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5 Chapter 1 The Status of African Americans before the Civil War From 1787 until the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, slavery was a central cause of tension between the North and South and was the focus of debates about the relationship between the states and the federal government. While states in the North early on passed gradual emancipation acts or abolished slavery outright, and some Northern jurists rejected human bondage as repugnant to natural law, Southern states upheld the institution of slavery. By 1860, fifteen slave-holding states contained 3,950,000 slaves who were considered property to be bought, sold, and largely treated as their masters wished. Another 251,000 free blacks lived in the slave-holding states, but few had the rights that whites did. The North contained almost 240,000 free blacks by 1860. African Americans in the North did not enjoy uniform rights, and according to historian Leon Litwack, theyremained“largelydisenfranchised,segregatedandeconomicallyoppressed.”1 At the time of the Civil War, only Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts permitted black men to vote on the same terms as white men. During the period 1848–57, Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa passed measures to prevent migration of free blacks into their states. As of 1860, blacks could not testify against whites in Indiana, Illinois, California, and Oregon (Oregon removed this stricture in 1862, and California did so by 1863). According to legal historian Paul Finkelman, Iowa’s 1851 law fining blacks who remained in the state two dollars a day after three days went largely unenforced. Indiana, on the other hand, did enforce its 1851 prohibition against black migration, and the state’s black population remained almost identical from 1850 to 1860. Illinois also enforced, albeit much less strictly than did Indiana, its comparable 1853 legislation mandating expelling and fining black immigrants (as well as a provision permitting sale at auction of blacks unable to pay the fine to someone who would pay it in exchange for the black’s unpaid labor). Nonetheless, Illinois’s black population grew in the 1850s by almost 2,200 people.2 Finkelman’s research illuminates the complexity of Northern race relations and demonstrates that attitudes toward blacks varied across the states and even within states. Racism in Cincinnati contrasted with the tolerance manifested by the existence of Ohio’s Oberlin College, which began to admit black students in 1835; integrated The Status of African Americans before the Civil War 6 schools in Syracuse, New York, differed from segregated schools in Buffalo and Albany in the 1840s and 1850s. Older and more northern states tended to provide more rights, while newer states and those closer to the South proved less egalitarian. In contrast to bondage in the South, in the North blacks at least enjoyed basic legal rights such as the ability to purchase and sell property, educate themselves, make contracts, sue, and convene in public meetings or conventions; in most states they could testify against whites, and in some they could vote. Yet, Chief Justice Roger Taney of the Supreme Court chillingly declared in his Dred Scott ruling (1857) that blacks held no rights that whites had to respect. Any rights that African Americans possessed were at the whim of state legislatures, and they continued to suffer curtailment of equal rights in both official (for example, blacks could not obtain patents) and unofficial ways. White abolitionists vehemently attacked both the morality and legality of slavery in the decades leading up to the Civil War. The 1833 Declaration of the American Anti-Slavery Society contrasted slavery with the principles of the Declaration of Independence: “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The Society condemned that slaves were instead “recognized by the law, and treated by their fellow beings, as marketable commodities, as goods and chattels, as brute beasts,” and “plundered daily of the fruits of their toil without redress; really enjoying no constitutional nor legal protection from licentious and murderous outrages upon their persons; are ruthlessly torn asunder—the tender babe from the arms of its frantic mother—the heart-broken wife from her weeping husband—at the caprice or pleasure of irresponsible tyrants. For the crime of having a dark complexion, they suffer the pangs of hunger, the infliction of stripes, and the ignominy of brutal servitude.” These abolitionists maintained that “no man has a right to enslave or...

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