Reckoning with Race. Gene Dattel

      As Ohio, Indiana, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Iowa demonstrated, Illinois’s racial animosity was no aberration. Ohio in 1810 counted 1,889 blacks (0.8 percent) in its population; by 1860 there were 36,673 blacks (1.5 percent) in a total population of 2,302,838. Soon after admission to statehood in 1803, Ohio passed a series of “black laws” designed to prevent blacks from coming into the state. An 1804 law required blacks or mulattoes to prove they were free before they could enter Ohio. An 1807 law mandated that blacks and mulattoes post a $500 bond to ensure “good behavior and self-support.” In 1832 an Ohio legislative committee described “free blacks” as without “moral constraint” and “more idle and vicious than slaves.” Free blacks were considered a “distinct and degraded class” who “demoralized whites simply by association.” Anyone with one-quarter black blood could not join the militia, vote, serve on a jury or testify against a white person in Ohio. In 1859 the Ohio Supreme Court ruled that any child who had “any visible taint of African blood” could not attend a school for white students.

      Cincinnati, a major trading city of the Old Northwest, was a scene of frequent racial strife. In 1829 violence erupted when the city’s trustees demanded that blacks pay the $500 bond or leave the city within thirty days. When blacks did not comply, a riot ensued. Mobs of whites, who could not be controlled for three days, attacked blacks, murdered some, and damaged homes. Almost a thousand blacks fled for Canada, where they founded the town of Wilberforce. In 1841 yet another race riot exploded in Cincinnati.

      Blacks in Cincinnati found solace in their own communities. Some managed to accumulate property. The riots provoked them to build their own schools. In Cincinnati as in other Northern cities, education was, the historian Carter G. Woodson noted, the “greatest problem” for blacks. By 1856 they were allowed to elect trustees of their own schools. One black school, the Gilmore High School, was used by white Southern planters to educate their mulatto children. Although the black exclusion laws were repealed in 1849, the city’s “black laws” stood basically unaltered until after the Civil War, when fear of a black migratory invasion subsided because of government policy designed to keep blacks in the South.

      Despite some changes, the black populations of Ohio cities remained in dire straits after the Civil War. Peter Clark, a respected Cincinnati black community member, noted that racial animosity “hampers me in every relation of life, in business, in politics, in religion, as a father or as a husband.” Anti-slavery Cleveland was also a hostile environment for free blacks. The prominent black John Malvin “found every door closed against the colored man . . . excepting only the jails and penitentiaries, the doors of which were thrown wide open to him.”

      Ohio indulged in the “most extensive colonization” rhetoric during the 1840s. In 1849 Ohio citizens pledged $11,000 to fund an “Ohio in Africa” resettlement. A bill providing $25 each for up to fifty black people a year failed to pass when legislators realized that there was no way to monitor blacks who might enter Ohio expressly to collect the money. The legislature did petition the federal government to establish a black reservation on land recently obtained from Mexico.

      If blacks could not effectively be excluded or deported, white Northerners—either Eastern or Western—wanted them to remain in the South or move there. If this could be accomplished there would be no need for further worry about a black migration north. The Ohio Democrat Jacob Brinkerhoff wanted slavery excluded from Western territories, but his views were essentially racial: “I have selfishness enough greatly to prefer the welfare of my own race to that of any other and vindictiveness enough to wish . . . to keep the South with the burden which they themselves created.” The Republicans George Julian of Indiana, Albert G. Riddle of Ohio, and Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, as well as Salmon P. Chase, governor and senator from Ohio before he became Lincoln’s secretary of the treasury, voiced hope that emancipation would “drain” the tiny Northern black community southward. Democrats and Republicans were aligned at least on the notion of keeping free blacks out of the North.

      The important Ohio Republican senator John Sherman, brother of the Union general, declared matter-of-factly that Ohioans were both anti-slavery and anti-black. Ohioans, according to Sherman, were “opposed to having many negroes among them,” and blacks in general “were spurned and hated all over the country North and South.” Sherman supported colonization. In June 1852 he worried that an emancipation bill “would have made Southern Ohio uninhabitable or driven us to the enactment of harsh and cruel [exclusion] laws.” He spoke of the impossibility of assimilation and the immutable “law of God. . . . The whites and blacks will always be separate, or where they are brought together, one will be inferior to the other.” After emancipation, Senator Sherman wrote to his brother, “No one cares about the negro except [that] as . . . he is the cause of the war he should be made useful in putting an end to it.” The senator was advocating the drafting of blacks into the Union Army.

      Salmon P. Chase gained visibility in Ohio by defending fugitive slaves. Later, as chief justice of the US Supreme Court, he admitted the first black lawyer to practice before the court. He had been a strong anti-slavery advocate and supported black suffrage, yet he wanted blacks out of the North, “at a distance.” In July 1862 he encouraged General Benjamin Butler, commander of the Union forces in the Gulf States, to emancipate the slaves in his territory. Chase’s motive was to make the area attractive to Northern blacks. After emancipation, he reasoned, blacks would gravitate toward the more appealing Southern climate.

      Ohio’s newspapers were outspokenly anti-black. In 1862 the Cincinnati Enquirer vehemently opposed “confiscating,” the term used for freeing the slaves: “The hundreds of thousands, if not millions of slaves it will emancipate will come North and West, and will either be competitors with our white . . . laborers, degrading them by the competition, or they will have to be supported as paupers and criminals at public expense.” The Columbus Crisis raised the specter of miscegenation, suggesting that Ohio’s “farmers and mechanics were not prepared to mix up four million of blacks with their sons and daughters . . .” Ohio’s Western Reserve, in the northeastern part of the state, was reputed to be relatively tolerant, yet a Republican editor there who had opposed black exclusion laws voiced his desire to rid Ohio and the country of blacks: “We have no special affection for negroes. We neither desire their companionship or their society. . . . We would be glad if there were not one in the State or one in the United States.”

      Ohio’s involvement with the Underground Railroad that helped fugitive slaves in their journey to freedom in Canada has been widely acknowledged by historians, historical memorials, and a museum in Cincinnati. None give the full story of Ohio’s antipathy toward blacks. American historians and heritage professionals in general focus on slavery and the South rather than the crucial impact of Northern racial hostility. The Underground Railroad was a transit line to carry fugitives through the state, not welcome them as residents. In 1862 an Ohio farmer waxed proudly about his state to an English visitor but added, “There is but one thing sir, that we want here, and that is to get rid of the niggers.”