Re: 167 - I wanted to ask if you might pass along some references made in the post, as it would be interesting reading. Thanks.
I will have to find them. The only issue where I tried to keep a collection of links to provide references was the issue of "natural born citizen", and I no longer even have that collection of links. Many of them simply stopped working, and are stored on another machine anyway.
I work from memory of the things i've read, and when I see something I consider significant, I make a point to remember it. Unfortunately this has not been working out so well as it used to. My memory was much better before all the bouts with COVID.
I do remember a couple of items that I can probably find you right now. Here is one.
SOURCE: Lerone Bennett, Jr., Forced Into Glory, Copr 1999, 6th printing 2002, pp. 184-8. (footnotes deleted)The man Lincoln called his special friend, Ward Hill Lamon, had no particular sympathy for Blacks, but even he decried the laws of the state, saying that the Illinois Black Code was "of the most preposterous and cruel severity, -- a code that would have been a disgrace to a Slave state, and was simply an infamy in a free one. It borrowed the provisions of the most revolting laws known among men, for exiling, selling, beating, bedeviling, and torturing Negroes, whether bond or free."
The "revolting" Illinois Black Laws didn't seem to bother Lamon while he was living there. Nor did they bother Lincoln, who never said a word against the Black Laws, although they were enforced in Illinois every year he lived there and were not repealed until 1865.
Under provisions of this code, one of the severest in a Northern state, Illinois Blacks had no legal rights White people were bound to respect. It was a crime for them to settle in Illinois unless they could prove their freedom and post a $1,000 bond. John Jones, the most prominent Black in Illinois in Lincoln's day, pointed out that these provisions were in violation of the Illinois constitution, which declared "that all men are born free and independent and have an indefeasible right to enjoy liberty and pursue their own happiness." It was also, Jones noted, "a gross violation" of the United States Constitution which said "that the citizens of each State shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens of the several States."
None of this disturbed Lincoln, who lived, without audible distress, with a Black Code, commonly called Black Laws, which said that any Black found without a certificate of freedom was considered a runaway slave and could be apprehended by any White and auctioned off by the sheriff to pay the cost of his confinement.
If a Black had a certificate of freedom, he and his family were required to meet reporting and registration procedures reminiscent of a totalitarian state. The head of the family had to register all family members and provide detailed descriptions to the supervisor of the poor, who could expel the whole family at any moment.
Blacks who met these requirements were under constant surveillance and could be disciplined or arrested by any White. They could not vote, sue, or testify in court.
No Negro was safe.
No Negro was secure.
Any Negro without certified freedom papers on his person was legitimate prey of kidnappers who roamed the streets of Lincoln's Springfield and other Illinois cities and towns. By the 1850s, and especially after passage of the Compromise of 1850, which Lincoln supported, kidnapping Negroes, with the aid and support of the state and the White population, had become a profitable business.
The way it worked, N. Dwight Harris said, was that two or three White men would form a Black-hunting gang. "One would establish himself at St. Louis, or at one of the other border towns, and work up a reputation as a seller of slaves. The others would move about the Illinois counties on the lookout for Negroes -- slave or free. The freebooters never stopped to inquire whether a colored person was free or not. The question simply was, could he be carried off in safety."
If the kidnappers didn't get him, the state would.
With Lincoln's active and passive support, the state used violence to keep Blacks poor. Most trades and occupations were closed to them, and laws and customs made it difficult for them to acquire real estate.
With Lincoln's active and passive support, the state used violence to keep Blacks ignorant. Schools and colleges were for the most part closed to Blacks. A law on the apprenticeship of children said "that the master or mistress to whom such child shall be bound as aforesaid shall cause such child to be taught to read and write and the ground rules of arithmetic... except when such apprentice is a negro or mulatto."
To make matters worse, the state taxed Blacks to support public schools that were closed by law -- and by the vote of Abraham Lincoln -- to Black children. The law, which Lincoln supported, specified that the school fund should be distributed on the basis of “the number of white persons under 20 years of age.” This disturbed a number of very conservative Illinois White people. In 1853, a year before Lincoln's Peoria Declaration, the Alton Telegraph praised Ohio for establishing schools for Black children and criticized Illinois for taking money from Blacks to educate White children. No one in the legislature paid any attention to this criticism, and Lincoln, the state's most powerful Whig politician, said nothing.
During all the years of what some historians call Lincoln's rehearsal for greatness, indentured servants, “a polite phrase,” Elmer Gertz said, "for the northern brand of slaves," were hemmed in by laws and restrictions similar to the ones in Southern states. They could be whipped for being lazy, disorderly or disrespectful to the "master, or master's family." As for the pursuit of happiness, which Lincoln occasionally paid tribute to, Blacks could not play percussion instruments, and any White could apprehend any slave or servant for "riots, routs, unlawful assemblies, trespasses and seditious speeches." It was a crime for any person to permit "any slave or slaves, servant or servants of color, to the number of three or more, to assemble in his, her or their house, out house, yard or shed for the purpose of dancing or revelling, either by night or by day…."
What did Abraham Lincoln say about these violations of government of the people, et cetera, et cetera?
He said he was in favor of the violations -- that's what he said. Not only did he back the Black Laws, but he voted to keep the suffrage lily-White and to tax Blacks to support White schools Black children couldn't, in general, attend.
In 1848 Illinois adopted a new constitution that denied Blacks the right to vote and to serve in the state militia. To make sure everyone got the message, the constitution authorized the state legislature to pass legislation barring slaves and free Negroes from settling in the state. Article XIV of the new constitution read:
The General Assembly shall at its first session under the amended constitution pass such laws as will effectually prohibit free persons of color from immigrating to and settling in this state, and to effectually prevent the owners of slaves from bringing them into this state, for the purpose of setting them free. In February 1853, one year before Abraham Lincoln praised the "White man's" Declaration of Independence at Peoria, the legislature made it a high crime punishable by a fine for a Black to settle in the state. If a Black violator couldn't pay the fine, he or she could be sold by the sheriff to pay court costs, making some Whites fear that the new law would bring back slavery.
The architect of this Negro Exclusion Law, which was, Eugene H. Berwanger said, "undoubtedly the most severe anti-Negro measure passed by a free state," was John A. Logan, who introduced the measure "solely to improve his political stature." During debate on the issue, Logan attacked White critics of his bill, which was called "An Act To Prevent the Immigration of Free Negroes into the State." Logan said he could not understand "how it is that men can become so fanatical in their notions as to forget that they are white. Forget that sympathy over the white man and have his bosom heaving with it for those persons of color." Logan looked around the hall and said words that many of his compatriots would say in the 1990s: "It has almost become an offense to be a white man."
Neither this speech nor his Negro Exclusion Law hurt the reputation of "Black Jack" Logan, who was later named a major general by Abraham Lincoln and who is celebrated today all over Chicago as a Civil War icon.
Most Illinois Whites supported the provisions of Logan's Negro Exclusion Law, but twenty-two legislators, eleven Whigs and eleven Democrats, voted against it in the lower house. There was also strong opposition in fourteen Northern counties, particularly from Quakers, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and New England immigrants.
The severity of the Negro Exclusion Law shocked antislavery forces. Frederick Douglass was outraged by the "enormity" of an act that "coolly" proposed to "sell the bodies and souls of the blacks to increase the intelligence and refinement of the whites [and] to rob every black stranger who ventures among them to increase their literary fund." It seemed to Douglass that "the men who enacted that law had not only banished from their minds all sense of justice, but all sense of shame." Another editor who felt that way was Horace Greeley, who said in the New York Tribune that it was "punishment enough" for Blacks "to live among such cruel, inhospitable beings" as the White residents of Illinois, not to mention the additional burden of having to live under such a law. The New Orleans Bee said the law was "an act of special and savage ruthlessness." The Jonesboro Gazette in the land of Lincoln asked: "How long will the people of this hitherto Tree State' suffer this shameful enaction to disgrace their statute book?"
What did Lincoln say?
He didn't say a mumblin' word.
Despite his Jim Crow votes and Jim Crow style, Lincoln got up on platforms and said he believed that the Declaration of Independence gave Blacks the right to some of the rights enumerated in that document, including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. If he believed this -- and the evidence goes the other way -- it was news to Illinois Blacks, who were denied the right to pursue anything in Lincoln's Illinois, except poor-paying jobs that Whites shunned until economic crises lowered the color of their expectations.in' word.
Another that I can find easily is the statement by Charles Dickens, who had toured the US for an extended period, meeting with people in both the North and the South. Here is what Charles Dickens said in 1862.
Every reasonable creature may know, if willing, that the North hates the Negro, and that until it was convenient to make a pretence that sympathy with him was the cause of the War, it hated the abolitionists and derided them up hill and down dale. For the rest, there is not a pin to choose between the two parties. They will both rant and lie and fight until they come to a compromise; and the slave may be thrown into that compromise or thrown out of it, just as it happens.
There are a whole host of writings about the public sentiment in the North against black people, and references to the need to keep the territories only for white people, but I will have to run across them again.
Articles about the New York riots is another example where you can read of how much hatred there was for black people.
As for fear of the possibility of slaves taking their jobs, these articles can be found if you look for them.