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The violence in Philadelphia did not quell black Americans’ desires to hold a national convention or their arguments that citizenship should be a legal relationship with the federal government. Many black activists understood themselves as Americans and wanted to access federal power to challenge state-level legal restrictions.49 Black protest operated in dialogue with formal law and politics in the United States, and the democratic principle of strength in numbers was a key part of their shared language. African Americans had seen the value of collective resistance to colonization, and they worked to expand on that accomplishment. After more than a decade of exchanging information, concerns, and protest strategies across state boundaries through print and in person, they had extensive experience working in broad activist communities. Black activist unity was not natural or inevitable, but longstanding circumstances and the exigencies of the moment made it especially important during the early 1840s. And so, after the failed New Haven convention and the violent suppression of the Philadelphia gathering, African Americans looked again to hold a convention in Buffalo, New York, in the summer of 1843. In that meeting, they argued for an American citizenship and experienced the ways ideology hindered the project of building that status.
In the spring of 1843, several dozen men from Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Ohio signed a convention call arguing that collective work was essential to black politics. They described themselves as descendants of a common set of black political forefathers and stated that their goal was to bring together “the oppressed citizens of the United States.” “In a great degree,” they said, “we have become divided” due to the long gap between national conventions. A gathering of activists would promote collective political work and enable them “to secure the enjoyment of their inalienable rights.” They called black people from across the country to “come and rally under the banner of freedom,” invoking the American flag as a symbol of national unity and the government’s expressed ideals. The phrase also pointed to the activists’ goal, an enrichment of freedom, which they hoped to realize by building a tangible connection between black Americans and the federal government. To stand under the banner of freedom would mean that the government had embraced black people as part of the nation and that they might be protected as members of the American community.50
The convention succeeded in connecting black people from across the country, with fifty-seven men attending from seven states, as far west as Michigan and as far south as Georgia. In a nod to their host city, delegates named Buffalo resident Samuel H. Davis convention chair and invited him to deliver opening remarks. Davis had been born free in Maine in 1810 and educated at Oberlin College, later moving to Buffalo, where he taught and served as principal at the Buffalo African School.51 Davis focused convention delegates on the work of constructing citizenship as a legal relationship. He recognized that free black people faced a variety of legal restrictions that typically differed in each state. But he encouraged them to see their shared desire “to secure for ourselves, in common with other citizens, the privilege of seeking our own happiness in any part of the country we may choose.” State laws violated the most important elements of the U.S. Constitution, which guaranteed “freedom and equal rights to every citizen.” This was a remarkable interpretive move, one with which Pennsylvania judge John Gibson and others would disagree. But the vagueness of citizenship as established in the Constitution made Davis’s argument possible. The document suggested that citizenship was an important legal status, connected it to individual rights, and at no point said that certain people, particularly on the basis of race, were to be excluded from the status. Davis thus felt assured in describing racial oppression as a “cankerworm in the root of the tree of liberty,” a disease that ought to alarm the country as a whole. Black activists needed to alert white Americans to the problems of their racialized legal system, to “change the thoughts, feelings, and actions towards us as men and citizens of this land.” And black unity was an essential part of that process. Quoting from an 1824 history of the United States, Davis invoked the founding fathers as a model for collective action, men who revealed in their revolution “that a people, united in the cause of liberty, are invincible to those who would enslave them.”52 Davis guided delegates in their work at the meeting and at the same time ensured that black and white listeners understood activists’ dedication to defining the content of citizen status.
The convention was an opportunity for black people to demonstrate that they were capable participants in a democracy and to knit together a political body that might collectively present arguments about citizenship. But among the challenges delegates encountered in the search for unity, they found themselves without a familiar and productive means of communication: the Colored American had published its last issue in December 1841. Convinced of the political value of print, they organized a committee on the press and called for the establishment of a new weekly paper “devoted impartially to the welfare of our whole people.” African Americans wanted to reclaim the power of print media to shape public opinion and to unite behind a single, explicitly political publication in order to do so.53
Delegates also appointed a committee on agriculture, which delivered a message stressing the virtues of agrarian life in the abundant space available in the United States. The Buffalo convention encouraged African Americans to embrace the colonialist impulse and take ownership of the nation’s physical landscape. Working collectively in rural communities, black people could leverage their economic stability and demographic strength to shape legal structures in new states and territories. For evidence of that path to influence, David Jenkins, a committee member from Ohio, presented a letter from black farmers who had settled in Mercer County, on that state’s far western border. Taking “the advice of our abolition friends,” several hundred African Americans had moved there in 1837 and settled into productive, comfortable lives. They purchased land, tamed the wilderness, built farms, and lived among white neighbors. The Mercer County settlers called on other black people to join them. Beyond what the settlers saw as the intrinsic value of economic productivity, they noted that work would allow black people to show their usefulness to society and counter the influence of prejudice. They suggested that any black person could go west and flourish, noting that they had built their new lives using only the funds they would otherwise have devoted to rent in a city. The committee in Buffalo cited similar farming communities in other Ohio counties and credited black movement to rural areas with decreasing prejudice in the developing West. And they encouraged migration to Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and then-territories Wisconsin and Iowa. Moving to some of those places might have been “objectionable on account of their laws”—Illinois in particular had a set of harsh, exclusionary black laws—but people could potentially change legislation, particularly in territories and newer states.54
That call for black emigration constituted a radical protest against state proposals to exclude black people from their borders. Black identity in relation to the United States was fraught given the realities of slavery and legal exclusion. But activists were vocal about how important it was that they had been born in the nation.55 The call to move west and shape American development politicized nativity as a path to changing the nation’s laws. It was a declaration that black people identified as Americans, that they should be connected to the national government and should thus be entitled to all the space that the nation claimed. Connection to the United States, they suggested, superseded any state efforts to bar them. The Mercer County farmers and the committee members disregarded the idea that black people could be outlawed from any part of the country. Their call for people from eastern cities to move to the old Northwest framed black identity as a bond with the nation. Black people moving to the West were not abandoning their home states but were instead populating their native country, claiming their place in American social, economic, and political communities.
Holding the 1843 convention in upstate New York embodied this westward push of blackness. These ideas of a black American identity and the potential to change legal restrictions through broad collective action were central to the Buffalo convention. Meeting in upstate New York might have insulated the activists from urban racial violence, but it was also a conscious choice to look beyond the traditional gathering place of Philadelphia. It was another way of presenting black people as Americans, conveying the reality that