Restrictions on voting followed other constraints on African American men and women. As early as 1790, Congress limited naturalization (the process of becoming a citizen) to white aliens, or immigrants. It also excluded blacks from enrolling in federal militias. In 1820 Congress authorized city officials in Washington, D.C., to adopt a separate legal code governing free blacks and slaves. This federal legislation encouraged states to add their own restrictions, including segregation of public schools, public transportation, and public accommodations like churches and theaters. Such laws were passed in the North as well as in the South. Some northern legislatures even denied African Americans the right to settle in their state.
In addition, blacks faced mob and state-sanctioned violence across the country. In 1822 officials in Charleston, South Carolina, accused Denmark Vesey of following the revolutionary leader Toussaint L’Ouverture’s lead and plotting a conspiracy to free the city’s slaves. One of 1,500 free blacks residing in the city, Vesey had helped to organize churches, mutual aid societies, and other black institutions. Whites viewed these efforts as a threat to the future of slavery because such accomplishments challenged assumptions about black inferiority. Vesey may have organized a plan to free slaves in the city, but it is also possible that white officials concocted the plot in order to terrorize free blacks and slaves in the area and to shore up the power of ruling white elites. Despite scant evidence, Vesey and 34 of his alleged co-conspirators were found guilty and hanged. Another 18 were exiled outside the United States. The African Methodist Episcopal church where they supposedly planned the insurrection was torn down.
Northern blacks also suffered from violent attacks by whites. Assaults on individual African Americans often went unrecorded, but race riots received greater attention. For example, in 1829 white residents of Cincinnati attacked black neighborhoods, and more than half of the city’s black residents fled. Many of them resettled in Ontario, Canada. They were soon joined by Philadelphia blacks who had been attacked by groups of white residents in 1832. Such attacks continued in northern cities throughout the 1830s.