Between Slavery and Freedom (21 page)

Opportunity motivated some people, but sheer panic drove others into exile. Reports that slave catchers had arrived in town prompted escaped slaves to head for the Canadian border in droves. In many cases those individuals and their families had been living as free for years, and their neighbors were stunned when they packed up and disappeared overnight. An unknown number who were legally free fled north as well, fearful that the slave catchers might seize
them
and ship
them
off to the South. Whatever prompted free blacks to leave America, black leaders in the 1850s were far less critical of voluntary emigration than those of an earlier generation had been. As Martin R. Delany saw it, black people should turn their backs on a nation that was obviously rejecting them. “We love our country, dearly love her, but she . . . despises us, and bids us begone.” He recommended that they move to any country willing to “receive [them] as her adopted children.”
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Although thousands of free blacks left the United States in the 1850s, the overwhelming majority stayed. Plenty of white people hoped that
they
would go as well because, in their opinion, the nation would be better off without them. Pressure mounted in various parts of the South for a black exodus. Virginia, Maryland, Missouri, and Kentucky earmarked public funds to advance the African colonization scheme. In 1853, the Tennessee legislature announced that henceforth every slave who gained his or her freedom must leave for Liberia. On at least two occasions, South Carolina lawmakers advocated rounding up free people and reducing them to slavery. Some free blacks panicked and fled the state. Others laid low, hoping the storm would soon blow over.

Arkansas lawmakers told free blacks outright that they must leave or lose their liberty. Admittedly, Arkansas's free population was not a large one—it numbered just 608 in 1850—but most free people heeded the warning and left. Virginia twice debated expulsion in the 1850s. North Carolina considered it, as did Maryland. There were rumors of similar moves afoot in Missouri, although ultimately they came to nothing. James Thomas recalled how the authorities in St. Louis had ordered all the free people in the city, some 1,500 individuals, to appear in court and answer questions about who they were, where they lived, and how they supported themselves. The situation in the free states was different in one major respect. Since slavery was dead, black people could not be reduced to chattel once more. They could, however, be made to feel that they counted for very little in other respects.

With prospects so gloomy in the North and the South, some free blacks hoped they might do better in the West. Many hundreds joined the surge of white Forty-Niners into California during the Gold Rush. In common with the majority of the white prospectors, most African Americans stayed even after they realized they were never going to strike it rich in the goldfields. California entered the Union as a free state, and that attracted more black settlers, but being a free state did not qualify California as a haven of peaceful coexistence. Some slave owners defied the law, brought their slaves to California, and tried to keep them. California's fugitive slave law helped them do so because it allowed people who did not reside permanently in the state to own slaves. Slaveholders simply lied about where they lived, and if their slaves ran away they hunted them down and reclaimed them, with the approval of the local courts.

African Americans had to contend with all sorts of legal disabilities in California. They could not vote or testify in court. There was even talk of stopping any more black people coming to California to live. Throughout the 1850s tensions ran high in California over the intertwined issues of slavery and the rights of people of color. Some black Californians decided it was simply not worth trying to change the hearts and minds of white people in the state and left, some to go back East, others to see if they could find a warmer welcome elsewhere in the West. Many more stayed put, however, ready to fight to preserve the rights they had and try to secure for their community the privileges that other Californians enjoyed.

In general, the West and the Southwest extended to black people no more legal rights than they had enjoyed back East. Oregon prohibited African Americans from owning land, making contracts, or suing in the courts. Eventually the state closed its borders to free blacks. Whites in Oregon did not want slaves, and Oregon was technically a free state, but it was hardly free in the sense in which black people understood freedom. When white settlers in the region north of the Columbia River separated from Oregon and formed the Washington territory, African Americans who tried to settle in the new territory encountered just as much hostility as in Oregon. Some of those who simply could not or would not endure the treatment whites meted out to them in the Pacific Northwest moved further north to British Columbia, especially after word spread of the 1858 Fraser Canyon Gold Rush.

Much further south, the territorial legislature of New Mexico (which included Arizona) enacted a ban on the entry of free people of color in 1856. Free blacks, most of them from Arkansas and Missouri, still managed to find their way into New Mexico. The numbers were small—fewer than a hundred
by 1860—but the presence of these men and women indicates that at least some African Americans were prepared to brave not only the wilderness but oppressive laws to seek economic independence in the Southwest.

When it came to the Nebraska Territory and a prefiguring of the bloody struggle of the Civil War, free people of color did not fare much better in regard to legal rights than they did elsewhere. The legislation that Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas pushed through Congress in 1854 created the Nebraska Territory out of the enormous expanse of land between the Rocky Mountains and the Missouri River and split it in two, creating Nebraska and Kansas. The Kansas-Nebraska Act authorized the settlers themselves to vote on whether or not they wanted slavery.

Nebraska became a free state, and a racially very homogeneous one. White settlers had no need for slavery, and no need for free black people either. By 1860, there were fewer than fifty in the entire state. The first free black settler, Sally Bayne, arrived in 1854 or 1855. More followed. Some took up the trades they had pursued back home. Kentucky native Jeremiah Crump was a barber. He and his wife, Jemima, lived in the fledgling settlement of Omaha with their infant son at the time of the 1860 census. A black shoemaker from New York, Cornelius Bye, lived next door to the Crumps with two white men who worked in the same trade. Other new arrivals gravitated to Nebraska City or forsook town life for farming. While white pioneers in Nebraska may not have been particularly well disposed toward blacks, they did not try to force them out of the state.

Black settlers who went to Kansas in the 1850s quickly discovered that they were in a war zone. Pro- and antislavery forces fought savagely for control of the territory. In 1859, Kansas entered the Union as a “free” state, but not one that accepted blacks as citizens. The 1860 census recorded that there were just 625 people of color living in Kansas, although the actual figure may have been higher because of the numbers of slaves who fled from neighboring Missouri, passed as free in Kansas, and hid from the census-takers.

Many abolitionists thought that if slavery could not spread, maybe it would die. That all changed, however, with a ruling of the nation's highest court. In the 1830s, white army surgeon John Emerson traveled around the Midwest, taking his slaves, Dred and Harriet Scott, with him to places where slavery was illegal, before settling back in Missouri, a slave state. The Scotts did not try to escape, but after Emerson died they went to court and sued their new owner for their freedom on the basis that they had been in free territory and as such were no longer slaves. After a decade, their case eventually wound up in the U.S. Supreme Court. What happened in the case of
Dred Scott vs. Sandford
would determine not only the status of the Scotts but
the constitutionality of the Missouri Compromise, which had limited where slavery could exist. Across the nation people watched intently, none more intently than America's free people of color.

In the spring of 1857, the justices overturned the Missouri Compromise by a majority of seven to two. They ruled that the Scotts' residence with their master in the free state of Illinois and then in the supposedly free territory of Wisconsin did not make them free. To many whites outside the South this seemed a harbinger of worse to come. Now slavery could spread into the territories and might even regain a foothold in the “free” states. To the free black community the ruling was infinitely worse. It struck at their sense of themselves as Americans because the court had essentially declared that African Americans, regardless of whether they were enslaved or free, had no rights that whites had to respect. They were not citizens, they never had been citizens, and they never would be, according to the justices. Wealth, education, respectability—nothing would alter it.

At this point, some free people who had previously been undecided about emigrating concluded that it was time to heed Martin R. Delany's advice and leave. They had not rejected America. America had rejected them. Other people began organizing
ad hoc
military units for the great conflict they believed was surely coming over the issue of black freedom. This was an era of growing militancy within at least certain segments of the free community. African Americans were far from passive observers as the nation came apart at the seams. They held three national conventions during the 1850s and no fewer than twenty state conventions. The
Dred Scott
decision only strengthened the resolve of many free people to rally in defense of their rights. They petitioned their state and local governments, and in some instances they took their complaints to Congress. In the handful of states where they could vote, they did so, although only after asking searching questions about where a particular candidate stood on the cause of black freedom.

Free people repeatedly put their lives on the line. Women and men participated in slave rescues and aided fugitive slaves in many ways. As far as they were concerned, it was irrelevant that they themselves were free. The slaves' cause was their cause. The fact that the Supreme Court had struck down the Missouri Compromise and, at least by implication, given slaveholders the right to take their slaves into any state or territory, endangered the liberty of all black people across the nation. With the foreign slave trade illegal, opening new lands for slavery boosted the price of slaves, and hence the profits unscrupulous whites could make from kidnapping free people. Many free blacks saw slavery and freedom as two sides of the same coin, and
they became more outspoken and more militant. Five black men, all but one of them legally free, fought alongside John Brown in the raid on the arsenal at Harpers Ferry in 1859, trying to get weapons to free slaves. If some black leaders like Frederick Douglass ultimately decided that they would not join Brown and his men, it was not because they wanted to focus on securing their own rights while ignoring the plight of the enslaved. It was simply that they did not think Brown's plan would succeed.

That, of course, begged the question of what Douglass and other black leaders thought
would
succeed. Some put their faith in the political process, but the occupants of the White House in the 1850s were either indifferent or downright hostile to black freedom, and the election of 1860 did not inspire much hope for change. None of the candidates supported abolition or seemed willing to address the status of the nation's free people. Republican nominee Abraham Lincoln had gone the furthest in his speeches, but hardly far enough. While he had declared his personal distaste for slavery, he had also insisted that he was not “in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black race.”
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As most of the slaveholding states seceded on the eve of Lincoln's inauguration and the new president called for troops to put down the rebellion, free men of color stepped forward. The recruiters informed them that their services were not needed and federal law forbade them to enlist anyway. The nation's free people of color watched and waited, certain only of two things: this was a war about slavery, whatever the politicians said about states' rights, and sooner or later the United States would have to address what freedom meant for black people. Lincoln had said the nation could not endure half-slave and half-free. He had been speaking in political terms. They interpreted “half-free” very differently. Half-free was what
they
were, and it was what four million slaves were likely to be if black freedom continued to mean an inferior brand of freedom. As they saw it, and as generations of black men and women before them had seen it, half-free was not free enough. Black people had lived in the “borderlands” between slavery and true freedom for far too long. It was time for that to change.

In 1860, the United States census recorded the nation's free black population at just under half a million and its slave population at almost four million. The census-takers had followed their instructions and listed the two segments of black society not on different pages of the census but in entirely different documents. “Free persons of color” belonged on the population schedules along with white people. Slaves belonged on the “slave schedules.” They were not listed by their own names but by age, gender, and complexion, under the names of their owners. In 1860, they were “property,” not persons.

By the time the United States conducted its next census, slavery was dead. Every black man, woman, and child was now a person, and the nation had almost five million black people living within its borders. All black people were free, although the nation was still coming to terms with what that meant. What it often meant at the state and local levels was that whites revisited the old laws that had regulated the lives of “free persons of color” during the era of slavery. If all black people were now free, then they must all be subject to those same laws. And where the laws were imprecise or insufficient, then the assumptions and attitudes that had governed the interactions between whites and free blacks must govern them still.