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In the early antebellum period, black northerners experimented with a range of arguments, demanding that lawmakers see black people as essential to American communities and, therefore, entitled to rights as citizens. For instance, some activists insisted that if racist laws pushed black people out of the country, Americans would lose valuable members of their communities. Black Ohioans, facing a bond requirement to live in their state, wrote to Samuel Cornish in 1829 that they had begun to consider abandoning the country and settling in Canada. Cornish helped explain their feelings to readers. “If the general government will see with indifference the rights of any part of her citizens so trampled upon,” he argued, “I see no reason why, the injured party should not in disgust, forsake the land of their birth and nativity.” If they were pushed to emigrate, black Ohioans would “give their strength and influence to a more righteous power.”62 The potential of voluntary black emigration here became a threat about the costs of black exclusion.
At other times, Cornish said black exclusion would tarnish the nation’s reputation and limit the republic’s radical egalitarian potential. Exclusionary laws would “trifle with the guarantees of our excellent constitution.” Black equality was essential to the United States’ survival and prosperity as a republic, he argued. Black protest was thus critical for all Americans. The young nation was fragile, he wrote ominously, and it was “threatened with internal national feuds.” State laws that flouted constitutional principles might shred the delicate national fabric. “If the proper authorities do not check this evil disposition,” Cornish declared, “while in embryo we soon shall have 21 Independant Republicks or petty Kingdoms.”63 Ohio’s proposed residency restriction might be a step toward national dissolution. Cornish and the black Ohioans expanded arguments about how black people contributed to their communities. By this logic, when they confronted racially biased laws, black activists were defusing threats to the nation. Cornish’s paper displayed black people’s contributions in action, spurring the effort to help the republic fulfill its destiny as a beacon of representative government for the world.
Cornish had to shutter the Rights of All in late 1829 due to financial difficulties, a common challenge black editors faced. For much of the next decade, he focused on the ministry, only occasionally writing to other newspapers about legal and political matters he felt were urgent. But in 1837, he reentered the publishing world, still convinced that a newspaper was a valuable way to highlight black people’s contributions and to claim rights through citizenship. On March 4 of that year, he printed the first issue of the Colored American. The black proprietors of the Weekly Advocate had decided to change their paper’s name and invited Cornish to lead it because of his editorial experience. With the new title, they declared the foundation of their politics: “we are Americans,—colored Americans, brethren.”64 They claimed a place in the nation while acknowledging that blackness made their experiences distinct; it was an argument about the essential complexity of the United States. Cornish and his colleagues challenged their legal exclusion by normalizing blackness in the nation.
Under the title, the paper bore the familiar masthead “Righteousness Exalteth a Nation.” Cornish planned to continue the work he had done at the Rights of All. The paper’s offices stood on Frankfort Street, near the recently constructed New York City Hall, and across the street from the Democratic Party’s political machine at Tammany Hall. Perhaps Cornish sat at a desk there and thought about the pernicious influence the party of slaveowners bore in northern state lawmaking. In the paper’s first issue, he called on Democrats to think in new ways about the terms of American citizenship, invoking the nation’s past to support his claims.65 He printed two messages in which Andrew Jackson called on free black men to defend New Orleans during the War of 1812. Jackson, then a U.S. Army general, asked African Americans to join hands with their “white fellow-citizens” and spoke to concerns that crossed the lines of color. His words refuted claims that black people did not belong in the United States. Cornish continued his history lesson with extracts from the debates at New York’s 1821 Constitutional Convention, during which a number of lawmakers suggested that black Americans were citizens and therefore entitled to equal access to the polls.66 Those items filled the paper’s front page, offering prominent endorsements for black citizenship politics.
As he had in the Rights of All, Cornish suggested to black readers ways to prove their value to American communities, emphasizing in particular that agricultural work could be a foundation of claims to citizenship and rights. He had written that “every constituent must become perfect, as far as human perfectibility goes, before the body politic can be made perfect,” and in the 1830s, he continued to advocate personal improvement as a means to broader societal progress.67 He again urged black people to turn to agriculture in order to secure legal rights as citizens. In April 1837, for instance, he noted the unmatched fertility of American soil; any “sober and industrious” person could reap a rich harvest. “Morally culpable is he who can ‘eat the bread of idleness’ ” while living so close to such potential, Cornish wrote. “In our large cities, we are passed by as not at all incorporated in the body politic.” As they left crowded cites and took up farming, black people would “exert a powerful influence in different communities.” With only a small financial stake and “fixed determination,” black farmers would become “lords of the soil.” African American farmers would exhibit their self-sufficiency in a new realm by cultivating America’s “fertile garden,” enabling them “gain some influence in [their] own country.”68
Again and again, Cornish insisted that black people remake their legal lives through agriculture.69 In June 1838, he reprinted the message from the Rights of All in which he had offered farmland for sale in western New York and urged readers to move and help make their children “useful and virtuous citizens.”70 He then copied an item from a newspaper called the Buckeye Ploughboy that said farmers possessed unique virtues, including the intelligence to “discharge in a proper manner the duties of a citizen.”71 Cornish’s correspondents also endorsed black agrarianism. A reader who called himself “Franklin” offered specific instructions for black people looking to become independent farmers. Traveling through western territories, Franklin had seen a number of European immigrants returning east from Kentucky and Ohio. Having discovered cheap land in those states, those immigrants had decided to work menial jobs in eastern cities until they saved enough money to buy property in the West. Franklin calculated that if a black man earned $25 each month as a porter and spent $100 per year on room, board, and clothing, he could save enough in one year to buy good western agricultural land. That man’s diligence and self-control would secure “the respect and confidence of the best part of the community,” while others remained trapped in a cycle of grueling work, extravagant spending, and debt. Franklin imagined a future in which thousands of old, black farmers relaxed in their comfortable homes and regaled their children with fireside tales of the thrift and industry that had allowed them to own the land on which they sat.72
By January 1839, Cornish appeared to grow frustrated with the long and as yet fruitless struggle for political rights. He seemed anxious and exasperated as he noted that black northerners bore the burden of defending the nation’s principles. “On that portion of us, nominally free, is flung the necessity of battling for freedom.” African Americans felt “a love of home which is stronger than death,” and their emotional ties spurred their protest. “If we falter, or yield,