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

Introduction

Introduction When I drew up the Ordinance, I had no idea the states would agree to the article prohibiting slavery. —nathan dane to rufus king, july 16, 1787 From the moment the Continental Congress created the Northwest Territory in 1787, the region was at the front lines of debate over the meaning of race and rights in the new nation. After over a year of squabbling between northern and southern delegates in the Congress, Nathan Dane of Massachusetts took over as leader of the Committee on the Western Territory and pushed through the Northwest Ordinance. A compromise measure, Article VI of the ordinance stated, “there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory.” As an inducement to the southern delegates, it only applied to the lands east of the Mississippi River, south of the Great Lakes, and west of the Ohio River, and contained a fugitive slave clause permitting southerners to retrieve escaped slaves from the territory. The Congress approved the measure on July 13, 1787.1 While many of the delegates regarded the ordinance as having settled the issue of slavery in this new Northwest Territory, they may not have realized either the extent to which slavery already existed there, or, as Dane suggested, quite what they were getting into.2 In reality, the ordinance left the way open for considerable debate over slavery’s status in this region. Subsequent residents and lawmakers of the Old Northwest struggled to mold the provisions of the ordinance to their own purposes. Many people who already owned slaves retained them and claimed the law only forbade them from bringing more slaves into the region.3 They clashed with abolitionists, advocates of African American rights, and 2 / introduction the Free-Soilers who wished to keep slavery out of future new states. With the Northwest Ordinance, the Continental Congress introduced rather than settled a struggle over slavery and race relations in a region whose national prominence would only increase over the next century. In the process, they set the precedent for continued disputes about the relationship between the growth of the nation’s territory and the future of slavery, including that institution’s ability to expand to the west. This quarrel escalated with the extension of the abolition movement into the Old Northwest in the 1830s. In the Old Northwest from 1830–1870, a bold set of activists fought against local and distant racial prejudice. These reformers ranged from map 1. The Northwest Territory. Map by Pam Schaus. introduction / 3 antislavery lecturers and journalists to African American leaders of the Black Convention Movement. This book is about these women’s and men’s expansive efforts to eradicate southern slavery and its local influence in the racist milieu of four new states carved out of the Northwest Territory: Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio. These states comprised the central battleground over race and rights in antebellum America, in a time when the social meaning of race was deeply infused into all aspects of Americans’ lives, and when people struggled to establish political consensus . The Old Northwest in its entirety encompassed those four states, as well as Wisconsin and a portion of Minnesota. This study omits the youngest states in the region, Wisconsin and Minnesota, for in the other four states in this period activism was more vibrant and violence against reformers was widespread.4 Antislavery and anti-prejudice activists from a range of institutional bases crossed racial lines as they battled to expand African American rights in this region, one with its own bleak history of limiting civil liberties by race. They formed associations, wrote publicly about their local racial climate, and gave or hosted controversial lectures. In the process, they discovered that they had to fight for their own right to advocate for others. * * * As race is a central concept in this book and one that scholars often debate, it is essential to define how it is used here. This book treats race as an ideological construction, particular to place and time, as do many scholars today. Race in the early United States was the product of deliberate human efforts to shore up white supremacy in law.5 Racial categories are formed through historical processes, through laws and human action, and are social creations rather than immutable facts.6 This historical understanding of race as constructed underlies the book’s analysis , but nonetheless, throughout the text, the term race and...