The Bone and Sinew of the Land

by Anna-Lisa Cox

  Meanwhile, more African American pioneers were coming onto the northwestern frontier, seeking the same freedom and success that Cornelius had dreamed of. But these pioneers had not been born into bondage; they were long free and wealthy. And by coming to the Great West they were risking the loss of much, including their liberty.

  5

  “To secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”

  Robertson County, Tennessee, Winter 1838

  The rooster was crowing, and the sharp smell of wood smoke was filling the air as they all worked together to get the morning chores done. January is a quiet time on a farm in Tennessee. But the animals still need tending, never an easy task when every water bucket fills with ice by morning, so Nancy Lyles would have done her morning chores with her youngest ones tagging along.

  Getting water meant walking the ice-slicked path down to the stream a little way off. Once there, they had to break a hole in the ice. Sometimes this took an axe and some hard hitting, but on milder mornings it could be a game, whacking at the thin skim of ice, which would crack and shatter in a most satisfying way. Then the buckets could be filled and hauled home.

  Everyone was busy, with even the smaller children ducking into the henhouse to gather eggs. Gathering eggs was always a particular delight on those winter mornings, being able to put their cold hands under the feathered bellies of the hens to find the warm eggs there. Eggs were scarce now that the days were so short, but still they would have hoped. At least there would be cream—Nancy made sure of that, milking their cow every morning.

  Even with the cold fogging their breath, if it was a clear morning surely they must have stopped for a minute to look at the sunrise. With acres now cleared around their home and barn, they could see for some distance across their land, their lovely land.

  How could they leave it?

  This region of Tennessee had been home to them since the early pioneer days. Nancy’s parents and siblings were all here, most of her sisters now married and living nearby. Nancy had married Daniel Lyles, and all of the Lyles family also lived close. But they were not supposed to be here anymore. Whites wanted them gone—even if they had helped to settle the state, as the Lyles family had, arriving right here in Robertson County, Tennessee, before the War of 1812.1

  And they had all come in such hope.

  Daniel’s parents, John and Patsy Lyles, had left their home in Henry County, Virginia, for the Tennessee frontier around 1810. Leaving would have been hard, for Virginia had been home to generations of the free Lyles family, since before the Revolutionary War. But they were eager to settle on this new frontier, with good land and low taxes. Better yet, if John could purchase some of that good land, Tennessee’s constitution clearly stated that he had the same right as any man to vote. Tennessee had become a state in 1796, during an unusual time when many American whites were still dedicating themselves to the ideals of liberty and equality. This meant that if a man could rise to the position of property holder, then he was a citizen in Tennessee, regardless of his color.2

  And John Lyles, with his son’s help, intended to do just that.

  Nancy’s husband, Daniel, would have remembered that journey well. Leaving their home and everything he had known to go out with his parents and his three brothers. They were already getting big enough to help settle a frontier farm. There was James, the eldest at almost twenty, then there were the three younger ones, all spaced about three years apart, Daniel, John Junior, and Joshua.

  Their parents, John and Patsy Lyles, were not the only long-free and propertied African American pioneers choosing to settle the southern frontier in those early days. Free African Americans had long been coming out to protect the borders of the newest portions of the nation, even in the slave South.

  Peter Caulder, like Nancy and Daniel Lyles, had been freeborn, although his home state was South Carolina. He had fought in the War of 1812 as a patriot and then gone out with an integrated group of eight soldiers to the Arkansas Territorial frontier as part of the first guard at the newly built Fort Smith. After serving as an active soldier and ranger at Fort Smith for fourteen years, he fell in love with Eliza Hall, the daughter of a free black pioneering family who had traveled together to the Arkansas frontier in 1819. Peter and Eliza married and settled on good land to start their farm in what is now Marion County, Arkansas.3

  It may seem odd that long-free African Americans settled the frontiers of slave states and territories. But at the time they came, their decision would have seemed sound. They could buy good land for little money and pay low taxes. They were also farmers, familiar with working in the climate of that region of the United States. And most people in the early 1810s assumed that slavery in the United States was dying, especially in the frontier regions, north or south. They would have seen all that had happened in their country to abolish slavery, and then in 1808 the international slave trade had been officially shut down. Everyone could see that at various ports, from Rhode Island to South Carolina, corruption was making the ending of this trade incomplete, but people were no longer supposed to be imported into enslavement, so how could slavery grow?

  Nancy’s and Daniel’s parents must have talked of those early pioneer days. And there was more time in the winter to talk, to gather. There were no crops to harvest, no fields to plow. Instead, there were well-built homes, warm fires, good food, and family.

  When they gathered together there were so many of them—three generations all calling Tennessee home. Most remembered their pioneer days and would have told the young ones the stories of that long trek from Virginia, their wagons loaded, their children so little. Although, as everyone must have laughed, it was hard to believe Daniel’s younger brother Joshua was ever very little, now topping out at six feet, two inches of lean strength.4

  Yes, John and Patsy could look at their babies now grown men, and fine, able to work the land their parents had settled around twenty-five years ago. And it was such good land, finally free of roots and rocks, a day of plowing pure pleasure. The younger ones may have shrugged and met each other’s eyes as the old ones talked of those frontier days. They knew the stories all too well, for they had lived them. They had also cleared the rocks, led the ox teams, wielded the axes that split rails for fences, hammered together the beams that built the barns. They had labored with their parents and now, now when they should all be reaping their reward, now this, the loss of their rights, which was now being followed by harassment.

  In 1834 the whites of Tennessee had spoken—whites, Grandfather Lyles must have reminded them, who had arrived long after their own family had. No longer would their freedom and their land give them the right to vote, as it had for almost forty years. No longer could they encourage more family and friends to come join them from Virginia, for the borders of Tennessee had now been officially closed to free African Americans. And they could no longer bear arms.5

  They could not hunt the deer or turkey they had always relied on. They could not keep the coyotes from the hens or the rabbits from the kitchen garden. Worse yet, they could not protect themselves. Then, in 1836 the Lyles men started being ill-used by white ruffians—with no discouragement from Robertson County’s justice of the peace.6

  The attacks had happened before, but this was worse. Daniel and his brothers had been hauled up on charges of disturbing the peace. The charges were dismissed, but they all knew it could happen again.

  Nancy and the other women, generations of them, must have talked together quietly in the evening, trying not to wake or worry the children.

  The older women must have talked of that first leaving from Virginia. They knew the pain of departure, the difficulty of starting over, and now they faced that prospect again—of arriving on another frontier and making a new home in rough conditions. Nancy’s kin would have known her heart and all the reasons she delayed going to that county office to get the free papers she needed to travel. Daniel had gon
e in December, before Christmas, but Nancy had waited until January. Standing in front of that clerk as he measured her height to within a quarter inch, eyeing her as he wrote down the color of her skin, the shape of her body, must have been so hard.7

  And maybe she hoped they wouldn’t have to leave after all. Maybe things would die down as they had in 1823.

  They would have reminded each other of the troubles they had seen before. They had survived hard times. Life here had never been exactly easy, but they had still made a way.

  Daniel’s parents, John and Patsy, had been expecting things to be hard on the Tennessee frontier when they arrived around 1810, but they could not have known there would be war. The War of 1812 did not trouble Tennessee too much, although it must have made this pioneering family’s life uncertain, for their new nation did not seem guaranteed to survive the conflict.8

  In those troubled years Patsy must have surprised them all, including herself, by having Tabitha in 1812 and Sanford in 1813. When Sanford was born he became the fifth living son in the Lyles family, his older brothers ranging in age from twenty-one to thirteen. In 1816, when Tabitha was four and Sanford only three, that terrible freeze hit. Seeing the ice lying thick over their crops in June must have been terrifying. Who knew if things would ever get better.9

  Luckily, there were still the woods and the animals to hunt there. Daniel’s parents made sure their family had food, even though the oldest boys were growing so fast they must have been hungry all the time. But they did not starve. Instead they thrived, and more family and friends came to join them from Virginia.

  Then in 1823, the local justice of the peace threatened the Lyles family. He demanded that they prove their freedom. It was purely harassment: everyone knew they had arrived years before, free and with the money and resources to give them a good start. But evidently this success did not sit well with the justice of the peace.10

  He may have been new, may indeed have arrived in Tennessee after them, for he seemed unaware that the Lyles family had a powerful and loyal friend.

  Colonel Hopson was a white Revolutionary War veteran who had also come west from the Lyles family’s home county in Virginia. He stood with them before the justice of the peace and affirmed that the entire Lyles family was free and had been free for generations back in Virginia.11

  Roughly a dozen years had passed since then, but a great deal had changed.

  Back in 1823, the colonel was not the only white man in Tennessee interested in the old revolutionary ideals. At that time there were still those in that state who had grown up believing slavery a sin and that the nation should do everything possible to extinguish it. Indeed, Tennessee had once had a thriving homegrown abolitionist society that started publishing its own newspaper in 1819. In the late 1810s and early 1820s, over 4,500 white Tennessee residents petitioned their government to end slavery. They reminded their political leaders of the Declaration of Independence’s words and ideals and spoke openly of the cruelties inflicted on enslaved people in their state.12

  Now, in 1838, their ally Colonel Hopson was dead, as were most Revolutionary War veterans like him. Few abolitionist petitions were sent anymore. And slavery—far from dying—had grown monstrously large in many of the newest slave states. In Tennessee alone, the number of people enslaved had grown from roughly 80,000 in 1820 to over 141,000 in 1830.13

  The Lyles family and their neighbors would have seen people chained in coffles coming from the east, bound together and made to march until the metal bands around their ankles bit deep. These were death marches, for only the strong made a good product and got a good price for the “drivers.” If a child or grandmother died, there was one less mouth to feed on the long trail to Tennessee.14

  If they survived the march, they were forced to clear land, dig up roots, build mansions, and make wealthy the people who felt entitled to call themselves pioneers and the founders of the state of Tennessee.

  How could Nancy explain it all to her children? True, she had been raised in the slave state of Virginia. But now whites in Virginia were breaking up families and selling people about as fast as they could to the traders who were marching those people into Tennessee and the other slave state frontiers.

  For Nancy and the other free people around her, freedom meant family. They had come out of Virginia together, and now three generations of parents, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, and cousins were living together in Tennessee.

  But their children were seeing terrors—other children in chains, brutalized and bleeding. And alone. Did her own children ever ask Nancy if they would be taken away from her? How could she reassure them when their father and uncles were taken by a white lawman whose job was to enforce slavery in that county?

  Yes, this miserable monster of slavery was growing very large, perhaps too big to kill.

  But the Reverend Nat Turner had tried. Enslaved people had waged battles against bondage before, but there was a sense that Nat Turner’s revolution was different. Turner was a preacher, a man of God, and enslaved. And he lived near Richmond, Virginia, close to where Daniel Lyles’s grandfather had grown up free. In August 1831, he had mounted one of the deadliest slave revolts in the United States. It was quickly put down. When Nat was found a couple of months later, he was put on trial, hanged, flayed, and his body torn apart.15

  In the weeks before Turner was found, whites were hungry for vengeance, hungry for blood, and it seemed that no one with a dark complexion in Virginia was safe from retaliation. Soon there were rumors of revolts rising in almost every slave state. The whites in Tennessee were far from immune to such rumors, which grew all through the winter and early spring of 1832. It could not have been an easy time for Nancy Lyles and her family.16

  The news had spread all the way up to Boston, where the white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison wrote a piece favorably comparing Nat Turner and the rumored rebel leaders in Tennessee to the struggle for independence occurring across the Atlantic in Poland.17

  Garrison may have been hated by every enslaver in the United States, but the enslavers may have been thinking very similar thoughts to Garrison. They knew all about revolutions, having kept a close eye on the successful slave rebellion in the Caribbean island of Saint-Domingue that had been controlled by the French and was now a free nation known as Haiti. Indeed, enslavers would have made it their business to know of every revolution, by blacks or whites at that time, anywhere in the western world.18

  They knew that no one could take away people’s freedom without some kind of revolt, whether it was a large armed militia marching toward New Orleans or poison in the Sunday soup. And the only way to be really safe from the threat of slave revolution was to get rid of slavery. So both Virginia and Tennessee considered doing just that.19

  Had the Lyles family heard rumors in 1831 that the Virginia General Assembly was shaken enough to consider abolishing slavery? When the rumors turned out to be true, they must have been encouraged by the sentiments coming out of Virginia, with even Governor John Floyd admitting that he would do everything in his power to “have a law passed gradually abolishing slavery in this state.”20

  In an odd twist, while white lawmakers in Virginia and Tennessee seriously contemplated ending slavery in their states, many white lawmakers in the North excused their creation of prejudiced laws against free African Americans as mere friendly support for slaveholding southern whites who could never be expected to abolish slavery.21

  Virginia brought a bill abolishing slavery to a vote, where it was hotly debated but ultimately rejected. Instead, the opposing side won, forcing through laws that not only strengthened the system of slavery but also resulted in terrible losses for free African Americans in the state. They lost their right to assemble, to worship with an African American preacher, and to teach their children to read and write. Whites in Virginia and throughout the South had made their decision—the Bill of Rights was less important than prejudice and bondage.22

  Soon afterward, it
was Tennessee’s turn, where whites were working on a new state constitution. Constitutional delegates and lawmakers seriously debated ending slavery, but in almost all cases their abolitionism was tied to massive prejudice, with most desiring to rid Tennessee of all people of African descent, enslaved or free. These were almost all colonizationists, as were most of the politicians in Virginia.23

  But those who supported enslaving people quickly killed the notion of ending bondage, even if it could result in the deportation of every African American in Tennessee.

  One of the men working on the new constitution was William Blount, who was a supporter of growing slavery and reversing rights for free African Americans in Tennessee. Blount was a man the Lyles family would have known. Daniel’s brother Joshua was now married and living in Montgomery County, the same county as Blount, who would certainly have noticed the six-foot-two Joshua on his fine farm surrounded by all those other free African American farmers.24

  So now the slavery debate was settled in Tennessee. Slavery would continue; it would be protected, and it would be grown. Now the white constitutional convention attendees turned their attention to the free African American population, which was, as convention delegate Edward B. Littlefield put it, “a curse to society” and “a degraded, debased race.” Another convention delegate, Leonard H. Sims, said Nat Turner’s rebellion had been the result of allowing “the free black and the slave to associate together.” He concluded that if laws were loosened to make it easier for more people to be freed, “the country would soon be filled with a race of free negroes… who will be a pest and a degradation on society.”25

  And before long the Lyles family and all free people with Africa in their blood had lost almost everything except their freedom. It was not exactly Nat Turner’s fault. Whites had been chipping away at equality ever since the Revolution.