Free Blacks in the North 1800+
- Northern free blacks celebrated the abolition of the international slavery after 1808
- But were still struggling to achieve their own emancipation at that time
- 3/4s of Northern blacks were free by 1810
- Virtually all were free by 1840
Free Black Life in the Antebellum Era
- Free blacks faced discrimination in employment, education, transportation and civil rights
- They had gained the vote during the revolutionary era, but they subsequently lost it By 1830 there was no extensive voting by blacks anywhere
- Most worked as laborers and domestic
- Excluded from many white institutions and discriminated against in others, starting in the 1780s free blacks founded their own churches, schools and mutual aid societies
Free Black Northerners were Central to the Antislavery Movement
- 1780s + pushed white abolitionists in the anti-slavery movement to help secure black freedom in the North
- 1809 created an annual holiday around the abolition of the international slave trade
- 1817 organized against the American Colonization Society
- Influenced white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison’s 1830 conversion to “immediatism” – a commitment to the immediate abolition of slavery
- Were prominent in the underground railroad
American Colonization Society
- Founded in 1816 by prominent whites, who wished to free America of both slavery and black people
- Called for black Americans to be returned to Africa and resettled in colonies there
- Supported the Colonization of Liberia and the recruitment of free blacks to travel there
- While formally antislavery, the ACS’s membership included slaveowners, and the Society confined its emigrationist efforts to free blacks
Free Black Resistance to the ACS
- The free black abolitionist movement first mobilized around resistance to with the ACS
- Within month’s of the ACS’s found, thousands of free blacks met in Philadelphia to express their unwillingness to emigrate
- Free blacks suspected that the colonizationists supported the removal of emancipated blacks only and would happily sustain slavery
- They also found colonizationist’s arguments that blacks could only flourish in Africa, to be racially demeaning and unfounded
Free Black Northerners were Central to the Antislavery Movement
- 1780s + pushed white abolitionists in the anti-slavery movement to help secure black freedom in the North
- 1809 created an annual holiday around the abolition of the international slave trade
- 1817 organized against the American Colonization Society
- Influenced white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison’s conversion to “immediatism” – a commitment to the immediate abolition of slavery
- Were prominent in the underground railroad
The Abolitionist Press
- Free black resistance to colonization, together with advances in inexpensive printing, led to the founding of the first African American newspaper, Freedom’s Journal in 1827
- Free blacks met with radical newspaperman William Lloyd Garrison in the late 1820s and help convince him that abolition must be immediate rather than gradual
- 1831 William Lloyd Garrison founded the Liberator, the first white abolitionist news paper
- 1847 Frederick Douglass founded the North Star—later known as Frederick Douglass’ Paper