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1 Marie-Jeanne Rossignol, University Paris Diderot “The Wilderness Years of Antislavery” Summary in English As Early As

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1 Marie-Jeanne Rossignol, University Paris Diderot “The Wilderness Years of Antislavery” Summary in English As Early As Marie-Jeanne Rossignol, University Paris Diderot “The Wilderness Years of Antislavery” Summary in English As early as the 1790s, the United States underwent a period of rapid westward expansion and new state-making. With the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 and the final defeat of Indian nations in the East on the occasion of the War of 1812, expansion was given further impetus. This paper focuses on how antislavery developed in the Old Northwest in the years between the War of 1812 and 1827, in an age characterized by the cotton boom and the internal slave trade. These were indeed “wilderness years” for the antislavery movement. Born at the end of the eighteenth-century as an East coast, elite-sponsored philanthropic endeavor with strong religious inspiration, it had to reconstruct itself as a popular movement with new methods and activists. This rejuvenation of the movement took place in the Old North-West in the 1820s mainly. William Lloyd Garrison’s clamouring for “immediate abolitionism” in the early 1830s was no radical break: the new generation of abolitionists who rose to national prominence with him could surf on the wave of (mainly Quaker and Baptist) activism that had previously developed in the West in the tough context of a frontier environment. Although immigrants moved to the “Old North-West” in the early 1800s, mass immigration to the region did not take place until after William Henry Harrison crushed the Indians during the War of 1812. The North-West was seen as the “Far West” by those early immigrants who still got lost on the prairie but did not have to fear hostile Indians. The Old North-West was bound to attract antislavery people as the 1787 Northwest Ordinance proclaimed that slavery was forbidden there. Yet somewhat surprisingly the region soon proved very hostile to free blacks and many settlers soon made it clear they supported bondage, asking for slavery to be re-established. Discrimination laws were passed in Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. Unlike their neighbours, Ohioans were not in favor of a return to slavery, but saw the American Colonization Society (founded 1816) as the proper solution for the final eradication of a black presence. By contrast Illinois was the scene of a vigorous campaign to re-establish slavery, in the wake of the Missouri compromise. The Missouri compromise (extending slavery into a new state situated north of the Mason- Dixon line) is usually presented as lightning in a blue sky –“a firebell in the night” Jefferson said -, but it did not strike people in the Northwest as particularly surprising as the 1 controversy over slavery had been brewing for many years in neighbouring Illinois, and Indiana. Unlike the Northwestern states, Missouri did not have to abide by the Northwest ordinance, and it was close to states (Tennessee, Arkansas) that were benefiting from the cotton boom and the internal slave trade. It indirectly benefited from them as a state exporting slaves. Yet the West did contain a reservoir of antislavery activists, whom the Missouri compromise boosted into action. Often they had come from Southern states where antislavery opinion and action was increasingly difficult beyond supporting a divisive American Colonization Society. Or they had left the South to avoid intermingling with blacks. North Carolina Quakers or Virginia Baptists had started moving to Tennessee or Kentucky at the turn of the century, and even to Ohio. By 1813 the first Ohio Yearly Meeting was held at Mount Pleasant, later a hotbed of antislavery activity. In 1815 Charles Osborn founded the very active “Tennessee Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves”. Calls for immediate emancipation were voiced in the region as early as 1817. By 1817 Osborn started publishing The Philanthropist, a weekly devoted to philanthropic and reformist causes, thus heralding one of the popular techniques of this new generation of abolitionists, and placing abolition at the heart of the sphere of print through an array of activist publications. The first monthly entirely devoted to antislavery was published in Tennessee by Elihu Embree in 1820 (The Emancipator). Embree’s clear vociferously anti-gradualist line came at a time when the United States government was officially backing the gradualist American Colonization Society, opposing the Atlantic slave trade and promoting Liberia. It thus indicated a clear break with official policies. This rising opposition took place in a climate of violence: Missouri opponents of slavery were physically assaulted during their 1820 campaign to resist the proslavery constitution but their own determination was shown as some, Benjamin Lundy for example, moved to the state on purpose to thwart proslavery forces. The physical commitment to the cause is illustrated in Levi Coffin’s Reminiscences, as he had to confront slave-catchers in 1822 on his first trip from North Carolina to Ohio. Breaking the law became Coffin’s life- long passion as he started organizing the Underground Railroad in Indiana as soon as he settled there in 1825. By that time another antislavery battle had been fought in Illinois, under the aegis of Edward Coles, a Virginian and neighbor of Thomas Jefferson, who had moved to the state in 1818 on purpose to free his slaves there. This fierce battle, conducted in the local press, in the assembly, and characterized by acts of destruction and violence against Coles’ property and his image, ended with a victory for the antislavery side in 1823. Yet Coles, with his Virginia 2 aristocratic background, and his somewhat dated revolutionary natural rights rhetoric, was not representative of the new men (the saddler Embree, the minister Osborn) as wellas the new ideas and methods which were to rejuvenate the movement. The abolitionists of the Northwest and their struggle must be re-discovered. 3 4 .
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