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

Conclusion

Conclusion Old Northwest activists grappled with the immense challenge of securing rights regardless of race in their reluctant region. While the battles over slavery and the “Black Laws” were inescapable for residents there, they were not merely of local concern. The Old Northwest was vital to the larger antislavery and anti-prejudice campaigns of its era. As activists fought the clutches of the slave system at home, they debated the broader national questions of all Americans’ freedoms and African Americans’ status. Old Northwest reformers defended their values in the face of constant attacks—both ideological and physical—from supporters of the slave system and from people who feared African American proximity. The “peculiar institution” obeyed no state boundaries, and Old Northwest activists formed a distinctive movement in response to the singular challenge of living as literal and cultural neighbors to slavery. There, often-isolated individuals encountered both enthusiastic supporters and enraged mobbers. Few people maintained neutrality, and their ideological differences often emerged in legal and physical battles. Discussions of race and slavery ignited this region in a particularly explosive fashion, affected organizational efforts, gender roles and expectations, and generated new ideas about rights, especially the right of freedom of expression. While modern observers can see that these Old Northwest activists ’ vision of equality took decades of effort to realize, these reformers lived and fought in a moment of possibility. Their hopes and convictions that they would attain their goals carried them forward, even if they did not reach their destinations rapidly, or at all. Their aims of racial conclusion / 235 egalitarianism—forged in this arena of pro- and antislavery clashes— deserve a place on the social reform spectrum of this period. Taken on their own terms, they made extraordinary efforts against slavery and prejudice in the combat zone of the Old Northwest. The Old Northwest activist culture was an inextricable and vital component of the national movement to improve African Americans’ lives. In contrast to reformers elsewhere, organizers in the Old Northwest had more direct encounters with anti-abolitionists, set distinctive factional boundaries, and had a diverse membership that was active in the most dangerous aspects of their work for change. This region of open spaces and wide rivers, like no other, called to a stalwart cohort of reformers there to work against slavery and prejudice. Its local organizers altered their reform landscape, and an examination of their labors proves the importance of investigating how race relations differed from region to region in the nineteenth century. The tiny African American populations and their white allies across the Old Northwest had ample weapons to fight for equality, and made their mark locally with interracial activism against prejudice. Their work against the “Black Laws” concretely manifested their desire to revolutionize race relations in their communities, a project they saw as continuous with the abolition struggle. Activists who lived under such legislation had to resist not only abstract mores and distant institutions, but also concrete laws. * * * These reformers crafted substantial challenges to the racial culture of the Old Northwest. While they were very much products of their place and time, the people who sought to transform the bias endemic in their society nonetheless refused to allow the exclusionary ideas of their fellow citizens to limit them. Indeed, they turned the hatred and scorn for African Americans and activists’ rights into assets for building a more just society, even if this was only in its infancy in 1870. Historians have firmly established that Reconstruction’s goals were only partially fulfilled in the South, but the northern postwar experience also left egalitarians there wanting more, including full citizenship for African Americans. Local people wedded to racist principles proved willing and able to stymie federal legal guarantees, but the activists who challenged Old Northwest biases had nevertheless achieved some gains by 1870. In the process, they shifted grassroots understanding of how to use the law to defend groups that local regulations and social practice singled out for 236 / conclusion opprobrium. There is more than ample evidence of pervasive limitations on African Americans’ rights in the Old Northwest. That is not the entire story, however, as proved by the ongoing crusade from 1830 to 1870 to improve African Americans’ circumstances, whether they were distant slaves or local farmers. Both the struggles Old Northwest activists confronted and the arguments they made transformed the conception of rights in the nineteenth century. For reformers, even though this place...