Black Hoosiers and the Formation of an Antislavery Stronghold in the Central Ohio Valley

On August 1, 1850, around two hundred African Americans conducted a parade to commemorate the British West Indies’ Emancipation Day in the streets of Madison, Indiana, a bustling county-seat town of roughly eight thousand citizens located on the Ohio River about halfway between Cincinnati and Louisville. As most of the participants were residents of the city’s eastside Georgetown district, it was natural that they met early that morning at the heart of their neighborhood, the corner of Walnut and Fifth Streets, to line up and make final preparations. Once the appointed step-off time arrived, however, African Americans from throughout surrounding Jefferson County were aligned in colorful but dignified cohorts: Masons in full regalia, women’s clubs enrobed in spotless white, and children’s church classes wearing their Sunday best. Bearing bright badges, signs, and banners emblazoned with patriotic slogans, the procession moved south on Walnut for three blocks before turning west on Main Cross Street to march more than a mile along the length of the city. Throughout most of this course, the participants could easily view the Kentucky shoreline of the Ohio River. Although evidence is sketchy, the parade route apparently ended back in Georgetown, where neighborhood festivities continued throughout the day.¹

Madison, Indiana (c. 1854).
JEFFERSON COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY RESEARCH LIBRARY

Jefferson County’s African American community conducted this annual ritual in Madison throughout the turbulent 1850s and even elaborated on it as the decade progressed. The 1854 program, held at Melodeon Hall, one of the city’s premier social venues, included a banquet with a featured orator. The twenty-five-cent admission contributed to the city’s black schools. In 1856 and 1857 the procession marched the length of the city but exited its western end, where participants spent the day at Clifty Grove, picnicking, socializing, playing games, and listening to speeches. It is not clear whether a parade was held in 1860, but 125 black citizens marked the day by taking an excursion on the Madison and Indianapolis Railroad to enjoy a picnic in the surrounding countryside northwest of the city. That evening, women of the “colored” Second Baptist Church held a “Fair and Supper” at the Melodeon Hall to raise money to repair their church building. One attendee, F. D. Bland, praised the taste and quality of the affair and commended his fellow white citizens: “We were gratified at seeing so large a number present.”²

Main Cross Street, Madison, Indiana (c. 1850s).
JEFFERSON COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY RESEARCH LIBRARY

Historians of abolitionism have been aware of these August First celebrations for generations, but only in recent decades have they begun to decipher their deeper meanings. Since the 1990s, historians have begun to draw insights from literary scholars’ concern with aesthetics and rhetoric, specifically with how people represent themselves in form and content to persuade others. Timothy Patrick McCarthy and John Stauffer claim that abolitionists widely used “print and image—language and representation” to create “a broad culture of dissent,” whose purpose was “to shape political discourse and alter public opinion in an effort to liberate the nation from the bonds of slavery and place it on the road to greater democratic equality.” Historians now view August First celebrations—encompassing speeches, music, banquet toasts, banners, showy attire, and even quasi-military parades—as artistic works of political rhetoric, performance art, whose purpose was to confront observers in a festive setting with the abolitionist ideas of universal freedom and equality in the hope they would embrace them. Displaying a high degree of sophistication, these events approached this goal practically by simultaneously displaying the competency of the black community’s social organization while reminding white citizens that the nation’s cherished republican ideals remained severely under-realized. Two other points of scholarly consensus are especially salient when one considers the annual Madison event: August First celebrations were the product of mature, well-organized black communities with strong leadership, and the expanding white participation in them demonstrated...