"We Will Be Satisfied With Nothing Less": The African American Struggle for Equal Rights in the North during Reconstruction

By Hugh Davis

Historians have focused almost entirely on the attempt by southern African Americans to attain equal rights during Reconstruction. However, the northern states also witnessed a significant period of struggle during these years. Northern blacks vigorously protested laws establishing inequality in education, public accommodations, and political life and challenged the Republican Party to live up to its stated ideals.

In "We Will Be Satisfied With Nothing Less", Hugh Davis concentrates on the two issues that African Americans in the North considered most essential: black male suffrage rights and equal access to the public schools. Davis connects the local and the national; he joins the specifics of campaigns in places such as Cincinnati, Detroit, and San Francisco with the work of the National Equal Rights League and its successor, the National Executive Committee of Colored Persons. The narrative moves forward from their launching of the equal rights movement in 1864 to the "end" of Reconstruction in the North two decades later.

The struggle to gain male suffrage rights was the centerpiece of the movement's agenda in the 1860s, while the school issue remained a major objective throughout the period. Following the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, northern blacks devoted considerable attention to assessing their place within the Republican Party and determining how they could most effectively employ the franchise to protect the rights of all citizens.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Aug 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9780801463655

Book preview

"WE WILL BE SATISFIED WITH

NOTHING LESS"

The African American Struggle for Equal Rights in the North during Reconstruction

HUGH DAVIS

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

ITHACA AND LONDON

For Jean

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments

Prologue

1. Launching the Equal Rights Movement

2. Toward the Fifteenth Amendment

3. The Crusade for Equal Access to Public Schools, 1864–1870

4. The Equal Rights Struggle in the 1870s

5. The Republican Retreat from Reconstruction

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

PREFACE

My decision to write this book was prompted in part by the fact that the most important general accounts of Reconstruction published since 1960 have focused almost entirely on the South. Studies by Eric Foner, John Hope Franklin, Kenneth M. Stampp, Robert Cruden, Rembert W. Patrick, Allen W. Trelease, and W. R. Brock have provided valuable insights into the broad social, economic, and political changes that occurred in southern life and how southern blacks helped to shape the contours of change during the Reconstruction era.¹ Yet these works have largely ignored the northern racial climate and especially African Americans’ struggle for equal rights throughout the North. For example, Foner’s Reconstruction, which remains the best treatment of this period, does not even mention the role of northern blacks in the crusade for full citizenship rights. Likewise, Franklin’s Reconstruction after the Civil War and Stampp’s The Era of Reconstruction, 1865–1877, which dominated the field of Reconstruction studies until the appearance of Foner’s book in 1988, briefly note that most northern states had long maintained discriminatory laws against African Americans but make only passing reference to northern blacks’ agitation for black manhood suffrage and desegregation of the public schools following the Civil War.²

A few scholars have recently argued that, because the historical literature on the modern civil rights movement in the mid-twentieth century has likewise tended to focus on the southern crusade against the Jim Crow system, it fails to reflect the national scope of racial inequality or the geographical breadth of the challenges to it. In his Sweet Land of Liberty, Thomas Sugrue notes that most studies continue to concentrate on the epic struggle in the South and turn northward only in the mid-late 1960s, when the urban riots erupted and the black power movement emerged. Sugrue, as well as Robert O. Self and Matthew J. Countryman, in their studies of the civil rights cause in Oakland and Philadelphia, respectively, call for historical accounts that recognize the important role that northern activists played in what was truly a national movement. While acknowledging that the southern cause richly deserves attention, they insist that to concentrate so heavily on the southern movement as the paradigmatic post–World War II black struggle is a serious distortion.³

Much as Sugrue, Self, and Countryman have argued that the narrative of the mid-twentieth century civil rights cause needs to be reframed, I believe that historians must similarly expand the geographical reach of their studies of Reconstruction to include, in a substantive manner, northern racism and the northern black struggle to eradicate racial segregation and inequality. In her 2009 work on race and reconstruction in the Upper Midwest, Leslie A. Schwalm has articulated this conviction that the Reconstruction-era black quest for equal rights—and Reconstruction itself—was in fact national in scope. Because so little attention has been devoted to Reconstruction in the North and so much of the historical literature that has taken northern society into account has concentrated on how northern whites viewed and participated in the reconstruction of the South, Schwalm argues, the history of how black freedom and citizenship were understood and defended in the post–Civil War years is still only partially chronicled.⁴

Recent studies by Andrew Deimer and David Quigley have further clarified my understanding that the northern black equal rights movement must be placed in a broader national context.⁵ While warning that one should not push the parallel between Reconstruction Philadelphia and the South too far, Deimer calls for a reassessment of traditional North-South boundaries in Reconstruction historiography. In concluding that the retreat from Radical Republican politics in Philadelphia was largely the result of local political conflict over racial equality, he elucidates the relationship between events in the South and the North. In his Second Founding, a study of Reconstruction politics in New York City, Quigley addresses this issue from a slightly different angle. He maintains that the intense debate as to who would be part of the democratic process and on whose terms involved black and white men and women in both the North and South. By emphasizing the northern black contributions to the debate on interracial democracy and identifying links between events in the North and the South, my book helps to meet the need for positing a national, not just a southern, vision of what Reconstruction could accomplish and for connecting local and state agitation for equal rights to a national Reconstruction.

A fairly substantial body of work on the northern black struggle for equal rights during the Reconstruction era does indeed exist. Studies by scholars such as David A. Gerber, Ira Brown, Davison M. Douglas, Elmer R. Rusco, Emma Lou Thornbrough, Eugene H. Berwanger, Roger D. Bridges, Edward R. Price, Arthur O. White, and Marion Thompson Wright have deepened our understanding of the northern movement.⁶ However, these studies have almost invariably examined the northern black quest in a particular state, territory, or community. Even the few works that transcend these geographical limits are rather restricted in scope. For example, Schwalm studies Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, while Berwanger examines only the states and territories that lay west of the Mississippi River. Likewise, though Douglas explores the school integration issue as it unfolded from New England to the West Coast, his study focuses largely on the legal dimensions after 1880, analyzes this struggle primarily from the northern white perspective, and does not investigate the suffrage issue. Moreover, Leslie H. Fishel’s 1953 dissertation on The North and the Negro, 1865–1900, which Schwalm cites as the most comprehensive survey of northern blacks and the race issue during the Reconstruction era, is dated and focuses primarily on the views of northern whites on racial discrimination in northern society.⁷

In researching this subject, I encountered several problems. One was the paucity of newspapers owned and edited by northern blacks. The limited number of northern black papers published during these years can be explained in part by the widespread poverty in black communities and the relatively small black population, which comprised only 2 percent of the northern population. Likewise, that few manuscript collections of black leaders are available can be attributed partly to the lack of interest among white archivists in collecting and preserving African American sources. Similarly, with the significant exception of the Pennsylvania State Equal Rights League, the records of black equal rights organizations either do not exist or are quite limited in scope.

Further, though northern black women attended and spoke at public meetings, collected signatures for petitions, filed lawsuits, engaged in acts of civil disobedience in defense of their children’s right to an equal education, and at times espoused universal suffrage, black men, whose views on gender roles were often similar to those of white males, tended to dominate the equal rights organizations, edit the newspapers, and lobby public officials. Consequently, while I have sought to take the views and actions of African American women into account wherever possible, it has been difficult to give them the voice they deserve.

Likewise, the extent to which the black non-elites were involved in the equal rights cause is not easily discerned. Steven Hahn’s A Nation under Our Feet, as well as documents in the series on the history of emancipation, edited by Hahn, Ira Berlin, and others, provide valuable insights into the role that freed people played in shaping their world following the end of slavery.⁸ Research in similar sources pertaining to the North—such as records of public meetings and local equal rights organizations, petitions, lawsuits, voting data, and reports of acts of civil disobedience—indicate that the crusade for full citizenship rights elicited broad support within northern black communities. One must, however, be careful not to overstate the role of northern black non-elites in the movement, for the documents of black elites—including newspaper editorials, reports, memorials, and personal correspondence—are much more available and tend to provide the most weighty evidence. The elites, after all, generally had the requisite money, time, and influence to be active within, and shape the agenda of, the equal rights cause.

Despite these archival limitations, my research in a broad array of primary sources sheds new and valuable light on the northern black struggle for equal rights during the post–Civil War era. Thorough research in all of the northern black newspapers and several white newspapers, government documents, proceedings of local black meetings and state and national conventions, petitions, and correspondence in the manuscript collections of both black and white leaders deepens our understanding of the role that black women and non-elites, as well as the black male leadership, played in the movement. In addition, these sources show, more clearly than any previous study, that Reconstruction began in the North and that African Americans relentlessly pressured often-reluctant white Republicans to live up to their stated ideals. At the same time, a close examination of the historical literature on the equal rights movement as it developed in specific northern states and communities breaks new ground in illuminating broad patterns of shared experience among its members as well as the diverse realities they encountered and the arguments and tactics they employed on behalf of racial justice.

This book is organized thematically, for the most part. It concentrates on the two issues that northern blacks considered most essential: black male suffrage and equal access to the public schools. Following an examination of their struggle, which culminated in the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, the focus shifts to their efforts to use the vote especially for the purpose of integrating the public schools. The Republican Party’s retreat from Reconstruction—and the response of northern African Americans to this development—is the central theme of the last portion of the book. However, these broad themes are explored in a partially chronological order. The narrative moves forward from the launching of the equal rights cause in 1864 to the end of Reconstruction in the North approximately two decades later. While the male suffrage issue was the centerpiece of the movement during the 1860s, the school issue remained a major objective throughout the period. During the 1870s, northern blacks were forced to assess their place within the Republican Party and to determine how they could most effectively employ the franchise as white Republicans inexorably retreated from their commitment to protect the rights of all citizens.

This book is divided into five chapters. The first chapter examines the factors that motivated northern African Americans to launch the equal rights movement and establish the National Equal Rights League late in the Civil War. It also investigates the broad areas of agreement among these activists as well as the issues that divided them. The Pennsylvania State Equal Rights League—one of the most active and influential of the state equal rights organizations—serves as a case study of the cause.

Chapter 2 concentrates on northern African Americans’ struggle to attain manhood suffrage rights. It investigates the varied arguments and tactics they marshaled on behalf of the franchise and their complex and often problematic interaction with northern white Republicans prior to the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment.

Chapter 3 studies the drive of northern blacks to end racial segregation within and, in some states, exclusion from, the public schools across the North during the mid- and late 1860s. It analyzes divisions within the movement over whether, and to what degree, the desegregation of public schools would serve the best interests of African Americans and explains how and why most northern blacks sought to gain equal educational opportunities.

Chapter 4 concentrates on the first half of the 1870s. It examines how, following the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, northern blacks sought to work within the Republican Party at the state level to gain equal access to public schools and, at the federal level, to pressure congressional Republicans to pass Charles Sumner’s Civil Rights Bill—especially its school integration clause. This chapter also analyzes the impact of the northern black vote on the outcome of elections and the growing frustration of northern blacks with their treatment by white Republicans.

Chapter 5 investigates the response by northern blacks to the collapse of Reconstruction in the South and tells the story of their ongoing efforts to gain equal rights into the 1880s.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is difficult to know where to begin in expressing my gratitude to numerous individuals and institutions that have helped bring this book to completion. Their support, advice, encouragement, and insights have sustained me in many ways in the course of researching and writing this book. I was ably and generously assisted in my research by librarians and archivists at the American Antiquarian Society, Boston Public Library, California Historical Society, California State Archives, Chicago Historical Society, Chicago Public Library, Columbia University Library, Connecticut Historical Society, Connecticut State Library, Detroit Public Library, Harvard University Library, Hayes Historical Library, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Howard University Library, Illinois State Archives, Illinois Historical Library, Indiana Historical Society, Indiana State Library, Library of Congress, Massachusetts Historical Society, Michigan Historical Center, National Archives, New Jersey Historical Society, New Jersey State Library, New York Historical Library, New York Public Library, Oberlin College Library, Ohio Historical Center, Pennsylvania Historical Library, Rhode Island Historical Society, Rhode Island State Library, Southern Connecticut State University Library, Syracuse University Library, Temple University Library, and Yale University Library.

I have benefited at every stage of my research and writing from the support provided by Southern Connecticut State University. A sabbatical leave, research reassigned time, and Connecticut State University research grants greatly facilitated my research. Moreover, the university’s Faculty Development Fund paid for the typing of the manuscript. I am especially indebted to Carol Culmo, who skillfully typed the manuscript and managed to retain her sense of humor. I deeply appreciate this generous institutional support.

I have been very fortunate to draw on the vast knowledge and keen insights of a number of exceptional scholars. When I embarked on this project, which represented a departure from much of my scholarly work, Jim Stewart, Randall Miller, and Merton Dillon reassured me that the African American struggle for equal rights in the North during Reconstruction deserved treatment and that I could see this study through to a successful conclusion. Several friends in the profession gave generously of their time in the midst of very busy and productive lives. Rich Newman and Merton Dillon read the entire manuscript, and Jim Stewart, Peter Hinks, and Stacey Robertson read portions of it. By helping me to better understand the dynamics of the northern equal rights movement and how it relates to the broader context of national Reconstruction and nineteenth-century African American history, these scholars, as well as the readers for Cornell University Press, significantly improved this book. In the final analysis, any errors or misconceptions that remain in the finished work are mine, not theirs.

In addition, a number of other friends in the scholarly community—including Stan Harrold, Jim Giglio, John Quist, Don Zelman, Harriet Applewhite, Fred Blue, Doug Egerton, Jack McKivigan, and Dick Smith—were a constant source of encouragement and inspiration. I deeply appreciate their moral support. I would hasten to add to this group of scholars my friends in the history department at Southern Connecticut State University, who exemplify the essential connection between teaching and scholarship. No acknowledgment of those who have assisted me along the way would be complete without mentioning the academic forums that enabled me to test my ideas and receive valuable feedback. I especially benefited from the recommendations offered by commentators at a symposium sponsored by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, a session at the Organization of American Historians meeting in Memphis, and a session at the Mid-America Conference on History held at Oklahoma State University.

I am deeply indebted to the editors at Cornell University Press. They have been extremely helpful and supportive throughout the process of revising and editing the manuscript. I wish, above all, to thank Michael McGandy, whose editorial talents were instrumental in making this a more coherent and polished study. I also appreciate the expert assistance of Karen Laun, who deftly guided me through the copyediting and production phases of the process.

My children—Andrew, Jenny, Kate, and Mark—deserve special mention. You have been a constant source of love and inspiration and have enriched my life in countless ways. You are very special to me, and I am extremely proud of each one of you. I also wish to acknowledge my daughters-in-law, Carolina and Kiowa, and my son-in-law, Dan. You are wonderful people who embody the meaning of family—love, concern, and caring. I have also been blessed with three beautiful grandchildren—Ryan, Liam, and Fallon—who are a source of immense pride and joy.

I am most indebted to my wife, Jean, who once again put up with a book’s intrusive presence in our lives. I cherish our shared commitment to family and friends, to each other, and to a more just and equitable society. Without your love, understanding, support, and sage advice, it is difficult to imagine how I could have written this book. You are a very special person. I feel honored to dedicate this book to you.

PROLOGUE

The 145 delegates who assembled for the National Convention of Colored Men in Syracuse, New York, in October 1864 were motivated by a complex mix of optimism and anxiety. Now emboldened to act above all by the emancipation unfolding across the South as well as the enlistment of black troops in the Union Army, they aimed to launch an equal rights movement. In addition, the rise to power of the Republican Party held out the hope of improved race relations. Yet these men and women also faced a very uncertain future. The Lincoln administration had acted cautiously against slavery, and the national elections that lay but a month ahead might conceivably place a Democrat in the White House. If George McClellan were to defeat Abraham Lincoln, there was good reason to expect the subsequent revocation of the Emancipation Proclamation and the resurrection of the Dred Scott decision, which had ruled that, because African Americans were not citizens, they deserved no rights. To make matters worse, in order to ensure its passage, congressional Republicans had recently removed any mention of black suffrage rights from the Wade-Davis Bill. Finally, while some black rights activists considered New York City the logical place for a national convention, painful memories of the horrifying draft riots a year earlier, which had resulted in the death of large numbers of African Americans, led the convention’s organizers to choose Syracuse as the site because of its central location and the active role its residents had played in the Underground Railroad. This combination of factors convinced the delegates—most of whom were Northerners—that this was a singular moment when they must organize and agitate for the full citizenship rights that had repeatedly been denied by northern whites during the past several decades.

When the delegates arrived in Syracuse, they were once again reminded of the depths of northern white racism when local toughs shouted racist slogans and physically assaulted a few of them. But the delegates were not to be deterred. The Syracuse Convention brought together a broader spectrum of northern black activists than had any previous African American meeting. Among the delegates were Frederick Douglass, George T. Downing, Henry Highland Garnet, and other prominent figures from the antebellum northern protest movement; a younger generation of African Americans, including Octavius V. Catto, George B. Vashon, and John Mercer Langston, who would occupy positions of power and influence in the postwar equal rights cause; soldiers from both the North and South; influential women such as Frances Ellen Watkins Harper; and the editors of several northern black newspapers. Although African Americans who lived west of the Mississippi River did not send delegates, and relatively few from the Midwest were present, they were fully aware of the convention’s proceedings and supported its objectives. Preparations for the convention and discussion of the major issues it would address had filled the columns of black newspapers for many weeks.

The Syracuse Convention launched the northern black struggle for equal rights. Undertaken in the face of widespread white opposition and indifference, this movement stands as the most important African American crusade for full citizenship rights prior to the modern civil rights cause of the 1950s and 1960s. In order to understand the national debate on the merits of interracial democracy during the post–Civil War years as well as the national scope of Reconstruction, it is necessary to bring northern blacks into the very center of the Reconstruction narrative as significant agents of change rather than as passive recipients of rights granted by sympathetic whites. Indeed, the equal rights cause African Americans initiated and sustained should be viewed as an early, and very important, chapter in the story of Reconstruction. At the time of the Syracuse Convention and the subsequent construction of a full-fledged northern black equal rights movement, the president and Congress had scarcely begun to develop a coherent blueprint for Reconstruction in the South, and the congressional debate on a civil rights bill lay more than a year in the future. By contrast, northern blacks were already establishing an agenda and a political strategy.

The northern black struggle for equal rights during the Reconstruction era sought to harness and direct the powerful forces unleashed by the Civil War toward the creation of a more just and equitable society. Unlike the short-lived National Council established by the 1853 Rochester Convention, the National Equal Rights League, which the Syracuse Convention created to coordinate the cause, became truly national in scope, with a network of state and local auxiliaries in every northern state from New England to the West Coast and in most of the southern states. Those who founded and guided the NERL and its numerous auxiliaries, as well as the thousands of African American men, women, and children who participated in the cause at the grassroots level, at times were divided along ideological, regional, class, cultural, and gender lines, and they often focused on repealing discriminatory laws in their own states and communities. Yet they had much in common, and they were keenly aware that they were part of a broad-based movement that extended across the country.

In the broadest sense, African Americans shared the conviction that they deserved full rights and privileges as citizens. They also generally agreed that suffrage rights for black males and equal access to public schools should be the central objectives of the movement. Virtually no African American doubted that justice, morality, and the protection of their vital interests required the attainment of the franchise. Even most black women and men who favored universal suffrage ultimately decided that, for strategic and other reasons, black manhood suffrage should take precedence over woman suffrage. There was even considerable agreement on the school issue. Whatever their misgivings about school integration, most northern blacks concluded that the reality of inferior black public schools—and the stigma whites attached to them—outweighed their concerns about the potentially negative effects of integration on black students and teachers as well as the black community’s already limited control over their own public schools. Further, even though their support for blacks-only (or racially exclusive) rights organizations and Republican political clubs seemed to clash with their insistence on integration and inclusion, most northern African Americans endorsed them for very practical reasons, including the desire to minimize their dependence on white allies—whom they did not entirely trust—to act on behalf of blacks’ fundamental interests.

Northern blacks’ relationship with white Republicans was often problematic. However, because only the Republicans were willing to support fundamental legal rights for African Americans, most northern blacks remained loyal to the party throughout the Reconstruction era. The ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, which the Democrats overwhelmingly opposed, was perhaps the most decisive moment in the Reconstruction-era northern black struggle for equal rights. Once black males secured political rights in the U.S. Constitution, they had an opportunity to employ the franchise as leverage to gain unfettered access to public schools and other public institutions and to carve out a meaningful place within the Republican Party. Thus, to understand the nature of northern black politics during the 1870s, it is necessary to examine their wide-ranging efforts to translate the Fifteenth Amendment into tangible political results, including their campaign to expand and clarify those rights articulated in the Fourteenth Amendment. Northern African Americans brought to this campaign a mix of pragmatism, idealism, tenacity, and creativity. An important facet of this endeavor was their effort between 1870 and 1875, in concert with southern blacks, to pressure white Republicans in Congress to pass Charles Sumner’s Civil Rights Bill, which called for a ban on segregation in many areas of the public sphere, especially the nation’s public schools. In addition, throughout the 1870s they continued their multifaceted assault—which they had begun in earnest in the mid-1860s—on northern state and local laws that mandated the segregation of African Americans within, or exclusion from, public schools.

Northern African Americans were neither naive about how they could best protect their political interests and advance their rights nor rendered passive by their dependence on white Republicans for the achievement of their objectives. The evidence indicates that their experience as an oppressed and despised minority shaped a realistic appraisal of the northern political landscape. Most of them fully realized that, because the vast majority of Democrats were their sworn enemy, there was no viable alternative to working with white Republicans. Notwithstanding this stark reality—and their gratitude for Republican-sponsored abolition and