Was the re-enslavement of free blacks about to be come legal in 1860?

Borderland

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Apr 16, 2015
I don't think this could have held up in an Upper South state like Virginia, but it's a frightening thought nonetheless. Only the Civil War's initial battles in 1860 curbed the movement temporarily for the state legislature in Arkansas.

From Ira Berlin's "Slaves Without Masters" ....P. 372-373

Arkansas, with one of the smallest free black populations of all Southern states, had long been a center of hostility to freemen. William Woodruff, editor of the state's largest newspaper and an ardent racist, had called for the enslavement as early as 1835. By the 1850s, legislators were regularly tendering bills to force free blacks out of the state or into bondage. These proposals were easily turned aside, partly because hysterical complaints about free black subversion made no sense to lawmakers who rarely saw a freeman. But events of the 1850s reinforced the demands to expel free blacks. In 1856, a measure threatening to enslave all free blacks who did not leave the state within a year was barely defeated when its constitutionality was called into question. Within a year, however, the United States Supreme Court in the Dred Scott decision had eliminated the slander protection of constitutional guarantees by stripping free blacks of citizenship.

Dred Scott breathed new life into the expansion movement. In July 1858, a large public meeting in Little Rock called for the immediate removal of free blacks from the state. Re-hashing the positive-good argument, whites declared it "insane to teach the slave.... by allowing the free man of his own color and race to be free, to deal and trade as a free man, to hold property and sue in court, that he is fit to be free, and can take care of and govern himself; while in the words we preach a different doctrine."

"...Under pressure from the governor, the state's leading newspaper, white workingmen, and petitions from various public meetings, the legislature hastily ordered black freemen to leave the state by 1 January 1860. All free blacks found in Arkansas after that date would be allowed to choose a master or would be sold into slavery, with the benefits of their sale to go to the stat school fund. ..."In 1860 only 144 mostly elderly free blacks remained in the state."
 
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