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CHAPTER 2

“Union Is Strength”: Building an American Citizenship

Temperance Hall was an odd name for a former tavern. Briefly in the 1830s, the three-story building in Philadelphia’s Northern Liberties, a few blocks from the Delaware River and a short stroll from Independence Hall, was a fashionable place to have a drink and see a concert or play. But the Northern Exchange, as it was then known, went out of fashion, and when the business failed, a group of teetotalers purchased it to serve as a meetinghouse. The building embodied the evils the temperance advocates looked to reform, and its new name gave their program a constant voice. Presumably, they would have held their major gatherings in the second-floor theater, meetings that likely attracted some of the city’s 10,000 free black residents, among the largest such populations in the antebellum North.¹

Whether or not they joined the teetotal crusade, black Philadelphians certainly knew about and had access to the building. For four days in August 1845, activists reserved Temperance Hall to hold what they later called rather simply a “Convention of Colored People.” Unlike other antebellum conventions, little evidence remains regarding the substance of the event. No surviving list records the names of attendees or officers. No minutes indicate who addressed the gathering or what issues the delegates debated. That the convention lasted four days might suggest that it included a large group of attendees and participants; it could also mean that a handful of delegates disagreed for days about strategy. And it is frustratingly unclear whether the event’s organizers planned it as a state or national convention. Despite those gaps in the record, when delegates closed the meeting with an “Address to the Free Colored People,” they made clear their central political goals. They wanted to confront legal exclusion, and they described the convention as part of a project “to unite the whole family of free colored people in interest and feelings” in that pursuit. In this way, activists looked to make the project of building American citizenship a collective black project. The convention could bring together a broad body of politically engaged people. Perhaps a large gathering could show the American public that black activists were invested in democracy and fit to take part in the nation’s formal political processes. The Philadelphia convention was part of a string of such meetings held across the Northeast and Midwest in the early 1840s designed to foster a cohesive activist community and present collective arguments on black Americans’ rights.²

What we know about this meeting comes from a statement of its “views and object,” bearing the names of Jehu Jones, Nathan W. Depee, Benjamin Pascal, Jonathan C. Miller, and Leonard Collins. “Union is Strength,” they proclaimed, and their present circumstances demanded “unanimity of action.” They looked to continue the work of their activist predecessors by denouncing the American Colonization Society’s removal program, and they warned of persistent, intense efforts at black removal that were taking place in “a neighboring state.”³ They might have been thinking of the aggressive and organized Maryland colonizationists, who separated from the national body of the ACS in the late 1830s and established a shipping company to link them with their colonial settlement in Liberia.⁴ For the Philadelphia delegates, colonization was an attack on black people’s belonging in the United States, a project that could prevent African Americans from claiming citizenship by denying them physical space in the country. In response, they urged black people to pursue “our national rights, as they are secured to all citizens, in the Constitution.”⁵ The delegates’ speech raises important questions about black politics in the 1840s and African Americans’ developing arguments about citizenship. Why did those men place so much emphasis on black unity in that particular historical moment? And what did it mean for them to envision citizenship as a protection of “national rights” under the federal Constitution?

Those Philadelphia delegates, along with their counterparts in other locations throughout the early 1840s, made the transformative claim that citizenship should be a national status connecting individuals to the federal government. In the early nineteenth century, few American people felt that the national government should play an important role in their lives, and many worried that centralizing legal authority might tread dangerously close to monarchy or tyranny. Not only had the nation’s founders refused to define citizenship in its founding documents, but also in the antebellum period, individual Americans typically did not see the federal government as an important force for shaping their legal lives.⁶ The framers of the Constitution left unsettled the question of whether ultimate sovereignty resided in the states or the federal government. By extension, it was unclear where a person should turn in seeking an authority to secure and protect his rights. The precise terms of both state and national citizenship and the specific ways those separate legal identities related to one another were uncertain. The legal structures under which American people lived were defined most robustly at the state level. But the program of colonization compelled black people to argue that they belonged in the nation, and as they did so, black activists put forward new ideas about citizenship as a relationship between individuals and the federal government.⁷ The activists in Philadelphia therefore called for fundamental legal change that would expand the reach of the federal government, bind individuals more firmly to its power, and yield a unifying legal status under which American people would live.

In the early 1840s, faced with state laws limiting their rights and denying them protections, black activists sought a relationship with the federal government that would make real the egalitarian language of the nation’s founding documents. They reimagined the relationship between individuals and American governments, both state and national. Activists made claims on different governments based on the specific concerns they faced at particular political moments. While they issued strategic appeals to state governments, black northerners also saw legislators and judges on the state level constructing specific barriers to black rights, defining state citizenship in ways that were often built around racial exclusion. Given the specificity of some state-level restrictions, activists appealed to a national citizenship because of the broad, soaring, egalitarian language in the nation’s founding documents. In so doing, black people answered questions about who had access to the law and made claims that framed the federal government as the chief arbiter of individuals’ rights and protections.⁸

Black activists’ calls for a unifying citizen status both mirrored and influenced their desire for a political community knit together by shared concerns. They worked to revive the national convention movement, presenting themselves as a “family of free colored people,” in order to seize the power of numbers to promote their political aims. Activists thus linked their investment in a national community of citizens to their desire for a unified community of African Americans. But in that project, they experienced the challenges of ideological conflict over both the past and future of black people in the United States. Their work to craft a national citizen status emerged amid arguments over the geographic expansion of the nation and the future of slavery and freedom in the country. Most critically, black activists argued among themselves about the best approach for the fight against slavery, an internal struggle that limited their efforts to make collective claims about citizen status.

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Black men took to the sea in large numbers in the antebellum period. The ocean, they felt, could be a means to economic security as well as a place of physical and psychological liberation, and African Americans came to comprise about one-fifth of the people who worked for northern merchants in the burgeoning shipping industry. That the sea provided black men with so much freedom alarmed white southerners already on edge due to rebellion among the enslaved. In 1822, Denmark Vesey’s planned revolt sparked anxieties and led to a wave of prosecutions and executions in South Carolina. That same year, state lawmakers adopted the Negro Seamen Act, requiring that when vessels made port, black sailors had to disembark and be detained in jail.⁹ From the 1820s through the outbreak of the Civil War, seven southern states would follow South Carolina and pass laws restricting black seamen.¹⁰ Southerners passed these laws because they wanted to use the power of their state governments to protect their enslaved property and their own lives, but laws generated intense opposition among northern lawmakers, abolitionists, and black Americans. The ensuing debate touched on crucial questions about the nature of citizenship and the relationships between individuals and American governments, and these arguments represent the range of ideas lawmakers held about federalism, citizenship, and black people’s legal status.

In 1824, a man of color named Amos Daley was jailed when his ship made port in Charleston. Daley, with his captain’s support, claimed that he had been born free in Rhode Island and was a citizen of the state. He said that because of the Constitution’s Privileges and Immunities Clause, he was entitled to move freely in South Carolina as in any other state. That provision, also known as the Comity Clause, was one of the central tools that black activists used to make arguments about the content of citizenship. “The citizens of each state,” the clause read, “shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several states.” Its wording created an opportunity for black activist work because it connected citizenship to a set of legal protections but remained vague about who state citizens were or what privileges and immunities they should possess. When they invoked the clause, Daley and his attorneys presented a richly textured argument about what citizenship was—a legal status that accrued to a person based on birth in the nation, one that should protect an individual throughout the United States and, in particular, should offer free mobility within the nation’s borders. South Carolina authorities were unimpressed by that specificity. Denying Daley’s claims to citizenship and the support his captain offered, officials bound him to a whipping post and delivered thirteen lashes, punishment, perhaps, for having the gall to make radical arguments about his legal status in the heart of American slavery.¹¹

The Negro Seamen Acts roused opposition far beyond southern ports. In the late 1830s, a group of Massachusetts merchants brought their concerns about the laws to their state legislature, which appointed a special committee on the issue in January 1839. Although powerful commercial interests opposed the laws, the legislative committee refused to act, calling it “inexpedient” to intervene. That ruling provoked an impassioned response from the committee’s minority, led by George Bradburn, a Unitarian minister and budding antislavery advocate.¹² Bradburn, like Amos Daley, invoked the Comity Clause to argue that because black sailors moved freely in Massachusetts, they ought to be able to do the same in South Carolina, Louisiana, or any other state, regardless of slaveholders’ political dominance. Bradburn argued that black men were citizens in a way that suggested the matter was not debatable. But that confidence belied his own uncertainty regarding how exactly citizenship connected individuals to the governments that comprised a federal system. Black sailors, he claimed, were “freeborn citizens of this State, and consequently of the United States also,” and were therefore protected by the Privileges and Immunities Clause.¹³ He said South Carolina’s Negro Seamen Act was an unjust state denial of black rights. And yet the root of Bradburn’s argument was that black sailors were connected to another state, that they were citizens of Massachusetts. Would the prerogatives of Massachusetts lawmakers override those of South Carolinians?

Bradburn reasoned that the U.S. Constitution protected black sailors because they were citizens of Massachusetts, but he buried contested assumptions about sovereignty and citizenship in his constitutional claims. Indeed, he spoke as part of a minority in opposition to South Carolina’s Negro Seamen Act because so many disagreed that black people were entitled to legal protections as citizens. And although he invoked federal authority, Bradburn declared it “a paramount duty of the state, to protect its citizens.”¹⁴ He argued around unresolved constitutional questions about the relationship between state and federal governments and state and national citizenship. Still, it is clear that Bradburn understood that citizen status was an important legal concept and that claiming the status could be a productive strategy for protecting black Americans. He read the Constitution in the same ways that many black activists did, using its ambiguities to secure legal protections for black people. His arguments convey the uncertainty surrounding the precise relationship between a citizen and different American governments, a question that black activists would work to resolve in the coming years.

FIGURE 2. “The sailor’s description of a chase & capture,” George Cruikshank (1822). Black men found gainful employment at sea, and many also enjoyed feelings of freedom and a sense of community among fellow sailors. As southern state lawmakers worked to protect slavery, the mobility of black sailors raised important questions about sovereignty and citizenship. Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress.

Amos Daley and his counsel as well as George Bradburn made arguments with transformative potential for American law. In the antebellum period, lawmakers generally agreed that citizenship indicated a person’s connection to a place, but they held varying ideas about the bonds of sovereignty and allegiance that would link individual citizens and various levels of American government. In fact, segments of the American population showed little concern with the content of citizen status, emphasizing instead their connections to community organizations to secure political and social powers. Few agreed whether local, state, or federal authorities should determine the content of citizenship or even that the content of citizen status should be important for their lives.¹⁵

At the same time that George Bradburn issued his minority report, another group of lawmakers from his state argued in favor of federal sovereignty yet denied that it would secure black rights. In February 1839, a group of women delivered a petition to the Massachusetts House that 1,400 other women had signed, calling for “the immediate repeal of all laws of the State which make any distinction among its inhabitants on account of color.” The petitioners cited a law that excluded black men from state militias, but the Committee on the Judiciary appointed to handle the petitions denied that this exclusion was unjust. Massachusetts law called for only white men to serve in militias, which was “but the recital, in terms, of the act of Congress, the supreme law of the land.” As for the exclusion, they called it a “silent exemption” through which “the colored citizen” had been relieved of the obligation of militia service. Even if they wished otherwise, they could not act, for the petition asked legislators to “cut the knot which cannot be untied.” “The power of enrolling the citizens in the militia belongs to the United States,” they concluded, “and not to the state sovereignty.”¹⁶ It is unclear how they arrived at that decision, but committee members stated that federal authority should determine at least one aspect of citizenship. In the process, Massachusetts legislators highlighted what was, for black Americans, the vexing problem of citizenship’s uncertain meaning. Although the lawmakers described black men as “colored citizens,” they did not feel that that status should allow them to form or serve in state militias. Instead, they presented a citizen status that was not necessarily connected to rights. Black activists could use the citizenship in their work, but those who opposed them could also deploy the same tool to further constrict black freedom.

The response to the women’s petition also points to the ways federal authority as established was potentially oppressive for black Americans. While Bradburn invoked both federal law and state birthright to claim citizenship for black people, his colleagues covered themselves in the same constitutional authority to deny responsibility for a specific exclusionary legal act. Perhaps this explains the approaches that Bradburn and Amos Daley took in challenging the Negro Seamen Act. They may have argued that black people were citizens based on their status in New England states because they were uncertain that federal authorities would agree with their claims. The way they used the Privileges and Immunities Clause—claiming a federal citizen status based on its conferral at the state level—could empower antislavery or antiracist northern lawmakers to deem black people citizens and could skirt potential opposition by a larger national government that included dozens of proslavery and racist lawmakers. They looked to exploit the particular opening that interstate comity provided to begin building a federal legal status for black Americans.

State judges similarly delivered a range of opinions on the way citizenship should function in a federal system. Judicial disagreements about sovereignty and black rights in Pennsylvania were central to the process of disfranchising black men in the state. As with the denial of black militia access in Massachusetts, the fact that citizenship was so vague made it possible for judges to construct the status in ways that both secured and denied specific rights to black Americans. For example, on October 13, 1835, William Fogg, a free black man living in Luzerne County in northeastern Pennsylvania, traveled to the polls to vote in races for governor and other state and local positions. Fogg met all of the state qualifications for a voter: he was over twenty-one years old, had lived in the county for at least two years, and had paid taxes to the county government at least six months before the election date. But when he presented his ballot and qualifications to Hiram Hobbs, who served as inspector for the election, Hobbs “refused to receive his vote.” Fogg sought legal redress and gained a favorable hearing from Judge David Scott, who instructed the jury that the election official Hobbs had unjustly abridged Fogg’s rights. Hobbs’s attorneys argued that because of his race, Fogg “was not a citizen within the meaning of the constitution,” but Judge Scott said that argument imposed an additional, extralegal qualification for suffrage. Further, Scott said, Pennsylvania’s gradual abolition law, passed in 1780, suggested that state lawmakers had wanted “to make the man of colour a freeman.” He claimed that the state’s founding generation had been looking to allow black men access to the legal status of freeman, which had traditionally been linked to voting.¹⁷ There was nothing explicit in state law that excluded black people from voting, and so, Scott ruled, William Fogg ought to have the right to vote.¹⁸

Judge Scott’s instructions compelled the jury to agree that Fogg had been unjustly disfranchised, but his forceful directions would become the foundation for Hiram Hobbs’s appeal. In the state supreme court, Chief Justice John Bannister Gibson found, or perhaps created, a legal basis to disfranchise black people. He mentioned a 1795 decision in a state appellate court that prohibited black suffrage, and although he produced no written record of that case, through word of mouth and memory, Gibson ruled that it was valid precedent. He proceeded to dismiss Scott’s arguments by crafting a history in which Pennsylvanians had tacitly acknowledged that black people should not participate in formal political processes. While the state enfranchised “every FREEMAN” who met particular qualifications, it did not necessarily include African American men, such as William Fogg, who happened to have been free. When Pennsylvania adopted her constitution, “the term freeman had a peculiar and specific sense, being used like the term citizen, which supplanted it, to denote one who had a voice in public affairs.” In 1682, Gibson noted, English law had detailed the terms of the status of “freeman,” which included the franchise. Because being a freeman meant far more than simply being free, Gibson argued, “it is difficult to discover how the word freeman … could have been meant to comprehend a coloured race.” In a twist on Corey’s and Bradburn’s arguments, Gibson also invoked U.S. law in support of his opinion, arguing that the Privileges and Immunities Clause was an insurmountable obstacle to black suffrage in the state. To claim that William Fogg was a citizen of Pennsylvania or was entitled to political rights would “overbear the laws imposing countless disabilities on him in other states.” Gibson closed with a sympathetic air. Whatever lawmakers may desire, they were obligated to look beyond “considerations of mere humanity” to recognize that state laws had been crafted by people who opposed black rights. He declared himself “bound to pronounce that men of colour are destitute of title to the elective franchise.”¹⁹

Gibson invoked multiple levels and generations of government to bolster his argument, and perhaps most strikingly, he interpreted a federal restriction of state laws through measures that state lawmakers had passed. He claimed that popular concerns and the mandates of state legislatures limited the ability of the U.S. Constitution to confer legal protections on a marginalized group. Society, he suggested, bound law on both the federal and state levels. Gibson thus defined citizenship in a way that excluded free African Americans and allowed him to deny that they could vote in Pennsylvania. But he did so without clarifying what level of government had the power to define and regulate citizen status.

As John Gibson declared that William Fogg should not have voted, his colleague John Fox, a Pennsylvania district judge, issued a similar ruling against black suffrage. Fox decided that a few dozen black men who voted in Bucks County should not have been permitted to do so. He concluded that slavery in the past and legal restrictions in the present meant that no free black person should be recognized as either “a citizen [or] a freeman” according to the state constitution. The 1790 state constitution had equated the terms, setting out qualifications for “elections by the citizens,” in which “every freeman” who met the bar could vote. Fox decided to exclude African Americans from both statuses, covering all bases in his quest to disfranchise black men. Like Gibson, he invoked restrictions from other states. As early as 1829, he noted, Illinois and Massachusetts had prohibited interracial marriage. More telling, Fox thought, was Ohio’s legislative effort to forbid black people from taking up new residence in the state. Those and other measures indicated that African Americans, although free, remained “an inferior and degraded caste.”²⁰ One could not reasonably conclude that any member of that group should be allowed to hold office, and because the Pennsylvania constitution linked citizenship to officeholding, one must recognize that black people were not citizens.²¹ Fox’s ruling expanded a narrow question of black suffrage in a local election to make a broad argument that denied the possibility of African American citizenship.

Both of these decisions indicate that Americans saw the imprecise definition of citizenship as an important legal tool for their efforts to align their society with their racial ideas. What is striking is that this imprecision was as important to people like Amos Daley and George Bradburn, who sought physical protection for black sailors, as it was to Judges Fox and Gibson, who wanted to legalize black exclusion. More than an uncertainty, more than a problem, the ambiguous concept of citizenship could be a cudgel that lawmakers wielded against black Americans. The same uncertainty that made particular kinds of black politics possible enabled white supremacist lawmaking and urged black activists to use citizenship to challenge their exclusion.

Still, the law in the antebellum period was not simply a force that acted against black people’s interests. Judges like Gibson and Fox denied black people legal protections in part because African Americans were working so ardently to secure them and because, in some cases, they succeeded. In the early nineteenth century, for instance, hundreds of enslaved people sued for freedom in Missouri courts. As in the later case of Dred Scott, slaveowners in the state often traveled and brought their human property beyond Missouri borders, sometimes sojourning for months in free territories. Enslaved people in the Midwest had opportunities to learn the legal culture of the region and could find ways to move themselves closer to freedom. African Americans filed nearly 300 freedom suits in the St. Louis County Circuit Court in the fifty years before Dred Scott’s case, and more than one-third of those suits resulted in emancipation. These were moments when black people acted in formal legal spaces and secured recognition of legal personhood, when the law declared individuals to be entitled to basic protections, including control over their own body.²² These cases mark the opportunities black people had to use the law, but what these claimants secured was neither equality nor a formal citizen status. Although the many freedom suits reveal that black exclusion was not absolute in the antebellum period, the possibility of a legal hearing would not satisfy free black Americans. They were working to establish a clear standard of access and an equal set of protections, rights, and privileges through citizenship.

Legal decisions like those of Fox and Gibson that denied black suffrage and the possibility of black citizenship pushed activists to pursue a legal relationship with the federal government as a way to potentially supersede state legal restrictions. When Fox invoked laws in Illinois, Massachusetts, and Ohio, he encouraged black people to seek change beyond a state judge’s authority. His decision pushed black activists to challenge a patchwork of state-level exclusion with a higher legal power. Most important, Fox and Gibson bolstered black activists’ efforts to use citizenship in their work. In their decisions, judges like Fox and Gibson confirmed that black citizenship politics was potent, that citizen status was key to how governments conferred and protected individual rights, and that the terms of citizenship were unstable and therefore contestable. Judges and lawmakers embodied the oppressive force of state governments in the period but at the same time revealed the potential for influencing the meaning of citizenship that could include ideas from both white lawmakers and black activists.

Black activists, though, had their own disagreements about the nature of citizenship in a federal system, and the complexities of African American identity in a slaveholding nation shaped their discussions about political strategy. In August 1838, for example, a debate between Samuel Cornish and the black minister and educator Lewis Woodson connected tensions over identity to ideas about government power. In their discussion, printed in Cornish’s Colored American, the men agreed that free black people were too concentrated in cities. But while Cornish encouraged people to move west and integrate rural communities, Woodson (writing under the pseudonym “Augustine”) called on African Americans to build their own society in the hinterlands. Woodson had been born free in Virginia in 1806, and his experiences in that slave state might have shaped his program of black separatism and self-sufficiency.²³ Writing to Cornish, Woodson declared that he intended to purchase lands “from the Congress of our native country” to use for separate black settlements. He scoffed at Cornish’s rebuttal that the plan amounted to “colonization magnified.” Woodson agreed with Cornish that black people should strive to “possess the inalienable rights of American citizens”—he saw citizenship as an important aim because it could be connected to a broad set of legal protections. But Woodson argued citizenship should be just that, a legal relationship, while Cornish felt that it ought to entail emotional bonds, “an identity of interest” among individuals. Woodson pointed out that people in different states or regions often felt little connection to their neighbors, and he argued that black people might embrace a separate racial identity that would not amount to a rejection of a place in the United States. “Men may be American citizens without having any intercourse with each other,” Woodson wrote. Neither residency nor race could exclude black Americans from citizen status, which he said should be a simple result of their birth in the nation and the fact that they had “contributed to the general welfare.”²⁴ Both Cornish and Woodson embraced the possibility of a citizen status that would connect black Americans and the federal government. But Woodson was not concerned with a status that would represent bonds of identity or love, which Cornish suggested were essential to gaining federal protection.

These debates among black activists and white lawmakers were particularly urgent in the early 1840s, as Texas moved to the center of American political discussions. Debates over Texas annexation raised questions about the very shape of the nation and what geographic change might mean for national principles. In 1838, John Quincy Adams, then a Massachusetts congressman, spoke against Texas annexation, arguing that the “gag rule” that blocked discussion of slavery had silenced significant opposition to proposals to add Texas to the union. Adams felt that the principle of the nation as “a compact of the People” might crumble if Congress voted to annex Texas without representing the breadth of American opinion on the issue.²⁵ Meanwhile, President John Tyler laid the groundwork for Texas annexation as early as 1841, and by 1843, cabinet officials publicly promoted annexation as a way to defend the country against antislavery British influence. By alleging British conspiracy, they framed expansion south and west as essential to national interests and identity, not simply a concern of southern states.²⁶ Other northerners echoed Adams’s concerns, as in a Massachusetts meeting in which people argued that annexation endangered the republic. “ ‘Domestic tranquility,’ ” they said, “will not be promoted by the increased strength of its great disturbing cause.” Texas seemed poised to determine whether the country would remain half slave and half free, to make a definitive statement on “what the country itself shall be.”²⁷

The extent to which the physical shape of the nation and its defining characteristics were up for debate in the late 1830s and early 1840s gave particular currency to black people’s arguments that citizenship should first and foremost connect individuals to the federal government. When activists called themselves citizens of the United States or appealed to federal authority, they made themselves part of urgent conversations about what constituted the United States, who belonged in the country, and how its government should relate to individual Americans. Black activists spoke a language that was familiar and important to lawmakers and others when they made their arguments about the terms and content of citizenship in a dramatically changing nation.²⁸

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As they argued that citizenship should connect them to the federal government, African Americans worked to build a broad political community that transcended state and local boundaries. They worked simultaneously to forge a black American community and an American citizen status. Beginning in the late 1820s, a handful of New Yorkers sought to represent the free black populace, hoping to unite African American voices and address their shared concerns. Understanding that their arguments about citizenship could affect all free black Americans, they wanted their statements to emanate from a coalition that crossed state borders. Unity was a central idea in their politics, but activists disagreed about the form a coalition should take and the ideas that should motivate its work.

Black newspapers and national conventions were two of the most powerful tools activists used to create a black American political community. Cornish’s work at the Rights of All emphasized the power of political unity. Faced with the financial challenges of sustaining a newspaper in the early antebellum period, Cornish’s investors called for support from a broad community of “people of colour” who might fill their subscription rolls. Encouraging people to feel connected to one another could make the paper financially stable and further black protest by tapping the energies and ideas of a larger body of potential activists. In 1829, Cornish and his colleagues argued that the Rights of All was “the only channel of communication which we have with the whites—the only voice by which we can speak to our brethren at a distance.” They understood that newspapers were crucial political tools for uniting people and amplifying their statements to lawmakers and the voting public.²⁹

Calls for a wider black political coalition seemed especially urgent in response to the American Colonization Society’s alarming vision of forced removal. Activists had launched the national convention movement in 1830, and delegates to that first meeting made clear the ties that bound them to the nation. They denounced the ACS as the “African Colonization Society,” denying its organizers’ claims to represent black Americans. They also established their own “American Society” of free black people and announced its chief goal as “improving their condition in the United States.” They undercut the push for emigration to Liberia by calling for a black settlement in Upper Canada—present-day Ontario—not as a permanent home for African Americans but as a means to alleviate the prejudice and economic inequality that resulted from overcrowding in northeastern urban centers.³⁰

The ACS’s removal programs, which were organized at the state level, gave rise to shared concerns that brought free black people together across state borders. African Americans recognized that ACS supporters would not be satisfied with simply removing black people from Maryland or Ohio. Activists identified black American political concerns and worked beyond state borders by traveling and exchanging information. These were central political tactics in demanding a national citizen status that would offer legal protection from injustices like forced removal. In 1833, Nathaniel Paul, a black minister based in Albany, New York, leaned on an image of unified protest in his anticolonization work. “The coloured people are unanimous in their detestation of, and opposition to, this Society,” he noted, “and if they go to Africa, it will be because they are compelled.”³¹ The ACS pushed activists to assert a connection to the soil on which they stood, and that rhetoric claimed a physical space and forged bonds among black Americans.

Opposing colonization thus united black Americans in a broad political community and encouraged activists’ investment in unity as a tool to secure rights through citizenship. After holding national conventions each year from 1831 to 1835, black activists did not gather in the latter half of the decade, but they looked to revive the event in the summer of 1840 when Maryland lawmakers proposed state-funded black removal. On June 16, a group of activists meeting in New York called for a national convention, declaring that “the existence of the late Maryland Black Law should arouse every colored inhabitant of this Nation to a proper sense of his endangered condition.” The organizers hoped the convention would bring together an impressive number of black Americans, enabling “simultaneous action” against the ACS. They chose New Haven as the site for their proposed meeting, perhaps to convey the power the movement had outside of larger urban centers. In a nod to the geographical breadth in which black politics flourished, the several dozen signers of the document identified themselves by their home cities, including Brooklyn, Poughkeepsie, Nantucket, Worcester, Hartford, Newark, Princeton, Pittsburgh, and Cincinnati.³² They used the call to show that they had united a dispersed community and bypassed allegiance to states, conveying a wider opposition to the Maryland proposal. But in the coming years, internal strategic differences led black northerners to struggle to revive the national convention.

Over several weeks before the 1840 convention call went out, free black Americans discussed its possible revival in the pages of the Colored American. Charles B. Ray, then editor of the paper, wrote in early May that he supported a national convention as a means to deal with “American caste” and to enable black people to “take a higher and firmer stand for our rights as American citizens.” In soliciting responses on the subject, Ray opened a debate on the function of a broad-based black American politics. Some of the correspondents agreed with Ray that a national convention could unite the scattered populace of “disfranchised American citizens.” But Ray wondered aloud whether or not such a plan truly represented black people broadly. Noting a series of upcoming political events, including meetings of the American Moral Reform Society in Philadelphia, a New York State convention in Albany, the Ohio State School fund society, and various New England temperance groups, Ray suggested that the black men in attendance should dedicate portions of those meetings to planning what might be a truly national convention. He hoped that working through those meetings might produce a new call that would capture “the voice of the people.”

In using his newspaper as a venue to debate the merits of a national convention, Ray imagined that print culture was a way to construct political unity. While a handful of Ohioans might visit New York’s convention, or teetotaling Pennsylvanians could trek to a New England temperance meeting, Ray saw more potential in the spread of the written word. He understood the coalition-building power of print, that given time and republication, a call originating at any local gathering could garner support from across the free states. As editor and sole proprietor of a well-established black newspaper, that concept served Ray’s interests, but it also argued for wider opportunity by imagining a political community that was open to any person with access to the printed word and a desire to claim a voice in political debates.³³

That Ray’s newspaper effectively served this purpose is borne out by the responses he received, which suggest that people relished the opportunity for conversation without the hardships of travel.³⁴ For example, African Americans who met in Worcester and Pittsburgh in June 1840 sent records of their proceedings to Ray’s newspaper. Black Pittsburghers found the original call for the New Haven convention too hasty and argued that a national convention should be held no sooner than the spring of 1841 in order to achieve “a union of the whole.” Meanwhile, those gathered in Worcester thought a convention that would promote “united action in our cause” could not be held before September 1841.³⁵ As the meeting date for the New Haven convention approached, a number of black people gathered in the city to protest the gathering. They called themselves “citizens of New Haven,” though some had traveled from Hartford and New York City to express their concerns. They denounced the proposed convention as “inexpedient, and uncalled for,” and noted that organizers even had failed to consult residents of their intended host city. These critics declared that the convention call represented only “a meagre proportion of our people.” If the call did lead to an assembly, they argued that it should not be called a national convention, a title they saw as too important to be claimed prematurely by a political minority.³⁶

Although Ray and others agreed with the New Haven convention organizers that it was critical to oppose colonization, the convention’s critics were also deeply concerned with organizing a geographically diverse political community. Indeed, their desire for such a coalition was so powerful that concerns about unity at times seemed as though they might distract activists from the project of claiming legal protection through citizenship. Beyond the reality that no single free black person or group of people could truly speak for all African Americans, free and enslaved, the desire for unity produced tensions among activists and, at times, efforts to silence alternative viewpoints.

In the end, the New Haven convention failed rather spectacularly. Ten days before it was to begin, some of those who had signed the call publicly withdrew their support.³⁷ On September 7, the appointed opening date, one man arrived in New Haven to sit as a delegate. The next day, the gathering grew to five, two of whom lived in the city, and they met at a private residence on the edge of town. Upon hearing this news, Charles Ray gleefully reported that the convention had been “almost a total failure,” satisfied, perhaps, that his paper had led people to reject the meeting. “The Convention did not come off quite so well as we expected,” Ray quipped. “We thought there would have been two or three others in attendance.”³⁸ Much of his satisfaction arose from evidence (at least in his own newspaper) that black people placed such significance on broad political engagement. They appeared to agree with him that, if a national convention was to be part of black citizenship politics, it should not be planned hastily or called for trivial matters and that it ought to be organized by a representative body and held in a location convenient for people across the free states. Nonetheless, Ray’s humor must have been as bitter as it was biting, given his expressed interest in constructing a citizen status connected to rights and his sense of the value of a national convention for that pursuit.³⁹

In addition to internal strategic differences, racist mob violence presented a serious challenge to reviving the national convention.⁴⁰ After the New Haven fiasco, for example, black Philadelphians began planning a national gathering in their city to be held in the summer of 1842, but hostile white observers organized to prevent the meeting. In their convention call, activists cited the U.S. Constitution and claimed “the privileges and immunities of citizens.”⁴¹ Even in their early planning stages, meetings intensified white opposition. One observer noted that, because of ACS doctrine and black disfranchisement, white Philadelphians were conditioned to believe that their black counterparts were not entitled to any legal protections. He reported that white youths would “justify outrages on the colored children, by [saying] ‘they have no rights.’ ”⁴² Many people had no context in which they could comprehend the idea of black equality and viewed any work to that end as a destabilizing attack on society.

In the summer of 1842, as black activists planned and white Philadelphians simmered, black people paraded through Philadelphia to celebrate West Indian Emancipation Day. On the morning of August 1, 1842, nearly 1,200 people came together for a celebratory march across the Schuylkill River in the western part of the city.⁴³ One of their banners depicted a black man pointing with one hand to his broken chains and with the other to the word “LIBERTY” writ large in gilded letters above his head. Later, white rioters would claim that the banner bore the more dangerous slogan “Liberty or Death.” Sometime before eleven o’clock, a handful of young white men contrived to block the parade; black marchers at the head of the procession “removed” them, and in the process, one of the white men fell to the ground. “The word was passed round that a white boy had been thrown down by ‘the niggers.’ ”⁴⁴ A larger crowd gathered, and a street fight ensued. Black and white Philadelphians traded blows for an hour, hurling stones and chunks of bricks and causing severe injuries on both sides. The white mob claimed the streets as their own, scattering the marchers and destroying the offending banners, thus denying that black politics had a place in their community.⁴⁵

Suppressing the Emancipation Day parade only spurred the mob to further violence. Through the evening and all of the next day, bands of white rowdies roved South Philadelphia, an area with a large African American population, attacking people on streets, smashing windows, barging through locked doors, and setting fire to private homes and public buildings. They threatened firemen with similar brutality, leading those volunteers to stand idly by as flames engulfed a black church and meeting house.⁴⁶ Finally, on the evening of August 2, the city council and mayor agreed to fund a special police force that patrolled the streets “armed with heavy maces” to suppress the violence. All told, about twenty people were hospitalized with serious injuries as a result of the riots. Perhaps more important, hundreds of black Philadelphians abandoned their homes to mob violence, compelled to seek refuge “in the woods and swamps of New Jersey.”⁴⁷

That mob was outraged over a specific celebration of black freedom as well as the general prospect of organized African American politics and activists’ claims to rights as citizens. A Philadelphia correspondent to the New-York Daily Tribune blamed the victims in his account of the violence. He argued that protest intensified prejudice because of what he called “the insolent bearing and unbecoming airs” of vocal black activists. That activist minority had pursued “obnoxious measures … indicated most unequivocally in the ‘National Convention,’ which was about to assemble in this city, and to which the late unfortunate procession was probably a preliminary step.” The correspondent quoted the call for the convention, in which organizers denounced colonization and claimed legal protections as citizens, a political project that the correspondent termed “ill-advised.” His account of the riot criminalized black politics, declaring that people who did not engage in activism would remain “entitled to the ample protection of the laws” but that all others were subject to extralegal violence.⁴⁸ Here again, a white observer promoted a hollow kind of legal belonging that African Americans were working to redefine.

The activist claim that black Philadelphians were American citizens and were entitled to federal protection particularly galled white supremacists. The violent response and its justifications reveal that the choices to pursue national black political organization and claim an American citizen status were distinctly radical and palpably dangerous. The Philadelphia correspondent for the Tribune obscured the reality that black people were protesting precisely because they did not have the protection of the laws, that their “ill- advised” convention call was part of a search for the privileges and immunities his account falsely claimed were already available. The white reporter’s response to the convention highlights the importance of tangible legal change. African Americans needed a fundamentally restructured set of laws that would make real the legal order under which white northerners claimed they lived. The planned 1842 convention did not come to fruition, but its claims regarding federal authority, black American identity, and national citizen status permeated later convention efforts.

* * *

The violence in Philadelphia did not quell black Americans’ desires to hold a national convention or their arguments that citizenship should be a legal relationship with the federal government. Many black activists understood themselves as Americans and wanted to access federal power to challenge state-level legal restrictions.⁴⁹ Black protest operated in dialogue with formal law and politics in the United States, and the democratic principle of strength in numbers was a key part of their shared language. African Americans had seen the value of collective resistance to colonization, and they worked to expand on that accomplishment. After more than a decade of exchanging information, concerns, and protest strategies across state boundaries through print and in person, they had extensive experience working in broad activist communities. Black activist unity was not natural or inevitable, but longstanding circumstances and the exigencies of the moment made it especially important during the early 1840s. And so, after the failed New Haven convention and the violent suppression of the Philadelphia gathering, African Americans looked again to hold a convention in Buffalo, New York, in the summer of 1843. In that meeting, they argued for an American citizenship and experienced the ways ideology hindered the project of building that status.

In the spring of 1843, several dozen men from Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Ohio signed a convention call arguing that collective work was essential to black politics. They described themselves as descendants of a common set of black political forefathers and stated that their goal was to bring together “the oppressed citizens of the United States.” “In a great degree,” they said, “we have become divided” due to the long gap between national conventions. A gathering of activists would promote collective political work and enable them “to secure the enjoyment of their inalienable rights.” They called black people from across the country to “come and rally under the banner of freedom,” invoking the American flag as a symbol of national unity and the government’s expressed ideals. The phrase also pointed to the activists’ goal, an enrichment of freedom, which they hoped to realize by building a tangible connection between black Americans and the federal government. To stand under the banner of freedom would mean that the government had embraced black people as part of the nation and that they might be protected as members of the American community.⁵⁰

The convention succeeded in connecting black people from across the country, with fifty-seven men attending from seven states, as far west as Michigan and as far south as Georgia. In a nod to their host city, delegates named Buffalo resident Samuel H. Davis convention chair and invited him to deliver opening remarks. Davis had been born free in Maine in 1810 and educated at Oberlin College, later moving to Buffalo, where he taught and served as principal at the Buffalo African School.⁵¹ Davis focused convention delegates on the work of constructing citizenship as a legal relationship. He recognized that free black people faced a variety of legal restrictions that typically differed in each state. But he encouraged them to see their shared desire “to secure for ourselves, in common with other citizens, the privilege of seeking our own happiness in any part of the country we may choose.” State laws violated the most important elements of the U.S. Constitution, which guaranteed “freedom and equal rights to every citizen.” This was a remarkable interpretive move, one with which Pennsylvania judge John Gibson and others would disagree. But the vagueness of citizenship as established in the Constitution made Davis’s argument possible. The document suggested that citizenship was an important legal status, connected it to individual rights, and at no point said that certain people, particularly on the basis of race, were to be excluded from the status. Davis thus felt assured in describing racial oppression as a “cankerworm in the root of the tree of liberty,” a disease that ought to alarm the country as a whole. Black activists needed to alert white Americans to the problems of their racialized legal system, to “change the thoughts, feelings, and actions towards us as men and citizens of this land.” And black unity was an essential part of that process. Quoting from an 1824 history of the United States, Davis invoked the founding fathers as a model for collective action, men who revealed in their revolution “that a people, united in the cause of liberty, are invincible to those who would enslave them.”⁵² Davis guided delegates in their work at the meeting and at the same time ensured that black and white listeners understood activists’ dedication to defining the content of citizen status.

The convention was an opportunity for black people to demonstrate that they were capable participants in a democracy and to knit together a political body that might collectively present arguments about citizenship. But among the challenges delegates encountered in the search for unity, they found themselves without a familiar and productive means of communication: the Colored American had published its last issue in December 1841. Convinced of the political value of print, they organized a committee on the press and called for the establishment of a new weekly paper “devoted impartially to the welfare of our whole people.” African Americans wanted to reclaim the power of print media to shape public opinion and to unite behind a single, explicitly political publication in order to do so.⁵³

Delegates also appointed a committee on agriculture, which delivered a message stressing the virtues of agrarian life in the abundant space available in the United States. The Buffalo convention encouraged African Americans to embrace the colonialist impulse and take ownership of the nation’s physical landscape. Working collectively in rural communities, black people could leverage their economic stability and demographic strength to shape legal structures in new states and territories. For evidence of that path to influence, David Jenkins, a committee member from Ohio, presented a letter from black farmers who had settled in Mercer County, on that state’s far western border. Taking “the advice of our abolition friends,” several hundred African Americans had moved there in 1837 and settled into productive, comfortable lives. They purchased land, tamed the wilderness, built farms, and lived among white neighbors. The Mercer County settlers called on other black people to join them. Beyond what the settlers saw as the intrinsic value of economic productivity, they noted that work would allow black people to show their usefulness to society and counter the influence of prejudice. They suggested that any black person could go west and flourish, noting that they had built their new lives using only the funds they would otherwise have devoted to rent in a city. The committee in Buffalo cited similar farming communities in other Ohio counties and credited black movement to rural areas with decreasing prejudice in the developing West. And they encouraged migration to Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and then-territories Wisconsin and Iowa. Moving to some of those places might have been “objectionable on account of their laws”—Illinois in particular had a set of harsh, exclusionary black laws—but people could potentially change legislation, particularly in territories and newer states.⁵⁴

That call for black emigration constituted a radical protest against state proposals to exclude black people from their borders. Black identity in relation to the United States was fraught given the realities of slavery and legal exclusion. But activists were vocal about how important it was that they had been born in the nation.⁵⁵ The call to move west and shape American development politicized nativity as a path to changing the nation’s laws. It was a declaration that black people identified as Americans, that they should be connected to the national government and should thus be entitled to all the space that the nation claimed. Connection to the United States, they suggested, superseded any state efforts to bar them. The Mercer County farmers and the committee members disregarded the idea that black people could be outlawed from any part of the country. Their call for people from eastern cities to move to the old Northwest framed black identity as a bond with the nation. Black people moving to the West were not abandoning their home states but were instead populating their native country, claiming their place in American social, economic, and political communities.

Holding the 1843 convention in upstate New York embodied this westward push of blackness. These ideas of a black American identity and the potential to change legal restrictions through broad collective action were central to the Buffalo convention. Meeting in upstate New York might have insulated the activists from urban racial violence, but it was also a conscious choice to look beyond the traditional gathering place of Philadelphia. It was another way of presenting black people as Americans, conveying the reality that their political communities existed beyond East Coast cities and the argument that people ought to be connected across the free states. Those present at the convention expressed a desire to examine and redefine their “moral and political condition as American citizens,” to discuss the reality of their status and convey their ideas about their proper position in the country. During the convention, delegates engaged extensively with Buffalonians, delivering speeches in the evenings at meetings in local churches that were “largely attended by the citizens generally.” Those orators included established figures such as Charles B. Ray, as well as a number of young men already celebrated for their oratory, most notably Henry Highland Garnet and Frederick Douglass.⁵⁶

Amid those imposing personalities and the wide-ranging issues that delegates presented, one person with little experience claimed a central role at the convention by making a direct argument about the nature of citizenship. William C. Munroe traveled to Buffalo from his hometown of Detroit, where he worked as a teacher and minister and had emerged as an important figure in activism around the Great Lakes.⁵⁷ Munroe had previously served as president of Buffalo’s Union Moral and Mental Improvement Society, and so he must have crossed Lake Erie with some frequency.⁵⁸ In Detroit, he had led the expansive work of the Colored Vigilant Committee, which encouraged education and uplift among free African Americans in addition to securing their physical freedom.⁵⁹ And he had joined other activists in pursuing equal suffrage in Michigan.⁶⁰ While Munroe had not previously attended national conventions, he was experienced with the forms of collective black politics and had been working toward substantive change in African Americans’ legal lives by the time he arrived in Buffalo.

Perhaps because of his reputation in the city, Munroe sat on the convention’s business committee, a group of nine men who drafted resolutions for the delegation’s approval. Typically, conventions centered on those resolutions, deciding which of them should be published and in what language in order to broadcast a protest ideology, condemn specific injustices, and recommend avenues for change. At times, black and white newspapers printed only these resolutions in lieu of other records from conventions.⁶¹ Munroe and his fellow committee members directed the 1843 convention through more than thirty proposals, a position from which they shaped the convention’s message to the public and its legacy for free black people’s lives.

On the afternoon of August 16, Munroe stood before his colleagues and presented Resolution No. 10, which was brief and direct: “by the second section of the fourth article of the Constitution of the U.S., we [are] citizens.”⁶² In so doing, he asked delegates to endorse an explicit claim to national citizen status under the Constitution. As had so many before him, Munroe invoked the Privileges and Immunities Clause, arguing for federal supremacy over restrictive state policy and calling for a legal relationship with the U.S. government. Munroe delivered “a flaming speech” in support of the resolution, rejecting rulings from “inferior courts” that black men were not citizens. “Mr. Munro[e] thought it high time for us to speak out upon this subject, and that the present was this time.”⁶³