Here and elsewhere, Cornish used traditionally male work to claim rights through citizenship. He spoke from the context of male-dominated public politics of the nineteenth century. Indeed, although these activists thought in transformative ways about people’s legal statuses, in many cases, they elided or obscured questions about women’s rights. To some extent, Cornish and other black male activists worked for change within the limits of accepted American ideas about political power. In his direct response to legal restrictions imposed on black men, he seemed uninterested in the possibility that women should engage in formal politics.
As they demanded work opportunities, black activists also spoke extensively about issues of morality. They used personal uplift programs to pursue legal change. As northern state lawmakers enacted laws that gradually ended slavery, they also imposed limits on black freedom, including, for example, measures that disfranchised black people and excluded black men from state militias. White northerners worried that the horrors of slavery had rendered black people unfit for freedom. Black activists looked to alleviate those concerns through a series of programs aimed at their “moral improvement.” They worked to spread Christianity, literacy, and standards of personal conduct among freed people. They promoted specific virtues such as temperance, religious devotion, frugality, and industriousness.27 Activists made arguments about citizenship in conjunction with that moral reform work. Uplift programs reflected concerns about morality and the desire to eliminate the legal restrictions on black northerners’ freedom. Black activists’ moralizing was part of their efforts to use citizenship in pursuit of specific legal changes.28
As he designed the layout for the first issue of the Rights of All, Cornish gave prominent place to a statement that linked morality, labor, and citizenship. Directly beneath his introductory statement, he copied an article from the Boston Courier that celebrated agrarian life, and he offered comments in support of that message. Rural landowners lived enviably independent lives, he said, vastly different from the geographic and economic restrictions urban residents felt. A farmer could “have the happiness to see his offspring [become] useful and virtuous citizens,” but Cornish anticipated that a city dweller would more likely raise “fashionable vagabonds.” He echoed a common concern that black people cared more about ostentatious displays of wealth than about the work necessary to earn it. Cornish argued that families who had the means should display their “respectability” by embracing an agrarian lifestyle: leaving cities, purchasing land, and preparing their children “for an investment in the right of soil.” A number of black New Yorkers had already made new homes in the countryside, and he hoped others would follow suit, “until our portion of city dissipation is transformed into country respectability and usefulness.” Cornish’s concerns about respectability and personal conduct reflected Christian beliefs that many black northerners shared. And even readers who disliked Cornish’s tone might have been glad to read the editor’s concrete plan for black people to escape the challenges they faced in cities. He closed one call for black agrarianism with an advertisement for 12,000 acres of land being sold in hundred-acre plots “in a fertile county in the state of New-York,” available at a price of 20 shillings an acre. People in towns and cities could form associations to purchase plots, he suggested.29 Writing from his Manhattan office, Cornish took hold of the notion of agrarian virtue to advance his political ends. Farming could offer black people a path to citizen status and then onward to legal protections. Cornish rhetorically opened a place for black Americans in a citizenry defined by morality and useful work.30
Cornish’s was one voice in a chorus of free black people who promoted moral improvement and connected legal protections to a person’s contributions to a community. For instance, a group of women who established the African Female Benevolent Society in Troy, New York, in 1833, declared that through divine principles of human equality, they were “entitled to the same rights and privileges” as “our fellow beings who differ from us in complexion alone.” They would embrace “such virtues as will render us happy and useful to society” to contest the legal manifestations of prejudice.31 Society members chose Elizabeth Wicks to speak at the organization’s first anniversary. As she reflected on their work in the previous year, Wicks declared, “My friends, I think I see an opening in behalf of our oppressed race.”32 She urged action, asking young people not to let their “youth be wasted away without improvement and utterly lost to every valuable and noble purpose.” Wicks reminded her fellow society members of the broad significance of their work, saying, “Let our minds travel south and sympathise with the present state of the two millions of our brethren who are yet in bondage.” She encouraged New York’s black women to think of their moral reform work as an antislavery crusade.33 The Society published Wicks’s address and their constitution together in a pamphlet, hoping that other black women in Troy would read about and join their efforts. Wicks and her fellow black women demanded legal change, working against racial prejudice and against the arguments of other activists that suggested men should lead the charge of black protest. They were undiscouraged by Cornish’s gendered politics and convinced that they could use moral improvement as a path to legal protections, regardless of prevailing ideas about who should possess rights.
Black people connected their uplift politics across a broader geography when they launched the American Moral Reform Society (AMRS) in 1835.34 At their annual meeting the following year, AMRS members proclaimed that education was “the most valuable blessing that we, as a people, can bestow upon the rising generation.” Speaking at that gathering, William Watkins added to education “moral training,” arguing that together, those programs could remedy “the universal depravity of the human heart” and its influence on the nation’s laws.35 Born in Maryland in 1801, the son of a free black minister, the precocious Watkins established a school for black children when he was only nineteen. He did the dangerous work of black politics in a slave state and remained attuned to the concerns of African Americans beyond Maryland’s borders.36 Watkins believed that individuals’ character shaped their communities. “It is unquestionable,” he declared in 1836, “that those children who are early taught to remember their Creator … to fear God and keep his commandments … will be far more likely than others, in adult life to be good citizens and exemplary christians.”37 A citizen must be morally upright, he said. Watkins and other delegates to the AMRS meeting laid a foundation in personal conduct for the nebulous legal status of citizenship. By creating a society dedicated to moral reform, black people implicitly argued that they were capable of being good citizens because they were so concerned with morality. Further, making personal conduct a foundation for citizenship denied claims that there was an insurmountable racial barrier to the status.
Watkins described for his audience a man named Henry Blair, who Watkins presented as a model black citizen. Blair was also a free black Marylander who had recently patented a mechanized corn planter and had his device exhibited in the nation’s capital. According to Watkins, Blair held himself to a high moral standard, and his invention revealed black people’s intellectual capacity. Watkins conjured for his audience an image of Blair standing beside his device, “triumphantly refuting” ideas of black inferiority. So long as black people worked to become “more intelligent, more useful, more respectable,” none could say they were unfit for life in the United States.38 Blair’s intellect and morality were mutually reinforcing traits. “The attractions of the gaming table and the ale house are not, in [Blair’s] view, to be compared with those to be found in his own domicil—in the rich volumes of a well selected library.” Black people thus educated and morally restrained would “cease