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The Bone and Sinew of the Land

Page 17

by Anna-Lisa Cox


  When the African Americans who had hired Wright refused to respond to the letter, another letter was sent a few days later, filled with obscene slander and threat.34

  There was an intimacy to this hatred. Rural communities were small and scattered, but that did not mean that people did not know each other, or know each other’s business. It was not just letters sent, it was people walking out of the general store to avoid seeing a neighbor. It was a rider galloping by on a horse cursing a family as he passed. It was two men inside a home, sitting on chairs while someone brought them something hot to drink.

  A visiting white abolitionist, Amzi D. Barber, was invited to the home of a Mr. McMullen (whom the abolitionist described as “an influential white man”). Barber almost certainly knew Clarissa Wright and had come to her aid. He was secretary of the Cincinnati Anti-slavery Society and had briefly run a school for African Americans in that city in 1836. During their conversation McMullen was more explicit about the threat to Wright, stating that a mob would burn the schoolhouse if Wright did not stop teaching there. McMullen kept assuring Barber that he would not hurt Wright or personally burn down the school. But Barber called his bluff, replying, “I have no fear of violence unless some influential men encourage it. And the very way to get up a mob is for every [white] man to prophesy that there will be one.” This so upset McMullen that he called Barber the worst thing he could think of—an abolitionist—and accused him of preaching abolition to the African Americans in the township. Barber replied, “I have never given an abolition lecture to the colored people. There is no occasion for it; if they were in favor of slavery they would go to the south, and put their necks under the yoke.”35

  Barber probably took courage from the fact that many whites in Ohio had arisen to combat the growing prejudice in their state, which was now home to over two hundred antislavery societies that would be reading and repeating his words. He may have been pleased with his wit in his argument with McMullen, but no argument between a young abolitionist and a powerful white man in an Ohio farming community would stop the threats to Wright and the families and children she was teaching. A few days later Wright wrote that she was now receiving the threats personally and that they included plans to tar and feather her and ride her out on a rail.36

  Elijah Lovejoy, the white abolitionist, had endured threats of similar abuse, but the fact that the threat targeted Clarissa Wright was significant. Everyone knew that if a person survived the coating of hot tar, their being forced to straddle a thin splintered rail was a form of sexual assault.

  But Wright would not give up; she stood with the African American farmers, and they stood with her, at the risk of terrible violence and loss. Her brother, Elizur, had almost been stabbed to death by two attackers during the 1834 race war in New York City because of his support of equality for all Americans. She knew that threats of violence could have very real consequences. She was not naive; nor were the African Americans who had hired her. As she wrote, “Should I fall victim to the fury of these wicked men, it is but little that they can do. The thought of departing from Christ is more dreadful than death.”37

  While Wright seems to have escaped alive, there is little record of what happened to the school or the children she was trying to teach.38

  The board of the Union Literary Institute knew that what they were doing was a rebuke to prejudiced whites, for the school Wright was teaching at was segregated, but the Union Literary Institute was most definitely not. But they also knew that they were not alone, for other African Americans and their white allies were working in the Northwest Territory states to found manual labor schools offering advanced education to African Americans.

  In Michigan two labor institutes were up and running, even though that state was less than ten years old. One was founded by the African American equal rights leader Prior Foster in Lenawee County. He had been joined in Michigan by James Birney, the previous editor of the Philanthropist, who had left Cincinnati and now sat on the board of trustees of Foster’s school. This was a family project, for Prior Foster’s brother was making the long journey from his farm in Wisconsin to bring wagonloads of corn for the school’s supplies.39

  As the Union Literary Institute’s board met in 1847 in Indiana they would have heard that the Union Seminary, just outside Columbus, had just been opened as a Manual Labor Institute by the AME Church. And there was talk that abolitionist-minded whites were planning a school they intended to call the Eleutherian Institute, down in southern Indiana in Jefferson County. But the nearest labor institute was the Emlen Institute in Mercer County, just forty miles north of them.40

  Mercer County had long been home to a thriving community of African American farmers. By 1840 the African American farmers there owned thousands of acres. And Charles Moore was one of their most successful residents. A freedom entrepreneur, he not only bought his own liberty but paid $2,200 to purchase his entire family’s freedom. By 1840 he had platted a village in the middle of this farming settlement that he named Carthagena, in honor of the North African city of Carthage.41

  It was no surprise that Augustus Wattles would want to try to work with these African Americans to found a manual labor institute in Mercer County. He was a white abolitionist and equal rights activist who was well aware of many of the African American farming settlements across rural Ohio.

  In 1839, Wattles had begun to work on creating a manual labor institute in the county, and in 1842 he managed to get good funding for the school. He traveled to Philadelphia to talk with the trustees of the estate of Samuel Emlen. Samuel Emlen had been a wealthy equal rights–minded native of New Jersey, and his trustees were now trying to figure out how to best spend his money. Having seen their city wracked by the war against African American equality, they must have been relieved to hear of a place where black success was not being violently destroyed and gave Wattles the money he was asking for.42

  But by 1847 the board of the Union Literary Institute would have been hearing troubling reports from Mercer County. There had been a bad incident in 1846 when a large group of people recently freed by the will of John Randolph had come to Mercer County, looking to settle there. Whites in Mercer County made clear that they did not want the population of African Americans in their area growing any larger. Violence had broken out not just against the recently freed people but against long-established African American farmers.43

  In August 1846 some of the most powerful white men of Mercer County, including Congressman William Sawyer, met to write up their stance on the free and successful African Americans of Mercer County. Mocking the black conventions now meeting in their state that were publishing beautifully worded resolutions calling for liberty and equality for all, these white men of Mercer County published their resolutions as well, which clearly stated their values: “Whereas the Supreme Ruler of the Universe has fixed immutable laws for the government of the world, and marked his lines and boundaries, and made undeniable distinction every where perceivable, between the different races of men.” They then made many formal resolutions, including that “we will not live among negroes.… [W]e have fully determined that we will resist the settlement of blacks and mulattos in this county, to the full extent of our means, the bayonet not excepted.”44

  And the board of the Union Literary Institute was trying to run a revolutionary school roughly forty miles south of this violence. But it was not without defenses. The board alone was a formidable group. And the Clemens and Alexander families could offer some support as well. They had already given money and land, but they had more—they had their standing.

  The Alexander and Clemens families were well represented both on the donor lists and on the board. The two families were neighbors, although the Alexanders were in Indiana, and the Clemenses were just across the border in Ohio. They had arrived in that region in the early 1820s, Thornton Alexander from North Carolina and James Clemens from Virginia. As soon as Clemens arrived, he bought over three hundred acres from the federal government
, and it was some of the best land on the western Ohio frontier. These two farming families were now the closest their two counties had to landed gentry, black or white, though they happened to be black. Between them, the two families owned almost 1,000 acres of land. These pioneers were community founders and deeply committed to freedom, equality, and education.45

  In some ways their large farms protected them. When harvest time came there would not have been enough African Americans in the region to harvest all the crops grown by these two wealthy families. Harvesting any grain involved intensive labor. A strong man, well trained with a scythe, could only harvest a quarter acre of grain a day. Many whites in the area would have relied on the Clemens and Alexander families for extra income at harvest time and at other times as well.46

  Of course, not all the money the Alexander and Clemens families made went to farm labor. All those acres of good land they owned were taxed to pay for the local public schools, but those schools were for white children only. The Alexanders and Clemenses had long lived with the injustice of taxation without representation, but they also had to suffer taxation without education. It must have stung.

  But they were not going to let prejudiced laws or people stop them.

  Founding an integrated school for both African American and white children was not the only path open to them. The extraordinary success of African American farmers across the Northwest Territory states meant that some African Americans were taking different paths to educating their children. In Illinois, for instance, the wealthy African American farmer Arthur Allen hired a local white teacher (who was also a justice of the peace) to tutor his children.47

  But the Alexander and Clemens families chose to work with local whites to create a more revolutionary educational opportunity for their children. They were joined by other wealthy activists, including the white Underground Railroad conductor Levi Coffin, another North Carolina man, elected to their board in 1846. As they gathered together, led by their African American board president, William R. J. Clemens, they knew that their board’s integration alone would be reason enough for prejudiced whites to bring guns and torches to end them and their school.

  But wealth and standing were not the only defenses the board had, for the black convention movement was rising in the Great West, and it was gaining strength. After starting in Philadelphia in 1830 and struggling in the cities of the East Coast, this movement had spread through the Northwest Territory states, starting in Indiana in 1842 and quickly followed by Michigan and Ohio in 1843.48

  African Americans from the farms to the cities of the Great West were gathering to organize, to petition, to criticize, and to encourage. They called upon whites to remember the early ideals and actions of the period just after the Revolution, reminding them just how far they had moved away from those founding beliefs and actions.49

  This new generation of equality activists knew exactly what had been stolen from them—the equality promised in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and then denied when whites created prejudiced state constitutions. This new generation of activists may have been strongly rooted in the nation’s old ideals, but they used every modern technology available to publicize their words and agendas, printing the proceedings of their conventions in newspapers and broadsides so that they could influence as large an audience as possible.50

  As was spoken (and later broadly published) during the main address at the 1844 Ohio convention, “The Declaration of Independence, the American Bill of Rights, the Ordinance of 1787, as well as the political Creed of every intelligent, generous and patriotic freeman, are clearly violated, nay shamefully desecrated, by that feature of our constitution that renders the color of the skin a qualification for electors and suffrages.… We shall urge our second plea upon the ground of justice.… ‘[D]o to others as you would have them do to you.’”51

  African American farmers from this region were attending and helping to lead these conventions. For there were many places in the Northwest Territory states where African-descended farmers could still safely leave their farms in the hands of family or friends for a few days so that they could lead a committee at the convention. And these brave and outspoken leaders knew all about the Union Literary Institute.52

  At the Ohio convention in Columbus in January 1849, a number of resolutions were voted on, including Resolution 15, which stated, “That the attempt to establish… schools for the benefit of colored persons EXCLUSIVELY… is in our humble opinion reprehensible.” Attendees also stressed that segregated education had a profoundly damaging effect on children of any skin color and that “in children thus divided by law, the most Satanic hate is likely to be engendered. This, no one who has studied human nature will deny.”53

  The daughter of Frederick Douglass, the great African American abolitionist whom they all knew and worked with, had just been expelled from a school in her hometown of Rochester, New York. The act, as they reminded their audience, had caused international outrage, “rebuked” by the “ladies of England, Scotland, Ireland and France.” No wonder one of the first articles about the Union Literary Institute was written up in Frederick Douglass’s newspaper, the North Star. The article praises the fact that the school “is intended especially for colored youth of both sexes; and the greater number of pupils have been such, though persons of all complexions are freely admitted, and about one-fourth of the whole number were whites. Two of the five trustees and four of the thirteen managers are colored men.”54

  The Union Literary Institute was standing by the old revolutionary ideas that division and prejudice hurt children and the nation. It could do this, in part, because African American farms were now established and thriving around them. And more were being established, with many successful African American farms now scattered across the Northwest Territory states.55

  It took roughly twenty years for frontier farmers to clear their land so that they could plow with horses instead of oxen. Twenty years of felling trees, chopping roots, pulling rocks. But many African American pioneers were now established farmers, and like the Clemenses and Alexanders, they were in a position to support organizations that supported equality.

  That did not mean there was no prejudice in much of the Northwest Territory states. Whites in some Ohio townships were burning barns. Whites in rural Illinois were creating vigilante groups to force African Americans out of Cornelius Elliott’s own Gallatin County. Whites in an Indiana county had risen to violently drive out the African American owner of the county’s most successful mill. While Frederick Douglass was speaking in nearby Madison County, Indiana, people tried to murder him. A crowd set upon him and the other abolitionists, screaming, “Kill the nigger, kill the damn nigger.” He only escaped with his life after one of his fellow abolitionists threw himself over Douglass’s body to shield him from the blows meant to finish him off.56

  The majority of whites in Madison County, Indiana, did not want freedom for all, for they had seen what the first wave of freedom had brought to that state—thousands of African-descended pioneers settling on thriving farms. So they had made sure that not one black landowning farmer lived within the county’s bounds in 1840.57

  But the blanket of prejudice had not smothered most of the rural and frontier spaces of the Northwest the way it had in the Northeast. Many of the African American farms in the region covered large spaces that required a level of trust in neighbors to survive. There could not have been constant attacks—the sheer number of African American farming homesteads settled by this time spoke to this reality.

  And in the areas where they were not run out, African American farmers were rising. And what a rising it was, growing out of the farms now scattered across those five states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin—farms that were now improving, with vast acreage under cultivation, giving those farmers the means to resist injustice and advance equality.

  The young people now attending the Union Literary Institute knew all about that rising. They had been a part of i
t.

  Not all of them would have been fond of farmwork, but they were used to it. They would have helped their parents clear land or heard their parents and grandparents talking of those early days. Even now, as many of those farms were more settled, they could have listened to the old ones talking about their land with love, praising it and fondly complaining about its many moods and foibles—the pasture that had a tendency to flood every spring, the few acres that still spat up rocks to blunt the plow, the high point that was always windy—gesturing with strong hands, cracked and worn.

  These students were the fruit of that land—good harvest of those farms and those families. And maybe their parents hoped more for them than farming. Maybe they dreamed of their becoming doctors, teachers, pastors, and engineers. Their dreams may have seemed fabulous, impossible. But they, and that school, had hope.

  So, as the board met that June day in 1847, its members knew they had some hard work to do.

  First, there were those fireworks.

  Soon they had added to their constitution this amendment: “No student shall burn gun powder in or near any of the Institution buildings.”58

  Next there were those upsetting games. So it was resolved that “No members of the Institution shall play at cards, checkers, chess, or any similar games of chance or skill.”59

  Then came the harder issues, such as courting. Had they heard that before the Noyes Academy was pulled off its foundations in New Hampshire, the local newspaper published terrible articles warning that the black students might start courting white women? That school had been all male except for the African American young woman Julia Williams, but those articles intentionally and successfully fueled the prejudice of whites in New Hampshire. The board members could not take this issue lightly.60

 

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