The Bone and Sinew of the Land

by Anna-Lisa Cox

  Working in those presses, Wilkerson was at the forefront of the news coming in from around the nation and the world. He would have read reports of the riots wracking the cities to the north of him. But he would have also heard of the revolutions in the New World and in Europe as people rose up against tyrannical governments. And he would have heard of freedom.

  The news that in 1833 Great Britain had officially ended slavery not only in England but in all her colonies was so important that Wilkerson probably did not have to read a newspaper to learn about it, for free African Americans across the United States rejoiced. Here, finally, was renewed hope that the West had not given up on the dream of freedom.

  Was there talk of Mexico, Bolivia, and Uruguay as well? Those nations had begun rejecting slavery earlier, between 1830 and 1831. And New Orleans, that city once held by the Spanish, would have been hearing talk that Spain was considering abolishing slavery as well.

  The supporters of slavery in the United States must have been furious—and frightened. Now freedom flanked them—with Canada and Mexico taking a stand for liberty. Maybe they became so fierce in their defense of their cause because they felt its popularity was weakening.

  There was certainly a new abolitionist movement growing in the United States, and James Wilkerson would have been able to read much about its actions as he helped to print the news in New Orleans.

  For years, African Americans and whites had petitioned their local, state, and territorial governments over issues of equality—from voting rights to due process under the law. Even in frontier Michigan in the mid-1830s, over two hundred white people sent such a petition from their homesteads on the territorial frontier. Many were barely surviving, living in small cabins while unseasonably cold summers destroyed their crops. But still, in their outrage over how their territory was sowing inequality and injustice for African Americans through its legislation, these pioneers traveled door to door, across miles of wilderness, to collect signatures.22

  They were not alone. While some whites rose up in organized violence to strengthen white supremacy, others worked hard against prejudice and slavery. Across the nation, from Massachusetts to Indiana, white and African American abolitionists petitioned their state and federal politicians. The petitions and proposals to abolish slavery and strike down laws that unfairly targeted African Americans grew so numerous that discussions of slavery, freedom, and equality dominated the Congress by 1835. This was not about some fringe group of wild-eyed abolitionists pushing a radical vision; this was about Americans demanding that their elected officials remember the core values their nation was founded on.23

  So in the early 1830s, the federal government decided it had to do something. Instead of even considering the petitions, they tried to figure out the best way to silence them. Rather than throw them out, the Congress would “table” them indefinitely. This “gag bill” passed with a majority of the vote from both southern and northern politicians. Its defenders claimed the bill was preventing the United States from breaking apart; its critics asked just how far the United States should go—how many of its most basic principles it should ignore—to keep the nation together. What kind of a nation would be left?24

  James Wilkerson and the other African Americans in New Orleans would have been paying close attention as the federal government all but shut down over the subject of slavery. And still Wilkerson worked to gain his liberty.

  But first he had to survive, and that was not the easiest task in New Orleans in the 1830s. The population of the city was growing—it would double in that decade alone—while at the same time it was wracked with yellow fever epidemics. But Wilkerson continued to work, and Richard Clague finally returned in 1835.

  Wilkerson never knew his birthday, but he would always remember the day he got his freedom. Clague was gone for roughly eighteen months, and when he returned, Wilkerson met him with cash in hand, as he later wrote, “not like a poor slave, with an aching heart and a head bowed down, but as an heir to inherit the promise of a father—even his liberty—yea that pearl of great price—the next gift to heaven itself.”25

  And so, on June 10, 1835, Wilkerson met with Richard Clague and his trusted attorney, Mr. Carlile Pollock, who drew up the emancipation papers that officially made James Wilkerson a free man.26

  And the first thing Wilkerson did was to leave New Orleans, moving as fast as he could to Virginia. He had to find his mother. He prayed she was still alive. He may have lived in a culture where people would sell their own kin for a profit, but Wilkerson rejected this. He wanted to find his mother, not just to embrace her, not just to rejoice with her at his liberty, but to make her free.

  But freedom was an expensive business. It would have made better economic sense to use his money to start his own printing press or to keep working, purchase a house, and find a wife in New Orleans. Instead Wilkerson met with the people who owned his mother, who could charge him anything they pleased, for they knew he was desperate and in no position to bargain.

  Still, Wilkerson met with lawyers, he paid the money, and in the same year that he gained his liberty, he created a family—his mother and himself, finally free.27

  Wilkerson decided to become a preacher and missionary. He sought out some of the top men of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, who educated him, and for six years he traveled all over the United States, from Virginia to Kentucky, from Maryland to Indiana, and almost everywhere in between. He became a familiar figure to some of the most renowned abolitionist and human rights activists in America at that time. And in 1841 he came to Ohio.28

  As he traveled around that state Wilkerson would have seen numerous African American farms and farming settlements. Many of them would have looked like the small settlement of Lexington, in Columbiana County. By 1837, a Quaker visiting the community reported that since its founding in 1821 it had grown to a “settlement of 51 families, numbering 264 individuals… altogether 1860 acres of land, valued at $29,200.” The community had funded and built two schools “taught by abolition females” and had also built a meeting house. The meeting house was central to that community of far-flung farmers. It was where they worshipped and their Sunday school met. And it housed their library. Community leaders proudly showed their visitor the library of over 120 books they had purchased. And there were, of course, freedom entrepreneurs like James Wilkerson. One of the fathers in Lexington earned $1,700 in order to purchase his entire family.29

  But James Wilkerson also went to the cities of Ohio. And in Cincinnati Wilkerson was quickly made that city’s African American militia leader. As an African American resident of that city would later recall, the militia “had full confidence in his ability, sincerity, courage and devotion, and were ready to follow him even unto death.”30

  Wilkerson had a way with words. He could give a speech or sing a hymn that could move men to action. And action was needed. After all, as he must have reminded the men of his militia, “dreaming, talking, singing and shouting about God and Liberty, all avails nothing.” So they would pray. They would dream. But they would also defend their community.31

  So here they were in Cincinnati in late August 1841, all of them dressed in darkness, all of them armed, all of them waiting for the storm to break.

  August 1829. July 1836. Each of those years had seen a riot. Well, some called it a riot, but it was really more of a war where whites attacked the African Americans in the city with the intent of killing their community. And now in late August 1841 it looked to be happening again.32

  When that first attack had come in 1829, the outrage of their being driven from their city, their state, their nation was reported nationally, and the injustice of it was felt by many people, both white and black.

  What these advocates of justice did not realize was that the riot in Cincinnati was just a start, that there was a newer and fiercer opponent. For the 1830s would see the explosive growth of a movement that was fueled by prejudice, driven by hate, and deeply destructive. The violenc
e of this movement reached the level of warfare in the 1830s. As a contemporary witness later recalled, “The days of thick darkness to the colored people were approaching.” This movement against equality and freedom had its own funders, its own organizers, its own meetings, and its own newspapers. And its supporters held some of the most powerful positions in government at that time.33

  Of course, it was not some monolithic movement, any more than the abolitionists were. It was not terribly cohesive. It had local chapters and organizers, and many of these were at odds and disagreed about their goals. Some wanted to abolish slavery, just as long as the United States was rid of anyone with African blood. Others wanted nothing more than to grow slavery and reopen the ports at Charleston and all along the coasts to shiploads of chained people from Africa. But all of them supported inequality and prejudice. And they were quick to turn to violence to achieve their goals.

  And this powerful movement loved nothing better than to blame the very people who were trying to resist them—resist the growing violence and division—for creating it.

  But still the abolitionist movement grew. African Americans had long been writing, organizing, and working to end slavery and advance equality, but this was a new time and there was a need for something new. The devastation in Cincinnati was one of many catalysts. For years now, whites in every state had been holding conventions to create—or re-create—their state constitutions. These conventions excluded African Americans and increasingly enacted state constitutions that barred African Americans from some of the most basic civil rights. So African Americans started their own convention movement: hundreds of African Americans gathering from all over the United States, organizing, meeting, and making known to all that they would fight injustice, bondage, and inequality. They held their first convention in Philadelphia in 1830.34

  Philadelphia made sense, for that city was home to the nation’s first national gathering of abolitionists in 1794, as well as the birthplace of the first African American denomination, the African Methodist Episcopal Church. By 1830 the AME’s founder, Bishop Richard Allen, was close to death, but his extraordinary leadership had given life to a church that had spread across the entire nation, north and south. But those churches had been under attack for a while now, and it was getting worse.35

  In early June 1834, people had gathered for their fourth annual convention, this time in New York City. The African American human rights advocate William Hamilton had been invited to give the opening speech. There was much to grieve for. Bishop Allen had died in 1831, and the movement to grow prejudice and slavery was gaining strength.36

  Speaking in a powerful voice strong enough for those seated at the farthest ends of the large hall to hear, Hamilton began speaking the truth and grieving: “How lamentable, how very lamentable, it is that there should be, any where on earth, a community of castes, with separate interests!… The society must be the most happy, where the good of one is the common good of the whole.… But alas for the people of colour in this community!… [F]rom them white men stand aloof.… Long, long, long has the demon of prejudice and persecution beset their path.” The opposition to equality was spreading. This was no longer just about Cincinnati.37

  In 1831 whites attacked the free African American community in Providence, Rhode Island, for so many days that the militia had to be brought in. African Americans in Providence had already been hit by smaller riots almost ten years earlier—some of the earliest known prejudice-driven riots in a northern city after the Revolution. But this mob action in 1831 was larger and became an all-out battle. When the guns finally ceased firing and the white mob was finally dispersed, an entire African American neighborhood had been destroyed.38

  Two years later Detroit was hit. There may not have been very many free African Americans in that territorial town, but they were brave, willing to risk living on the rough edge of the nation. When two of their longtime neighbors were captured and imprisoned for the crime of being refugees from enslavement, the free African Americans of that city decided to take action. The African American refugees—a married couple—were imprisoned as they awaited their return to bondage, even though they had been living profitable and peaceful lives in Detroit for years. But when a few of their friends tried to rescue them, a local white lawman was injured.39

  The repercussions were terrible. Almost every free African American man and woman in Detroit was rounded up and imprisoned, held hostage until they paid their $500 Black Code bonds. African Americans were blamed for a few fires set in buildings around the prison, and in retaliation whites burned over forty African American homes. Finally, after weeks of violence, with white gangs attacking any African Americans who dared walk the streets, the mayor ordered the final act of violence—that the militia banish all African Americans who could not pay the $500 bond. By early August almost all African Americans in Detroit had been forced out of the city.40

  Then it was Philadelphia’s turn. In 1834 whites attacked African Americans in their homes, breaking, burning, and looting the places that gave shelter and comfort to equality.41

  And still the dreadful list grew. In 1834 it was New York City and New Haven, Connecticut. In 1835 it was Boston, Utica, and Washington, DC. Then in 1836 it was Cincinnati’s turn again.42

  The violence in Cincinnati, as in most of the cities, was well orchestrated. Powerful, sophisticated businessmen had been organizing antiabolition and pro-prejudice meetings since January, attended by hundreds of whites. It wasn’t just bank president Robert Buchanan and Methodist minister William Burke; it was the mayor, the postmaster, a former US senator, and military men like colonels Charles Hale and Robert Lytle.43

  Both Hale and Lytle were northerners, Hale from Pennsylvania and Lytle—who, as a congressman, had firmly supported President Andrew Jackson—was from Massachusetts. Their prejudice was native to the North and virulent.44

  It was an old story. They claimed that everything was fine in Cincinnati, that the only problem was those outsiders—those abolitionists—riling things up by spreading harmful ideas about freedom and equality. They argued that their city was perfectly content, no one of any color needing or desiring equality. Conveniently forgetting that it was prejudiced whites in Cincinnati who had been trying to violently destroy equality and social harmony since 1829, and that many in the hall that day were outsiders—newly arrived white men enraged by the successful African Americans they saw all around them in Ohio.

  These prejudiced whites were the radicals, for some of the oldest, most powerful white curmudgeons in the state cherished the old ideals of equality. Senator Thomas Morris of Ohio continued to hold to the old values of the Revolution he was raised up in. In 1838, while a senator for Ohio in the federal government, Morris made clear to the Ohio press that the Declaration of Independence was still his guiding light. He wrote, “I have contended that all men were born equally free and independent, and have an indisputable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”45

  The pro-prejudice organizers may have been respected and powerful men, but they were using language so threatening and disturbing that local newspapers would not print the words. This indecency was surprisingly common among leaders of this movement. The language used by prejudiced white politicians in the Northwest Territory states was viciously violent against African Americans. These men and these words had very real power. They were encouraging hatred and violence, encouraging whites not only to turn their backs on equality but to hate, to torture, and to even kill African-descended people.46

  No other group—women, Native Americans, Jews, Catholics, or any other ethnic group—was targeted with this level of violent hatred in the speeches of powerful white men in the Northwest Territory states. This language was a tool to strengthen division and prejudice and encourage violence. And it worked.47

  As Colonel Lytle from Massachusetts wryly put it, he was all for the mixing of the races. If anything could improve the “bestiality” of people from Africa, it might be forcin
g them to “mingle their blood with foreign currents.” To do this, he advocated castrating all the men and raping all the women. Of course the nineteenth-century press would not print his brutal language in full, even if newspapers had no problem advocating the most obscene violence against African Americans and their allies. Instead, they delicately reported that Lytle had thundered out to hundreds of angry and prejudiced whites in Cincinnati, “You must castrate the men and ____ the women!”48

  In April 1836 the attack started. The repeated attacks mostly followed the same pattern: target the white abolitionist editors and presses, then move on to attack African Americans and destroy their homes and businesses.49

  But Cincinnati was not the only city to harbor prejudiced leaders and suffer repeated assaults. That same year whites in New Haven, Connecticut, again went to battle, burning churches and wounding African American citizens. As a Connecticut gentleman wrote to a friend around this time, “The colored people can never rise from their menial condition in our country; they ought not to be permitted to rise here. They are an inferior race of beings, and never can or ought to be recognized as the equals of whites.”50

  So much energy, so much organization, so much destruction, just to reject the ideals of their forefathers. And so the murders and oppression continued. Conservative estimates put the number of these battles waged against African Americans in the cities of the North at roughly forty-six, in just a three-year period between 1834 and 1837. So many whites going to war against equality, and some even fighting other whites.51

  In 1837, the murder of a handsome young white abolitionist in Alton, Illinois, by radical antiabolitionists, brought much sympathy. Elijah Lovejoy had died trying to prevent the destruction of his newspaper press from a battalion organized by some of the most powerful men in the state of Illinois.