We Do Not Care How Black He Is

Ohio’s 1802 constitution disfranchised black men, and a series of Black Laws passed soon after sharply regulated the legal status of African Americans. But an 1831 state supreme court decision, Polly Gray v. Ohio, established that anyone who could claim he or she was “preponderantly white” was legally white, and could vote if male. Beginning in the late 1830s, black men began pressing to overturn the Black Laws, and voted, aided by white allies like the attorney Salmon P. Chase, founder of the state’s Liberty Party, and the Whig congressman Joshua Giddings. By the 1850s, they were voting in large numbers, led by the lawyer John Mercer Langston, and helped elect Chase, now head of the Republican Party, as governor.