Remaking the Republic. Christopher James Bonner

      Delegates also appointed a committee on agriculture, which delivered a message stressing the virtues of agrarian life in the abundant space available in the United States. The Buffalo convention encouraged African Americans to embrace the colonialist impulse and take ownership of the nation’s physical landscape. Working collectively in rural communities, black people could leverage their economic stability and demographic strength to shape legal structures in new states and territories. For evidence of that path to influence, David Jenkins, a committee member from Ohio, presented a letter from black farmers who had settled in Mercer County, on that state’s far western border. Taking “the advice of our abolition friends,” several hundred African Americans had moved there in 1837 and settled into productive, comfortable lives. They purchased land, tamed the wilderness, built farms, and lived among white neighbors. The Mercer County settlers called on other black people to join them. Beyond what the settlers saw as the intrinsic value of economic productivity, they noted that work would allow black people to show their usefulness to society and counter the influence of prejudice. They suggested that any black person could go west and flourish, noting that they had built their new lives using only the funds they would otherwise have devoted to rent in a city. The committee in Buffalo cited similar farming communities in other Ohio counties and credited black movement to rural areas with decreasing prejudice in the developing West. And they encouraged migration to Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and then-territories Wisconsin and Iowa. Moving to some of those places might have been “objectionable on account of their laws”—Illinois in particular had a set of harsh, exclusionary black laws—but people could potentially change legislation, particularly in territories and newer states.⁵⁴

      That call for black emigration constituted a radical protest against state proposals to exclude black people from their borders. Black identity in relation to the United States was fraught given the realities of slavery and legal exclusion. But activists were vocal about how important it was that they had been born in the nation.⁵⁵ The call to move west and shape American development politicized nativity as a path to changing the nation’s laws. It was a declaration that black people identified as Americans, that they should be connected to the national government and should thus be entitled to all the space that the nation claimed. Connection to the United States, they suggested, superseded any state efforts to bar them. The Mercer County farmers and the committee members disregarded the idea that black people could be outlawed from any part of the country. Their call for people from eastern cities to move to the old Northwest framed black identity as a bond with the nation. Black people moving to the West were not abandoning their home states but were instead populating their native country, claiming their place in American social, economic, and political communities.

      Holding the 1843 convention in upstate New York embodied this westward push of blackness. These ideas of a black American identity and the potential to change legal restrictions through broad collective action were central to the Buffalo convention. Meeting in upstate New York might have insulated the activists from urban racial violence, but it was also a conscious choice to look beyond the traditional gathering place of Philadelphia. It was another way of presenting black people as Americans, conveying the reality that their political communities existed beyond East Coast cities and the argument that people ought to be connected across the free states. Those present at the convention expressed a desire to examine and redefine their “moral and political condition as American citizens,” to discuss the reality of their status and convey their ideas about their proper position in the country. During the convention, delegates engaged extensively with Buffalonians, delivering speeches in the evenings at meetings in local churches that were “largely attended by the citizens generally.” Those orators included established figures such as Charles B. Ray, as well as a number of young men already celebrated for their oratory, most notably Henry Highland Garnet and Frederick Douglass.⁵⁶

      Amid those imposing personalities and the wide-ranging issues that delegates presented, one person with little experience claimed a central role at the convention by making a direct argument about the nature of citizenship. William C. Munroe traveled to Buffalo from his hometown of Detroit, where he worked as a teacher and minister and had emerged as an important figure in activism around the Great Lakes.⁵⁷ Munroe had previously served as president of Buffalo’s Union Moral and Mental Improvement Society, and so he must have crossed Lake Erie with some frequency.⁵⁸ In Detroit, he had led the expansive work of the Colored Vigilant Committee, which encouraged education and uplift among free African Americans in addition to securing their physical freedom.⁵⁹ And he had joined other activists in pursuing equal suffrage in Michigan.⁶⁰ While Munroe had not previously attended national conventions, he was experienced with the forms of collective black politics and had been working toward substantive change in African Americans’ legal lives by the time he arrived in Buffalo.

      Perhaps because of his reputation in the city, Munroe sat on the convention’s business committee, a group of nine men who drafted resolutions for the delegation’s approval. Typically, conventions centered on those resolutions, deciding which of them should be published and in what language in order to broadcast a protest ideology, condemn specific injustices, and recommend avenues for change. At times, black and white newspapers printed only these resolutions in lieu of other records from conventions.⁶¹ Munroe and his fellow committee members directed the 1843 convention through more than thirty proposals, a position from which they shaped the convention’s message to the public and its legacy for free black people’s lives.

      On the afternoon of August 16, Munroe stood before his colleagues and presented Resolution No. 10, which was brief and direct: “by the second section of the fourth article of the Constitution of the U.S., we [are] citizens.”⁶² In so doing, he asked delegates to endorse an explicit claim to national citizen status under the Constitution. As had so many before him, Munroe invoked the Privileges and Immunities Clause, arguing for federal supremacy over restrictive state policy and calling for a legal relationship with the U.S. government. Munroe delivered “a flaming speech” in support of the resolution, rejecting rulings from “inferior courts” that black men were not citizens. “Mr. Munro[e] thought it high time for us to speak out upon this subject, and that the present was this time.”⁶³