The Bone and Sinew of the Land

by Anna-Lisa Cox

  26. Paul Finkelman, “Evading the Ordinance: The Persistence of Bondage in Indiana and Illinois,” Journal of the Early Republic 9, no. 1 (spring 1989): 33–34.

  27. Indenture Deed Book, 1806, McGrady-Brockman House Archive, Knox County Public Library, Vincennes, Indiana. My grateful thanks to Ann Hecht at the McGrady-Brockman House Archive for her invaluable research assistance.

  28. Ibid.

  29. For a comparison of indenture bonds for white indentured servants in the Indiana Territory at this time, see Deed Book 1, Harrison County, Harrison County Courthouse, Corydon, Indiana.

  30. Indenture Deed Book, 1806, Knox County Public Library, Indiana.

  31. “[They were] mustered into the service of the United States by Gen. Harrison who formed a colored company to aid in defending the frontier.” Birkbeck and Flower, History of the English Settlement, 266.

  32. Liberty Hall newspaper, Cincinnati, Ohio, October 29, 1830, from Audrey C. Werle Papers, “Research Notes on Indiana African American History,” M 792, William Henry Smith Memorial Library, Indiana Historical Society, Indianapolis, Indiana. The overseer of the poor was often the official responsible for enforcing Black Laws. If free African Americans entered the state and could not pay their $500 bond, they could be forced by the overseer of the poor to do six months of forced labor as a punishment.

  33. History of Knox and Daviess Counties, Indiana: From the Earliest Time to the Present; with Biographical Sketches, Reminiscences, Notes, etc.; Together with an Extended History of the Colonial Days of Vincennes, and Its Progress Down to the Formation of the State Government (Chicago: Goodspeed, 1886), 600–601.

  34. Courtney Bettner, Polly v. Lasselle: Slavery in Early Indiana (Muncie, IN: Ball State University, 2012).

  35. Thornbrough, The Negro in Indiana, 25–26; Paul Finkelman, “Almost a Free State: The Indiana Constitution of 1816 and the Problem of Slavery,” Indiana Magazine of History 111, no. 1 (March 2015): 64–95; Bettner, Polly v. Lasselle; Malcolm Maurice Hodges, “A Social History of Vincennes and Knox County, Indiana from the Beginning to 1860” (Muncie, IN: Ball State University, 1968); Jacob Piatt Dunn, Indiana: A Redemption from Slavery (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1905).

  36. Thornbrough, The Negro in Indiana, 121; Stephen Middleton, The Black Laws in the Old Northwest: A Documentary History (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993); Randall T. Shepard, Slavery Cases in the Indiana Supreme Court: Where Slaves and Former Slaves Found Hope (Indianapolis: Indiana Supreme Court, 2007).

  37. M. Scott Heerman, “In a State of Slavery: Black Servitude in Illinois, 1800–1830,” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 14, no. 1 (winter 2016): 137.

  38. Ibid.

  39. Unfortunately, those same voters who included this as section 1 in their constitution thought this statement should extend not to equality, only to freedom: The State v. Lasselle, (Supreme Court of Indiana 1820). Lasselle, it seems, tried to appeal this decision to the Federal Supreme Court but was rejected. See Polly v. Lasselle, Assignment of Errors, US (July 27, 1820), Indiana State Library Digital Collection, accessed July 7, 2017, http://cdm16066.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p16066coll38/id/26.

  40. For more on enslaved women bringing suits for freedom during this period, see Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016).

  41. History of Knox and Daviess Counties, 660–601; L. Rex Myers, Daviess County, Indiana: History (Paducah, KY: Turner Publication Co., 1991), 37. My thanks to Ken Graves at the Daviess County Historical Society for his generous research assistance. There are haunting similarities between the widowed Mrs. Hawkins and Dred Scott’s case many years later, in which a widowed enslaver insisted upon her right to keep people enslaved in the Northwest Territory states.

  42. History of Knox and Daviess Counties, Indiana, 769.

  43. Ibid., 600–601; Myers, Daviess County, Indiana, 37.

  44. Myers, Daviess County, Indiana, 37.

  45. History of Knox and Daviess Counties, Indiana, 769–771.

  46. The Vincennes Gazette, October 9, 1830, vol. 1, no. 2, from McGrady-Brockman House Archive, Knox County Public Library, Vincennes, Indiana.

  47. Benjamin Drew, A North-Side View of Slavery. The Refugee: or, The Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada. Related by Themselves, with an Account of the History and Condition of the Colored Population of Upper Canada (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1968), 139–163.

  48. Ibid.

  49. Ibid., 148; “Deeply Interesting Facts,” Philanthropist (1836–1843), December 24, 1839, accessed October 2, 2017.

  50. For more on the important role of African American Underground Railroad agents in Indiana and the Northwest Territory states, see Cheryl LaRoche’s excellent Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad: The Geography of Resistance.

  51. Thornbrough, The Negro in Indiana, 19.

  52. Abdy, Journal of a Residence and Tour in the United States of North America, 360–370.

  53. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (New York: Vintage Books, 2001).

  Chapter 4: “And secure the blessings of Liberty”

  1. George W. Smith, “The Salines of Southern Illinois,” in Transactions of the Illinois State Historical Society for the Year 1904, ed. Illinois State Historical Society (Springfield, IL: Phillips Bros., State Printers, 1904), 245–258.

  2. Jacob Myers, “History of the Gallatin County Salines,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society (1908–1984) 14, no. 3/4 (1921): 337–350.

  3. Robert Martin Owens, “William Henry Harrison’s Indiana: Paternalism and Patriotism on the Frontier, 1795–1812” (PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, 2003), 245–255; Myers, “History of the Gallatin County Salines,” 342–343.

  4. Smith, “Salines,” 246.

  5. M. Scott Heerman, “In a State of Slavery: Black Servitude in Illinois, 1800–1830,” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 14, no. 1 (2016): 130; Anne Silverwood Twitty, “Slavery and Freedom in the American Confluence, from the Northwest Ordinance to Dred Scott” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2010), 28–29.

  6. Charles Noye Zucker, “The Free Negro Question: Race Relations in AnteBellum Illinois, 1801–1860” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 1973), 57–61; Yvonne Blackmore, “African-Americans and Race Relations in Gallatin County, Illinois, from the Eighteenth Century to 1870” (PhD diss., Northern Illinois University, 1996), 16–19; Twitty, “Slavery and Freedom in the American Confluence,” 26–27; Heerman, “In a State of Slavery,” 121–122.

  7. Heerman, “In a State of Slavery,” 129–130; Blackmore, “African-Americans and Race Relations in Gallatin County,” 116–117.

  8. Smith, “Salines,” 255; Mary Prince and Sara Salih, The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 7.

  9. Smith, “Salines,” 256.

  10. Ibid., 251; US Department of the Interior, Census Office, Population Schedules of the Seventh Census of the United States, 1850, Gallatin County, Illinois.

  11. H. Obert Anderson, comp., Register of Slaves (Indentures) and Emancipation of Slaves from the Gallatin County Clerk’s Office, Shawneetown, Illinois, 125–126, from the Shawneetown Public Library History Collection, Shawneetown, Illinois. See also “New African-American Genealogy Data at ISGS Website,” Illinois State Genealogical Society Blog, July 4, 2011, accessed June 12, 2017, https://ilgensoc.blogspot.com/2011/07/new-african-american-genealogy-data-at.html (the deed was recorded in 1829, but the actual transaction occurred on August 4, 1821); Smith, “Salines,” 251; Samuel Bernard Judah, “A Journal of Travel from New York to Indiana in 1827,” Indiana Magazine of History 17, no. 4 (1921): 347; Samuel H. Williamson, “Measuring Slavery in 2016 Dollars,” MeasuringWorth.com, www.measuringworth.com /slavery.php; Scott Derks and Tony Smith, The Value of a Dollar, 1600–1865: The Colonial Era to the Civil War (Millerton, NY: Grey
House Publishing, 2005), 363.

  12. James Penick, The New Madrid Earthquakes of 1811–1812 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1976).

  13. Ibid.

  14. Benjamin Drew, A North-Side View of Slavery. The Refugee: or, The Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada. Related by Themselves, with an Account of the History and Condition of the Colored Population of Upper Canada (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1968), 49.

  15. Paul Finkelman, “Evading the Ordinance: The Persistence of Bondage in Indiana and Illinois,” Journal of the Early Republic 9, no. 1 (spring 1989): 33–34; Matthew Salafia, Slavery’s Borderland: Freedom and Bondage Along the Ohio River (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 67–68. For more on the conflict between pro- and antislavery forces in early Illinois, see Suzanne Cooper Guasco, Confronting Slavery: Edward Coles and the Rise of Antislavery Politics in Nineteenth-Century America (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2013).

  16. Anderson, Register of Slaves (Indentures), 125–126.

  17. Drew, North-Side, 106–107.

  18. Ibid.

  19. Roy Finkenbine, “A Beacon of Liberty on the Great Lakes: Race, Slavery and the Law in Antebellum Michigan,” in The History of Michigan Law, ed. Paul Finkelman, Martin J. Hershock, and Clifford W. Taylor (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006), 84; James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community, and Protest Among Northern Free Blacks, 1700–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 102–103; Eugene Berwanger, The Frontier Against Slavery: Western Anti-Negro Prejudice and the Slavery Extension Controversy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 32; Coy Robbins, Forgotten Hoosiers: African Heritage in Orange County, Indiana (Bowie, MD: Heritage Books, 1994), 52–65.

  20. Anderson, Register of Slaves (Indentures) and Emancipation of Slaves, 169.

  21. Campbell Gibson and Kay Jung, “Historical Census Statistics on Population Totals by Race, 1790 to 1990, and by Hispanic Origin, 1970 to 1990, for Large Cities and Other Urban Places in the United States” (Working Paper Series No. 56, Population Division, US Census Bureau, September 2002), www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0076/twps0076.html; Stephen Middleton, The Black Laws in the Old Northwest: A Documentary History (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993), 291–294.

  22. Anderson, Register of Slaves (Indentures).

  23. Ibid., 125–126.

  24. Illinois State Archives, Servitude Database, www.ilsos.gov/isa /servEmanSearch.do?nameNo=1604.

  25. Robert Scott Davis, “Free but Not Freed: Stephen Deane’s African Family in Early Georgia,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 97, no. 1 (2013): 61–72. For more on African Americans who chose to own enslaved people who were not kin, see Loren Schweninger, Black Property Owners in the South, 1790–1915 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997).

  26. Alexandra Piper, “Ruthless, Lawless, and Defiant: The Unbelievable Life of Freed Slave Armistead Lawless in Nineteenth Century St. Louis,” Special Research Project, Hope College, Holland, Michigan, 2016. Unpublished paper, in author’s possession.

  27. Cheryl LaRoche, Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad: The Geography of Resistance (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 113–117; David Gerber, in Black Ohio and the Color Line, 1860–1915 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), 19, noted that as many as 20 percent of African Americans in two southern Ohio African American communities had bought their own freedom or been bought into freedom by kin or loved ones; Juliet E. K. Walker, Free Frank: A Black Pioneer on the Antebellum Frontier (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983), 1–7; Christopher Valvano, “‘Some Day on American Soil’: The Material Record of New Philadelphia and the Middle Class on the American Prairie” (PhD diss., Michigan State University, 2015), 36–50.

  28. Valvano, “‘Some Day,’” 36–50.

  29. Walker, Free Frank, 1–7.

  30. Anderson, Register of Slaves (Indentures).

  31. Ellen Eslinger, “Liberation in a Rural Context,” in Paths to Freedom: Manumission in the Atlantic World, ed. Rosemary Brana-Shute and Randy J. Sparks (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009), 363–381.

  32. For a comprehensive look at the various conflicts in the Great Lakes region of the Northwest Territory, see Larry L. Nelson and David Curtis Skaggs, Sixty Years’ War for the Great Lakes, 1754–1814 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2001).

  33. Anderson, Register of Slaves (Indentures), 61.

  34. Deed Book K, Gallatin County Courthouse, Shawneetown, Illinois, 66–67. Land Deed 1, July 6, 1829. Elliott bought numerous plots of land starting in 1829, which are recorded in this deed book on pp. 64–69. While the deeds were recorded in the late 1830s, they are clearly records of land deeds for land purchased by Elliott between 1829 and 1839. Other historians have merely stated the date the deeds were recorded rather than the actual sale date of the land. This confusion between actual deed dates and when those deeds were recorded by the county clerk also includes deeds of sale and freedom for Elliott and his family members, which has resulted in some unfortunate confusion in later historical works about Elliott.

  35. Smith, “Salines,” 255–256; US Department of the Interior, Census Office, Population Schedules of the Seventh Census of the United States, 1850, Gallatin County, Illinois. Later local historians have made claims that Elliott purchased the freedom of over a dozen family members, but his son and daughter stated that it was around four, and the known historic record shows much fewer. It is my hope that more research into records in Tennessee, Kentucky, and other states may find more people whom Elliott purchased and freed.

  Chapter 5: “To secure these rights,…”

  1. It is important to note that various branches of the Lyles family in Indiana have preserved different oral traditions about their background before coming to the region. And these oral traditions are important to the ways they identify themselves. In the last few decades, however, there has been growing interest in the Lyles family’s background, and a few scholars have discovered that some of the oral traditions preserved within the Gibson County branch were not entirely accurate. In most cases, scholars try to share information and work with others to build an accurate record of the past. Unfortunately, this information about the Lyles family was used in a way that was—at a minimum—disrespectful to that family. It ended up bringing into question their entire history and distracting attention from all the extraordinary accomplishments of these highly successful rural entrepreneurs in nineteenth-century Indiana. This is not the first time this has happened to families from some of the pioneering settlements that still exist in the Northwest Territory states. And since this incident, members of the Lyles family itself have done excellent research of their own, discovering important and noteworthy facts about their background. It is important for historians to remember that successful African American pioneering families in the Northwest Territory states were—and sometimes still are—surrounded by prejudice. Scholars need to understand the power that they themselves hold and should try to be respectful and careful when dealing with these pioneering families’ sense of self and identity. Surprising them in public with information intended to expose them as holding myths about their past, without at least first sharing information with them in a collegial, quiet, and respectful way, distracts from these pioneering families’ actual accomplishments on the frontier and can have a harmful effect. For more on the damage that such actions can do, see Arlene Blanks Polk, “The Truth About Joshua Lyles: A Free African American Settler of Lyles Station, Indiana,” Traces of Indiana & Midwestern History 25, no. 4 (October 2013): 32–37.

  2. Ibid., 32–37.

  3. Billy D. Higgins, A Stranger and a Sojourner: Peter Caulder, Free Black Frontiersman in Antebellum Arkansas (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2004), xi, xii–xiii.

  4. Gibson County Negro Registry, 1851, Princeton Public Library, Princeton, Indiana.

  5. William Imes, “The Legal Status of Free Negroes
and Slaves in Tennessee,” Journal of Negro History 4, no. 3 (July 1919): 254–272. For an excellent overview of the debates in Tennessee over slavery and the status of free African Americans during this period, see Lacy K. Ford, Deliver Us from Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

  6. Polk, “The Truth About Joshua Lyles,” 32–37.

  7. Deed Book W, Vanderburgh County Recorder’s Office, Evansville, Indiana, 235. My gratitude to Stanley Schmitt at the Willard Library in Evansville for his extraordinary research and assistance in locating these and other documents connected to the Lyles family in Vanderburgh County, Indiana.

  8. Polk, “The Truth About Joshua Lyles,” 32–37.

  9. Ibid.

  10. Ibid.

  11. Ibid.

  12. Ford, Deliver Us, 394.

  13. Caleb Perry Patterson, The Negro in Tennessee, 1790–1865 (Austin: University of Texas, 1922), 153–175.

  14. A man who had fled enslavement and was living in Canada in the 1850s recounted how the most helpless members of slave coffles were treated by drivers on these long marches: “killing babes—I have seen one with its brains dashed out against a red oak tree. Tired of carrying it… they put it out of the way.” Benjamin Drew, “Mr. ,” in Refugees from Slavery: Autobiographies of Fugitive Slaves in Canada, ed. Tilden G. Edelstein (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2004), 197–199.

  15. David F. Allmendinger, Nat Turner and the Rising in Southampton County (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014); Patrick Breen, The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

  16. Ford, Deliver Us, 343–356; John Hope Franklin, The Free Negro in North Carolina,1790–1860 (New York: Russell & Russell, 1969), 73–74; The Western Freeman, September 6, 1831, Shelbyville, Tennessee, quoted in Patterson, The Negro in Tennessee, 154.