The Bone and Sinew of the Land

by Anna-Lisa Cox

  26. Eugene Berwanger, The Frontier Against Slavery: Western Anti-Negro Prejudice and the Slavery Extension Controversy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 60–67. For more on African Americans in the territories and states west of the Rockies in the nineteenth century, see Quintard Taylor’s groundbreaking In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528–1990 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999).

  27. Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), 197.

  28. John Quincy Adams, quoted in Clayton Cramer, Black Demographic Data, 1790–1860: A Sourcebook (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997). 44.

  29. Cramer, Black Demographic Data, 44–45.

  30. Ibid.

  31. Cohen, At Freedom’s Edge, 1–30. For more on the importance of land-ownership to this free black diaspora, see Stephen A. Vincent, Southern Seed, Northern Soil: African-American Farm Communities in the Midwest, 1765–1900 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999); Cramer, Black Demographic Data, 113, 114. This free African American move to frontiers, or borderlands, of the nation in the 1850s in order to find a space for equality points to a rich vein within the academic field of borderland studies that could well produce interesting new findings.

  32. Marcia Sawyer, “Surviving Freedom: African American Farm Households in Cass County, Michigan, 1832–1880” (PhD diss., Michigan State University, 1990), 85–86, 89; Anna-Lisa Cox, A Stronger Kinship (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 2006), 47–48; Clarence Knuth, “Early Immigration and Current Residential Patterns of Negroes in Southwestern Michigan” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1969); “Chain Lake Missionary Baptist Church Records,” Michigan State University Archives, Lansing, Michigan, http://archives.msu.edu/findaid/190.html.

  33. Sawyer, “Surviving Freedom,” 85–86, 89; Weiner, Race and Rights, 208–209; Thomas M. Cooley, The Compiled Laws of the State of Michigan (Lansing, MI: Hosmer & Kerr, State Printers and Binders, 1857); 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 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006), 83–107. Note that the speech made just before this law was passed passionately opposed the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, attacking it as trampling Michigan’s state’s rights. This suggests that the law granting African Americans this limited voting right may well have been a response to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law.

  34. US Department of the Interior, Census Office, Population Schedules of the Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, Michigan, Cass County; George Hesslink and Joanne M. Hesslink, Black Neighbours: Negroes in a Northern Rural Community (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1974), 31, 37; H. Robert Baker, The Rescue of Joshua Glover: A Fugitive Slave, the Constitution, and the Coming of the Civil War (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007).

  35. The African American Stewart family were the first pioneers to buy federal land in Forest Township, Bad Ax County, Wisconsin, quickly followed by many other long-free families, such as the Bartons, Robertses, Allens, and Nolcoxes. US Department of the Interior, Census Office, Population Schedules of the Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, Wisconsin, Bad Ax, Forest, 136; Lynne Heasley, A Thousand Pieces of Paradise: Landscape and Property in the Kickapoo Valley (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 98; Zachary Cooper, Black Settlers in Rural Wisconsin (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1977), 5–6; History of Vernon County, Wisconsin (Springfield, IL: Union Pub. Co., 1884), 508, 510; US Department of the Interior, Census Office, Population Schedules of the Seventh Census of the United States, 1850, Illinois, St. Clair, Ridge Prairie, 478; Jordon Dodd, “Illinois Marriages, 1790–1860,” Ancestry Library Edition, accessed June 12, 2016, https://search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=2086. While Zachary Cooper claims that Wesley Barton became the first African American postmaster in the United States, the first African American postmaster was James Mason, who founded his post office in Sunnyside, Arkansas. See Deanna Boyd and Kendra Chen, “The History and Experience of African Americans in America’s Postal Service,” Smithsonian National Postal Museum, accessed November 9, 2015, https: //postalmuseum.si.edu/AfricanAmericanhistory/p16.html. And Post Office petition records at the National Archives show that it was not Wesley Barton who founded a post office in Wisconsin, but his son, in 1870.

  36. US Department of the Interior, Census Office, Population Schedules of the Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, Wisconsin, Oconto County, Peshtigo Township. William Welch (from New York) married to Sarah (from Canada) in Brothertown Township, Calumet County; Pascal Menard (M from Wisconsin) married to Mary (W from Wisconsin), Prairie du Chien Township, Crawford County; Mather Robinson (M from Virginia) married to Emeline (W from Virginia), Plymouth Township, Rock County.

  37. Ibid.

  38. John Matsui, “‘We See What Our Fathers Did Not’: Interracial Friendship in the Millenarian Atlantic World, 1816–1866” (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2013). Matsui details the terrible attacks on Professor William Allen and Maria King when they were married in Fulton, New York, in 1852 (349–358).

  39. Thornbrough, The Negro in Indiana, 125–126.

  40. Quoted in Stephen Middleton, The Black Laws in the Old Northwest: A Documentary History (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993), 154.

  41. Aimee Lee Cheek and William F. Cheek, John Mercer Langston and the Fight for Black Freedom, 1829–65 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 177–197, 249–255.

  42. Ibid., 244–245.

  43. Macon Bolling Allen was appointed to the position of justice of the peace in Boston in 1847, but John Langston was the first African American on record to have been freely elected to a political position in the United States. See John Clay Smith, Emancipation: The Making of the Black Lawyer, 1844–1944 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 94–96. By May 18, John Langston had been invited to speak at a special celebration of the anniversary of the American Anti-slavery Society in New York City. This meeting was attended by some of the most noted antislavery politicians of the time. The news of his election was broadly publicized both at this meeting and in the reports of it published in the Liberator (“Anniversary of the American Anti-slavery Society,” Liberator, May 18, 1855).

  44. Quoted in Cheek and Cheek, John Langston, 260.

  45. “Address of the State Convention,” Palladium of Liberty (Columbus, Ohio), November 13, 1844, front page, accessed August 3, 2017, http: //coloredconventions.org/files/original/945c2778ed57366af6d37c528e85f036.pdf.

  46. “Report of the Proceedings of the Colored National Convention Held at Cleveland, Ohio, on Wednesday, September 6, 1848,” Colored Conventions, accessed August 3, 2017, http://coloredconventions.org/items/show/280, 3.

  47. Daily Journal, July 28, 1857.

  48. Pickard and Furness, The Kidnapped and the Ransomed, 401–409.

  49. Mills, “‘They Defended Themselves Nobly,’” 2–8; Daily Enquirer, July 28, 29, 31, 1857, August 1, 2, 1857; Daily Journal, July 24, 27, 28, 29, 30, 1857, August 1, 1857.

  50. See notes 1 and 17 in this chapter.

  51. Daily Journal, July 29, 1857.

  52. Mills, “‘They Defended Themselves Nobly,’” 2–8.

  53. Vanderburgh Circuit Order Book K, Vanderburgh County Courthouse, Evansville, Indiana, 1858, 105–108.

  54. Philip Foner and George E. Walker, Proceedings of the Black State Conventions, 1840–1865 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979), 2:70–71.

  55. Ibid.

  56. Cox, A Stronger Kinship, 55–62, 70–71. The existence of African Americans across the Northwest Territory states was so well known before the Civil War that recruiters for Civil War African American regiments came from the East Coast to recruit soldiers. The Lyles men and other African Americans in Gibson County were recruited by the Fourteenth Rhode Island Heavy Artillery USCT (History of Gibson County, Indiana: With Illustrations Descriptive of Its Scenery, and
Biographical Sketches of Some of Its Prominent Men and Pioneers (Edwardsville, IL: Jas. T. Tartt & Co., 1884), 135.

  57. Jennifer Weber, Copperheads (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 24; V. Jacque Voegeli, Free but Not Equal: The Midwest and the Negro During the Civil War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 8–9.

  58. Voegeli, Free but Not Equal, 88, 170. See Jacque Voegeli for more on violence and prejudice against African Americans in the Northwest Territory states during the Civil War.

  59. Foner and Walker, Proceedings of the Black State Conventions, 1: 181–182.

  Conclusion: “All men are created equal”

  1. For a full history of African Americans in the Civil War, see Noah Trudeau, Like Men of War: Black Troops in the Civil War, 1862–1865 (Edison, NJ: Castle Books, 2002).

  2. Darrel Bigham, We Ask Only a Fair Trial: A History of the Black Community of Evansville, Indiana (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 15–16.

  3. Emma Lou Thornbrough, The Negro in Indiana Before 1900: A Study of a Minority (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1957), 231–287.

  4. “Communicated,” Princeton Clarion, May 30, 1872, front page.

  5. “U.S., Indexed County Land Ownership Maps, 1860–1918,” Ancestry.com, accessed 2013, https://search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=1127. Original data: Various publishers of county land ownership atlases, microfilmed by the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

  6. Cally L. Waite, Permission to Remain Among Us: Education for Blacks in Oberlin, Ohio, 1880–1914 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002).

  7. Greenville Democrat, October 1878, quoted in Stephen Miller, The Palestine Book: History of Liberty (German) Township Darke County, Ohio. Compiled for Palestine Sesqui-Centennial 1833–1983 (Defiance, OH: Hubbard Company, 1983), 253–255.

  8. “District Rally of Klan Well Attended,” Arcanum Times, June 19, 1924, front page. Greenville Public Library Genealogical Collection, Greenville, Ohio. My deepest thanks to Roane Smothers and Connor Keiser for their assistance and courageous research into the history of race relations in this region.

  9. Dana M. Caldemeyer, “Conditional Conservatism: Evansville, Indiana’s Embrace of the Ku Klux Klan, 1919–1924,” Ohio Valley History 11, no. 4 (2011): 3–24.

  10. Historians of the Ku Klux Klan in the twentieth-century Midwest have long assumed that there were very few African Americans in the rural Midwest during the rise of the Klan in the 1910s and 1920s. This is not the case. But due to this assumption, historians have tried to come up with various reasons why the Klan arose in Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin—and have argued that prejudice against African Americans was not a central focus of the Klan in these states. My cursory research into Klan violence against rural African American farming communities during this period has revealed that these communities were truly embattled and had to fight for their survival against attacks by the Klan. Further research is sorely needed in local records and with African Americans in the region to fully gauge the impact of the Klan on African Americans in the rural Midwest during this rise. But until this has been accomplished, the assumption should be that in these states, the Klan was racist toward people of African descent and reflected a continuation and growth of the type of prejudiced violence that had long wracked that region. See Kathleen Blee, “Book Review of Citizen Klansmen: The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, 1921–1928 by Leonard J. Moore and The Dragon and the Cross: The Rise and Fall of the Ku Klux Klan in Middle America by Richard K. Tucker,” Journal of American History 79, no. 3 (1992): 1219–1221, doi:10.2307/2080914; Craig Fox, Everyday Klansfolk: White Protestant Life and the KKK in 1920s Michigan (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2011); “Early Black Settlements, Grand County,” Indiana Historical Society, accessed April 11, 2016, www.indianahistory.org/our-collections /reference/early-black-settlements/grant-county#.WQp2GxiZPos.

  11. Elliott Jaspin, Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America (New York: Basic Books, 2007).

  12. In the 1920s children of African American farming families in Gibson County were horribly harmed by a radiation experiment illegally conducted on them in the local hospital. There has been a documentary made on the subject: Hole in the Head: A Life Revealed (www.holeinthehead.com). For the other injustices mentioned, see Valerie Grim, “Between Forty Acres and a Class Action Lawsuit: Black Farmers, Civil Rights, and Protests Against the US Department of Agriculture, 1997–2010,” in Beyond Forty Acres and a Mule: African American Landowning Families Since Reconstruction, ed. Evan P. Bennett and Debra Ann Reid (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012); Jasmine Melvin, “Black Farmers Win 2.5 Billion in Discrimination Suit,” Reuters, February 18, 2010, www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-farmers-pigford/black-farmers-win-1-25-billion-in-discrimination-suit-idUSTRE61H5XD20100218; Greg Burns, “Farms Run by African-Americans in Illinois Are ‘Mighty Few,’” Chicago Tribune, June 12, 2005, http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2005-06-12 /business/0506120151_1_national-black-farmers-association-african-american-calvin-beale. African American farmers in and around the Griers’ home county of Gibson, Indiana, were able to win some recompense for the Department of Agriculture’s racist loan policies, but many had already lost their farms and could not buy them back.

  13. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Negro Farmers,” in Department of Commerce and Labor Bureau of the Census Special Reports: Supplementary Analysis and Derivative Tables (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1906), 512–513. For an important discussion on the long-term effects of landownership on African Americans, see Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Forty Acres and a Gap in Wealth,” New York Times, November 18, 2007, www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/opinion /18gates.html.

  14. Booker T. Washington, “Two Generations Under Freedom,” Outlook (1893–1924) 73, no. 6 (February 7, 1903): 292. Washington asserted that the African Americans in Cass County had all arrived as enslaved people fleeing bondage, but the historical record and later research shows that most of the earliest settlers and landowning famers in Cass County had been free before coming to Michigan. See Marcia Renee Sawyer, “Surviving Freedom: African American Farm Households in Cass County, Michigan, 1832–1880” (PhD diss., Michigan State University, 1990); Anna-Lisa Cox, A Stronger Kinship: One Town’s Extraordinary Story of Hope and Faith (Boston: Little, Brown, 2006).

  15. “Address of the State Convention,” Palladium of Liberty (Columbus, Ohio), November 13, 1844, front page, accessed July 4, 2017, http://colored conventions.org/files/original/945c2778ed57366af6d37c528e85f036.pdf.

  16. John Wooden and Steve Jamison, My Personal Best: Life Lessons from an All-American Journey (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004), 1–9; Zac Keefer, “Indiana Basketball Player Broke Racial Barrier,” IndyStar, March 15, 2017, updated March 16, 2017, accessed August 20, 2017, www.indystar.com/story /sports/college/2017/03/15/private-pain-clarence-walker/99144560.

  17. Annelise Morris, “Jumping the Legal Color Line: Negotiating Racial Geographies in the 19th Century” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society of Historical Archaeology, Seattle, Washington, January 6–11, 2015), accessed April 2, 2016, www.academia.edu/11559423/Jumping_the_Legal _Color_Line_Negotiating_Racial_Geographies_in_the_19th_Century; L. Rex Myers, Daviess County, Indiana: History (Paducah, KY: Turner Pub. Co., 1988). The Beulah AME Church that Jacob Hawkins founded in Washington, Indiana, is still an active church despite the fact that its building has been burned down at least twice, a fate that occurred to many AME churches across the rural Northwest Territory states, including the AME church founded by Charles Grier in Gibson County. See “Beulah AME Church,” Facebook, www.facebook.com/Belah805Washington. My deepest gratitude to Brenda Jett and Roane Smothers for showing me around the Clemens home, as well as for their work with Dr. Jayne Beilke, Connor Keiser, and the many others who are researching and preserving the African American pioneer history of Darke County, Ohio. See Aileen LeBlanc, “Historic Ohio Town Fights ‘Mega Dairy,’” NPR News and Notes, February 13, 2006, accesse
d July 28, 2016, www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5203581; Kevin Williams, “An Ohio Town Where Races Mixed Freely,” Washington Post, September 26, 2015, accessed August 21, 2017, www.washingtonpost.com/national/an-ohio-town-where-the-races-have-mixed-freely-for-more-than-200-years/2015/09/26/7ab3b250-4cfa-11e5-bfb9-9736d04fc8e4_story.html. (Kevin Williams seemed unaware of the prejudice and prejudiced violence that arose in Darke County after the Civil War.)

  18. For more on the Clemens family’s involvement in the Underground Railroad, see “A Free Black Settlement and the Underground Railroad,” Ohio River National Freedom Corridor, accessed December 10, 2017, www.ohioriver nationalfreedomcorridor.org/a-free-black-settlement.html.

  19. There continue to be challenges to preserving these very visible testimonies to African American wealth and success in the antebellum Northwest Territory states, and many homes have been lost. See Wayne L. Snider, All in the Same Spaceship: Portions of American Negro History Illustrated in Highland County, Ohio, U.S.A. (New York: Vantage Press, 1974), 34–36. While John Langston’s farmhouse in Ohio has been destroyed, work is being done to preserve the home he and his family lived in, in Oberlin, Ohio, soon after he was elected to office in 1855. At the time it was built, it was considered one of the finer homes in the area. See “Introduction to John Mercer Langston,” John Mercer Langston Historic Home, accessed July 23, 2017, www.johnmercer langstonhistorichome.org.