Free Northern states legally barred Black people from voting, juries, land, and residence

Evidence

Garrison accompanied Frederick Douglass on a speaking tour in the Old Northwest (what is now the easternmost portion of the Midwest). En route through Pennsylvania, he came face-to-face with racism outside of the immediate vicinage of slavery. When they arrived in Ohio in August 1847, every single free state in the region had restricted Black people from voting and serving in the militia in the prior half century. During this period, Ohio and Illinois explicitly named whiteness as a prerequisite for jurors; Black jury service in Indiana, Michigan, and the territory that would become the state of Wisconsin was unheard of. By 1851, many Midwestern states had restricted Black people from owning land or contracting for labor by forcing them to provide certificates of freedom and posting bonds to ensure that they would not become dependent. Several states prevented Black people who had recently arrived from residing there altogether. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1265

Categorization

• XREF: This is the empirical evidence that empirically tests Garrison’s claim against Tocqueville’s — concrete data that racism thrived in states without slavery, feeding the book’s central reframing. — connects to: Slaveholders deliberately sought alliance with Northern white labor on color caste — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 354; Free northern states like Illinois erected legal barriers to black settlement — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 1268; Literacy tests and poll taxes were written to let local officials disenfranchise black voters — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 2063
• ADDENDUM: Complements ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ only loosely, but strongly connects to the imputed-caste logic of the 1619 thesis about Northern complicity.