Ohio Black Code

Context

In 1787 the American nation was in its infancy. The land west of the Appalachian Mountains was a territory largely unsettled by white Americans. On July 13, 1787, just two months before the signing of the U.S. Constitution, the American Confederation passed the Northwest Ordinance, which arranged for the orderly settlement of the territory north of the Ohio River.

The Northwest Territory would eventually become the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Article 6 of the ordinance banned slavery and involuntary servitude in the territory. This was significant because slavery was legal south of the Ohio River in Kentucky and Virginia. The Ohio River itself is the confluence of two rivers, the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers in western Pennsylvania. Along its thousand-mile course to the Mississippi River, the river borders West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois. The Ohio River, therefore, served as the divide between slave and free territory. In the summer of 1795 Native Americans ceded the southern two-thirds of what would become Ohio to the United States in the Treaty of Greenville. Once the treaty opened the region to settlement, white Americans streamed into the new territory. As they entered the future state, white and black Americans tried to define the meaning of the border between slavery and freedom.

When Ohioans wrote their state constitution in 1802, they affirmed Article 6 of the Northwest Ordinance and banned slavery and involuntary servitude in the new state. The Ohio River was not a very strict barrier between slave and free states, however. Although political leaders banned slavery in Ohio, they did not support racial equality. Many of the white residents of Ohio in the early 1800s came from states that allowed slavery, including nearby Virginia and Kentucky. In fact, early statehood leaders such as Edward Tiffin and Thomas Worthington brought freed slaves with them to Ohio and bound them as servants. Some southern Ohioans worshiped at the same churches as their southern neighbors, socialized with them at local taverns, and clearly shared racist beliefs with their neighbors in bordering slave states.

Indeed, it could be said that white Ohioans feared the immigration of African Americans. In the early 1800s Americans throughout the country feared the notion of dependency. Wage labor was uncommon in the early republic. Instead, laborers worked for others, sometimes as tenants on farms or bound to skilled craftsmen as apprentices. Therefore, Americans believed that land ownership was the only way for a person to be truly independent. Otherwise, one would be dependent on another for his livelihood.

When Ohio became a state, the legislators formed the Overseers of the Poor to keep tabs on dependent residents. The specific responsibilities of the Overseers of the Poor included offering financial relief to those who needed it, paying residents for boarding homeless Ohioans, binding children and unemployed men and women to established residents, and expelling unruly paupers from the community. The overall purpose of the Overseers was to maintain the virtue of the community by keeping men and women from becoming charges of the county. Their primary means of accomplishing this goal was to keep everyone working. President Thomas Jefferson believed that the United States should be a country of independent farmers. Many white Ohioans believed that African Americans were racially inferior to whites and therefore predisposed to a life of dependency—a condition that threatened the social fabric of the republic. According to this theory, the influx of African Americans into the state would also be an influx of dependent citizens. These dependent citizens would then become liabilities—burdens on the state who could potentially break down the social order. Clearly, the racial ideas of the time were directly linked to the creation of the laws known collectively as the Black Code.