36. David Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights (New York: Vintage, 2006), 60.
37. “Deeply Interesting Facts”; Goodheart, Abolitionist, 68.
38. Given Clarissa Wright’s standing within the Ohio and national abolitionist movement, as well as the fame of the Wright family in general within this movement, news of her murder would have been covered by those presses, and there are no such reports.
39. Blanche Coggan, Prior Foster, Pioneer Afro-American Educator, First Afro-American to Found and Incorporate an Educational Institution in the Northwest Territory, Woodstock Manual Labor Institute, Addison, Lenawee County, Michigan (Lansing, MI: J. P. Kaechele, 1969); Richard Sisson, Christian K. Zacher, and Andrew R. L. Cayton, The American Midwest: An Interpretive Encyclopedia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 854. Prior Foster opened his school close to the white abolitionist Laura Smith Haviland, who was also planning on opening a school for African Americans. Unfortunately, allies of Haviland seem to have spread rumors about Foster’s school and its finances. These rumors were later proven untrue but did irreparable damage to Foster’s school (Coggan, Prior Foster, 7–8). See also Shelly McCoy Grissom, “An Examination of a Woman’s Life Work: Laura Smith Haviland and the Founding of the Raisin Institute” (PhD diss., Cappella University, 2007).
40. African Methodist Episcopal Church Review 8, no. 4 (April 1892), accessed October 17, 2017, http://dbs.ohiohistory.org/africanam/html /page4c71-2.html?ID=2372&Current=P394&View=Text; William Thompson, “Eleutherian Institute,” Indiana Magazine of History 19, no. 2 (1923): 109–131. Founded around 1849 the Eleutherian Institute was for African Americans only, but it was mixed gender. It faced violent opposition, and some of its first buildings were burned by local prejudiced whites. A mixed-race couple who moved from Mississippi and started supporting the school also found themselves under attack. However, the school’s founders and funders persevered, and by 1860 the school was teaching around 150 students. M. W. Montgomery, History of Jay County, Indiana (Chicago: Printed for the author by Church, Goodman & Cushing, 1864), 191–195; Carter G. Woodson, The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861 (New York: Arno Press, 1968), 294. While some historians have made much of Liber College as a pioneering integrated school, founded in Jay County, Indiana, in 1853, records from the time reveal that the school only ever accepted one African American student. When that student was accepted, most of the school’s board members and donators were so opposed to his admission that they resigned and withdrew their funding.
41. J. S. H., “Our Coloured Population,” Friend; a Religious and Literary Journal (December 1840), 100; Richard Folk, “Black Man’s Burden in Ohio, 1849–1863” (PhD diss., University of Toledo, 1972), 8–14; Mary Ann Brown, “Vanished Black Rural Communities in Western Ohio,” Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture, I, ed. Camille Wells (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987), 97–113. Unfortunately, as Augustus Wattles tried to raise funds for their school, he or his allies seem to have decided it would help their cause if they asserted that it was Augustus Wattles himself who had founded the settlement. Land deeds showing African Americans buying land there long before Wattles did disprove this. Other white abolitionists who visited Mercer County and some contemporary newspaper editors also corrected this claim. As the editor of the Massachusetts Abolitionist wrote in May 1839, “We presume the Witness is not exactly correct here. The colored people have purchased land for themselves [original emphasis].… The ‘tract’ which we think cannot be extensive is solely for the manual labor school. Brother Wattles encourages individuality and independence, and not a common-stock settlement or any thing of the sort” (“Anchoring in the Soil,” Massachusetts Abolitionist, May 30, 1839, accessed via the Slavery and Abolition, 1789–1887 website of the University of Arkansas). Later historians seem not to have recognized these facts or corrections, however, and some perpetrated the myth of a “utopian” community for African Americans paternalistically founded by the white Wattles.
42. Woodson, The Education of the Negro, 294; J. S. H., “Our Coloured Population,” 100.
43. Ross Bagby, “The Randolph Slave Saga: Communities in Collision” (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 1998). Because of the amount of attention paid to the Underground Railroad and the communities that whites tried to create as homes for large groups of people newly released from bondage, this study avoids focusing on those two aspects of life for African Americans in the Northwest Territory states. For overviews of two manumission settlements, see Ross Bagby, “The Randolph Slave Saga,” and Carrie Eldridge, Cabell County’s Empire for Freedom: The Manumission of Sampson Sanders’ Slaves (Bowie, MD: Willow Bend Books, 1999). For African Americans’ role in the Underground Railroad in the Northwest Territory states, see Cheryl LaRoche, Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad: The Geography of Resistance (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013); Keith Griffler, Front Line of Freedom: African Americans and the Forging of the Underground Railroad in the Ohio Valley (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004).
44. Quoted in Bagby, “The Randolph Slave Saga,” 164–165. Bagby points out that while the white men who wrote this document claimed first right and settlement to that county, most of them had only settled there after 1840, including the two county officials and Congressman Sawyer, long after the African American pioneers had settled that frontier and established good farms there. This pattern of prejudiced whites asserting their roots in a community and attacking white and black equal rights proponents as “outsiders,” even though they were often there before the prejudiced whites, has a long history in the North in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is a social pattern well worth more study.
45. Frazer Wilson, History of Darke County, Ohio: From Its Earliest Settlement to the Present Time in Two Volumes: Also Biographical Sketches of Many Representative Citizens of the County (Greenville, OH: Darke County Genealogical Society, 1997 [1914]), 554–555; ULIPS, Preservation Plan, 13–49; Smothers, “Union Literary Institute National Register of Historic Places Nomination”; US Department of the Interior, Census Office, Population Schedules of the Seventh Census of the United States, 1850, Indiana, Randolph County and Ohio, Darke County; Deborah Rotman, African-American and Quaker Farmers in East Central Indiana: Social, Political and Economic Aspects of Life in Nineteenth-Century Rural Communities: Randolph County, Indiana (Muncie, IN: Archaeological Resources Management Service, Ball State University, 1998), 46–48.
46. While the mechanical reaper/harvester machines were invented in the United States in the 1830s, they were not utilized in the Northwest Territory states until the 1850s, which meant that there was an intensive need for labor during harvest time, especially for grain. For more on farming in Ohio and the Northwest Territory states at this time, see Graeme Quick and Wesley Fisher Buchele, The Grain Harvesters (St. Joseph, MI: American Society of Agricultural Engineers, 1978); C. H. Danhof, Change in Agriculture: The Northern United States, 1820–1870 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), 228–250. My thanks to Richard Roosenberg of Tillers International for sharing this secondary information and for the generous sharing of his hands-on research into the labor involved in harvesting grain with a variety of scythes.
47. Darrel Dexter, “Arthur and Patience Hawley Allen,” Free African Americans, last modified November 2004, accessed October 17, 2017, www.freeafricanamericans.com/free_AAllen.htm.
48. “Conventions by Year,” Colored Conventions: Bringing Nineteenth-Century Black Organizing to Life, accessed October 17, 2017, http://coloredconventions.org/convention-by-year. For more information on these conventions, please see this excellent website. I am very grateful to the team at the University of Delaware for creating this important website on the antebellum black convention movement—they are truly continuing the work of these early American activists.
49. Derrick Spires, “Imagining a State of Fellow Citizens: Early African American Politics
of Publicity in the Black State Conventions,” in Early African American Print Culture, ed. Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 274–289.
50. Ibid.
51. “Address of the State Convention,” Palladium of Liberty, Columbus, Ohio, November 13, 1844, front page, accessed at http://coloredconventions.org/files/original/945c2778ed57366af6d37c528e85f036.pdf.
52. While by no means complete, this table gives a sense of the involvement of African American farmers as leaders in state conventions. Attendees were rarely mentioned by name, so these are only people in leadership positions. I am greatly grateful to Tsione Wolde-Michael for her assistance in researching these convention attendees.
Cursory List of African American Leaders of Midwestern Black State Conventions with Land Holdings Worth More Than $1,000
Name: Rev. William Chandler
Town/Township/County: Lost Creek, Vigo
Value of Land (Census Year): $3,000 (1850)
Conventions Attended: Indiana, 1851
Name: Noah Nooks
Town/Township/County: Milton/Jackson
Value of Land (Census Year): $3,000 (1850)
Conventions Attended: Ohio, 1849
Name: Lewis Adams
Town/Township/County: Concord/Champaign
Value of Land (Census Year): $1,500 (1850)
Conventions Attended: Ohio, 1849, 1852
Name: John Mercer Langston
Town/Township/County: Brownhelm/Lorain
Value of Land (Census Year): $4,590 (N/A*)
Conventions Attended: Ohio, 1849–1865
* John Mercer Langston is not recorded in the 1850 or the 1860 census in Lorain County, so land values are taken from local records found in William F. Cheek and Aimee Lee Cheek, John Mercer Langston and the Fight for Black Freedom, 1829–65 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 179–180, 244.
Name: Thomas Brown
Town/Township/County: Russia/Lorain
Value of Land (Census Year): $1,000 (1850)
Conventions Attended: Ohio, 1850
Name: George Adams
Town/Township/County: Wayne/Pickaway
Value of Land (Census Year): $1,800 (1850)
Conventions Attended: Ohio, 1850
Name: P. Letchford/Plesant Leitchford
Town/Township/County: Perry/Franklin
Value of Land (Census Year): $8,000 (1850)
Conventions Attended: Ohio, 1850
Name: Cyrus King
Town/Township/County: Green/Clinton
Value of Land (Census Year): $4,120 (1850)
Conventions Attended: Ohio, 1852
Name: David Barnett
Town/Township/County: Pebble/Pike
Value of Land (Census Year): $1,000 (1860)
Conventions Attended: Ohio, 1852
Name: William Morgan
Town/Township/County: Monroe/Logan
Value of Land (Census Year): $1,160 (1860)
Conventions Attended: Ohio, 1852
Sources: Philip Foner and George Walker, ed., Proceedings of the Black State Conventions, 1840–1865 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979), 1:176–177, 218–238, 241–256, 274–294; US Department of the Interior, Census Office, Population Schedules of the Seventh Census of the United States, 1850, Ohio, Vigo County, Lost Creek Township, 174; Ohio, Jackson County, Milton Township, 314; Ohio, Champaign County, Concord Township, 318; Ohio, Lorain County, Russia Township, 259; Ohio, Pickaway County, Wayne Township, 127; Ohio, Perry County, Franklin Township, 239; US Department of the Interior, Census Office, Population Schedules of the Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, Ohio, Clinton County, Green Township, 166; Ohio, Pike County, Pebble Township, 428; Ohio, Logan County, Monroe Township, 179. (All census records were sourced from Ancestry.com [Provo, Utah], Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2009, http: //search.ancestrylibrary.com/group/usfedcen/US_Federal_Census_Collection.aspx.)
53. Foner and Walker, Proceedings of the Black State Conventions, 1:232–233.
54. Ibid.; North Star, November 10, 1848, in Smothers, “Union Literary Institute National Register of Historic Places Nomination.” For more on Douglass’s daughter, Rosetta, and her experience in the schools of Rochester, New York, see Leigh Fought, Women in the World of Frederick Douglass (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 156–158.
55. See map at the beginning of this book.
56. Dana Weiner, Race and Rights: Fighting Slavery and Prejudice in the Old Northwest, 1830–1870 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2013), 159.
57. Weiner, Race and Rights, 151–162; “Madison County,” Early Black Settlements, Indiana Historical Society, accessed September 13, 2017, www.indianahistory.org/our-collections/reference/early-black-settlements/madison-county#.WkvFZsaZM0Q; US Department of the Interior, Census Office, Population Schedules of the Sixth Census of the United States, 1840, Indiana, Madison County. As these sources make clear, there were a few African Americans living in Madison County by 1840, but none of them were landowning farmers, and one was actually held enslaved. By 1840 African Americans had proven themselves eager to settle and farm good land in the lower Northwest Territory states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Research in Indiana on rural African American antebellum settlements has shown that if, by 1850, a county in that state did not have any African American farmers, it was because of the concerted effort of whites in those counties to use the prejudiced laws of their state—and often violence as well—to drive out the African Americans who were there when the prejudiced whites arrived and to repel any further African American settlers. Further research in local records for the enforcement of prejudiced Black Code laws, as well as the use of violence, is needed to determine the extent of this pattern. However, historians of this region during this settlement period should assume that if by 1850 a rural county in Ohio, Indiana, or Illinois had no African American residents, some form of prejudice was at work during a period when so many African American farmers were intent upon integrating those states. I am grateful to Wilma Gibbs Moore, head archivist of the Indiana Historical Society’s African American collection, for spearheading this important research in Indiana and making this point to me.
58. ULIPS, “Constitution,” Board of Managers’ Secretary Book, 26–45.
59. Ibid.
60. Genevieve Haas, “The Brief, but Courageous Life of the Noyes Academy,” Dartmouth Life, December 2005, accessed October 17, 2017, www.dartmouth.edu/~dartlife/archives/15-5/noyes.html.
61. ULIPS, “Constitution,” Board of Managers’ Secretary Book, 44.
62. Ibid.
63. Ibid., 42.
Chapter 8: “For taking away our Charters,…”
1. Cheryl LaRoche, Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad: The Geography of Resistance (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 53–54, 76–77, 118–121; William Still, The Underground Rail Road: A Record of Facts, Authentic Narratives, Letters, &c. (Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1872), 27–29 (accessed via HathiTrust on the Harvard HOLLIS website).
2. Emma Lou Thornbrough, The Negro in Indiana Before 1900: A Study of a Minority (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1957), 114–115.
3. LaRoche, Free Black Communities, 118–121; Thornbrough, The Negro in Indiana, 114–115.
4. Thornbrough, The Negro in Indiana, 106–118; Silvana Siddali, Frontier Democracy: Constitutional Conventions in the Old Northwest (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 161, 240, 283, 378. There has long been an assumption among most historians that these prejudiced laws in the Northwest Territory states did not matter very much or had little effect on African Americans in those states. To be fair, many of these historians assumed that there were very few African Americans living in that region, so there were few people to be affected by these laws. Others have argued that since state populations of African Americans did not massively decline in response to these laws, these prejudiced laws must not have been upheld very consistently. But histori
ans have not fully investigated just how many people were discouraged or actually prohibited from settling in those states and can never know how many more may have come if those laws had not been passed. Until the local records of antebellum African American settlements can be carefully studied in the Northwest Territory states, we cannot assume that these laws were not used and did not have a powerful impact. For excellent and well-researched exceptions to this stance among historians, see Stephen Vincent, Southern Seed, Northern Soil: African-American Farm Communities in the Midwest, 1765–1900 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), and LaRoche, Free Black Communities.
5. Frederick Douglass, November 27, 1851, quoted in Leon Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 249. For more on the effects of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 on African American equal rights advocates in the Northwest Territory, see Aimee Lee Cheek and William F. Cheek, John Mercer Langston and the Fight for Black Freedom, 1829–65 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 169–174, 183–189. For more on its effects in the Northeast, see Eric Foner’s excellent Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
6. Philip Foner and George E. Walker, Proceedings of the Black State Conventions, 1840–1865 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979), 1:262, 1:256.
7. Arlene Polk, “The Truth About Joshua Lyles: A Free African American Settler of Lyles Station, Indiana,” Traces of Indiana & Midwestern History 25, no. 4 (2013): 32–37. “America: History and Life with Full Text,” EBSCO, www.ebsco.com/products/research-databases/america-history-and-life-with-full-text; US Department of the Interior, Census Office, Population Schedules of the Seventh Census of the United States, 1850, Indiana, Gibson County.
8. Gil R. Stormont, History of Gibson County, Indiana: Her People, Industries and Institutions, with Biographical Sketches of Representative Citizens and Genealogical Records of Many of the Old Families (Indianapolis: B. F. Bowen, 1914), 236–238.
The Bone and Sinew of the Land Page 29
