“The Most Free of the Free States”: Politics, Slavery, Race, and Regional Identity in Early Ohio, 1790–1820

The July Fourth celebration held at Steubenville in 1820 was a rowdy and festive affair. Like so many July Fourth celebrations in the early republic, it was also a political affair. But with the Missouri Controversy at its height, Steubenville’s July Fourth celebration also became a somber event. As various groups and politicians took to the stage to offer their toasts, questions concerning the place of slavery in an expanding American republic hung heavy in the air. One toast decried “Slavery—A blot upon the national escutcheon—it blights whatever comes within its pestiferous influence.” Another toast went to “The Missouri Question—the Genius of Columbia mourns over the degeneracy of modern America.” As was customary, a toast was offered to the newest state in the Union, in this case, Missouri. But like the toasts that preceded it, this one was hardly celebratory: “Missouri—Although the tears of the slave shall mingle with her streams, and the sighs of the captive be heard in her forests, she is still our youngest sister.” The toast was followed by “1 gun, no cheers,” and the “tune, ‘Galley Slave.’”¹

In these toasts, state and local politics intersected with national, sectional, and regional events to encourage white Ohioans to express and further their antislavery political convictions. Important in and of themselves, these antislavery political convictions were also instrumental in shaping state, regional, and sectional identities shared by many white Ohioans. The identities white Ohioans had forged were evident at Steubenville’s July Fourth celebration in 1816, when a toast was offered to “The state of Ohio—the most free of all the free states.”² That state identity, in turn, fed antislavery politics and actions in the state. Responding to a spate of widely decried kidnappings and the subsequent enslavement of free black Ohioans, in January 1819 the state passed a stringent anti-kidnapping law designed to protect the rights of free blacks and alleged fugitive slaves. Later that year, a Washington County judged freed a runaway Virginia slave on a technicality and then charged his would-be captor with assault and battery. At the end of 1819, Ohio’s congressional delegation uniformly opposed Missouri’s entrance into the Union as a slave state. Though Congress ultimately permitted slavery’s expansion into Missouri, the efforts of Ohio’s congressional delegation to halt slavery’s expansion was recognized in yet another toast, which praised them as “good men and true: not one dough faced traitor amongst them” had voted to permit slavery’s expansion.³

Despite these antislavery professions, politics, and actions, historians have long emphasized that white Ohioans’ opposition to slavery was tied to a deep-seated racism and a desire to see all blacks, whether free or enslaved, excluded from the state. Other historians have emphasized that racism and economic ties to slaveholders in the Ohio Valley allowed slavery, servitude, and other forms of unfree labor to thrive from the 1790s through the 1810s and to persist into the 1830s. More broadly, historians have concluded that racism marked out the boundaries of white opposition to slavery and acceptance of blacks in Ohio. Racism determined that the far great majority of whites in Ohio would oppose blacks’ claims to equality and citizenship. White racism limited white action against slavery, perpetuated discrimination against blacks, and thwarted blacks’ aspirations for freedom and equality. Likewise, racism and the determination of some white Ohioans to evade Ohio’s ban on slavery allowed various sorts of slavery and servitude to persist well into the 1810s. In short, as had happened in other Northern states in the aftermath of the American Revolution, a white “racial consensus” quickly emerged in Ohio. White Ohioans’ “racial consensus”—the conviction that Ohio was a state for free whites alone—fostered racial exclusion and discrimination, allowed for the perpetuation of unfree labor and bondage, limited white action against slavery, and halted the development of antislavery politics.⁴

In a recent Ohio History article, James Gigantino II develops a racial consensus interpretation of early Ohio in...