“The Most Free of the Free States”: Politics, Slavery, Race, and Regional Identity … History...

“The Most Free of the Free States”: Politics, Slavery, Race, andRegional Identity in Early Ohio, 1790–1820

John Craig Hammond

Ohio History, Volume 121, 2014, pp. 35-57 (Article)

Published by The Kent State University PressDOI: 10.1353/ohh.2014.0015

For additional information about this article

Access provided by Penn State Univ Libraries (13 Apr 2014 08:24 GMT)

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ohh/summary/v121/121.hammond.html

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ohh/summary/v121/121.hammond.html

“the most free of the free states” 35

The July Fourth celebration held at Steubenville in 1820 was a rowdy and festive affair. Like so many July Fourth celebrations in the early republic, it was also a political affair. But with the Missouri Controversy at its height, Steubenville’s July Fourth celebration also became a somber event. As vari-ous groups and politicians took to the stage to offer their toasts, questions concerning the place of slavery in an expanding American republic hung heavy in the air. One toast decried “Slavery—A blot upon the national escutcheon—it blights whatever comes within its pestiferous influence.” Another toast went to “The Missouri Question—the Genius of Columbia mourns over the degeneracy of modern America.” As was customary, a toast was offered to the newest state in the Union, in this case, Missouri. But like the toasts that preceded it, this one was hardly celebratory: “Missouri—Although the tears of the slave shall mingle with her streams, and the sighs of the captive be heard in her forests, she is still our youngest sister.” The toast was followed by “1 gun, no cheers,” and the “tune, ‘Galley Slave.’”1 In these toasts, state and local politics intersected with national, sectional, and regional events to encourage white Ohioans to express and further their antislavery political convictions. Important in and of themselves, these anti-slavery political convictions were also instrumental in shaping state, regional, and sectional identities shared by many white Ohioans. The identities white Ohioans had forged were evident at Steubenville’s July Fourth celebration in 1816, when a toast was offered to “The state of Ohio—the most free of all the

Ohio History, Vol. 121 © 2014 by The Kent State University Press

“The Most Free of the Free States” Politics, Slavery, Race, and Regional

Identity in Early Ohio, 1790–1820

john craig hammond

1. Western Herald and Steubenville Gazette, July 8, 1820.

36 ohio history volume 121

2. Ibid., July 12, 1816. 3. Western Herald and Steubenville Gazette, July 8, 1820 (quote). For the kidnapping of free blacks and alleged fugitives, see Cincinnati Western Spy, July 25, 1817; Inquisitor and Cincinnati Advertiser, July 14, 1818. For the anti-kidnapping law, see Stephen Middleton, ed., The Black Laws of the Old Northwest: A Documentary History (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1993), 25. For the freeing of an alleged fugitive slave in Washington County, see Niles Weekly Register, Nov. 13, 1819. For the importance of political rituals such as July Fourth celebrations in shap-ing political culture, politics, and regional and national identities, see David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1997). 4. For criticism of the “racial consensus” interpretation of early national and antebellum

free states.”2 That state identity, in turn, fed antislavery politics and actions in the state. Responding to a spate of widely decried kidnappings and the sub-sequent enslavement of free black Ohioans, in January 1819 the state passed a stringent anti-kidnapping law designed to protect the rights of free blacks and alleged fugitive slaves. Later that year, a Washington County judged freed a runaway Virginia slave on a technicality and then charged his would-be cap-tor with assault and battery. At the end of 1819, Ohio’s congressional delegation uniformly opposed Missouri’s entrance into the Union as a slave state. Though Congress ultimately permitted slavery’s expansion into Missouri, the efforts of Ohio’s congressional delegation to halt slavery’s expansion was recognized in yet another toast, which praised them as “good men and true: not one dough faced traitor amongst them” had voted to permit slavery’s expansion.3 Despite these antislavery professions, politics, and actions, historians have long emphasized that white Ohioans’ opposition to slavery was tied to a deep-seated racism and a desire to see all blacks, whether free or enslaved, excluded from the state. Other historians have emphasized that racism and economic ties to slaveholders in the Ohio Valley allowed slavery, servitude, and other forms of unfree labor to thrive from the 1790s through the 1810s and to persist into the 1830s. More broadly, historians have concluded that racism marked out the boundaries of white opposition to slavery and acceptance of blacks in Ohio. Racism determined that the far great majority of whites in Ohio would oppose blacks’ claims to equality and citizenship. White racism lim-ited white action against slavery, perpetuated discrimination against blacks, and thwarted blacks’ aspirations for freedom and equality. Likewise, racism and the determination of some white Ohioans to evade Ohio’s ban on slavery allowed various sorts of slavery and servitude to persist well into the 1810s. In short, as had happened in other Northern states in the aftermath of the American Revolution, a white “racial consensus” quickly emerged in Ohio. White Ohioans’ “racial consensus”—the conviction that Ohio was a state for free whites alone—fostered racial exclusion and discrimination, allowed for the perpetuation of unfree labor and bondage, limited white action against slavery, and halted the development of antislavery politics.4


In a recent Ohio History article, James Gigantino II develops a racial con-sensus interpretation of early Ohio in perhaps its strongest form. According to Gigantino, “the Buckeye State offered little hope for freedom” to blacks. Though early Ohio “was rife with debates over the continuation of slavery and other servile relationships,” Gigantino argues that “instead of stead-fastly embracing freedom, these debates led many white Ohioans to advo-cate for a continued bound role for blacks.” More broadly, Gigantino claims that various forms of unfree labor and bondage were common and utilized by “many” whites in Ohio; that the racism practiced by white Ohioans dif-fered little from the racism found in Southern slave states; and, finally, that the racism of many white Ohioans and their support for unfree labor made them functionally pro-slavery and Ohio little different from the slave states to the south of the Ohio River.5 Gigantino’s argument and the broader racial consensus interpretation are valuable in their ability to point out that racism and unfree labor persisted in free Ohio. Yet as valuable as these works remain, the racial consensus inter-pretation of early Ohio fails to account for the antislavery politics, political conflicts, and actions that were widespread in the early American republic and in early Ohio. The racial consensus interpretation incorrectly assumes that white racism necessarily precluded the development of a meaningful form of antislavery politics. It fails to explain why so many white Ohioans de-cried the continuation and expansion of slavery in the South and the South-west while condemning slaveholders in the strongest terms. The racial con-sensus interpretation also leaves historians unable to explain why so many free and enslaved blacks fled across the Ohio River. It leaves historians further

Northern politics, see James Oakes, “Conflict vs. Consensus in the History of Antislavery Politics,” in Contesting Slavery: The Politics of Bondage and Freedom in the New American Na-tion, ed. John Craig Hammond and Matthew Mason (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 2011), 291–303. For “racial consensus” interpretations of early Ohio, see James J. Gigantino II, “The Flexibility of Freedom: Slavery and Servitude in Early Ohio,” Ohio History 119 (2012): 89–100; Emil Pocock, “Slavery and Freedom in the Early Republic: Robert Patterson’s Slaves in Kentucky and Ohio, 1804–1819,” Ohio Valley History 6 (Spring 2006): 3–26. The two clas-sic statements of the racial consensus interpretation are Leon F. Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790–1860 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1961) and Eugene Berwanger, The Frontier against Slavery: Western Anti-Negro Prejudice and the Slavery Exten-sion Controversy (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1967), 7–29. For other works on race and slavery in early Ohio, see Nikki Taylor, Frontiers of Freedom: Cincinnati’s Black Community, 1802–1868 (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 2005); Stephen Middleton, The Black Laws: Race and the Legal Process in Ohio, 1787–1860 (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 2005); Stanley Harrold, Border War: Fighting Over Slavery Before the Civil War (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2010); John Craig Hammond, Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion in the Early American West (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 2007); Ellen Eslinger, “The Evolution of Racial Poli-tics in Early Ohio,” in The Center of a Great Empire: The Ohio Country in the Early Republic, ed. Andrew R. L. Cayton and Stuart D. Hobbs (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 2005), 81–104. 5. Gigantino, “Flexibility of Freedom,” quotes at 90, 93.


6. For recent works that challenge the racial consensus interpretation while accepting that white racism coexisted with antislavery politics and actions, see Oakes, “Conflict vs. Consen-sus”; Richard S. Newman, “‘Lucky to Be Born in Pennsylvania’: Free Soil, Fugitive Slaves, and the Making of Pennsylvania’s Anti-Slavery Borderland,” Slavery & Abolition 32 (Sept. 2011): 413–30; Nicholas Wood, “‘A Sacrifice on the Altar of Slavery’: Doughface Politics and Black Disenfranchisement in Pennsylvania, 1837–1838,” Journal of the Early Republic 31 (Spring 2011): 75–106; Paul J. Polgar, “‘To Raise Them to an Equal Participation’: Early National Abo-litionism, Gradual Emancipation, and the Promise of African American Citizenship,” Journal of the Early Republic 31 (Summer 2011): 229–58.

unable to explain the numerous instances where white Ohioans defended and assisted blacks’ struggles to gain their freedom, assistance that was ren-dered sometimes with force and violence, and often in blatant violation of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793, the laws of Ohio, and Northern commitments to respect the rights of slaveholders in the federal Union. Finally, the racial consensus interpretation of early Ohio greatly overstates the extent to which unfree labor was tolerated by white and black Ohioans alike.6 This article, then, challenges the racial consensus interpretation of early Ohio by examining the relationship between antislavery politics, antislav-ery action, and state, regional, and sectional identities in Ohio from the ter-ritorial period in the 1790s through the Missouri Controversy in 1819–20. The growing presence of slavery in the Ohio Valley and the determination of free and enslaved blacks to challenge it meant that issues involving race, slavery, and freedom frequently entered into Ohio politics and public life. Beginning with efforts to overturn the Northwest Ordinance’s Article VI prohibition against slavery in the 1790s, white Ohioans experienced pro-longed public debates over the place of slavery in Ohio, the Northwest, the Ohio Valley, and the expanding American republic. Widespread popular political participation in debates over slavery and in public rituals such as July Fourth celebrations gave ordinary Ohioans the opportunity to define the meanings of race, slavery, and freedom in their state and region. Fur-thermore, the determination of so many free blacks and fugitive slaves to gain a degree of freedom by fleeing from slave states into Ohio provoked numerous conflicts with slaveholders and slave states, forcing white Ohio-ans to grapple further with the meanings and practices of race, slavery, and freedom. In confronting slavery and slaveholders, white Ohioans created a state, regional, and sectional identity that celebrated freedom from slavery as one of its defining features. This state, sectional, and regional identity, in turn, fed a deep antislavery animus in politics and public life. Racism determined that few whites would accept blacks’ claims to equality and citi-zenship. Nonetheless, free blacks and fugitive slaves recognized that race, slavery, and freedom had profoundly different meanings north and south of the Ohio River. White Ohioans frequently recognized blacks’ claims to


freedom as legitimate and protected blacks’ efforts to secure freedom in Ohio, deepening white Ohioans’ commitment to maintaining their anti-slavery state identity and antislavery political convictions. Whether Ohio was “the most free of the free states,” by 1820 many blacks and whites had convinced themselves that it was, those convictions would feed antislavery politics and actions straight through to the Civil War.7

I

Article VI of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 held that “There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude” north and west of the Ohio River. While the Ordinance prohibited slavery, it also recognized the property rights of slaveholders by including a fugitive slave clause allowing that any slave who fled for freedom north of the Ohio River “may be lawfully re-claimed, and conveyed to the person claiming his or her labor or service.”8 With that, the Northwest Ordinance created a border between slavery and freedom that excluded slavery from the territory north of the river while protecting the property rights of slaveholders living south of the river. Ar-ticle VI would not be the final word on slavery and freedom in the Ohio Valley, however. Indeed, rather than quieting discussions of slavery, Article VI would only incite them. Too many interests would seek to evade or over-turn the Article VI prohibition on slavery. Too many slaves were willing to gamble that a chance for freedom in Ohio was better than a life of servitude south of the river. Finally, in an expanding nation that was both heavily de-pendent on slavery and increasingly divided by the institution’s continuing growth, the place, meaning, and significance of slavery and freedom in the Ohio Valley would repeatedly enter into politics and public life. The place of slavery in what would become Ohio became a political issue even before statehood. The Virginia Military District of Ohio was the trian-gular-shaped swath of land, bordered by the Ohio, Scioto, and Little Miami rivers, which Virginia retained in exchange for ceding its claims north and west of the Ohio River to the United States. In the mid-1790s, at least some leading men in the Military District had emancipated their slaves in Virginia,

7. For the differences between abolitionism and antislavery politics, and an examination of the ways in which antislavery beliefs, politics, and actions “could be compatible with rac-ism, with respect for property [in slaves], and with an unwillingness to threaten the sectional understandings upon which the Union had been erected,” see Donald J. Ratcliffe, “The De-cline of Antislavery Politics, 1815–1840,” in Hammond and Mason, Contesting Slavery, 267–90, quote at 268. 8. For the antislavery provisions of the Northwest Ordinance, see Peter S. Onuf, Statehood and Union: A History of the Northwest Ordinance (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1987).


but forced them to serve as indentured servants in Ohio. Article VI’s express prohibition of indentured servitude made this a risky proposition. In turn, as emigration from Virginia increased in the 1790s, so did interest in modify-ing or overturning Article VI. In September 1799, “several” Virginians who possessed warrants for land in the Military District presented the legislature of the Northwest Territory with petitions asking “for the toleration to bring their slaves into this Territory.” The legislature referred the petitions to a com-mittee, which concluded “that the prayer of the petitioners was incompatible” with Article VI, “and therefore could not be granted.” The legislature accepted the decision “unanimously,” but Virginian slaveholders continued to push the issue. Two months later, a larger group of “officers and soldiers” from Virginia requested that they be permitted to settle in the Military District with their slaves under some sort of gradual abolition statute that would free the slaves or their children after a certain period of time. The legislature decidedly re-jected the petition with an overwhelming vote of 16 to 1.9 Antislavery groups and individuals quickly challenged these efforts to overturn Article VI. The Virginia petitions were accompanied by an article in the Cincinnati Freeman’s Journal, calling for a modification of Article VI that would allow settlement with slaves or indentured servants, at least for a limited period of time. The essay by “Marcus” in favor of repeal is now lost, but it did draw forth a poignant, antislavery response. The essayist “Querist” directly attacked Marcus’s claim of popular support for repeal of Article VI, condemned slavery, and rhetorically asked, “Is it not a funda-mental principle of genuine republicanism that all men are equal? Is not the holding of slaves by Americans an inconsistency with their national char-acter?” The following year, continuing concerns about challenges to Article VI prompted the organization of an abolitionist society. In March of 1800, the Cincinnati Western Spy and Hamilton Gazette carried a notice announc-ing the formation of “the Humane Society, north west of the River Ohio.” The “attempts which have already been made to introduce slavery amongst us, has justly spread a general alarm,” announced the notice. “[T]ho’ the movers of this business have met with defeat,” the author warned that “they will no doubt, rally their forces” and seek repeal in the future. “It therefore

9. Journal of the House of Representatives of the Northwest Territory, 1799, 17, 19, 108, 117; An-drew R. L. Cayton, The Frontier Republic: Ideology and Politics in the Ohio Country (Kent, Ohio: Kent State Univ. Press, 1986), 57–59; Pocock, “Slavery and Freedom.” Gigantino, “Flexibility of Freedom,” and Middleton, The Black Laws, badly overstate the prevalence of unfree labor in early Ohio, in part by conflating Ohio with the portions of Illinois and Indiana that had long been settled by French slaveholders. Furthermore, even in Indiana and Illinois, where white attitudes toward unfree labor were far more lax, and where the territorial laws permitted inden-tured servitude, very few slaveholders proved willing to risk their valuable property in slaves in places where it had clearly been banned by Article VI. For the limits of indentured servitude in Indiana and Illinois, see Hammond, Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion, 98–103.


behoves every friend to liberty,” he continued, “to stand on his guard, keep his eyes open, and use his utmost endeavors to prevent the infringement of that noble ordinance which prohibits slavery and involuntary servitude in this territory.” To that end, the Humane Society pledged to work for “the abolition of slavery” and to “repel any and every attempt for the introduc-tion of slavery into this territory.” Two years before statehood, articles about antislavery politics had already been published in Ohio’s newspapers and Ohio had its first abolitionist society.10 As squabbles over slavery ensued, white settlement in the portion of the Northwest Territory that would become Ohio proved rapid. The 1800 census recorded upwards of 45,000 white residents, prompting Congress to create a separate Ohio Territory. In 1802, Congress concluded that the Ohio Ter-ritory’s population had reached the 60,000-person threshold required for statehood, and the Enabling Act of 1802 authorized the residents of the Ohio Territory to draft a constitution and then seek admission to the Union as a state. However, the Enabling Act said nothing about slavery, leaving the deci-sion to permit or exclude slavery in the future state to the delegates charged with framing a state constitution. The 1802 election, in which voters would select delegates for the constitutional convention set to meet in Chillicothe in November 1802, became highly competitive, partisan, and issue-oriented as ambitious office seekers began to court voters in the highly democratic world of early Ohio politics. Aside from the question of continuing as a ter-ritory or accepting statehood, slavery became one of the most important issues in that 1802 election.11 The election of 1802 became most competitive, and slavery the most im-portant political issue in the two most densely settled portions of the terri-tory: Hamilton County and in the Scioto Valley. In Hamilton County, the election began with Federalists claiming that the Republicans favored state-hood because they secretly planned to overturn Article VI. The Republi-can Corresponding Society of Cincinnati quickly responded to Federalist charges with a well-organized political campaign that placed heavy emphasis on Republican opposition to any form of slavery or unfree labor in Ohio. The Corresponding Society organized a total of nineteen chapters in Hamilton County in preparation for the 1802 election out of fear that a proliferation of pro-statehood, anti-Federalist candidates would lead to vote-scattering and

10. Querist, “Response to Marcus,” Cincinnati Freeman’s Journal, Mar. 5, 1799; “The Hu-mane Society, North West of the River Ohio,” Cincinnati Western Spy and Hamilton Gazette, Mar. 12, 1800. 11. For Ohio statehood and the 1802 election, see Donald J. Ratcliffe, Party Spirit in a Fron-tier Republic: Democratic Politics in Ohio, 1793–1821 (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1998). For the place of slavery in the 1802 election, see Hammond, Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion, 76–95; Middleton, Black Laws, 25–32.


the inadvertent election of Federalists to the convention. The Correspond-ing Society then invited candidates to seek the society’s endorsement and encouraged voters to cast ballots only for Corresponding Society candidates. In the months leading up to the election, the Hamilton County Republicans sponsored publication of a barrage of antislavery articles in the Cincinnati newspapers. Then, as the election neared, the society asked candidates to address five questions, the answers to which would appear in the Cincinnati Western Spy and Hamilton Gazette. One question directly asked candidates to prove they were “strenuously opposed to the introduction of involuntary servitude.” Candidates seeking endorsement replied with statements that denounced slavery in the strongest terms and pledges to oppose any type of slavery or involuntary servitude in Ohio. Importantly, while the Hamil-ton County Republicans gave opposition to slavery a central place in their agenda, they did not resort to racism or black exclusion to make their case. Instead, they stressed the incompatibility of slavery and the principles of the American Revolution, and warned that tyrannical slaveholders would flock to Ohio if slavery was permitted. The Corresponding Society’s goal of elect-ing only Republican candidates firmly opposed to slavery paid off. Eight of Hamilton County’s ten delegates were Society-endorsed Republicans bound by public pledges to oppose slavery or involuntary servitude. And lest any of the delegates waver once they attended the convention, a group calling itself The Friends of Humanity vowed to use “our utmost efforts” to end the politi-cal career of any delegate who strayed from his pledge.12 In the Virginia Military District of Ohio, voters and candidates hailed primarily from Maryland, Virginia, and Kentucky, and many of the leading candidates for the convention were former slaveholders who had freed their slaves prior to settling in Ohio. Furthermore, it was in the Virginia Military District in particular that the 1798 petitioners had asked that Article VI be set aside. As had happened in Hamilton County, in the Scioto Valley, slavery stood out in a campaign for delegates that was democratic, competitive, and played out in newspapers, broadsides, and stump speeches. In Ross County, twenty-two candidates sought election to the constitutional convention. As the election neared, the Scioto Gazette called on the candidates to address five questions, including “whether they are, or are not, in favor of slavery being admitted” into Ohio. Chillicothe was soon “glutted with hand-bills

12. “An Elector and Friend to the County,” Cincinnati Western Spy, Sept. 25, 1802; “The Friends of Humanity,” Cincinnati Western Spy, July 31, 1802; Hammond, Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion, 76–95. An exhaustive search of extant Cincinnati newspapers through 1810 produces only two antislavery essays or statements that linked opposition to slavery and slav-ery expansion to black exclusion, and both essays were written by Federalists. See “Hamilton Farmer,” Cincinnati Western Spy, Nov. 11, 1802; “For Liberty Hall: Reflections,” Cincinnati Lib-erty Hall and Cincinnati Mercury, Oct. 22, 1805.


and long tavern harangues” on the forthcoming election, and the columns of the Scioto Gazette were filled with antislavery essays and candidate pledges to block any effort to overturn Article VI. All told, of the twenty-two candi-dates running for the convention, at least sixteen issued public pledges to up-hold the Article VI exclusion of slavery in its entirety. Only two candidates, both Federalists, pledged to overturn Article VI. Of those two, one changed his position in the face of mounting public opposition to slavery, explaining that if a “majority should think proper . . . to prohibit slavery,” then “Let the will of the people be done.” In the election, the will of the voters clearly fa-vored upholding Article VI in its entirety, as antislavery Republicans carried the election in Ross County.13 The convention that met in Chillicothe in November 1802 overwhelm-ingly voted to exclude slavery and involuntary servitude from Ohio, but narrowly voted to deny free blacks the right to vote.14 Yet the 1802 constitu-tion would no more spell the end of public debates about race, slavery, and freedom than did passage of the Northwest Ordinance in 1787. Between 1803 and 1820, issues of race, slavery, and freedom frequently informed politics and public life due to local, state, regional, sectional, and national issues and conflicts. In a rapidly expanding nation where sectional and regional identi-ties remained in flux, white Ohioans struggled to create an appropriate state, regional, and sectional identity in booster tracts, in political speeches, in es-says on political economy and commerce, and in political rituals such as court day and July Fourth celebrations. Likewise, slaves who fled to Ohio—along with the slave-catchers who followed them—forced white Ohioans to grapple with the realities of race, slavery, and freedom. On the one hand, the flight of fugitive slaves and free blacks into Ohio led to passage of exclusion-ary Black Laws in 1804 and 1807. Yet whites and blacks repeatedly challenged black exclusion laws and efforts to re-enslave African Americans, prompting further discussions about the meanings and practices of race and slavery, and the state and sectional identity of Ohio. As settlement in the Ohio Valley proceeded from the 1790s through the 1810s, white Ohioans created state and regional identities that situated their state in the Ohio Valley with the emerging “free” North and in an expanding federal union. What emerged was a broad, general agreement that whites

13. Letter, Nathaniel Massie to Thomas Worthington, Oct. 1, 1802, Thomas Worthington Papers (microfilm edition), Ohio Historical Society, Chillicothe, Scioto Gazette, Sept. 4 and 11, 1802; Hammond, Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion, 76–95. 14. While the delegation from Ross County voted to exclude slavery from Ohio in the con-vention, the Ross County delegation, which hailed primarily from Virginia, was also largely responsible for the convention’s decision to deny voting rights to African Americans. See Helen Thurston, “The 1802 Constitutional Convention and the Status of the Negro,” Ohio History 81 (Winter 1972): 14–37.


had settled in Ohio because of the ban on slavery, and that the absence of slavery made Ohio superior in every sense to other western states that had permitted slavery. As early as the 1802 campaign to elect delegates to the state constitutional convention, politicians celebrated that the “great portion” of Ohio’s citizens had settled “here to avoid slavery.” Fifteen years later, a speaker at Cincinnati’s July Fourth celebration contended that “Ohio’s population is an assemblage of citizens from almost every part of the globe, allured hither by the fertility of its soil, the salubrity of its climate, and the free principles of its constitution which forbids involuntary slavery.” At an 1819 seating of a grand jury in Dayton, the judge’s charge was preceded by a speech on the an-tislavery principles of Ohio’s settlers, a discourse on slavery’s many evils, and a reminder of the superiority of free Ohio versus the slave states. Similarly, Ohio’s great booster and promoter, Dr. Daniel Drake, attributed the rapid settlement and development of Ohio to the prohibition on slavery. Writing in 1815, Drake contended that “The principle inducements for immigration to this state are, the fertility of its soil; the low prices of lands, and security of titles; the high price of labor, and the exclusion of slavery.” Indeed, according to Drake, “The prohibition of slavery has contributed greatly to the popula-tion of this state.” Like so many other speakers, writers, and politicians who celebrated Ohio’s greatness, Drake went further than merely attributing the rapid growth of Ohio to settlement by men and women who wished to avoid slavery. According to Drake and other boosters, Ohio’s exclusion of slavery made it in all ways superior to the slave states south of the Ohio River.15 White Ohioans further fashioned a regional and sectional identity, along with political opposition to slavery, in popular political celebrations such as those held on July Fourth. In the early American republic, July Fourth served as a public celebration that included participation from various groups such as skilled craftsmen and their apprentices, along with prominent individuals such as ministers, lawyers, and politicians. These were thoroughly political affairs that featured numerous and lengthy speeches by politicians and lead-ing local figures who extolled the virtues of their community, celebrated each group’s contribution to its well-being, and defined a community’s place in the American Union. As a July Fourth celebration wore on, various groups and leading figures offered toasts, many with heavy political overtures. Because the participants planned to publish their toasts and proceedings in newspa-pers throughout the state, region, and nation, they chose their words care-

15. “A Citizen,” Chillicothe, Scioto Gazette, Aug. 21, 1802; “Nathan Guilford’s address at the Presbyterian Church, July 4, 1817,” Cincinnati Western Spy, July 11, 1817; “Extract from the Charge of the Hon. Judge Crane, Delivered to the Grand Jury,” Scioto Gazette and Fredonian Chronicle, Sept. 24, 1819; Daniel Drake, Natural and Statistical View, or Picture of Cincinnati and the Miami Country . . . (Cincinnati: Looker and Wallace, 1815), 26, 27, 170; Daniel Drake, Notices Concerning Cincinnati (Cincinnati: John W. Browne & Co., 1810), 30.


16. “The Dayton Association,” Cincinnati Western Spy, June 26, 1802; “The Republicans from Whitewater and Miami Townships,” Cincinnati Liberty Hall and Cincinnati Mercury, July 7, 1807; “The Mechanics of Neville, Clermont County,” Cincinnati Liberty Hall, July 21, 1817; Cincinnati Liberty Hall, July 7, 1807. Cincinnati Western Spy, Aug. 7, 1807. For the impor-tance of toasts in forging political identities and convictions, see Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes.

fully. White Ohioans incorporated their beliefs about slavery and freedom into their toasts. In the months preceding the election for delegates to the 1802 convention, a meeting of the Federalist Dayton Association offered a toast that “SLAVERY shall not be disseminated on this bank of the Ohio.” Five years later, in similar fashion, “the Republicans from Whitewater and Miami Townships” called for “emancipation and competence, to every enslaved mor-tal,” and then toasted that “slavery never be admitted in the state of Ohio.” The Mechanics of Neville offered similar toasts that articulated opposition to slav-ery, celebrated its absence from Ohio, and called for its abolition elsewhere. Their toast—to “The State of Ohio—Independent and Free”—was followed by a plea to Ohio’s “Sister States” of Virginia and Kentucky to “deal justly, love mercy, and let the oppressed go free.” At a celebration hosted by the Appren-tices of Cincinnati in 1807, a toast was offered to “the state of Ohio—May it never be clouded by the demon of slavery,” while another reveler asked that “slavery never disgrace our land, but the principles of Liberty and Justice be preserved continually, and transmitted generation to generation, to the end of time.” In such toasts, Ohioans celebrated their opposition to slavery and expressed their hope for slavery’s eventual abolition in the United States.16 Like other toasts, the 1816 gathering in Steubenville that celebrated “The state of Ohio—the most free of all the free states” joined popular opposition to slavery with an emerging sectional identity that situated the “free” state of Ohio with the “free” states of the North. This free-state identity extended to the broader West as well. In 1813, Josiah Meigs, a Connecticut Yankee who had been driven out of Georgia because of his outspoken opposition to slav-ery, offered his toast to “The Mississippi, father of rivers—may the rains and dews of Heaven, never fertilize the fields which he drains, if they are occupied by slaves.” In this toast and others, Ohioans such as Meigs demonstrated how they understood their state’s exclusion of slavery as part of a larger struggle between slavery and freedom that was playing out in the early American West. More than mere alcohol-induced revelry, the popular antislavery sentiments displayed at July Fourth celebrations affected the positions of politicians. As governor of the Indiana Territory, William Henry Harrison had led efforts to overturn Article VI there. When Harrison returned to Ohio with ambitions for office in 1816, his opponents labeled him “a friend of slavery,” perhaps the most damning of political epithets in early Ohio. Recognizing the severity of the charge, Harrison responded with antislavery speeches and broadsides.


He was also sure to attend a July Fourth celebration where he offered a toast to placate voters skeptical of his past support for slavery. Harrison toasted that “the fertile banks of the Miami be never disgraced by the cultivation of a slave or the revenue they afford go to enrich the coffers of a despot.” An adroit politician, Harrison knew that opposition to slavery was a prerequisite for holding office in much of early Ohio.17 The press in Ohio served as more than a conduit for the alcohol-soaked toasts of politicians and voters. Slavery maintained an omnipresence in the new American nation and in the Ohio Valley, and Ohio’s early newspapers were filled with a remarkable number of antislavery essays, articles, morality tales, political reports, and stories deprecating the many horrors of slavery. Antislavery pieces appeared in the Ohio press as early as 1799, when “Querist” denounced efforts to modify Article VI. As Ohio moved toward statehood in 1802, politicians filled Ohio’s newspapers with statements criticizing slavery from every possible angle, and they expected that these antislavery polemics would create antislavery voters. The Cincinnati Western Spy published the anything but short “Short Observations on Slavery” in the issue preceding the July Fourth celebrations planned in Cincinnati and Hamilton County with the expectation that it would influence the forthcoming celebrations. Summarizing and citing much of the antislavery literature produced in Eu-rope and the eastern states in the 1790s, the Cincinnati Republicans who produced and paid for the publication of “Short Observations” specifically sought to sway public opinion against slavery in the upcoming election for delegates to the state constitutional convention.18 Statehood and the prohibition of slavery would not end the publication of antislavery essays; indeed, in the first decade of statehood, essays that were remarkably abolitionist appeared in Ohio’s Republican, Federalist, and inde-pendent newspapers. In 1807, Ohio modified its Black Laws, placing more stringent restrictions on free blacks. An essayist in the Steubenville Gazette forthrightly attacked Ohio’s Black Codes, the prejudices that underwrote them, and the politicians who passed and supported them. Like other anti-slavery essayists and speakers in Ohio, “Agricola” tied together a state and re-gional identity that celebrated the absence of slavery, an acceptance of blacks’ claims to freedom and their desire to settle in Ohio, and antislavery politics. According to Agricola, Ohio’s Black Laws seemed designed for “one of the

17. Western Herald and Steubenville Gazette, July 12, 1816; Cincinnati Western Spy, July 10, 1813; “To the Electors of the First Congressional District,” broadside dated Oct. 1, 1816, Ohio Historical Society, Archives; Cincinnati Liberty Hall, July 14, 1816. 18. Querist, “Response to Marcus” Cincinnati Freeman’s Journal, Mar. 5, 1799; “Some Short Observations on Slavery,” Cincinnati Western Spy and Hamilton Gazette, July 3, 1802. For the proliferation of antislavery political speeches and essays in the run-up to the 1802 election, see Middleton, Black Laws, 25–32; Hammond, Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion, 82–95.


slave states . . . where the same laws are made for the government of man and beast.” Such laws had no place in Ohio, where “all are equally free.” Agricola concluded his essay by denouncing the politicians who had abandoned the “principles” of Ohio’s antislavery constitution, and then counseled voters to cast ballots only for politicians who were committed to passing laws that make “no distinction of colour or rank.” Four years later, reports of a slave rebellion in Louisiana led Caleb Emerson, printer of the Marietta Western Spectator, to commission a series of at least fifteen “Essays on Slavery,” which appeared between March 1811 and February 1812. The writer of the “Essays on Slavery” used virtually every criticism of slavery that Abolitionists and free-soil Republicans would deploy from the 1830s through the Civil War. Agricola and the “Essays on Slavery” not only reminded white Ohioans of slavery’s enormous and growing presence in the trans-Appalachian West and the Ohio Valley, they also insisted that blacks possessed an unquestion-able right to freedom, demanded that white Ohioans respect those rights in law and in practice, and called on Ohio politicians to work for the abolition of slavery in the United States.19 Among early Ohio’s newspapers, perhaps none was more adamant in its opposition to slavery than the Cincinnati Liberty Hall and Cincinnati Mer-cury, published by John Browne, a leader of the city’s Democratic Repub-licans. As was common in the early republic, Browne reprinted essays and reports from American and foreign papers, including numerous essays from the burgeoning Anglo-American antislavery movement. Along with the reprints, Browne frequently added his own comments linking the broader Anglo-American struggle against slavery in the Atlantic world to the con-tinuing battles against slavery in the Ohio Valley. In 1806, the Cincinnati Liberty Hall encouraged its readers to pay careful attention to the British ab-olitionist campaign against the international slave trade. He deemed the re-ports “of considerable importance” to the people of Ohio because it provided hope that “the same spirit of wisdom, policy and equity will be encouraged in the states of America south of the Ohio.” In the pages of Browne’s Cin-cinnati Liberty Hall, Ohio became a battleground in a worldwide struggle against slavery that extended from London and Washington to Ohio and the broader Ohio Valley. In his essays, Browne forthrightly challenged white Ohioans to side with the worldwide forces of liberty against slavery and the systems of aristocracy and tyranny that underwrote it. According to Browne,

19. “Agricola,” Steubenville Western Herald, July 25, 1807; Marietta Western Spectator, Mar. 5, 1811, Feb. 8, 1812. For other explicitly abolitionist tracts in early Ohio, see, for example, “Slavery” and “From the Western Spy,” Williamsburg Western American, Dec. 15, 1815; Thomas H. Genin, An Oration, Delivered Before the Semi Annual Meeting of the Union Human Society, Held in Mount Pleasant Ohio, May 14th, 1818 (Mount Pleasant, Ohio: Charles Osbourne, 1818).


true Americans—and true Ohioans—had to steadfastly oppose slavery, its expansion, and its nefarious effects on individuals and society.20 Settlement and slavery in neighboring Indiana, the second state formed out of the Northwest Territory, also influenced the state, regional, and sec-tional identities of Ohio, popular antislavery politics, and the positions of politicians. Beginning in 1804, Indiana slaveholders and politicians sought to repeal or suspend the Article VI prohibition on slavery in the Indiana Territory. John Browne quickly became the main nemesis of Indiana’s move-ment to overturn Article VI. Browne published a series of essays warning Indianans of the evils that would follow slavery into their territory, and put pressure on Ohio politicians to vote against any attempts to repeal Article VI that might come before Congress. As Indiana moved toward statehood in 1816, antislavery Ohioans concerned that Indiana might permit slavery in its constitution took action. Antislavery Ohioans prepared and printed a series of letters and addresses pleading with the people of Indiana to reject slavery and imploring Ohio’s congressional delegation to oppose Indiana statehood if it permitted slavery. Ohio newspapers also gave a running ac-count of the election for delegates to Indiana’s state constitutional conven-tion, unabashedly cheering for the election of antislavery delegates. In the spring of 1816, the Cincinnati Western Spy printed a notice that the delegates for Indiana’s constitutional convention had been elected, including what it considered to be the most important piece of information for the residents of Ohio: the delegates were uniformly opposed to slavery, and “a gentlemen . . . from Indiana” had “no doubt” that Indiana’s constitution “will exclude involuntary slavery from that rising state.” The Spy added that “We sincerely hope this expectation will be realized.” The piece from the Spy was reprinted widely, and as the convention met, Ohio’s newspapers reported that “It is expected that slavery will be excluded from this new state.” In 1816, July Fourth toasts in Ohio went to “The Convention of Indiana—Another star will be added to the escutcheons of Liberty—May its luster be untarnished by the name of Slavery.” When Indiana’s constitution was complete, these same papers celebrated “Slavery prohibited, and the constitution never to

20. Cincinnati Liberty Hall, Jan. 15, 1805 and Jan. 13, 1806. For reprints of articles from other papers on the horrors of slavery see, for example, Cincinnati Liberty Hall, Dec. 4, 1804 and Dec. 2, 1805. Browne also printed antislavery books and pamphlets for sale at his printing office. See Cincinnati Liberty Hall, Nov. 19, 1805 and Jan. 6, 1806. Early Cincinnati’s other ma-jor newspaper, the Western Spy, along with south-central Ohio’s main newspaper, the Scioto Gazette, also reprinted articles detailing the horrors of Southern slavery. For examples, see “ON THE SLAVE TRADE,” Cincinnati Western Spy, July 10, 1802; “Something New,” Cincin-nati Western Spy, July 24, 1802; “Negro Slavery,” Cincinnati Western Spy, July 25, 1817; “Slavery,” Scioto Gazette, Jan. 21, 1805. For the importance of the press and editors in shaping popular politics in the early republic, see Jeffrey L. Pasley, “The Tyranny of Printers”: Newspaper Poli-tics in the Early American Republic (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 2003).


be amended so as to admit of it. (Some slave holders disappointed!!!)” Fi-nally, in his annual address to the Ohio legislature, Gov. Thomas Worthing-ton noted that Indiana’s constitution “is very similar to our own, and I feel highly gratified that they have in the most unqualified manner prohibited slavery.” White Ohioans’ long-standing opposition to slavery in Indiana deepened their identification with a “free Northwest” that now included Indiana. Those same antislavery sentiments were voiced in the speeches of politicians. More importantly, these broad antislavery sentiments dictated that Ohio politicians would steadfastly oppose slavery’s expansion into Il-linois in 1818 and into Missouri in 1819 and 1820.21

II

In the 1830s and again in the 1850s, Alexis de Tocqueville and Harriet Beecher Stowe immortalized the differences and similarities between slaveholding Kentucky and free Ohio in the pages of Democracy in America and Uncle Tom’s Cabin. But long before the fictional Eliza dashed across the ice-strewn Ohio River to freedom, fugitive slaves and free blacks tested white Ohioans’ claims that Ohio was “the most free of the free states.” Despite the persistence of bondage and servitude, discrimination and oppression, Ohio continued to serve as a destination for free and fugitive blacks seeking to secure a degree of freedom and greater control over their own lives. While racism remained a very real and powerful force in early Ohio, free and fugitive slaves found that many whites proved willing to recognize and protect blacks’ claims to free-dom, even if whites steadfastly opposed blacks’ desires for equality and citi-zenship. Furthermore, while bondage and unfree labor persisted in Ohio and along the Ohio River, both blacks and whites went to extraordinary lengths to

21. For Browne’s fight against slavery in the Indiana territory, see, for example, Cincinnati Liberty Hall, Dec. 2, 1805, Mar. 31, 1806, June 2, 1806, Dec. 10, 1806, Mar. 10, 1807. For anti-slavery pamphlets and addresses written by Ohioans to the voters of Indiana, see “Circular Address to the Citizens of Indiana,” Cincinnati Western Spy, Feb. 3, 1816; Constitution of the Columbian United Abolition Society, . . . To Which Is Prefixed, An Address to the People of the States of Ohio and Indiana, On the Subject of Slavery (Cincinnati: Williams and Mason, 1816); A Citizen of Ohio [Alexander Mitchell], An Address to the Inhabitants of the Indiana Terri-tory, on the Subject of Slavery (Hamilton, Ohio: The Office of the Philanthropist, 1816). For the reprinting of the Cincinnati Western Spy’s notice concerning the antislavery delegates elected to Indiana’s state constitutional convention, see, for example, Zanesville Muskingham Messen-ger, May 30, 1816; Chillicothe Supporter, May 14, 1816; Dayton Ohio Republican, June 5, 1816. For the toast against slavery in Indiana, see “Fourth of July,” Dayton Ohio Republican, July 10, 1816. For notices that the Indiana constitution officially prohibited slavery, see Cincinnati Western Herald and Steubenville Gazette, July 19, 1816. For Worthington’s speech, see “Gov-ernor’s Message,” Chillicothe Supporter, Dec. 10, 1816. For Ohio politics during the Missouri Crisis, see Ratcliffe, Frontier Republic, 232–34.


eliminate bondage from Ohio and to assist blacks in securing their freedom. While many white Ohioans remained adamantly and even proudly racist, that prejudice did not preclude many white Ohioans from supporting blacks’ efforts to secure freedom for themselves and their families. The remarkably large number of runaway slave advertisements that ap-pear in early Ohio newspapers demonstrates that slaves from Kentucky and western Virginia—and sometimes slaves from as far away as Tennessee and Louisiana—believed that the Ohio River formed a meaningful border be-tween slavery and freedom. From the moment that runaway slave advertise-ments appeared in the Ohio Valley’s first newspapers, Kentucky slaveholders suspected that fleeing slaves “will make for the north west side of the Ohio.” Slaves who fled to Ohio frequently attempted to “pass for a freemen,” as one of Andrew Jackson’s slaves did in 1802. To back up their claims of freedom, fugitive slaves frequently changed their names and “procure[d] a pass” certi-fying that they had been freed in a slave state. Some fugitive slaves concocted plausible stories to substantiate their claims of free status. One favored story was for slaves to claim that they had been freed by a conscientious Methodist family. One Kentucky slave went a step further, taking with him “a copy of Watts’s hymns” and passing himself off as a free minister. Other slaves de-vised equally ingenious methods to get themselves safely through slave states and across the Ohio River. In 1804, an enslaved Tennessee man named Josh changed his name to Jack Sweet and headed off to Ohio. Jack bolstered his claim to be free by claiming that he had served “in the army several years” as an Indian interpreter. As usual, his owner “expected that his object will be to cross the Ohio.” For these runaway slaves—and for their owners—the differences between the states north and south of the Ohio River were both real and meaningful.22 Shortly after statehood, Southern slaveholders had already begun to com-plain about the difficulties they encountered in recovering fugitive slaves in Ohio. Furthermore, the Ohio legislature feared that fugitive black settle-ments in Indian territory threatened to set off a new series of Indian wars if slave owners violated the sovereignty of Indian nations within Ohio’s bor-ders while seeking to recover fugitive slaves. Thus, in 1804 the legislature passed a series of Black Laws that supplemented the 1793 federal Fugitive Slave Act and placed restrictions on free blacks in Ohio. Ohio’s 1804 Black Law required that all free blacks possess a certificate testifying to their free status; required that free blacks register with the county in which they re-

22. Cincinnati Sentinel of the Northwest, May 31, 1794; Cincinnati Western Spy, June 19, 1802; Cincinnati Western Spy and Hamilton Gazette, Dec. 21, 1803; Cincinnati Western Spy and Hamilton Gazette, July 17, 1802; Scioto Gazette, July 17, 1802 and Dec. 23, 1804. For additional accounts of fugitive slaves, see Middleton, Black Laws, 67–70.


sided; and criminalized the employment of any blacks lacking free papers. Three years later the legislature amended the Black Laws, requiring that all blacks seeking residency either post, or have posted on their behalf, a surety bond backed by $500 in property.23 While historians have rightfully pointed to the discriminatory nature of these laws, local officials and residents very rarely enforced them prior to Cin-cinnati’s expulsion of a significant portion of the black community in 1829. As Daniel Drake noted in 1815, “free negroes are prohibited from settling in this state, without giving bond and security . . . but as this provision is considered unconstitutional, it has, I believe, in no instance, been enforced.” In short, neither state nor local authorities did much to disturb blacks’ efforts to gain and maintain their freedom in Ohio. Indeed, fugitive slaves, free blacks, and well-meaning whites used the Black Laws requiring registration as a means of securing black freedom. Thus, former Virginia and Kentucky slaveholders who migrated to Ohio with their former slaves used the registration process to have the freedom of their former bondsmen and bondswomen registered with the state and county. Other free or fugitive blacks—often working with whites who met the $500 surety bond with their own property—used regis-tration to provide themselves with freedom papers, adding another layer of security against kidnapping and re-enslavement. Finally, runaway slave ad-vertisements suggest that forged free papers and passes for slaves were ubiq-uitous and easy to obtain in the Ohio Valley, even in slave states themselves. Through the 1810s, then, the main barrier keeping free and runaway blacks out of Ohio were slave owners and slave-catchers, not the laws or officials of Ohio. As Daniel Drake observed in 1815, “we have all the black population which unopposed immigration could give.”24 Accordingly, in 1808, two enslaved brothers from Kentucky, Bristol and Matt, were suspected of crossing the river “into the state of Ohio,” where they intended “to pass for free negroes” by using “fraudulently obtained passes.” In 1815, when an enslaved Kentucky man named Abraham decided that service

23. “Report of the Ohio House Proceedings,” Cincinnati Western Spy and Hamilton Ga-zette, Dec. 17, 1803. Middleton, Black Laws, 15–18. The 1804 Black Law also provided stiff punishments for the illegal seizure of any free black or alleged fugitive in Ohio. 24. Drake, Natural and Statistical View, 170. For other examples of state officials refusing to apply the Black Codes, see, for example, The Trial of Charles Vattier (Cincinnati: Press of David L. Carney, 1807), 30–31, where court officials permitted the black man Charles Britton to testify against a white man. Despite the strenuous objections of the defense, the court offi-cials ruled that the law prohibiting black testimony was a “prostitution” of Ohio’s constitution. For the nonenforcement of Ohio’s Black Laws, and the use of Black Laws by free and fugitive slaves to gain free papers, see Eslinger, “Evolution of Racial Politics in Early Ohio,” 86–90; Middleton, Black Laws, 60–66. Pocock, “Slavery and Freedom in the Early Republic.” For a similar situation in Pennsylvania, where whites and legal officials sided with blacks’ claims to freedom over the property rights of slaveholders and state and federal law, see Newman, “Lucky to Be Born in Pennsylvania.”


to his owner during the War of 1812 entitled him to freedom, he fled from Ma-son County, Kentucky, into Ohio. Two years later, former Louisiana governor William Claiborne placed an advertisement for an enslaved man named Wil-liam, who “passed himself for a freeman and ascended the river as a waiter or steerage passenger in some steam boat or barge bound for Cincinnati.” The advent of steamboat travel up the Mississippi and Ohio rivers provided even slaves in Deep South states with an opportunity to flee for freedom. Other slaves went to equally extraordinary lengths to make it to Ohio. The same year that Governor Claiborne’s slave William was working his way up the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, an enslaved Tennessee man named Jess and his wife hatched a bold scheme to gain their freedom. Jess and his wife obtained both a forged bill of sale that made them the property of a white man who was aiding them in their escape, and a forged set of freedom papers that would attest to their freedom once they reached Ohio. Like so many other slavehold-ers south of the Ohio River, Jess’s owner “expected they will pass through some part of Kentucky to Ohio.” Runaway slave advertisements in Ohio and Kentucky newspapers suggest that, by the 1810s, Kentucky, Virginia, and even Tennessee slaveholders were “induced to believe” that their fleeing slaves had “made an attempt to reach the state of Ohio” unless they had solid evidence to the contrary. While slave flight remained an incredibly risky ordeal, slaves throughout the Ohio Valley crossed the river in an attempt to secure freedom for themselves, as the numerous runaway slave advertisements and growing black population in Ohio demonstrated.25 While some free blacks and fugitive slaves deliberately fled to Ohio to secure their freedom, others fled when opportunity unexpectedly presented itself. Slave traders who began moving slaves from the Chesapeake to Ken-tucky and the lower Mississippi Valley in the early 1800s frequently used the Ohio River. In 1801 and again in 1803, two groups of slaves killed the slave traders transporting them down the river and fled into the Ohio wilderness. In 1817, Virginia slaveholder John Hathaway was moving down the Ohio River on his way to Kentucky with two of his slaves. One night while the boat was docked on the Virginia side of the river, his slaves Ben and Daniel ap-propriated their vessel and fled across the river. That same year, an enslaved Virginia man named Ben, traveling through Ohio with his owner, found himself in the Quaker-dominated community of Mount Pleasant, Jefferson County. As Ben and his owner moved through town, “a mob”—presumably a Quaker mob, if such a thing existed—surrounded the enslaved and his

25. Cincinnati Western Spy and Miami Gazette, Jan. 4, 1808; Washington (Ky.) Wash ing ton Union, May 5, 1815; Cincinnati Western Spy, Aug. 1, 1817; Lexington (Ky.) Western Monitor, Aug. 9, 1817; Lexington (Ky.) Reporter, Aug. 28, 1813. For slaves using forged papers and fleeing with assistance from whites, see, for example, the advertisement for a runaway named Jess, Lexington (Ky.) Western Monitor, Aug. 30, 1817; Harrold, Border War, 29.


owner. The mob insisted that because Ben was in Ohio, “he was as free” as his owner. The mob then surrounded his owner, allowing Ben to escape, pre-sumably with assistance from others in the town. The owner, foregoing any hope of recovering Ben, promptly took out an ad in the Steubenville Herald warning residents of “any of the slaveholding states” to avoid Mount Pleasant as they traveled through Ohio.26 An enslaved Kentucky family found freedom in an equally unexpected way. In 1817, Harry Black, a free black man living in Kentucky, filed a free-dom suit in Greenup County, Kentucky, on behalf of his wife Mariam and their five children. Harry and Mariam were prepared to argue that Mariam’s 1783 birth in Pennsylvania legally entitled her and her children to freedom. A Kentucky court ordered the Black family’s alleged owner, Jacob Kounts, to post a bond of $1,000 to insure that Kounts would allow the family to appear before the court. Recognizing that his title to the enslaved fam-ily might be shaky, Kounts’s agents seized Mariam and her five children, and then headed down the Ohio River with the intent of selling them into Deep South slavery. Meanwhile, the head of the enslaved family, Harry Black, raced to Maysville, Kentucky, where he sought assistance from an “Emancipating Society.” Black and members of the Emancipating Society intercepted the boat on the Ohio River and forced it to land at Cincinnati. Assisted by yet another Emancipating Society—this one from Cincinnati—Kounts and the Black family promptly appeared before an Ohio justice of the peace. The justice freed all members of the family on the grounds that Mariam’s 1783 birth in Pennsylvania made her free.27 The experiences of Mariam Black and her family were not isolated cases. In 1804, Kentuckian James Patterson moved to Dayton with at least six slaves. Concerned locals quickly freed at least some of the slaves, duly recording their free status in the county’s Record of Black and Mulatto Persons. Two years later, Patterson, a fellow Kentucky slaveholder, and an armed slave-catcher attempted to capture two of the former slaves—Ned Page and his wife Lucy—and return them to Kentucky. In a showdown at a Dayton tavern, Pat-terson’s slave-catcher pulled a gun on the freeman Ned. An armed and hostile crowd, which included local officials, promptly backed Page and even passed a pistol to him. As the standoff ensued, Page and the crowd forced Patter-

26. Cincinnati Western Spy, Aug. 26, 1801; Scioto Gazette, Nov. 12, 1803; Maysville (Ky.) Eagle, Nov. 21, 1817; Western Herald and Steubenville Gazette, Jan. 31, 1817. 27. “Jacob Kounts v. ———,” Cincinnati Western Spy, May 30, 1817. The Black family appar-ently moved to a Quaker-settled portion of Indiana, where agents for the Kounts estate seized the family and found a judge who ordered their return to Kentucky. The Columbian United Abolition Society of Whitewater, Indiana—located just across the border from Ohio—took on the Blacks’ case and wrote to Cincinnati papers pleading for assistance to help the family regain their freedom. See Cincinnati Liberty Hall and Cincinnati Gazette, Sept. 21, 1819.


son and his posse to back down. The officials present at the standoff then charged Patterson with disturbing the peace. When Patterson again tried to capture Ned Page and his wife, local whites intervened and Patterson was charged with assault and violation of the 1804 Black Law, which protected free blacks such as Page from kidnapping. By the mid-1810s, it had become com-mon enough for individuals and even towns to protect free blacks from cap-ture and to harbor fugitive slaves. In 1816, an enslaved Virginia man named Jim made his way to Steubenville. Jim’s owner, Hezekiah Conn, had tracked him to Steubenville, but Jim eluded capture because at least some locals had “harbor’d or conceal’d” him. Conn was not giving up on Jim without a fight. Conn “forewarn[ed] all persons in the state of Ohio, from hiring or harbor-ing” Jim “under penalty of their lives—for I am determined to risk mine in defense of my property.” Like Jim, an enslaved Kentucky man named Jack ap-parently had assistance when he first escaped to Cincinnati in February 1817. Jack was subsequently recaptured by his owner and returned to Kentucky, but not for long. By June, Jack had escaped again; again, he had assistance in elud-ing his owner and slave-catchers. Jack’s owner promptly took out a notice in the Cincinnati Western Spy warning “all persons from secreting or harboring” Jack “on penalty of being dealt with as the law directs.”28 For Kentucky and Virginia slave owners, however, Ohio’s laws provided little recourse as local courts and officials increasingly freed slaves who could make any plausible claim to freedom. In 1819, Washington County officials charged a Virginia slave-catcher with assault and battery against the enslaved man he was attempting to recapture. When the slave-catcher produced pa-pers certifying that he was lawfully seeking to recover a fugitive slave, the court denied the validity of the Virginia papers and ruled that the alleged fugitive was free according to the laws of Ohio. As a Virginia newspaper an-grily noted, “it appears from the decision that a resident of Virginia cannot appoint an agent to arrest his servant who may have fled from him and taken refuge in the state of Ohio.” Two years earlier, a Kentucky family seeking to recover a fugitive slave in Cincinnati discovered just how far white Ohio-ans were willing to go to protect blacks’ efforts to gain freedom. After the Hayden family of Jessamine County, Kentucky, presented legal papers seek-ing to recover a slave who had lived freely in Cincinnati for a year, a public official summarily declared the slave to be free. Meanwhile, a mob quickly rushed the slave to the safety of the city jail, where they stood guard lest the Hayden family sought to seize the slave. At the same time, officials issued an arrest warrant for the Hayden family, forcing them to flee across the Ohio River to Kentucky. With the Haydens in Kentucky, white Cincinnatians sent

28. Pocock, “Slavery and Freedom in the Early Republic”; Steubenville Herald and Western Gazette, Apr. 12, 1816; Cincinnati Western Spy, June 27, 1817.


the slave on his way to Canada, where he would be safe from further efforts at recovery.29 By 1817, enough slaves were finding “refuge in the state of Ohio” that the Kentucky government felt compelled to take action. The Kentucky legisla-ture passed a resolution noting “the difficulty experienced by the citizens of this state in reclaiming their fugitive slaves who have escaped” into Ohio and Indiana. The legislature was especially frustrated by the ability of fugi-tives to “conceal themselves,” to be “concealed,” and to be “assisted in their concealment” in Ohio. Kentucky governor Gabriel Slaughter then sent a letter to Ohio governor Thomas Worthington, noting that Kentuckians en-countered “serious obstructions to the recovery of their property” in Ohio and asking for recourse. In his response, Worthington noted that white Ohioans disliked free blacks and fugitive slaves as much as Kentuckians did. But Worthington’s shared racism provided small comfort to Kentucky slaveholders whose slaves sought freedom in Ohio. Though Worthington acknowledged white Ohioans’ desire “to get rid of every species of negro population” in the United States, he also noted “that a universal prejudice against the principles of slavery does exist and is cherished” in Ohio. From there, Worthington explained that Kentuckians had no one to blame but themselves for having Ohio courts free so many slaves on legal technicalities and thin claims to freedom. So long as “the proofs of the right of property” presented by Kentucky slaveholders proved “defective” by the standards of Ohio’s courts, Ohio “judges must act according to the facts” of the case and the laws of Ohio. That meant certifying alleged fugitives as free so long as Kentuckians could not satisfactorily prove ownership in Ohio courts, even if neither Ohio nor federal law made any provision for freeing alleged fugi-tives. Receiving no recourse from Ohio, in 1818 Kentucky and Virginia took their case to Congress, where they sought a new fugitive slave law. Indicating Northern whites’ growing hostility against slavery and slaveholders, the bill failed to pass because Northern Republicans—including members of Ohio’s congressional delegation—insisted that a new fugitive slave law extend the right of habeas corpus to alleged fugitives.30 While some slaves from Kentucky and Virginia were gaining their free-dom, so were those illegally held in bondage in Ohio. The long history of

29. Niles Weekly Register, Nov. 13, 1819; “For the Western Monitor,” Lexington (Ky.) Western Monitor, Oct. 18, 1817. 30. Acts of Kentucky, 1816–1817, 282; Letter, Gov. Gabriel Slaughter to Gov. Thomas Worth-ington, Sept. 4, 1817, Univ. of Kentucky, Special Collections, Margaret I. King Library; Letter, Worthington to Slaughter, Oct. 23, 1817, Kentucky Historical Society, Frankfort. For Southern demands for a new fugitive slave law, see Annals of Congress, 15th Cong., 1st sess., 231–40, 825–40. The willingness of white Ohioans and Ohio courts to free or to protect the freedom of alleged fugitive slaves continued to produce clashes in the Ohio Valley straight through to the Civil War; see Harrold, Border War.


unfree labor in the Ohio Valley, combined with the expansion of slavery into Kentucky and western Virginia, and the determination of some white Ohio-ans to evade Ohio’s ban on slavery, meant that various forms of unfree labor persisted in Ohio into the 1810s and 1820s. While the holding of indentured servants and even slaves persisted in some parts of Ohio during the territorial period, with the 1803 constitution clearly banning slavery or involuntary ser-vitude, slaveholders had to devise elaborate plans to use slave labor in Ohio. Some slaveholders dodged the ban by having slaves work in Ohio by day only to recross the river each evening. Others hired slaves to work in Ohio for brief periods of time. Frequently enough, those plans failed as enslaved men and women and sympathetic whites fought against the practice. When Kentuck-ian Robert Patterson sought to use slave labor on his Ohio farm, whites in Dayton who had little tolerance for slavery promptly freed Patterson’s slaves, recorded their status in the county records, and assisted the freedmen and freedwomen in maintaining their freedom. Ten years later, the Union Hu-mane Society, an abolitionist and black legal aid society in St. Clairsville, sought “to collect information of the condition of all persons unlawfully held in bondage in their vicinity; to give such persons advice, information and instruction, and use all lawful means to affect their liberation.” Later that year, the Union Humane Society had identified a woman whom they suspected was being held in slavery and began working to secure her freedom.31 The most devastating blow against the continuation of bondage and slav-ery in early Ohio was delivered by the Ohio Supreme Court in 1817. Richard Lunford, whose owner had him work in Cincinnati by day, only to return to Kentucky every evening, sued for his freedom. Lunford’s case made its way to the Ohio Supreme Court, whose decision both made it more difficult for whites to use slave labor in Ohio and all but ensured that slaves who worked in Ohio could successfully sue for their freedom. In a widely reprinted opin-ion, future Supreme Court Justice John McLean ruled that “wherever the master seeks a profit, by the labor of his slave in this state, he forfeits all rights to the possession and services of such slave.” McLean also used the case to delineate the differences between Ohio and slave states. “In Kentucky, as in every state where slavery is tolerated, a presumption may perhaps arise, that every black man is a slave unless the contrary appear. In this state, the pre-sumption is different. Every man is supposed to be free, until his obligation to servitude be clearly shown.” The ruling and McLean’s opinion were widely celebrated in Ohio’s newspapers, frequently with commentary adding that the ruling was “undoubtedly a correct decision.”32

31. Pocock, “Slavery and Freedom in the Early Republic”; Constitution of the Union Hu-mane Society (St. Clairsville: Benjamin Lundy, 1816), 4; Union Humane Society, Proceedings, Cincinnati Historical Society, Manuscripts. 32. “State of Ohio v. Thomas D. Carneal,” Cincinnati Liberty Hall, June 16 and 30, 1817;


In pontificating on the differences between free Ohio and the slave states, McLean directly contravened Ohio’s own laws, which assumed that all blacks were fugitives unless proven otherwise. Yet in doing so, McLean was simply aligning the Ohio Supreme Court with the practices of local Ohio courts, towns that harbored and freed fugitives, and Quakers who mobbed Southern slaveholders, all of whom acted on the proposition that blacks in Ohio were free, even when slave owners possessed a sound legal claim to a slave.

III

Over the past two decades, historians who focus on racial ideologies in the early American republic have demonstrated that pervasive racism shaped the meanings and practices of race, slavery, and freedom across the North-ern states as they underwent the process of abolishing or excluding slavery. As valuable as these works remain, they tend to overstate the power of those racial ideologies to shape the practices of race and slavery and to limit an-tislavery politics and actions. They incorrectly assume that white Ohioans’ racial consensus was uniformly shared and largely uncontested, and thus fail to account for the antislavery political convictions and actions of both whites and blacks. Yet in early Ohio, white racism could and did coexist with a virulent strain of antislavery politics, a state identity that celebrated freedom from slavery, and a willingness of white Ohioans to recognize and protect blacks’ efforts to gain their freedom. Indeed, while something like a white “racial consensus,” which held that blacks were neither equal nor fit for citizenship, pervaded early Ohio, so did conflicts over slavery and blacks’ claims to freedom. Those conflicts would continue to shape politics, public life, and the meanings and practices of race, slavery, and freedom in Ohio straight through to the Civil War.

Western Herald and Steubenville Gazette, July 25, 1817; Zanesville Muskingum Messenger, July 17, 1817. The ruling was also reprinted in Virginia newspapers; see, for example, Petersburg (Va.) American Star, Aug. 7, 1817.

“The Most Free of the Free States”: Politics, Slavery, Race, and Regional Identity … History...

Documents

Transcript of “The Most Free of the Free States”: Politics, Slavery, Race, and Regional Identity … History...