The history of African Americans, Midwest and slavery is unlike any other region of the United States.
Slavery was both banned and protected in the Early Midwest. In 1787, Congress enacted the early Midwest territory law, known as the Northwest Ordinance. The law provided, “There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory, otherwise than in the punishment of crimes…”
Right after, the law also said: “[A]ny person escaping into the [Midwest], from whom labor or service is lawfully claimed in any one of the original States, such fugitive may be lawfully reclaimed and conveyed to the person claiming his or her labor or service as aforesaid.”
This was the first time Congress imposed a federal ban on slavery anywhere in the United States. It was also the first time — even before the Constitution was written — Congress enacted a “Fugitive Slave Law“.
The Midwest slavery ban would be adopted by every Midwest state, starting with Ohio in 1803, with one exception. In 1821 Congress extended the ban throughout the Midwest, making one exception by allowing slavery in Missouri under the Missouri Compromise.
The slavery bans were at first riddled with loopholes. Southerners migrated with enslaved African Americans to the Midwest, claiming they were “voluntary” servants. U.S. Army officers brought black enslaved servants claiming the state and territory laws didn’t apply to them. And enslaved African Americans were forced to work in the region’s mines — legally in Illinois, and illegally in Wisconsin.
It made the Midwest a paradox for African Americans: the region offered freedom to most, but not all. It also did not provide equal rights, much less full citizens rights. And it made the Midwest the “frontline” of the nation’s war over slavery until the Civil War.
In the Midwest before the Civil War, a legal war over slavery and racial equality was waged in the region’s legislatures and courthouses.
Racist “Black Laws” in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa and Missouri barred free African Americans from becoming residents. Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin rejected the racial exclusion laws, but Ohio required black newcomers to pay a $500 bond. Indiana required blacks residing in the state to register with government offices. All Midwest states denied African Americans voting rights. But Midwest legislatures enacted some pro-freedom laws as well, including personal liberty laws against the Fugitive Slave Act in Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin.
African Americans in the early Midwest turned to the courts in the fight for justice and equality. “Freedom Lawsuits” were one key tool: African Americans asserted their legal right to freedom under slavery bans. The Midwest courts often agreed that African Americans “once free are always free,” that any person brought to the region was automatically emancipated. In one freedom suit, a black Illinois woman, Nance Bailey won her freedom, assisted by the young attorney, Abraham Lincoln. Bailey’s lawsuit moved the Illinois Supreme Court to declare in that state, “every person was free, without regard to race . . . the sale of a free person is illegal.”
Anti-slavery lawsuits related to Freedom Suits included lawsuits against conductors of the Underground Railroad, and constitutional challenges to pro-slavery laws. Several lawsuits in the Midwest challenged the Fugitive Slave Act’s legality, and in 1855 Wisconsin’s Supreme Court declared the Act unconstitutional.
The Midwest courts’ anti-slavery decisions moved the U.S. Supreme Court, dominated by southern judges, to rule that the Midwest slavery bans were unconstitutional.
In the infamous Dred Scott v. Sandford case, Dred and Harriet Scott sued for theirs and their daughters’ freedom after living in Illinois and Minnesota, then part of theWisconsin Territory. Despite winning their trial in the St. Louis courts where they then lived, the Supreme Court ruled the Scotts’ didn’t even have the right to file a lawsuit, infamously writing that African Americans had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” The Dred Scott decision is considered the most egregious Supreme Court decision in U.S. history, and was a major contributor to the outbreak of the Civil War.
The Midwest before the Civil War was the “Gateway to Freedom” for thousands of enslaved African Americans.
The 1,000+ mile border between the free Midwest states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Iowa, and the slaveholding states of Kentucky, Virginia and Missouri, was the means of escape for tens of thousands of enslaved African Americans.
Black Underground Railroad “conductors,” free black settlements, and Native American tribes offered assistance to escaped freedom seekers. Other African Americans found freedom completely on their own, navigating the Midwest’s forests and rivers, making it as far as Canada.
Famous Midwest freedom seekers include Josiah Henson, who inspired the anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Thornton Blackburn; and William Wells Brown, who after his escape, spent years working on the steamboats of Lake Erie, smuggling individuals from the Midwest to Canada.
Famous Midwest African American Undergrond Railroad Conductors included John Parker, who helped over 400 African Americans escape to freedom; Peter Fossett, a former slave from Thomas Jefferson’s plantation, Monticello; and George de Baptise, a one-time White House servant, leader of the Indiana and Detroit Underground Railroads, and organizer of the 1st Michigan Colored Volunteers army unit during the Civil War.
Margaret Garner’s escape was perhaps the most tragic and infamous in American history. Garner escaped across the frozen Ohio River from Kentucky with her children. Cornered by slave catchers in Cincinnati, Garner killed her daughter rather than allow her to be returned to slavery. Her story was immortalized in Beloved, the novel by Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison and made into a feature film by Oprah Winfrey.