Introduction

Strongest Champion and Truest Friend

A few days after Christmas in 1874, Gerrit Smith, seventy-seven, died of a stroke in his nephew’s home in Manhattan. Obituaries were long and lavish, praising public work and private deeds alike. Editors who scoffed at Smith’s politics and style while he lived put the barbs away to laud a moral icon. In newspapers and magazines, essays honored the equal rights reformer who, offered the New York Herald, “was not great, as Clay and Webster and Calhoun were great—[and] was not even so profound a champion of his cause as Charles Sumner, but [who] united the aristocratic bearing of the gentleman with the simplicity of the servant of the bondman, giving to him as a brother, in such equal proportions that he earned for himself a title better than that of gentleman, better than that of philanthropist—that of a man.” The Tribune, long a thorn in Smith’s side, was fulsome: “The possession of great tracts of land makes common men conservative and monopolists. It made of Gerrit Smith one of the most radical and generous of men.” Four articles on Smith’s career and funeral ran in the New York Times. An editorial mourned the end of “the era of moral politics” and reminded readers of the “stubbornness of conviction and moral courage” it took to be an “ ‘out-and-out Abolitionist’ (even worse than the cry of ‘Infidel’ in the Middle Ages) in the antebellum era when so much of New York’s trade and commerce was for slavery,” and “when a ‘nigger’s’ appearance anywhere near a Tammany meeting meant a broken head, if not an ornamented lamp-post.” In Philadelphia, the Christian Recorder tolled the losses: “One by one are passing away the noble band of men who were the nation’s truest leaders through the wilderness of the dark era of Slavery.” Lovejoy, Giddings, Seward, Chase, Greeley and Tappan—all gone, and now, “the prince of them all … , Gerrit Smith. Providence could not have given the cause a more efficient ally. He was just the man.”⁷

Viewing hours at General Cochrane’s home where Smith’s body rested under ferns in an ice shell by a window were brief and little publicized. Still, word sifted out and crowds collected, and the reporter from the New York Times judged that “fully one-fourth of those who called were colored people, whose grief on viewing the remains of their deceased benefactor was intense.” Neither Frederick Douglass nor William Lloyd Garrison attended, but here was Smith’s old friend Henry Highland Garnet, and what the churchman offered spoke for thousands: “The colored people without exception looked upon Mr. Smith as their dearest and even their only friend, such was … their affection for him. They know that in him they have lost their strongest champion and truest friend, and they keenly feel their loss.”⁸

Other Black mourners in the room that day were Peter Porter, the “Railroad Champion for Equal Rights” (his fight for Black access to public transport thrice roused the wrath of mobs), and Charles Reason, a scholar-poet and school head. Elder Ray, Smith’s city land agent, was detained, but he sent two daughters in his stead, and all this was duly noted by the Times. What the reporter didn’t write, however (how could he know?), was that all the Black attendees he named had a tie to Smith’s land giveaway of 1846. Reason, Porter, and Garnet were deedholders. Charles Ray was, like Garnet, both agent and grantee. In fact, when Smith died, Charles Ray was still working for the giveaway and would keep working for it until his death in 1886, at which time his daughter Florence took up the baton.⁹

Ray’s devotion would have left Smith baffled. Why still bother? What meaning has this plan for anyone? Who remembers it? Who cares? Out of all the good I’ve done in my long life, why fix on the deed that so starkly failed to meet my expectations?

But Smith’s expectations are exactly what I’ve tried to push aside to see how his idea played out in ways he could not anticipate or imagine. He did not expect his grantees to squat on lots that weren’t the ones he gave them or guess they would develop mini-neighborhoods of their own. And they did. He did not foresee the interest of Black speculators, who, like Smith, recognized a bargain when they saw one and started trading in Adirondack gift lots as soon as they came up for sale. He may have guessed that the agrarian values he invoked to explain his project would be touted at Black political conventions from the 1840s to the 1860s, but maybe not that activists would obliquely reference the Smith Lands when they promoted farm colonies for fugitives in Canada. After the Civil War, Black reformers also tipped their hats to Smith’s great “scheme” of emigration when they urged Southern freedmen to put Ku Klux country at their backs and go west. White land reformers in the postbellum era recalled Smith’s gift land, too, when they courted his support and urged him to back a more sweeping land reform agenda. Indirectly, white progressives honored the giveaway when they spun great schemes to head south after the war and establish farm colonies for freed people, impoverished immigrants, or poor white families, “honest and industrious.” They knew what Smith tried to do in 1846. Now that slavery was over, maybe it was time to revive an old idea. They, too, were the heirs of Timbuctoo.¹⁰

Several deedholders, many prominent Black reformers among them, were inspired by their gift land not to move north but head instead for California, Michigan, and Canada West. One deedholder used Smith’s idea as a model for an upstate colony of his own (a repurposing from which Smith recoiled). Nondeedholders, beguiled by the rumor of a corner of New York where Black families were farming, ventured to the Black Woods and claimed it for their home. And none of this Mr. Smith saw coming. Nor would he extend his giveaway to out-of-staters, but they still came, and mostly from the South. The expectation that only free people of color would respond to his offer was never very realistic, as Smith himself may have understood. The line between the free Black New Yorker and the fugitive was too porous, and without fanfare, freedom seekers would head north. But neither Smith nor his agents likely guessed that enslavers still chafing at the loss of human property would send their hired guns in hot pursuit of one Black farmer who had lived free in New York for a decade. Smith no more anticipated this than he imagined his Black agents might consider setting up an enslaved person with a gift lot of his own. But it happened, and the legal dust-up that attended it would span two centuries, long after the enslaved grantee and Gerrit Smith were dead. Nor would Smith ever learn that a key goal of the giveaway he deemed a failure had been realized, if not as robustly as he’d hoped. It was his bitter conviction that almost all his deedholders failed to retain their land for its value at the polls. But he was wrong. In 1903, the New York Times revealed that after the Fifteenth Amendment was enacted in 1870, as many as four hundred downstate Black New Yorkers gave up or sold the gift deeds their parents or grandparents received from Gerrit Smith. They had retained them for twenty-four years, until the hated property requirement was nullified and their rights of citizenship were guaranteed. Then, and not until, they let them go. So the gift deeds helped them vote. This was Smith’s idea, and some part of it bore fruit.

If the first meaning of this book’s title invokes the settlers who responded to Smith’s offer, and the world they made with their white neighbors in the Adirondack woods, there is a second meaning too. There is the blackness of obscurity, of what cannot be seen. Since 1859, a vigilant and little-challenged narrative has kept this story in the shadows. “John Brown Country,” the third section of this book, takes up the shaping role of historiography. How and why was a Black agrarian initiative reduced to anecdotal marginalia? From the first days it was publicized, Smith’s giveaway was misrepresented in terms, here coded, there explicit, that racialized the Adirondacks as a country made and fit for white people. This prejudice shapes an image of the region even now.

This is not to say this whiting-out was special to this region. Scholars have delved deeply into forgotten or never-documented pockets of Black social history in Iowa and Indiana, Maine, Oregon and Alabama, and all the old Northwest Territory. A midnight mob, a vanished neighborhood, a once thriving country church put to the torch—no corner of the country lacks a lost-and-found or still-lost story of its own. What distinguishes the Black Woods is the legibility of the process. With its glib and frequent linkages of environmental integrity and racial purity, the Adirondack brand has informed a racialized literary culture for a century and a half. And for this reason, the Black Woods suggests a model for considering this process in many places, Northern, rural, and purportedly all white, where the Black story has been othered. Lost and othered aren’t the same. What happened in the Black Woods reminds us why the difference matters.¹¹

How did it begin? Smith’s plan was destined to be distorted; the pervasive racism of his time ensured this. But the shelf life of some fantasies-turned-facts has been very long indeed. Early on it was asserted that the giveaway was for “runaways,” and, even now, casual summaries of this effort frame New York as a land of refuge and redemption, not as the state whose strident racism was a driving reason for Smith’s plan. Another example along these lines: the insistence in antiquarian accounts that in a few years Black families on the ground thinned to one (in fact, the census reveals that as late as 1900, scores of deedholders’ descendants resided in the region). Or the offhand, popular assertion that only one Black settlement, Timbuctoo, ever saw the light of an Adirondack day, when, in fact, four communities (Freeman’s Home, Timbuctoo, Blacksville, and Negro Brook) were Black-founded, and Black families put down lasting roots in older hamlets founded by Canadians and New Englanders, such as St. Armand, Bloomingdale, and Franklin. Very sticky, too, has been the notion that when Black settlers left, they drifted “home” to cities they all came from and where they presumably belonged. In fact, when families moved from the Black Woods, they often migrated to small towns or other farm districts in upstate New York or New England.¹²

The most egregious historical distortion, the assertion of Black inferiority, did not originate with the sacralized terrain I call John Brown Country. Much older Eurocentric readings claimed this part of the New World for hegemonic narratives of white supremacy. John Brown himself stood for the opposite of this, of course, but the fierce antiracism he preached and practiced all his life would be much transformed—diluted and deracinated—after he was hanged and buried. The enshrinement of the antislavery martyr, which began with the gloomy trip that hauled his body home from Virginia to North Elba, an odyssey that pitched his widow Mary Ann and her companion, Wendell Phillips, from train to sail ferry, oxcart to wagon, and culminated in the sodden winter burial with its sparse mourners, put John Brown Country on the map. And as the allure of John Brown Country brightened with every visitor’s rapt account, so would Brown’s radical call for a world without caste or race hate grow fainter.

No grand tour of the Adirondacks in the late nineteenth century failed to include a stop at Brown’s home; no magic lantern show lacked a slide of his slim headstone in its protective case of glass. Accounts of the pilgrimage to the farm usually put the rigors of the journey on a par with visiting the grave itself, which underscored a hopeful likeness between North Elba and holy sites like Calvary and Jerusalem. In the next century, the faithful included civil rights activists, Cold War zealots, and political progressives. From the 1920s into the 1970s, schools closed and church bells tolled as North Elbans gathered at the grave on Brown’s May birthday, joining members of the John Brown Memorial Association from Boston, Worcester, Philadelphia, and New York. Speeches, prayers, and hymns were offered, and wreaths tipped tenderly against his stone. In local history and guidebooks, Brown was embraced as hometown hero and archetypal Adirondacker, resilient, blunt, God fearing, resolute.

But in these visits, the land gifts of Gerrit Smith, the part to do with equal voting rights, went unremarked. And if we have Brown to thank for forcing history to notice Timbuctoo at all, the blessing of his influence is mixed. The emphasis in shelves of “Browniana” on all the white man did for the grantees—the lot lines he set right, the lifesaving stores of food he supplied when famine threatened, the Scripture he intoned at Sabbath—did not extend to a concern with what his Black neighbors did for themselves or their impressions of their white neighbor. Except as conduits for John Brown anecdotes, they had no voice in his biographies. How they survived, or didn’t, and what the Black Woods meant to them, were subjects not explored. Not so the assumption of the grantees’ “natural” inadequacy, lack of mettle, staying power, or grit.

Why, biographers, historians, and memoirists loved to wonder, did so many of them abandon their gift farms? Why had none of them followed Brown to Kansas? Did they not see this was all for them? It is a fact that Brown moved to North Elba in part to find Black fighters for clandestine work to come, a goal he could not realize. The locals who joined his militant campaign were his sons (not all) and some white neighbors. The grantees in his neighborhood declined. The reason? They were obtuse. Unworthy of Brown’s vision. Even Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the Massachusetts abolitionist and Brown’s friend who found more things to praise about the Black farmers than most, embraced this judgment. When it came to the right stuff, said Higginson, Brown would find it only in his sons, “reared” to sacrifice and valor.¹³

Not to blame the poor grantees! Not to ask for what they never had to give! Asserted Smith’s biographer, Octavius Brooks Frothingham, in 1878, “On the best land they would have done nothing. They had none of the qualities that make the farmer… . [Had] the land been the richest in the State they would not have responded, for they could not; it was not in them.” Almost a half century later, E. P. Tanner dusted off the verdict for the state historical association, blaming the “failure” of Smith’s giveaway on “the character of the colonists who naturally had neither the training nor the stuff in them for pioneering.”¹⁴

Twentieth-century Black memory ought not to be censured for borrowing these essentialist conclusions. That W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1909 John Brown biography suggested that Brown alone was responsible for “much if not all of [the giveaway’s] success,” or that Zita Dyson, a Black scholar writing on the giveaway in 1919, declared the Black grantees “had none of the qualities of farmers” and moreover were “disabled by infirmities and vices,” reflected a necessary reliance on white antiquarian perspectives before primary sources became widely available (and before many libraries welcomed Black scholars). In the 1920s, the Black pilgrim-speakers of the John Brown Memorial Association ( JBMA) never once spoke proudly of Smith’s giveaway or acknowledged the Black settlements that brought their hero to North Elba. In fact, in 1978, the North Elba chapter of the JBMA joined ranks with white neighbors to crush a long-planned state initiative to bring a history center to the farm that would have fixed Brown’s Adirondack chapter in the context of Black voting rights and Timbuctoo.¹⁵

Black Americans who moved to the Adirondacks in the decades of the Great Migration, seeking jobs in the grand resorts, service industry, iron mines, blast furnaces, and foundries, learned nothing of it either. The miner’s daughter and social justice activist Alice Paden Green, whose family journeyed to the mining town of Witherbee from South Carolina after World War II, heard about the Black Woods only in her seventh decade. Black history at her Adirondack high school in 1948 was a ten-minute interlude on Booker T. Washington and Jackie Robinson, “and if you missed that one class, that was it.” For Alice and her siblings, the campaign for civil rights and racial justice belonged to blighted cities and a benighted South. Discovering a voting rights campaign that sired a nineteenth-century Black farm colony in her own Essex County thrilled her. But it also got her wondering: How was she never told? Did her teachers know? Did anyone? Why had this story gone away?¹⁶

It didn’t go away, of course. What the public record junks is never sheer caprice. The Black Woods was the staging ground of an unprecedented voting rights initiative and the home of a cherished abolitionist shrine, but it also was the stronghold of an Anglocentric narrative of purity and inviolability that saved a wilderness while clinching the region’s name as a place where nonwhite Americans did not fit, did not belong, feared they would never feel welcome, and suspect this even now.

We can’t resolve this contradiction. The side-by-sideness of this world, the fractured quality of a culture so internally at odds—here gains and there reversals, now boons and later blows—more than characterized Adirondack Country. It enabled it. It defines it still. Far from the ennobled landscape so dear to abolitionists, travel writers, environmentalists, and town historians, this was an all-American roiling mess, a world of stubborn paradox where people said one thing, did another, and then went and did something else. It looked like hypocrisy but that would mean one thing was false and the other true and this wasn’t how it was. Both sides were true; both sides were felt.

We chafe at this. The forward thrust of history clamors for coherence and progression but the lives as they were lived, up close, resist. And this confounds us. We want consistency. We ask, How could they manage? How did they bear it?

As if we were beyond this. As if this weren’t us.