The Bone and Sinew of the Land

by Anna-Lisa Cox

  9. Ibid., 231–232.

  10. While it is true that there are many myths surrounding the Underground Railroad in the Northwest Territory states, I am somewhat at a loss to understand why some historians have argued that the African American abolitionist William Still partly or wholly fictionalized the account of Seth Concklin’s rescue of Peter Still’s family, when there is so much evidence to corroborate the event. This could be because some of the evidence comes from local and fairly obscure sources, such as local Evansville newspapers, the Gibson County history written by the Stormonts’ son Gil, and the personal autobiography later published by the Reverend Johnston. The fact that both Seth Concklin and the Reverend Johnston separately name Charles Grier as the “colored” conductor who brought Concklin and the Still family to the Stormonts is also strong evidence that the story is true, for the Griers had been able to protect the secret of their activities up until that point, and it is unlikely that William Still would have known of Charles Grier unless Seth Concklin had indeed written to him about Charles Grier.

  11. US Department of the Interior, Census Office, Population Schedules of the Seventh Census of the United States, 1850, Indiana, Gibson County.

  12. Still, The Underground Rail Road, 27; Stormont, History of Gibson County, 224–225, 232.

  13. For Concklin’s frustration in arranging help north of the Ohio River, see Seth Concklin, letter sent from Princeton, Indiana, February 18, 1851, quoted in Still, The Underground Rail Road, 28–29; Nathan R. Johnston, Looking Back from the Sunset Land; or, People Worth Knowing (Oakland, CA, 1898), 120–121.

  14. Kate Pickard and William Henry Furness, The Kidnapped and the Ransomed: Being the Personal Recollections of Peter Still and His Wife “Vina,” After Forty Years of Slavery (Syracuse, NY: W. T. Hamilton, 1856), 245–255.

  15. For more on the growing restrictions on freeing enslaved people in the slave South in the 1850s, see Thomas Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).

  16. Still, The Underground Rail Road, 24.

  17. Ibid.

  18. Ibid., 25.

  19. Seth Concklin, letter sent from Princeton, Indiana, February 18, 1851, quoted in Still, The Underground Rail Road, 28–29; Johnston, Looking Back, 120–121.

  20. Siddali, Frontier, 298–299; Thornbrough, The Negro in Indiana, 64–69.

  21. Siddali, Frontier, 306–308; Stephen Middleton, The Black Laws in the Old Northwest: A Documentary History (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993), 291–294.

  22. Quoted in Siddali, Frontier, 274, 278.

  23. Thornbrough, The Negro in Indiana, 79–80, 144–146. See map for African American landowning farmers in Indiana during the period this new state constitution was being drafted. For other entrepreneurs in Indiana, see Thornbrough, The Negro in Indiana, 139–142; Joe William Trotter Jr., River Jordan: African American Urban Life in the Ohio Valley (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2015), 37–42.

  24. Foner and Walker, Proceedings of the Black State Conventions, 176–177; Vincent, Southern Seed, xii.

  25. “At a Called Meeting for Sufferings of Indiana Yearly Meeting Held 25th of 11th Month 1850,” Indiana Yearly Meeting for Sufferings Minutes, Indiana Yearly Meeting Archives, Friends Collection and College Archive, Earl-ham College, Richmond, Indiana. My grateful thanks to Dr. Thomas Hamm for his able assistance and extraordinary efforts to preserve and disseminate the history of Quakers in the Northwest Territory states.

  26. Lacy K. Ford, Deliver Us from Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 9–10; Siddali, Frontier, 270–272.

  27. Still, The Underground Rail Road, 28–29.

  28. Johnston, Looking Back, 119–131.

  29. Charles Grier, Census of Agriculture, 1850, Franklin-Hamilton Counties, reel 3890, Indiana State Archives, Indianapolis, Indiana.

  30. Pickard and Furness, The Kidnapped and the Ransomed, 281, 286.

  31. Still, The Underground Rail Road, 30.

  32. Ibid., 24, 30.

  33. Seth Concklin, letter sent from Princeton, Indiana, February 18, 1851, quoted in Still, The Underground Rail Road, 28–29. Seth Concklin consistently misspelled the Stormonts’ last name as “Stormon” in his letters to William Still, just as he often misspelled the Griers’ last name as “Greer.”

  34. Johnston, Looking Back, 121.

  35. Ibid., 121–122.

  36. Pickard and Furness, The Kidnapped and the Ransomed, 402.

  37. Still, The Underground Rail Road, 26–31; Pickard and Furness, The Kidnapped and the Ransomed, 402–409.

  38. Pickard and Furness, The Kidnapped and the Ransomed, 400; Still, The Underground Rail Road, 34. The Evansville press would later praise Sheriff Gavitt for his role in capturing the “slave stealer” Seth Concklin; see Chapter 9.

  39. N. R. Johnston, letter, Evansville, Indiana, March 31, 1851, quoted in Still, The Underground Rail Road, 30–31.

  40. LaRoche, Free Black Communities, 6.

  41. Johnston, letter, Evansville, Indiana, March 31, 1851, quoted in Still, The Underground Rail Road, 30–31; Pickard and Furness, The Kidnapped and the Ransomed, 400–408. Of course, the irony of this (as abolitionists who came down to Evansville to investigate the incident later pointed out) was that Sheriff Gavitt was willing to use the “testimony” of an African American, Levin Still, against a white man, Seth Concklin, which was technically illegal in Indiana at that time.

  42. Johnston, letter, Evansville, Indiana, March 31, 1851, quoted in Still, The Underground Rail Road, 31.

  43. Still, The Underground Rail Road, 31.

  44. Pickard and Furness, The Kidnapped and the Ransomed, 339–342.

  45. Ibid., 349–352.

  46. Ibid.

  47. Ibid., 307–362, 366–367.

  48. Thornbrough, The Negro in Indiana, 69–70. These registries are a painful part of Indiana’s past. When I first did research in Gibson County, Indiana, the “Negro Registry” book—a beautifully bound volume—was hidden away in a broom closet under a stack of old phone books in the basement of the Princeton library. I will always be deeply grateful to the library volunteer who showed it to me when I asked if they had such a registry. She admitted that it had long been hidden away. A few years later the library staff had the courage to face the past and make the book public, having it scanned and put online for all to see.

  49. Gibson County Negro Registry, Princeton Public Library, Princeton, Indiana, 1851.

  50. Ibid.

  51. 1850 Agricultural Census, Daviess County, Indiana, US Seventh Census of Agriculture, Indiana–1850, 401-E-4, Clark-Dearborn Counties, Reel 3888, State of Indiana Archives, Indianapolis, Indiana.

  52. History of Knox and Daviess Counties, Indiana: From the Earliest Time to the Present; with Biographical Sketches, Reminiscences, Notes, etc.; Together with an Extended History of the Colonial Days of Vincennes, and Its Progress Down to the Formation of the State Government (Chicago, IL: Goodspeed Pub. Co., 1886), 769. Accessed on HathiTrust website via the Harvard HOLLIS website.

  53. Lori Jacobi, “More Than a Church: The Educational Role of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Indiana, 1844–1861,” Indiana’s African-American Heritage: Essays from Black History News & Notes, ed. Wilma Gibbs (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1993), 3–18; Thornbrough, The Negro in Indiana, 151; LaRoche, Free Black Communities, 30, 134–137, 139–140, 142, 165; Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, America’s First Black Town: Brooklyn, Illinois, 1830–1915 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 37–39; Vincent, Southern Seed, 70; Coy Robbins, Forgotten Hoosiers: African Heritage in Orange County, Indiana (Bowie, MD: Heritage Books, 1994), 82–83.

  54. Ronald Palmer, “History: AME Bishop William Paul Quinn: Notes Toward a Biographical Chronology of an American Original,” African Methodist Episcopal Church Review 120, no. 395 (July–September 2004): 40–61.

  55. Vincent, Southern Seed, 70.

  56. Palmer, “Bish
op William Paul Quinn,” 40–61.

  57. “Communicated,” Princeton Clarion, May 30, 1872, front page.

  58. History of Knox and Daviess Counties, Indiana, 770–771.

  59. Thornbrough, The Negro in Indiana, 72.

  60. History of Knox and Daviess Counties, Indiana, 742.

  61. 1850 Agricultural Census, Daviess County, Indiana.

  62. Graeme Quick and Wesley Fisher Buchele, The Grain Harvesters (St. Joseph, MI: American Society of Agricultural Engineers, 1978), 39–62.

  Chapter 9: “A history of repeated injuries and usurpations”

  1. The following detailed narrative of this attack is drawn from Randy K. Mills, “‘They Defended Themselves Nobly’: A Story of African American Empowerment in Evansville, Indiana, 1857,” Black History News & Notes (August 2005): 2–8; Emma Lou Thornbrough, The Negro in Indiana Before 1900: A Study of a Minority (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1957), 130–131; Daily Enquirer, July 22, 24, 28, 29, 31, 1857, August 1, 2, 1857; Daily Journal, July 22, 23, 24, 27, 28, 29, 30, 1857, August 1, 1857 (microfilm newspaper collection, Willard Library, Evansville, Indiana). The details of this attack were well documented in local newspapers in Evansville at the time. The Democrat Daily Enquirer was overtly prejudiced and directly involved in fomenting these attacks on the Lyles family and other African Americans around them. The “Whig” Daily Journal was more moderate, making its insidious and prejudiced reporting on the Lyles family damaging in different ways from that of the Daily Enquirer, but still damaging. While both newspapers were prejudiced against African Americans, some details of the attack on the Lyles homestead seem fairly truthful based on corroboration by surviving subsequent court records. My thanks to Shannon Grayson at the Evansville Public Library for sharing Randy Mills’s article from their collection, and an especial thanks to Stanley Schmitt at the Willard Library in Evansville for his heroic work in locating and preserving primary archival material on the Lyles family in Vanderburgh County, as well as generously sharing that material with me.

  2. B. N. Griffing, “Union Township,” in Griffing’s Atlas of Vanderburgh County (Philadelphia: D. J. Lake & Co., 1880); Surveyor’s Record Book B, p. 47, Vanderburgh County Courthouse, Evansville, Indiana.

  3. “U.S., Indexed County Land Ownership Maps, 1860–1918,” Ancestry.com, accessed 2010, https://search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=1127. Original data: Various publishers of county land ownership atlases, microfilmed by the Library of Congress, Washington, DC; US Department of the Interior, Census Office, Population Schedules of the Seventh Census of the United States, 1850, Union Township, Vanderburgh County, Indiana; Conevery Bolton Valenčius, The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 1–15.

  4. Arlene Blanks Polk, “The Truth About Joshua Lyles: A Free African American Settler of Lyles Station, Indiana,” Traces of Indiana & Midwestern History 25, no. 4 (October 2013): 32–37; Gibson County Negro Registry, 1851, Princeton Public Library, Princeton, Indiana. The Gibson County Negro Registry also shows that members of the Lyles family based in Gibson County and Vanderburgh County stayed for long visits with each other. The Evansville newspapers published bitter complaints against the whites around the Lyles family, furious that they were willing to move in around African Americans and work with them. See front page, first column of the Daily Enquirer, July 28, 1857.

  5. Christian Bippus, Recorder, Register of Marks, Union Township, Daniel Lyles, Vanderburgh County Courthouse, Evansville, Indiana, 1854.

  6. Mills, “‘They Defended Themselves Nobly,’” 2.

  7. For an excellent scholarly overview of the Dred Scott decision, see David Thomas Konig, Paul Finkelman, and Christopher Alan Bracey, The Dred Scott Case: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Race and Law (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010).

  8. For an intimate and well-researched history of Harriet and Dred Scott and their trials during their fight for their family’s freedom, as well as their life in the Northwest Territory states, see Lea VanderVelde, Mrs. Dred Scott: A Life on Slavery’s Frontier (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), which informs much of this section. For an overview of the lives of African Americans, both enslaved and free, in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Saint Louis, see Julie Winch, The Clamorgans: One Family’s History of Race in America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2011).

  9. “The Dred Scott Decision: Opinion of Chief Justice Taney,” Library of Congress, accessed August 18, 2017, www.loc.gov/resource/llst.022.

  10. Gene A. Smith, The Slaves’ Gamble: Choosing Sides in the War of 1812 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 5–32; William Cooper Nell and Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution: With Sketches of Several Distinguished Colored Persons: To Which Is Added a Brief Survey of the Condition and Prospects of Colored Americans (Santa Maria, CA: Janaway Publishing, 2010 [1855]); “The Dred Scott Decision: Opinion of Chief Justice Taney.”

  11. Daily Enquirer, July 22, 24, 28, 1857; Daily Journal, July 22, 23, 24, 27, 28, 1857 (microfilm newspaper collection, Willard Library, Evansville, Indiana). See note 1 in this chapter for sources.

  12. Quoted in Brent Campney, “‘The Peculiar Climate of This Region’: The 1854 Cairo Lynching and the Historiography of Racist Violence Against Blacks in Illinois,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society (1998–) 107, no. 2 (2014): 145, doi:10.5406/jillistathistsoc.107.2.0143Campney.

  13. Joseph Spencer’s death was reported in many newspapers, some calling it a “tragedy.” This was a notable act of violence, and it was reported in papers from Saint Louis to Cleveland. Many report that he was suicidal at the time of the event, using a barrel of dynamite to threaten those who would attack him. However, further research into Joseph Spencer and this case in court and local records is called for to bring all the facts to light.

  14. Daily Journal, July 29, 1857; Kate E. R. Pickard and William Henry Furness, The Kidnapped and the Ransomed: Being the Personal Recollections of Peter Still and His Wife “Vina,” After Forty Years of Slavery (Syracuse, NY: W. T. Hamilton, 1856), 401–409; William Still, The Underground Rail Road: A Record of Facts, Authentic Narratives, Letters, &c. (Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1872), 26–31; Mills, “‘They Defended Themselves Nobly,’” 2–5.

  15. Horace Plummer, the Lyles family’s lawyer, was excoriated in the Evansville newspapers for his belief in equality and his courageous defense of the Lyles men.

  16. “Nigger vs. White Man,” Daily Enquirer, July 24, 1857, front page (microfilm newspaper collection, Willard Library, Evansville, Indiana).

  17. Vanderburgh Circuit Order Book J, Vanderburgh County Courthouse, Evansville, Indiana, 1857, 469, 485, 493–494, 497–498; Vanderburgh Circuit Order Book K, Vanderburgh County Courthouse, Evansville, Indiana, 1858, 2, 57–58, 60, 61, 66, 68, 75, 82, 152. There seem to have been three separate hearings involving the Lyles family in 1857 and 1858 surrounding these incidents. The first was their initial hearing for bail. The second was a full trial involving Alexander Maddox/Maddux and five other men, with charges against the Lyles men for assault and battery with attempt to kill in which the Lyles men were found not guilty. The third seems to have involved the attack on the Lyles family home. According to Stanley Schmitt, head archivist and librarian of the Willard Library in Evansville, who has been working to locate and preserve these documents, the judge may have allowed the Lyles family to bring charges against the men who attacked them, although this would have broken Indiana law at this time. Further research is needed into these extensive court documents for the full story.

  18. Daily Enquirer, July 24, 1857.

  19. Darrel Bigham, We Ask Only a Fair Trial: A History of the Black Community of Evansville, Indiana (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 15.

  20. To this day oral traditions about this attack have been preserved among the African American families in Lyles Station. I am grateful to Stanley Madison for sharing this information.

  21.
Benjamin Drew, A North-Side View of Slavery. The Refugee: or, The Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada. Related by Themselves, with an Account of the History and Condition of the Colored Population of Upper Canada (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1968), 189–191.

  22. Ibid.

  23. Ibid., 189–191. For more testimony from African Americans moving into Canada after the passing of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, see ibid., 276, 279–280.

  24. Campney, “‘The Peculiar Climate of This Region,’” 143–170; Dana Weiner, Race and Rights: Fighting Slavery and Prejudice in the Old Northwest, 1830–1870 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2013), 209.

  25. What happened to the Lyles family in Vanderburgh County does not seem to have been unique. There are troubling reports in both Indiana and Ohio of entire settlements disappearing or becoming much smaller during this time. While some African American farmers may have decided to leave voluntarily, mob violence often drove people from their homes. In Pebble Township, Pike County, Ohio, whites organized violent attacks against African American farmers at this time, including burning down the home of the African American farmer Minor Muntz. See “Pee Pee Settlement, Ohio History Central,” Ohio History Connection, accessed October 12, 2017, www.ohiohistory central.org/w/Pee_Pee_Settlement.Meanwhile, in Indiana, free African Americans residing in the large, established African American farming settlement on the Franklin and Decatur County line, who predated most white settlers in that area, were driven out by white violence. This settlement started close to the Whitewater River before statehood in 1816. By 1850, 270 African Americans were counted as living there. Around the time of the Dred Scott decision, the entire settlement was forced to leave. The Snellings were some of the most established families of that settlement, and by 1860 they were in Cass County, Michigan. See the excellent website by the Indiana Historical Society on African American rural communities. For Decatur County, see w​w​w​.​i​n​d​i​a​n​a​h​i​s​t​o​r​y​.​o​r​g​/​o​u​r​-​c​o​l​l​e​c​t​i​o​n​s​/​r​e​f​e​r​e​n​c​e​/​e​a​r​l​y​-​b​l​a​c​k​-​s​e​t​t​l​e​m​e​n​t​s​/​d​e​c​a​t​u​r​-​c​o​u​n​t​y​#.WShm TBiZN8c; for Franklin County, see w​w​w​.​i​n​d​i​a​n​a​h​i​s​t​o​r​y​.​o​r​g​/​o​u​r​-​c​o​l​l​e​c​t​i​o​n​s​/​r​e​f​e​r​e​n​c​e​/​e​a​r​l​y​-​b​l​a​c​k​-​s​e​t​t​l​e​m​e​n​t​s​/​f​r​a​n​k​l​i​n​-​c​o​u​n​t​y​#​.​W​S​h​n​Z​h​i​Z​N​8c.For more on the rise of violence against African Americans in Illinois, see Campney, “‘The Peculiar Climate of This Region’”; Christopher Hays, “Way Down in Egypt Land: Conflict and Community in Cairo, Illinois, 1850–1910” (PhD diss., University of Missouri, Columbia, 1996). For more on the importance of movement to freedom, see William Cohen, At Freedom’s Edge: Black Mobility and the Southern White Quest for Racial Control, 1861–1915 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997).