Ohio Black Code

Impact

Ohio’s Black Code had little immediate impact on the movement of African Americans into the state. The immigration laws were seldom enforced, and African Americans continued to migrate to the state. The black population in Ohio grew steadily throughout the antebellum period, with the city of Cincinnati developing a vibrant African American community. However, the laws did make clear that white Ohioans did not welcome African Americans into their state, and the statutes legislating the second-class status of African Americans, particularly their inability to testify in court in cases involving whites, had a stronger impact. African Americans were effectively unable to use the law to protect themselves from assaults by white Americans. Blacks repeatedly expressed their hatred of this law in newspapers such as the Colored American.

The Ohio Black Code gained symbolic importance throughout the antebellum period. White abolitionists such as James Birney and John Rankin joined free African Americans in attacking the injustice of the laws. Salmon P. Chase, an American lawyer who would later serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, made legal efforts to define Ohio’s free soil and undermine the Black Code. The movement to repeal the laws gained steam in the 1830s, when free African Americans, led by the American educator and diplomat John Mercer Langston, launched the State Convention of Colored Men to formally protest the laws. At these conventions, black leaders targeted education, suffrage, and the right to testify in court in their petitions to the state government. The Ohio government repealed the black laws of 1804 and 1807 in 1849. While black and white antislavery leaders applied pressure on the government, ultimately the repeal was the result of a political deal between the Democratic Party and the Free Soil Party. Chase brought these parties together, bargaining for his own election as senator and the repeal of the Black Code in return for the election of two Democrats as Ohio’s congressional representatives. Immediately on the heels of this repeal, however, the federal government enacted the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, requiring law-enforcement officials to arrest alleged fugitive slaves and greatly undermining the security of black freedom throughout the country.

Historians have long understood Ohio’s Black Code as symptomatic of the racist undertones that tainted northern claims of antislavery ideals. Most famously, Eugene Berwanger argues that white midwesterners were against slavery because they were antiblack. Essentially, Berwanger makes the argument that midwesterners’ antislavery sentiment stemmed from their racial prejudice. Thus, they sought to keep slavery isolated to the South, with the hope of its eventual termination, because they believed that the end of slavery would also lead to the elimination of the African American population from the country. Specialists in the field of African American history have similarly used Ohio’s Black Code to highlight the national scope of racism in early America and the limits on black freedom. More recently, experts have looked at the limitations and contradictions of these laws. Historians such as Stephen Middleton point to the ways in which African Americans challenged the legality of the Black Code and even used it to protect their freedom. Paul Finkelman highlights the relative weakness of the Ohio’s Black Code in light of other laws dealing with race in northern states and the lack of enforcement as evidence of white Ohioans’ ambivalence about the presence of African Americans in the state. Still, much work remains to be done on the social and cultural impact of the Black Code outside of the legal system.