These debates among black activists and white lawmakers were particularly urgent in the early 1840s, as Texas moved to the center of American political discussions. Debates over Texas annexation raised questions about the very shape of the nation and what geographic change might mean for national principles. In 1838, John Quincy Adams, then a Massachusetts congressman, spoke against Texas annexation, arguing that the “gag rule” that blocked discussion of slavery had silenced significant opposition to proposals to add Texas to the union. Adams felt that the principle of the nation as “a compact of the People” might crumble if Congress voted to annex Texas without representing the breadth of American opinion on the issue.25 Meanwhile, President John Tyler laid the groundwork for Texas annexation as early as 1841, and by 1843, cabinet officials publicly promoted annexation as a way to defend the country against antislavery British influence. By alleging British conspiracy, they framed expansion south and west as essential to national interests and identity, not simply a concern of southern states.26 Other northerners echoed Adams’s concerns, as in a Massachusetts meeting in which people argued that annexation endangered the republic. “ ‘Domestic tranquility,’ ” they said, “will not be promoted by the increased strength of its great disturbing cause.” Texas seemed poised to determine whether the country would remain half slave and half free, to make a definitive statement on “what the country itself shall be.”27
The extent to which the physical shape of the nation and its defining characteristics were up for debate in the late 1830s and early 1840s gave particular currency to black people’s arguments that citizenship should first and foremost connect individuals to the federal government. When activists called themselves citizens of the United States or appealed to federal authority, they made themselves part of urgent conversations about what constituted the United States, who belonged in the country, and how its government should relate to individual Americans. Black activists spoke a language that was familiar and important to lawmakers and others when they made their arguments about the terms and content of citizenship in a dramatically changing nation.28
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As they argued that citizenship should connect them to the federal government, African Americans worked to build a broad political community that transcended state and local boundaries. They worked simultaneously to forge a black American community and an American citizen status. Beginning in the late 1820s, a handful of New Yorkers sought to represent the free black populace, hoping to unite African American voices and address their shared concerns. Understanding that their arguments about citizenship could affect all free black Americans, they wanted their statements to emanate from a coalition that crossed state borders. Unity was a central idea in their politics, but activists disagreed about the form a coalition should take and the ideas that should motivate its work.
Black newspapers and national conventions were two of the most powerful tools activists used to create a black American political community. Cornish’s work at the Rights of All emphasized the power of political unity. Faced with the financial challenges of sustaining a newspaper in the early antebellum period, Cornish’s investors called for support from a broad community of “people of colour” who might fill their subscription rolls. Encouraging people to feel connected to one another could make the paper financially stable and further black protest by tapping the energies and ideas of a larger body of potential activists. In 1829, Cornish and his colleagues argued that the Rights of All was “the only channel of communication which we have with the whites—the only voice by which we can speak to our brethren at a distance.” They understood that newspapers were crucial political tools for uniting people and amplifying their statements to lawmakers and the voting public.29
Calls for a wider black political coalition seemed especially urgent in response to the American Colonization Society’s alarming vision of forced removal. Activists had launched the national convention movement in 1830, and delegates to that first meeting made clear the ties that bound them to the nation. They denounced the ACS as the “African Colonization Society,” denying its organizers’ claims to represent black Americans. They also established their own “American Society” of free black people and announced its chief goal as “improving their condition in the United States.” They undercut the push for emigration to Liberia by calling for a black settlement in Upper Canada—present-day Ontario—not as a permanent home for African Americans but as a means to alleviate the prejudice and economic inequality that resulted from overcrowding in northeastern urban centers.30
The ACS’s removal programs, which were organized at the state level, gave rise to shared concerns that brought free black people together across state borders. African Americans recognized that ACS supporters would not be satisfied with simply removing black people from Maryland or Ohio. Activists identified black American political concerns and worked beyond state borders by traveling and exchanging information. These were central political tactics in demanding a national citizen status that would offer legal protection from injustices like forced removal. In 1833, Nathaniel Paul, a black minister based in Albany, New York, leaned on an image of unified protest in his anticolonization work. “The coloured people are unanimous in their detestation of, and opposition to, this Society,” he noted, “and if they go to Africa, it will be because they are compelled.”31 The ACS pushed activists to assert a connection to the soil on which they stood, and that rhetoric claimed a physical space and forged bonds among black Americans.
Opposing colonization thus united black Americans in a broad political community and encouraged activists’ investment in unity as a tool to secure rights through citizenship. After holding national conventions each year from 1831 to 1835, black activists did not gather in the latter half of the decade, but they looked to revive the event in the summer of 1840 when Maryland lawmakers proposed state-funded black removal. On June 16, a group of activists meeting in New York called for a national convention, declaring that “the existence of the late Maryland Black Law should arouse every colored inhabitant of this Nation to a proper sense of his endangered condition.” The organizers hoped the convention would bring together an impressive number of black Americans, enabling “simultaneous action” against the ACS. They chose New Haven as the site for their proposed meeting, perhaps to convey the power the movement had outside of larger urban centers. In a nod to the geographical breadth in which black politics flourished, the several dozen signers of the document identified themselves by their home cities, including Brooklyn, Poughkeepsie, Nantucket, Worcester, Hartford, Newark, Princeton, Pittsburgh, and Cincinnati.32 They used the call to show that they had united a dispersed community and bypassed allegiance to states, conveying a wider opposition to the Maryland proposal. But in the coming years, internal strategic differences led black northerners to struggle to revive the national convention.
Over several weeks before the 1840 convention call went out, free black Americans discussed its possible revival in the pages of the Colored American. Charles B. Ray, then editor of the paper, wrote in early May that he supported a national convention as a means to deal with “American caste” and to enable black people to “take a higher and firmer stand for our rights as American citizens.” In soliciting responses on the subject, Ray opened a debate on the function of a broad-based black American politics. Some of the correspondents agreed with Ray that a national convention could unite the scattered populace of “disfranchised American citizens.” But Ray wondered aloud whether or not such a plan truly represented black people broadly. Noting a series of upcoming political events, including meetings of the American Moral Reform Society in Philadelphia, a New York State convention in Albany, the Ohio State School fund society, and various New England temperance groups, Ray suggested that the black men in attendance should dedicate portions of those meetings to planning what might be a truly national convention. He hoped that working through those meetings might produce a new call that would capture “the voice of the people.”
In using his newspaper as a venue to debate the merits of a national convention, Ray imagined that print culture was a way to construct political unity. While a handful of Ohioans might visit New York’s convention, or teetotaling Pennsylvanians could trek to a New England temperance meeting, Ray saw more potential in the spread of the written word. He understood the coalition-building power of print, that