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 35  Modernizing “Difference” The Political Meanings of Color in the Free States, 1776–1840 8 As the decade of the 1830s opened, people living in the states “north of slavery” found themselves facing unprecedented dangers and opportunities that resulted from rapidly accumulating racial tensions. As crises multiplied, headlines of that time (even in generic form) conveyed their enormity and potential for violence—Nullification Spirit Sweeps South Carolina—Jackson Demands Cherokee Removal—Slaves Revolt and Murder in Southampton County, Virginia—Walker’s Appeal Found among Southern Negroes—Garrison Demands Race Amalgamation— Abolitionists Gather Women and Negroes in Promiscuous Assemblies— Mobs Attack Negro Neighborhoods. At no previous time in the history of the “free states” did so many racially charged events overtake one another in such rapid succession. Never before were assumptions about the proper dynamics of “race relations” so suddenly and so heavily questioned , revisioned, and defended. Only during Reconstruction, or later still, during the post–World War II civil rights movement, would people experience trauma more drastic than that which swept the free states in the late 1820s and early 1830s. And only in these much more recent struggles would the trajectory of history so suddenly open similar possibilities for democratic change, for brutal repression, and for new political understandings of what skin color differences ought to mean. This essay seeks to explain what deeper historical developments led Originally published as “Modernizing Difference: The Political Meanings of Color in the Free States, 1776–1840,” Journal of the Early Republic 19 (Winter 1999): 691–712. © 1999 Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. Reprinted with permission.  36  CONTEXTS the North to this sudden conjuncture in the late 1820s and early 1830s, what its specific dynamics were, and how its long-term influence reshaped and reinforced the power of “race” to define the modernizing political culture of the free states before the Civil War. Before this watershed moment, from 1790 until around 1830, society in the North, though suffused with prejudice, nevertheless fostered a surprisingly open premodern struggle over claims of “respectability” and citizenship put forward by many social groups, and particularly by free African Americans . This effort to achieve respectability, in turn, stimulated deepening internal and external divisions among people of differing skin colors and finally promoted the unprecedented interracialism of a nascent immediate abolitionist movement. By the opening of the 1830s, the compounding effect of these volatile contests had frayed the social fabric of free states to the point of disintegration. Then came David Walker’s Appeal, Turner’s insurrection, South Carolina’s nullification crisis, and, above all, William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator. When this publication announced that abolitionists—black and white, male and female—were embarking on a crusade for racial equality, the impact of this extraordinary venture transmuted the North’s accumulating racial tensions into a general crisis that exploded into mob violence across the free states.l By the late 1830s, as the mobs dispersed African American neighborhoods and the beleaguered victims began to rebuild their lives, views of racial order had changed dramatically for practically everyone in the 1. It is important to acknowledge the influence of the burgeoning scholarship on racial “formation,” with its emphasis that meanings of skin-color difference involve shifting ideological formulations and social relations. In this regard, the title of this essay, “Modernizing Difference,” registers the idea that the role of race in the political development of the early republic is best understood as a set of rapidly evolving, conflicting ideological expressions by specific social groups over at least three decades that heavily determined the development of the North’s two-party system and of the abolitionist movement as well. For discussions of this theme and methodology in current historiography, consult David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London, 1991); Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class, Politics, and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1990); Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and the North, 1780–1860 (Ithaca, 1998); Stuart Hall, ed., Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London, 1997), 225–97; Barbara J. Fields, “Ideology and Race in American History,” in J. Morton Kousser and James M. McPherson, eds., Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward (New York, 1982), 143–78. On the specific pertinence of cultural studies scholarship on race to the history of the early republic, see David...

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