The Bone and Sinew of the Land

by Anna-Lisa Cox

  30. Langston, From the Virginia Plantation to the National Capital, 64.

  31. Wilkerson, History of His Travels, 18.

  32. Taylor, Frontiers, 50–79; Richards, Gentlemen, 34–35, 92–100. William Lloyd Garrison made sure that the events in Cincinnati in the summer of 1841 were well covered by his Boston-based newspaper, the Liberator. Before the battle broke out in August, Garrison had already been covering more personal attacks in the city starting in July. “A Mob in Cincinnati,” Liberator, July 16, 1841.

  33. Henry Barnard and Moses B. Goodwin, History of Schools for the Colored Population (New York: Arno Press, 1969), 200.

  34. Harry Reed, Platform for Change: The Foundations of the Northern Free Black Community, 1775–1865 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1994), 127–161.

  35. Ford, Deliver Us, 484. For more on Bishop Allen and the AME Church and its schools, see Richard Newman, Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers (New York: New York University Press, 2008).

  36. For use of the term “human rights” among early American abolitionists at this time, see Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016).

  37. Phillip Lapsansky, Richard S. Newman, and Patrick Rael, Pamphlets of Protest: An Anthology of Early African-American Protest Literature, 1790–1860 (New York: Routledge, 2001), 111; John Hope Franklin and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2011), 165–166.

  38. John Wood Sweet, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730–1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 395; Richards, Gentlemen, 34.

  39. Karolyn Smardz Frost, I’ve Got a Home in Glory Land: A Lost Tale of the Underground Railroad (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 163–190.

  40. Ibid.

  41. Richards, Gentlemen, 9; Andrew Neilly, “The Violent Volunteers: A History of the Volunteer Fire Department of Philadelphia, 1736–1871” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1959), 63–69.

  42. For more on the riots of this period, see Richards’s groundbreaking Gentlemen of Property and Standing.

  43. Ibid., 3–19.

  44. For an important work on pro-slavery and prejudice in the North, see Leon Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961).

  45. While Thomas Morris started out as a supporter of Andrew Jackson in the late 1820s, in 1844 he ran for vice president on a Liberty Party ticket with James Birney as an abolitionist and equal rights advocate. Stephen Middleton, The Black Laws: Race and the Legal Process in Early Ohio (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005), 124; “Thomas Morris,” Supreme Court of Ohio, www.supremecourt.ohio.gov/SCO/formerjustices/bios/morris.asp.

  46. Silvana Siddali, “‘The Language of Wrath’: Race, Violence, and Civil Rights in Western State Constitutional Conventions, 1835–1865” (paper presented at the African Americans in the Nineteenth-Century West Research Symposium, Saint Louis University, Saint Louis, Missouri, May 21, 2016).

  47. Ibid.

  48. Quoted in Richards, Gentlemen, 95. Richards suggests that Lytle probably used a more obscene term than “castrate.”

  49. Ibid., 93–100; Taylor, Frontiers, 109–112.

  50. Andrew Judson to Reverend Samuel May, March 1833, quoted in Diana Ross McCain, To All on Equal Terms: The Life and Legacy of Prudence Crandall (Hartford: Connecticut Commission on Arts, Tourism, Culture, History and Film, 2004), 29.

  51. John Melvin Werner, “Race Riots in the United States During the Age of Jackson: 1824–1849” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 1972); Sinha, The Slave’s Cause, 232–239.

  52. Richards, Gentlemen, 101. For more on Elijah Lovejoy’s activities in Saint Louis, including his educating of African Americans there, see Christopher Hamilton’s interview in Benjamin Drew’s A North-Side View of Slavery.

  53. Richards, Gentlemen, 103–104, 106.

  54. Charles Noye Zucker, “The Free Negro Question: Race Relations in AnteBellum Illinois, 1801–1860” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 1971), 123–124, 129. Zucker’s dissertation offers an excellent overview of the antislavery movement and the rise of white supremacy in antebellum Illinois.

  55. Quoted in Richards, Gentlemen, 109; Zucker, “The Free Negro Question,” 184. For a full exploration of the way in which Lovejoy fit into the larger abolitionist movement in Illinois, see Dana Elizabeth Weiner, Race and Rights: Fighting Slavery and Prejudice in the Old Northwest, 1830–1870 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2013), 100–110.

  56. “Colonization,” Liberator, October 1841.

  57. Quoted in Ford, Deliver Us, 501.

  58. For more on African American presses at this time, see Todd Vogel, The Black Press: New Literary and Historical Essays (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001). During my research I have been surprised by how well connected the Liberator was, becoming a clearinghouse for other newspapers and republishing articles about violence rising across the country at this time, from an attack against an African American physician in Detroit to each of the Cincinnati riots. And Garrison was far from alone. A study of the Carl Bajema clippings collection (Grand Rapids Public Library, African Americans, 1830–1856, Folder 1) in Grand Rapids, Michigan, revealed a variety of newspapers covering issues surrounding prejudice and violence against African Americans during this period. A broader study of how newspapers across the United States focused on prejudiced violence during the 1830s is worth further study.

  59. Taylor, Frontiers, 109–115.

  60. Richards, Gentlemen, 92–100; Taylor, Frontiers, 109–112; “Mob in Cincinnati. Destruction of Mr. Birney’s Press,” Liberator, August 13, 1836; “The Cincinnati Riot,” Liberator, August 27, 1836; “Mr. Birney,” Liberator, September 17, 1836.

  61. D. Laurence Rogers, Apostles of Equality: The Birneys, the Republicans, and the Civil War (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2011), xi–xiii. See this volume for more on James Birney’s life before coming to Cincinnati.

  62. Ibid., 107–117; Clayton Douglas Cormany, “Ohio’s Abolitionist Campaign: The Study of Rhetoric of Conversion” (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 1981), 30–33.

  63. James Birney, The American Churches: The Bulwarks of American Slavery (London, 1840), 8.

  64. Ibid., 24–25. For an excellent summation of the religious dialogue over slavery during the revolutionary period, see Mark A. Noll, In the Beginning Was the Word: The Bible in American Public Life, 1492–1783 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

  65. Birney, American Churches, 6.

  66. Ibid., 5, 32.

  67. Neilly, “The Violent Volunteers,” 63–69; Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 53–76.

  68. Emma Lou Thornbrough, The Negro in Indiana Before 1900: A Study of a Minority (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1957), 58.

  69. Taylor, Frontiers of Freedom, 188–193.

  70. Drew, A North-Side View of Slavery, 199.

  71. Cheek and Cheek, John Mercer Langston, 62.

  72. Taylor, Frontiers, 118; Richards, Gentlemen, 123. There was also a “Captain Brough” mentioned as leading the white militia in Cincinnati, who became notorious for his unwillingness to keep the peace or defend African American lives and homes during the 1841 race war. See Liberator articles cited in note 1 of this chapter.

  73. As Robert Parkinson points out in his excellent book The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), using the press to prejudice, divide, and bring people to violence was an American tradition dating back to the Revolutionary War. But by the 1830s there were many more newspapers and more readers. And newspapers had gained even more power. For the role of newspapers in fomenting these attacks, see Richards, Gentlemen.

  74. For a strong
recent critique of the “uplift” argument, see Ibram Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Nation Books, 2016). For a critique of “uplift” written at the time of these battles against equality, see Hosea Easton’s brilliant A Treatise on the Intellectual Character and Civil and Political Condition of the Colored People of the U. States and the Prejudice Exercised Towards Them (Philadelphia: Rhistoric Publications, 1969 [1837]).

  75. The riots in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1834 and 1835 hit Hosea Easton close to home. For more on Easton and his family, see George R. Price, “The Easton Family of Southeast Massachusetts: The Dynamics Surrounding Five Generations of Human Rights Activism, 1753–1935” (PhD diss., University of Montana, 2006); Hosea Easton, George R. Price, and James Brewer Stewart, To Heal the Scourge of Prejudice: The Life and Writings of Hosea Easton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999).

  76. Easton, A Treatise, 43.

  77. Ibid.

  78. Information and quote from Richards, Gentlemen, 123.

  79. See note 1 in this chapter for full citation of sources for this section on the actions of the mob and Wilkerson’s defense against them in 1841.

  80. Taylor, Frontiers, 20–25; John Langston, From the Virginia Plantation to the National Capital; or, The First and Only Negro Representative in Congress from the Old Dominion (New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1968 [1894]), 64; Cheek and Cheek, John Mercer Langston, 59–63; Richards, Gentlemen, 122–129; “Riot at Cincinnati,” Liberator, September 4, 1841; “Riot, Mob, Confusion and Bloodshed,” Liberator, September 17, 1841; “The Mob,” Liberator, September 17, 1841; “The Riot in Cincinnati,” Liberator, September 24, 1841; “Reign of Terror Again in Cincinnati,” Liberator, September 24, 1841; “Cincinnati Riot,” Liberator, October 1, 1841; “Selections from the Cincinnati Philanthropist,” Liberator, October 1, 1841.

  Chapter 7: “The right of the people peaceably to assemble”

  1. I acknowledge with gratitude the support of the Spencer Foundation in funding this research on integrated and African American educational opportunities in the rural antebellum Northwest Territory states.

  2. Union Literary Institute Preservation Society (ULIPS), Union Literary Institute Board of Managers’ Secretary Book: From Original Book Housed at the Indiana Historical Society, (Indiana: ULIPS, 2001), 39. My grateful thanks to Roane Smothers and the Board of the ULIPS for their tireless efforts to preserve the history of this extraordinary school and their willingness to share their research with me.

  3. ULIPS, “Constitution,” Board of Managers’ Secretary Book, 26–45.

  4. The board members in the first few years of the Union Literary Institute’s founding changed pretty frequently, but core members included Thornton Alexander (African American, Virginia), William R. J. Clemens (African American and the first board president, born in Indiana but father born in Virginia), Levi Coffin, Nathan Thomas (Quaker, born in Indiana in 1811, but his parents were from the South), David Willcutt (North Carolina, Quaker); ULIPS, Board of Managers’ Secretary Book, 14–16; Center for Historic Preservation (Ball State University), Randolph County (Indiana), and ULIPS, Preservation Plan for the Union Literary Institute Building, Randolph County, Indiana (Muncie, IN: Ball State University, 2010), 13–49; Roane Smothers, “Union Literary Institute National Register of Historic Places Nomination” (unpublished, in author’s possession, 2014); US Department of the Interior, Census Office, Population Schedules of the Seventh Census of the United States, 1850, Indiana, Randolph County and Ohio, Darke County. For more on the relationship between Quakers and these early African American pioneers to the Northwest Territory states, see Stephen Vincent, Southern Seed, Northern Soil: African-American Farm Communities in the Midwest, 1765–1900 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).

  5. ULIPS, “Constitution,” Board of Managers’ Secretary Book, 26–45.

  6. Ibid.

  7. Valerie Scura Trovato, “Slate Pencils? Education of Free and Enslaved African American Children at the Bray School, Williamsburg, Virginia, 1760–1774” (master’s thesis, The College of William and Mary, 2016).

  8. Maurice Jackson, Let This Voice Be Heard: Anthony Benezet, Father of Atlantic Abolitionism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), ix–xv, 1–30, 57–70.

  9. Ibid., 1–30.

  10. For a good overview of the education of free African American children in the antebellum South, see Loren Schweninger, Black Property Owners in the South, 1790–1915 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997).

  11. David Kantrowitz, More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829–1889 (New York: Penguin Books, 2012), 26.

  12. Leslie Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 64–66.

  13. Henry Barnard and Moses B. Goodwin, History of Schools for the Colored Population (New York: Arno Press, 1969 [1871]), 195.

  14. John Hope Franklin, The Free Negro in North Carolina,1790–1860 (New York: Russell & Russell, 1969), 171.

  15. Barnard and Goodwin, History of Schools for the Colored Population, 196; Russell Irvine, The African American Quest for Institutions of Higher Education Before the Civil War: The Forgotten Histories of the Ashmun Institute, Liberia College, and Avery College (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2010), 436; “Building to Be Renamed for Pioneer Black Educator Anne Marie Be-craft,” Georgetown University, www.georgetown.edu/news/anne-marie-becraft-hall; Lacy K. Ford, Deliver Us from Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 183–184.

  16. See C. L. Glenn, “Enslaved and Free Blacks Before 1862,” in African-American/Afro-Canadian Schooling (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

  17. For more on the intersections between education in America and concepts of citizenship, see Carolyn Eastman, A Nation of Speechifiers: Making an American Public After the Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Kim Warren, The Quest for Citizenship: African American and Native American Education in Kansas, 1880–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Hilary Moss, Schooling Citizens: The Struggle for African American Education in Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

  18. Diana Ross McCain, To All on Equal Terms: The Life and Legacy of Prudence Crandall (Canterbury, CT: Prudence Crandall Museum, 2004), 13–15. For more on Prudence Crandall and the work of other women on the antebellum East Coast to educate African American children, see Philip Foner and Josephine F. Pacheco, Three Who Dared: Prudence Crandall, Margaret Douglass, Myrtilla Miner: Champions of Antebellum Black Education (London: Greenwood, 1984).

  19. Quoted in McCain, To All, 27.

  20. Ibid., 32–34.

  21. Ibid.

  22. Ibid., 36–39.

  23. Ibid., 40.

  24. Irvine, The African American Quest, 165–184; Russell Irvine and Donna Zani Dunkerton, “The Noyes Academy, 1834–35: The Road to the Oberlin Collegiate Institute and the Higher Education of African-Americans in the Nineteenth Century,” Western Journal of Black Studies 22, no. 4 (winter 1998): 260.

  25. Irvine, The African American Quest, 172–175.

  26. “Colored School at Canaan,” Liberator, September 5, 1835 (accessed on Accessible Archives, August 12, 2016); Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 231; Irvine, The African American Quest, 176–177.

  27. For more on African Americans achieving higher levels of education in the early years of the United States, see Daniel Harrison, “Southern Presbyterians and the Negro in the Early National Period,” Journal of Negro History 58, no. 3 (1973): 291–312; ULIPS, Preservation Plan, 13–49.

  28. “Deeply Interesting Facts,” Philanthropist (1836–1843), December 24, 1839, 2. Clarissa Wright’s story is drawn from this long and detailed article.

  29. Clarissa Wright’s report is featured in Susan Wattles, “Education Amo
ng Colored People—Report,” Philanthropist (1836–1843), November 26, 1839, 1. For more on Clarissa Wright and other Garrisonian white female abolitionists and their teaching roles in African American schools in antebellum Ohio, see Douglas Gamble, “Moral Suasion in the West: Garrisonian Abolitionism, 1831–1861” (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 1973), 143–144. Gamble makes clear that he never found a school where women were on the board, as they were at the Union Literary Institute.

  30. For more on Clarissa Wright and her family’s abolitionist activities, see Lawrence Goodheart, Abolitionist, Actuary, Atheist: Elizur Wright and the Reform Impulse (Kent, OH: Kent State University, 1990).

  31. John Melvin Werner, “Race Riots in the United States During the Age of Jackson: 1824–1849” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 1972), 103, 172, 177; Goodheart, Abolitionist, 37–39.

  32. Northwest Ordinance, July 13, 1787; (National Archives Microfilm Publication M332, roll 9); Miscellaneous Papers of the Continental Congress, 1774–1789; Records of the Continental and Confederation Congresses and the Constitutional Convention, 1774–1789, Record Group 360; National Archives, www.archives.gov/historical-docs/todays-doc/?dod-date=713. Note that this clause in Article 3 of the Ordinance is directly followed by clear proscriptions that “the utmost good faith shall always be observed towards the Indians.” Clearly many of the intentions of the 1787 Ordinance were broken where both African-descended and indigenous peoples were concerned. For more on the history of indigenous peoples in the Northwest Territory, see Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

  33. “Deeply Interesting Facts.”

  34. Ibid.

  35. Taylor, Frontiers, 94; “Deeply Interesting Facts.” For more on Amzi Barber and the Wright family’s involvement in the struggle for equality in Cincinnati and Ohio, see Stacey Robertson, Betsy Mix Cowles: Champion of Equality (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2014).