The Bone and Sinew of the Land

by Anna-Lisa Cox

  Elijah Lovejoy had recently left his home in Saint Louis, Missouri, horrified by the murder of a free African American man there. That African American man in the city had been captured and tied to a stake where he was slowly burned to death on a bonfire as hundreds of whites looked on. This incident had made Lovejoy more than a little anti-Catholic, blaming the murder on Catholics in the city. But Lovejoy was about to find out just how murderously prejudiced Protestants in a free state could be.52

  As in so many of these battles, those organizing the attack against equality and freedom in Alton were high-ranking officials. Among the Alton group that opposed Elijah Lovejoy was the new attorney general of Illinois, Usher F. Linder, and Dr. Thomas Hope, soon to become mayor of Alton. They were joined by men of great rank and education: the Harvard-educated Dr. William Emerson, Dr. Horace Beal from Maryland, and Dr. James Jennings from Virginia.

  These men met to discuss whether to murder Lovejoy or just torture him. In the end they decided to destroy Lovejoy’s press, then capture him, strip him naked, pour hot tar over his body, and force him to straddle a thin splintered log as they carried him out of town. This, they all agreed, would be the most humane option. But in the end, Lovejoy died defending his press, as the gentlemen of Alton tried to wrest from him his right to free speech.53

  What is rarely mentioned is that Alton lies in Madison County, which was already home to a large settlement of African American farmers by the time Lovejoy arrived. Nor was Lovejoy the first equal rights advocate to live in Madison County. George Churchill had been its earliest state representative and by 1822 (when the state of Illinois was only four years old) had presented a petition put together by the large and established free African American population in Madison County. In it, they asked for the right to vote as well as protection from kidnappers. Historians have not noted what happened to the African Americans who signed the petition, but George Churchill was soon burned in effigy by some of the whites living in his county at the time for his willingness to represent the African American taxpaying members of his county.54

  The attack on Elijah Lovejoy’s press was not just an attack on abolition; it was an attack on racial equality of all kinds. As a white farmer who was part of the mob that killed Lovejoy shouted, “How would you like a damned nigger going home with your daughter?”55

  Historians have so far not unburied what happened to the African Americans of Madison County during the attack on Elijah Lovejoy. But if whites murdered this respected and well-connected white man, there is little telling what they did—or had been doing—to the landed African American farmers in the county.

  One year later, in 1838, Philadelphia was hit again. But this time it was worse. Schools, orphanages, churches, meeting halls, and printing presses were all destroyed as whites attacked the engines of equality, trying to break hearts and hope. They seemed intent upon making a nation divisible, all to empower inequality and privilege.

  By 1841, many of the cities and towns of the northern United States had glass from the windows of African American businesses, homes, and churches ground into the mud of their streets, shards of crystal pressed into the cracks between their paving stones, glittering—sharp reminders of violence and loss.

  This violence had a powerful and circular logic. Bigoted whites violently attacked anyone or anything that might represent a productive or peaceful coexistence between Americans that these prejudiced people were labeling “black” and “white.” These prejudiced whites then pointed to the growing division as proof that whites and blacks could never live together in harmony.

  Worse yet, if their circular argument was convincing—that whites could not possibly tolerate free and successful blacks—then the abolitionist movement to end slavery was cut off at the root. Why would northern whites support the ending of slavery if they believed that equality for all was impossible—if they thought freeing enslaved people in the United States would only lead to division and violence?

  Pro-slavery advocates rejoiced in the violence against African Americans and the destruction of examples of successful equality or integration. They must have hoped that this destructiveness would convince more whites to support the forced removal of free African Americans through the work of the American Colonization Society. And even convince African Americans themselves that the hearts and minds of whites in their nation had changed so drastically that they had to leave. The goals of this warfare were not secret; nor did they go unnoticed. After one of these many attacks, the Boston-based abolitionist newspaper the Liberator decried the fact that prejudiced whites were using these battles as “proof… of the inveterate antipathy between the two races.”56

  No wonder John Forsyth, President Andrew Jackson’s secretary of state, urged Vice President Martin Van Buren in 1836 to encourage even more attacks against African Americans and their white allies in the North. Forsyth and many he worked with knew that there was still too much sympathy for the old ideals of liberty and equality in the North, so he asked the vice president, a New York native, to organize “a little more mob discipline.” Forsyth, understanding that any mob actions must look like the work of rabble-rousers, not gentlemen, cautioned that “a portion of the magician’s skill is required in the matter.” He wanted Van Buren to do some deft misdirection and some fancy hocus-pocus but urged him to be quick about it, adding, “The sooner you set the imps to work the better.” But misdirection couldn’t disguise the fact that the people of the nation were being sawn in half, not just between North and South, but along a violent color line.57

  But prejudice did not move every white person, and most African Americans could see right through to the truth—that these were choices being made to destroy equality and strengthen slavery. And together advocates for equality and freedom continued to fight injustice through their petitions, their organizations, their sermons, their schools, their newspapers, and their pamphlets.

  And prejudiced whites could not destroy all of the newspapers that were rising, that were bearing witness. Editors, writers, reporters, and newspaper owners were making sure that this movement against equality did not go unreported. They tried to print the truth—that these forces rising to strengthen prejudice and the color line should not be defended as regional or a local spat. While some tried to explain away a particular mob action as sparked by an influx of Irish immigrants or a dried-up river, a brothel or an insult, these newspapers reminded their readers that this violence was a national problem, a national wounding. In addition to abolitionist presses, many presses that were not actively bigoted were bearing witness.58

  And the prejudiced whites of the United States, whether secretaries of state, city mayors, or farmers, despised not just the words of these torchbearers for liberty but any instance in which whites were not trying to destroy blacks. They condemned any example of toleration, peace, or cooperation between people of different skin color—because each example revealed that prejudice was a choice and inequality a violent invention.

  No wonder so many whites hated James Birney, for he was a white man willing to stand with African Americans for the causes of equality and freedom. He was editor of the Philanthropist, one of the oldest abolitionist newspapers in the United States, first started in Ohio then abandoned. But James Birney had restarted it in Cincinnati in 1836, hiring some of the most ardent equal rights activists in the nation to write for him. And he paid dearly for it.59

  James Birney’s press was attacked and destroyed in 1836, and if he had not been out of town that night, Elijah Lovejoy may not have been the only white abolitionist killed in the Northwest Territory states.60

  James Birney was an interesting one. Born into a wealthy slave-owning family in Kentucky and educated at Princeton University, he enslaved people from a young age. His first enslaved people were received as a gift, so that he and his young wife could start their life together in luxury. Much about Birney’s youth must have pained him later. There was the weakness for gambling that led his young family perilous
ly close to ruin and did ruin the lives of many enslaved people when he sold entire families in order to pay off his debts. Then there were his years as the owner of a cotton plantation in Alabama, where he became an ardent supporter of the colonization movement and its mission to remove all free African Americans from the United States. But in the mid-1830s something in him changed.61

  It could not have been easy to turn his back on wealth, on social standing, on respectability. But by 1836 James Birney had done all of this. No longer part of the southern slaveholding elite, he was now a despised abolitionist in Cincinnati, trying to change the nation.62

  Birney was gripped with a fervor for the immediate end of slavery. He published the work of equal rights advocates intent not just on the plight of the enslaved south of the Ohio River but on the evils of prejudice rising in the North, even in Ohio itself. But how strange it must have been to find himself transforming backward, embracing the old-fashioned ideals of the Revolution now more than a generation past, while he watched both his church and his nation shift away from them.

  But he was not alone. He was joined by a new generation of people, black and white, who were arguing for equal rights and freedom in America. He worked with William Lloyd Garrison, another abolitionist newspaper editor based in Boston, although the two men could not have been more different, for Garrison was raised close to poverty in the North.

  Garrison’s parents had signed him on to an apprenticeship in the rapidly booming newspaper printing business. In 1831, this idealistic twenty-six-year-old decided to start a newspaper called the Liberator, in which he advocated for the immediate end of slavery and resistance to inequality. He could not have done it without the financial support of African Americans, who became his first subscribers and spread word of his paper.

  While Garrison had never supported slavery, Birney was a convert, and he had a convert’s zeal. This zeal sometimes blinded him to the trouble his passion might bring to those around him, whether it was his family or his African American neighbors in Cincinnati. But he was trying. And he had a new project he was excited about.

  James Birney was immersed in a project that gripped his lawyer’s mind. He was planning a trip to England to give a series of lectures in London and around that country to raise money and interest in the abolitionist cause. He had decided to talk about the churches of the United States and the ways in which they supported slavery. He particularly focused on the Methodist Church, a church he had once helped lead back in the South.

  So he started digging around in church records, appalled to see just how much churches had changed in just fifty years and how much they had forgotten. He discovered so many facts that he had not known. His own Methodist Church had once required all its members to free their slaves or be “barred from our Society or to the Lord’s Supper” till they had complied.63

  And in 1794 the Presbyterian Church had written strong words acknowledging that African-descended people were fellow human beings and that enslaving them was a grave injustice. Yet by the late 1830s that same denomination had reversed itself, not just staying neutral but actually encouraging slavery and inequality. Even Birney, who knew that church well, was astounded by the terrible transformation, as he found example after example of churches siding with enslavers and growing in monstrous prejudice.64

  As he read through church records, Birney could see the various denominations going from their original stance of seeing slavery as “a mournful evil” and a “gross violation of the most precious and sacred rights of human nature” to reversing their course and choosing to uphold slavery, rejecting the concept that people of African descent were fully human. Indeed, many were now arguing that slavery was a necessary good rather than a necessary evil. Birney was well aware of this troubling turn and published the resolution of a group of enslavers in Clinton, Mississippi, who wrote, “Slavery through the south and the west is not felt as an evil, moral or political, but it is recognized… as a blessing to both master and slave.” This was a reversal of the revolutionary ideals of the nation, the ideals that had propelled its actions toward freedom and equality for decades. Instead, these supporters of slavery were clearly basing their arguments on the belief that all men were not created equal.65

  Were the enslavers surprised by how rapidly whites in the nonslave states and territories took to their argument? Maybe they had not realized just how strong the backlash against freedom and equality had become in the states to the north of them. Did they imagine that Harvard-educated men from Maine would support their cause in Illinois? That the former abolitionist Reverend Joel Parker, who now held the powerful position of president of the Presbyterian Theological Seminary in New York, would preach a sermon titled “Abolition might be pronounced a sin as slavery”?66

  And now supporters of prejudice and inequality in the North were using swords, guns, cudgels, torches, and words. Because for this evil to rise, it took more than words; it took destruction—and intent.

  In Pennsylvania, there was careful planning to advance inequality. Most white lawmakers did not respond with outrage or sympathy at the terrible losses the African Americans and their white allies suffered in Philadelphia at the hands of mobs. Instead, these white leaders took a stand for increasing prejudice and supporting slavery—using as their excuse that it was the only way to keep friendly with the slave states and thus keep the nation from dividing. True, the white politicians defended their actions by arguing that slavery and prejudice were realities they could not change. But it was not a reality they were facing; it was a reality they were making.

  Of course, as these prejudiced white politicians and their supporters in the North were already making violently clear, they were not happy with the population of free and successful people of African descent that had grown out of the first wave of abolition in America. Maybe they thought it was better to passionately uphold an argument that no white enslaver in the South could possibly wish to end slavery than to face the possibility of more free African Americans.

  Whatever their reasons, white lawmakers in Pennsylvania worked hard in 1837 and 1838 to draft a new state constitution that would steal the vote from anyone of African descent. It went to the polls for ratification in October 1838. Despite the riot that May that destroyed Pennsylvania Hall—the city’s newest and grandest meeting hall built to host meetings supporting the cause of liberty and equality for all—whites turned their hatred into political action and voted for the new constitution that denied the vote to African Americans. Their votes outnumbered, African Americans could not block its passage.67

  Pennsylvania, that state that had hosted the nation’s first national gathering of abolitionists, that state of brotherly love that was supposed to lead the nation toward its best ideals, not follow other states down a path of injustice, now had a majority of white people who had decided to turn their backs on those ideals. This was a particular sorrow.

  But that state was far from alone in doing this. It was merely joining other states in both the North and the South that were working to destroy equality by destroying African Americans’ rights. Whites in Indiana had finally joined most of the other Northwest Territory states in passing an anti-immigration Black Code bond law. Now any African American entering that state had to register with a local white official and the Black Code bond was $500.68

  Of course, these injustices were not going unnoticed. Each one of these attacks were reported in sympathetic newspapers. They were discussed at conventions. They were spoken of in churches and by traveling preachers. And as the news spread, it must have seemed to African Americans, and to all who fought with them against this rising prejudice, that equality was not just dying; it was being murdered.

  Now it was 1841, and the men on the roof around James Wilkerson were convinced that violence was about to rise again. After all, they knew this city better than he did. They were “Freesies,” the name given to free people of color in that city. This city was their home, their base, and many of them were r
ivermen working on the Ohio and Mississippi. And they had seen much in their travels. Some owned their own boats—flat boats, cargo boats, passenger ferries—carrying anything that needed moving. Others worked those floating palaces, the steam-driven paddle wheel ships.69

  These Cincinnati men went farther than the Ohio River, for good money could be made taking loads south down the Mississippi River. And those travels put them deep into the new slave states, where the brutal work of cotton production was leading to horrors. These new plantations were large, set in a vast freshly settled land whose entire legal and social system rested on forcing large groups of people to labor. But the rivermen would have witnessed.

  There are few accounts from them of what they saw, but they were likely similar to what the African American Isaac Griffin saw. He first made the trip down the Ohio and then the Mississippi as a young man sometime in the 1840s, still enslaved. Later he would try to tell what he witnessed: “Just before day, the first time I went down, as I was floating down the Grand Gulf, I heard the whip cracking and a man crying, ‘Oh Lord! Oh Lord! Oh Lord!’ I was afraid somebody was murdering: I called my master—he said, ‘Somebody is whipping his slave.’ We had to put in there. I saw the man. He was put over a log, his feet tied, his hands tied, and a rail between. They would whip him, then rest upon it. They flogged him off and on until daylight. His back…” Here Isaac Griffin stopped, unable to continue.70

  And many on the rooftops of Cincinnati that night in 1841 knew these horrors more intimately, for they had survived them.

  They had run hundreds of miles to be here; others had come already free. But all of them were agreed: they were not going to run anymore. Here they were free. Here they could do something. They could keep their families together, and they could protect them.

  Their life here in this city might be hard, but it was better than what others suffered in bondage. Here they possessed their own bodies, their own lives, and their families, their friends, their community. Now they were prepared to lay down their lives to preserve all that they held dear.