Engaging the state is key to allow blackness in politics to exercise civic power freely

White and black activists alike were often ambivalent toward the “complexional” nature of these conventions. William Whipper, James McCune Smith, and other black activists opposed the 1840 convention because of the expense, the possible diffusion of labor, and their sense that the suffrage movement would be better served by an interracial coalition under the umbrella of human rights.95 After the convention, Whipper famously penned a set of three letters to the Colored American critiquing the 1840 convention’s emphasis on color as “in direct opposition to the ‘rights of humanity.’ ”96 White antislavery activists such as Nathaniel Rogers, editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard, went further and accused the organizers of repeating the prejudices of white men in addressing their call to colored citizens. Rogers’s editorial on June 18, 1840, addresses itself to the organizers as a “friend” and then argues, “We oppose all exclusive action on the part of the colored people, except where the clearest necessity demands it.” Rogers continues, “Time should be taken to discuss the measures to be employed deliberately; and the people should be made distinctly to understand that our country is your country; our God your God.” The language implies that at best, the conventioneers’ actions were too hasty, showing a lack of rational deliberation; at worst, Rogers’s commentary implies that this deliberation could only occur with their (white) legitimating presence and direction. Defending the convention against such attacks compelled supporters to articulate the meaning of “color” as an organizing principle, racialization as a political phenomenon, questions of agency vis-a`-vis fracturing antislavery organizations, and the tensions between presenting black citizens as autonomous individuals and the public’s tendency to read their political actions as the result of white patronage or pawns in the jockeying of political parties.97 One defender, “Sidney,” responded to William Whipper’s letters in one of the clearest articulations of a pragmatic political black nationalism in early African America: “Whenever a people are oppressed, peculiarly (not complexionally), distinctive organization or action is required on the part of the oppressed, to destroy that oppression. The colored people of this country are oppressed; therefore the colored people are required to act in accordance with this fundamental principle.”98 In much the same vein, Samuel Ringgold Ward responded to Rogers’s Standard editorial by pointing out white abolitionists’ racial privilege and myopia: their inability “to see a colored man when in the company of other whites necessitates such a convention.”99 Ward upbraids Rogers: “Had you a colored skin from October ’17 to June ’40, as I have, in this pseudo-republic, you would have seen through a very different medium.”100 Sidney and Ward connect being “colored” to a historical experience of antiblackness and to a mode of seeing this oppression as an issue of political power and representation. Being colored in this instance signifies in much the same way as being propertyless might in other circumstances. To have a “colored skin,” their analysis suggests, is to be without property in whiteness, a property worth about $250 in New York.101 This material and historical perspective, Ward and Sidney suggest, gave black citizens a theoretical and experiential understanding of politics different from their would-be white advisors that necessitated naming the racist elements of New York law. There was more at stake here than political perspective, though. The convention welcomed white attendance—even needed their approbation— but organizers maintained that any political progress would require the kind of publicity that only a gathering arranged by an autonomous black political collective could provide. The political exigencies and the way race framed and suffused these politics superseded the sentimental affiliation Rogers suggests in proclaiming, “Every abolitionist should be a colored person in this case.”102 Every abolitionist, Ray argues, cannot be a colored person because being “colored” is shaped by material and political realities that white citizens, no matter how well intentioned, do not share. Black citizens needed to be seen organizing for themselves and in leadership positions in ways that even the antislavery conventions, where, as Ray observed, black participants were often “looked upon as playing second fiddle to” the white organizers, could not produce.103 Such an event, a “different medium,” would demonstrate to the state that, rather than operating as puppets to abolitionist organizations or even the burgeoning Liberty Party, black citizens desired the franchise for their own and the state’s benefit, “that as citizens we should possess the privileges and immunities of citizenship: and . . . we are as capable of appreciating and exercising those rights as others.”104 It would position them as political agents rather than as objects of legislation or the political wards of white philanthropists. It would allow black citizens to exercise their own civic power more visibly and freely and therefore more productively for themselves and the state as a whole. The debates preceding the convention positioned the delegates as representatives of a political community of colored citizens. After the convention, the delegates used print to extend the convention’s performance, with the circulation of the collected “Proceedings” or “Minutes”—including debates, resolutions, addresses, and petitions—and the conventions’ form petitions that articulated the delegates’ central position in a shorter form.105 If, as the convention argued, the suffrage served as the official circuit for civic power, then these documents created an unofficial, alternate route providing a mechanism for black citizens to exercise citizenship by directly engaging the state and their fellow citizens. The organizers of the 1840 New York convention were keenly aware that the convention’s legitimacy—for both white and black onlookers— depended as much on how well it executed its business as a deliberative body (or at least how well it presented this execution to the public) as it did on what the convention actually decided.106 Ray reiterates again and again that the “Proceedings” (both event and printed record) represent the convention’s “respectable and noble” character, revealing the delegates’ ability to conduct business without “angry debate,” settling differences “amicably and yet without compromise.”107 Indeed, the form of these debates and resolutions carried at least as much weight as their content because the text confirms Ray’s claim that the convention adhered to a republican style of politics. And, because audiences would read any sign of disorder as confirmation of black difference, the minutes needed to be especially scrupulous on this point.