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Book Review
| Nikki M. Taylor, Frontiers of Freedom: Cincinnati's Black Community, 1802–1868, Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2005. Pp. 315. $55.00 cloth (ISBN 0-8214-1579-4); $24.95 paper (ISBN 0-8214-1580-8).
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| Nikki Taylor's Frontiers of Freedom is a recent publication in the Ohio University Press Series on Law, Society, and Politics in the Midwest. In this valuable book, she has done a social history study of an important antebellum community: Cincinnati, Ohio. This community's history developed in the backdrop of the law, as indicated by the Northwest Ordinance. The states of the Old Northwest were brought into the United States as non-slaveholding states, insofar as the Northwest Ordinance limited slavery's presence. Nonetheless, slavery mattered very much in Cincinnati, Ohio. Bordering northern Kentucky, it was a Northern city with a Southern pro-slavery sentiment, as indicated by support for the Black Laws, passed in 1804 and 1807, that mirrored the slave codes of its Southern neighbors in denying their black residents rights to vote, serve on juries, and testify against whites. All these limited blacks in their ability to protect themselves under the law, until the laws were repealed in 1849. Despite their repeal, the 1851 state constitutional convention and subsequent legislative enactments still limited rights. Blacks did not remain passive in the face of these onslaughts, however: they organized, petitioned their government, used the law when they could, and organized in self-defense when faced with violence from outside the community. |
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Why did the Cincinnati elite support legislation that discriminated against blacks? Cincinnati's white mercantile elite regularly did business with Southern slave owners, and Southerners regularly visited Cincinnati. The white working and immigrant class too had their Southern sentiments; they opposed the presence of free blacks who competed with them for jobs. They could be relied upon to participate in mob violence that terrorized the community, violence that could be sanctioned by local authorities as a legitimate means of extra-legal social control. This violence could push members of the free black community to emigrate outside of the city, as far north as Canada, in order to escape oppression. Yet, Cincinnati's geography marked it as a haven, nonetheless, for enslaved blacks. Its proximity to Kentucky made it a station on the Underground Railroad, a destination for runaways seeking freedom. Thus, blacks living in the city and traveling the Mississippi river that divided Ohio from Kentucky experienced shifting legal paradigms grounded in geography, through two matrices: freedom versus slavery. |
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These shifting paradigms became ever more acute as the fugitive slave acts gained importance in determining the fortunes of blacks in the city. Used as a compromise between Northern states with the interests of slave owners in the South, the Constitution authorized Southerners to seek the return of fugitives in the North. But the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, aimed to strengthen the act of 1793, denied blacks constitutional protections. Because they could not testify in their defense, slave catchers and masters had rights to accuse, prosecute, and repatriate those alleged to be runaway slaves. Abolitionist lawyers were an important defense, then, against the acts. Members of the community relied upon them when Cincinnati blacks, free or enslaved, and their white allies, faced prosecution. These threats to blacks' civil rights meant that free blacks who were not fugitives became vulnerable to any white hoping to claim them, especially when commissioners had a financial incentive under the law to find for slave owners. Those who repatriated could receive ten dollars; those who found in favor of an alleged fugitive received five. |
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The Fugitive Slave Acts became moot by the thirteenth amendment that ended slavery in the United States, but the struggles of the community to establish its place persisted throughout the Civil War period, when Taylor ends her study. Men and women in Ohio supported the Union effort, even though black men were denied the right to serve, since whites were leery of blacks bearing arms. Just as in the South, the struggle for civil rights continued, in the form of support for the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments: the right to equal protection under the law, combined with the right to vote and thus finally become full citizens of their state and the United States. |
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| Bernie Jones
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| University of Massachusetts, Amherst |
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