In the “antebellum” period between the American Revolution and the US Civil War, practical and ideological understandings of citizenship and democracy were heavily influenced by the pressing issue of Black freedom. Whereas all of the northern states gradually abolished slavery within their jurisdictions between 1777 and 1804, the southern states briefly increased manumissions but subsequently redoubled their commitment to slavery, expanding it into the newly acquired territories of the trans-Appalachians. As the nation became bifurcated—with one half of the union committed to some version of Black “freedom” and the other half to slavery—disputes within states across the country arose regarding the rights and legal personhood of African Americans who were either legally free (through birth, manumission, or emancipation) or were legally enslaved but had escaped to free soil.
How was the racial landscape of citizenship and democracy in antebellum America characterized, and how did free Black populations in various states navigate such landscapes? “In the Shadows of Slavery” explores the answers to these questions from a comparative and conceptually innovative perspective. It moves away from singular national narratives of American democracy and instead argues that various states in the early republic developed different approaches to democracy, based on the ways in which local communities understood and experienced free Black citizenship. Specifically, this project examines the spectrum of democracy in antebellum America, advancing a new conceptualization and arguing that states in this period developed distinct “varieties” of democracy, informed by their approaches to newly established communities of free Blacks within their borders.
