Racial Justice

Slavery

Most northerners were perfectly willing to let southerners own slaves, so long as it was clear that an allowance was being made for the slave states. Abolitionists obviously went further than that, calling for an end to slavery in all states, territories, and other holdings, but the argument had raged for decades before the abolitionists' voices became as loud as the others. The importation of new slaves was banned as early as 1808, but as long as the children of slaves remained slaves, all that did was limit the slave trade, not slave ownership. Free African Americans continued to be kidnapped and forced into slavery.

Throughout the 19th century, slavery and the treatment and position of former slaves were the most prominent issues in American politics, alongside currency. Free African Americans were continually treated as lesser citizens than whites, especially because for most of the antebellum period, more than half of free African Americans lived in the southern states or territories. The later codified practice of segregation originated (in a sense) with the creation of free African-American institutions by free African Americans, who established their own businesses and schools because of their exclusion (whether official or not) from white institutions. This also established an African-American power base, which, while limited, in many parts of the country (for example, New Orleans) became significant. The African-American middle class, though all but invisible to most whites, originated in the 19th century among the growing numbers of free African Americans. This development likely felt as much like a threat to pro-slavery southerners as northern abolitionists.

By the middle of the 19th century, the treatment of African Americans was the preeminent issue in federal politics. After the Bleeding Kansas dispute over the issue of slavery in the new state of Kansas, with fears that slaves in Missouri would escape to a free Kansas boiling over into riots and arson, and after the assault on Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner by South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks, and the kidnapping and [Page 692]murder of five pro-slavery Kansans by radical abolitionist John Brown, the Supreme Court decided in the 1857 Dred Scott Decision that no one of African descent, regardless of whether they had ever been a slave, could be a citizen of the United States. It was in some sense a worse blow to racial justice than slavery itself, the American practice of which at least provided for the ability of slaves to be freed and, theoretically, enjoy the same rights as other Americans.

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