The First Reconstruction

Black Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War

Van Gosse

• Editore: The University of North Carolina Press
• Anno: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781469660110
• Argomento: Sciences sociales
• Categoria: Études afro-américaines

It may be difficult to imagine that a consequential black electoral politics evolved in the United States before the Civil War, for as of 1860, the overwhelming majority of African Americans remained in bondage. Yet free black men, many of them escaped slaves, steadily increased their influence in electoral politics over the course of the early American republic. Despite efforts to disfranchise them, black men voted across much of the North, sometimes in numbers sufficient to swing elections. In this meticulously-researched book, Van Gosse offers a sweeping reappraisal of the formative era of American democracy from the Constitution's ratification through Abraham Lincoln's election, chronicling the rise of an organized, visible black politics focused on the quest for citizenship, the vote, and power within the free states. Full of untold stories and thorough examinations of political battles, this book traces a First Reconstruction of black political activism following emancipation in the North. From Portland, Maine and New Bedford, Massachusetts to Brooklyn and Cleveland, black men operated as voting blocs, denouncing the notion that skin color could define citizenship.

Chapter 1

Our Appeal for a Republican Birthright

The Ideology of Black Republicanism before the Civil War

We are Americans. We were born in no foreign clime.…

We have not been brought up under the influence of other, strange, aristocratic, and uncongenial political relations. In this respect, we profess to be American and republican. With the nature, features and operations of our government, we have been familiarized from youth; and its democratic character is accordant with the flow of our feelings, and the current of our thoughts.…

We call upon you to return to the pure faith of your republican fathers. We lift up our voices for the restored spirit of the first days of the republic—for the great principles then maintained, and that regard for man which revered the characteristic features of his nature, as of more honor and worth than the form and color of the body in which they dwell. For no vested rights, for no peculiar privileges, for no extraordinary prerogatives, do we ask. We merely put forth our appeal for a republican birthright.

—Convention of the Colored Inhabitants of the State of New York, To Consider Their Political Disabilities, “Address to the People of the State of New York,” August 1840

One hundred thirty-four men representing thirty-three of New York’s fifty-seven counties issued this manifesto, which became the exemplary black political text of the antebellum era. Their unprecedented gathering built on a statewide drive for “equal suffrage” in the nation’s premier electoral arena. Probably authored by the Reverend Henry Highland Garnet, a twenty-four-year-old fugitive and now a well-educated Presbyterian minister, their “Address” set the terms for the next generation. Aimed at white Whigs and ex-Federalists for whom Jacksonian Democracy meant mob rule, it mixed familiar patriotic tropes with nativist disdain for those “born in foreign climes” who had brought with them “strange, aristocratic” habits. The “appeal for a republican birthright” reminded New Yorkers that black men voted in the Empire State from 1777 until 1821, when most were disfranchised by a “freehold” property qualification, meaning real estate worth $250. Above all else, however, Garnet evoked a declension from “the pure faith of your republican fathers.” With supreme audacity, he claimed for black men the Revolution itself, “the first days of the republic” and “the great principles then maintained,” before modern corruption set in.¹

Yet this first statewide black convention, the dozens of conclaves it inspired over the next twenty years (statewide meetings from Maine to California, including ten in New York), and the movement represented at those conventions, are now largely unknown, eclipsed by stories of slave resistance and the Underground Railroad. Consider the best-known speech by a black American in this period, Frederick Douglass’s 1852 “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”: “What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? … I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us.… The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me.… This Fourth of July is yours, not mine.” Douglass’s antipatriotic excoriation has been quoted dozens of times as the authentic voice of black alienation. How could it be otherwise? How could black people declare “We are Americans” as long as slavery drove the nation’s economy, laws, and politics? From that perspective, Garnet’s 1840 address seems irrelevant or deluded. What kind of “republican birthright” could a slave hope to share?²

In defiance of the notion that slavery defined African Americans, northern free men of color, led by self-emancipated slaves like Garnet and Douglass, made the claim “We are Americans” over and over. Douglass’s 1852 oration was a provocation, one of the things he did best. By then, he was an international celebrity whom even Negrophobes flocked to see. Speaking to whites in Rochester, he pressed upon them the republic’s inevitable damnation while slavery persisted. They wanted Douglass’s lash, and they got it, in high style. But his views speaking to his peers one year later conformed exactly to the terms Garnet set out in 1840. In July 1853, Douglass presided at the Colored National Convention in Syracuse, and chaired the committee that drafted its address “to the People of the United States.” This document repeated the 1840 language almost verbatim, with a dollop of aggressive Protestantism for good measure: “We are Americans, and as Americans, we would speak to Americans. We address you not as aliens or exiles … [but] as American citizens asserting their rights on their own native soil.… We ask that, speaking the same language and being of the same religion, worshipping the same God, owing our redemption to the same Savior, and learning our duties from the same Bible, we shall not be treated as barbarians.”³

To make sense of these addresses, we must stop thinking of men like Douglass as simply defiant fugitives and firebrand agitators—the way they portrayed themselves for popular consumption, on the lecture circuit in countless towns and dozens of “slave narratives.” We should see them instead as they knew themselves: as leaders of an embryonic political class several thousand strong, ambitious for office, practical men focused on issues of organization, program, alliances, and advancement—on politics, in sum.

Usually, politics consists of two interlocking activities: speaking, in person and via printed texts, and assembling, to act together through voting, rallying, canvassing, and lobbying. This chapter focuses on the former, on antebellum African Americans’ political speech, for two reasons. First, because the study of discourse (what people say to or about their political friends and enemies) is the quickest way to get at the premises of their practice. Second, because a common discourse was the only truly national component of black political culture before Reconstruction, when black men first entered Congress. I call this discourse “black republicanism,” meaning a version of American republicanism, the lingua franca of all who operated within the public sphere. As Daniel Walker Howe underlines, “Republicanism was a paradigm for understanding political life and a vocabulary for explaining it.” Everyone “spoke the language of republicanism. Every group interpreted it in a distinctive way and claimed to be its rightful heir.” To position themselves within the national family, African Americans needed to prove that they were, save a few details of phenotype, identical to other Americans. They could not afford the separateness of the Quakers or the Jews, the nation’s two recognized ethnoreligious minorities. The only vehicle for their claim was a republicanism incorporating the distinctly American notion of birthright, meaning citizenship defined entirely by nativity and thus common ownership in a country. But birthright alone was not enough, so black men added their own ascriptive Americanism, a quasi-ethnicity made up of Protestant evangelicalism, speaking English, and military service, all the attributes marking them off from recent Irish and German immigrants. Together, these assertions of inclusion based on native birth, nativism, and “colored patriotism” constituted the positive ideology of black republicanism. This chapter examines how over time these tropes forged a reliable synthesis available to black men and their white allies as a vernacular politics focused on voting and electoral participation.⁴

There is one more piece to the argument, hard to comprehend in retrospect. Antebellum persons of color did not share today’s overriding focus on race. When they declared “We are Americans,” they meant it without qualification, as an unremitting assault on assertions of difference between them and other native-born citizens. Backed by an elite cohort of whites, and sometimes even by ordinary white men, African Americans confronted the new scientific racism by deriding the notion of race as no more than a foolish obsession with “complexion.” Their republicanism was emphatically nonracial, in ways that confound our contemporary understanding of blackness and whiteness. And as we shall see, noting the possible permutations of any man’s complexion, whether “yellow,” “black,” “tawny,” or “dark,” was a key weapon in black republicanism’s arsenal.⁵

“Of Aliens and Natives”

Black republicanism germinated in the distinctly American assertion of birthright citizenship, and the special authority the new republic conferred on the native-born. Birthright citizenship has a complex history in Anglo-America. Its roots are feudal, in the equal status assigned to all His or Her Britannic Majesty’s subjects, as famously defined by William Blackstone in 1765: “The first and most obvious division of the people is into aliens and natural-born subjects. Natural-born subjects are such as are born within the dominions of the crown of England, that is, within the ligeance, or as it is generally called, the allegiance of the king; and aliens, such as are born out of it.” Even more well-known was his assertion that the “spirit of liberty is so deeply implanted in our constitution, and rooted even in our very soil, that a slave or a negro, the moment he lands in England, falls under the protection of the laws; and so far becomes a freeman.” This passage is commonly cited for its antislavery content, but its key affirmation is the civil equality of subjects.⁶

The free people of color gained distinct advantages from subjectship’s basis in English common law, how that legal category evolved in British North America, and the emergence of a historically unprecedented conception of citizenship during and after the Revolution. At each stage in this process, juridically recognized and widely accepted precedents ignored race, emphasizing either religious affiliation, as in the transnational categories of Protestant, Catholic, and Jew, or the centrality of jus soli, the birthright of the native-born. Taken together, these precedents pointed toward citizenship for free black men as “Christians” (meaning Protestants) born in America, regardless of how that logic offended many whites’ social, cultural, and political sensitivities.⁷

The original law of subjectship, as codified in Calvin’s Case (1608), asserted an irrevocable relationship between the monarch and all born under the king’s authority, mandating both obedience (“ligeance”) and an entitlement to protection. In England, however, the native-born were privileged over everyone else. Well into the nineteenth century, English law recognized a hierarchy of legal rights and privileges “between natural-born subjects, naturalized subjects, and ‘denizens,’ all of whom were members of the community in some sense” (a denizen being “a sort of halfway member who ranked above the alien yet somewhat below the native-born or naturalized subject”).⁸

In this legal order, free black men born in British North America could only have been subjects at the time of the revolutionary separation. They had no other possible identity, however much slave-state (and sometimes free-state) jurists and legislators strained to create one out of nothing after 1820. Therefore—and this was the crucial leap of republican faith—they became citizens with all the other “inhabitants” who had heretofore been British subjects. At least that was how Garnet, Douglass, and dozens of other black men asserted their citizenship after 1790, the earliest form of “originalism” in American political discourse.⁹

Their argument gained force through how subjectship itself was radically simplified in the thirteen settler colonies strung along the Atlantic. Their legislatures and courts “moved toward a new understanding of the ties that bind individuals to the community,” reversing the English focus on an alien’s existing allegiance by birth, privileging instead his choice of a new allegiance that was “volitional and contractual.” Through a squatter’s rights revision of the common law, colonial assemblies promulgated much looser definitions of subjectship, enacting “generous naturalization policies that promised aliens virtually the same rights as Englishmen.” Desperate to attract new members, especially young men, these precarious statelets voided the three-part distinction between the native-born, denizens, and naturalized persons which remained central in British law, and regularly granted political rights to foreigners, sometimes even Catholics and Jews, so that “the distinctions between the various categories of subjects—still quite real in the mother country—began to soften and blur.” In British North America, immigrants made an easy transition from aliens with full property rights to naturalized subjects with full political rights. Periodically, particular colonies enfranchised whole groups of Protestant foreigners (Huguenots or German Moravians), and men of foreign birth held high offices out of reach in England. British authorities tolerated these colonial aberrations, just as they accepted that a much higher proportion of men voted than at home. To regulate the promiscuous granting of equal rights to immigrants, a 1740 Act of Parliament declared that seven years of continuous inhabitance “in any of His Majesty’s colonies in America,” accompanied by the usual oaths to prove Protestantism (Jews and Quakers exempted), would guarantee subjectship, with “the certificates of naturalization issued under this statute … recognized in all courts throughout the British Empire.” Almost 7,000 persons gained subjectship in this fashion, with lists sent to the Board of Trade each year, mainly from Pennsylvania. By midcentury, therefore, “England’s hierarchical ranking of natives, naturalized aliens, and denizens [had] collapsed in America”—they were subjects all, including those of a darker hue.¹⁰

The second instance of black men benefiting from white men’s politics came during the Revolution. As the provisional American governments separated from Great Britain, they necessarily avoided distinguishing between different groups of subjects. The Founders could not afford to permit anyone under their fragile dominion to opt out of the new category of “Americans.” All Americans were required to transfer their “ligeance” as subjects; thus all Americans (other than slaves) became citizens, whether born in England, or creoles born of English parentage, or people who had arrived freely (or not so freely, as indentured servants) from somewhere other than England. A single, inclusive nationality was asserted on June 24, 1776, when Congress created American citizenship by revoking allegiance to the king, declaring “that all persons residing within any of the United Colonies, and deriving protection from the laws of the same, owe allegiance to the said laws, and are members of such colony.” Underlining the capaciousness of this new citizenship, in 1781 Congress welcomed “all such foreigners” deserting from the British forces, and specified in Article Four of the Articles of Confederation that “the free inhabitants of each of these states (paupers, vagabonds, and fugitives from justice excepted) shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of free citizens in the several states.”¹¹

It is impossible to read these stipulations covering “all persons” and “the free inhabitants” as implicitly excluding one complexion or phenotype. Nonetheless, many scholars have presumed or implied that the refusal to exclude people of color by inserting the word “white” was an accident or oversight. That argument was easily disposed of at the time of Dred Scott. Republicans from Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Curtis to Abraham Lincoln pointed to incontrovertible evidence that during the 1770s and 1780s (but not the 1790s) the Founders rejected attempts to racialize American citizenship. In February 1859, during a House debate over admitting Oregon as a state, the Ohio Republican John A. Bingham asked the rhetorical question “Who, sir, are citizens of the United States?” and answered, “First, all free persons born and domiciled within the United States—not all free white persons, but all free persons,” adding that it would be useless to look “in the Constitution of the United States, for that word white; it is not there.” He then made the central point, that “the omission of this word—this phrase of caste—from our national c...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures, Maps, and Tables
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Our Appeal for a Republican Birthright: The Ideology of Black Republicanism before the Civil War
• Part I. Caste versus Citizenship in Pennsylvania
• Part II. The New England Redoubt
• Part III. The New York Battleground
• Part IV. A Salient on the West
• Conclusion: Going to War
• Appendix. Black Leaders and Their Electorates
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index