The Black Freedom Struggle of the 19th Century North

During the mid-nineteenth-century, Black people collectively fought for racial equality and social justice within the U.S. The scholarship of historians, including Herbert G. Gutman and Jennifer L. Morgan, collectively illustrate that enslaved people consistently and diversely challenged the complex institution of slavery. Their work, for instance, highlights that enslaved people demonstrated agency (over an extended period and locations) in their unified demands for the recognition of their humanity.

To be clear, there is no question that the important histories of enslaved people (later freedpeople) should continue receiving both public and academic attention. At the same time, turning attention to northern freeborn Black people, who lived in free states, gives avenues to understanding how racial discrimination evolved, in numerous ways, outside of slavery. Additionally, focusing on northern freeborn Black people provides ways to explore how they repeatedly demonstrated agency against their white oppressors.

Living in free states, during the antebellum and Civil War-era, did not guarantee that freeborn Black people could avoid becoming enslaved themselves. While the threat of becoming a victim of Blackbirding—the kidnapping of a Black person for the explicit purpose of selling them into slavery—was a sad reality in the early-nineteenth-century, the threat dramatically intensified after the Compromise of 1850. More specifically, the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 (FSA of 1850), a revised version of the 1793 federal policy, legalized slaveowners’ attempts to reclaim enslaved people who refugeed, regardless of the length of freedom, to a free state. In addition to forcing any deputized white person (regardless of their stance on slavery) to participate in the detainment of a suspected refugee, the federal law provided latitude for a slaveowner to claim any Black person was their “property.” Black people throughout the nation understood that the passage of the FSA of 1850, which free state Congressmen supported to keep the U.S. unified, sanctioned war on all Black people as their citizenship and humanity, regardless of their status, was unimportant to the U.S. government.

Northern Black communities swiftly mobilized to condemn the policy, while seeking to protect Black people from possibly becoming bondspeople. In various northern localities, Vigilance Committees (some of which originated in the 1830s) refocused their efforts to offer aid and possible safety to “fugitives.” For instance, the New York City Vigilant Committee successfully helped 1,000 people avoid enslavement. Northern Black women were critical members of the Vigilance Committee, including working to keep freeborn Black children from becoming victims of the FSA of 1850 (sometimes as they traveled and from school). Black women also helped adults avoid becoming enslaved as well.