NORTHWEST TERRITORY

African American history and Haitian history have common bonds in English and French colonialism, especially in the "Northwest Territories," the vast property ceded to the United States by the British at the Treaty of Paris, at the end of the Revolutionary War, in 1783. The Northwest Territory was claimed by both the French and the English. Both imperialist nations had moved militarily, diplomatically, religiously, and commercially to dispossess the Indians, Spanish, and each other, of these lands. They had also waged a long, losing battle with encroaching American settlers, free blacks and whites, for these rich lands, lying west of the Alleghenies and north of the Ohio River, bound by the Mississippi River on the west, Canada, north. In Anna-Lisa Cox's masterful book, THE BONE AND SINEW OF THE LAND: AMERICA'S FORGOTTEN BLACK PIONEERS AND THE STRUGGLE FOR EQUALITY (2018), the author describes the dynamics: "Within only ten years of abolishing slavery and declaring equality among mankind , France turned its back on its ideals as well. Just as in the United States, there had been an almost immediate attempt to restore slavery, with French slave powers making a plea for a return to the practice in 1795. "Just eight years later much had changed, and in 1803 France went to war to reinstate slavery in all its colonies. Napoleon Bonaparte 's colonial minister Denis Decres defended the moves, arguing, 'Liberty is a food for which the stomachs of the negroes are not yet prepared.' The island of Saint-Dominique only managed to stay free by once again fighting the French for its liberty. But the people of the French island of Guadeloupe lost their battle and were reenslaved ... "Meanwhile , the men of color who had stood up at the 1794 convention in Paris as supposedly full and equal citizens--those revolutionaries from Sainte-Dominique --were being arrested . Some were deported while others died in French prisons. And in 1804 Napoleon Bonaparte was crowned emperor ... "But this did not immunize the United States from a backlash of its own; it just looked different and grew more slowly. But this did not make it less terrible or destructive.... "Ohio was the first state carved out of the Northwest Territory, and whites in that state were also the first to reverse the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, using the word 'white' in their state constitution as a criterion for full citizenship when Ohio became a state in 1803. By all that was just, these states should have held the right to vote as sacred as freedom from slavery...Every new state created out of the Northwest Territory would follow suit. But this did not destroy the hopes of African Americans and their allies that the dreams of equality would still become a reality. "After all, the fervor for freedom was one reason there were free people who would come to the frontier of the Great West. In 1790 there were roughly 58,000 African descended people counted as free in the nation's first census, but by 1810 there were roughly 186,000. When New York finally decided to pass legislation officially ending slavery in 1827, the number stood at roughly 320,000. This was the largest number of free people of African descent existing in any New World or European nation at the time, except for the revolutionary island of Saint -Dominique , which was now called Haiti. This was a blossoming, a blighted one to be sure, but still bearing fruit." P. 38-40