Watkins hoped that his address, published separately from the AMRS proceedings, could influence those who doubted “‘that all men are created equal.’ ”40 His was part of a tradition of proclaiming equality in print, a history in which words produced real change. He spoke to fellow reformers and to white opponents of racial equality. Watkins, along with Samuel Cornish and Elizabeth Wicks, suggested that black people could enjoy citizen status if they pursued moral improvement and education. Their arguments laid foundations for people to claim legal protections through citizen status. Their vision of citizenship placed the power for change in black people’s hands, working to ensure that prejudice could not prevent African Americans from securing legal change. Activists thus made arguments about the social foundations of citizenship as a step toward using the status to claim rights.
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Moral uplift challenged the advocates of colonization and specified the responsibilities of an American citizen. From that foundation, activists outlined the rights citizenship should entail, focusing particularly on formal political participation. Black New Yorkers pursued uplift politics in direct response to state restrictions on black suffrage embedded in the 1821 constitution. When a delegate to that year’s constitutional convention proposed to limit the franchise to white men over age twenty-one, he sparked a heated debate over the terms and significance of civic participation. John Ross favored disfranchising black men because “they are a peculiar people,” who were “seldom, if ever, required to share in the burdens or defense of the State.” Others echoed Ross’s doubts that black people would reliably promote the common good as voters.41 Delegates voted against that proposal, but it made black suffrage a question for debate. They appointed a committee to define new qualifications for voting, and its membership included many who had supported the sweeping racial exclusion. Committee members proposed a “freehold qualification” requiring black New Yorkers to own $250 in real property in order to vote.42 One delegate worried that under the proposal, “37,000 of our free black citizens, and their posterity, for ever, shall be degraded by our constitution.” Prejudice would prevent many black New Yorkers from earning the wealth required to vote, others observed. But the measure passed, in part because men like Martin Van Buren believed that the property requirement “held out inducements to industry” among black New Yorkers.43
Black activists thus understood the promotion of moral uplift and industrious labor as ways to refute the arguments that had been used to disfranchise them. And they understood that they might use citizenship to claim formal political rights. When Cornish and Russwurm announced Freedom’s Journal in 1827, they intended to “urge our brethren to use their right to the elective franchise as free citizens.”44 They framed suffrage as a fundamental aspect of citizen status, and they did not mention the freehold qualification, which they saw as an illegitimate denial of an essential right. In August 1828, Russwurm published the voting regulations in states from Maine to Mississippi. “In every case,” he concluded, “voters are required to be citizens of the United States, by birth or naturalization.”45 Linking suffrage and citizenship would open the polls to black Americans if they could claim citizen status through their personal conduct. Uplift ideology emerged from conservative ideas about personal conduct, but activists deployed it in radical challenges to the exclusionary legal order and in pursuit of formal political rights. If they showed people like Martin Van Buren the myriad ways they contributed to their communities as well as the extent to which they were diligent and frugal, they would solidify their claims to suffrage. Just six months before Russwurm decided to emigrate, he seems to have agreed with Cornish that through uplift ideology, citizenship could offer a path to black rights.
But Russwurm ultimately grew tired of talking about citizenship and demanding black suffrage, leaving the project to Cornish and the Rights of All. Cornish made the radical claim that delegates to the 1821 Constitutional Convention had acted “very wrong and illegally.” “A State has the right of appointing qualifications of its voters,” he said, but it was illegal to make color one of those distinctions, just as it was illegal “to require of A. six feet stature, and not require of B. the same.”46 This was a transformative vision of the law for the young republic, a claim that discrimination on the basis of natural traits was fundamentally unjust. In his pursuit of suffrage, Cornish made a sweeping argument in favor of racial equality before the law.
Cornish published specific critiques of state laws that presented barriers on a path to justice. His editorial seeking opportunities for black men as “cartmen and porters” not only reflected ideas about the freemanship but also responded directly to the text of New York’s 1821 constitution. Article II, Section 1 of the constitution established basic qualifications for voters—male citizens, twenty-one years old, residents in the state for at least six months, and had paid a property tax. The constitution also allowed any man to vote who had been exempted from taxation, performed militia duty, been exempted from the militia because he was a fireman or had worked in building public roads. At the end of that list, the constitution declared that “no man of colour” could vote without meeting the $250 property requirement.47 White men’s work offered them a variety of routes to the polls; labor was critical to lawmakers’ ideas about voting and citizenship in the early antebellum period. And so when Samuel Cornish promoted black agrarian selfsufficiency or called for people to do useful work in their communities, he demanded rights in the terms state lawmakers had established. Talking about specific kinds of men’s work delivered a targeted attack on black exclusion. Disfranchisement was unjust because black men were walking the very paths to suffrage that lawmakers had built for white men. Cornish was redefining the community, pushing lawmakers to think of “men of colour” within the category of “male citizens” that comprised the electorate.
Searching for an example that connected personal conduct, citizen status, and suffrage, Cornish turned to the government of British Honduras, the Central American colony that would become Belize. He quoted the white editor of the New York Albion, who was surprised that “the coloured population there seems to have equal privileges with the white, and are actually struggling with them for political ascendancy.” Any person, black or white, who had been born in the colony and possessed $3,000 worth of property could be elected to the colonial legislature. While Cornish might have disagreed with the property qualification, the fact that it was universal reflected the truth of human equality. “Why should there be any distinction among the worms of the dust,” he wrote, “the occupants of Jehovah’s footstool, save that which results from merit?” Christianity decreed all men to be equal and offered a foundation for their personal conduct. “Cultivated minds and sanctified hearts, would so qualify our brethren in Honduras for the exercise of their rights, as to leave the Albion, no cause for surprise.” He concluded, “The same causes … will produce the same effects in this country.”48 Protestantism was central to Cornish’s political ideology, as it was for many northern black activists. He put his faith to work, advocating “sanctified hearts” because they showed people’s fitness for political rights.
Lawmakers in northern states deprived black people of specific rights and, as in Pennsylvania, tried to enact laws to bar African Americans from living in their states. Activists recognized that they could use uplift politics to oppose residency restrictions in the same ways they pushed for equal voting rights. Black New Yorkers’ struggles for suffrage paralleled fights against laws that restricted black movement and residency. In 1807, Ohio enacted a law requiring black emigrants to pay a $500 bond within twenty days of entering the state. Lawmakers justified the law with claims about personal conduct, arguing that the bond was insurance against the criminality, poverty, and general misconduct they anticipated of African Americans. The law lay dormant for two decades, but in 1829, officials began planning to enforce it, perhaps fearing a black population boom.49 On hearing that news, a black man in Pittsburgh wrote to Samuel Cornish to denounce the measure, which he saw as a product of southern influence.