Don’t You be My Neighbor: Support for Racial-Exclusion Constitutional Provisions in Mid-19th Century Indiana and Illinois

• Author: Jac C. Heckelman,John Dinan
• Published date: 01 September 2021
• Date: 01 September 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X211015346
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X211015346

American Politics Research

2021, Vol. 49(5) 504 –516

© The Author(s) 2021

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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X211015346

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Article

Introduction

The U.S. Constitution and many of the 50 state constitutions

have at various times contained racially discriminatory pro-

visions. The U.S. Constitution barred Congress from abol-

ishing the slave trade for 20 years, required states to help

return enslaved persons who fled bondage, and counted

enslaved persons as 3/5 of a person when apportioning taxes

and determining state representation in the House of

Representatives and electoral college.

State constitutions, which have only recently begun to

attract the scholarly attention they merit (Dinan, 2006; Tarr,

1998; Williams, 2009), have included an even wider range of

racially discriminatory provisions. Although many of these

provisions appeared in southern state constitutions and

entrenched slavery in various ways in the antebellum era

(Herron, 2017), these provisions also appeared in a number of

northern state constitutions (Weiner, 2013). Prior to ratification

of the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, most northern

state constitutions explicitly limited voting to whites or, in the

case of New York, required blacks to hold a certain amount of

property in order to vote, while imposing no such property

requirement on whites (Liebman 2018, p. 387; Tarr, 1998,

pp. 106, 107; Wesley, 1948, p. 166). On a number of occasions

from the 1840s to the 1860s, voters in northern states had an

opportunity to remove limits on black suffrage but in all but a

few cases a majority opted to keep them (Bateman, 2020).

Even after slavery and explicit constitutional restrictions

on black voting were eliminated or rendered unenforceable

by the post-Civil War amendments to the U.S. Constitution,

some state constitutions continued to include racially dis-

criminatory provisions. State constitutions frequently barred

interracial marriage and required that schools be racially seg-

regated, at least prior to the 1950s and 1960s when the U.S.

Supreme Court invalidated all provisions of this kind. Still

other provisions with racially discriminatory effects were

added to state constitutions in the 20th century, as with adop-

tion of a 1964 California amendment that authorized racially

restrictive housing covenants and was later declared invalid

(Reny & Newman, 2018).

1015346APRXXX10.1177/1532673X211015346American Politics ResearchHeckelman and Dinan

research-article2021

1Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC, USA

Corresponding Author:

John Dinan, Department of Politics and International Affairs, Wake Forest

University, 305 Kirby Hall, Winston-Salem, NC 27109, USA.

Email: dinanjj@wfu.edu

Don’t You be My Neighbor: Support for

Racial-Exclusion Constitutional Provisions

in Mid-19th Century Indiana and Illinois

Jac C. Heckelman1 and John Dinan1

Abstract

Racially discriminatory provisions in the U.S. Constitution and southern state constitutions have been extensively analyzed,

but insufficient attention has been brought to these provisions when included in northern state constitutions. We examine

constitutional provisions excluding blacks from entering the state that were adopted by various northern states in the mid-

19th Century. Previous scholarship has focused on the statements and votes of the convention delegates who framed these

provisions. However, positions taken by delegates need not have aligned with the views of their constituents. Delegates

to state constitutional conventions held in Illinois in 1847, Indiana in 1850 and 1851, and Oregon in 1857 opted to submit

to voters racial-exclusion provisions separate from the vote to approve the rest of the constitution. We exploit this

institutional feature by using county-level election returns in Illinois and Indiana to test claims about the importance of

partisan affiliation, religious denomination, social-welfare policy concerns, labor competition, and racial-threat theory in

motivating popular support for entrenching racially discriminatory policies in constitutions. We find greater levels of support

for racial exclusion in areas where Democratic candidates polled better and in areas closer to slave-holding states where

social-welfare policy concerns would be heightened. We find lower levels of support for racial exclusion in areas (in Indiana)

with greater concentrations of Quakers. Our findings are not consistent with labor competition or racial-threat theories.

Keywords

state constitution, referendum, racial exclusion