Race and Rights: Fighting Slavery and Prejudice in the Old Northwest, 1830–1870 by Dana Elizabeth Weiner (review)

BOOK REVIEWS WINTER 2013 85 Race and Rights Fighting Slavery and Prejudice in the Old Northwest, 1830-1870 Dana Elizabeth Weiner This broadly researched book is about the United States’ first sustained civil rights movement in the states of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio. These border states—or in the case of Michigan, a destination for fugitive slaves—became sites of some of the hottest conflicts over slavery and race in antebellum America. The book begins by establishing the “taproots” of abolitionism. The 1820s proved the decisive watershed, shifting abolitionist belief from old republican notions of gradualism to the more evangelical and absolutist immediatism. Weiner offers some intriguing corrections to the current literature on abolitionism . Midwestern abolitionists were more willing than their eastern counterparts to work together and a close examination of their activities reveal that they maintained local affiliations even as they gained national political ones. Weiner’s research suggests that historians have overdrawn the distinctions between different kinds of abolitionists, at least in the Midwest. Abolitionists struggled mightily not just against slavery, but against the Midwest’s infamous “black laws,” which effectively relegated people of African descent to second-class status. She begins by noting the many links people in the Old Northwest had to slavery, a point well known to scholars but one that bears repeating because of the common assumption that antislavery sentiments ran high north of the Ohio River. But this was not the case, particularly in the contentious border region of southern Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. The early restrictions on black immigration and the exercise of civil and political rights enshrined republican notions of independence and whiteness into the states’ laws. In opposition to such views, black and white abolitionists advanced notions of legal equality, though in Weiner’s reading their efforts had little direct effect on political or legal reality. Among the book’s many strengths is its sustained look at the manner in which people fought for rights. Weiner has not crafted this history from the dry pronouncements of judges or the even drier statute books. People fought for their First Amendment freedoms by asserting them, by organizing for protection if necessary . In one of the best, sustained treatments Dana Elizabeth Weiner. Race and Rights: Fighting Slavery and Prejudice in the Old Northwest, 18301870 . De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2013. 325 pp. ISBN: 978087580576 (cloth), $38.00. BOOK REVIEWS 86 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY on freedom of assembly I have yet read, Weiner details how abolitionists stood up for their right to assemble and hold meetings in the face of real violence. Abolitionists linked freedom of assembly “to the broader rights struggles of the era” (79). We usually think about freedom as a function of speech and the press, but in the nineteenth century the public meeting stood at its center. Anti-abolitionist activity thus became—in the hands of wily abolitionists— an attack on everybody’s rights. And although mobs enjoyed at least tacit support from local authorities, their supporters soon had to confront the uncomfortable proposition that they relied on illegal violence to combat the exercise of an established right of the people, and that they did so in aid of the slave power. Much the same occurred in the exercise of speech and press rights. Abolitionists famously confronted slavery and racism by speaking and writing about it. They thrived on confrontation and almost courted repression, which they combated by invoking the First Amendment (119). Weiner rejects the claims of some scholars that violence against abolitionists waned in the 1850s, arguing instead that spikes of violence depended more upon the location and intensity of abolitionist activity. The same held true of itinerant lecturers, who faced powerful opposition even after the Civil War began. These latter claims get to the heart of Weiner’s historiographic contribution. “Recent efforts to refute the [Old Northwest’s] racism,” says Weiner, “go too far” (201). The repeal of some of the Black Laws and resistance to the execution of the fugitive slave laws, argues Weiner, do not amount to proving that the region somehow stood “against slavery.” The Black Laws remained in effect, although some legislatures repealed some laws, and courts generally enforced them. The...