North Elba, Disavowed

Taking a cue from Mary MacKenzie, modern chroniclers of Timbuctoo hold Alfred Donaldson to blame for the casually racist portrait of the Black pioneers. But it didn’t start with Donaldson. It didn’t start with Stoddard. Pocket histories of Timbuctoo that reinforce a racializing agenda are as old as the giveaway. As early as 1852, the upstate Democratic legislator Winslow C. Watson judged Smith’s scheme doomed because its giftees were inherently undeserving, “ill adapted in [their] physical constitution … , with neither experience or competency to the independent management of business affairs, and adverse to them from habits and propensities.” Never mind concerns about the climate or the soil—the problem was “the Negro.” Because of his “propensities,” Smith’s plan “bore in its inception inherent elements of failure.” After John Brown’s raid, this assertion of a flaw, a lack, would be extended to indictments of the grantees’ benefactor. Smith’s two months in the Utica Asylum gave his critics a perfect opening to discount his philanthropic work for Black New Yorkers as evidence of mental illness—for who but a lunatic would give free land to Blacks? Northern editors invoked Smith’s “mania for negroes,” expressed in gifts of “small farms to as many of them as choose to take them,” as proof that “he was not exactly a person of sound mind.” The Albany Journal called Smith’s philanthropy a symptom of the “state of political hallucination” that kept him on “the borders of insanity for a quarter of a century.” This was beyond marginalization. Smith’s land gifts were pathologized— madness that had gone too long by kinder names.⁵

After the Civil War, this dire spin relaxed. The assertion of Smith’s lunacy reverted to a default charge of eccentricity. At least until the demise of Reconstruction while Northerners still had a use for John Brown as an icon of Christian rectitude and Yankee courage, Smith’s reputation gained. He noted it himself in his 1867 Manifesto (“The more the public identifies me with John Brown, the more it honors me”). Cherishing this link to Brown fulfilled a debt to public memory; Smith tried to live up to the billing. As Harpers Ferry transformed the Black Woods into John Brown Country, so was Smith recast, foremost, as John Brown’s Friend.⁶

But it could be a very dull assignment. Smith heard from people wanting to track down Brown’s family, from artists wanting funding for their Brown-themed exhibitions, and from autograph hounds thirsting for Brown’s signature. An Ohio medium knew Smith would like to hear Brown’s messages for him from the spirit world beyond: “Glory to God, Liberty to the Slaves. I greet you on the prospective freedom of the colored race in a short time. God aid you in this course. Farewell, John Brown.” For the rest of Smith’s life he would hear from the Liberty Party faithful about his providential role in Brown’s career. A reformer asked Smith to represent the “Murdered Patriarch” in Vermont, noting Peterboro’s proximity to “John Brown’s Tract” (in fact, the John Brown of this tract was a Rhode Island land baron and no kin to the abolitionist, and the tract itself was far from the Black Woods). An Illinois publisher named Eastman hoped Smith would ornament a reunion of career abolitionists, because, he said, “I believe you did more than any other ten men to place John Brown where he is—John Brown’s action at Harpers Ferry was the doing of your doctrine as taught in your address to the Slaves.”⁷

In 1872, Smith, guest of honor at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia, was introduced as “the oldest pioneer in the cause of emancipation in this room.” Governor Richard Oglesby of Illinois called Smith “that venerable, sublime man of New York,” a living icon, “the impersonation of American dignity and benevolence… . [To] see and hear that great agitator, who long before the Republican party had, at its birth, recognized our duties toward a down-trodden race, and waged earnest battle for their rights, at a time when most of us here today were young and useless”—all this, said Oglesby, “rejoiced my heart.” But it was not Smith’s name that whipped up “the grandest scene in the history of any political assemblage” and brought the delegates to their feet with “scarcely a dry eye in all that great assemblage.” Only the “familiar, electrifying strains” of one anthem could do that, and it wasn’t named for Smith.⁸

Years before, Smith predicted his friend Brown would emerge as “the most admired person in American history.” It didn’t happen, and it won’t. But in Gerrit Smith’s lifetime and for a generation after, Brown’s fame was unassailable. His trial riveted all of Europe; his story was the world’s. In Vladivostok in 1900, Russian troops sang his praises (a Black American diplomat was amazed). Surely that summer day in Philadelphia, Smith, with the Republicans, raised his age-faded voice and sang the old familiar song. Duty beckoned. He was the vestigial conduit, the lone link to the martyred icon. Smith knew Brown well, had funded him, got him rifles, given him a farm.⁹

But what Smith did out of the public eye—not his acts so much as his own inaction—reveals a relationship with Brown more ambivalent than history admits. Smith could have visited Brown’s family in North Elba after he was released from the asylum. George Stearns, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and Frank Sanborn made the trip, but not Smith, whose upstate home was nearer to Brown’s grave than any one of theirs. Nor would he send a sculptor to the Charles Town jail to make a bust of Brown or hire a mason to etch Brown’s name into his grave. Stearns did that. A fund to help Brown’s family in the years after his death? That fell to Higginson and Sanborn. Also Sanborn’s contribution: the full account of the Secret Six’s contributions to John Brown’s plan. No public record reveals any trip Smith made to John Brown’s grave before Smith died in 1874.¹⁰

In 1869, Smith heard from Isaac Gates, an aging abolitionist in Iowa. “You must allow me to congratulate you,” Gates wrote, “on the fact that you have out lived ‘Slavery,’ survived its persecution & have lived to see the day when to be called the ‘friend’ of ‘John Brown’ are ‘words of good repute.’ ” Smith would not have argued, but his words and actions stayed at odds. Smith was grateful for the restoration of Brown’s reputation, but how do we explain his answer to abolitionists who hoped to buy John Brown’s North Elba farm and preserve it in Brown’s honor?¹¹

Never mind that the farm’s leaseholder, Alexis Hinckley, told Smith that Brown’s widow, Mary, in California since 1864, “would greatly prefer to have the place sold in that way.” Smith said no. If he could not stop the conflation of his name and Brown’s, he was not obliged to prolong it. He did not want the farm memorialized. Let a farmer take it, he told Hinckley. Let the cult subside. In 1872, the year he rose to sing “John Brown’s Body” at the Philadelphia convention, Smith told Sanborn that the very mention of “this John Brown affair” made him so jittery that he feared “a recurrence of my insanity.” Better to push it out of mind, and to let the woods and fields that Smith’s philanthropy once made synonymous with “justice and benevolence” go back to being just another farmscape, with no deeper resonance, no higher purpose.¹²

Better, anyway, for him. Others would be slower to forget.

The Making of a Shrine

Alexis Hinckley was pitching hay in Brown’s old field when the approaching stranger caught his eye. Fresh from a first-time Adirondack camping trip (a thrilling jaunt she wrote up for the Tribune), the St. Louis journalist Kate Field had come to tour the grave and home of Old John Brown. But in 1873, the house was empty, picked clean except for Brown’s picture on a wall. Did no one live there? Not these days, Hinckley told her. Even he, the “sad, thin man” who owned the place, came around only occasionally and, anyway, had plans to sell.¹³

“For sale! For sale with the bones of John Brown lying there!” The reporter was aghast. Surely the old abolition cohort in Boston, stronghold of the Secret Six, would give $2,000 to buy and rescue John Brown’s farm. But Massachusetts balked. Even Brown’s own family seemed not especially invested in it, Ralph Waldo Emerson reminded Field. And he had seen the place. It “did not look attractive.” Why make it more than what it was?¹⁴

Then Field tried New York. The Union League Club, the fraternity of civic-minded merchants, pressmen, and politicos who stood for Lincoln, had lobbied sternly (if unavailingly) for martial law and federal intervention during the draft riots, and collaborated with Black activists to get relief to city Blacks made homeless by marauders. The league had also—and this less than a year after the city’s “rabbledom and rebeldom” claimed hundreds of Black lives—organized three Black regiments, raised money for the US Sanitary Commission, and, after the war, promoted Reconstruction with suffrage drives and speeches. And the Union League came through.

How recently, after all, had many of these Leaguers marched to the tune that bore Brown’s name? When so many civil rights initiatives were imperiled, when equal voting rights for Black New Yorkers had again expired at the polls, and when even the Liberal Republican Horace Greeley was hawking a reconciliationist line that would repeal federal protection against the Klan for freedpeople in the South, Union Leaguers agreed that salvaging the modest home of “God’s Meteor” was not so much to do.¹⁵

Kate Field had her cash in two days. Members of the newly formed John Brown Association each chipped in one hundred dollars. The historic farm would not be sold to an indifferent farmer who might eventually raze it or turn it into an inn, camp, or club. It would be a place of pilgrimage, and its eleventh-hour rescue would become part of what pilgrims came to honor too—a drama without bloodshed, heroic action without trauma. There would be no invocation in this story of Brown’s guerrilla days in Kansas, the massacre of proslavery settlers at Pottawatomie. Visitors to this shrine would not be made uneasy. And when, in 1896, the aging representatives of the John Brown Association passed on the title to the farm to the State of New York, the pilgrims’ way of loving and explaining John Brown’s home was passed along as well.¹⁶

One consequence of this was a tilt away from the suggestion of some parity, or balance, between the Brown family’s intimate domestic life (farm-bound family, sugarbush and fields, house and barn), and, a little walk away, the grave and boulder that stood for the more storied rest—the Kansas raids, bid for Harpers Ferry, Brown’s capture and his hanging. These two realms, the secular and the sacralized, made a fitted, balanced whole. But in the late nineteenth century, the balance skewed toward the latter, and enshrinement overwhelmed. A granite “Donors Monument” commemorated Field and the white knights of the Union League Club (1896); a bronze marker honored John Brown’s raiders who fell at Harpers Ferry (1899); another marker flagged the remains of Oliver Brown (1899); a spear-tipped wrought-iron fence went up around the graveyard (1900); a marker was erected for the fallen raiders whose names were left out in 1899 (1916); Brown’s headstone got a cover made of bronze and plate glass (1941); and local white women, Browns and Thompsons, who sacrificed their “men-folk” to the raid, were honored with a plaque as well (1945). (Not quite a part of this, for reasons I’ll explain, is the statue erected by the John Brown Memorial Association, set a stroll away from home and shrine in its own traffic turnaround in 1935.)¹⁷

The plaques and markers bore their own proud explanations. But the little home stayed stark. Why the Browns came here to live, how they lived, and how the family fared when Brown was gone were questions left unanswered. No tour or signage addressed them. Artifacts that might have animated the Browns’ off-and-on residency were held to a small room of the farmhouse; until 1926, the caretaker and his family took up the rest. With fields to mow and cows to milk, the farmer-caretaker who was supposed to show visitors around often lacked the time. And when visitors were acknowledged, some were met with grievance (See that leak? The Conservation folks told me they’d get to it months ago… .) and with historical accounts that were fanciful at best. Among the nuggets of misinformation that visitors reported were the confident assertions that Brown named North Elba “as a result of [his] partiality” for Napoleon, carved his name and death year in the boulder just before he left, rescued Lyman Eppes and family from enslavement and brought them north in covered wagons, “laid out” the Black enclave at Freeman’s Home, came to North Elba to build a lumber empire, complete with paper mill, tanneries, and towns, and was dispatched to points west by a rousing send-off from a village band.¹⁸

And riding like an empty raft on all the speculation was everything left out: Smith and the agents’ devotion to Black voting rights and agrarian reform, and the scope of Smith’s idea, which encompassed territory well beyond Brown’s farm. Unremembered: families besides the Eppeses who stayed in the Black Woods for years. Unesteemed: Brown’s good friendship with the Brooklyn grantee Willis Hodges, the Franklin homesteader who parceled out the lifesaving supplies that Brown sent to Timbuctoo and Blacksville. Unobserved: Lyman Eppes the citizen and farmer, community builder, guide, and standard bearer for Smith’s idea.

This is not to hold the caretakers responsible for these lacunae. The rift between what happened and how selectively it was remembered started widening at Harpers Ferry. Until Brown was imprisoned, North Elba was just a name—no special resonance, no aura. A hard place, too, from what Brown wrote. Don’t worry about me. Worry about my family in North Elba who will be “left very poor” on my death. Only when Brown published his wish to be buried by this home, and for his name to be inscribed on the headstone of his Connecticut-born ancestor from the Continental Army, along with the names of two slain sons, would the homeplace gain a glow. Brown’s conflation of two movements, one aspiring to free a nation, the other to liberate a race, sacralized the neighborhood—though, admittedly, it was a while before Brown’s abolitionist allies discerned how North Elba could be used. After all, where was this place? How to get there? Was it even on a map? At the patriots’ Olympus, Mt. Auburn cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Brown would gain a properly imposing monument and a shrine that would be marvelously, continuously thronged—or so claimed the abolitionists Henry C. Wright, Thaddeus Hyatt, Lydia Maria Child, and Wendell Phillips. As early as Brown’s hanging, Phillips remonstrated with Mary Brown for a burial in prestigious, pilgrim-worthy Cambridge. Sixty thousand people visited Mt. Auburn annually! How many would ever get to the Adirondack woods?¹⁹

Maybe it was a stiff rejoinder from Brown’s widow on the way to Essex County (on sopping roads “found to be even worse than was anticipated”) that restored Phillips’s wayward tact, or his discovery of the devotion of Brown’s family and neighbors (white and Black, for here, at the funeral, were Eppeses, Hasbrooks, and likely Hazzards too, all bearing witness to Gerrit Smith’s original idea). Whatever the cause of his change of heart, Phillips quickly saw that if pilgrims could not visit North Elba as easily as they might Old North Church or Bunker Hill, they would find other ways to know the place. In the New York Times, Greeley’s Tribune, Garrison’s Liberator, Douglass’ Monthly, the Atlantic, and the proliferating biographies of Captain Brown, North Elba took on the literary allure that limns it still. Within months of the interment, what the Boston abolitionists deemed a hopeless liability, the grave’s great distance from hubs of antislavery activity, would register as an advantage. Any Sunday tourist could stumble on an abolitionist’s headstone at Mt. Auburn. That North Elba called for effort, inconvenience, even risk, only brightened its allure.

“ ‘All of Us!’ Was the Hearty Response”

This pilgrimage took time, planning, a willingness to be transformed by not just the object but the perils of the journey. Rough roads? Hair-raising precipices? Plunging cliffsides looking “as if ready to fall each moment upon our heads,” and breathless views that loomed abruptly, then vanished behind mist in an “enchanted land” of “wild grandeur”? All were stations on a via dolorosa that cast the pilgrim, however faintly, in Brown’s hardy mold, and earned the pilgrim’s right to honor Brown at his grave. The jolting passage through a rough, unyielding wilderness before arriving at Brown’s home helped make sense of Brown himself. “Stern and strong,” harsh and fearful, the aloof, self-regulating wilderness was made in John Brown’s image, and John Brown returned the favor.²⁰

Then might come (and not before the fraught preamble) the literary pilgrim’s description of the grave and the massive boulder behind it. If the Revolutionary War headstone invoked the patriotic legacy that drove Brown’s sense of national mission, the big rock declared a greater calling still. Seeming (from the Liberator) “to have been upheaved from the farthest depths of earth in the convulsions of some mythical age,” this “primeval relic” bruited how lasting were the laws that made it—unlike human rules, which rationalized the enslavement of God’s children. In its agelessness and immobility, the big rock honored God and Brown’s conscience, both beyond the reach of perishable legalisms. No human hand made the boulder he adored; no human law constrained the inner law that drove him.²¹

And more than Adirondack nature was destined to be idealized. In 1866, the Civil War veteran officer Col. Francis Lee, and Lee’s friend the Boston attorney George S. Hale, paid a stoneworker to chip Brown’s name into the side of the great rock. Hale immortalized the undertaking with an “Ode”:

In a half century of writerly accounts of visits to Brown’s home, those “seeds” “on every side”—among them, Brown’s white neighbors—won a role in John Brown country as the faithful chorus that fanned the flame of freedom. In the much-syndicated account of John Brown’s funeral in the Tribune, Northerners read about the “dear good men and women of Old Essex” (Frederick Douglass’s words) and the frontier patriots who stood vigil over Brown’s coffin in the county courthouse, the aged abolitionist Phineas Norton who solaced the funeral cortege with a midday lunch for all, and Brown’s unnamed neighbors who braved the frigid weather to meet the funeral party and lantern-light its way to the widow’s home. John Brown, said Wendell Phillips at the funeral, was “not alone” in his good work here, but rather “the majestic centre of a group.” At a July 4 memorial service at the farm eight months after the funeral, Francis J. Merriam of Boston, one of five raiders at Harpers Ferry who was not captured, praised North Elbans for their fighting spirit. How many in this crowd would defend abolitionists and fugitives from the “bloodhounds of Virginia?” he called. “ ‘All of us!’ was the hearty response.” And if we stayed right here, he pressed, and the New York governor issued warrants for our arrest, would you still defend us? “ ‘I would,’ and ‘I,’ ‘I,’ came from a large number of persons.” That day, too, Thaddeus Hyatt, a Boston abolitionist, saluted Brown’s Adirondack allies. Gaze into the eyes of Brown’s family and neighbors, Hyatt declared, and you see at once that “Charlestown has not put out the hero; his fires still live and burn in his descendants, burn in the seething blood of the third generation … Charlestown throttles in vain! God and the Adirondacks still stand.” Once no more consequential than a jot on a map, North Elba now stood for Brown himself, even to the extent that if the frontlines of militant abolitionism fell, and the last of the antislavery men were driven from Philadelphia, Boston, even Plymouth Rock!, they would take “the Ark of Freedom” and “retire to North Elba, that Calvary of our cause.”²³

Out of History, into the Divine

North Elbans as Brown’s apostles? Well, maybe. Brown had some white neighbors who shared his antislavery convictions. Others were more interested in his ideas about sheep breeding. Some loved the man but deemed his politics deranged. Brown’s social culture in North Elba was as checkered as the antislavery movement itself. People who heard him out on slavery when he took a wayside meal in Westport, Elizabethtown, or Vergennes knew what he stood for and respected him, and nobody objected when North Elba (later on Lake Placid) gained a reputation as John Brown country. But this hardly made his neighbors his disciples. The John Brown brand was good for business. It brought pilgrims and tourists both, and never mind politics. Frame his story as a generic paean to conscience and anyone could find a reason to like John Brown’s home. As travel writers proved, it was no hardship to reverence Brown’s elegiac grave and disavow his life (Love the bones of the old martyr, not so keen on what he did. . .).²⁴

Seneca Ray Stoddard kept his distance from the “monomaniac” but made a visit to Brown’s grave a core vignette in The Adirondacks Illustrated. The Adirondackophiles Alfred Billings Street, Charles Benno Hoffman, and Martin Ives favored the site too—and none were fans or friends of Brown’s ideas. Tucking a visit to Brown’s home into the grand tour of the northern wilderness claimed the home for nature—another scenic wonder in a strand. Guidebooks, stereoscopic images, and articles positioned visitors to respond to the farm, and especially the grave, with the reverence they brought to a waterfall or gorge. In 1903, Mary Ellis Nichols recalled her “Adirondack Pilgrimage” in the National Magazine. First came the dramatic approach, the silent peaks and stippled woods and streaks of silver where water beaded down a rockface, followed by a landscape of enchantment, vistas “in ever widening circles of amethyst, topaz and sapphire” opening, at long last, to the object of her quest: “At our feet, set like a ground bird’s nest in the midst of green pastures, stood the little woodcolored house just as the owner left it forty-four years ago.” Nichols’s rendering of Brown’s farm nested it and tamed it. Field, woodland, bird’s nest, farm—all partook of a peaceable divine.²⁵

The whole neighborhood was haloed with a nimbus of divinity, declared the Connecticut essayist Charles Dudley Warner in 1866. This “region” was “consecrated with his spirit. Everybody here had something to tell us about the old man.” Warner was glad the bid to bury Brown in Massachusetts came to naught. “It is better as it is,” he wrote. “In these wilds there is something consonant with his own untamable spirit.” In the New York Times, one “G.S.” confessed he had no use for Brown’s militancy, but entering “this circle through dark and deep mountain passes” worked a change in him: it freed him from the awkward job of having to judge and defend Brown historically. North Elba’s Brown was more than an insurrectionist—he was part of nature, centerpiece of a design. “It does appear as though God prepared this spot for some specific object. Was this rock placed here purposely as a monument for the one who alone and silently lies at its base? Was this mountain chain designedly reared to wall this spot around?” For “G.S.,” the culmination of his trip to Brown’s shrine was the “whisper” of his conscience saying, “This is sacred ground.” And “G.S.” spoke for legions of visitors who liked the idea of Brown much more than the deeds that fixed his fame. What Brown did at Pottawatomie and his plans for Harpers Ferry—all this, for the law-abiding, was problematic, and for some, outright repugnant. So what was reverenced was not the physical reality of Brown’s career—the bloodied swords, the severed arms, a moonlit creek pinked with blood—but the certitude that drove it. Not the raids, but the conviction. Not the dull work of the body moldering away, but the goes-on-marching soul. And as Brown’s legacy was dehistoricized, the story of that other historical reality, his work and hopes for Timbuctoo, grew ever more peripheral, uncompelling, and easy to dismiss.²⁶

Black Memory and the Gift Land

In December 1847, only two months after he left Boston to write and work for Douglass’s new North Star in Rochester, the Black writer William Cooper Nell got a welcome-to-New-York gift deed from Gerrit Smith. Nell, a civil rights activist up to his stiff collar in committee work and book projects, was never going to farm. Boston-bred, he was all city. But he did like owning that gift lot in the Adirondack woods. In 1860 (he let Smith know), he was still paying his taxes on it. He might have tried to sell it, but its value was more than fungible. It looked ahead, urged faith, patience, and the sweetness of an unused option. And maybe these, for Nell, were gifts enough.²⁷

Hundreds of grantees (as George Downing’s mass buy of gift deeds in 1870 revealed) held on to their deeds for decades for their value on Election Day. But Nell was not a New York voter, and still he kept his land. And other grantees kept gift deeds after the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment. Why was this? Thirty years after the 1846 distribution, Susann Owens of New Haven asked Smith to replace her late husband’s missing deed. She’d paid taxes on it and did not want to lose the lot. In 1874, an Ausable Forks attorney asked Smith to send him deeds for his clients, the Payne family, deedholders who hoped to replace the titles they had mislaid. Rachel Webb of New York City, a steamboat stewardess “of great industry and intelligence and moral worth” (so offered John Jenkins of Manhattan, who scripted her appeal), inherited five gift lots from her late husband, the speculator James Blair Webb, and when she mislaid the deeds in 1869, she tapped Smith for duplicates. Twice from London, the reformer William Wells Brown directed his Boston friend Wendell Phillips to cover his taxes for “my Gerrit Smith farm.” There was no farm. The acreage in North Elba was wild and unworked. But the possibility, the mere promise of a homestead, now stood for hope itself.²⁸

The activist and author Willis A. Hodges clung to his Franklin land on Loon Lake for three decades. It stayed his after he returned to Brooklyn, and while he scouted for the Union Army in Virginia, and when he made a mark after the war as one of the most engaged and forthright delegates to Virginia’s first integrated Constitutional Congress in 1867 and 1868. The land was not his destiny; he did not dream of moving back. But it stood for something beautiful; it gave him heart and hope. One visionary resolution in particular bore the imprint of his Adirondack adventure. For the benefit of poor Virginians in need of wild land to “hunt, gun and fish in,” Hodges called for unimpeded public access to “all woodland, swamps, marshes, creeks, rivers, lakes and bays in this State.” The resolution did not pass, but the memory of Blacksville and the open-hearted wilderness endured.²⁹

And long after Hodges died, his Adirondack land retained a sentimental value; in the early 1930s, his descendant Alexander Augustus Moore ventured north from New York City to see Loon Lake himself. Mary Chase, the aging innkeeper who, with her husband, a Civil War veteran, bought Hodges’s lot in 1878, offered this Black pilgrim “quite a little history of what her father knew of the settlers.” The old woman, whose inn would welcome Oscar Wilde, Irving Berlin, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and three US presidents, steered her visitor to a place in the woods where he could see the hand-hewn sills of Hodges’s log home and icehouse still “rot[ting], 86 years after erection.” She also told him she would be “glad to see any of the descendants of Hodges and would deed back one acre centering from Hodge Hill if they would live there.”³⁰

How many others? How many like Mary Ann Brown, an impoverished Brooklyn widow who asked her family doctor to urge Gerrit Smith to make over her late husband’s deed in her name? Or John J. Johnson of Manhattan, who beseeched Smith to sort out a wayward deed for him in 1874? Nathan Johnson of New Bedford would not accept a gift deed in 1846 because, he wrote, “At the time I was doing well, and would not take what I thought [belonged] to the more needy,” but by 1873, Johnson was in a bad way and wondered if Smith might spare “a pittance, peradventure a loose, unappropriated greenback,” to stand for the farm he had so gallantly dismissed a quarter century before.³¹

Lyman Eppes, who kept a sharp eye on real estate, was twice tapped by faraway grantees or their descendants to help broker the sale of a gift lot. In 1890, Eppes found a buyer for a bank worker in Manhattan whose father was a Smith grantee. Two years earlier, Eppes did the same for a Manhattan deedholder, Silas Harris, who kept up taxes on his gift lot for forty-two years before he let it go.³²

Revelations from the Courts

One story in particular underscores the resonance of the gift land in Black memory—in this case, the hundred-acre south half of Lot 277 in Essex County’s Township 11. In 1847, this big lot was assigned to Stephen Pembroke, an Ulster County grantee. Charles Ray had Pembroke listed in his book, too, and living in Manhattan. In fact, both residences were invented. Stephen Pembroke lived in Maryland. He received his gift land while he was enslaved. And he would not learn he was an Adirondack landowner for years.³³

Did Smith know? He didn’t pick the grantees; that fell to his agents. To give land to a slave ran afoul of his rules of eligibility and of state and federal laws too. And while this may not have troubled the reformer who urged antislavery Southerners to give pocket compasses to prospective fugitives so they could guide themselves to freedom, and urged escaping slaves to steal “whatever is essential to your escape,” it would not go well for Smith if his detractors learned he gave land to slaves. He would be judged a liar and a criminal. He might be tried, sued, and jailed. And he would put his own grantee-settlers in danger, since rumors of self-freed slaves in the Black Woods would rouse the appetite of bounty hunters. Risks these reckless were not Smith’s style.³⁴

It was all the more important, then, that Smith have confidence in his Black land agents to uphold his rules. But sometimes the agents didn’t, and maybe they let Smith know and maybe they chose not to. The esteemed Rev. James W. C. Pennington, a Smith grantee and a great advocate for Smith’s idea, had escaped his own enslavement in 1827. Back then, when he was very young, he was simply “Blacksmith Jim,” one of the large and close-knit Pembroke clan on Frisby Tilghman’s Maryland plantation. James ( Jim) Pembroke changed his name to Pennington when he got to Pennsylvania soon after his escape. After sojourning with antislavery Quakers, he pushed on to New York, where he wrote the harrowing account of his enslavement and escape that put him at the forefront of the abolition cause. Mark Twain borrowed details from The Fugitive Blacksmith for Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Gerrit Smith was so moved that he gave Pennington a gift lot with a warm note marveling at his “wisdom and integrity” (praise that so delighted Reverend Pennington he published Smith’s note in an edition of his book). The self-taught Pennington, a gifted orator, would lecture about slavery to audiences in Jamaica, Heidelberg, and England. He was pastor of the First Colored Presbyterian Church of New York, one of the largest Black churches of that denomination in the nation.³⁵

But Pennington could not fully know his freedom while his family was enslaved, and his failure to do for them what he’d managed for himself made him despair. He had tried to buy the freedom of his older brother. Stephen’s enslaver never answered. Gerrit Smith’s land gifts suggested another way to help. If and when Stephen escaped, his brother James could make sure land was waiting for him, an Adirondack getaway, a place for a new start. Pennington numbered several of Smith’s agents among his closest friends. One of them would help him, surely. And, indeed, on page 3 of Charles B. Ray’s receipt book is Stephen Pembroke’s signature, with a great X in the middle of it that Ray likely penned himself, just as it was likely Ray who made sure these brothers’ gift lots were near each other, and ensured that Pembroke’s name was in his book of grantees, and Gerrit Smith’s.³⁶

Preemptive planning on this order for enslaved people who were not yet free was not unheard of. Black Northerners sometimes lined up situations, jobs, or homes for fugitives in advance of a prayed-for escape. But the flagrant disregard for Smith’s intent in this case, and by two of his good friends, raises some beguiling questions. Was Pembroke an anomaly? Or were there more among Smith’s three thousand who got New York deeds and fake addresses while they were enslaved? If one story flags no trend, it surely prods the imagination. Most of Smith’s Black agents were active in their cities’ Underground Railroads. If one did this, why not more than one, and more than once? Why not furnish scores, even hundreds of enslaved Black men with fake New York addresses so they could qualify for deeds?³⁷

“Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history,” mused the German writer Novalis in 1799. Someday a novelist may meet the challenge posed by this scenario, and bless Timbuctoo with what Philip Roth called the “ruthless intimacy of fiction.” And someday a tireless historian may give us something more to coast on than eager speculation. I stick with Pembroke’s story because it furnishes an usually well-blazed trail, and where one trail shows the way, more might be discovered.³⁸

Stephen Pembroke did join his brother, finally, in May 1854. After his wife died and seven years after he was made an Adirondack deedholder, Pembroke and his two teenage sons escaped from their Maryland enslaver, making first for Philadelphia. At once William Still, the lead conductor of Philadelphia’s legendarily well-managed Underground Railroad, got word to Pennington of this party’s plan to join him in Manhattan. The astonished and elated (and also frantic) Pennington moved fast to find a safe house for his family that was within walking distance to his own, and to prepare for this reunion with the older brother he hadn’t seen in thirty years, and whose boys—his nephews!—he’d never met.³⁹

And what a sight they were! For two enchanted hours, the four of them soaked each other up, talked and wept, recovered and caught up. Then fatigue blindsided all of them, and the exultant churchman returned to his own bed.⁴⁰

That one enchanted night—first glimpse, full gaze, embrace, first words and last—would haunt Pennington for the rest of his life. While he slumbered in his home, before the city sky began to pale, Philadelphia slave hunters armed with warrants broke into the rooms of his brother and two nephews and took them into custody. Father and sons were led to jail. Special Commissioner G. W. Morton scheduled their hearing bright and early, before the press could rally. Happily for Morton, and so much more efficient, the Fugitive Slave Act spared him the necessity of offering the defendants legal counsel, and his court aides, very shrewdly, assured the panicked Pennington and his attorney that a hearing would come later on that day. It didn’t. And as fast as Pennington raced to get a writ of habeas corpus, the commissioner was quicker: that afternoon, and under guard, James, Robert, and Jacob Pembroke were on a southbound train to Maryland. The Fugitive Slave Act authorized a five-dollar fee to special commissioners when an alleged fugitive was released, and ten dollars if the fugitive went “home” with the claimant. Thirty dollars richer, Commissioner Morton surely counted this a very nice day’s work.⁴¹

Fifty-year-old Stephen Pembroke had aimed to deliver his two boys to freedom. Instead he saw them bound, chained, and “twice sold before my face… . My master’s son lay in the room where I lay with a brace of pistols under his head; and when I turned over, he would start up and lay his hand on me.” Frederick Douglass, outraged, ran updates on the Pembrokes in his newspaper for six weeks; this case especially, he felt, was an emphatic call to arms: “Stephen, Robert and Jacob Pembroke should never have been taken from the house in which they were lodged without bloodshed… . Every colored man in the country should sleep with his revolver under his head, loaded and ready for use.” Pembroke’s captors weren’t complaining. The more fuss the Northern papers made of the captives’ plight, the more compensation might be wrung out of their antislavery friends. From Sharpsburg, Pembroke made his stark appeal to Pennington: “Do my dear brother, make arrangements, and that at once, for my relief… . I will work daily when I get there to pay you back. If you only knew my situation and my feelings you would not wait.” His sons had already been “sold to the drivers”; for them, it was too late. A North Carolina lumber merchant owned them now. They were assets—back to stuff. Soon Stephen Pembroke, the past property of three masters, was sure to share their fate.⁴²

James Pennington pounded every door. Abolitionists, an ex-governor, even the New York Colored Orphan Asylum pitched in to help him meet this ransom. The “man-thieves” had their thousand dollars in a month. Pembroke moved to Brooklyn and worked as a whitewasher. Sometimes he joined his younger brother at the lectern or pulpit to speak of his ordeal. And it seems he remarried (the 1865 state census has him living with a woman from Virginia). But his public footprint was not deep. She moved out, and then he died, and where his home was at the end was anybody’s guess. Somebody was keeping up the taxes on his land, though. Someone aimed to keep it in his name.⁴³

The land Pembroke never saw was not as lovable in 1846 as it may seem today. Lot 277, South Half, Township 11, Old Military Tract, one hundred acres, “much water,” Gerrit Smith had written in his Land Book. Just how much was much? Was it mostly water, and the rest a marsh? Were there hardwoods? Was there access? It would take several decades and the gilded lens of recreational tourism to make this lakeside piece enticing. But the Elizabethtown attorney Oliver Abel had always loved this wild stretch. As a boy, he camped here, and his memories of the brilliant fishing and the long paddles were rich. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, waterfront lots on lovely lakes with misty mountain views were gaining value fast. The Westside, a hotel he and Mary owned and ran on Lake Placid, now had a following. On Oliver’s hundred-acre childhood getaway, their good fortune might be trebled.⁴⁴

In 1870, Oliver Abel’s close review of county land records met with encouraging results. Though a few boathouses and small buildings had sprouted on Lot 277, no one had pursued a title, which, since 1847, had remained in Stephen Pembroke’s name. Could this be one of Gerrit Smith’s long-gone or never-got-here colored people? Abel was familiar with the giveaway. After the Civil War, he gave Black veterans a hand with their pension claims, and it may have been these clients who suggested he and Mary consider speaking with the one Black agent who still seemed to take an interest in the deedholders. Elder Charles B. Ray was living in Manhattan. The Abels tracked him down.⁴⁵

Their delight in this new ally can scarcely be imagined. Yes, Elder Ray had known the late Stephen Pembroke. He knew his late brother, James Pennington. He knew they both were Smith grantees. And he knew that Pembroke had some sons. A wretched story there. Last Ray heard, they lived in Alabama. And he would help the Abels find them, though he was far from idle, with obligations at Bethesda Congregational, his mission outreach, and now stumping for Mr. Lincoln’s GOP, a dearer cause than ever. He would find the “twice-sold” nephews of his old friend.⁴⁶

Streetlights were the business of the day when the Greensboro attorney James E. Webb heard from Charles Bennett Ray in 1882. Greensboro, the Hale County seat, didn’t have a one. Come sundown, this town worthy couldn’t see the tips of his own shoes. The good news was that the mayor had approved a town petition to get Greensboro illuminated, and Webb would be in charge. This was a tall order, installing thirty kerosene streetlamps, but Webb, a Democratic Party operative, liked a challenge. And this letter out of nowhere from New York City—here was a challenge for the archives. A Black minister in New York City was asking him, Colonel Webb, a four-year veteran of the Army of Virginia, to take time out of his day to track down two Negro laborers with a proposition so outlandish, a piece of news so unimaginable—how could he say no?⁴⁷

These Negroes, Robert and Jacob McCray, had inherited a piece of New York’s Adirondack wilderness. Would they know the Adirondacks from Bessemer or Eutaw? If he pulled a map out, they’d look at it and nod. But they couldn’t read a map. They couldn’t read, period. They were ex-slaves. As for Charles Bennett Ray, what was he to them? Less than nothing, likely, but this Ray certainly knew plenty about them. He knew their father and their uncle. And he knew all about this land. The father, Stephen Pembroke, came into it (somehow!) in the late 1840s, and now there was a New York lady who would pay these brothers three hundred dollars for it, free and clear.⁴⁸

In January when Webb was asked to find these men, nobody was picking cotton. Everything was baled up. The wide, hard-lit fields were listless. But somewhere in Hale County these gentlemen were working, “day clear to first dark,” maybe chopping wood, or at the sawmill. Two poor Black men name of McCray—Webb, a man with many friends, would find them soon enough. In Alabama’s Black Belt, Hale County took its name from the Confederate officer who, on President Lincoln’s election, predicted “all the horrors of a San Domingo servile insurrection, [the consignment of] her citizens to assassinations, and her wives and daughters to pollution and violation, to gratify the lust of half-civilized Africans.” Greensboro was also where Walker Evans took his photographs for James Agee’s documentary opus of 1941, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. found refuge in a family’s modest home from hooded men in pickups trawling the back roads. That night in 1968, Dr. King was fortunate. Before dawn, his Black friends got him out of Greensboro to safety. In Memphis two weeks later, the good luck he never trusted abandoned him for good.⁴⁹

Hale County was impoverished when Dr. King visited, and it was poor in the time of the McCrays. The odds are good that when the aging brothers heard what the white lawyer had to say, they had been farming shares for a quarter of a century, work that held them rigidly in debt and bound them to a peonage that was, in all but name, a variant of slavery. The sum that Oliver and Mary Abel had told Ray to offer the McCrays was a splinter of the land’s true value—as Ray (a shrewd speculator in his own right who had amassed a minor fortune in wild land and city real estate) surely understood. Did he feel the Abels should offer more? Or fear that any greater compensation might invite predatory schemers and put the sharecroppers at risk? If the offer’s stunning insufficiency troubled Ray, the McCray brothers, he may have reasoned, would not object. Three hundred dollars in 1882, which today would hold a $7,000 value, could go a distance for two croppers with families. It could turn them from farmworkers to subsistence farmers, buy them livestock, clap a Bible on the table, pay a debt, and lay in seed for fall. It could sweeten the idea of the future. In 1882, the year the Supreme Court declared the Ku Klux Klan Act unconstitutional, stripping federal patrols of the power to protect freedpeople from lynch mobs, anything even a little hopeful was big news.⁵⁰

So, yes, said the McCray brothers to the white lawyer about this never-dreamed-of windfall out of the clear Yankee blue. They would mark the title Charles Ray had sent to Mr. Webb with their Xs, claim it, then at once sell back land and title to the New Yorkers and get paid. And here we may be tempted to wrap things up and count the story (like the news of gift deeds held for voting rights by hundred of grantees) as one of several that gave the giveaway a warm pulse long after history declared it dead. But more would be revealed than the McCrays’ unexpected fortune. White memory had other plans for Pembroke and his heirs.

Verdicts and Reversals

The Abels were hell-bent on nailing down Pembroke’s title for a reason. In the lot they’d set their hearts on lived, intermittently, a squatter. Gaining title to the land would mean they could evict him—and eviction it would need to be since Benjamin T. Brewster would not go without a fight. No backcountry trapper clad in buckskin, Brewster had his eye on this lot too, and he badly hoped to buy it. A speculator and a businessman with one successful inn already going strong, he (just like the Abels) also had in mind a second hostelry, maybe with a piazza lined with rockers and Chinese lanterns twinkling overhead. In Essex County in this era, lakefront hotels were pushing up like mushrooms after a May rain. Capillary trails widened into coach roads and railroad spurs, and prize lots were selling and reselling as fast as developers could flip them. Some local folks were saying that the hundred-acre Lot 277 was worth as much as $50,000.⁵¹

Thus the Abels’ race for legal standing. Brewster had paid taxes on the property in a desultory way and put up some modest structures, which would boost his case in court. But if the Abels owned the title? That might give their team the edge. But further work awaited. Pembroke’s death and the disappearance of the original title compelled the use of circumstantial evidence. And while Smith’s Land Book and Ray’s Receipt Book held Pembroke’s name and the number of his lot, neither document was legally binding. Witnesses would need to be called up who could verify these notebooks’ value, speak for Pembroke’s credibility, confirm his marriage to the boys’ late mother, and vouch for Pembroke as the father of his Alabama sons. By the last quarter of the century, who was left who knew about the giveaway? Pennington had died in 1870, Smith in 1874, and Ray, most unhelpfully, in 1887. Also gone to their long home: the Black land agents Wright, McCune Smith, Loguen, Garnet, and Ward.⁵²

Charles B. Ray’s daughter Florence grew up with the giveaway; the tribute to her father she wrote with her sister, Henrietta Cordelia, vividly described Ray’s devotion to Smith’s scheme. Garnet may have been the best recruiter, and McCune Smith the sharpest thinker about the giveaway’s larger value, but Ray was on the ground, the fixer, the one who lobbied for the grantees after other agents gave up. So when Ray’s schoolteacher daughter Florence journeyed from Manhattan to Elizabethtown in 1889, she did more than stand up for the Pembrokes. She defended her father’s mission. Brandishing his receipt book with the grantees’ names, she told the all-white jury, “I have known of the existence of this book all the years I can remember anything. It remained in my father’s possession as long as he lived.” She knew how he worked to get deeds dispersed to thousands, knew all about the Pembrokes and how her father tracked down the old slave’s orphaned sons. Her defense of her father’s notebook defended the giveaway itself.⁵³

Unlike Florence Ray, Gerrit Smith Miller did not grow up with the giveaway. He was an infant when it was launched. But this grandson of the late philanthropist, and manager of the family’s vast estate, shared Florence Ray’s devotion to Smith’s initiative and, like her, came to court with evidence in hand: Smith’s Land Book with Pembroke’s name inscribed within. From Peterboro to craggy Essex County on bad roads in early winter was a trek, but Smith’s namesake would find the courthouse. For the sake of justice, history, and the collaborative effort that made a bold idea flicker fleetingly to life, he showed up.⁵⁴

The finding for the plaintiff in this “important real estate case” (so judged the Essex County Republican) may seem easily explained: Stirred by stories of John Brown’s body in this courthouse; roused by the oratory of Mary and Oliver Abel’s lawyer, Richard Hand (who as a young man stood vigil over Brown’s coffin in this room); moved by the testimony of Gerrit Smith’s grandson (the striking and well-spoken Miller, who introduced pure-bred Holsteins to American dairy, was, for many farmers, something of a hero); possibly beguiled by the eloquent schoolteacher from the city; and maybe even disposed to tender feelings about the grand old “scheme of justice and benevolence” that lured Brown’s family to Essex County years before, this jury ruled for Mary Abel and, in so doing, for the legitimacy of Stephen Pembroke’s deed.⁵⁵

But a harder look at court records suggests that the real reason for this ruling was anything but sentimental. This jury had been given a directed verdict from the judge, a state supreme court justice from Montgomery County then presiding over circuit court in Elizabethtown, the Essex County seat. In this decade in New York, a judge might introduce a directed verdict when he feared a jury would ignore the rules of evidence and law. Judge Frothingham Fish of Fultonville knew the law favored the Abels’ claim, but he was enough of an upstater to guess that Adirondackers would never challenge a local as venerable as Brewster, whose taproot in the region reached as deep as Mirror Lake. And the judge may have expected, too, no small resistance to a Black deedholder’s posthumous claim to Adirondack land, and a concern among these jurists about other long-dead claimants lacking any visible connection to North Elba who might gain the legal power to oust a local from his land.⁵⁶

Hence the directed verdict. This way, Judge Fish knew that justice would be served. But his ambivalence showed starkly in a summary so fraught with his misgivings that it might have served as a blueprint for the defense—and maybe did. When the case moved to Albany, Ben Brewster got his way: New York Supreme Court justice W. J. Learned and two junior judges dismissed the Abels’ claim outright. Why, Judge Learned groused, was Pembroke’s name in Smith’s Land Book not written by himself? Learned was also troubled by the mismatch between Pembroke’s name and the surnames of his sons. Could anyone know these men were his sons? Was there proof that their parents were even married? In his deposition, Robert McCray hardly seemed to know his father. Why, he could not even name his father’s trade!⁵⁷

The judgment for Mary Abel was reversed. And the relief that met an outcome favoring Ben Brewster, founder-pioneer, is easy to imagine. What resonates about this case, however, is not so much Brewster’s victory as the blithe, untroubled ignorance of slavery that the appellate panel revealed in its response to the McCrays—and this despite the fact that the presiding judge was an erudite legal scholar, well traveled and politically informed. Judge Learned knew the late Stephen Pembroke was a slave. He knew Robert and Jacob McCray’s mother, Surena Pembroke, died enslaved in Maryland. Why, then, his dullness on their mismatched surnames? Learned was forty-two when President Lincoln freed the slaves. That enslaved people were property, that slave marriages were not recognized by law—was any of this news? Surely he could infer that when slaves and their enslaved children held different surnames, they had been named (and owned) by different people. Even if this judge knew nothing of Stephen Pembroke’s flight, or his recapture and the sale of his boys to a North Carolina lumber merchant, he understood that slavery stood on the wide shoulders of a terroristic culture that brutalized Black families. Yet all the esteemed jurist could suppose was the McCrays were born out of wedlock: “No explanation is given why they do not bear their father’s name… . No proof of the marriage of the parents, except the witness says his mother’s name was Surena Pembroke… . It does not appear that they ever lived together… . Certainly, if a man and woman cohabit, the ordinary inference is that the children are illegitimate.”⁵⁸

Ordinary inferences did not apply to life under slavery. On their return to Maryland in 1854, Robert and Jacob Pembroke were reenslaved at once. McCray was the name they got from their new enslavers. But either Judge Learned knew nothing of the ghastly pressures and lasting ruptures that slave families endured, or he did not care. Why would he? The temper of his era favored his response. This was, after all, the 1890s, dawn of a new age of forgetting, when, writes David Blight, Civil War memory “fell into a drugged state, as though sent to an idyllic foreign land from which it has never fully found the way home.” If Northern memory was slower to forget than Southern, it was glad enough to endorse the notion that emancipation freed not only slaves but all of white America from an obligation to concern itself with slavery’s causes or lasting toxins. Thus Judge Learned’s selective memory. He had testimony from the Pembrokes’ neighbors that made it clear this couple was considered married; that their children were not considered bastards; that this family was churchgoing, stable, and intact. But the judge required a certificate of marriage—as if a slave could pick one up as freely as a stick. He needed proof that Stephen and Surena shared one address—as if married slaves with different masters chose their beds. He would read the details of a slave’s life as he might his own, and when those details were lacking or confused, when a witness, for example, recalled the McCrays as the McCrarys, or when fifty-four-year-old Robert McCray could not say what his father, whom he had not seen in three decades, did in New York City, the judge assailed his credibility.⁵⁹

The indifference to the injuries to which slave families were exposed, the imposition of Northern mores on slave culture, revealed more than a failure of imagination. Girding Judge Learned’s response was the iron of denial; his blind spot was the nation’s. Nothing in his upstate world (law school dinners, social clubs, Democratic Party meetings) urged a deeper knowledge of the facts of slavery; nothing said, Remember how it was. In fact, to fight the reflex of a purposeful forgetting in the name of sectional reconciliation might have been judged subversive, even unpatriotic. Judge Learned’s readiness to find reasons to discredit the McCrays was vicious but not personal. It was the habit of the land.

The dogged Mary Abel won a retrial in 1890, and two years later a new judge heard the case. Once again, Florence Ray and Gerrit Smith Miller testified in Elizabethtown, and with them was Oliver Abel, now brandishing fresh evidence of the Pembrokes’ marriage from a Sharpsburg druggist whose father owned Pembroke’s first wife Surena, and from a laborer who knew the Pembrokes too. The late Rev. James Pennington’s adopted son, Thomas H. S. Pennington, a retired pharmacist in Saratoga Springs, also testified for Abel. This Civil War veteran, once a regimental hospital steward for the Twentieth Regiment, USCT, was a scholar of his late father’s activist career and well informed about his uncle’s ruptured family.⁶⁰

Another witness for the plaintiff in November 1892 was Robert Grove of Sharpsburg, Maryland: merchant, magistrate, and kin to Stephen Pembroke’s last owner. Grove came a long way in late November to wade into a dustup between these Yankee speculators. Did the Abels make it worth his while? Since Ray tracked down the McCrays, the value of this lakeside acreage had surged to $80,000. But the Marylander may have had his own less mercenary reasons for this trip. He knew the McCrays when they were Pembrokes; Jacob and Robert were boyhood friends. He knew what stood for a marriage between slaves, and maybe his white Southern memory registered a cut when a Yankee judge called the Pembrokes’ union fake.⁶¹

In the end, Judge Leslie Russell invoked the antebellum US slave code to “non-suit” the plaintiff once and for all. Being property himself, he can own no property, nor make any contract. When Stephen Pembroke got his lot, this was the law. Property can’t own itself. Therefore, reasoned Russell (Fourth Judicial District, ex-attorney general, loyal Republican), Pembroke’s deed was illegal from day one. Yet if this point was quite so obvious, why was it not made by Brewster’s first attorney or Judge Learned of Albany? Did they balk at calling on an article of law so virulently tough it took a civil war to kill it?⁶²

Even if Judge Russell had no such qualms, he might have urged a more nuanced reading of the slave law. Slaves did own property before emancipation. They owned horses, clothes, crops, and wages. Land rights had more to do with privileges of access, not ownership of title. But Judge Russell might nonetheless have argued that since slavery was illegal in New York when Pembroke was assigned a deed, state law made him eligible to own land in New York that would be held in trust for him (and, indeed, effectively was) until his emancipation was secured. But an argument like this would have marked Russell as a trailblazing radical. This was not his wish. So Ben Brewster got his way, along with $1,000 in court costs. Over the years he would expand his holdings to 517 acres. He built fine lakefront hotels. He filled a boathouse with guide boats and canoes. His beard grew long and pillowy. In 1914, a film company in Lake Placid gave him a bit part as Father Time.⁶³

As for the McCrays, did anyone alert them to this case’s final disposition? They got their $300. Would they care how it panned out? I think they might have. They had reason.

Robert McCray, “Negro,” had registered to vote in Greensboro as early as July 1867, only five months after the passage of the federal Reconstruction Act that legalized this right. But legalized or not, this remained Alabama. The war was over, and, of course, it wasn’t. By 1874, Alabama Democrats had overtaken the state legislature and routed every nonfederal reform measure on the books. Black voting rights, a federal entitlement, remained, but the brief shining spell of equal voting rights, interracial jury duty, fair elections, government employment, an integrated legislature, and government-mandated protection against white terrorist attacks was already a fading dream.

But Robert McCray had registered to vote, and I’m guessing that if he took this step so early in the process, he meant business. He voted because he was a citizen; it was his obligation and his right. And I want to think he kept voting even when it meant he had to pay a poll tax, pass a literacy test, prove he owned property, or abide by any of the other white-enforced restrictions that would, by 1957, reduce Black voters in Hale County to 1.8 percent of the population.⁶⁴

I’m also guessing that because he knew the risks he ran each time he cast a ballot (risks that ranged from intimidation to joblessness, eviction, whippings, and the lynch mob), he might very much have liked to know the disposition of a court case involving his own blasted family. In New York City in 1854, a New York judge had enabled his and Jacob’s reenslavement with a ruling that resulted in a lifelong separation from their one living parent and their loss of freedom for eleven years. In Albany in 1892, another New York justice refused to recognize his and his brother Jacob’s ruptured lives in slavery. Which legal outcome was the worse is hard to know—the feel of freedom for less than half a day before the resumption of his chatteldom, or the injury embedded in the cool, abstracted language of a court hearing twenty-seven years after the Fifteenth Amendment, a ruling that stripped two aging men of the right to their own remembered lives. One insulted their humanity; the other made it plain that their history, their lives in slavery, as Pembrokes, as their parents’ sons, had no meaning, had never happened.⁶⁵

For the message here from Albany was plain: You have no story. You have no past. We don’t see you. You aren’t there.