James A. Shedd to Dr. David Jordon: A Documentary Perspective on the Dayton Mob of 1841

When Martin R. Delany, abolitionist and coeditor of The North Star with Frederick Douglass, visited Dayton, Ohio, in June 1848 in search of badly needed subscribers for their antislavery weekly, he well knew of the city’s reputation. “It will be scarcely necessary for me to state that this is a very pro-slavery community, as it has been long known for the mobocratic spirit which in former days prevailed in the place.”¹ Delany’s view of Dayton rested heavily on a particularly violent, protracted episode that occurred on January 23, January 25, and February 3, 1841, when anti-abolition mobs broke up an appearance by antislavery activist and former Ohio senator Thomas Morris, attacked some local abolitionists, started a fight in an African American neighborhood that led to the death of one white man, and returned a week later to burn houses and evict many of the black residents. This incident has received little notice even in local histories, being greatly surpassed in scholarship by the far more severe race riot that occurred in Cincinnati later that same year.² Nonetheless, in addition to its significance for local history, the episode is of interest because it evidenced characteristics of three types of antebellum mob violence in a remarkably short span of time: garden variety anti-abolition mobbing, a spontaneous attack on a black neighborhood with undertones of hostility over racial integration, and an effort to expel African Americans from an urban area. Thinly documented apart from contemporary newspaper reports and one detailed piece of published correspondence, a recently cataloged letter in Louisiana State University’s Special Collections offers another vivid firsthand account of some of these events, describing an episode of significant violence long after the highpoint of anti-abolition mobbing in the mid-1830s.³ Its author was James Adams Shedd (1804–76), a Dayton abolitionist with a curious past, who related his experiences during the event and conveyed his views on the plight of the antislavery cause in a largely unwelcoming city.

When James Shedd finally ended his ambitious search for a place in life— a roundabout trek from his birthplace in Rindge, New Hampshire, through New York and Michigan, and finally to a legal career in Dayton at the close of the 1820s—he chose a busy little town on the cusp of outstanding growth. The completion of the Cincinnati-to-Dayton portion of the Miami and Erie Canal in 1829 opened the small town to a new flow of commerce and settlement just as the tremendous wave of immigration into Ohio during the first half of the nineteenth century was about to peak. Dayton’s population rose from 2,358 in 1829 to 6,067 in 1840, an increase of more than 150 percent. A witness remarked of Dayton’s transformation in 1829 that “If you were to be dropped down in Dayton you would hardly know it. Great improvement is going on. The streets are all busy, drays running, hammer and trowel sounding, canal-boat horns blowing, stages flying—everybody doing something. The corporation has graveled nearly all of the streets in town, and are now about erecting a new market-house in Main Street. . . .”⁴

The eighty-six African American residents, still largely inconsequential at barely 3.5 percent of the community in 1829, initially received little significant hostility from the white residents. Twenty-four blacks emigrated to Haiti in 1824 at the expense of the government of President Jean Pierre Boyer when he urgently sought skilled labor from the United States, but they all soon returned, suggesting that whatever dissatisfaction drove them to leave was not compelling enough to make the all-black republic preferable to Dayton. At times, whites assertively defended blacks hounded by slave catchers, even before the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 made protection of runaways a more heartening cause in the North. Two dozen white men prevented a pair of Kentuckians from taking as fugitive slaves Ned and Lucy Page, a couple legally free under Ohio law for the previous two...