The First Black Voters
Black men could vote in many U.S. states after the American Revolution, but they soon battled a wave of disenfranchisement laws as the nation turned its back on equality
Run It Back offers carefully researched articles on lesser told parts of black history. But I’m only able to do this work with your help. Please consider getting a paid subscription to Run It Back to help me keep writing these stories and making them available to students, educators and lifelong learners. Subscribe now.
At noon on July 8, 1776, a colonel in the Continental Army strode to the steps of Independence Hall clutching a freshly printed broadside and began reading the Declaration of Independence to the public for the first time. Crowded around him were some of Philadelphia’s wealthiest merchants and lawyers.1 No one paid much mind to the nine-year-old black boy who had also found his way to the State House Yard that afternoon. But for young James Forten, the moment was a turning point.2 He would carry the words he heard that day for the rest of his life, summoning a particularly resonant line in his own future writings: “All men are created equal.”
Sixty-two years later, Forten sat at a Presbyterian church in Philadelphia as another demand for liberty was presented--not a declaration, but a call to action. The Appeal of Forty Thousand Citizens, drafted by Philadelphia’s black leaders in 1838, sought to prevent Pennsylvania from stripping black men of their voting rights. A public vote on a new state constitution was imminent, and the Appeal was meant to persuade white voters that disenfranchising black people was not only morally wrong but a danger to the political stability of the new nation. “When you have taken from an individual his right to vote,” one passage read, “you have made the government, in regard to him, a mere despotism; and you have taken a step toward making it a despotism to all.”3
Pennsylvania was hardly the only state backsliding on civil rights at the time. The types of people who were “equal” in the United States seemed to be growing narrower with each passing year. But Forten had sacrificed too much for his country to see the nation’s core ideals tossed aside so easily. He insisted on believing in America. He had to.
---
James Forten broke boundaries for what a black man could achieve in the new United States, and he began early. At age 14 he volunteered to fight for the colonies in the American Revolution, sailing the seas on a privateer in support of the Continental Navy. He soon survived a stint as a captive of British forces. When a British captain offered to free him if he sided with the crown, the young Forten replied, “I have been taken prisoner for the liberties of my country, and never will prove a traitor to her interest."4
After the war, Forten returned to Philadelphia and took up his father’s industry of sailmaking. With keen business sense and a rapport with people of all races, Forten soon built his sailmaking enterprise into a local empire. He owned property across Philadelphia and employed both black and white workers. He stood at the forefront of a growing and relatively prosperous population of free black people in the city, numbering about 15,000 by 1830.5 Many of his neighbors and friends were former slaves. Some had been freed as Northern states abolished slavery one by one in the early 1800’s, while others had escaped the plantations of the Deep South in search of freedom. Philadelphia represented liberty to much of Black America.6
Notions of freedom in the early United States were bound up with the right to vote. As the early states were drafting their first constitutions in the 1790’s and early 1800’s, many of them echoed the soaring rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence, extending suffrage to “all men” or “freemen.” Such language ostensibly included the growing free black population. As far south as North Carolina7 and Kentucky8, black men technically had voting rights, though in many communities intimidation and other voter suppression tactics kept them from the polls. Forten himself did not vote, but he exerted political power by dictating to his white employees who they should vote for and even accompanying them to the polls.9
As the 1800’s wore on and the idealism of the Revolution waned, however, black people saw their rights steadily crimped in both the South and the North. One by one, states amended their constitutions to take the franchise from black voters.10 New states admitted to the Union, such as Michigan, barred black voting from the onset.11 By the mid-1830’s, only seven of the 26 U.S. states allowed black men to vote. This retrenchment was part of a broader restriction of rights for anyone not deemed “American” enough; immigrants also saw their voting rights rolled back during this time.12
Forten was used to pushing back against such incursions on black autonomy--"Let us, in legislation, be considered as men,” he wrote in a famous 1813 treatise called “Letters From a Man of Colour.”13 But the backlash to black progress reached a boiling point during Pennsylvnia’s state constitutional convention in 1837 and 1838. Economic competition between black and white workers had led to a series of race riots in recent years, and politicians had begun hawking false stories about voter fraud to demonize the few black Pennsylvanians who dared to venture to the polls. While the state’s original constitution allowed all “freemen” who paid taxes to vote, a delegate proposed changing the language to “white freemen” to put an end to any notions of racial equality.14
Black Pennsylvanians did all they could to stop their disenfranchisement, but each effort was met with a rebuff. When James Forten’s son tried to sit in the gallery during the voting debate at the constitutional convention, he was "brutally" removed by an officer.15 Another black Pennsylvanian, Wiliam Fogg, filed a lawsuit when he was turned away from the polls in a county election. The state Supreme Court ruled against him, arguing that “no coloured race was party to our social compact.”16 With judges helping to clear a legal path, the convention delegates voted in favor of disenfranchising black men across the state.
The new constitution was set to become law unless white voters rejected it at the polls, so Philadelphia’s black leaders launched a campaign to change hearts and minds. The Appeal of Forty Thousand Citizens was a last-ditch effort to rally the electorate to the cause of black suffrage. Robert Purvis, a prominent abolitionist and Forten’s son-in-law, was the main author of the document.
Robert Purvis (left) and Jamse Forten (right) were part of a family that fought for black freedom in Philadelphia
The Appeal of Forty Thousand Citizens walked through a detailed legal argument for why free black people should be considered citizens, citing both the U.S. Constitution and the original Pennsylvania one. It invoked Benjamin Franklin, the most famous Pennsylvanian of all, who became a staunch abolitionist late in his life. Throughout the document, black Pennsylvaians regularly regularly returned to the core tenets of American democracy that had been laid out at the nation’s founding--no taxation without representation, due process of law, and that persistent notion of equality. “We love our native country, much as it has wronged us,” one passage read, “and in the peaceable exercise of our inalienable rights, we will cling to it.”17
Forten and other black leaders eagerly endorsed the Appeal during a March 1838 meeting at a Presbyterian Church. The work was shared around the country in abolitionist circles like The Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison’s antislavery newspaper.18 But it wasn’t enough to sway white Pennsylvanians. In October 1838, the new state constitution was approved by a narrow margin of roughly 1,200 votes--less than the total number of black men in the state who had been denied the franchise.19
Pennsylvania was the last state to amend its constitution to disenfranchise black voters before the Civil War. James Forten tried to file another legal appeal in 1838, but it went nowhere.20 He died in 1842, in what must have felt like a nadir for American politics and morality.
But there are lessons in failure as much as victory. Forten and his neighbors refused to suffer through a darkening political climate in silence. Documents like the Appeal for Forty Thousand Citizens make clear that the nation’s free black population was politically active long before the Civil War. And Forten’s commitment to black progress served as inspiration for his children and son-in-law Purvis, who would play key roles in Philadelphia’s antislavery moment and the development of the Underground Railroad there.21 Forten did not live to see America live up to its promise, but his story is a reminder that citizens have the power and responsibility to challenge injustice, even when it seems like no one is listening.
John R. Vile, “The Proclamation, Reading, and Immediate Reception of the Declaration of Independence,” The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History,
Julie Winch, “The Making and Meaning of James Forten’s Letters from a Man of Colour.” The William and Mary Quarterly 64, no. 1 (2007): 129–38, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4491602.
Robert Purvis, Appeal of Forty Thousand Citizens, Threatened with Disfranchisement, to the People of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: Merrihew & Gunn, 1838).
Julie Winch, A Gentleman of Color: The Life of James Forten (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 46.
Eric Ledell Smith, “The End of Black Voting Rights in Pennsylvania: African Americans and the Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention of 1837-1838,” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 65, no. 3 (1998): 279–99, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27774118.
A Gentleman of Color, 127
Humber, John L, "Convention of 1835," NCpedia, October 2022.
“Voting Rights in Kentucky, 1792-1799 - Free Negro, Mulatto, Indian Males,” Notable Kentucky African Americans Database.
“The End of Black Voting Rights in Pennsylvania.”
“The End of Black Voting Rights in Pennsylvania,” 279.
“Constitution of Michigan of 1835,” Michigan Legislature.
Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Consted History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 52.
“The Making and Meaning of James Forten’s Letters from a Man of Colour.”
“The End of Black Voting Rights in Pennsylvania.”
Ibid.
Ibid; Hobbs v. Fogg, July 1837, Westlaw.
Appeal of Forty Thousand Citizens.
The Liberator, April 13 1838, 1.
“The End of Black Voting Rights in Pennsylvania.”
Ibid.
“Black Founders Big Idea 7: Continuing the Forten Family Legacy,” Museum of the American Revolution.
very interesting history no one knows about. thank you. one of the best articles i've read this year.