Ohio History

Responding to a critic of his home state of Ohio in 1851, abolitionist Rep. Joshua R. Giddings extolled the virtues of the racial equality that followed the partial repeal of the state’s Black Laws in February 1849. He noted that “a black or mulatto person now enjoys the same liberty to settle in Ohio as [the critic] Col. Schouler, and would be listened to in a court of justice there with the same respect.”¹ For Giddings and some other white political abolitionists, the repeal represented a singular accomplishment, a promise of things to come. For African American reformers such as Alfred J. Anderson, Charles B. Ray, and Frederick Douglass, the Ohio repeal suggested “there is yet work for the friends of Universal Freedom in the State of Ohio.” African Americans viewed the “victory” as only a partial achievement. One activist remarked that “the colored population has been in a starving condition, for want of the benefits of education, and the enjoyments of various precious rights, and now our Legislature gives them only a small share of what they should have.”²

Historians sometimes dismiss Ohio’s Black Laws because some were rarely enforced and they seldom prohibited the movement of African Americans into [End Page 7] the state. The state counted a mere 337 African American residents at statehood, but by 1860 the number approached 37,000. At first glance the growing population seems astounding; however, on the eve of the Civil War black Ohioans made up less than 2 percent of the state’s 2.3 million residents. It is likely that some African Americans chose to avoid settling in Ohio, where their rights could fall victim to sporadic Black Law enforcement. To mid-nineteenth-century African Americans and their advocates in the reform community, especially, the very existence of the Black Laws enforced or not, represented one more bastion of racism in antebellum American society. The Black Laws offered a tangible target in the movement for racial equality and black uplift that grew along with immediate abolition after 1830. Repeal of the Ohio Black Laws became a goal of the national and state black convention movements, of regional white abolitionists, and was of national concern to African Americans. Some of their efforts on behalf of African Ohioans will be considered here in an effort to understand the complicated nature of the struggle for racial equality in antebellum America.

The very denial of basic civil rights, including the franchise, under Ohio law meant that no matter how hard they struggled, African Americans could claim “only a moral power” in the fight for repeal. It was up to white allies such as Giddings, Salmon P. Chase, and a few like-minded state delegates to push the repeal through the legislature. Chase took up the cause of repeal at a politically expedient time—he would ride his newfound Free Soil constituency all the way to the U.S. Senate. The legislative action to at least partially repeal the laws was made more urgent by a petition and pamphlet campaign from Ohio’s female antislavery activists, and editorials in the national black press. Yet even after repeal, with the exception of a handful of Ohio’s most light-skinned blacks, African American men could still not cast a vote in favor of those who supported civil rights.³ They were denied this basic right of citizenship [End Page 8] under the Ohio constitution, and the state’s Black Laws further restricted civil and political rights.⁴

The terms “black codes” or “black laws” generally bring to mind the post‒Civil War South, where legal restrictions governed the lives of African Americans. There, laws restricted the freedom of blacks, determined employment patterns, and aimed to keep African Americans laboring for little or no money. By the late nineteenth century Jim Crow laws codified the separation of African Americans and whites in public accommodations and denied blacks access to basic civil rights across the South. These systems evolved in the wake of slavery’s end; however, from the nation’s founding, slavery had profound consequences in all regions of the United States. As settlers moved to fill up the Old Northwest, slavery’s influence followed. In seeking to navigate the line between white and black, and freedom and slavery, Ohio’s founding fathers struggled with a vision for the new state and determined not to extend full equality to its African American citizens.

As the first state created out of the Northwest Territory, Ohio’s formation in 1803 provided a model for other Midwestern states to emulate. Unfortunately for African American residents, that model would not include racial equality. Although article six of the Ordinance of 1787 declared that “there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude” in the Northwest Territory, contemporary politicians’ interpretations of this provision gave tacit approval to racial discrimination by only enforcing the provision on those bringing slaves into the territory after 1787.⁵ Gov. Arthur St. Clair, who was charged with administering the Northwest Territory, was himself a slaveholder and protective of property rights. When he arrived to take up his post as governor, he brought with him two slaves named Ben and Bell, whom he had purchased from Thomas Galbreath while he still lived in Pennsylvania.⁶ In addition to his own violation of the ordinance, St. Clair enforced article six as if it were a [End Page 9] gradual emancipation law, declaring slaves brought into the territories before the passage of the Ordinance legally held in bonds. Because of this interpretation, slavery existed in all corners of the Old Northwest. As historian Stephen Middleton contends, the Federalist St. Clair’s endorsement of slaveholding in the territory fostered racial discrimination, creating a climate favorable to the formation of the Black Laws enacted in all but one of the states created from the Old Northwest. This interpretation, combined with Ohio’s close proximity to the slave states of Virginia and Kentucky, influenced the state’s Founding Fathers to enact a system of laws limiting the liberty of African Americans in the Buckeye State.⁷

Although the Black Laws became the hallmark of racial discrimination in the Old Northwest, their enactment was not a foregone conclusion. Among the Ohio Territory citizens voting for delegates to the constitutional convention in October 1802 were a number of African American men. Congress had empowered all male citizens of the territory to choose representatives to the convention that would create Ohio’s first constitution. Echoing Congress, Governor St. Clair similarly declared eligible voters those men who resided in the territory for a year, providing their taxes were paid to date. There was no restriction based on race at this juncture most likely because the black population of the territory was so small. The census of 1800 enumerated only 337 African Americans in Ohio.⁸

The resulting convention of thirty-five delegates met in November 1802 at Chillicothe to establish the political framework for Ohio as the seventeenth state. The convention was dominated by Republicans, only seven Federalists were elected, and those by representatives from southern Ohio. A majority of delegates originally hailed from southern states, especially Virginia, and among them were former slaveholders. As a part of the agreement in which Virginia ceded its claim to western land in the early 1780s, Congress created the Virginia Military District within the Ohio Country. Marking several thousand acres west of the Scioto River, the lands were made available to Virginia’s Revolutionary War veterans. Many brought with them a disdain for both slavery and African Americans. Dominated by the ideology of these southerners, the convention easily included a ban on slavery in the new constitution, but black suffrage was another matter. When the convention tied seventeen-seventeen, [End Page 10] the rights of African American voters were denied by convention president Edward Tiffin, who broke the tie, casting his vote against black suffrage. Tiffin, who would soon become Ohio’s first governor, was emblematic of the former Virginians in the convention. The English-born Tiffin freed his slaves in Virginia before moving to the Northwest Territory in 1797. Under his leadership, the resulting 1802 constitution granted suffrage to “all white male inhabitants, above twenty-one years of age,” and an 1803 law provided that “every free, able-bodied, white male citizen of the state . . . shall severally and respectively be enrolled in the militia.” Although the state that entered the Union in 1803 did not have de facto slavery, neither would it offer liberty or citizenship to African Americans.⁹

Enacted primarily in 1804 and 1807, Ohio’s Black Laws went beyond denying suffrage and militia service to reflect the racist views of whites in the state, and to protect economic ties to slaveholding states across the Ohio River. In addition to the settlers crossing from the South to settle permanently in Ohio, many more southern slaveholders conducted business in Ohio on a regular basis and did not want to wonder if their slaves would be freed simply by accompanying them or being sent on business trips. Farmers and merchants along the Ohio River traded daily with southerners and became dependent on the commerce that allowed them to provide southern slaveholders with food and other goods. The Black Laws were also meant as prohibitory legislation to create a climate unfavorable to free African American settlement. Among the most restrictive of the 1804 law’s provisions were requirements that African Americans provide a certificate of freedom, to register with the county clerk upon residency, and prohibiting the employment of those without such registration. It also sought to reassure slaveholders in Virginia and Kentucky that Ohioans would comply with the federal Fugitive Slave Law of 1793 by placing additional punishments on those caught assisting or harboring runaways.¹⁰

The 1807 law moved to further restrict immigration by requiring African Americans to find two current state residents willing to secure a $500 surety within twenty days of residence, and prohibited blacks from testifying against whites. Stiff fines were put in place for any person found employing or harboring a fugitive or unregistered African American. These two pieces of legislation [End Page 11] formed the basis for the restriction of black settlers in Ohio, but later laws also affected their rights and protections within the state. African American children were excluded from the public school system created in 1821, although their families were initially taxed to support public education. An 1829 law providing for the education of African American children was repealed just two years later in 1831.¹¹

Following Ohio’s lead, other states carved from the Northwest Territory enacted similar black codes. Achieving statehood in 1816, Indiana’s legislature denied African Americans suffrage as well as the right to testify against whites. It forbade blacks from militia service and required that individuals prove their status as free men or women. Two years later, Illinois followed suit requiring proof of free status, but also granted local overseers of the poor the power to remove so-called indigent blacks from their towns. Illinois went a step further, demanding proof of freedom as a condition for employment. Michigan, which became a state in 1837, excluded African Americans from public schools and restricted suffrage to “white male citizens.” Of all the states created from the territory, only Wisconsin had no Black Laws. When Congress accepted its statehood petition in 1848, however, its constitution prohibited African American suffrage.¹²

Scholars have sometimes dismissed the efficacy of the Black Laws in Ohio and other parts of the Old Northwest, and in fact, in some parts of Ohio laws were rarely enforced. The clerk in each county, appointed for a seven-year term by the county’s common pleas court, was responsible for enforcing the registry provision of the law. The sparse extant records for most counties point to lax enforcement. In Greene County in the southwest corner of the state, for example, the registry was kept fairly regularly between 1805 and 1844. In Cuyahoga County in the Western Reserve, however, only about four hundred registrations were recorded for the 1830s, and none at all after 1837. Yet the laws did discriminate against black Ohioans and offered whites a legitimate tool to lash out at them when convenient. Before the 1829 Cincinnati race riot, an announcement of the pending enforcement of the Black Laws led many blacks already considering a move to Canada to emigrate from the state. The riot that resulted in physical attacks on the city’s black community was sparked by a newspaper announcement indicating that the bond provision of the 1807 Black Law would be “rigidly enforced” thirty days following [End Page 12] the notice. Possibly inspired by the notice and certainly spurred by the city’s disdain for its black residents, a mob of some fifteen hundred whites attacked black residences and businesses between August 15 and 22. Between one thousand and fifteen hundred African Americans left the city during the week of violence, and many never returned.¹³

The Cincinnati riot is an extreme example of the climate of race relations fostered by the Black Laws. As a general rule the detrimental influence of the Black Laws tended to more often affect individuals than groups of Ohio’s blacks. When a white man in Cincinnati swindled an African American woman in 1838, a magistrate was unable to issue a warrant for his arrest because no white person had witnessed the crime. Following the 1829 riot in that city, strict enforcement of the settlement and registration requirements of the 1804 law sent many Cincinnati blacks begging when they could not obtain legal employment because they were not registered with the county clerk. Countless similar examples made the Black Laws target of repeal campaigns, especially after the rise of the movement for immediate abolition in the 1830s. Both white and black abolitionists decried the Black Laws as discriminatory and wrong, but African Americans had the strongest stake in seeing the repeal movement succeed.¹⁴

Among the reform community, interest in repealing Ohio’s Black Laws took the form of legislative petition drives as early as 1829, with activists of both races participating. Members of Cincinnati’s African Methodist Episcopal Church spearheaded one of the earliest petition drives. Realizing their petition would receive more credence if whites signed, church leaders sought and gained the signatures of a number of influential whites who were sympathetic to the cause of repeal. When enlisting white patrons failed to make the legislature take notice, African Americans turned to their own organizations to push for repeal of the Black Laws. Ohio’s first black state convention was held in 1837, and that same year nearly two hundred African Americans from Cincinnati petitioned for repeal of the Black Laws. Lacking suffrage rights, petitioning was the only legitimate political avenue open to African Americans. Some state legislators hoped to strip blacks of even this basic political right and thereby quiet critics of the laws. In 1839, the state House of [End Page 13] Representatives determined that repeal was “impolitic and inexpedient,” and further resolved that the right to petition was not afforded to blacks under the Ohio constitution.¹⁵

Such pronouncement did not stop petitions from flooding the legislature. As abolitionists had learned in their appeals to the federal Congress, petitioning persistently gained their cause much-needed attention. In the early 1840s antislavery activists mailed hundreds of petitions to the House of Representatives demanding the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. Many were signed by women and African Americans, including those who were disfranchised, marking the earliest exercise of political rights for some petitioners. The Ohio legislature’s move to strip African Americans of their petition rights echoed the gag rule used by Congress to silence antislavery petitioners. Neither act had a significant impact on the number of petitions being signed. In fact, the Ohio petition campaign intensified after 1845, and during the 1846 legislative session it was reported that “scarcely a day has elapsed, without witnessing the presentation of memorials on the subject.”¹⁶ Petitioning the political system seemed at first to work when in 1846 the drive resulted in the appointment of a legislative select committee to examine “repealing the laws which make distinction on account of color.” The committee explored the evolution of the Black Laws and determined that before the adoption of the 1802 constitution, African Americans in the Ohio territory enjoyed basic citizenship rights, including suffrage. Such rights were intentionally stripped from African Americans during the statehood process. The committee concluded that Ohio’s Black Laws were “contrary to the letter of the constitution, and should therefore be repealed without delay.”¹⁷ But the state legislature did not act favorably upon the report and the Black Laws remained on the books.¹⁸

The situation in Ohio attracted the attention of the black press and African American reformers across the North. Between 1838 and 1841 New York activists Philip Bell and Charles B. Ray took up the cause of Ohio’s African Americans in their weekly, the Colored American. Bell and Ray were prominent black intellectuals who had no real ties to Ohio. Ray trained early as a boot maker and was later ordained as a Methodist minister, but was best known as a journalist. He began working for the New York-based Colored [End Page 14] American in 1837 and took over as sole proprietor in 1839. He used his editor’s pen to demand equal suffrage rights for black men in New York, and saw kinship in the woes of African Americans in Ohio who lived under the shadow of that state’s Black Laws. Like Ray, Bell was born free in New York and spent considerable effort in the cause of black enfranchisement and civil rights. Although he left the Colored American in 1839, he continued to write actively for many African American newspapers. In March 1838, with these two strong black activists at the helm, the Colored American printed a series of lengthy memorials to the Ohio legislature that demonstrated the accomplishments of African Americans within the state, in hopes that their good behavior would be rewarded with the rights of citizenship. The county-by-county testimony demonstrated that African Americans were responsible citizens who owned substantial amounts of land, built churches and schools, and formed temperance and benevolent societies.¹⁹

The following year, when Ray himself visited the Buckeye State, his editorial correspondence educated his New York readers about the Black Laws. As one of New York City’s most prominent African American abolitionists and a minister, Ray’s words carried weight in the black community. He outlined the restrictions placed on African Americans as a result of the Black Laws and concluded that black Ohioans “are too much cut off from intercourse with the white people, and the whites are not enough inclined to bring them into contact, and intercourse with them, abolitionists by no means excepted, this is the direct way to keep our people always in mental slavery. When will it be otherwise?”²⁰ In 1841 Ray continued his attack on the Ohio statutes through a series of editorials focusing on laws he found especially egregious. One editorial attacked the inequities in Ohio’s public education system, including an 1829 law that specifically excluded African American children from public schools. Another attacked the provision of the 1807 law that prohibited African American testimony in cases against whites. In April Ray remarked upon the recent session of the Ohio legislature that completed its work but left the Black Laws intact, agreeing with commentary in another black newspaper, the Palladium of Liberty, that “the most important act of the session was the act to adjourn.”²¹ [End Page 15]

Abolitionist women, particularly those linked to Ohio antislavery societies and the Liberty Party, also expressed outrage over the restrictions facing African Americans in the Old Northwest and especially Ohio. Harriet N. Torrey, a corresponding editor for the Warren-based Western Reserve Chronicle, condemned the Whig politicians who refused to support Black Laws repeal. Most outspoken on behalf of repeal was Oberlin College graduate Betsy Mix Cowles. An activist committed to William Lloyd Garrison’s form of abolition, Cowles penned a three-part pamphlet titled Plea for the Oppressed in 1846. According to historian Stacey Robertson, Cowles used funds from the treasury of the Ashtabula County Female Anti-Slavery Society to pay for its publication. The act drew the ire of some eastern Garrisonians, who argued that the expenditure was an inappropriate use of the organization’s money, but Cowles persisted in using every means at her disposal to protest the Black Laws and raise public awareness of the need for repeal. These female activists persisted to oppose the Black Laws despite the criticism that their actions attracted from some male reformers. William Lloyd Garrison, for example, worried that focus on discriminatory practices diverted needed energy from the goal of ending slavery. Nevertheless, feeling a kinship with African Americans in much the same way as they did with the enslaved, Cowles and other female abolitionists remained outstanding critics of the Black Laws.²²

Other well-known abolitionists inspired by Cowles’s pamphlet or their own travels to the Buckeye State also took up the cause of repeal, increasing the national attention given to Ohio’s Black Laws. Most prominent among these was Frederick Douglass, whose own weekly North Star served as a forum for black concerns in the late 1840s. As the Ohio petition campaign for repeal heated up in 1848 and attracted support from white antislavery politicians such as Giddings and Chase, Douglass featured a series of personal and guest editorials attacking the Black Laws. Although published from Rochester, New York, the North Star offered more editorial coverage of the repeal movement in 1848 than did Ohio’s leading antislavery sheet. The Anti-Slavery Bugle, published at Salem as the official organ of the Garrisonian Western Anti-Slavery Society, offered a mere two editorials, one by Betsey Mix Cowles [End Page 16] and another by William L. Perkins, both appearing in December, just weeks before the repeal vote in the legislature.²³

In sharp contrast, the North Star’s editorial coverage began in the spring and stretched throughout 1848, offering detailed analysis and attack on the dreaded laws. Douglass felt a special kinship with African Ohioans. The previous year, in the company of William Lloyd Garrison, he completed a lecture tour across Ohio. Acting as a general correspondent for New York’s National Anti-Slavery Standard during the 1847 western tour, Douglass informed eastern readers about the Black Laws in Ohio, declaring that “These shameful laws are not the natural expression of the moral sentiment of Ohio, but the servile work of pandering politicians, who, to conciliate the favour of slaveholders, and win their way into political power, have enacted these infernal laws. Let the people of Ohio demand their instant repeal. . . .”²⁴

Although during his 1847 visit Douglass spent most of his time in the company of white abolitionists in the Western Reserve, he remained actively concerned with the condition of blacks in Ohio and would return on several occasions to support their uplift. Armed with firsthand knowledge of the state’s Black Laws and an increasing devotion to the elevation of free African Americans, Douglass fashioned his editorial attack. In March 1848 he authored a sustained assault on the Black Laws, declaring that, “In no State of the Union are there to be found laws more cruel, unjust and atrocious, than those on the Statute Book of Ohio.” He attacked the immigration and bond provisions of the 1807 law, which he believed was “doubtless enacted at the bidding of Kentucky slave-holders.”²⁵ Indeed, the laws did have more support in the southern region of the state, where the Ohio River formed the dividing line between freedom and slavery. A correspondent for the Anti-Slavery Bugle once remarked that Ohio was as divided along sectional lines as the nation, with the National Road (modern-day U.S. Route 40) forming “Mason and Dixon’s Line.” Douglass believed that most of northern Ohio abhorred the laws, but that the “trickery of pandering politicians” caused the defeat of the repeal movement. He urged the people of Ohio to continue to demand that the Black Laws be removed.²⁶ [End Page 17]

During the summer of 1848 Douglass made space in the North Star for a series of editorials by Alfred J. Anderson, an African American barber from Butler County, Ohio, and a leader in the Ohio black suffrage movement. Although he had only three months’ formal education to his credit, Anderson argued points of law in an articulate and cogent fashion. He tied his first editorial, which appeared in early May, to concerns over black uplift by arguing that the laws “stand as checks to prevent [blacks] from doing anything for their own improvement, to discourage any attempts they may make to elevate themselves, to degrade them in every sense of the word.”²⁷ In June Anderson delivered a second missive that decried the provision of the Black Laws prohibiting testimony against whites. Unlike the registration and bond laws, this provision was almost universally enforced. Anderson argued it left African Americans especially vulnerable to attacks, kidnapping, even robbery and murder. Drawing cleverly from the state constitution’s guarantee of unalienable rights, Anderson claimed that the Black Laws closed “every avenue for the administration of impartial justice to colored citizens.”²⁸

Anderson’s final published attack on the Black Laws in August 1848 focused on suffrage rights, a cause that he would continue to champion in the 1850s. He declared that “to freemen, the exercise of the right of suffrage is sacred next to religion.” Anderson again drew upon the Ohio constitution to support his argument that as citizens, African Americans should be granted the right to vote. He lamented the fact that the only political rights allowed to African Americans was the ability to petition for repeal of the Black Laws, noting that even then “our prayers do not command the same respect and attention as those coming from free white voters.” Similar arguments prevailed the following month, when Frederick Douglass joined Anderson and other prominent Ohio blacks for a three-day national convention held at the Cleveland courthouse beginning September 6.²⁹

Douglass traveled to Cleveland to preside over the meeting. The National Negro Convention movement included a series of a dozen meetings, beginning in 1830, that gathered prominent northern blacks to discuss issues of concern to their race in American society, including slavery, colonization, education, temperance, civil and political rights, and self-help. Among the important resolutions adopted at the Cleveland convention was a call to African Americans [End Page 18] in northern states to hold annual conventions with a goal of petitioning “the Legislatures thereof to repeal the Black Laws, or all laws militating against the interests of colored people.”³⁰ Members of the Ohio delegation to the convention accepted the challenge, issuing a call for a statewide meeting to be held at Columbus’s Bethel Church in January 1849. Among the first items on the agenda of that meeting was the repeal of Ohio’s Black Laws.

Charles H. Langston, a prominent member of the Ohio abolition and African American community, presided over the four-day convention. Before the meeting evolved into a bitter debate over the merits of emigration, a committee of five delegates was designated to draft a legislative petition for repeal of the Black Laws. The convention also issued an address to the citizens of Ohio praying for repeal and for a broad removal of discriminatory policies and measures across the state. Through the address convention delegates appealed to the bonds of common humanity and masculinity when they implored: “We ask not that you remove the disabilities under which we labor merely because you pity us. We ask for no such sympathy. We ask for equal privileges, not because we would consider it a condescension on your part to grant them—but because we are MEN, and therefore entitled to all the privileges of other men in the same circumstances.”³¹

Within weeks of the Columbus convention, the Ohio legislature acted to partially repeal the Black Laws, but the words of black activists were not behind the legislature’s actions. During the 1840s liberal-leaning Whigs gained power in the Ohio legislature and antislavery sentiment in the form of the Free Soil movement made significant inroads. Ohio Rep. Joshua R. Giddings and other state antislavery men persistently urged support for stopping the extension of slavery and opposed the annexation of Texas. Giddings believed that repealing the Black Laws to be logically connected to antiextension and urged Ohio Whigs to move in that direction. Ohio was not moving toward a climate that favored equality for African Americans, but one in which Whigs and Liberty Party activists found it politically inexpedient to leave the Black Laws in place. By 1846 Whigs dominated the Ohio legislature and in that year Whig gubernatorial candidate William Bebb’s campaign called for a modification of the Black [End Page 19] Laws. Although some suggested that Bebb changed his position on race matters depending on his audience, clearly the tide was shifting toward a climate in which repeal might be looked upon with favor.³²

Although liberal-leaning Whigs generally believed the Black Laws were a contradiction and should be modified or repealed, the main force behind their removal was Salmon P. Chase, who affiliated with the Democrats and then the antislavery Liberty Party. When the Free Soil Party formed in 1848, Chase was one of its strongest leaders at the national level. Opposed to slavery since the 1830s, Chase used his law practice to assist fugitive slaves and developed a constitutional argument to bring legitimacy to the antislavery cause. He argued that the nation’s founders had generally opposed slavery and had expected that it would one day disappear from the United States. He claimed that none of the founding documents supported slavery and that section six of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which prohibited slavery in the territories, provided evidence of the founders’ intentions. Chase was among the Free Soil leaders at a state committee meeting held at Columbus in December 1848. There a 180-member convention of Ohio’s Free Soilers ratified the new party’s national platform and adopted a state platform, which included repeal of the Black Laws. Chase worked behind the scenes to convince Ohio’s leading Democrats to join the Free Soilers and liberal Whigs in support of repeal. In a letter to John F. Morse, Chase extolled “the Legislature which repeals the Black Laws . . . will not soon be forgotten in the History of the State.” With Chase’s assistance in drafting, Morse, a Free Soil member of the House of Delegates, introduced House Bill 52 calling for repeal of the Black Laws. With some minor adjustments, Morse’s bill passed the House 52–10 and the Senate 23–11. Chase would not be forgotten either; the same coalition of supporters in the legislature pushed his name forward and he was elected to the U.S. Senate in early 1849.³³

After the February 1849 partial repeal of the Black Laws, African Americans were free to settle in the Buckeye State, and were permitted to testify in court cases involving white defendants. With the help of Sen. Salmon P. Chase, who authored most of the repeal bill that Morse introduced, the legislature [End Page 20] also passed a bill designed to provide education for black children, and designated that the taxes of African Americans be directed to these segregated schools. Allies and members of the African American community were elated that the legislature finally heeded their pleas and petitions, yet it was a small victory at best. Black Ohioans still did not enjoy the right to vote, nor could they sit on juries. Just before passage of the repeal measure, some legislators attached a rider that excluded African Americans from jury service and from receiving poor relief guaranteed to whites under state law.³⁴

In the months following the partial repeal of the Black Laws, African Ohioans held meetings in localities across the state to celebrate the victory, but also to plan their next move. The repeal of 1849 was a positive sign of change, but much work remained. Continued progress toward racial equality was a common theme of these meetings, as evidenced in the resolve of a Cincinnati meeting: “That we deem it a duty which we owe to our God, ourselves, and our country, to use all honorable, lawful means in our power for the repeal of all laws, rules or regulations, that make a distinction on account of color.” African Ohioans continued their struggle for civil and political rights through the 1850s and 1860s, and during those decades they would continue to find allies in the national abolitionist community, white and black, male and female. Stripped of suffrage rights until the ratification of the fifteenth amendment in 1870, black Ohioans could wield “only a moral power” over the Black Laws and discriminatory practices of their state, but they continued their struggle firmly believing that “it is only necessary to wield this power aright, and it is mighty to the pulling down of the strongholds of oppression and wrong.”³⁵ [End Page 21]