The Bone and Sinew of the Land

by Anna-Lisa Cox

  So African American pioneering farmers worked with what they had: good land, good skills, and, if necessary, the ability to move to a new place. In the current political environment, the frontiers of the Northwest Territory and states must have still seemed their best hope. Many were moving to its edges, mainly Michigan and Wisconsin. Soon the African American population of those two states was growing, and fast. It doubled in Wisconsin from 630 to almost 1,200 between 1850 and 1860; in Michigan in that same decade it grew from around 2,500 to 6,700. Despite these relatively small numbers, the impact of this successful settlement movement must have been immense, for many of these African American pioneers brought enough wealth and resources to become very successful farmers by 1860 (see map).31

  One of the most popular areas was in southern Michigan in a county called Cass. There were many reasons why successful landowning African Americans would choose this county. They went far beyond the mere fact that it was farther north and thus further removed from the threats that slave raiders from the southern states could pose. African Americans coming into Cass County in the 1850s would have been well aware that it was already home to successful free African Americans who had founded one of Michigan’s first African American Baptist churches in 1838. It was also home to many abolitionist-minded whites, Quakers included, who had been running a successful branch of the Underground Railroad with local African Americans.32

  There was also still ample good land and a strong network of African American farmers already in place. And there were schools.

  Cass County had good integrated public schools, despite state laws forbidding integrated education in publicly funded schools. For years African Americans in the county had petitioned the state for the right to vote in school district meetings, as well as to run for and hold office in the local school district councils. Finally, in 1855, whites in governance in Michigan decided that African Americans should at least have the right to vote in their local school board elections. This fairly minor victory was definitely not a return to the full voting rights of the Northwest Ordinance, but on a national level it had profound importance, for Michigan was one of the rare states in the 1850s moving toward African American equality and citizenship.33

  The African American population of Cass County practically exploded in the 1850s. By 1860 over six hundred African Americans lived there, making it one of the largest rural African American settlements in the Northwest Territory states. While Michigan was drawing most of this third wave of African American pioneers, Wisconsin also offered some hope. True, it was still a frontier state in the 1850s, but the whites in government there still had not created Black Code bond laws to limit African American immigration. Of course, whites in power had allowed themselves to be ruled by prejudice, changing the Northwest Territory voting guidelines and restricting voting rights to whites only when it became a state in 1848. But just five years later, in 1853, the Wisconsin Supreme Court heard a case involving Joshua Glover, who had freed himself by fleeing to Wisconsin. Aided by those working to overturn the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, the Court had ruled that law unconstitutional.34

  However, many of the African Americans settling in that state were not refugees from enslavement but long-free people seeking a new home where they could prosper without so much prejudice. Many came up the Mississippi River from Illinois, moving into the wilds of western Wisconsin, where some were the first settlers to purchase federal land in their chosen townships. And more than African American businesses and farms were rising in the backwoods of Wisconsin. Something else was blossoming in the wilderness: love.35

  Among the small group of African American landowning farmers in frontier Wisconsin in 1860, four who allowed themselves to be counted in the census were in mixed marriages. Cyrus and Mary Livingston lived in Peshtigo Township, Oconto County. Cyrus was an American of African descent, born in Virginia in 1815, and Mary was a German immigrant. Together they were farming their land with Mary’s brother, John Schidt, who lived with them.36

  Some of these families were astonishing in their blending. In some cases one or both spouses had been widowed and brought children from their previous marriages with them. Mather and Emeline Robinson were farming their land in Plymouth Township, Rock County. Like Cyrus Livingston, Mather Robinson was an African American born in Virginia, while Emeline was white and from Vermont. Together they were raising their eight-year-old daughter, Mary, who was attending the local school, as well as Emeline’s son, William Anderson, from her first marriage.37

  Free people in the North had long intermarried. But as the tide of prejudice grew, it caught love in its current and tried to drown it. A white man raping an African-descended woman was one thing, as Colonel Robert Lytle had made clear back in 1830s Cincinnati. But love between two free people that resulted in marriage was becoming increasingly hated—even among self-professed abolitionists.38

  And tarring and feathering was increasingly used as a weapon utilized in a war trying to enforce hate—a war to destroy any relationship that represented equality—whether it be a white woman teaching African American children or a couple marrying.

  A young man and woman in Indianapolis discovered this fact in 1840 when they wed in that city. Both looked to be of European descent, but the young man happened to be of African descent as well. When his ancestry came to light, a mob dragged the young couple from their home; the white wife stripped, tarred, feathered, and ridden out of Indianapolis on a rail.39

  Pioneer life may have been very difficult indeed, but by the 1850s nothing was as dangerous to these mixed families as other white people.

  Nothing about this violence was fated; nothing natural forced whites to rise up in destructive hatred. And some whites in Ohio were proving this fact, despite all the forces rising against equality across the nation.

  It began in 1849. The newly elected Free Soil Party in Ohio managed to get some of the prejudiced laws in Ohio overturned or softened, including the anti-immigration laws. It was a small victory—African Americans still could not vote and had to pay taxes for public works they couldn’t use—but it was something. In a gathering in Columbus at the Second Baptist Church, African Americans made clear that “the repeal is not an act of grace, but of justice, and right, and evinces a return to the principles of ’76, and to the Bill of Rights of this State.” Even if many whites in the Northwest Territory states had forgotten the principles of the early republic, African Americans would remind them and would defend and fight for those rights.40

  Still, no one had expected John Langston to win them in 1855. Langston had barely survived the Cincinnati riot of 1841, running through that wrecked city to save his brothers. And now, fourteen years later, he was grown and living on his own fine farm in northern Ohio.

  He had also become a lawyer. That had not been easy, even after he graduated from Oberlin College with top honors. But his wife would have encouraged him. Langston was lucky to have won Caroline Mathilda Wall’s affections. She was an opinionated, strong, and brilliant graduate of Oberlin College. They were quite a couple, committed to the struggle for equality and known to many of the most renowned leaders of that movement across the nation, from Frederick Douglass to William Lloyd Garrison.41

  Their farm in Brownhelm Township was their home, their base, but with Langston working as a lawyer and both of them busy with their organizing, they had hired the Slaters—a white couple recently immigrated from England. The Slaters managed the daily running of the Langstons’ farming estate of a few hundred acres, as well as the cooking and cleaning around the house.42

  And recently the Langstons had been very busy indeed, working together on John’s election. John Langston may not have been allowed to vote in Ohio, but he intended to hold office. John Langston was used to being the first. He was the first African American lawyer in Ohio, and now he intended to be an elected official. He had been speaking all over the township, debating with his white opponent as the white electorate watched. And if elected, he would be pl
aced in a position of power over all the whites in that township.

  But more was at stake than just a local township election. Indeed, his race for this position was being closely watched not just in his state but across the nation. For if Langston won he would be the first man of African descent to win an election in the United States—the first, the only, the noticed.43

  John Langston had managed to survive those bloody days during the Cincinnati race riots, but the memories surely lingered: the screams, the gunfire, the white faces with their eyes glittering in the light of black homes burning. He and Caroline knew all too well the violence and destruction being endured by northern African Americans considered just a bit too successful. Both knew that having a white couple run their fine farm, while John campaigned for an election, would be enough for most whites to coat his body with tar or fill it with bullets.

  But on that April day in 1855, John Langston stood in the midst of a crowd of whites closely packed into a hall as the election results were read aloud. He must have looked around at their faces as they all waited there. Did he think of those other white faces fourteen years ago, filled with fury and hate? Now here he was again, surrounded by white men, but this was a different day.

  Returning from the election, Langston went to his study to write a letter to his friend Frederick Douglass.

  From his seat he would have been able to see out the window to the world blossoming into spring. What a strange place he lived in—a place where politicians spoke of killing all people of African descent and wealthy whites entreated those same politicians to remember that all were equally kin in Christ. A place where whites went to war against successful people with dark skin but whites also voted for black men to lead them. As he penned his letter to Douglass, he filled it with all the irony, humor, and triumph of the day: “They put up a colored man and he was elected clerk of Brownhelm, by a handsome majority indeed. Since I am the only colored man who lives in this township, you can easily guess the name of the man who was so fortunate as to secure this election.”44

  But Vanderburgh County, Indiana, was no Lorain County, Ohio.

  Did the Lyles family ever wonder why?

  There was no reason why their success should be so hated. There was no reason for the violence now rising against them. The whites around them could just have easily decided to welcome them as neighbors, as equals. No one was hurt that day in Brownhelm, Ohio, when John Langston was elected. Instead, the whites of that township now had a well-qualified lawyer as their township clerk.

  As African Americans had asked their white neighbors in Ohio a few years earlier, “What injury could possibly result to you from colored people in your State becoming educated, honest and intelligent, high-minded, useful and wealthy citizens, or rather let it be asked what incalculable advantage might not emanate from such a happy result, to all our fellow citizens?”45

  But in Vanderburgh County, Indiana, white men were taking up arms and risking their lives to destroy any possibility of the advantage that the white citizens of Lorain County, Ohio, were now peacefully enjoying to their benefit.

  Of course, while the whites around the Lyles family were open about their envy and hatred of the African Americans who were outstripping them, some prejudiced white Americans were not. Instead, they spoke of innate African American failure and weakness. These were not new ideas; they were very old, passed down by those who believed in a social order in which a few people ruled over many. Those were the old ideas that so many had fought and worked against during and just after the Revolutionary War. Yet they were regaining popularity with northern whites in the United States in the 1850s.

  Some African Americans were trying bravely to use their success to disprove these arguments. Allan Jones from Ohio was one of them. He volunteered to be one of the first speakers at a “Colored National Convention” held in Ohio and attended by supporters from all over the United States. Jones stood up on stage, telling the hundreds of people gathered in the hall that during his time in bondage he had earned about $10,000 for the man who enslaved him, while also working to earn $360 to purchase his freedom. Concluding, “And yet some people would say ‘he was not able to take care of himself.’” But the Lyles family and the thousands of other long-free successful settlers of the Northwest Territory states must have wanted to tell Allan Jones that they had long proven that they could succeed when free. Indeed, it was their very success that so often led to attacks against them.46

  By the 1850s free African Americans were trying to defend themselves on two fronts, for being too successful and for supposedly being doomed to failure. Ultimately, they were not supposed to exist as equals in America, and nothing they did would overcome that belief among many white Americans in the South or the North.

  The newspapers were full of news of bleeding Kansas, that state being torn apart as people—many of them white—battled each other over the growth of slavery. But the Lyles family knew that the war over liberty and equality was also being waged in the Northwest Territory states, even though it was not getting much coverage in Washington, DC, or the rest of the nation. It was a war that had killed Elijah Lovejoy, had killed Joseph Spencer, had killed Seth Concklin, had killed and injured so many people fighting for liberty and equality in the Northwest. This was a war that had been dividing and destroying for years.

  Even as the Lyles family recovered from the attack against them, another was being planned. Flyers were again being printed to tell white men when and where to organize in order to march on Daniel and Nancy’s home. And those flyers were being printed in the sheriff’s office.47

  And then Sheriff Gavitt came calling. He knew of all the African Americans in the area, even up in Gibson County. He also knew of the Stormonts, those white abolitionists who had tried to help Seth Concklin assist the Still family in their escape. After all, Gavitt had participated in their capture. But he hadn’t been able to touch the Stormonts, and he could not weaken the bond between them and the African Americans around them. He would have also heard that Peter Still had raised a small fortune to free his wife, Vina, and their children in 1854, and that they had now published a book in which he was mentioned more than once in some rather unflattering ways. All these facts must have rankled.48

  But he could hurt Daniel and Nancy Lyles. And he knew that would hurt their kin up in Gibson County. And he did hurt them.

  While the Evansville newspapers reported Gavitt’s actions as kindly intended, his offer to “protect” the Lyles family by housing them in the Evansville jail was actually a threat. At worst, he aimed to bring the Lyles men into a place of bondage where they could be more easily lynched—after all, the Evansville newspapers had been calling for the men to be jailed and lynched for days. Even the newspapers, however, could not mask the threat in the sheriff’s actions. He made clear to the Lyles family that they would not be safe, would not be protected, if they stayed in Vanderburgh County. The only other option he offered them—as men printed up those pamphlets calling for war in the sheriff’s office—was to leave. They would have to leave their home, their farm, their church, their community. And they would have no choice about where they could go, for Gavitt and his men would march them all the way to Gibson County.49

  When was the Lyles family told that the men who had attacked them—Alexander Maddox and five others—were now suing them in court for attempted murder? By all rights they should have been able to have those men arrested for trespassing and assault, for the wounding of women and children. Instead they would have to pay a lawyer to defend themselves, and they would have to go back into the Evansville courthouse. This promised peril.50

  The local newspaper reported on July 29 that whites had lined the roads to watch the Lyles family and other African Americans being forced to leave for Gibson County. It added with evident triumph that whites would finally get their hands on Lyles land, for “arrangements will be made to purchase their property… and all occasion for future disturbances will be removed.”51
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br />   In the end, so much of this was about their good land, about their nice home.

  But Daniel and Nancy would not sell. They may have been forced to leave, but they would keep their land.

  Their lawyer was not their only white ally in Evansville, and they were able to rent out their property even as they lived up in Gibson County. That land helped pay for their defense, the trial dragging through a grand jury, their lawyer asking for a change of venue and being denied. This was a double injustice, for they now knew they could not expect a fair trial, and every trip back into Evansville to attend court endangered their lives. But they survived, making the trek from Patoka Township in Gibson County down to Evansville, their kin all hoping that they would make it back.52

  In April the court decided. It found all the Lyles men innocent of trying to kill anyone but convicted them of various levels of assault and battery, with fines and jail sentences lasting from one day to sixty. At this obvious miscarriage of justice, they asked their lawyer to request a retrial. The request was denied. They had defended their lives and kept their land, but the injustice must have been hard to take.53

  Many Evansville whites may have wanted them gone, but Indiana was their home state, even if most whites wanted to claim it for themselves only. Their land in Vanderburgh County had sheltered and supported them when they came from Tennessee, and it was now their home place. Daniel and Nancy must have promised each other that they would return to it someday.

  They were not the only ones refusing to leave a Northwest Territory state. Despite many African Americans leaving Illinois after the passage of the dreadful law in 1853, despite the rising tide of violence, African Americans were still staying and organizing in Illinois.

  In 1856 they gathered in Alton, Illinois, the very town where twenty years earlier Elijah Lovejoy had been killed. On November 14 they met and read aloud a declaration of sentiment and a plan of action. It was beautifully constructed, connecting the words of the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution with their own additions calling on the nation’s revolutionary roots. Its first resolution read, “That all men are born free and equal, possessing certain inalienable rights, that can neither be conferred or taken away; they were man’s from the beginning, before he could comprehend them, eternal, indestructible.”54