“I had never been able to read much,” Hodges declared, but he was inspired by abolitionist lectures he heard in New York, and he subscribed to three newspapers, including the Colored American.85 He also organized African Americans in the developing community of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to take part in black state conventions held in the early 1840s. Hodges spoke at the 1841 convention in Troy, where he praised the virtues of agrarian life in contrast to the limited opportunity available in the cities. That same year, he helped organize the Williamsburg Union Temperance Benevolent Society and served as its first president.86
Hodges plunged into political work in the 1840s, deciding to publish a newspaper of his own to claim an independent public voice. In 1846, New York voters faced a referendum on the property qualification for black suffrage, and Hodges joined the struggle against disfranchisement. A white editor of the New York Sun urged readers to reject any change, arguing that black men’s voting would be a step toward racial intermarriage. Hodges responded to the editor, but the Sun charged $15 to print his argument, then placed it in a corner of the paper reserved for advertisements. “The Sun shines for all white men, not black men,” the editor explained. Hodges connected with Thomas Van Renesslear, a black activist who had previously worked on antislavery newspapers, and together they launched the Ram’s Horn on January 1, 1847.87 Only one issue of the paper survives, and it includes an announcement signed “W. A. H.” for a meeting of the New York Emigration Association, intended to organize black settlement on the Smith Lands. Hodges believed the land grants “must eventually prove a blessing or a curse,” though he leaned toward the former. Once they moved upstate, settlers would contribute “timber, leather, iron, furniture and clothing” to markets for trade. “There too,” he added, “our young men and women who are now the victims of vice and idleness, would have regular employment under those who have an interest in their future happiness.”88 Hodges preached the virtue of rural life, encouraging people to leave cities like New York and even smaller towns like Utica and Troy. He became “convinced that something besides ‘speechifying’ … had to be done if we wanted our rights.” After a series of meetings, Hodges forged a “little band” with eight black families, left Williamsburg, and settled on a 40-acre tract in the Adirondacks.89
Hodges made his home in Franklin County and later reported that while living there, he was elected to the position of town collector. A New York law of 1845 prohibited any property qualification for officeholding. Owning land might have allowed Hodges to vote for himself and some of his fellow black settlers to cast ballots as well. But his election points to the odd legal reality that it was easier for a black man to hold office in 1840s New York than it was for him to vote.90 Hodges’s election provided a direct form of political engagement and affirmed his legal position in the state and the nation. Settling on the Smith Lands allowed him to secure that place.
Willis Hodges’s story brings together histories of black agrarianism, anticolonization, uplift, and the pursuit of formal political rights. His life stands at the nexus of those critical aspects of black citizenship politics in the early antebellum period. Hodges illuminates the legal possibilities of black life in the mid-nineteenth century. Activists made potent arguments about citizenship and took action that secured political rights. But his experience was peculiar in many respects. Rare fortune opened the door for his achievements: his free parents helped him secure a formal education, he had disposable income that allowed him to relocate to and move within New York, and he had a helpful white man recommend him for a job as a porter. Only through those opportunities did Hodges achieve something like the citizenship that people like Samuel Cornish had so long tried to build. Leaving the city allowed him to own land, contribute his labor to a community, and find an avenue to formal political participation. But what Hodges secured was a contingent citizenship; it was not a status available equally to African Americans.91 Black people crafted citizenship through a struggle for specific rights based on the terms that had conferred those rights on narrow a subset of white men. Hodges’s achievements, particularly his election to local office, could obscure the exclusion that characterized black people’s lives. Surpassing the state’s legal standard for black suffrage did not directly confront the inequality at the heart of the state’s law. Instead, Hodges assumed the burden of his blackness and asked other African Americans to do the same, to navigate the world under the legal weight of their race. The citizenship that activists constructed and the legal rights Hodges attained involved adopting a specific, regimented way of life, embracing a set of restrictions that might, in return, produce certain privileges and protections.
FIGURE 1. Willis Augustus Hodges, from I. Garland Penn, ed., The Black Press and Its Editors (1891). Hodges earned a place in this collection because of his work as a newspaper editor. But his life also reflects the many other avenues for black citizenship politics that people pursued outside of the realm of print culture.
Hodges’s outstanding accomplishments emphasize the challenges African Americans faced as they sought legal protections in American communities. His experiences reveal the boundaries of a citizen status that black people had to earn through contributions that white Americans only reluctantly permitted or acknowledged. Citizenship was useful to black people because it was being constructed in public debate, but existing legal structures constrained the terms of that debate. Given the barriers that stood between black people and the legal lives they imagined, it is worth reflecting again on John Russwurm and the way he explained his move to Liberia. Black people might achieve a great deal in the United States, as Willis Hodges had. Individuals could experience a meaningful kind of legal belonging. But given the constant hurdling, given the terms under which they may be grudgingly admitted into the political community, perhaps John Russwurm was right to say black Americans could never truly enjoy their citizenship. As African Americans fought against racial exclusion, they built their own set of barriers to membership, crafting a citizenship that was less than freedom and that reproduced inequalities. Those restrictive arguments continued to shape black protest in the years to come.
CHAPTER 2
“Union Is Strength”: Building an American Citizenship
Temperance Hall was an odd name for a former tavern. Briefly in the 1830s, the three-story building in Philadelphia’s Northern Liberties, a few blocks from the Delaware River and a short stroll from Independence Hall, was a fashionable place to have a drink and see a concert or play. But the Northern Exchange, as it was then known, went out of fashion, and when the business failed, a group of teetotalers purchased it to serve as a meetinghouse. The building embodied the evils the temperance advocates looked to reform, and its new name gave their program a constant voice. Presumably, they would have held their major gatherings in the second-floor theater, meetings that likely attracted some of the city’s 10,000 free black residents, among the largest such populations in the antebellum North.1
Whether or not they joined the teetotal crusade, black Philadelphians certainly knew about and had access to the building. For four days in August 1845, activists reserved Temperance Hall to hold what they later called rather simply a “Convention of Colored People.” Unlike other antebellum conventions, little evidence remains regarding the substance of the event. No surviving list records the names of attendees or officers. No minutes indicate who addressed the gathering or what issues the delegates debated. That the convention lasted four days might suggest that it included a large group of attendees and participants; it could also mean that a handful of delegates disagreed for days about strategy. And it is frustratingly unclear whether the event’s organizers planned it