In the Shadows of Slavery: Black Freedom and Democracy in the Early United States

The American free Black population expanded continually during this period. Between 1777 and 1804, all of the northern states abolished slavery within their jurisdictions. The southern states, by contrast, briefly increased manumissions in the wake of the Revolution - bolstering free Black communities within their borders - but subsequently redoubled their commitment to slavery, expanding it into the newly acquired frontier territories of the South.

As the nation became bifurcated, with one half of the union increasingly committed to some version of Black “freedom” and the other half to slavery, disputes within and among states arose regarding the citizenship rights and legal personhood of African Americans who were either legally free (through birth, manumission, or emancipation) or who were legally enslaved but had escaped to free soil.

To what extent should they be considered members of the polis, with access to the legal and constitutional rights and privileges that such membership entailed? Could they be re-enslaved or otherwise subjected to coercive labour relationships, and if so, under what conditions? Did they have the right to move across state borders? Did they have equal access to the justice system? Could they participate in democracy?

Various states answered these questions in different ways. The resulting disputes in turn constituted the driving force behind state-level and sectional conflicts over the relationship between race, citizenship, democracy, and state sovereignty - conflicts that ultimately led the United States down the path to civil war.

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