Over the past fifteen years notable books have transformed interpretations of the nineteenth-century freedom movement in the North. The result is a new history of the struggle for racial equality and against slavery. Its path was uncertain: freedom struggles flared up episodically, occurred in different places with varied emphases and champions, tended to emphasize antislavery more than racial equality, and frequently endured defeat. Taken as a whole, however, the movement grew steadily over time, slowly but surely penetrated politics, became increasingly interracial, and eventually led Northerners to destroy slavery and to begin protecting the civil rights of African-Americans.

This session examines Illinoisans who developed and strengthened Illinois’ freedom movement. Morris Birkbeck was a transatlantic radical inspired by the American republican experiment who selected Illinois as his future home. In response to Illinois’ proslavery movement in 1822, he drew on American ideals of human equality and participatory government to denounce slavery, just as he had aristocracy. To Birkbeck, freedom required slavery’s abolition. Illinois’ slaves and indentured servants also joined the freedom movement, often encouraged by white allies. Thomas Cook, Sarah Borders, and Jane Bryant each challenged the legality of bondage in Illinois, claiming their human rights. In doing so they probed slavery’s right to exist in the absence of positive law, pushed Illinois’ legal system to repudiate slavery, and forced leading politicians like Abraham Lincoln and Lyman Trumbull to reckon with slavery in the state. Like Birkbeck, the plaintiffs desired a total separation between slavery and freedom in Illinois. Zebina Eastman founded Illinois’ most important abolitionist paper in 1842, spurring the antislavery movement in the state, and led the fight against Illinois’ severe black codes for the next two decades. He also played a key role in finding common ground for the broader antislavery movement in the 1850s.

The Declaration of Independence united these Illinoisans. Morris Birkbeck called liberty an “unalienable birthright of every human being,” and lauded the “sacred transcript of universal rights on which the people of United States founded their Constitution.” Cook, Borders, and Bryant followed in the path of slaves who had petitioned for freedom during the Revolution. Moreover, their legal arguments against slavery and indenture rested in part on the emancipatory power of the Northwest Ordinance, which was a product of revolutionary ideals. Both Lincoln and Trumbull used the Declaration of Independence to justify national antislavery policy in the 1850s, and Eastman went further. Like other Illinois abolitionists, he insisted that the Declaration expressed not only the nation’s antislavery principles, but those of God. The masthead of the Western Citizen declared “THE SUPREMACY OF GOD AND THE EQUALITY OF MAN.” As the actions and ideas of these Illinoisans suggest, the Declaration provided a crucial foundation for what became a widespread political movement. In 2026, in the Declaration’s semiquincentennial year, Illinois’ intrepid advocates of freedom will stimulate new discussion of the nineteenth-century freedom movement and its consequences.

Note: To preserve 30 minutes for discussion, each presenter will speak extemporaneously for 15 minutes, and the commentator for 10.