Reckoning with Race. Gene Dattel

      Lincoln’s Illinois and all the states of the Northwest Territory, now the Midwest, followed their Eastern counterparts in disdaining the presence of free blacks. History texts and courses invariably mention that slavery was prohibited by law in the Northwest Territory in 1787. Slavery could not be established in the states of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota that would be carved out of the territory. But accounts generally fail to mention that the white populations of these states, once admitted to the Union, invariably legislated against blacks. “Exclusion laws” prevented free blacks from even moving there. The new states, like those of the colonial North, according to Eugene Berwanger, “dreaded the thought of a biracial society,” slave or free. The legal response to the imagined threat of a black invasion was drastic: exclusionary residence laws, racially segregated schools, denial of suffrage, prohibitions against miscegenation, the banning of blacks from jury service or from testifying against whites, denial of poor relief, flogging, and exclusion from the militia. The North gave the South a blueprint for racial control after emancipation.

      Illinois was typical in its fear of a black invasion after emancipation. In 1830 the state had 2,486 blacks (1.6 percent of the population); by 1860 there were 7,698 (0.4 percent of the population). Nevertheless black laws were quickly enacted. In 1813 Illinois territorial laws provided that justices of the peace force every “incoming free black or mulatto” to exit. If a free black or mulatto did not leave, thirty-nine lashes were to be administered every fifteen days while the person was resident. Free blacks had to register with the local court and purchase documents attesting to their freedom.

      In 1818, when Illinois was admitted to the Union, anti-slavery literature touted the state’s prohibition of slavery in order to avoid the inheritance of free blacks through manumission. In 1823 Governor Edward Coles, a staunch anti-slavery advocate, declared that slavery corrupted the morality of the white population. But his particular concern was miscegenation, “the shameful, the disgraceful, the degrading” practice of sex between the races. By 1829 free blacks had to post a $1,000 bond with proof of freedom in order to enter Illinois. Like Indiana, Iowa, and Michigan, Illinois outlawed interracial marriages and nullified any that had occurred.

      Anti-black measures continued into the Civil War years. In 1848 Illinois citizens, by a voting margin of four to one, passed a black exclusion clause. When a black organization proposed in 1852 that the restriction on black testimony against whites be removed, the proposal was tabled. In January 1853 “An Act to Prevent the Immigration of Free Negroes into the State” passed the legislature by forty-five to twenty-three. Under this law, any person who brought a free black or mulatto into Illinois was subject to a fine of $100 to $500 and a jail sentence of one year. Blacks who entered and stayed in Illinois for ten days were subject to a $50 penalty. If the black person could not pay, his services were sold to pay off the fine. Although a black exclusion law was already in effect, Illinois citizens in March 1982, by a two-to-one majority, reinforced it. In August 1862 Illinois voters, by a five-to-one majority, renewed the prohibition on black suffrage—at a time when blacks comprised 0.4 percent of the population.

      Like other nonslave states, Illinois wanted black people out of Illinois. Republican senator Lyman Trumbull opposed the extension of slavery as well as “giving Negroes . . . privileges” equal to white citizens. He favored colonization or any other plan to get rid of blacks “Godspeed.” In 1859 he declared, “We the Republican Party, are the white man’s party. . . . We are for the free white man.” He pondered the fate of emancipated slaves: “What will we do with them; we do not want them set free to come in among us. . . .”

      Other Illinois politicians agreed. Republican congressman Owen Lovejoy, brother of the slain abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy, opposed slavery but held that blacks were inferior and that the United States was meant exclusively for white people. General (and future governor) John M. Palmer, a Republican, wrote that freedom was not the issue. For him it was “the presence of the negro race; a race which the sentiments of our people doom to a condition of racial and political inferiority beyond the reach of all efforts for their elevation.” In 1863 Illinois’s Republican governor, Richard Yates, suggested that competition with white labor would lead blacks in the North to a life of “pauperism and neglect.” His belief that the benefits of freedom in the South would rid the North of blacks soon became commonplace in the North. The black migration to Illinois did not appear until the labor shortage induced by World War I ignited it. It was then an economic, not a humanitarian, event.

      Lincoln, a lifelong opponent of slavery and its extension, was an advocate of both colonization and “diffusion”—the forced distribution of blacks according to population. His hometown Springfield paper, the Illinois State Journal, was both Republican and a supporter of Lincoln and offered a strong whiff of prevailing Northern racial sentiment and an endorsement of free blacks only “at a distance.”

      The truth is, the nigger is an unpopular institution in the free States. Even those who are unwilling to rob them of all the rights of humanity and to labor and to enjoy the fruits of their toil, do not care to be brought into close contact with them. . . . Now we confess that we have, in common with the nineteenth-twentieths of our people, a prejudice against the nigger. . . .

      Lincoln has been pardoned for his own racially inspired derogatory comments about blacks. His admirers justify his approach as necessary pragmatism required for winning elections. In 1854, in Peoria, Illinois, Lincoln spoke against black equality: “I am not contending for . . . political and social equality between blacks and whites.” His statement presupposes an electorate to which racial antipathy appeals. In an attempt to deify Lincoln and remove any racial stigma, he is further exonerated by interpretations of his evolving enlightened attitude toward blacks. Thus he gets a pass on the late-twentieth-century racial litmus test, and there has been no outcry to tear down the Lincoln Memorial. As an example, the historian George M. Fredrickson euphemistically describes the prewar Lincoln as “clearly a white supremacist, but of a relatively passive or reactive kind.” Lincoln knew that slavery was the “root cause” of the Civil War and that cotton was its economic base; he wanted slavery abolished by gradual means, by force if necessary. But he had no plan for the millions of freed slaves.

      Colonization, according to V. Jacque Voegeli, was Lincoln’s “favorite answer to the race problem.” In 1862 he posed