AHC: Pre-Civil War Negro member of Congress?

How specifically was Ariosto race misstating the state of race relations in the North during the 1850s?

Blacks could vote in Massachusetts before the Civil War, and the state banned segregated schooling in 1855.

Massachussetts isn't all of the North, but apparently this is equivalent to slavery?

Plus, pop quiz, which states allowed blacks to vote after the Fourteenth Amendment, and which states witnessed a paramilitary movement designed to disenfranchise newly freed slaves?
 
Weren't there some mixed-race slaveowners in South Carolina? It seems possible to me that a successful African-American (by the "one-drop" rule, though probably not by his own estimation) planter could get into Congress from SC... which would be massively ironic, the first black Congressman would be a slavocrat :eek:
 
Weren't there some mixed-race slaveowners in South Carolina? It seems possible to me that a successful African-American (by the "one-drop" rule, though probably not by his own estimation) planter could get into Congress from SC... which would be massively ironic, the first black Congressman would be a slavocrat :eek:

I don't know whether or not there were any mixed race slave owners in antebellum South Carolina, but the possibility of any person of African heritage, regardless of how much or little, being elected to Congress from there before the Civil War (War of Northern Aggression ;)) is between infinitesimally small and none-what-so-ever.
 
Blacks could vote in Massachusetts before the Civil War, and the state banned segregated schooling in 1855.

Massachussetts isn't all of the North, but apparently this is equivalent to slavery?

I in no way mentioned that the Political Process and Slavery were in any way equivalent.

My point was that an African American being elected in the North was not something that would happen without extreme difficulty on the local level, and especially more so when one is discussing electing them to the national level like Congress.

I will admit I had not known about segregated schooling, but I remain steadfast that people in the North were not especially enthused about the idea of African Americans voting, even (to a degree) in New England. Unlike in the South though, they weren't about to take up arms to prevent it, and were largely apathetic once the 14th was passed.
 
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