The first half of American history is tainted by slavery and Jim Crow. And the second half is haunted by their lingering legacies. Northerners and Minnesotans might prefer to think slavery was an exclusively southern phenomenon even though racism against African Americans has applied to every state of America. This kind of thinking has rested on our conventional historical narrative, which told us that Northern states like Minnesota were not entangled with slavery. The Missouri Compromise banned slavery in new northern territories. And Minnesota entered the Union as a free state, not a slavery state. That means slavery was never legal in Minnesota both as a territory and a state.
But such conventional wisdom is also mistaken due to historical amnesia.
In his new book Slavery’s Reach, historian Christopher P. Lehman demonstrates that the illegality of slavery does not mean Minnesota was not complicit in this practice. Minnesotans actually had very deep relations with slave owners and the early development of Minnesota as a territory and a state was highly dependent on the profits garnered from business dealings with these southerners. While previous scholarly works have already revealed the reliance of the northern industries and financial markets on the agricultural economy of the South prior to the Civil War, Lehman’s work still surprised me because I did not expect the active and direct engagements of slave owners with Minnesota politics and economy. My additional research efforts found few works documenting this part of Minnesotan history. So Slavery’s Reach constitutes a very important addition to our knowledge of Minnesotan history around and before the Civil War.
When I was reading Slavery’s Reach, I was amazed by the rich information Lehman pulled out from the archives all over Minnesota. He presented every historical figure he mentioned in painstaking details. Many of us are ignorant of the the historical evidence he presents of Minnesota’s compliance with the demands of slave owner. The hotel operators allowed southern tourists to bring their slaves in and named their slaves “servants” as euphemism; Insurance companies offered slave insurance policies to slave owners who were travelling to Minnesota to ensure that any damages to their “properties” shall be reimbursed. The Fugitive Slave Acts offered bounty hunters in Minnesota great incentives to kidnap people and to return to their “owners”. And hundreds of Minnesotans even petitioned the legislature to make slavery legal in Minnesota. Besides, the politicians, including American presidents, mayors, presidents of the territory, and later governors of the state, created favorable conditions for southerners to start businesses or to buy lands with the dirty money they earned from slavery. Sometimes they even profited from these by taking bribes or personally participating in these business transactions. And to cover the illegal and unconstitutional nature of these political favors, these politicians depicted these favors as compromises in the best interests of all American people and the harmony of the Union. The African American slaves, of course, were not really people in their soothing political discourses to justify their pro-slavery policies.
Minnesota is not the only Northern state which had reached a harmonious relation with southern slave owners before the Civil War. So Lehman’s work is a great beginning for other scholars to do similar works in other states. Apart from this, Slavery’s Reach is also significant for Minnesotans today to cure our amnesia for the pro-slavery past. While today’s white Minnesotans should not be held directly responsible for their ancestors’ or predecessors’ ugly past, it is essential for us to understand the historical and structural problems the slavery history had inflicted on our fellow African American citizens.
The East Side Freedom Library is happy and honored to host Dr. Christopher P. Lehman for a presentation and discussion at 7 pm on Tuesday, December 10. He will introduce his new work and research. Everyone is welcomed to join us that night to share opinions and experiences on issues of slavery and racism in Minnesota history and contemporary period.
Zhantao Luo, December 7, 2019
Zhantao Luo is an international student from China. He graduated from Macalester College in 2019 and he is an intern at the East Side Freedom Library.