Remaking the Republic. Christopher James Bonner
They practiced their politics in ways they knew would resonate because of uncertainties about federalism, individual rights, and the future of slavery that stood at the heart of the nation’s laws and governments. Free African Americans in the North imagined and helped to build a new legal order through their political uses of citizenship.22
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Remaking the Republic is rooted in the extensive published record of antebellum black protest. Free African Americans believed that speaking in public was essential to producing change. They used common political forms of the early United States—organizing conventions, printing newspapers, circulating petitions, gathering for public demonstrations—hoping to change ideas about black people and the legal protections to which they were entitled. Black northerners published dozens of newspapers under such weighty titles as the Rights of All, the Colored American, the North Star, the Ram’s Horn, the Aliened American, the Mirror of Liberty, and the Colored Citizen.
These papers conveyed the thoughts of prominent editors like Samuel Cornish and Frederick Douglass, who had formal education, social connections with white northerners, and access to resources that amplified their voices and concerns. But black newspapers also enabled lesser-known black people to engage the public through letters to the editor as well as by organizing and participating in political events that newspapers covered. State and national conventions brought together dozens of black activists to discuss contemporary challenges and develop political strategies, often including hundreds of people as participants and audience members in formal and informal proceedings. And public protest meetings were designed to be large and open, to present a sizable community interested in pursuing legal change.
Black men’s voices emerge clearly and frequently in this archive, while black women often remain at the margins. African American activists, like others in the nineteenth century, tended to view politics as a space for men; newspapers and conventions offered limited opportunities for women to speak directly to the public. Still, women were essential to the functioning of conventions and to the survival of black activists.23 Further, black women did a great deal of what was seen as traditionally male political work—standing on the front lines during fugitive rescues, attending public meetings where they endorsed and contested men’s claims, and organizing in their own spaces to offer their own arguments about black people’s proper legal position. I seek to underscore important moments when black women engaged in the public forms of black citizenship politics, to consider what these moments meant to them, and to analyze critically the gendered forms and limitations of particular strategies of black protest.
While a handful of well-connected men produced many of the statements at the heart of this book, the printed record in which their voices are most vivid reflects a wider African American community. Extant sources emerged from a free black population characterized by ideological conflicts, and those tensions helped shape published statements. In collaboration and in conflict, black northerners advocated legal changes that could transform the lives of a broad range of people in the United States. I use printed material to explore the concerns of a large, diverse, politically engaged free black population. Through these sources, I tell the story of the complex communities and ideas that shaped the development of American laws in the nineteenth century.24
The printed records of northern black activists make clear that free African Americans were knit together in a political community that crossed state borders. Black people’s political concerns were not bound by political geography. Just as lawmakers looked to other states for precedent, black people saw that their advocacy could shape legal developments beyond their local communities. Further, making claims based on a national citizen status was significant for people beyond the specific state in which those claims were made. Most importantly, the infrastructure of black politics relied on interstate networks and labor, reflecting and perpetuating a community of concern that spanned the free states.25
This book tells the story of how African American activists reshaped law and society as they worked to enrich their own freedom. In the 1860s, emancipation and Reconstruction created new opportunities for African Americans to define their relationship with the federal government, and the government took definitive steps to determine the criteria for and rights of citizenship. But the central questions of Reconstruction—the qualities of black freedom and the content of American citizenship—had a long and contentious antebellum history.26 Black northerners’ political work helped to produce the legal changes of the Civil War era. By the time of the war, activists had for decades emphasized that black people should be seen as citizens, that citizen status should link people to the federal government, and that federal authority should protect people’s rights. They built the intellectual context for the legal changes of Reconstruction.27
This story of free black people’s politics reveals the techniques that marginalized groups have used to challenge and remake the structures that excluded them. It is a story of a radical political project working within the rhetorical pathways that the uncertain terms of citizenship provided. African Americans seized the opportunity to remake the republic’s legal foundations by working to change understandings of legal belonging in the nation. The nation’s laws were, and remain, tenuous and malleable. Remaking the Republic is about black people imagining futures as African Americans and using citizenship to build them. Understanding the many ways that people could and did redefine the law illuminates the possibilities of securing justice in exclusionary societies. Bringing together histories of black politics and American laws highlights the ways law has been made and contested by those who were formally excluded from government. It underlines the ways the law, which has so often been a tool to bind black people, also was used to create new possibilities for African Americans’ lives.
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The first three chapters of this book explore black activists’ work to connect with an expanding set of communities in pursuit of rights. First, I consider the ways black New Yorkers used citizenship to protest disfranchisement. People in New York joined those in other states who faced similar restrictions. Together, they argued that because they had built their communities, they were citizens, and that citizenship must entail formal political rights. Chapter 2 connects black politics to debates about the nation’s expansion in the early 1840s. As lawmakers considered the annexation of Texas and the changing geography of slavery, black activists challenged state-level legal restrictions with appeals to federal authority, arguing that they should possess rights through a national citizen status. To foster black political unity and a relationship with the federal government, they presented themselves as a body of African American citizens, a national community bound together by a shared legal status. In the spring of 1848, revolutions across Europe captured Americans’ attention. Chapter 3 builds around Frederick Douglass’s thoughts on Europe and the ways activists attacked the hypocrisy of a nation of slaveholders who praised a new birth of freedom abroad. Traveling and reading about Europe influenced the ways black people imagined citizenship and worked for legal change in the late 1840s.
The second half of the book focuses on a set of protest strategies black activists used amid a series of legal and political watersheds during the midnineteenth century. Slavecatchers posed the most urgent threat to black northerners’ freedom. Activists used citizenship to argue for legal protections, including a jury trial for any person alleged to be a fugitive from slavery. Chapter 4 examines that work in the 1830s and 1840s alongside extralegal rescues, which also implicitly demanded legal protections of black freedom. The potency of those multiple forms of black politics led southerners in Congress to push through the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, a law that created a substantial new apparatus to arrest black people in the North and ship them into bondage in the South. Similarly, black citizenship politics produced other moments of crisis and opportunity in the next two decades. In May 1857, Chief Justice Roger Taney erected a new legal barrier designed to silence African Americans’ arguments about citizenship when he ruled in Dred Scott v. Sandford that black people could never be American citizens. Chapter