And they reminded the whites of Illinois and of their nation “that the Constitution of the ‘United States’ declares in its preamble that it was intended to establish justice, therefore opposed to injustice; to promote domestic tranquility, therefore opposed to domestic turmoil; to promote the general welfare, therefore opposed to the general misery.”
While they referenced the founding documents of their nation, they also referenced the writings of Bishop Richard Allen, who decades earlier had witnessed his church—the church he preached in—turn its back on its earlier values to create segregation and support slavery. The attendees wrote, “We the colored citizens of Illinois… feel ourselves deeply aggrieved by reasons of the cruel prejudice we are compelled to suffer in this our ‘native land,’ as dear to us as it is to white men—as the blood-bought inheritance of our ancestors.”55
They had indeed bled for the causes of liberty, justice, and equality. And more blood would soon be spilt. There was one more war to fight, one more war to win, for the Civil War was about to start.
African Americans heeded the call yet again, rising up all over the Northwest Territory states to join the fight. They rose up from their farms in Ohio, from the woods of Wisconsin, from the embattled states of Illinois and Indiana. Every single Northwest Territory state organized and sent at least one regiment of African-descended men to the front during the Civil War, and more were recruited to fight in regiments from other states.56
They rose up even though they were still fighting the war against equality, the war against them and their families, in their own home states. Those men who had tried to drive them out and destroy them were now being called Copperheads, and they were organizing by the thousands to attack African Americans, whites, and anyone else who stood for freedom and equality for all.57
African Americans rose up even though white Union soldiers of the Northwest Territory states might hate their existence and most white lawmakers continued to uphold prejudiced laws in their states. They rose up even though Union soldiers from Indiana aimed their guns at African Americans trying to cross the Ohio River, telling them that they would “fire upon them” if they came ashore, refusing to allow Indiana to become an “asylum” for freedom.58
They rose up to trample tyranny and to bring the blessings of liberty and equality along the length and breadth of their land.
The time has come for us… to speak out in our own defense upon the great cause of Human Liberty and Equal Rights. Yes! Yes! Let us assemble—let us come together, and pledge ourselves in the name of God and bleeding humanity and posterity, to organize, organize and organize, until the green-eyed monster Tyranny, shall be trampled under the feet of the oppressed, and Liberty and Equality shall embrace each other, and shall have scattered their blessings along the length and breadth of our land.
—Black Convention of the State of Michigan, 184359
Conclusion: “All men are created equal”
The Civil War was over.
There had been terrible losses. Many African American men from the Northwest Territory states had died. Fathers and husbands, sons and uncles, nephews and cousins, all lost to the cause of freedom. But oh, what they had won. Freedom for their fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, grandmothers and grandfathers, uncles and aunts, nephews and nieces, cousins and all—all fought for, all free.1
But the violence in the Northwest Territory states against African Americans had not ended just because a war was being fought. Reverend Jackson, the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) pastor back in Daniel and Nancy Lyles’s home community of Evansville, was stabbed to death in 1864 as he walked the streets of that town. His white murderers were caught but never charged.2
But slavery was finally ended. And in 1870 the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified. Equal voting rights had finally been won—or in many cases regained—for all men, regardless of the color of their skin. Charles Grier was a very old man, eighty-seven years old, when whites in Indiana went to the polls to decide whether to pass the Fifteenth Amendment. Many in Indiana did not want to see it ratified, and its passage was contested, but finally it passed.3
Charles was determined to vote before he died. He and Keziah had become free during that first fervor for freedom in their new nation, and he was determined to take advantage of this new wave of rights now sweeping the nation. There was no way to know whether this freedom would last.
Charles Grier died in 1872, just a few months short of his ninetieth birthday, but he had cast his vote. The last words in his obituary were, “It was a great pleasure to him that he enjoyed the privilege of a citizen, and went to the polls and voted.”4
Meanwhile Daniel and Nancy moved back to their land in Vanderburgh County. By 1870 their land, which they’d nearly been forced to give up, was worth $15,000, and they were working toward building a school for African American children on their property. And members of the Lyles family up in Gibson County worked hard to bring the railroad to their community in 1870, a community that was officially named Lyles Station in 1886.5
But while the war had ended slavery, the struggle for equality still continued in the Northwest Territory states. Already there was a backlash against the equality that had been won. Oberlin College, which had defied all the violence arising in the Northeast against African American education by opening its doors to women and men of all colors, started segregating African American students by the early 1900s.6
And Darke County, Ohio, home to the wealthy Clemens family who had helped found the Union Literary Institute, was not immune. In 1878 a group of men with white sheets over their heads surrounded the farmhouse of the African American farmer Stephen Wade while he and his three small children slept inside. Stephen was killed, and his children barely escaped. This was not Mississippi or South Carolina; this was Ohio, and even the local Democratic newspaper, infamous for its prejudice, stated, “No community can afford to silently acquiesce in murderous ‘Ku-Klux’ raids.”7
But by 1924 the front page of a Darke County newspaper proudly trumpeted the large and popular gathering of the Ku Klux Klan at the county fairgrounds, followed by a grand Klan parade through the streets of the county seat of Greenville, Ohio.8
By the 1920s the Klan was claiming hundreds of thousands of members in Indiana. This was a resurgence of an old movement. And one of the first cities to organize a chapter in the northern United States was Evansville, Indiana, that same city that had sent a fighting force to kill Daniel, Nancy, and their children.9
This was no mistake. The Klan was rising with great strength, threat, and violence in rural areas where African Americans had been successful pioneers. In 1930, a photo circulated around the nation of two young African American men lynched in a tree, surrounded by whites pointing, cheerful as partygoers. That lynching occurred in Marion, Indiana, in Grant County. And Grant County had been home to African American pioneers who had come there long before the Civil War, founding an AME church by 1849 and continuing to thrive on their farms for generations.10
Mobocrats.
Copperheads.
The Klan.
The Whitecaps.
It didn’t matter what they were called; they were just new names for old ideas. New names for old actions.
And they were still doing a lot of damage, long after the Civil War. For the Northwest Territory states no longer look like the map in this book. And we have to ask why—why there are so few of these farming settlements left.
We must not assume that the reasons for their disappearance are all benign. Some local historians in this region have been too quick to argue that people just left, gradually and peacefully vanishing from the land that they loved. Some may have, for cities called to young people of African descent just as they called to all young people. But many of these settlements disappeared for reasons that were far from gentle. For some farmers before the Civil War, it was the very real threat of the Fugitive Slave Law, enthusiastically supported by the state or local government. In some cases in the
twentieth century, the violence was so terrible and immense that African Americans were driven out of whole counties in Indiana.11
And prejudice had many ways to force people out. A church might be burned down, again and again. A county or state might refuse to build levies around rivers that frequently flooded African American farms and homes. Roads might go unrepaired. Farm loans might be denied, not just from local banks but from the US Department of Agriculture. Terrible harm could be done to African American children at a local hospital. And there was exclusion: from seed co-ops, from schools, from libraries, restaurants, and movie theaters.12
But that does not mean the accomplishments of these free African American pioneers should be ignored. These hundreds of settlements, these thousands of people, who over generations successfully rose on the land they worked and loved—they all deserve recognition and remembrance. These pioneers helped preserve liberty and equality, defending and growing it on America’s first free frontier, and they should never be forgotten.
They were there. Some still are.
Even though the Evansville newspaper triumphantly proclaimed in 1857 that the “obnoxious negroes” had all been removed and their land would now belong to white people, this was not the reality. While the violence in 1857 had a very real effect, the land still belonged to Daniel and Nancy Lyles, and they came back.
As late as the turn of the century, the long-term effects of antebellum black frontier and rural settlements in the Northwest Territory states could still be seen. W. E. B. Du Bois clearly showed their legacy in his 1906 study of African American farmers in America. He was the first to report the startling fact that African American farmers in this region owned more land of higher value than their counterparts in any other region of the country except the frontier West, where a few large single-owner ranches skewed the statistical results. Striking differences appear in the landholdings of black farmers in the South and the Midwest, according to Du Bois’s study. In the nineteenth century, the most important land for farmers was improved land, where trees had been cleared and the soil was treated to result in the best crop production. Du Bois found that at the turn of the century, African American landowning farmers in the South owned an average of 51.5 acres, of which 60.4 percent was improved, while African American farmers in the Northwest Territory states owned an average of 64.2 acres, of which 71.9 percent was improved land.13
At least two farming settlements in rural Michigan managed to continue to grow equality. Cass County continued to have integrated schools and by the 1890s had elected a wealthy African American farmer as a township supervisor. And Covert, Michigan, where the first African American was voted into political office in the 1860s. Like John Langston in Ohio, whites elected this African American pioneering farmer illegally, before black men had a right to even vote in that state.14
One of the secrets of these communities was that most of their residents kept alive the old belief that they lived in a nation that was founded on the ideal—if not the reality—that all men are created equal. And they never allowed themselves to forget that prejudice was a danger to all Americans and must be constantly battled.
These were not color-blind communities; they knew their history. But awareness of any kind of difference, whether hair follicles or faith, does not have to result in prejudice. And these communities proved that, while recognition of difference may be common, prejudice is a choice. They followed the very simple principle that the African American leaders of the 1844 Ohio convention advocated: “Do to others as you would have them do to you.”15
The famous white college basketball coach John Wooden probably never heard of these early equal rights advocates, but he was raised in the beliefs that African Americans cherished and preserved in his state. He grew up on a small struggling farm in rural Indiana. Taught well from an early age about the ideals of equality and fairness, Wooden went on to fight for integration in basketball. Working with the courageous African American Clarence Walker, their integrated team became champions. And Wooden became the winningest basketball coach of his time, proving—yet again—“what an incalculable advantage” true equality can bring.16
But Coach Wooden is well known, while the African Americans who pioneered his home state are not. There were so many more like the Grier, Elliott, Hawkins, Clemens, and Lyles families. They were heroic, but they were not unusual.
And they are not all gone. A few communities still exist despite all the prejudice that rose around them, some now over two hundred years old.
There are still Morrises living in Illinois, in the same region their ancestors came to in order to build and defend Fort Allison. People still gather to worship every Sunday at Jacob Hawkins’s church, Beulah AME, in the town of Washington in Daviess County, Indiana—despite the fact that his church was burned down repeatedly. And there are still African-descended residents in Darke County, Ohio, working with others to preserve the Clemens family legacy.17
Because of their work, the Clemens home still stands, massive and majestic, a mansion of brick and limestone as grand as any plantation home in the South. But this house sits among rolling cornfields in Ohio.
This was the home of James Clemens, who bought his first three hundred acres in Ohio from the federal government in 1822. But the Clemens family was not content with mere economic success, for they held the ideals of the American Revolution close to their hearts and were willing to be revolutionaries in order to uphold liberty and equality. They started and supported the Union Literary Institute and were active conductors on the Underground Railroad.18
The Clemens home now stands empty, its big windows shuttered with plywood as it patiently awaits renovations. Someday the house will be a museum, but for now it takes the generosity of a descendant of these pioneers to be invited in—to be able to witness the beauty and grandeur of a home that once belonged to a wealthy African American farming family in the Northwest Territory states.
First the door must be unlocked and pushed hard to open, the house breathing out a sigh of cool air smelling of old wood, dust, and damp stone.
There is no electricity, so it takes a flashlight’s flickering light to reveal the evidence of great wealth, one grand room after another, with massive fireplaces decorated with intricately hand-carved surrounds. One of those surrounds mimics the tiered shape of a Yoruba crown, a shape that can be seen in Washington, DC, in the building that houses the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.
In the gracious central entry hall of the Clemens home there is a slight roughness in the smooth plaster of the wall. This is where James Clemens scrawled his name in flowing script into the fresh plaster upon his home’s completion.
This home stands as a witness to a lost chapter of this nation’s past—the story of tens of thousands of African American pioneers making their way in the Northwest Territory states.
This book is their story, but only a tiny portion of it. There were so many other mansions, many now destroyed or lost.19
But there are still other communities, other home places, whether the homes are still there or not. Reunions are still held, and people are working to preserve the past and hold on to farms in the present. And they often call those places the “home place” because that is what they are. These are their roots, their land, where their ancestors settled generations before.20
Lyles Station is one of these communities. Frequent flooding has long since washed away many of the oldest buildings in the area, but Stanley Madison, a fifth-generation farmer in Gibson County, is continuing the long tradition started by Keziah and Charles Grier over two hundred years ago. He and the African American farmers around him work the good earth that their families have been working for generations, planting their seeds every spring in hope, despite all the many challenges they have faced.
And Stanley Madison has been working hard to preserve the history of that community.
Sometimes he visits Charles Grier’s grave. It is in a small ce
metery on a windy rise surrounded by farm fields. The stone is old and worn, but the beautifully carved weeping willow can still be seen. Was it chosen by Keziah, grieving the loss of Charles? They had been married for over fifty years when he died.
From that rise Stanley Madison can see for miles, the cleared fields stretching into the distance. Charles and Keziah Grier helped make that land, that county, that state, and the nation. As Stanley Madison says, “The soil, the land, is what we make it.”21
Anna-Lisa Cox is an award-winning historian of race relations in the Old Northwest Territory and states. She is currently a fellow at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. She holds an MPhil from the University of Cambridge and a PhD in American history from the University of Illinois. She has been the recipient of numerous awards for her research, including the Gilder Lehrman Foundation Fellowship, a Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellowship, and grants from the Spencer Foundation. She was a recent research associate at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, where her original research underpinned two historical exhibits, including the “Power of Place” exhibit on African American pioneers that is now the subject of this book. She is author of the award-winning A Stronger Kinship: One Town’s Extraordinary Story of Hope and Faith. She lives in Michigan.
Notes
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