4. Mattie Marie Harper, “French Africans in Ojibwe Country: Negotiating Marriage, Identity and Race, 1780–1890” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2012); Kenneth W. Porter, “Negroes and the Fur Trade,” Minnesota History 15, no. 4 (1934): 421–433.
5. Section 3 of Indiana Territory survey, Township No. 5 north of the Base Line, No. 10 west of the 2nd meridian, surveyed by Daniel Sullivan in 1807, under the authority of Ebenezer Buckingham in 1805. “Indiana Township Maps, Facsimiles 1805–1807 Surveys,” Byron R. Lewis Historical Library at Vincennes University. From photostats in the Indiana Division of the Indiana State Library, Indiana. I am grateful to Lishawna Taylor and Richard Day for sharing this information with me.
6. “Primary Documents in American History: Northwest Ordinance,” Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/ourdocs/northwest.html.
7. Rohrbough, The Land Office Business, 295.
8. Isabella Oliver, “On Slavery,” 1805, reprinted in James G. Basker et al., Early American Abolitionists: A Collection of Anti-slavery Writings, 1760–1820 (New York: Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, 2005), 203–208.
9. Phillis Wheatley, “To the Right Honorable William—Earl of Dartmouth” (1773), in Phillis Wheatley, The Poems of Phillis Wheatley, ed. Julian D. Mason (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989). It is important to note that while both Isabella Oliver and Phillis Wheatley were clear that freedom and equality should be the common rights of both the European and the African descended, they were still hostile toward Native Americans, whom they—and many Americans—viewed as savages fit only to be killed or violently removed from the land.
10. For more on Phillis Wheatley, see Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: America’s First Black Poet and Her Encounters with the Founding Fathers (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2003). For more on pro-slavery patriots, see Alfred Blumrosen and Ruth Blumrosen, Slave Nation: How Slavery United the Colonies and Sparked the American Revolution (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2005). For the role of prejudice in binding together white Revolutionary War soldiers, see the excellent book by Robert Parkinson, The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016).
11. I am grateful to Danielle Allen’s insights into the Declaration of Independence and its support of equality, brilliantly explored in Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality (New York: Liveright, 2015), which informed both this chapter and this book.
12. The study of slavery and race during the American Revolution is a large field of study. Some of the sources that have informed this section are Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016); John Wood Sweet, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730–1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Stephen Middleton, The Black Laws: Race and the Legal Process in Early Ohio (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005); Paul Finkelman, Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1996); Charles Rappleye, Sons of Providence: The Brown Brothers, the Slave Trade, and the American Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006); Gary B. Nash, Race and Revolution (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1990); Stephen David Kantrowitz, More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829–1889 (New York: Penguin Press, 2012); Robin D. G. Kelley and Earl Lewis, eds., To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Sylvia R. Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991); Gene A. Smith, The Slaves’ Gamble: Choosing Sides in the War of 1812 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004).
13. I use the word “prejudice” instead of “racism” to be historically accurate. “Prejudice” was the most common term used in the late 1700s and early 1800s to describe the problem of discrimination against people of African descent, or discrimination and unjust treatment—especially disenfranchisement—of any group of people. We might use the term “racism” today, but it was a word invented in the twentieth century and was created to describe damaging ideas about supposed essential and negative differences in people that would warrant their segregation or even extermination. See Francisco Bethencourt, Racisms: From the Crusades to the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013).
14. James Otis and Richard Dana, The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved (Boston: Printed and sold by Edes and Gill, in Queen-Street, 1764), Evans Early American Imprint Collection, accessed October 4, 2016, https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/evans/N07655.0001.001/1:5?rgn=div1;view=fulltext.
15. Charles de Secondat Montesquieu et al., The Spirit of the Laws (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1900), 284–285.
16. Ibid., 284–286. Montesquieu presents this story as a way of explaining why skin color should not be used as an excuse to enslave people. Given that his experience of people with red hair in Europe would have been of people with very pale skin, this story almost certainly implies that it was people with white skin who were killed out of prejudice.
17. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and William L. Andrews, Pioneers of the Black Atlantic: Five Slave Narratives from the Enlightenment, 1772–1815 (Washington, DC: Civitas, 1998), 210.
18. For more on the creation of the idea of human and equal rights, including during this revolutionary period, see Lynn Avery Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008).
19. Sweet, Bodies Politic, 251–253; Middleton, The Black Laws, 10.
20. Thomas Jefferson, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson: Being His Autobiography, Correspondence, Reports, Messages, Addresses, and Other Writings, Official and Private. Published by the Order of the Joint Committee of Congress on the Library, from the Original Manuscripts, Deposited in the Department of State, ed. H. A. Washington (Washington, DC: Taylor & Maury, 1853), 23; Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: Norton, 2005), 34–35; John Hope Franklin and Alfred A. Moss, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994), 79–81. For more on Thomas Jefferson and his many contradictions on the subject of slavery and racial equality, see Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009); Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf, “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs”: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2017).
21. Paul Finkelman, Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1996); Parkinson, The Common Cause; Sinha, The Slave’s Cause, 34–64.
22. Sinha, The Slave’s Cause, 65–76, quote from p. 43. While there have been many good books written on African-descended people during the revolutionary period, Manisha Sinha’s offers a detailed and compelling overview of the struggle for freedom and equality during the Revolution and afterward, and I am indebted to her excellent work. See also Daniel Littlefield, “Revolutionary Citizens,” in Kelley and Lewis, To Make Our World Anew; Gates and Andrews, Pioneers of the Black Atlantic.
23. Sinha, The Slave’s Cause, 12–24; James Birney, “American Churches, the Bulwarks of American Slavery,” Philanthropist (1836–1843), November 18, 1840, 1. James Birney also published this information in a pamphlet, and it was later reprinted in England.
24. For an important study of the importance of the slave trade in New York compared to Charleston, see Melissa Maestri, “The Atlantic Web of Bondage: Comparing the Slave Trades of New York City and Charleston, South Carolina” (PhD diss., University of Delaware, 2015). For more on the length and results of this early emancipation, see Ira Berlin, The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).
25. Sinha, The Slav
e’s Cause, 86; John Hope Franklin, The Free Negro in North Carolina, 1790–1860 (New York: Russell & Russell, 1969), 14–15. The number of people freed during this period is very difficult to gauge accurately. For more on the difficulty of counting manumitted people during this period, see Andrew Levy, The First Emancipator (New York: Random House, 2005).
26. Littlefield, “Revolutionary Citizens,” 103–168.
27. Middleton, The Black Laws, 25.
28. This understanding of voting rights is also clear in that the wordings were changed in subsequent years as whites decided to exclude African Americans from the vote.
29. Franklin, The Free Negro in North Carolina, 12–13; C. Perry Patterson, The Negro in Tennessee, 1790–1865 (Austin: University of Texas, 1922), 163–166. In 1776 North Carolina opened the vote to free people of color; Tennessee followed suit in 1796.
30. Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2009), Table A.4. I have not included Georgia in this total, even though it removed “white” from the definition of who could vote in 1789, out of an excess of caution. Keyssar notes that he was not able to find any evidence in secondary sources of African Americans voting in that state. However, given that there were wealthy African-descended plantation owners in Georgia at this time, further research is needed on voting rights in Georgia during this early period when they were granted.
31. Sinha, The Slave’s Cause, 65–96.
32. Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), 1–7, 168–169, 142, 163–164.
33. Ibid., 169.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid., 170.
36. Jennifer Randazzo, “Introduction,” in Basker et al., Early American Abolitionists, 217–220.
37. Basker et al., Early American Abolitionists, 234.
38. Basker et al., Early American Abolitionists, 235, 237.
39. Ibid.
40. Randazzo, “Introduction,” 217–241.
41. “Northern Involvement in the Slave Trade,” Tracing Center, accessed July 10, 2017, www.tracingcenter.org/resources/background/northern-involvement-in-the-slave-trade. For more on the financial power and importance of the Rhode Island slave trade in the early United States, see Charles Rappleye, Sons of Providence: The Brown Brothers, the Slave Trade, and the American Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006).
42. Keyssar, The Right to Vote, Table A.4.
43. Middleton, The Black Laws, 7–40; Jacob Piatt Dunn, Slavery Petitions and Papers (Indianapolis: Bowen-Merrill Company, 1894), 74.
44. Middleton, The Black Laws, 14; John D. Barnhart and Dorothy Lois Riker, Indiana to 1816: The Colonial Period (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1971), 347; Robert M. Owens, Mr. Jefferson’s Hammer: William Henry Harrison and the Origins of American Indian Policy (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007), 68–72. Robert Owens’s book offers an excellent overview of William Henry Harrison’s petitions and actions during this territorial period.
45. Dubois, Avengers of the New World, 196.
46. Ibid., 4, 284–286.
47. Ibid., 284–286. My grateful thanks to Michael Rapport and Jonathan Sperber for their generous assistance in helping me to connect the various revolutions in the United States, France, and Haiti, the advancements within those revolutions toward ending slavery and moving toward racial equality, and the subsequent backlash against those advancements.
48. Keyssar, The Right to Vote, Table A.4. Also in 1802, Thomas Jefferson made sure that Washington, DC, barred African Americans from voting; see Franklin and Moss, From Slavery to Freedom, 153.
49. It was exceeded only by the island of Saint-Domingue, otherwise known as Haiti, whose enslaved people had waged a successful revolutionary war to free themselves. See Dubois, Avengers of the New World.
Chapter 3: “The pursuit of Happiness”
1. Census records for this period of early statehood are often incomplete and full of errors. Census takers in southern Indiana working on the 1820 census would often separate African Americans entirely from the regular census pages, placing them at the end on a separate sheet and categorizing them as indentured/enslaved and free. See pp. 256–257 of Gibson County, Indiana Federal Census for 1820 (where the website Ancestry.com mistakenly records Charles Grier as white). Because of these irregularities, it is difficult to know just how many children the Griers had at this time, especially since death was common among infants and children on the frontier during this period. But the 1840 census shows that the Griers had nine children still living, four boys and five girls. And the 1850 census shows that Malinda was their eldest child, born in 1818 (US Census Bureau, 1840 Federal Census Records, Montgomery Township, Gibson County, 107). All US federal census records accessed through the website Ancestry.com, January 1, 2015, to October 1, 2017.
2. Denise Gigante, The Keats Brothers: The Life of John and George (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011), 226. Gigante offers a fascinating and detailed account of how English pioneers viewed the Old Northwest frontier region in the early 1800s.
3. US Census Bureau, 1850 Federal Census, Patoka Township, Gibson County, Indiana.
4. E. S. Abdy, Journal of a Residence and Tour in the United States of North America, from April, 1833, to October, 1834 (London: J. Murray, 1835), 2:366. Abdy recorded a thriving African American farming settlement just outside Madison, Indiana, where African Americans settled on some of the best land in the region in the 1810s. He writes, “While they were clearing their farms of the timber, they were unmolested; but now that they have got the land into a good state of cultivation, and are rising in the world, the avarice of the white man casts a greedy eye on their luxuriant crops; and his pride is offended at the decent appearance of their sons and daughters.”
5. Benjamin Lundy, Letter Box 1, Folder 4, Benjamin Lundy Papers, 1821–1904 (MSS 112, Ohio History Center, Columbus).
6. Emma Lou Thornbrough, The Negro in Indiana Before 1900: A Study of a Minority (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1957), 21.
7. Morris Birkbeck and George Flower, History of the English Settlement in Edwards County, Illinois, Founded in 1817 and 1818 (Chicago: Fergus Print. Co., 1882); Nathan Jérémie-Brink, “Transnational Frontiers of Freedom: An 1823 Black Emigration from the Illinois Prairie to the Republic of Haiti” (paper presented at the African Americans in the Nineteenth-Century West Research Symposium, Saint Louis University, Saint Louis, Missouri, May 20–21, 2016).
8. Birkbeck and Flower, History of the English Settlement, 258–260.
9. Ibid., 265.
10. For a good overview of the creation of the ACS and its various motivations, see Nicholas Guyatt, Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation (New York: Basic Books, 2016). For more on African Americans’ resistance to the colonization movement and the movement’s rise in the Northwest Territory states, see Ousmane K. Power-Greene, Against Wind and Tide: The African American Struggle Against the Colonization Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2014). For the colonization movement in Indiana, see Racquel Henry, “The Colonization Movement in Indiana, 1820–1864: A Struggle to Remove the African American” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 2008).
11. Lacy K. Ford, Deliver Us from Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 70–73; Cheryl J. LaRoche, Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad: The Geography of Resistance (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 106–110.
12. Ford, Deliver Us from Evil, 9–10.
13. Jérémie-Brink, “Transnational Frontiers of Freedom”; Birkbeck and Flower, History of the English Settlement, 266.
14. David Walker and Peter P. Hinks, David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 59.
15. Jérémie-Brink, “Transnational Frontiers of Freedom”
; Birkbeck and Flower, History of the English Settlement, 269–273.
16. David Fiske, Solomon Northup’s Kindred: The Kidnapping of Free Citizens Before the Civil War (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2016); George Rogers Taylor, The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860 (New York: Harper & Row, 1951), 56–69.
17. For excellent overviews of this forced migration west, see Ira Berlin, The Making of African America (New York: Viking, 2010); Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013). For more on the importance of the Ohio River as a border between slavery and freedom, see Matthew Salafia, Slavery’s Borderland: Freedom and Bondage Along the Ohio River (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).
18. John Wood Sweet, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730–1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 251–253. For more on the growth of slavery during this period, see Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014).
19. Keziah Grier is listed as being unable to read and write on the 1850 federal census.
20. Senator William Pinkney, quoted in Jeremy Tewell, A Self-Evident Lie: Southern Slavery and the Threat to American Freedom (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2013), 131–132.
21. Ibid.
22. Henry Barnard and Moses B. Goodwin, History of Schools for the Colored Population (New York: Arno Press, 1969), 195–199.
23. For more on African-descended people in South Carolina, see Peter Wood’s groundbreaking work, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 Through the Stono Rebellion (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974).
24. Thornbrough, The Negro in Indiana, 11–12; John D. Barnhart and Dorothy Lois Riker, Indiana to 1816: The Colonial Period (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1971), 347.
25. Raymond H. Hammes, ed., Cahokia, St. Clair County Record Book B, 1800–1813 (Springfield: Illinois Research Center for Colonial and Territorial Studies, 1982), 13; Robert Owens, Mr. Jefferson’s Hammer: William Henry Harrison and the Origins of American Indian Policy (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007), 68–72.
The Bone and Sinew of the Land Page 25
