Between Slavery and Freedom by Julie Winch Page B

citizenship for everyone once slavery had been banished from American soil. As the years passed and Forten grew to manhood, he discovered that America was only partially fulfilling its commitment to liberty and justice for all.
    The Articles of Confederation, the framework of government the delegates to the Continental Congress formally adopted in 1781, said nothing about slavery, emancipation, or rights for black people. Those were matters for the individual states to decide upon. There was one piece of legislation passed during the period of Confederation, however, that had far-reaching implications for the nation as a whole and most especially for black Americans. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 described in detail what was to happen to the land between the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers and the Great Lakes, the old Illinois Country. The United States had gained the territory from Britain at the end of the war. Lawmakers proposed to divide the vast area into five territories, each of which could apply for statehood. None of those states could permit slavery to exist within their borders. Few of the congressmen who approved the Ordinance were ardent abolitionists. Their goal was to keep the Old Northwest for white family farmers by barring entry to planters from the South with huge gangs of slaves. The fate of the slaves who were already living in the Old Northwest, some of them from the days when the French had controlled the region, remained uncertain. The governments of the new states—states that did not even exist yet—would ultimately have to address that thorny question, along with the issue of what rights, if any, free black people would have.
    When the Founding Fathers gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 to revise the Articles of Confederation, and ended by crafting an entirely new document, they again skirted around the matter of slavery. They discovered how volatile it could be when they tackled the apportioning of political representation. While each state would have two senators, its number of representatives would depend on the size of its population. Determining who could vote was left up to each state, but determining who should be counted was another matter. The Three-Fifths Compromise resolved the impasse by proposing that, in reckoning population, five slaves would be equal to three nonslaves. So much for the slaves, but when it came to black people who were not enslaved, the Founding Fathers said nothing, beyond implying that the census-takers would enumerate them with all other free people.
    As the white Founding Fathers put the finishing touches to the U.S. Constitution and prepared to depart Philadelphia, a group of free black Founding Fathers set to work. They were a diverse group—Richard Allen, a self-purchased ex-slave from Delaware; Absalom Jones, another former slave who had paid for his freedom and become a moderately successful craftsman; William Gray, an independent tradesman; and some two dozen other men, all of them free and all of them determined to use their freedom well. Their immediate goal was to create an organization that would secure their own and their families’ futures. They knew that if they fell upon hard times they could not expect help from the white community, so they undertook to pay money into a common fund on which they could draw in time of need. Their mutual benefit society was not the only one in existence. Free blacks in Newport, Rhode Island had already formed the Newport African Union, and there were probably similar societies in other cities and towns. However, the Free African Society was undoubtedly the largest and most ambitious of any of the groups. In part, that was because of the sheer size of Philadelphia’s free community of color, which numbered around 1,800 people in 1787, more than any other city in the former British colonies. The message that Jones, Allen, Gray and the other officers of the new Free African Society wanted to send to whites