Remaking the Republic. Christopher James Bonner

black people thriving as “husbandmen, mechanics, and labourers.” The law had been unenforced so long, he wrote, precisely because it reflected the concerns of a prejudiced minority. African Americans had cleared and cultivated the Ohio territory on which white southerners settled, but once the landscape was tamed, state officials were happy to exclude black people. Ohio’s law seemed to reflect federal policies of Indian removal, and the Pittsburgh writer encouraged policymakers to reconsider enforcing a measure that would “tarnish the fair-escutcheon of our national character.”⁵⁰ Like Cornish, the anonymous author worried about black people having access to a physical place in the United States, and he made clear that in both past and present, black people had done essential work in building American communities. The letter, written in Pennsylvania about an Ohio law and then printed in New York, asserted black people’s Americanness, reflecting their political community that spanned the free states. Black northerners recognized that an exclusionary law in Ohio could set a dangerous legal precedent for the free states. They developed shared political approaches to confront their common concerns.

      For instance, a group of African Americans met in Pittsburgh in 1831 to protest colonization, passing a series of resolutions that reflected their concerns about wider legal developments across the North. They declared themselves citizens because they had been born in the United States. “We are just as much natives here as the members of the Colonization Society,” they announced. Bonds of affection tied them to their state and nation. “Here we were born—here bred—here are our earliest and most pleasant associations—here is all that binds man to earth, and makes life valuable.” They had met to denounce the ACS and to solidify their claims to political rights. As “freemen … brethren … countrymen and fellow-citizens,” they were “as fully entitled to the free exercise of the elective franchise as any men who breathe.”⁵¹ These activists worried about Pennsylvania lawmakers’ attempts to ban black migration into the state. But they also worried that legislators might take inspiration from other northern states and enact further restrictions of black freedom. Black men in Pennsylvania had the right to vote in 1831, but these activists felt the need to defend their access to the polls. They saw legal developments in New York and Ohio in the 1820s and anticipated that black disfranchisement might sweep across the free states. The Pennsylvanians invoked the nation’s founding in their resolutions, pledging “to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor,” asserting the national significance of their local politics. Black people across the United States were entitled to rights because of their personal histories in the nation, they argued. Black disfranchisement in New York, like proposed residency restrictions in Ohio and Pennsylvania, unjustly excluded black people from American communities. Activists challenged those exclusions together, simultaneously claiming that as citizens, they were entitled to physical communities and a role in governing structures through the right to vote.⁵²

      In 1837, state lawmakers realized black Pennsylvanians’ fears by taking steps to disfranchise black men. Together, legislators and judges outlawed black voting in the state. While Pittsburgh activists had hoped their protest statements would have meaning across state borders, the process of their disfranchisement reflected the locality of much of antebellum law and the ways the lawmakers could use the vagueness of citizenship to further black exclusion. That process began in 1837 in Bucks County, about forty miles north of Philadelphia, after close races for county auditor and commissioner. The defeated candidates contested the results, claiming that the victors had received “between 30 and 40 votes” from black county residents “who, it is believed, had no legal right to vote.” Two angry white men sparked the process of statewide disfranchisement in their effort to suppress a few dozen black people’s votes. County judge John Fox presided over the suit and agreed with their complaint, ruling that black suffrage required the support of positive law. The state constitution held that “in elections by the citizens, every freeman” over age twenty-one who had resided in the state at least two years and paid taxes could vote. Fox said those provisions did not include black people.⁵³ While Fox heard that case, state lawmakers met to consider updating the 1790 constitution. During a convention lasting ten months, delegates agreed to insert the word “white” into the list of voter qualifications. They added an additional qualifier to deny black suffrage, skirting the thorny question of black people’s legal status that Judge Fox had raised. The proposal passed with a decisive majority of votes, 77–45, and the legislators inserted the racial qualifier into the amended constitution sent to voters in February 1838.⁵⁴

      Black activists focused their protest on the proposed constitutional change. Hoping to influence the vote, a group of Philadelphians met on March 14 in a South Philadelphia Presbyterian church, where they chose Robert Purvis to present their criticism. Purvis had been born free in South Carolina in 1810 and moved to Philadelphia as a child. His father worked in antislavery politics, which likely influenced Purvis, who by the early 1830s worked closely with the radical white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Purvis had also resisted colonization programs in the state.⁵⁵ He and his fellow committee members worried that in addition to losing the vote, disfranchisement might encourage efforts to force black people out of Pennsylvania. They cherished voting as a “check upon oppression,” without which they would be “thrown upon the mercy of a despotic majority.” “Our expatriation has come to be a darling project with many of our fellow citizens,” they noted. Voting would ensure black people had a formal political voice as they struggled to secure a physical place in the United States. “We assert our right to vote at the polls as a shield against that strange species of benevolence which seeks legislative aid to banish us.”⁵⁶ The activists invoked an earlier meeting when hundreds gathered in Philadelphia to protest the ACS. Their address, they said, “was adopted with a unanimity and spirit equaled only by the memorable meeting of 1817.”⁵⁷ Anxious about the ramifications of disfranchisement, they took the opportunity to make larger arguments about connected injustices and in pursuit of a clearer set of legal protections.

      Activists built their challenges to disfranchisement and colonization around claims to citizen status. They reminded white voters “in almost every State we have been spoken of, either expressly or by implication, as citizens.” In 1790, Benjamin Franklin, then president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, said the organization was designed to prepare freed people “for the exercise and enjoyment of CIVIL LIBERTY.” “Are we now to be told,” Purvis asked, “that BENJAMIN FRANKLIN did not know what he was about, forasmuch as it was impossible for a colored man to become a citizen of the commonwealth?”⁵⁸ Purvis argued that “civil liberty” was equivalent to citizenship and that it must include suffrage. He and his colleagues exploited gaps in the law, crevices into which they could insert their voices and ideas, spaces to make arguments through citizenship. While citizen status did not have a specific meaning, it had been key to the ways lawmakers framed the relationship between individuals and governments as early as the nation’s founding. Precisely because of its vagueness, black activists could open discussions about rights by using the language of citizenship.⁵⁹

      Like their colleagues in other states, Pennsylvanians emphasized the ways they contributed to their communities as a foundation for their claims to citizen status and formal political rights. They were “tax-paying colored men” and their ancestors had “bled to unite … TAXATION and REPRESENTATION.” They used ideas about personal uplift to dispute the claims of people like Judge John Fox, who said that black people had been historically and must remain “a degraded caste.” Like Judge Fox, the black Pennsylvanians invoked a broad range of legal precedents that further emphasized their contributions. For instance, a New York legislator had opposed suffrage restrictions in his state because black soldiers had fought in American wars. They offered a litany of contributions they felt entitled them to citizen status and political rights. “The very fact that we are deeply interested for our kindred in bonds,” they proclaimed, “shows that we are the right sort of stuff to make good citizens of.” And by working so diligently to hold onto the franchise, black activists were defending the United States as a republic. “When you have taken from an individual his right to vote, you have made the government, in regard to him, a mere despotism.” The threat reached beyond a concern with black voting; disfranchising some was “a step towards making it a despotism to all.”⁶⁰

      At heart, Purvis and his colleagues