The Bone and Sinew of the Land

by Anna-Lisa Cox

  First, he asked only for a temporary period of ten years. Over and over he stressed that the enslavement of people was awful but suggested that using small groups of enslaved people to clear the frontier might be slightly better than working them to death on a large rice plantation in South Carolina. But, as Keziah Grier and others like her knew, separating children from their families, bringing them lonely and heartbroken to the frontier, and forcing them to clear land for their enslavers was not exactly a kindness.

  Still, William Henry Harrison knew that the federal government wanted the land he governed controlled and cleared. This was no easy task in a place where Native Americans had been in contact with Europeans for over a century, were armed and sophisticated, and had no interest in seeing the new young nation of the United States usurp their land. Harrison knew that the politicians back east expected him to control this territory and open it to settlement, and so he was arguing that, distasteful as it might be, forcing enslaved people to clear the forests, even if many were lost (as many probably would be), was better than losing the region so recently won from the French and now the British. Yet even Harrison’s delicately worded petition, with its veiled threat about losing control of the Indiana Territory, could not win. Though sent to a committee headed by a congressman from Virginia, his petition was rejected.44

  Still, while the federal government managed to fend off these larger attempts to legalize human bondage in the Northwest, it did not protect equality. There was a fervor for freedom, but what little dedication white Americans had for the project of equality was beginning to weaken. And not just Americans’ dedication. Within only ten years of abolishing slavery and declaring equality among mankind, France turned its back on those ideals as well. Just as in the United States, there had been an almost immediate attempt to restore slavery, with French slave powers making a failed plea for a return to the practice in 1795.45

  Just eight years later much had changed, and in 1803 France went to war to reinstate slavery in all its colonies. Napoléon Bonaparte’s colonial minister Denis Decrès defended the moves, arguing, “Liberty is a food for which the stomachs of the negroes are not yet prepared.” The island of Saint-Domingue only managed to stay free by once again fighting the French for its liberty. But the people of the French island of Guadeloupe lost their battle and were reenslaved.46

  American enslavers had also made the argument that enslaved people were not fit for freedom and equality, and they would turn to it with even greater enthusiasm some years later. But whether in French or English, it employed the same language of prejudice to justify a return to a prerevolutionary culture of hierarchy that assumes some people are fit only to be ruled, whether that ruler is a king or a plantation owner. Yet Decrès and the French who were empowering enslavement and prejudice, as well as their American counterparts, knew just how successfully people of African descent could stomach liberty. They had seen just how ably they could create, defend, and further it.

  Meanwhile, the men of color who had stood up at that 1794 convention in Paris as supposedly full and equal citizens—those revolutionaries from Saint-Domingue—were being arrested. Some were deported while others died in French prisons. And in 1804 Napoléon Bonaparte was crowned emperor.47

  Of course, France and the United States were very different places with different cultures. For one, the United States managed to hold on to its fervor for freedom—which affected not just its government but its churches and many of its citizens—for an entire generation. It had started down a path of freeing tens of thousands of people and set aside a vast region of its lands for freedom. But this did not immunize the United States from a backlash of its own; it just looked different and grew more slowly. But this did not make it less terrible or destructive.

  But even as that backlash was brewing, people of African descent, long free or recently liberated during the fervor for freedom, would make the Northwest Territory and states their home. And as they settled the Great West, these African American pioneers and their white allies preserved and grew the vision of liberty and equality that had once stirred the nation.

  That backlash manifested itself in many ways across the nation, from the southeast to the northwest, from the cities to the rural regions. But a particularly terrible form of this backlash against equality arose in the Northwest Territory as the region settled, its territories became states, and more people of African descent moved onto that frontier. Whites decided to take away equal voting rights.

  Ohio was the first state carved out of the Northwest Territory, and whites in that state were also the first to reverse the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, using the word “white” in their first state constitution as a criterion for full citizenship when Ohio became a state in 1803. By all that was just, these states should have held the right to vote as sacred as freedom from slavery. And many whites still believed that America should be ruled by a free and equal citizenry. The discriminatory wording was not added to the Ohio constitution without debate, but in the end it was included. Every new state created out of the Northwest Territory would follow suit. But this did not destroy the hopes of African Americans and their allies that the dreams of equality could still become a reality.48

  After all, the fervor for freedom was one reason there were free people who could come to the frontier of the Great West. In 1790 there were roughly 58,000 African-descended people counted as free in America’s first census, but by 1810 there were roughly 186,000. When New York finally decided to pass legislation officially ending slavery in 1827, the number stood at roughly 320,000. This was the largest number of free people of African descent existing in any New World or European nation at that time, except for that revolutionary island of Saint-Domingue, which was now being called Haiti. This was a blossoming, a blighted one to be sure, but still bearing fruit.49

  This was the nation that Keziah and Charles Grier were helping to create. These were the ideals that their freedom, their frontier, and their lives were founded on. And they would nurture and grow those ideals on their Northwest Territory farm, in their family, and in their community even as those ideals came under attack.

  3

  “The pursuit of Happiness”

  Gibson County, Indiana, Spring 1828

  Sometimes she woke before it was light.

  Keziah Grier always had reasons for waking early. Until she was free she had been forced awake before most others, and the body can carry long habits.

  But now there were so many other reasons for waking. The child coughing, the baby hungry, Charles turning to hold her.

  The cabin was crowded, but she could go outside.1

  Her bare feet might feel dew, cold enough, but not sharp frost. This was a goodness. Even in May every clear night brought the fear of frost. And there was no snow. The rain was better, but it still could be tiresome. It must have seemed that it would never stop, coming straight down or driven hard by winds that grew into storms.

  But finally there was a clear morning.

  As she stood there, Keziah would have heard her own breath in the stillness, watching that bright star that always hung low in the east over the trees at the edge of their field—their field so much bigger than when they had started working it ten years before. There were fewer wolves now but more people—and those people could also be a trouble.

  Many were just passing through. Illinois to the west was drawing many. Keziah would have heard so many different voices, languages, and accents. A lot of English pioneers were coming to New Harmony, that odd place on the Wabash full of people with more dreams than sense. But most of the English preferred river travel, arriving on boats that could bring them west still wearing silk slippers. The big spaces of grassland west of the Wabash River were being promised as easy land for settlement to city folk from London. But Keziah knew that while trees might have roots to battle, they offered all that was necessary for life on the frontier.2

  The forest gave them so much: the wood to build all their fences, to
build barns, to add to their home and then heat it in the winter.

  Then there were the berries, the greens, and the wildlife. Even in the coldest months Charles could shoot something for the stewpot when they were all tired of preserved pork.

  Their pigs were fine in the forest. Most of the settlers had figured this out and would let their hogs roam. Hogs could grow, if not fat, then at least larger, for they would eat just about anything—acorns, roots, even an old deer carcass rotting by the river. In fact, the forest was increasingly full of hogs, and Charles may well have needed to strengthen the fences against the wandering beasts that could wreck a field of sprouting corn in minutes.

  Now, in the spring, they could let the cow forage in the forest as well. That cow loved the fresh green leaves, stretching her head up, her neck seeming to grow longer, her tongue reaching and wrapping around the tender leaves. That cow could strip a branch bare in minutes. Did Keziah ever feel that same hunger in the spring? Her own belly seemed to be ever growing large with babies, and after the long winter the green of any growing thing must have made her mouth water.

  Their lives had settled somewhat. The summers had not frozen their crops, and the ground that Charles chose had proven good. The earth was so rich that everything they sowed seemed to grow. There was the squash, ranging its heavy vines over mounds of earth, wonderfully huge. And the corn, though thin and weedy, was tall and full of ears. Even the grain, the bit they dared to plant, ripened fine and heavy at the end of the summer.

  And now they had a family. Did Keziah laugh to see Charles closely followed about the yard by their children as they all went out in the morning? They followed him like chicks after a hen as he walked to the barn to feed the livestock.

  But for now, alone in the dim light, it was still.

  Soon the rooster would crow or the cow would complain, but for now she could stand there.

  Then a warm hand tucked into hers, small and soft. Her absence had been noticed; she was missed.

  Malinda was her oldest, now ten years old and growing so fast.3

  Malinda still might have that troublesome cough, worse in the morning, trying to get clear from her winter illness. The very things that made their crops grow also seemed to make people die. The wet, the water, the flooding, and the rich mud that made this such good growing land also made for sickness.

  This was such a tender age. If the cow ate the wrong weed, the kettle spilled, the ice on the river broke, the cart tipped, the cut festered, the snake struck. Or more people came.

  New people were a danger to them until they could figure out otherwise. If Keziah heard a noise, she had to discover what had made it, and fast.

  Was it someone lost? But there are all kinds of lost.

  There were those white folks who were now flooding in, their wagons everywhere—thousands of them. Some were fine with Keziah and Charles, but others were not. Seeing the Griers’ cleared land and snug home, some of those pale faces would get that pinched look, their light eyes narrowed.4

  Some settlers into the Northwest Territory states did not think of fairness or hard labor, for they were already poisoned by prejudice.

  Ohio was filling up even faster than Indiana, and the malice directed against African American pioneers like Keziah was already growing. In 1821 the young white abolitionist Benjamin Lundy came across a sizable African American settlement on his way to Michigan, about three miles from the village of Somerset. When he visited with them he found the residents furious—“wonderfully wroth” as he put it—over their treatment by the whites who were settling around them.5

  Closer to home, some whites in the Griers’ own Gibson County, Indiana, had petitioned the territorial government in 1814 to ban any free African Americans from settling there. Indeed, some of the earliest African American pioneers to the Northwest Territory were already leaving.6

  The African Americans who had settled around Fort Allison, just across the Wabash River from the Griers, were being urged to leave the United States entirely. George Flower, a wealthy and influential Englishman who had recently arrived in the United States, was now trying to people the prairie with English pioneers. He was pressuring the African Americans who had been there when he arrived, to leave for Haiti, the land of fresher revolution, urging them to make a new start there.7

  Flower hated slavery, but he was not overly fond of people of African descent either. He reviled slavery because it combined “the degenerate European aristocracy, and a full-blooded African barbarism.” In the same breath he accused white Americans of prejudice because they “retain the old colonial feeling of hatred toward color” and praised Englishmen for having “no feeling of superiority or inferiority as connected with a cuticle of any color.”8

  He hired African Americans to work his land and publicly professed to admire their work ethic and skill. But over time he decided that it would be better if they were gone from his lands and what he considered to be his country.

  Of course, he passionately defended his actions. He mentioned local white hostility and an attempt to kidnap one of his laborers. Finally he admitted to seeing “no hope of just treatment for the free colored people that lived on my lands, or relieving myself from the trouble of defending them, I proposed that they should go to Hayti.”9

  George Flower was one of a new breed of abolitionists. He despised the system of slavery but was not warm toward free people of African descent. He was a colonizationist.

  All those states giving up slavery, all those now free, had created a response, and one of the most popular was the colonization movement. Called by its founding members the American Colonization Society (ACS) and formalized in 1816, it supported an extreme form of segregation: the removal of all free people of African descent from the United States. Its motivations ranged from pure prejudice to a worry that free African Americans would give enslaved people ideas about the joys of liberty—as if a person had to see someone else of the same skin color enjoying liberty in order to long for it.10

  It didn’t matter whether they were newly freed people like Keziah and Charles or belonged to those families with free roots deeper in the New World than the founding members of the ACS had. They could be newly arrived from Ghana or descended from every kind of person now living in the United States—Dutch, Narraganset, Nigerian, Irish. The ACS did not care; it just wanted those Americans thought of only as “African” gone.11

  Maybe it was because those free people revealed their lies—all those twisted words the prejudiced wrote and spoke about inferiority, monkeys, and sons of Hamm to support their prejudice. But in the end it was just a return to the old ways of thinking that some men were not created equal—a way of thinking that the Revolution was supposed to have put an end to.12

  Of course, many of the men who started the ACS were also extreme pro-integrationists. They thought it a lovely thing to have their babies nursed at a black breast, to eat food grown and cooked by dark-skinned people, to have African-descended women in their beds—so they could be very intimate with them indeed—as they raped them.

  Of course, those people all had to be enslaved to be worthy of such integration.

  Now, George Flower did not own any slaves, but he was certainly new to the United States. And now he had convinced the Jones family, an old American family of African-descended patriots, who had built and later defended Fort Allison through the War of 1812, that they should leave the nation they had helped to create.13

  Bishop Richard Allen would have been furious.

  Bishop Allen was an influential and respected African American preacher based in Philadelphia who had started off preaching to both blacks and whites. But with the growing prejudice in the Northeast and the segregation of the Methodist Church, he left and created the African Methodist Episcopal Church. And he utterly opposed the ACS and its attempts to remove free African Americans from their homes. In 1829 he wrote, “Why should they send us into a far country to die? See the thousands of foreigners emigrating to America every
year: and if there be ground sufficient for them to cultivate, and bread for them to eat, why would they wish to send the first tillers of the land away?… This land which we have watered with our tears and our blood, is now our mother country.”14

  In the end George Flower did not manage to convince many of the African Americans in his region to leave their land in Illinois. Keziah must have been relieved. Indeed, some worried that Flower’s plan was a hoax to get all of them on a boat to New Orleans, where they would be sold into slavery.15

  Being a dark-skinned pioneer brought so many unique dangers, and Keziah and her family were so very dark. Whites not only hankered after their farm but wanted their bodies.

  No matter how free they were, their skin made them a commodity in the right market, and there were men, both white and black, who took advantage of free families like theirs, deep in the northern woods. And they often hunted in secret, at night, trying to catch people while they were asleep. New Orleans seemed a long way away, but there were auction blocks with people on them much closer than Louisiana. Louisville and Saint Louis were both just spitting distance away on one of those newfangled big steamships now running on the Ohio River.16

  Perhaps Charles took her down to the Ohio River to see those ships. Their wheels thumping the water, the noise so loud it must have felt like it was moving right through her body. And all that power, that force, being used to carry that cargo they would have been able to see clearly on the open decks—people in chains, mothers like her, being taken south and west.

  Keziah knew that for some the Ohio River was a crossover into the promised land of freedom, but for most it held nothing but misery. Once there had been ships packed with people in chains, being forced across the ocean to America’s shores, destined to be sold. But now rivers had replaced oceans, and steamships had replaced sailing vessels. Those steamboats on the Ohio ran south into sorrow, traveling deep into slavery. Anyone on its waters would hear the weeping.17