The Bone and Sinew of the Land

by Anna-Lisa Cox

  324 Emmett, Calhoun County

  325 Lee, Calhoun County*

  326 Barry, Barry County

  327 Hope, Barry County

  328 Fulton, Gratiot County

  329 Fairplain, Montcalm County

  330 Otisco, Ionia County

  331 Paris, Kent County*

  332 Gaines, Kent County*

  333 Byron, Kent County

  334 Spring Lake, Ottawa County

  335 Ravenna, Muskegon County

  336 Bridgeton, Newaygo County

  337 White River, Muskegon County

  338 Ontonagon, Ontonagon County

  Author’s Note

  At the front of this book is a map of a reality that no one thought existed, of a population that most have considered impossible—a population of successful African American pioneers integrating America’s first free frontier.1

  The territory on this map became part of the United States in the revolutionary days of the early republic, and it was truly revolutionary, for this is the Northwest Territory—the largest piece of land in the New World to be set aside as free of slavery and to offer equal voting rights to American men regardless of the color of their skin. Before California or Texas, before Wyoming or Oregon, this territory was known as the Great West, a region of tremendous importance that shaped the nation before the Civil War. The pioneers featured in this book grew their farms and families on the frontier while also keeping alive the dream that had given birth to their new homes and their new nation, a dream of a country where all men are created equal and there could be liberty and justice for all.

  The map reveals the activities inspired by this dream, but it is limited in a few ways. It does not represent all African Americans in the Northwest Territory states, only African American farming settlements, so none of the many African American urban entrepreneurs are shown. And even in the rural areas, it excludes all the African American businesspeople who were not property-owning farmers, such as blacksmiths, general store owners, and mill owners.

  My definition of a successful landowning African American entrepreneurial farm is based on the following criterion: a man of any skin color owning at least two hundred acres of property would have been eligible to run for office based on the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. Having that much acreage would represent considerable economic success: Loren Schweninger points out in Black Property Owners in the South, by the mid-1800s a farmer with property worth between $2,000 and $5,000 was in the top 13 percent of wealthy landowners in the United States at that time, regardless of skin color. Many of these settlements included farmers with such wealth, and some were even wealthier.

  What’s more, the number of landowning African American farming settlements on this map is conservative, and so is the value of the farms. African American farming families often did not want themselves or their farms counted on federal documents before the Civil War. This is unsurprising given the anti-immigration laws, the fugitive slave laws, and the unjust taxation policies in these states. The first African American lawyer in Ohio would not allow the federal census to record the value of his large and successful Ohio farm in the 1850s; it is recorded only in local land deeds and tax records.2

  Because of settlement patterns, I drew information about Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois farms primarily from the 1850 federal census, while Michigan and Wisconsin data came from the 1860 federal census. Although some of these settlements had disappeared by 1860 and others only existed for a decade, they are still counted, for they had an impact both on the African American farmers themselves and on the white pioneers moving in and around them. Each of these pioneer farming families and each of these settlements testifies to the truth that people of African descent had the ability, courage, and perseverance to rise in America. This is the story of their rising and what happened when they rose.

  Introduction

  Boston, Massachusetts, 1853

  William Lloyd Garrison left Boston in early October 1853 to travel to the Great West. He headed first to Albany, New York, where he would catch a train that would take him hundreds of miles west. By 1853 Garrison was one of the most widely recognized and revolutionary white abolitionists of his day, and he had been publishing his newspaper, the Liberator, in Boston for over twenty years, filling its pages with reports from the region he was now on his way to visit.1

  The Great West, the Northwest territories, the frontier. Today these words conjure up images of the Rocky Mountains or the wild ranges of Texas. But the “Great West” was the name commonly given to the first territory created by the new nation of the United States, in 1787. Most of this region would become the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin in the first half of the 1800s. Maps from the early nineteenth century show the nation ending at the Mississippi River, as if that waterway were a cliff at the end of the world.

  And even as the nation expanded, this image of the Northwest Territory stayed strong in the minds of many Americans.

  In 1853, Garrison did not plan on visiting all five of those states, just Ohio and Michigan. He was not getting any younger, and the new train lines now connecting the East Coast to Michigan and Ohio made travel there much easier. But he also had to be careful to visit what he deemed the safest parts of the Old Northwest Territory states. He knew of vicious attacks against abolitionists in some of these regions—he had reported on them in his newspaper for years. Of course, Boston was not exactly safe either. In the 1830s Garrison had nearly been tarred and feathered as well as lynched in his hometown of Boston. And tarring and feathering continued to be a favored means among pro-slavery men of torturing those struggling against the tyrannies of bondage and prejudice, even in the Northwest Territory states.2

  Garrison wrote accounts of his journey soon after returning. He wrote of traveling around Michigan and Ohio, speaking to crowds large and small, of being barred from speaking halls in Detroit and almost attacked there. He wrote of his meetings with white and black abolitionists, as well as their enemies. He wrote with good humor of the time a young white man on a train platform in Ohio had warned him that an antislavery meeting was to be held in the area and “the nigger man from Boston was going to be there,” referring to Garrison himself. Garrison wrote, “This was really a very fine compliment, and I was as much gratified as amused by it.”3

  But he devoted his first article upon his return, when his memory was freshest, to certain facts about the region that moved him and gave him hope:

  Is it not on the American soil that the “Great Debate, the Conflict of the Ages,” is to be settled… as to the equality of the human race—human brotherhood—the value of man as man? Settled, not as an abstract theory, but by a practical recognition of the world-reconciling fact; settled, not with mountains or oceans intervening, but with people of every clime and race standing side by side, grouped together in one common locality, literally neighbors, daily looking each other in the face, and continually interchanging the kindnesses and courtesies of civilized life!4

  As Garrison wrote about “people of every clime and race standing side by side” as neighbors, he was not envisioning some grand imagined experiment, some ideal future; he was describing a reality that he knew existed across most of the Great West. He was writing about a population in that region that most historians today do not know existed. But it did.

  At the very time when the United States was forming itself, when the young nation was opening its first free frontier, there was a pioneering movement so massive and successful that it changed the legal and social landscape of our country. This movement consisted of free people of African descent.

  Long before the Great Migration of the twentieth century, there had been another Great Migration, one that spanned the first half of the nineteenth century. This was a migration, in wagon trains and on foot, of tens of thousands of African American pioneers who became some of the earliest settlers of the Great West. Most of these pioneers had not come to cities; instead, they had flung themselves at
the wildest edges of the frontier. Highly visible, assertive, and brave, they scattered themselves across the land in hundreds of farming settlements.

  But the full scope of these pioneers’ accomplishments has been lost, for even the best historians have assumed that there were very few successful African American farming settlements across the Northwest Territory before the Civil War.5

  Of course, historians have long known that by 1860 the federal census counted over 63,000 African Americans as living in the five Northwest Territory states. And as Stephen Vincent pointed out in his important work on African American farmers in antebellum Indiana, 73 percent of those counted in those five states in 1860 were living in a rural setting.6

  To put this number into context, the Northwest Ordinance, completed in 1787, stipulated that a region could become a state if it had 60,000 non–Native American settlers. This meant that by 1860 more than a state’s worth of African-descended people were living in the Great West. Much has been written about the move of African Americans to the African colony of Liberia starting in the nineteenth century; yet by the early twentieth century the descendants of those American immigrants only numbered around 15,000.7

  Until recently, we have known little about the lives of African American pioneers in the Great West. Some historians have argued that the frontier was too dangerous and challenging for African Americans, who faced many social and legal adversities beyond the inherent difficulty of building up a farm from nothing.8

  But before William Lloyd Garrison was even born, African Americans had settled in the region, guarding its forts and homesteading their farms in the earliest days of American expansion.

  Most African American pioneers faced a brutal irony. They could only enjoy some freedom and equality at the far edges of the nation, where its laws and culture lay lightly on the land. But there was also something about timing—about the fact that these pioneers were able to settle a region created at the height of the young nation’s fervor for freedom. And these earliest pioneers, some even joined by whites who continued to hold on to the ideals of liberty and equality, were able to carve out spaces in the rural Old Northwest where astonishing levels of equality were possible at a time when most of the rest of the nation—south or north—was growing hostile to those ideals.9

  While some of the first African-descended people in this region had arrived before there was even a United States and lived harmoniously with Native Americans, later pioneers of African descent were sometimes different. Some were even Indian agents, taking up arms during the War of 1812 to battle Native Americans in the Northwest Territory.10

  The violence on this American frontier—the brutal battles, forced removals, death marches, and genocides—is truly horrifying. This was no virgin territory free for the taking. However, African American pioneers before the Civil War did see the Northwest Territory as a place of fresh hope. They understood how dangerous it was, how violent it was, how their settlement would displace Native peoples, with whom they might even come into conflict. But they sought success, and before the Civil War that meant owning good land and farming it well. And they intended to succeed on the frontier. The Northwest Territorial Ordinance of 1787 promised that this region would not only be free of slavery but offered equal voting rights to any man who owned at least fifty acres of land.11

  While free African-descended people had long owned farms from Vermont to Virginia, this movement of African Americans onto the frontier created a wholly new situation. They came to settle where they wished to, around the people they wanted to be near. Determined to be equal, these pioneers defined their own goals, working independently and with whites to further the causes of liberty and equality.

  They used their position as free homesteading pioneers across this portion of the nation to assert their rights and push for change. As their numbers, their farms, and their communities grew, they refused to lie low.

  And they managed to succeed in extraordinary ways. They organized successful conventions that brought pressure against state governments, helping to roll back prejudiced laws. They founded and funded successful schools open to girls and boys, black and white, in the cornfields of 1840s Indiana, when attempts to create such schools in the Northeast were being violently opposed. And it was in the rural spaces of this region that the first African American was elected to political office in a free and open election before the Civil War.

  No wonder a group of African American farmers from Carthagena, Ohio, wrote to African Americans in Cleveland, urging them to leave the cities where they were being oppressed and attacked to come to the rural areas and farm. As they wrote, “Those who live in towns and follow those precarious occupations for a livelihood, which prejudice has assigned to you, would you not be serving your country and your race to more purpose, if you were to leave your present residences and employments and go into the country and become a part of the bone and sinew of the land?” Of course, these rural African Americans discovered that in some regions their very successes could cause prejudiced whites to attack them. In the years before the Civil War, the rising of African Americans in the Northwest Territory states led to incidents of legal, political, and social violence. But while achieving success may not have been a solution to prejudice, prejudice could not erase the fact that African Americans were succeeding—were rising—in much of the rural and frontier spaces of this region.12

  These pioneers reflected almost all the faces of African American freedom. Some were first-generation free. But some came from families who had been free for centuries and were literate landowners in the slave South. Many of these long-free families could trace their liberty back to the seventeenth century and had fathers or other relatives who had fought as patriots in the Revolutionary War. But while some were freed, some had purchased their freedom, and some were generations free, all of these successful landowning pioneers chose to be farmers.

  They understood that by colonizing the newest portion of the nation, they were laying claim to citizenship in powerful ways. Today, most Americans’ identity has little to do with land ownership, but in the early United States a man could only vote if he owned property, so ownership of land was key to being considered a full person, a full American. And as they scattered across the frontier, these propertied black farmers were keeping alive a national discussion about the meaning of freedom and equality.

  These were pioneers in the purest sense, willing to risk their freedom and their lives for the chance to gain not just land but their rights. This is their story, the story of African American pioneers who became the bone and sinew of the land.

  1

  “Life, Liberty”

  Gibson County, Indiana, Spring 1818

  Keziah and Charles Grier strapped their axes onto their backs before going to hitch up the oxen for their first day of plowing together. Once they got to the starting place, Charles would have adjusted the lines, glancing at Keziah, who held the team’s head up front, then called out for the team to start.

  They had their axes ready, but not for trees. Those were already gone on this little patch of land that they planned to work this spring. Charles had already been clearing the trees and underbrush since he purchased his forty acres in 1815. Some trees he set alight until they crashed to the ground, smoking. Others that looked good he had felled for building the small cabin that was now their home.1

  If he was lucky enough to find some chestnut trees on his land, then he had his fence wood. Once he had felled the tree, his back damp and sore from the effort, he would have to cut through the thick trunk in long lengths of roughly twelve feet. Then there was the splitting of that green wood. Making the first split was always the hardest, a task requiring patience, time, and exhausting effort. The fence was necessary to protect the kitchen garden from the deer and to keep the hogs penned before slaughter. But this work was so hard that many pioneers either paid strong young men eager for money or forced their bonded laborers to do it.2

  Until recently, Charl
es had been one of those men forced to do this kind of labor. But this was his frontier. And now, this was his labor, his life, his land.

  He must have shown Keziah his likely land as he was courting her, all forty acres of it.

  It was the best land. Already it was highly prized, for it was rich river-bottom land where almost anything would grow. It was close to the Patoka and Wabash Rivers, so they could easily find transportation for themselves or anything they might want to sell. But it was also high enough to avoid the yearly flooding that struck so many other areas nearby. It was almost perfect. It had to be.3

  The Griers knew that their lives depended on this land, for this soil was to grow their food and support them, and more besides. Of course, they wanted a family, but they hoped for more than mere survival. Had Charles already told Keziah that he wanted to be able to grow not only their family but their farm? He wanted to leave behind a legacy, an investment in this new nation to pass along to their children. Not just freedom but a future full of success.

  But that was the future. That was their dream. First came the plowing.

  The oxen were fresh, but Keziah and Charles knew that their team was tender and the land hard. For they were not just plowing, they were clearing the frontier—the first people to ever put a blade into this particular patch of earth and turn it to cultivation.

  So they adjusted the axes on their backs and started walking. There would be a lot of walking that day, and every day, until the field was plowed. Even on cleared land, plowing one acre with a single-blade plow required nine miles of walking on rough mud.4

  And the Griers were starting with forty acres. If they had been farming outside New York City and decided to drop their traces and set off for Boston, the plowing of that forty acres would have walked them there and back every spring. Those farmers lucky enough to have a hundred acres under cultivation might just as well have been walking from New York City past Chicago every spring. But there was no city of Chicago yet in 1818; there was just water and wilderness.