Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction

by Kate Masur

One delegate claimed that free African Americans were “idle and lazy” and that his area “was overrun with them.” Some alleged that slaveholders sent elderly slaves into Illinois to avoid the cost of caring for people who could no longer be productive laborers. One insisted that the Black population was growing because slave states were forcing out free Blacks.5 Indeed, some Illinois delegates may have felt special urgency because of Missouri’s new bar on Black migration. In describing free African Americans with such words as idle, lazy, and worthless, delegates trafficked in racist stereotypes but also drew on the poor-law tradition that had authorized governments to monitor or exclude people whom they believed threatened public order or were likely to drain public resources. Their arguments were bolstered by their view that differences in “race” were natural and immutable. One southern Illinois delegate asserted that nature had created “a barrier between the two races,” and he found it inconceivable that “negroes are entitled to all the privileges of citizenship—social and political.”