All the Black Men Vote for Mr. Otis

Abstract

This chapter covers all of New England from the Revolution on, as each of its original four states emancipated enslaved people, joined by Vermont in 1791 and Maine in 1820. It argues the four Upper New England states constituted a Yankee Republic committed to “sectional nationalism” and formally non-racial politics, led by Federalists like George Thatcher, congressman from Massachusetts’ “Maine District” in the 1790s. The nation’s first black political leader, Prince Hall, emerged in Boston in the 1780s, presaging an entire political class of defiant small businessmen, which reached its apogee in the 1820s, incorporating David Walker.