Morris Birkbeck and the Making of an Antislavery Freedom

From 1822 to 1824, Illinois witnessed a remarkable debate over slavery and freedom. Illinois’ territorial law had permitted an indirect form of slavery through indentured servitude. Although the state’s constitution in 1818 largely prohibited further indentures, proslavery politicians in 1822 sought to legalize slavery by authorizing a referendum on whether to hold a constitutional convention. The debate raged for eighteen months, deeply dividing Illinois’ electorate. Only a concerted antislavery ideological campaign and a late surge of antislavery immigrants into the state won the day. The Illinois contest, hard on the heels of Missouri’s controversial admission to the Union as a slave state, laid bare the need for northerners to defend an antislavery conception of freedom. Slavery’s evangelists in America now promoted a proslavery version.

Morris Birkbeck played a key role in developing an antislavery idea of freedom. An English immigrant, Birkbeck settled in Illinois Territory in 1817. He admired America’s republican experiment, and in two widely read books encouraged Englishmen to become Americans. However, he disdained slavery, calling it a “foul blotch” on American republicanism. Unsurprisingly, Birkbeck enlisted his pen against slavery in Illinois. He wrote a lengthy pamphlet and several letters under his own name, and more than ten newspaper articles under a pen name. Combined, his writings represent a significant and sustained intellectual effort to explain why freedom precluded slavery. He drew on political economy, political theory, Christianity, and American nationalism to argue against slavery but, just as importantly, defined freedom as a universal condition that transcended “color” and protected everyone from “oppression.” He therefore urged Illinois’ citizens to sustain “true liberty” and preserve “our country!” Strikingly, many of his ideas foreshadowed Abraham Lincoln’s rhetorical appeals. For Birkbeck, as for Lincoln, slavery and freedom were irreconcilable opposites—and freedom needed to prevail.