17. Liberator, January 7, 1832, viewed on Accessible Archives; Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 210–213.
18. Edward Rugemer, “Caribbean Slave Revolts and the Origins of the Gag Rule: A Contest Between Abolitionism and Democracy, 1797–1835,” in Contesting Slavery: The Politics of Bondage and Freedom in the New American Nation, ed. John Craig Hammond and Matthew Mason (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 93–114. While Rugemer does an excellent job researching the ties between abolitionist activities and revolution, as well as describing the fears that enslavers had about abolitionist activities in the United States, he misses the point that most enslavers understood and debated at this time: that the best way to avoid the risk of revolution was to end slavery.
19. Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963); Walter C. Rucker, “‘I Will Gather All Nations’: Resistance, Culture, and Pan-African Collaboration in Denmark Vesey’s South Carolina,” Journal of Negro History 86, no. 2 (spring 2001): 132–147; Adalberto Aguirre Jr. and David V. Baker, “Slave Executions in the United States: A Descriptive Analysis of Social and Historical Factors,” Social Science Journal 36, no. 1 (1999): 1–31; Ford, Deliver Us, 361–375, 390–417.
20. Governor John Floyd Diary, November 21, 1831, quoted in Ford, Deliver Us, 362.
21. For more on the rhetoric and actions of prejudiced whites in the North during this period, see Chapter 6.
22. Antonio T. Bly, “Slave Literacy and Education in Virginia,” Encyclopedia Virginia, last modified July 11, 2017, accessed October 8, 2017, www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Slave_Literacy_and_Education_in_Virginia; Hilary Moss, Schooling Citizens: The Struggle for African American Education in AnteBellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 2–5.
23. Imes, “The Legal Status of Free Negroes,” 264; Ford, Deliver Us, 343–357, 390–417.
24. Imes, “The Legal Status of Free Negroes,” 262–264.
25. Leonard H. Sims, quoted in Ford, Deliver Us, 392.
26. Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), Table A.4.
27. For a brilliant overview of the contentious debate over prejudice and equality in the Old Northwest Territory state constitutional conventions, see Silvana Siddali, Frontier Democracy: Constitutional Conventions in the Old Northwest (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 265–308; Stephen Middleton, The Black Laws in the Old Northwest: A Documentary History (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993), 18–41.
28. Patterson, The Negro in Tennessee, 156.
29. Philip Foner and George Walker, Proceedings of the Black State Conventions, 1840–1865 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979), 1:233.
30. Keyssar, The Right to Vote, Table A.4.
31. Franklin, The Free Negro in North Carolina, 12–13, 18, 112–113.
32. John Chavis, quoted in Franklin, The Free Negro in North Carolina, 106.
33. More research is needed on how these Black Code bonds were used to strengthen inequality and unfairly target successful African Americans. A number of such incidents were recorded in various cities of the Northwest Territory states, including in Cincinnati and Detroit. Less research has been done on rural areas, although Ross F. Bagby in his PhD dissertation found the bonds being used as an excuse for organized mob violence against African Americans in rural Mercer County, Ohio, in the 1840s. See Ross Bagby, “The Randolph Slave Saga: Communities in Collision” (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 1998), 59–108.
34. Jefferson County, Indiana Deed Book P, 355, in Audrey C. Werle, “Research Notes on Indiana African American History,” M 792, William Henry Smith Memorial Library, Indiana Historical Society, Indianapolis, Indiana.
35. Abraham Bishop, quoted in Sinha, The Slave’s Cause, 59–60.
36. The census data in Indiana would seem to show that the Lyles family moved in waves over five years. Based on birth places, John and his family seem to have arrived first, around 1837, with Daniel and Nancy coming in the early 1840s. But given the inaccuracy of this census data, especially concerning birth information, they may all have come together.
37. For more on the challenges free African American farmers faced in Canada in the first half of the 1800s, see Anna-Lisa Cox, A Stronger Kinship: One Town’s Extraordinary Story of Hope and Faith (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2006).
38. See Chapter 6 for more on the violence rising in northern cities. For more on the creation of ghettos in cities of the Western world as a means of controlling and disempowering minority groups, see Mitchell Duneier, Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016).
39. “Resolution from Michigan’s Black Convention of 1843,” in Foner and Walker, Proceedings of the Black State Conventions, 1:189.
40. Ira Berlin termed these early Americans “Atlantic Creoles.” Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 15–77. Toni Morrison’s novel A Mercy gives a masterful description of what life was like for the people from many lands and of many ancestries living in seventeenth-century Virginia.
41. John Finger, Tennessee Frontiers: Three Regions in Transition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001).
42. While free African Americans had been moving onto the Old Northwest frontier since the 1700s, the majority did so between 1830 and 1850. In some areas of North Carolina and Virginia the number of people leaving during the height of this diaspora was notable. Stephen Vincent, in Southern Seed, Northern Soil: African-American Farm Communities in the Midwest, 1765–1900 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 38–39, describes this extraordinary out-migration and its local effects in North Carolina, noting that over half of free African American families left Greenville County between 1833 and 1835. Luther Porter Jackson, in Free Negro Labor and Property Holding in Virginia, 1830–1860 (New York: Atheneum, 1969), 25, gives evidence of a clear period of out-migration from Virginia in the 1830s.A large percentage of these free black pioneers seem to be free blacks from North Carolina and Virginia. By the early nineteenth century, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina had the highest number of free blacks of any of the southern slaveholding states. It could be that African Americans in Maryland did not move onto the frontier in such large numbers because they were primarily urban, while North Carolina’s African American population was primarily rural and Virginia also had a large rural African American population, but further research is needed on this question. See Loren Schweninger, “Prosperous Blacks in the South, 1790–1880,” American Historical Review 95, no. 1 (February 1990): 41–44; Vincent, Southern Seed, 13; Roger Peterson, African Americans Found in Owen County, IN Records, 1819–1880 (self-published, 1996), 27, 48; William Katz, Black Pioneers: An Untold Story (New York: Atheneum, 1999), 29; Franklin, The Free Negro in North Carolina, 7. For more on life for free African Americans in rural antebellum Virginia, see Melvin Ely, Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s Through the Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2004).
43. For more on the integrated nature of this pioneering movement to the Northwest territories and states, as well as the southern and northern whites who were coming to this region to fight for equality and freedom, see Vincent, Southern Seed; Brian Hackett, “‘Harboring Negroes’: Race, Religion, and Politics in North Carolina and Indiana” (PhD diss., Middle Tennessee State University, 2009); Lynn Marie Getz, “Partners in Motion: Gender, Migration, and Reform in Antebellum Ohio and Kansas,” Frontiers 27, no. 2 (2006): 102–135, 163.
44. Prejudice in the Northwest Territory states has often been blamed on southern whites. True, some white southern yeoman farmers seem to have come to the Northwest territories looking to escape the company of African Americans. And some wealthy and powerful southern whites worked hard to spread slavery acro
ss the Northwest Territory states. But an alternate southern culture—both black and white—was settling the Northwest Territory states. These southerners must also be considered when thinking about the identity of this region. My grateful thanks to Brother Abraham, OSB, for his thoughtful challenges to my assumptions about region, identity, and politics in antebellum America, which led me to explore this issue more thoroughly throughout this book.
45. Drew, “Mr. ____,” in Refugees from Slavery, 193–196.
46. Augustus Wattles, “Communications,” Philanthropist (1836–1843) 2, no. 25 (August 4, 1837): 1 (article was originally accessed on Proquest, October 11, 2013).
47. Vincent, Southern Seed, xi–xvii, 26–45.
48. Juliet E. K. Walker, The History of Black Business in America: Capitalism, Race, Entrepreneurship (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 95.
49. Darrel Dexter, “Free and American: A Study of Eleven Illinois Families of Color,” Free African Americans of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland and Delaware, last modified September 14, 2001, accessed October 8, 2017, www.freeafricanamericans.com/Illinois.htm.
50. US Department of the Interior, Census Office, Population Schedules of the Seventh Census of the United States, 1850, Ohio, Delaware County, Concord Township, 252; Fred Fowler and H. Georgiana Whyte, “Some Undistinguished Negroes,” Journal of Negro History 5, no. 4 (October 1920): 484–485.
51. US Department of the Interior, Census Office, Population Schedules of the Seventh Census of the United States, 1850, Ohio, Franklin County, Perry Township, 239; Fowler and Whyte, “Some Undistinguished Negroes,” 484–485. “Litchford” is the spelling of the name given by Georgiana Whyte, who knew the family, although “Letchford” is the spelling of the name in the convention records, while “Leitchford” is the spelling on the 1850 census.
52. Walker, Black Business, 95. For more on the corruption common in these federal land offices during this period, see Malcolm J. Rohrbough, The Land Office Business: The Settlement and Administration of American Public Lands, 1789–1837 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968).
53. Loren Schweninger, “The Fragile Nature of Freedom: Free Women of Color in the U.S. South,” in Beyond Bondage: Free Women of Color in the Americas, ed. David Gaspar and Darlene Hine (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 109. Kidnapping of free African Americans was a threat in both the North and the South. See Carol Wilson, Freedom at Risk: The Kidnapping of Free Blacks in America, 1780–1865 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994); Wilma King, Stolen Childhood, Second Edition: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 212–261; Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 140–141.
54. Thomas P. Weaver, “Life and Works,” Free African Americans of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland, and Delaware, 1922, www.freeafricanamericans.com/19th_4.htm.
55. Vincent, Southern Seed, 26–27. This story was passed down as an oral narrative within the settlement in Indiana. Oral narratives have especial potency within the African American community, particularly in the Northwest Territory states. Because the truth of their history was denied or ignored, these oral narratives kept important truths alive within these pioneering families and settlements, often with an astonishing level of accuracy. See my previous book A Stronger Kinship for a full discussion on the use of African American oral narratives.
56. Vincent, Southern Seed, 26–27.
57. Cox, Stronger Kinship, 53–54.
58. Foner and Walker, Proceedings of the Black State Conventions, 1:234.
Chapter 6: “Burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people”
1. The details of this Cincinnati race war of 1841 are drawn from Nikki Taylor, Frontiers of Freedom: Cincinnati’s Black Community, 1802–1868 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005), 20–25; John Langston, From the Virginia Plantation to the National Capital; or, The First and Only Negro Representative in Congress from the Old Dominion (New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1968 [1894]), 64; William F. Cheek and Aimee Lee Cheek, John Mercer Langston and the Fight for Black Freedom, 1829–65 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 59–63; Leonard Richards, Gentlemen of Property and Standing: Anti-abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 122–129; “Riot at Cincinnati,” Liberator, September 4, 1841; “Riot, Mob, Confusion and Bloodshed,” Liberator, September 17, 1841; “The Mob,” Liberator, September 17, 1841; “The Riot in Cincinnati,” Liberator, September 24, 1841; “Reign of Terror Again in Cincinnati,” Liberator, September 24, 1841; “Cincinnati Riot,” Liberator, October 1, 1841; “Selections from the Cincinnati Philanthropist,” Liberator, October 1, 1841. In all, William Lloyd Garrison published over twenty-four articles in 1841 about the battle in Cincinnati. In some of these cases Garrison was reprinting articles originally published in Ohio and New York papers, doing his best to get the information to his readers and spread word of the attack on African Americans in Cincinnati. On October 1 he posted an article stating that he, Wendell Phillips, and their Massachusetts Anti-slavery Society had raised and sent $100 to the Cincinnati abolitionist newspaper the Philanthropist, whose press had been destroyed by the mob. (All Liberator articles accessed on Ebscohost’s website between 2015 and 2017. Grateful thanks to my research intern, Miriam Roth, who helped me find many of these articles.)
2. Steve C. Gordon, “From Slaughterhouse to Soap-Boiler: Cincinnati’s Meat Packing Industry, Changing Technologies, and the Rise of Mass Production, 1825–1870,” IA: The Journal of the Society for Industrial Archeology 16, no. 1 (1990): 55–67; Margaret Walsh, “Pork Packing as a Leading Edge of Midwestern Industry, 1835–1875,” Agricultural History 51, no. 4 (1977): 702–717.
3. Taylor, Frontiers, 28–79. Nikki Taylor shows that African American leaders courageously managed extraordinary levels of organizing in the face of white threats of violence in order to make escape plans to Canada for many of the African American citizens of Cincinnati.
4. Numerous historians over the years have identified these patterns of white prejudice against African Americans, most recently Ibram X. Kendi in his magisterial Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Nation Books, 2016).
5. Shane White, Prince of Darkness: The Untold Story of Jeremiah G. Hamilton, Wall Street’s First Black Millionaire (Gordonsville, VA: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Edward Williams Clay, engraver, “Life in Philadelphia, Plate 4 / C. fecit,” Philadelphia, published by W. Simpson, 1828, Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/item/2012647352. For more on the earliest northern roots of bigoted American cartoons, see John Wood Sweet, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730–1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 365–392.
6. Taylor, Frontiers, 28–79.
7. Langston, From the Virginia Plantation to the National Capital, 64; Major James Wilkerson, “The Midnight Cry: The Parable of the Great Supper” (Philadelphia: Quinn, Card and Job Printer, 1859), accessed on Readex, Series: American Broadsides and Ephemera. First series: no. 10550.
8. Wilkerson, “The Midnight Cry”; James Wilkerson, Wilkerson’s History of His Travels and Labors, in the United States, as a Missionary, in… Particular, That of the Union Seminary (Columbus, Ohio, 1861).
9. Wilkerson, “The Midnight Cry”; Wilkerson, History of His Travels.
10. For more on James Wilkerson’s grandfather, see Andro Linklater, An Artist in Treason: The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson (New York: Walker, 2009).
11. Wilkerson, History of His Travels, 36; Wilkerson, “The Midnight Cry.”
12. Wilkerson would mention his connection to the Joseph story often in his writings and wrote a hymn on the theme. See Wilkerson, “The Midnight Cry”; Major James Wilkerson, The Midnight Cry & Millennium Dawn: A Cry from the Forest or Wilderness—Prepare to Meet Thy God, O Israel! (New Orleans, 1865), Houghton
Library, Harvard University.
13. Wilkerson, History of His Travels, 36.
14. Ibid., 13.
15. Wilkerson, “The Midnight Cry.”
16. Richard Anthony Lewis, “Richard Clague Jr,” Encyclopedia of Louisiana, ed. David Johnson, Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, 2010–, last modified January 11, 2011, accessed June 30, 2017, www.knowlouisiana.org/entry/richard-clague-jr.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.; Wilkerson, “The Midnight Cry.”
19. Much has been written on large-scale manumissions in antebellum America, but as late as the 1850s, southern enslavers continued trying to personally end enslavement. See Ross Bagby, “The Randolph Slave Saga: Communities in Collision” (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 1998), 59–108; Carrie Eldridge, Cabell County’s Empire for Freedom: The Manumission of Sampson Sanders’ Slaves (Bowie, MD: Willow Bend Books, 1999).
20. Wilkerson, “The Midnight Cry.”
21. Ibid.
22. Undated petition by the residents of Cass and Van Buren counties (c. 1835), Box 223, File 7, Group 44, State of Michigan Archives, Lansing, Michigan. I am deeply grateful to Debian Marty for the extraordinary work she has done to tell the history of abolitionism in Michigan and who kindly identified and dated this document I found in an uncatalogued collection.
23. Lacy K. Ford, Deliver Us from Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 496–497.
24. Ibid., 481–503.
25. Wilkerson, “The Midnight Cry.”
26. Ibid. For the full record of Clague’s work with Pollock, see “Pollock, Carlile Indexes, 1817–1845,” Research Center and Historical Documents, Clerk of the Civil District Court for the Parish of Orleans, www.orleanscivilclerk.com/pollock.htm.
27. Wilkerson, “The Midnight Cry.”
28. Ibid.; Wilkerson, History of His Travels.
29. Augustus Wattles, “Communications,” Philanthropist (1836–1843) 2, no. 25 (August 4, 1837): 1 (article was originally accessed on Proquest, October 11, 2013).
The Bone and Sinew of the Land Page 27
