Black Suffrage Before 1860

Black Suffrage Before 1860
Many historians have written justifiably about the virulence of white racism in the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century. The federal census counted 4.4 million blacks in 1860, nearly 14 percent of the republic’s total population. Of these 3.9 million were slaves in the upper and lower South. The remaining half a million were divided almost equally between free blacks (many of whom were former slaves) resident in the
North and South. Life for most antebellum blacks was harsh—not only for the majority of bondsmen and women but also for free blacks, whose horizons everywhere were constrained by racial prejudice, poverty, and legal discrimination. Even in the North, where African-Americans worked mainly as menial laborers in the city and countryside, they enjoyed few rights and were generally regarded by the dominant population as innately inferior and as temporary sojourners in the white republic. Although social and economic trends linked to the growth of a national and international market contributed significantly to the demise of suffrage qualifications for white males after 1787, the fiercely competitive politics of the Jacksonian period did not embrace blacks. Indeed, there is much evidence to suggest that a relatively democratic antebellum political system was constructed in part by defining certain groups as beyond the pale of political society. Certainly,
most blacks and Indians (as well as women and minors) were excluded from the suffrage during this period and the regnant Democratic party solidified its main constituents (white yeoman farmers, slaveholders and workingmen) by appealing to their deepest racial fears and prejudices. Most states went out of their way to disfranchise free blacks during the early decades of the nineteenth century. Ohio provided fora racially exclusive franchise in 1802. In 1821 New York withheld the vote from all blacks save those few who held more than $250 worth of property and who had lived in the state for three years. And in 1838 Pennsylvania, previously tolerant of limited black voting, disfranchised all African-Americans when local Democrats claimed that ignorant blacks had defeated Jacksonian candidates in that year’s autumn elections. Because the federal Constitution gave the individual states control over suffrage qualifications within their own borders, the die appeared to be cast. By 1860 blacks could vote in only five New England states (Massachusetts, Vermont, Maine, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire)
and, on a limited basis, in New York.
On the whole, matters were made worse for antebellum blacks by the rapid rise of sectional tensions associated with slavery expansion after As the peculiar institution strengthened its grip on Southern society and the national government, slaves found manumission harder to secure, free blacks below the Mason–Dixon Line were subject to increased harassment and legal restraints, and their Northern counterparts witnessed the passage of a tough
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new Fugitive Slave Act which, potentially at least, rendered their own freedom vulnerable to the activities of slave catchers, US. marshals and federal judges.
The s were a particularly harsh decade for Northern blacks. Several thousand of them fled to Canada to avoid seizure under the new federal law and the rest were constantly reviled and abused for the race’s unwitting role in the burgeoning political conflict between North and South. For the first time large numbers of blacks contemplated leaving the United States. Their disillusionment seemed entirely justified when, in March, 1857, the US
Supreme Court ruled in the case of Dred Scott v. Sanford that blacks could not be considered national citizens under the law.
Depressing though the racial situation was in this period, it was by no means entirely hopeless. In the North at least, particularly in large urban centers like Philadelphia and New York, free blacks managed to found community institutions such as churches, schools, and fraternal lodges which imparted real meaning to their lives, nurtured the development of a uniquely
African-American culture and identity, provided genuine leadership training, and enabled them to survive the kind of sustained white assaults which afflicted urban blacks in the Jacksonian period. Inevitably, the mayhem,
murder, and property destruction which accompanied these riots could be profoundly corrosive of community morale. In 1842, after a predominantly
Irish mob had reacted violently against black efforts to commemorate the anniversary of British West Indian emancipation, Robert Purvis, one of
Philadelphia’s leading black citizens, wrote I am convinced of our utter and complete nothingness in public estimation . . . and despair black as the face of Death hangs over us—And the bloody Willis in the heart of the [white]
community to destroy us.”
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Such understandably bleak responses to white supremacist violence, however, did not prevent Philadelphia blacks, like their peers in other parts of the North, from asserting their perceived rights as men and equal citizens. In this respect, no other issue was more important to free blacks than their fight for the suffrage.
By the mid-nineteenth century the advent of adult white male suffrage had made the ballot the most conspicuous and valued badge of first-class citizenship in the United States. Turnout in antebellum elections reached historic levels in large measure because white males regarded the vote as a potent weapon in the ongoing struggle to protect the nation from those designing and corrupt individuals who, in the eyes of apolitically polarized electorate, would undermine the precious liberties of the people in their quest for personal aggrandizement. Throughout the United States the physical act of going to the polls constituted an assertion of citizenship and a positive contribution to the welfare of the republic. Unsurprisingly,
therefore, the majority of disfranchised Northern free blacks made attainment of the ballot a central feature of their evolving campaign for equal rights.
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After 1830 numerous colored peoples conventions met to press government for the abolition of slavery and the enfranchisement of African-
Americans. Antebellum black leaders such as the New York Presbyterian minister Henry Highland Garnet, and the slave-born abolitionist Frederick
Douglass, had no doubt that racism and slavery were intrinsically connected and that attainment of the vote would contribute significantly to the downfall of the peculiar institution, not only by proving that blacks were capable of acting as responsible citizens but also by bringing their influence to bear on the major political parties of the day. Battling against inchoate prejudices rooted in scientific racism, biblical exegesis, and contemporary power relations, the conventions passed numerous resolutions demanding the right of black men to vote. The language of such resolutions and of many speeches delivered by contemporary leaders was often gendered and nativist—the ballot was critical to the black male’s concept of manhood, and drunken,
ignorant Irishmen were invariably deemed to be unworthy of the franchise—
but it was generally patriotic and couched in the rhetoric of natural rights.
African-Americans repeatedly declared themselves to be loyal to the republic and therefore deserving of the same political rights as their white counterparts. America is my home, my country, and I have no other intoned
Garnet in February, 1848, in a statement designed in part to undercut the colonizationist argument that blacks should return to Africa.
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Although passage of the Fugitive Slave Act two years later rendered most blacks more ambivalent about the United States, Frederick Douglass was still able to announce at a pro-suffrage convention in September, 1855, that We love our country.”“The more unitedly he told whites, you can attach us to your institutions, the more reason you give us to love your government, the more you strengthen the country in which we live.”
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Black efforts to achieve the ballot before the Civil War went beyond mere rhetoric. Pro-suffrage petitions were addressed to legislatures and delivered in person to legislative committees. Black leaders allied themselves with progressive whites (primarily political abolitionists) in order to pressurize white politicians into acknowledging the existence of black suffrage as a legitimate political issue. Relatively sophisticated organizations were setup by state and local community leaders to distribute pro-suffrage literature,
most notably in New York in the autumn of 1860 after the Albany legislature had provided fora popular referendum on black enfranchisement. The fact that eight black suffrage referenda were held in five different Northern states between 1846 and 1860 is an indication that these tactics were surprisingly successful. The cause appealed to significant numbers of whites,
particularly evangelical Protestants involved in the New England diaspora after the Revolution. An awareness that a small but vocal fraction of their party demanded black enfranchisement on religious and humanitarian grounds forced pragmatic Northern Whigs and Republicans to provide their
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constituents with an opportunity to vote on the issue. Consistent Democratic attempts to fan the flames of popular racism made positive endorsements of black suffrage suicidal outside areas of radical strength such as upstate New
York and the Western Reserve around Cleveland, Ohio, but even the most moderate of major party leaders understood that a safety valve had to be found for antislavery and pro-suffrage sentiment.
If one ignores an anomalous vote in favor of black ballots in Wisconsin in 1849, nearly a third of all people voting in the antebellum suffrage refer- enda expressed willingness to enfranchise African-Americans.
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Although a minority of these voters were certainly abolitionists, the majority were ordinary Whigs and Republicans who believed that their party stood for more than federal support for internal improvements or simple opposition to the expansion of slavery into the western territories. In Iowa perhaps as many as a fifth of Republican voters participating in the 1857 gubernatorial election favored black suffrage in a referendum in which 86 percent of whites voting on this issue opposed it.
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At least half of all New York Republicans who voted for Abraham Lincoln in the November presidential election may have supported extending the franchise to all black males. Pro-suffrage majorities in western counties (the centre of the heavily evangelized Burned
Over district) were overridden by white supremacist votes in the eastern and southern portions of the state, not least heavily Democratic New York City.
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The significance of these statistics should not be overstated. Even though abase of white support clearly existed for black suffrage in the antebellum
North, it was not, even with the growth of the anti-Southern and antislavery
Republican Party in the mid-1850s, sufficiently large to bring major victories.
Many Republican leaders on the radical wing of the party were willing to pay more than lip service to the idea that blacks were as entitled to vote as whites but even they understood the force of Democratic and popular racism well enough not to push the point. Under pressure from their opponents most centrists were content, like Abraham Lincoln during his famous Illinois senate campaign into cite the Declaration of Independence, assert that free blacks were entitled to basic civil rights short of the ballot, and focus the voters attention on the alleged Slave Power conspiracy to subvert republican liberties and institutions. Little wonder then that on the eve of the Civil War even those black leaders most sympathetic to the Republicans had become disillusioned by the new party’s apparent readiness to defer to grassroots prejudice. Speaking at Framingham, Massachusetts, on July 4,
1860, the Illinois black leader, H. Ford Douglass, criticized the Republican presidential candidate, Abraham Lincoln, for refusing to sign a pro-suffrage petition two years earlier. I am a colored man insisted Douglass. I am an American citizen and I think that I am entitled to exercise the elective franchise.”
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