|
|
|
Book Review
| Stephen Middleton, The Black Laws: Race and the Legal Process in Early Ohio, Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006. Pp. xi + 363. $59.95 cloth (ISBN 0-8214-1623-5); $26.95 paper (ISBN 0-8214-1624-3).
|
| In The Black Laws, Stephen Middleton demonstrates the rise and fall of nineteenth-century Ohio's legal regime that rendered African-Americans as "quasi-citizens," or "residents, rather than citizens" (74, 101). Middleton, a professor of history at North Carolina State University, places primary emphasis on the genesis and persistence of the Black Laws in a state owing its origins to powerful doctrines of individual freedom. In an era saturated with the rhetoric of Republicanism and natural law, why did the free state of Ohio bar African-Americans from testifying against whites; from serving in the militia; from utilizing the public relief and public schools for which they paid taxes? Why did Ohio, just one year after ratifying a constitution proclaiming the equality of all men, require African-Americans to register and post bond simply to live within its borders? |
1
|
|
For Middleton, the answer to these questions is simple. As Middleton tellingly cites an Ohioan reminiscing in 1850, "'Ohio was a state for White men. The Negroes were intruders'" (43). Indeed, while Ohio's first generation of transplanted New Englanders and southerners early relinquished slavery, their plan for a white Ohio had no place for people of color. Thus, the revered Republican fathers of Ohio statehood—Edward Tiffin, Nathaniel Massie, Thomas Worthington, and especially Philemon Beecher—engineered a legal regime to make life so difficult for African-Americans as to "deter black settlement in Ohio" (51). Conservative white Ohioans thus constructed a legal order to engineer their vision of a white society. |
2
|
|
Through the early 1830s, African-Americans, despite daily acts of resistance and coordinated political campaigns, suffered mightily under the Black Laws. And Ohio's blacks alone could not effect change. In fact, Middleton's key agents of change are "white progressives"—moral reformers in the 1830s, liberal Whigs in the 1840s, and abolitionists in the 1850s (6, 293 n.1). In the late 1830s, the Ohio Supreme Court, and reformist petitions to the state legislature, explains Middleton, set the foundation for repealing the Black Laws. Thus placed "in the right political position," Middleton's "white progressives" saw an opportunity for change in the slow political death of the Whig party. A vocal minority within the Whig Party from 1834 to 1840, liberal Whigs defected to the Liberty and Free-Soil Parties in the 1840s. Once free of the Whigs' conservatism, these liberals, among them Salmon P. Chase and Joshua Giddings, tied their stance against the Black Laws with a broad critique of a southern "slave power." With their powerful cudgel, white progressives became a crucial electoral bloc. In the election of 1848, Free-Soilers won enough seats to force the state's Democratic majority to seek a compromise: if the Free-Soilers supported Democratic legislation undoing Whig electoral gerrymandering, their reward would be a partial repeal of the Black Laws. However badly damaged, the remaining Black Laws nonetheless persisted until the late nineteenth century, finally collapsing under the weight of new national paradigms of individual rights. |
3
|
|
Densely researched and carefully argued, Middleton's work thus offers a highly nuanced story of how a diverse set of agents, and social, legal, and political developments, at different times and different places, built up and then destroyed Ohio's Black Laws. And readers will entertain but minor quibbles with this fine work. Middleton's sporadic use of modern political terminology to describe antebellum political structures—for example, was the Ohio Antislavery Society truly a "political action committee" (89)?—may raise a few eyebrows. More importantly, though, The Black Laws' complexity occasionally renders potentially major insights as mere suggestions. Middleton implies, for example, that while Ohio's Black Laws "approximated the slave codes of the South" (56), the state's postbellum law of segregation paralleled the Jim Crow order. Similarly, echoing Charles Payne's study of the twentieth-century civil rights movement, Middleton suggests that Ohio's black educational institutions "produced an educated leadership class that could attack" institutional racial subjugation (84). Such provocative comparisons beg for far more elaboration than Middleton provides. |
4
|
|
Yet Middleton's achievements far outweigh these minor criticisms. Constitutional and legal historians will appreciate a narrative that demonstrates the specific connections between antebellum and postbellum mechanisms of racial domination. Likewise, Middleton provides a new story of African-American survival and resistance amid systematic, institutionalized racism. Indeed, historians writ large will marvel at Middleton's remarkable ability to weave together, rather seamlessly, local, state, and national law and politics. |
5
|
|
Finally, The Black Laws' normative implications will likely haunt scholars for many years to come. "The vigilance of a conscientious citizenry," Middleton concludes, "is required to secure civil rights for all Americans" (261). This is a fitting conclusion to a story of racial discrimination that begins with the Northwest Ordinance and concludes with The Civil Rights Cases (1883) and Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). By all indications, Middleton believes that this story is far from over. |
6
|
| Gautham Rao
|
| University of Chicago |
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|