“We Will, of Course, Expect an Equal Participation”: Free Black Activists and Economic Equality in the Era of the Civil War

On the eve of the Civil War, an anonymous author in the Weekly Anglo-African declared that “two ideals reduced to practice, will... change the whole face of American society, and break down, forever, the power of gold. We mean land-reform, and the association of social economies and of labor.” Coming from one of the most influential African-American periodicals of the day, the endorsement is a surprising one, given that the land reform and labor movements often downplayed slavery and barred Blacks from membership in trades unions, while the historiography on Black abolitionism and other forms of antebellum free Black activism is largely silent on African-American involvement in working-class reforms.

This paper challenges these assumptions in the literature, building on new work on abolitionism and Black politics in Early America to argue that free Black activists slowly but steadily moved towards an embrace of ideas and measures promoting economic equality over the course of the 1840s and ‘50s. During these years, free Black leaders including Frederick Douglass, James McCune Smith, Henry Highland Garnet, and Martin Delany increasingly challenged moral suasionism and free labor orthodoxy, developing new approaches that combined support for antislavery politics with radical ideas stemming from labor agitation, the land reform movement, Fourierism, and the 1848 revolutions in Europe. Recognizing their oppression on the basis of both class and skin color, antebellum Black leaders tempered their support for such reforms with demands for equal participation and calls for self-determination. The extent to which these efforts were reciprocated by white labor reformers provides a rare glimpse of interracial activism within the pre-Civil War labor movement, while prefiguring the challenges and opportunities that lay ahead in Reconstruction.