It was not until I read about P. Gabrielle Forman’s pathbreaking work on the Colored Conventions Project that I began to see a deeper history than high-flying rescues or dramatic courtroom dramas. The story that I now sought to present to my students centered on how the Fugitive Slave Act overruled a presumption of citizenship for free Blacks in the North. However, it was more than simply access to the writ of habeas corpus. Black abolitionists offered a profound re-reading of the text of the Constitution and the power of the Declaration of Independence that had far reaching implications. In the 1850s, the Fugitive Slave Act certainly raised questions relating to resistance, but it also helped to bring attention to the powers and prerogatives of the states when it came to the privileges and immunities of citizenship. State-level agitation in Ohio for civil rights mirrored state-level opposition to implementation of the law.
In reading the Ohio Black convention debates, my students began to see how the words of Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence and the Preamble to the 1787 Constitution were turned into a new political creed by Black reformers. Southern white leaders, as historian William Wiecek noted long ago, were on record opposing Jefferson’s Declaration as rhetorical flourish in a political manifesto as early as 1821. But for Ohio’s William Howard Day, an Oberlin graduate and the editor of The Aliened American, Cleveland’s first Black newspaper, the Declaration and the Constitution were the “foundation of liberties” with coequal status.
What became clear to my students as our classroom examination developed was that “privileges or immunities,” “due process,” “equal protection,” and rights of citizens of the United States was something that Black activists had been talking about for decades. I was able to do an overview with my students of the free Black opposition to the American Colonization Society in the early 1830s that helped to illustrate this. It was clearly not something that first arose during the post-Civil War period.
Across the northern free states, according to Kate Masur, Black “activists forcefully insisted that laws that made explicit race-based distinctions had no place in American life.” These activists “pressed new ideas about citizenship, individual rights and the proper scope of state power.” The discourse on the Constitution at Black conventions clearly demonstrated that the process of creating constitutional law involved more than lawyers in the courtroom. Ohio Black leaders declared that they would “continue to agitate” before “the people, to circulate petitions among the people, and memorialize” the state legislature. They would not stop until Ohio became a “true democracy, conservator of equal and impartial liberty.” By making claims to citizenship and invoking the founding documents, Black leaders expanded the reading of the constitutional text. Jefferson’s Declaration was viewed as having a direct link to the Constitution and creating an obligation for civic and political equality.