Antebellum Black Enfranchisement

June 27, 2008

Or, in plain language, “black voting rights before the Civil War.”

A couple of folks have suggested here that Northern sentiment towards black civil rights was more or less one of convenience and self interest — that no one was actually interested in treating Black people as equals. Not knowing any better, I assumed this was true enough to not make any difference. But it turns out that the late Antebellum North saw quite a blossoming of civil rights for free Black men. Several states had votes on enfranchising black people, and Massachusetts actually desegregated their public schools in the 1850s.

I’m not suggesting that civil rights were high in the mind of everyone, or even in the majority on the North. But there were enough people thinking and working for equal rights in the nineteenth century for the issue to show up on the political radar. In fact, Democrats in the 1856 election trying to slander the Republican party by claiming the Republicans supported equal rights for blacks, a charge the Republicans tried to deny but couldn’t — because there were enough of them who demonstrably did.

What I’ve found so far is pretty sketchy — anyone else know anything about this?

Posted in Civil War