The White Man’s Proviso

Unfortunately, 1846 would prove to be as devastating as the summer of 1845 was hopeful, with each month bearing a fresh crisis. Manifest destiny, an offhand catchphrase in 1845, would by the end of 1846 be extravagantly realized with the expansion of the great republic by one-third. The bulk of it was gained by “Mr. Polk’s War” on Mexico, a brazenly imperialistic land grab. For the boxy piece called Oregon, the United States could thank Great Britain, whose leaders, after years of wrangling, finally figured that the course of empire might run marginally better with one less Pacific colony to manage from afar. Was this land needed? In 1846, the historian of the Mexican conquest, William H. Prescott, wrote the abolitionist Charles Sumner, “One would suppose that millions of uncultivated acres inviting settlement and the hand of civilization that lie within our present limits might satisfy the most craving cupidity”—and so they might have if cupidity were all of it. But hungrier than greed was the habit of entitlement. The population of the United States had grown by one-third every decade from 1800 to 1850, a growth spurt unmatched by any other country. Did not a growth rate so exuberant deserve to be rewarded with more territory to contain it? Would not more land refresh the people’s love of nation building and distract them from their sectional disputes?⁶

This was President Polk’s serene prediction. But tensions only surged, and for the antislavery cohort, the rush to settle this new land looked disastrous. Slavery would surely prevail at the polls in the newly annexed territory; at the headlong pace that Southerners and their human property were rolling west, how could it not? Concerned about the threat to the fragile balance of political power between free states and the slaveocracy, David Wilmot, a freshman Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania, proposed a law in August 1846 that would bar slavery’s extension into the new territories. Approved in the House but twice failing to win passage in the Senate, the Wilmot Proviso tapped a stress fracture between North and South that split into a chasm in a few congressional seasons.⁷

And all the while, abolitionists were powerless. No part of the legislative battle to keep the western territories free of slavery concerned itself with the millions of Black people enslaved in the South. Nor could antislavery activists look to Wilmot’s Free Soilers to support the rights of free Black pioneers who wanted to move west. For many in Wilmot’s camp, free labor was white labor. Free Blacks would stay east; in the new land they weren’t welcome. “Shall the Territories Be Africanized?” rang the panicky alarm. Not if David Wilmot and his Free Soilers had anything to do with it. None of the stern rhetoric about keeping western territories free of the “disgrace which association with negro slavery brings upon free labor” damned white racism itself. Wilmot called his plan a “White Man’s Proviso”—to keep out slavery from the new territory was to keep it safe for “the sons of toil, of my own race and own color.” At the heart of the debate, Eric Foner has observed, was this “crucial ambiguity… . Was it the institution of slavery, or the presence of the Negro, which degraded the white laborer?” For thousands of Free Soilers, one implied the other. Slave or free, competition from Black labor was reviled.⁸

The 3001st Grantee

It is possible that in this hard year Gerrit Smith let his thoughts stray from the raucous frontline of race and politics to more distant scenes, like, say, the discovery of Neptune, or the removal of more than ten thousand Mormons to the West, fresh from the debacle of Nauvoo. The Irish potato blight, two years strong, would have split Smith’s heart between pity for the famine victims and horror at the antisuffrage influence that Irish immigrants, new-minted Democrats, now wielded at the polls. Much as Smith talked up his rustic insularity and country ways, he was no stranger to the world. His donations over decades to a constellation of causes—Greek patriots, Hungarian rebels, the starving Irish—showed the ecumenicism of his compassion. But 1846 was not a year to let him reach for the vast, cooling overview. It was a year, as the historian Bernard DeVoto put it, when “something had shifted out of plumb, moved on its base, begun to topple down.” With the swelling contours of the nation and the prospect of a much-expanded slave economy, “something was ending in America, forever. A period, an era, a social context, a way of life, was running out.”⁹

DeVoto dubbed it, famously, the “Year of Decision.” For the resolute white pioneers, bold explorers, and cocky politicians in his enduring history of that name, that’s maybe how it seemed. For Black America, free or enslaved, it was the opposite: a year of unremitting impotence just when decisive action was needed. And if free Black Americans, lacking strength of numbers, voting power, money, and public access to debate, were demoralized, so, surely, was a white man as perennially hopeful of his influence as Gerrit Smith.¹⁰

Smith identified his three thousand beneficiaries in his scrupulously documented Land Book. But there was another giftee, never named. This was Smith himself. To give was to claim agency, to make oneself of use, to do. In 1846 especially, Gerrit Smith needed this. Without doing, he was lost.

In August 1846, two months after the start of the New York Constitutional Convention and two months before it reconvened to tackle equal suffrage, Smith shared his hope of giving away land in a letter to three Black activists in New York City. Rev. Theodore Wright and Elder Charles B. Ray were Smith’s long-standing acquaintances. Dr. James McCune Smith was newer and untested, but said to be whip-smart and politically astute. These activists, whom Smith asked to serve on his New York City Committee, had the job of finding eligible grantees in all of metropolitan New York. Earlier in 1846, these three suffrage advocates and several others had implored Smith to back a one-time Whig-Liberty alliance for the coming Constitutional Convention; the prosuffrage lobby badly needed votes. Smith would not oblige. In fact, their appeal stiffened his opposition. But that was then, and this was now. Smith’s August invitation not only aimed for reconciliation, it proved, unequivocally, his commitment to Black suffrage. Only read my plan. You’ll see. If the Black Laws in the new territories discouraged pioneering in the West, Smith had an alternative. Here, in our own New York, is a wilderness where Black homesteaders will feel welcome. Here, a fresh frontier for hopeful voter-pioneers.¹¹

After Smith lined up his New York City agents, he organized committees for the Hudson River Valley, the Mohawk Valley and the Southern Tier, and Western New York. In all, thirteen antislavery activists, five white, eight Black, would act as agents for his giveaway and oversee the distribution of 120,000 acres among three thousand Black New Yorkers from 1846 to 1853. Each of the four committees was charged with whipping up interest in the giveaway in its designated regions, and with vetting and collecting the names of eligible grantees. No compensation was offered (though Smith’s Black agents would get gift lots, and sometimes more than one). Smith thought hard about the makeup of his committees, and for the New York City group he asked the city abolitionist Lewis Tappan for advice. Tappan was all for Ray and Wright but about the youthful physician he had doubts. Dr. McCune Smith, he feared, had some “peculiar notions about things etc.” Ironically, no one of Smith’s agents would be a better friend to the philanthropist than the brilliant Black physician. He and Smith shared warm, confiding letters well after the gift land was parceled out.¹²

For the recruitment of grantees in the Hudson Valley, the Capital District, and all points north, Smith fixed on three Albanians and a Trojan. The Troy minister Rev. Henry Highland Garnet was Black, as was Albany’s prominent suffrage lobbyist William Topp. The newspaper editor William Chaplin and the lumber merchant Nathanial Safford were white. Between them these four agents covered seventeen counties along New York’s northeastern flank. Nine counties in central New York and north into the St. Lawrence River valley were assigned to three white abolitionists from Utica: Wesley Bailey, George Lawson, and Alfred H. Hunt. All counties to the west of Broome, Chenango, Madison, and Oswego Counties belonged to three Black activists: the churchmen Samuel Ringgold Ward from Cortland and Jermain Wesley Loguen of Syracuse, and James W. Duffin, a Geneva barber.¹³

With thirteen downstate counties on its watch, the New York City Committee bore the brunt of the job. Smith was asking it to find two-thirds of his three thousand deedholders in the great city at the mouth of the Hudson, where most Black New Yorkers lived. Here, he felt, was where the love of caste flourished most robustly, where workshops and the wharves were trip-wired with racial restrictions, neighborhoods mined with slums and rum shops, and white gangs driven by “Negro-hate.” Only when the New York agents fell short of Smith’s high quota would he direct them to less congested counties beyond Brooklyn and Manhattan, and while this expansion made good sense, it hardly eased their work. Then, nine months after the giveaway was publicized, Reverend Wright died of pleurisy, and now two agents, Ray and McCune Smith, assumed the work of three. But Smith was eager. Momentum now was everything. Once his critics learned about his plan, they would leap to tear it down. On the first of August, his city agents got their marching orders. If they could round up the first two thousand names as fast as possible, he would date them all September 1, and the grantees could get their deeds as early as October.¹⁴

He did not write, “in time for a November referendum on Black suffrage.” He and the agents all knew that the distribution of the deeds would not impact the outcome of a November plebiscite on equal voting rights for Black New Yorkers. Forty-acre woodland lots, barely surveyed, never settled, could not meet the $250 property requirement or even a fifth of that amount. But clear the land and cultivate it, harvest it for timber, or just hold on to it for resale, and its value would go up. Not in time for this election, but maybe for the next.

Could Smith know what he was asking? His Black city agents were family men with taxing day jobs and no access to the resources that a rich white man took for granted. They had no land office, secretaries, or stables full of carriages and tack. They were expected to cover twelve downstate counties without benefit of legal access to public transport, to lobby for a wild land that, for Black people, lacked any resonance or allure, and to introduce a largely illiterate constituency to deeds and surveys, maps and tax dates. Gerrit Smith guessed that what he expected them to do might entail “no little labor.” He had no idea.¹⁵