party swelled with Irish votes, boasting ever-grander ambitions for a “manifest
destiny” of continental conquest, the black and New Englandish versions of “Americanism” became an
explicitly biracial political stance. As cities filled up with strange-sounding European peasants, black men
found an audience for their claim to be Americans among both canny Whigs proving their credentials as
“Northern men,” and the ultra-republicans in the abolitionist Liberty Party, founded in 1840 as a split from
the Whigs.
Readers aware of the scornful parodies of black people in the ubiquitous minstrel shows dominating
antebellum popular culture may not be aware of the simultaneous stream of ridicule aimed at the Irish.
While Irish-baiting never equaled the Negrophobia of minstrelsy, it routinely featured ridiculous “Paddys,”
whose detestation of black people was notorious; Josephus Erin O’Riley “loved his country because it was
oppressed…loved America because it was free, and…hated negroes because they were black,” as a story in
a New Orleans paper put it.42 It was commonplace to insert “Dinah,” the stock colored woman—for
instance, in story of a Paddy tricked into kissing a “a great strong negro wench” and his farcical horror:
“Do me eyes desaive me? Am I in me sinsis? Be the rock of Cashel! You’re not me collen baan—me own
Nancy Clancy; but a naygur, as black as the ace of spades, and as ugly as an ourang-o’tang!”43 Indeed, this
one word—“naygur,” “negur,” or “nagur”--was the pay-off in many Paddy tales. Even in Ireland,
Americans were told, bitter Catholics referred to Oliver Cromwell or the local taxman as a “bloody
nagur.”44 At times, it became an ironic comment on the virtues of abolitionism, as in the Daily Ohio
Statesman’s story “Paddy in Africa,” recounting “a negro celebration” at which the speaker so impressed
an Irishman that he exclaimed, “Bedad, he speaks well for a nagur; didn’t he, now?” When told the black
was “only a half negro” he replied “Only a half nagur, is it? Well, if half a nagur can talk in that style, I’m
thinking a whole nagur might bate the prophet Jeremiah?”45
Strikingly, black publicists and orators entirely avoided this vernacular, in which every utterance was recast
in an “Irish” accent. Douglass’ outburst against “drunken Irishmen” was quite rare, an indicator of the
Yankee respectability that came naturally to black public men in this era. One searches the black press in
vain for the anti-Irish slurs common to the white press, north and south.46 They abjured “Paddy” stories and
41
See Marc M. Arkin, “The Federalist Trope: Power and Passion in Abolitionist Rhetoric,” Journal of
American History 88 (June 2001), 75-98, which posits “a continuity of New England culture” linking
Federalist anti-southernism to radical abolitionism.
42
Daily Picayune, January 22, 1840.
43
“Rory O’Rourke’s Last Serenade” in the Northern Standard (Clarksville, Texas), August 4, 1849,
reprinted from The Delta. An especially popular if grotesque version of this comedy of idiots had the
handyman Mulrooney misunderstanding an order to give the “black filly” its warm mash. When Phillis, the
colored cook, responds to his demand with “Taint no such a thing. Go way, our poor white Irisher! I tell
‘ee I won’t. Who ebba heard ob a coloured ‘ooman taking a bran mash afore?,” he force feeds her, head in
a vise, to the master’s great amusement. It ran as “An Irish Story” in the New-Hampshire Patriot, August,
2, 1854; the Times Picayune, October 14, 1855; and the Macon Telegraph, July 20, 1858.
44
National Era, September 23, 1852, for the Cromwell reference; Trenton State Gazette, July 3, 1851, for a
story featuring the line “I was forced to borrow money from that tame negur, the exciseman.”
45
Daily Ohio Statesman, July 17, 1858, also reprinted in the Columbus, Georgia Ledger-Enquirer,
February 18, 1858, and several other papers. A similar note was struck in “Horace Greeley a White Man,”
in which the correspondent of a Wisconsin newspaper overhears three Irish servants discussing the famous
editor, the punch line being “Sure an’ he’s a white man!” “Av coorse he’s a white man” says another “in a
patronizing tone,” to which the third responds, “Wall, be my sowl, I’ve been deceived in the old fellow
entirely, I thought he was a naygur” (Weekly Wisconsin Patriot, December 29, 1855).
46
Dale T. Knobel, Paddy and the Republic: Ethnicity and Nationality in Antebellum America (Middletown,
CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1986) is the best analysis of the “love and theft” at work in Anglo-
14 even the word itself, and when they assailed Irish violence, they had a point. The Irish reputation for
brawling was well-earned, and organized clan violence (“faction fights,” as they were called in Ireland) was
a significant element in the island’s stubbornly collectivist peasant culture.47 The closest black
propagandists got (at least in print) to the casual bigotry of the white nativists was Frederick Douglass’
Paper reprinting a story on a West Indian Emancipation celebration in Ohio, where the colored people were
“All very well dressed, and well behaved and all perfectly sober. The only absolutely drunken man we saw
was an Irishman, who had been led out, and who was very confident that he could whip ‘anny Nagur on the
ground.’”48 Nor did colored men have recourse to a more genteel version of anti-Irish prejudice in the
contemptuous dismissal of “papists.” To the extent that African Americans were anti-Catholic, they
emulated white anti-clericalism, in which opposition to the ritualistic hierarchy of Roman Catholicism
remained axiomatic for republicans.49
The furthest extent of black hostility was the pained outrage felt by the “gentleman of color” Robert Purvis,
son of a wealthy Scottish-born merchant in Charleston and his common-law wife, herself the daughter of a
Jewish immigrant and a woman reputed to be a Moor from North Africa. In the 1840s and 50s, Purvis was
Pennsylvania’s best-known black leader, living on an estate outside Philadelphia. Phenotypically a white
gentleman but proud of his African heritage, he vented his disgust with “this modern Democratic, Christian
Republic” at the Annual Meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1860.
Who makes your mobs on your canal lines, and in the construction of your railroads? Who swells
your mob in your beer gardens, and in your Sunday excursions? Who make your Native and AntiNative American mobs? Your Forrest and Macready mobs [rival gangs of Irishmen and “Native
Americans” who fought each other in New York city], which the military have to be called out to
put down? I am sure, not the colored people! Not the native-born Americans who have tilled your
soil in times of war, and whose reward has been disfranchisement and threatened annihilation, but
your foreign-born European immigrants of yesterday--men who can't speak your language, and
don't respect your laws. These are the people who are invested with all the franchise of the
country, including that of trampling on the black men. These are the people who are, at the same
time, the most turbulent and most insolent class of the whole American population….I believe in
the equal natural rights of all men; and hence it is that I protest against the anti-republican and
unjust distinctions in favor of a stranger and foreigner against a native-born American, against
American Hibernophobia, for whom “American character was ethnic character, Anglo-American character”
(96). In this analysis, black Americanism clung to an increasingly fragile perch, since by the prewar
decades “ethnicity was no longer treated as a matter of ‘character,’ culture, and environment but of blood,
and nationality was no longer understood as attainable by any who met certain standards of intelligence and
morality. Nationality was neither to be had by nurture nor by choice” (99). I prefer to see the cacophony of
images and arguments as a free-for-all, in which, given the deepening sectional divide, black men seized a
chance to position themselves within the nation.
47
Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1985), *.
48
Frederick Douglass’ Paper, August 18, 1854, from the Columbus Elevator. See Douglass’ predilection
for nativism by indirection in his reprinting a story entitled “Shall Black Men Vote?” from the Hartford
Republican: “Shall black men vote in Connecticut? Shall we freely accord to every ignorant Irishman, and
every drunken native, the right to exercise the electoral franchise, and refuse it to a class of men because
they are black?” (ibid., September 1, 1854), and his casual inclusion of a letter from England, denouncing
an American minister for justifying slavery: “The Doctor recapitulated the several points of his public
reply, recounted every fallacy in due course, like a Papist his beads” (Douglass’ Monthly, May, 1859).
49
We can see this in the Reverend Samuel Cornish’s campaign in the Colored American against “Prejudice
in the Churches,” suggesting that the corruption of excluding black people meant that soon “Infidelity, and
Popery will fill the land, and over spread the ruins of the church,” in Colored American, March 18, 1837,
also May 6 and November 18, 1837, echoing this warning. Similarly, William Wells Brown, after visiting
Oxford in the 1850s, commented on how “At one time popery, sent protestants to the stake and faggot; at
another, a papist King found no favor with the people. A noble monument now stands where Cranmer,
Ridley, and Latimer [three Anglican martyrs, burnt at the stake by Queen Mary, daughter of Henry the
Eighth], proclaimed their sentiments and faith, and sealed it with their blood.” Frederick Douglass’ Paper,
October 2, 1851, “Letter from William Wells Brown.”
15 whom no charge can be made except that of the complexion which the Almighty God has given
him.50
Purvis was not just asserting that black men like him were Americans, but that they were the best kind of
Americans, those who refused to participate in mobs under any circumstances. By implication, those
others, “the most turbulent and most insolent class,” were the worst sort, the dregs—perhaps not
“American” at all!
“Colored Patriots of the American Revolution”
After 1815, fewer and fewer black people identified as “African” in other than a nominal sense. Instead,
the figure of “the native-born Colored AMERICAN,” as the editors of the newspaper of that name framed
it in 1837, became “a ‘respectable’ alternative to ‘African,’” and a way of underlining one’s nativity, versus
the colonizationists.51 By that point, to be from somewhere, black people inside the United States had no
other choice than to assert that they were ethnically “American” by virtue of their habits, tastes, faith, and
attitudes. That was the task their leaders grasped, to forge from a motley collection of peoples (since by
then West Africans had cohabited with each other, poor whites, and Indians, for almost two centuries) a
single identity, a “nation within the nation” as one of them famously put it.52 But they had some
advantages: the notion that some man born in West Cork or Dusseldorf, barely literate in English and
practicing a heterodox religion, was more American than an English-speaking native Protestant, did not
come as easily then.
To make an ethnic claim for birthright over phenotype, Northern free people of color documented how they
emulated the achievements of northern Anglo-America, the “Universal Yankee Nation” spreading
westward below the Canadian border. Garnet’s 1840 “Address to the People of the State of New York”
embodies this effort to reframe their narrative, as whites flocked to minstrel shows depicting slaves
cavorting, and free people of color dressed up like infants on parade. Against this, Garnet insisted that
Cut off from the sympathies of our fellow citizens, almost abject in poverty…we have
nevertheless, by the practical operation of common sense, by habits of industry, and the cultivation
of the religious sentiments, been enabled to elevate ourselves above abasement, and possess
ourselves of many of the advantages of RELIGION, INTELLIGENCE and PROPERTY…there
are but few families in which books are not a common and necessary commodity. In all parts of
the state, from Montauk to Buffalo, literary and debating societies and clubs exist among our
50
Liberator, May 18, 1860. “Forrest and Macready” is a reference to the Astor Place riot on May 10, 1849,
between followers of the English actor William Macready and those of the American Edwin Forrest, the
latter including large numbers of Irishmen.
51
Weekly Advocate, February 4, 1837. Noting the existence of white abolitionist newspapers like The
Liberator, the editors stressed “We have, however, peculiar difficulties to encounter, and we act with a
fearful weight of responsibility resting upon us. We stand ALONE in the field! Hitherto the native-born
Colored AMERICAN has been without an ADVOCATE….”; shortly they changed their paper’s name to
the Colored American. See also Patrick Rael, Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 46-47, 83-84, 90. The last public manifestations of
a cultural heritage drawn on Africa, at least in the North, were seen in the 1820s; see William J. Brown,
The Life of William J. Brown of Providence, R.I., With Personal Recollections of Incidents in Rhode Island
(Freeport, New York: Books For Libraries Press, 1971; originally published 1883), 83-84, which describes
how at the founding of Providence’s first black church in 1822, “a military company (called the African
Greys)” escorted “the African societies to their new house of worship” as the latter “wore their regalias.
The president of the societies, who was their commander, was dressed to represent an African chief, having
on a red pointed cap, and carried an elephant’s tusk in his hand; each end was tipped with gilt.”
52
As James Brewer Stewart explains, the first generation of African American leaders “succeeded
magnificently in shaping ethnically diverse groups of urban transients into enduring communities,” but this
process often required “drastic alterations of identity and allegiance,” among “`multiracial’ families with
bloodlines that had mixed African, Indian, and Euro-American ancestors”; see Stewart, “Modernizing
`Difference’: The Political Meanings of Color in the Free States, 1776-1840,” Journal of the Early
Republic (Winter 1999), 694, 696.
16 people….Our schools and associations are continually sending forth a host of youth, with strong
determination and purpose of subserving the best and highest interests of their proscribed
race….Throughout the State, we have upwards of forty independent religious
congregations…each with a temple erected to the worship of the Almighty; most with settled
pastors under a regular yearly stipend….
No matter how accurate and often repeated, however, these litanies of familial probity, Protestant
orthodoxy, and self-improvement were hardly sufficient to convince Northern whites that blacks were
“fellow Americans.” Whether in 1840, 1940, or 2010, black Americans remained deeply exotic. Lacking
the access to cheap land that enabled a majority of white men to gain economic autonomy, most of them
existed on society’s margins, on small patches of land in the country, and alleys and cellars in the city.53
Black men needed a trump card to prove their citizenship, an argument to override poverty’s correlatives of
shabbiness and petty crime. To gain a quasi-ethnic advantage, they invoked the same history that white
men had used since 1775---that they had served their country in wartime, and were equal to all who served,
and thus superior to any latecomers.
Black men’s references to heroic military service were not easily discounted. Enough white men had seen
black soldiers and sailors in action, so that even sixty years later, an aged white “veteran of the revolution”
spoke with feeling about how a major battle where
There was a regiment of blacks in the same situation— a regiment of negroes fighting for our
liberty and independence— not a white man among them but the officers—in this same dangerous
and responsible position. Had they been unfaithful, or given way before the enemy, all would have
been lost. Three times in succession were they attacked with a most desperate fury, by well
disciplined and veteran troops, and three times did they successfully repel the assault, and thus
preserve an army. They fought thus through the war. They were brave and hardy troops.54
By the 1830s, black leaders could list decades of exemplary service, beginning with their volunteering en
masse during Philadelphia’s yellow fever epidemic in 1794, and again during the War of 1812 when 2,500
men of color marched out to build fortifications in that city as well as Brooklyn.55 A striking instance of
how military service proved their Americanism was The Appeal of Forty Thousand Citizens, Threatened
with Disfranchisement, to the People of Pennsylvania, issued in 1838 to protest the insertion of the word
“white” into the suffrage clause of that state’s amended constitution. Written by Robert Purvis, it rang
every familiar change—
We love our native country, much as it has wronged us; and in the peaceable exercise of our
inalienable rights, we will cling to it…..We are PENNSYLVANIANS, and we hope to see the day
when Pennsylvania will have reason to be proud of us, as we believe she has now none to be
ashamed!
53
W.E.B. Du Bois’ recollection of his western Massachusetts family in Darkwater captures this precarious
existence: “The family were small farmers…The bits of land were too small to support the great families
born on them and we were always poor,” so that, over time, “economic pressure was transmuting the
family generally from farmers to ‘hired’ help,” quoted in David Levering Lewis, ed., W.E.B. Du Bois: A
Reader (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 116. Bruce Levine, Half Slave and Half Free: The Roots of the
Civil War (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), 49, documents that well into the nineteenth century, as much
of 70% of the north‘s white farming population were land-owners.
54
This was a “Dr. Harris of Franoestown, N.H.,” quoted in “an Address to the Citizens of Rhode Island, on
the Right of Suffrage, by the Executive Committee of the Rhode Island State Anti-Slavery Society,”
publishd in The Liberator, December 10, 1841.
55
Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People, During the Late
Awful Calamity in Philadelphia in the Year 1793: and a Refutation of Some Censures Thrown Upon Them
in Some Late Publications (Philadelphia: William A. Woodward, 1794); on building fortifications during
1814, when the British had burned the nation’s capital, see Nash, Forging Freedom, 212-213, also Robert
J. Swan, “John Teasman: African-American Educator and the Emergence of Community in Early Black
New York City, 1787-1815,” Journal of the Early Republic (Autumn 1992), 353-354.
17 Purvis’ thrust throughout was revolutionary filiopiety, and his tone of righteous grievance proved widely
popular. The “Appeal” began with an attack on the Constitutional Convention’s vote to disfranchise black
men: “Was it made the business of the Convention to deny that all men are born equally free, by making
political rights depend upon the skin in which a man is born? Or to divide what our fathers bled to unite, to
wit, TAXATION and REPRESENTATION?” Linking “representation” and “taxation” to black and white
men suffering together under fire was a neat way to underline the former’s organic role in revolutionary
state-founding. Then, following the usual claims for colorblindness at the Founding, and the achievements
of black Pennsylvanians (“22 churches, 48 clergymen, 26 day schools, 20 Sabbath schools, 125 Sabbath
school teachers, 4 literary societies, 2 public libraries, consisting of about 800 volumes, besides 8,333
volumes in private libraries, 2 tract societies, 2 Bible societies, and 7 temperance societies”), Purvis homed
in on credentialing black veterans.
He began with Philadelphia congressman Charles Miner’s statement in the House in 1828 (“The African
race make excellent soldiers”) and then cited delegate Robert Clarke at the 1821 New York convention: “In
the war of the revolution these people helped to fight your battles by land and by sea.” Then came his coup,
quoting Andrew Jackson’s official communique after the Battle of New Orleans, where he hailed his black
troops’ role in the republic’s greatest military triumph. Pennsylvania’s intensely Negrophobic Democrats
could only wince as their hero was cited at length by Pennsylvania’s leading man of color:
SOLDIERS! When, on the banks of the Mobile, I called you to take up arms, inviting you to
partake the perils and glory of your white fellow citizens, I expected much from you….I knew
with what fortitude you could endure hunger and thirst, and all the fatigues of a campaign. I knew
well how you loved your native country, and that you had, as well as ourselves, to defend what
man holds most dear, his parents, relations, wife, children, and property. You have done more than
I expected….I find, moreover, among you a noble enthusiasm, which leads you to the performance
of great things. SOLDIERS – the President of the United States shall hear how praiseworthy was
your conduct in the hour of danger, and the representatives of the American people will, I doubt
not, give you the praise which your deeds deserve.
Here we see the elasticity of colored Americanism, as it skated over the irregularities of America’s racial
patchwork, using white men’s obsession with “color” to black men’s advantage. Long before, and long
after, Purvis’ 1838 “Appeal,” black men made the “qualities most formidable” of General Jackson’s
colored “fellow citizens” defending their “native country” a staple of their oratory.56
From a historical perspective, however, this example was irrelevant. The “Free Men of Color” hailed by
Jackson had nothing in common with the North’s “colored Americans.” They were either the sons of men
who founded militia companies under the Spanish in the 1780s to suppress slave insurrections, or the
mulattos of the “Battalion of St. Domingue Volunteers,” exiles from the island’s racial civil wars. As
professional soldiers, they spared no effort to prove their loyalty, patrolling New Orleans during the 1811
Pointe Coupee slave rebellion. In 1862, their descendants offered themselves to the Confederacy as “Native
Guards.”57 In the White America of the 1830s and 40s, however, what mattered was the uses to which they
could be put, in the pageantry of “color.”
The apogee of this militaristic “colored Americanism” came in 1855, with the publication of William
Nell’s Colored Patriots of the American Revolution. Over three hundred pages, he unfurled a story of black
men’s unrequited commitment to the republic, cataloguing every instance of military service, and raising
Crispus Attucks to a position he has never lost as the first martyr of the Revolution. For a skilled
propagandist like Nell, the Battle of New Orleans was one piece of a larger tapestry, stretching from
Attucks’ death under British muskets in 1770 to the immediate past. Nell was too careful to fabricate
56
As the editors of an authoritative collection put it, “Perhaps no single historical event outside the
Revolution received greater attention from black pamphleteers than Andrew Jackson’s proclamation of
thanks to African-American soldiers during the war of 1812;” see Richard Newman, Patrick Rael, and
Philip Lapsansky, eds., Pamphlets of Protest: An Anthology of Early African-American Protest Literature,
1790-1860 (New York: Routledge, 2001), 24.
57
Donald E. Everett, “Emigres and Militiamen: Free Persons of Color in New Orleans, 1803-1815,”
Journal of Negro History 38 (October 1953), 377-402; also Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American
Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 112, 155.
18 anything out of whole cloth, and backed up his account with copious quotations from respectable sources.
Given the public silence over the extent of black American collaboration with British forces in 1775-1781
and 1812-1814, he was able to present a remarkably one-sided account of the “colored patriots,” providing
lecture notes and debating points to dozens of white and black men.58
Here the practical realities of American politics aided the black freedom struggle. Southern leaders were
intensely alert to how the British could summon a reserve army off their plantations at any time. They
referred to this danger constantly in private communications between state and federal officials, ordering
the disposition of troops and equipment to guard armories, and watching for “British agents” stirring up
their slaves. In public, however, it was essential to maintain a discreet silence.59 Any discussion of slaves
as a permanent fifth column encouraged insurrectionary hopes, as confirmed by the testimony of witnesses
and informers in the trials of the leaders of major slave revolts like Gabriel Prosser and Denmark Vesey.60
“This line of distinction is so nice that you cannot tell who is white or black”
We have seen how black men asserted their birthright against the spurious citizenship awarded to
“foreigners,” backing up that assertion through a carefully nurtured narrative of military service. To these
arguments for citizenship, however, they and their allies added something else--a fierce dismissal of race
itself as no more than a difference in “complexion.”
Most historical scholarship on anti-racialism in the early republic locates its origins in evangelical
Protestantism’s commitment to the absolute brother- and sisterhood of all Christians, if not all human
beings. How Protestantism of a certain sort led towards abolitionism and anti-racialism is a well-told story,
oriented towards pronouncements in which eminent Puritans like Cotton Mather and Samuel Sewall (later
Chief Justice of Massachusetts) expressed their scathing disdain for the notion of immutable racial
difference.61 From there one traces a straight line to Garrison, Gerrit Smith, and John Brown, men for
58
Certainly, the First Rhode Island Regiment (the Continental Line’s one officially black unit, organized in
1778) served well in several major battles, and a black man named Salem Poore probably did shoot the
British Major Pitcairn in the eye at Bunker Hill. But any serious history of the Revolution documents that
the Deep South states blocked any large-scale recruitment of black men, and much larger numbers fought
for Britain from New York’s environs to the Chesapeake’s Eastern Shore and the South Carolina Low
Country. A good recent synthesis of the evidence is Douglas R. Egerton, Death or Liberty: African
Americans and Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford, 2009).
59
A search of the website America’s Historical Newspapers, scanning thousands of newspapers published
between 1790 and 1860 turned up exactly one reference to Britain’s arming American slaves; in late 1859,
as part of the debate on how to respond to John Brown’s raid, the Mobile Register insisted that most slaves
had been loyal, and “few sought refuge on Lord Dunmore’s ships” (reprinted in The National Era,
November 24, 1859.
60
Merton L. Dillon, Slavery Attacked: Southern Slaves and Their Allies, 1619-1865 (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1990) contains a wealth of detail on these fears as a recurrent element in
Southern political culture, stretching from the Quasi War with France in 1798, through various coastal
scares early in the new century about “French negro incendiary prisoners” off Savannah and British ships
containing black troops in Charleston harbor, to a supposed plot in Virginia in 1812, when an informer
named “Poor Black Sam” reported that English agents were “disrupting the niggres,” telling them “the
Inglish will land and then they will be free” (76). In 1831, the first response among slaves hearing of Nat
Turner’s rebellion was that the British had landed, with a slave reported saying that “If they really were in
the County killing white people…it was nothing and ought to have been done long ago” (153).
61
In his The Negro Christianized. An Essay to Excite and Assist that Good Work, the Instruction of NegroServants in Christianity (1706), Mather declared, regarding black people, that
Their Complexion is sometimes made an Argument why nothing should be done for them. A Gay
sort of argument! As if the great God went by the Complexion of Men, in His Favours to them! As
if none but Whites might hope to be favoured and Accepted with God!...Away with such Trifles!
The God who looks on the Heart, is not moved by the colour of the Skin; is not more propitious to
one Colour than another.
19 whom the requirements of Christianity necessitated action against slavery by any means necessary—even
the dissolution of the Union or armed struggle.
It is a mistake, however, to see racial egalitarianism as proceeding entirely from Christian universalism, as
if only an immersion in austere Biblicalism could soak the racism out of white Americans. Not so. One did
not need to be an evangelical New Englander to find the newfangled ideology of `whiteness’ a humbug, a
bad and dangerous joke. The modernizing racialism of the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian ascendancies
threatened an established social order based on class, in the broad sense of education cum property and
status. It undermined logic, by leveling all white men up or down into a single mass. For that reason alone,
at slavery’s apex in 1830-1860, as the science of “race” rooted in inherent biological characteristics spread
nationwide, some prominent white men dissented in an earthily contemporary vernacular, scorning the
notion that “complexion” signified anything more than vagaries of climate, health, or individual heritage.
In his classic study of race in the long eighteenth century, Winthrop Jordan described how at certain points,
“whiteness” was mocked by commenting on the “dark” or “swarthy” visages of factional opponents,
hinting at the glass houses inhabited by many Southern white families. This minor counter-discourse
extended well into the nineteenth century, with black men joining in. Consider again Robert Clarke at the
1821 New York convention, expostulating on the foolishness of inserting the word “white” into the
constitution’s suffrage clause, since it was “repugnant to all the principles and notions of liberty…and to
our Declaration of Independence.” Then he ceased to speak of “principles of liberty” and focused on
persons, saying any color bar would be “impractical” given the “many shades of complexion,” since some
“men descended from African ancestors” were “pretty well white-washed by their commingling,” and other
whites had a “swarthy complexion.”62 During the same debate, Chancellor Kent used an equally dismissive
tone: “What shall be the criterion in deciding upon the different shades of colour? The Hindoo and Chinese
are called yellow—the Indian red!”63 The stenographer underlined his comments, adding an exclamation
mark, since Kent was pointing out what every school child pondered, that Indians were hardly as red as a
British lobsterback’s uniform, any more than Jefferson or Washington were truly white as rice.
Clarke’s use of “complexion” was more than a casual variant on “color.” Complexion is variable and
personal. It varies by personality (think of the words “apoplectic” or “splenetic” once applied to illtempered white men), season, health, tastes in food or drink, and much more. Men and women are sallow
and pale, rather than white; ruddy or olive-skinned, rather than black. Yet whites in England and America
used “complexion” rather than “color” or “race” consistently throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries as the most precise way to describe non-European (sometimes simply non-English) others.64 The
Pennsylvania Emancipation Act of 1780 asserted
It is not for us to enquire, why, in the Creation of Mankind, the Inhabitants of the several parts of
the Earth, were distinguished by a difference in Feature or Complexion. It is sufficient to know
[Quoted in Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812
(Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969), 258.] Similarly, in The Selling of Joseph (1700) Sewall insisted
It is most certain that all Men, as they are the Sons of Adam, are Coheirs; and have equal Right
unto Liberty, and all other outward comforts of Life. GOD hath given the Earth [with all its
Commodities] unto the Sons of Adam, Psal 115.16. And hath made of One Blood, all Nations of
Men, for to dwell on all the face of the Earth, and hath determined the Times before appointed,
and the bound of their habitation: That they should seek the Lord…
[see Samuel Sewall, The Selling of Joseph: A Memorial, edited, with notes and commentary, by Sidney
Kaplan (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1969), 7. This simple sentence, “And hath made
of One Blood…” became the touchstone of the religious egalitarianism grounding abolitionism. It was
unanswerable, on some level, for any believing Protestant, which is to say most white Americans.
62
Quoted in Gellman and David Quigley, eds., Jim Crow New York, 120.
63
Ibid., 125.
64
Winthrop’s White Over Black includes citations to twenty-six different instances where “complexion”
was used by authors from Shakespeare (The Merchant of Venice and Othello) to Ben Franklin, usually to
mark what we would now call “race,” although in Franklin’s case, it was to draw a distinction between
white Englishmen and “swarthy” Germans (see pages 13, 15, 37, 60, 94, 97, 102, 119, 143, 165, 173, 248,
253, 254, 255, 259, 277, 278, 305, 369, 407, 416, 497, 524, 525).
20 that all are the Work of an Almighty Hand, We find in the distribution of the human Species, that
the most fertile, as well as the most barren parts of the Earth are inhabited by Men of Complexions
different from ours and from each other, from whence we may reasonably as well as religiously
infer, that he, who placed them in their various Situations, hath extended equally his Care and
Protection to all, and that it becometh not us to counteract his Mercies.65
In 1791, North Carolina’s slaveholding legislators agreed, writing into their laws a guarantee of slaves
receiving equal treatment in their courts, since a slave was “equally a human creature, but merely of a
different complexion.”66
After 1800, however, the language of difference began to harden, abroad through the increasingly
scientistic demarcation of “races” rather than nations and peoples, and at home via the influence of
Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, wherein he speculated on the separate, lower humanity of people
from Africa. In that context, in the half-century leading to the Civil War, the trope of “complexion”
became increasingly important as an alternative, anti-racialist understanding of difference.67 Republican
disdain for “complexion” as no more significant than red or gray hair continued throughout the antebellum
period. In December 1820, New Hampshire’s Morril attacked Missouri’s attempt to bar emigration by
colored Americans in the Senate, saying that potentially
It would keep any citizen of the union out; and this was the design of it. Surely, if they were to
say, (which they could with equal propriety) that no citizen with a gray head, should settle in
Missouri, I would never make the attempt. Hence, then, this provision ….is in direct hostility to
the Constitution of the United States…. If you can proscribe one class of citizens, you may
another, colour no more comes into consideration to decide who is a citizen, than size or
profession. You may as well say a tall citizen shall not settle in Missouri, as a yellow citizen shall
not. If one state can do this, all may; the consequence will be, that size, profession, age, shape,
colour, or any disgusting quality in a citizen, will be a sufficient reason, why he should be
precluded settling in any state, who from their pride, caprice, or vanity, are disposed to keep him
out….68
The dismissal of complexional difference was a marked feature of William Jay’s writings. In his Inquiry
Into the Character and Tendency of the American Colonization and American Anti-Slavery Societies in
1834, he noted mordantly that “So far as we are aware, men with red hair are not styled citizens in the laws
of Congress, or any of the States,” which hardly prevented them from voting, and went on to point out that
65
http://www.slavenorth.com/penna.htm
Quoted in Laura F. Edwards, The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of
Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 233.
67
See, for instance, the Essay on the Causes of Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species by
Princeton University’s President Samuel Stanhope Smith in 1810, long a definitive text for those seeking to
refute the new science of racial hierarchy. Nicholas Hudson, “From ‘Nation’ to ‘Race’: The Origin of
Racial Classification in Eighteenth-Century Thought,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 29 (Spring, 1996), 247264, traces how scientific notions of separate biological groups encompassing national stocks “began to
emerge at some point in the eighteenth century” (248) leading to “a continental division of humanity”
(255), and how by the mid-nineteenth century, race and nation fused again in a “formidable and
grotesquely fruitful remarriage” (258), permitting the grading of every people into a vast hierarchy. As
Rowland Berthoff has pointed out, however, via a close reading of debates in twenty-four state
constitutional conventions between 1821 and 1870, ordinary white men rarely invoked explicit racialism, as
“their concept of politics and society lagged well behind that of the leading theorists,” and was motivated
rather by “an old-fashioned logic to their prejudices…a literally classical republicanism.” Revolutionary
unity had required according “the privileges of citizenship to tenants, employees, and others of small
property or none.” Having admitted this lower tier of “dependents” into their republic of equal liberty, the
question became “who would be less than a full citizen? Hitherto neither women and blacks, as such, had
necessarily been subordinate,” but that premise came under fire, with the result often the exchange of a premodern class system for a modern racial-gender hierarchy; Berthoff, “Conventional Mentalities: Free
Blacks, Women, and Business Corporations as Unequal Persons, 1820-1870,” Journal of American History
76 (December 1989), 756, 758, 759.
68
“Debate on the Constitution of Missouri, Speech of Mr. ll, of New Hampshire,” City of Washington
Gazette, December 18, 1820.
66
21 “in no country in Europe is any man excluded from refined society, or deprived of literary, religious, or
political privileges on account of the tincture of his skin,” and how “only two” of the original thirteen states
“were so recreant to the principles of the Revolution, as to make a white skin a qualification for suffrage.”69
It kept pace with his steady radicalization; by 1845 Jay would write that “Whenever any of our colored
citizens are imprisoned at the South, on account of their complexion, to seize an adequate number of the
citizens of the state committing the outrage, who may be found on our soil, and to hold them as hostages
for the liberation and full compensation of said colored citizens.”70 At the end of his life, in 1858, he
denounced the Dred Scott decision by noting the absurdity of allowing birthright to be overridden by
complexion:
The Laplander, Esquimaux, or Chinese may seek for redress of injuries in the Supreme Court of
the United States, but if a native born citizen of the State of New York, an elector, and eligible to
the highest offices presumes to seek for justice in the same court, the Judges examine his
complexion, and if it reaches within a certain shade of black, he is ignominiously turned out of
court, with the intimation that the founders of the Republic regarded people to whom God had
given such a skin as void of all rights.71
The scorn with which Jay referred to “Esquimaux” and “Laplanders” so as to mock all distinctions of
“race” took on a parodic, brutal edge in other hands, through a special kind of race-baiting—needling
Southern white men about their hidden-in-plain-sight black relations. It was a specialty of John Quincy
Adams, that “mischievous, bad old man," as John C. Calhoun called him.72 In his diary, Adams speculated
with relish on the suspect antecedents of various Southern members of Congress.73 Publicly he turned that
prurience into a political impulse. On 1842 he gleefully proposed a “Committee on Color” to investigate all
Members of Congress “for the examination of their respective pedigrees….and in all cases where the
parties shall be found to have the least drop of colored blood in their veins, they shall be expelled from
office and their places filled by persons of pure Anglo Saxon blood.”74 This sally seems quaint now, as we
accept the inviolability of whiteness, that a person really is what he or she claims to be. The possibility of
passing back and forth, or getting stuck in-between, was much more immediate in the antebellum era.
Mocking “complexion” was especially useful for African Americans. In the first appearance by a black
man before a formal legislative body in the United States, Charles Lenox Remond, son of a prosperous
immigrant from Curacao, testified against railroad segregation before a committee of the Massachusetts
House of Representatives in 1842. On his return from attending the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention in
London and then toured Great Britain, he had been Jim Crowed on the Boston-Salem railroad, an
opportunity abolitionists and their legislative allies used to great advantage. Remond’s testimony began
with a ringing declaration that
Trusting, as I do, that the day is not distant, when, on all questions touching the rights of the
citizens of this State, men shall be considered great only as they are good — and not that it shall
be told, and painfully experienced, that, in this country, this State, ay, this city, the Athens of
America, the rights, privileges and immunities of its citizens are measured by complexion, or any
other physical peculiarity or conformation, especially such as over which no man has any control.
Complexion can in no sense be construed into crime, much less be rightfully made the criterion of
rights….It is JUSTICE I stand here to claim, and not FAVOR for either complexion.
Remond then pointed to England, where he traveled “without any regard to my complexion,” and described
how he asked the railroad’s superintendent that he “wished to know… if, in the event of his having a
brother with red hair, he should find himself separated while travelling because of this difference, he should
69
Jay, Inquiry, 40, 373, 374.
Jay to Dr. Henry Bowditch, March 19, 1845, as quoted in Robert A. Trendel, Jr., “William Jay:
Churchman, Public Servant and Reformer,” Ph.D. Dissertation, Southern Illinois University, 1972. (New
York: Arno Press, 1982; Dissertations in American Biography Series), 390.
71
Jay to ___ Lieber, March 9, 1858, quoted in ibid., 214.
72
Quoted in Leonard L. Richards, The Life and Times of Congressman John Quincy Adams (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1986), 125.
73
Cite needed here
74
Quoted in Miller, Arguing Over Slavery, 349.
70
22 deem it just.” Further, “What if some few of the West or East India planters and merchants should visit our
liberty-loving country, with their colored wives—how would he manage? Or, if R.M. Johnson, the
gentleman who has been elevated to the second office in the gift of the people, should be travelling from
Boston to Salem, if he was prepared to separate him from his wife or daughters?” This last reference to the
sitting Vice President of the United States, who lived openly with his colored mistress, Julia Chinn, and
their two daughters, provoked an “involuntary burst of applause, instantly restrained,” and Remond pressed
his advantage on the complexional front: “Sir, it happens to be my lot to have a sister a few shades lighter
than myself, and who knows, if this state of things in encouraged, whether I may not on some future
occasion be mobbed in Washington—street, on the supposition of walking with a white young lady!,”
leading to what The Liberator’s correspondent called “Suppressed indications of sympathy and
applause.”75
Seventeen years later, Remond’s sister Sarah used the same indictment of “complexion” to batter George
Mifflin Dallas, the American Minister to the Court of St. James, for refusing her a passport to go from
London to Paris. After the legation’s secretary threatened to physically eject her and her sister from his
office because Sarah commented that “Thank God we are in a country where our rights are respected,” she
got the Philadelphia Inquirer to publish her letter to Dallas, that “Being a citizen of the United States, I
respectfully demand, as my right, that my passport be vised by the Minister of my country.” He refused,
and on January 25 the National Principia of New York printed her rejoinder:
You now lay down the rule that persons free-born in the United States, and who have been
subjected all their lives to the taxation and other burdens imposed upon American citizens, are to
be deprived of their rights as such, merely because their complexion happens to be dark, and that
they are to be refused the aid of Ministers of their country, whose salaries they contribute to pay.76
Disparaging “complexion” as an all-purpose rejoinder to racialism also had specific political uses. In a
celebrated 1848 speech in Cleveland, William Henry Seward, the leader of Northern antislavery Whigs,
deployed it to signal his implicit abolitionism. Seward assured Clevelanders (whom he wanted to vote for
Zachary Taylor, the slaveholding Louisianan and Whig presidential candidate) that the United States’
“democratic system…is founded on the natural equality of all men—not alone all American men, nor alone
all white men, but all MEN of every country, clime, and complexion, are equal—not made equal by human
laws, but born equal.”77
Rather than fading away, the attack on “complexion” reached its apogee before the Civil War. In 1849,
Massachusetts Whig Congressman Horace Mann denounced slavery in the District of Columbia, insisting
with grave seriousness that the connection between “complexion” and racial subordination posed an
imminent danger to some Members:
Sir, there is not a member of Congress who has not frequently seen some of his fellow-members,
in the spring of the year, with a jaundiced skin more sallow and yellow than that of many of a
slave who has been bought and sold and owned in this city. I have seen members of this House to
whom I have been disposed to give a friendly caution to keep their ‘free papers’ about their
persons, less suddenly, on the presumption of color, they should be seized and sold for runaway
slaves. A yellow complexion here is so common a badge of slavery, that one whose skin is
colored by disease is by no means out of danger.78
The through-line here, from before the Revolution to Lincoln’s election, was the slippery, subjective,
chimerical quality of “complexion”—that it might depend on diet, season, a propensity for wine or spirits,
or the ultimate trickery of sex, and who jumped into whose bed. Like Mann, white and black people
75
“Remarks of Charles Lenox Remond, Before the Legislative Committee in the [Massachusetts] House of
Representatives, respecting the rights of colored citizens in travelling, &c.,” Liberator, February 25, 1842.
76
All quoted in C. Peter Ripley, ed., The Black Abolitionist Papers, Volume I: The British Isles, 1830-1865
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 469-471.
77
Quoted in George E. Baker, ed., The Life of William H. Seward, with Selections From His Works (New
York: Redfield, 1855), 125. It is hardly accidental that the “Cleveland Speech” was reproduced in the year
Seward became a Republican, and a likely presidential candidate.
78
National Era, April 26, 1849, reporting a speech given on February 23.
23 referred with regularity to those slaves who looked white and the numerous whites who appeared yellow,
brown, red, swarthy, dark, or even, amazingly, “black.” Nor were these necessarily poor whites of
uncertain provenance. The nation’s most admired statesman was commonly known as “Black Dan”
Webster, a sobriquet persisting into the twentieth century in Stephen Vincent Benét’s story, later a famous
movie, The Devil and Daniel Webster. In theory, it referred to his coal-black hair and saturnine
countenance, but by the late 1840s, abolitionists continually derided Webster’s dubious coloring, by then
further darkened by his notorious propensity for alcohol. At a packed “Anti-Webster Meeting of the
Colored Citizens of Boston and Vicinity” to denounce the Fugitive Slave bill in March 1850, the Reverend
Samuel R. Ward, a surpassingly brilliant, coal-black orator, made rich use of this complexional conundrum:
There is a man who sometimes lives in Marshfield [Webster’s celebrated country estate], and who
has the reputation of having an honorable dark skin. Who knows but that some postmaster may
have to sit upon the very gentleman whose character you have been discussing to-night? (Hear,
hear.) 'What is sauce for the geese, is sauce for the gander.' (Laughter.) If this bill is to relieve
grievances, why not make an application to the immortal Daniel of Marshfield? [Applause.] There
is no such thing as complexion mentioned. It is not only true that the colored men of
Massachusetts—it is not only true that the fifty thousand colored men of New York may be
taken….but any one else also can be captured. My friend Theodore Parker alluded to Ellen Craft
[a phenotypically white slave who escaped by dressing up as a young Southern aristocrat with her
husband William playing the part of the boy’s servant]. I had the pleasure of taking tea with her,
and accompanied her here tonight. She is far whiter than many who come here slave-catching.
This line of distinction is so nice that you cannot tell who is white or black. As Alexander Pope
used to say, 'White and black soften and blend in so many thousand ways, that it is neither white
nor black.' (Loud plaudits.)79
**************
Over seven decades, as the problem of slavery slowly gutted national unity, black men found a tenuous
niche inside the antislavery precincts of Northern politics by insisting on a black republicanism purer,
older, and more authentic than the corrupt nineteenth century version. To the extent that some whites heard
them and were convinced, they succeeded, but otherwise, they rarely “won” in conventional terms. Most
state courts ruled against their citizenship rights, and when “Equal Suffrage for Colored Men” was tested in
state referenda, in state legislatures, and at state constitutional conventions, it went down to defeat year
after year. In 1857, the Supreme Court, in Dred Scott v. Sandford, mandated black people’s permanent
exclusion from the republic’s body politic, and, even in the North, many whites accepted that decision as
necessary to preserve national harmony. Thus, this story of how black men used the catch-alls of popular
politics to insist on their place inside the republic, whether the `common sense’ of birthright, antiracialist
folk humor, or waving the bloody shirt of military service, has no evident conclusion other than “and then
the war came.”
The most successful aspect of black republicanism was its ubiquity. The key elements of their discourse
were accessible to all, whether in a legislative chamber or a local mass meeting, voiced by a Whig lawyer
or a former slave, because black republicanism rested on common understandings. Even in small towns far
from abolitionist centers, black men echoed the 1840 “Address to the People of the State of New York.” A
November 1848 “Public Meeting of Colored Citizens” in Columbia, Pennsylvania, abjured the “denial or
obliteration of rights and privileges, in our persons, that have, from the foundation of the government, been
regarded as the birth-right claim of the native-born citizen.”80 This was hardly different from the language
79
80
Liberator, April 5, 1850.
North Star, December 8, 1848, reprinted from the Columbia Spy. Their petition to the legislature declared
…as Americans and Pennsylvanians, we feel as deep an interest in the reputation, prosperity and
progressive improvement of our common country as any other class of citizens who can claim
nativity by the accident of birth. Born under the influence of the same institutions, our feelings,
love of liberty, interests, sympathies, hopes and aspirations, by nature and education, are destined
to mingle with theirs.
24 used by a Connecticut Whig, “Mr. Coe, of Killingly” in 1855, debating the re-enfranchisement of black
men in that state’s House of Representatives. A Democrat had pontificated on the natural “feeling of
aversion to the colored race, implanted by nature in man,” but Coe dismissed him, saying he could see no reason why the elective franchise should not be extended to native-born Americans,
who came here with out forefathers, and assisted us in achieving our liberties, and were acquainted
with our instructions….The gentleman…was in favor of admitting foreigners of every color
except African, though their sentiments were as entirely repugnant to our institutions as light to
darkness. Where is the consistency of such doctrines?81
These were the terms upon which black men fought for their rights as American citizens, and convinced
some Americans of a different complexion that those rights were natural and inalienable. We turn our
attention now to where those fights actually took place, not across that generalized abstraction called “the
North,” which had only the barest meaning in either the constitutional or political senses, but in certain
Northern states such as Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, and Ohio, where the parameters of
freedom were wide enough, and the weight of black men as voters was substantial enough, to permit a fight
to be waged.
81
Frederick Douglass’ Paper, June 29, 1855.
25