'Free, White and Twenty-One': Race and Citizenship
in the Jacksonian South
Lacy Ford
University of South Carolina
Across the South, the state constitutional reform
movements of the Jacksonian era fought to democratize Revolutionary and
early national era state constitutions which, as a rule, restricted suffrage
to property holders and left state legislative bodies malapportioned. At
first glance, any appraisal of the egalitarian crusade of the Jacksonian
era might justifiably conclude that constitutional reformers achieved only
partial victory. But under closer scrutiny, a more striking success emerges.
Throughout the South, the political and constitutional debates of the Jacksonian
era also produced a discussion over the role and meaning of race in southern
society. In the upper South, the debate over the coming of racial modernity
occasionally focused on the future of slavery itself, and addressed the
problematic role free blacks played in a slaveholding society. As a whole,
the upper South remained committed to a conception of slavery as a necessary
but possibly temporary evil, an evil that could be at odds with the ideals
of white independence and equality over the long term. Thus the arguments
over race in the upper South often centered on how the region might whiten
itself, either through gradual emancipation and colonization of ex-slaves,
the colonization of free blacks, a gradual shift to free white labor facilitated
by the sale of slaves to the cotton growing areas of the deep South, or
some combination of these approaches. By contrast, in a heuristic middle
South of Tennessee and North Carolina, few saw slavery as a positive good
but nevertheless sentiment favoring emancipation, on any terms, seemed
on the decline. In these states, the discussion of race centered on whether
or not free people of color should have a political voice. In the middle
South, Whiggish paternalists defended the idea of promoting uplift and
respectability among free blacks, while subordinationists, both conservative
and egalitarian, championed disfranchisement. In the lower South, the case
for slavery as a positive good remained in its infancy at the beginning
of the Jacksonian era, but most political leaders considered slavery essential
to the region's staple economy, which, despite fits and starts in the international
market and vulnerability to unpredictable credit crunches, remained the
bellwether of the region's prosperity. In the cotton South, the Jacksonian
debate over race centered more on the prevention of insurrections, tighter
regulation or removal of free blacks, and the desirability of regulating
or even eliminating the interstate slave trade. Together, these three subregional
debates constituted the larger Jacksonian South's attempt to define racial
modernity and render it tangible in their political arrangements.
Through an examination of southern state
constitutional debate and action on issues related to slavery and the political
status of free blacks, my essay will argue that egalitarians in the Old
South proved as driven by their interest in sharpening the racial boundaries
of popular republicanism as they were by their commitment to obliterating
public recognition of class distinctions among whites. Indeed, the advancement
of herrenvolk egalitarian ideology, the drawing of civic and political
boundaries along strict racial lines in order to secure the domination
of one race and the subordination of another, emerged as arguably the most
consistent and remarkable outcome of the era's constitutional "reform"
movement in the South.