Notes

Preface

1.David Gibson, “A Living, Growing Memorial to Brother Yusuf,” Adirondack Almanack, 9/12/2019; Lauren Stanforth, “Youth Leader, Brother Yusuf, 64,” Times Union (Albany), 12/10/2014; Frederick Rasmussen, “Students Learn the Importance of a Bond with Nature,” Baltimore Sun, 1/15/2011; Mark Frankel, “Xbox Detox,” Sierra, 7/1/2010; Brother Yusuf Burgess, “Keynote Address,” 2nd Annual Michigan No Child Left Behind Coalition Summit 2020, University of Michigan–Dearborn, 6/23/2010; Yusuf Burgess, conversations with the author, 1999–2012.

2.Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 39.

3.Worth recalling here is the historian George Frederickson’s observation about German antisemitism—the linchpin of Nazi ideology at a time when the German Jewish population was less than 1 percent. Frederickson, Racism, 126–27. In the colonial era, whiteness underscored the white male’s assertion of civic standing and entitlement. It did this for an ascendant master class of planters in Virginia (Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, 386), for white working men in the north (Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, 20), and for Irish immigrants striving for recognition as vote-worthy whites (Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White). Blackness, the go-to point of contrast for all things unfree and despised, underscored the value of white freedom, and Emancipation would not easily dissolve the conflation of Black skin with freedom’s opposite; the idea of Blackness as freedom’s counterpoint was too useful and entrenched. According to a search of NYS Historic Newspapers (https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/), from 1840 to 1960, the word “nigger” appeared in Essex, Franklin, Warren, and Clinton County newspapers over two thousand times, and “Rastus,” a stock character in minstrelsy and typically the butt of jokes he never gets, crops up a slew of times in Essex County newspapers between 1849 and 1960. Svenson, Blacks in the Adirondacks, 99–102, 151–52.

4.On the convergence of the eugenics movement with the Adirondack conservation discourse, see Godine, “Conservation’s Dark Side.”

5.Watson, Military and Civil History, 220; Sylvester, Historical Sketches, 139; Smith, History of Essex County, 664. David Reynolds (John Brown, Abolitionist, 164–65) observes that John Brown embraced the Puritan connection, and that his contemporaries reveled in it. Samuel Ridley Howe proudly pictured Brown as a representative “of the Puritan militant order.” Howe’s wife, Julia, dubbed Brown “a Puritan of the Puritans” (Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist, 292). Historian F. E. Chadwick (who declared North Elba as “wholly unfitted by climate and production to the negro race,” heralded Brown’s “Puritan stock” in Causes of the Civil War, 1859–1861, v. 19 (Harpers, 1906, 69). Brown, mused the cultural critic and author Charles Eliot Norton in 1913, was “a man born out of time… . He belonged to the Covenanters, with the Puritans.” Peterson, John Brown, 81, 179n1; Blight, Race and Reunion.

6.Jones, “They Called It Timbucto.” Russell Banks’s novel Cloudsplitter (HarperCollins, 1998) roused a surge of interest in Timbuctoo, most of it enthusiastic. But the North Elba historian Mary MacKenzie was no fan. Banks brought fugitives into his story. He killed off one character whose life, in actuality, was long. “Already [Banks’s novel] has done irreparable damage to local history,” MacKenzie wrote, “and caused me no end of trouble… . For 36 years I have labored very hard to eliminate the kind of nonsense that Banks spouts … and then [he] comes along and overnight destroys my efforts.” (Mary MacKenzie, letter to the editor, Orion, 11/20/1997, LPPL archives; and MacKenzie, “Regarding Russell Banks’s Novel, ‘Cloudsplitter,’ ” in More from the Plains, 97–101.) But the outrage of a town historian who saw no value in “a fictitious biography of a famous man” was no match for public opinion. Banks’s readers were looking for the gong of truth, not the rat-a-tat of fact, and did not miss what they weren’t after. Banks’s “nonsense” limned a world beyond the reach of historical method. If the novelist went where historians feared to tread, this was, after all, his job.

7.Caleb McDaniel (Rice), Hadley Kruczek-Aaron (SUNY Potsdam), Daegan Miller (Cornell), and Lynne M. Feeley (Harvard) have all plumbed the meanings of Timbuctoo and its representations. Kruczek-Aaron, an anthropologist, has for several years conducted field digs on the gift lot of the grantee Lyman Eppes, at John Brown’s North Elba home, and on other nearby land with ties to Timbuctoo. In May 2014, the Northern Lights Community Choir performed the composer Glenn McClure’s Timbuctoo: An Abolition Oratorio in the Adirondack hamlet of Saranac Lake. McClure’s later composition, Promised Land: An Adirondack Folk Opera, also was inspired by stories of Timbuctoo. See Peter Crowley, “Hymns of a Promised Land,” ADE, 5/18/2016. The North Country Underground Railroad Museum (https://www.northcountryundergroundrailroad.com/museum.php) opened in Ausable Chasm in May 2011. While its emphasis is on the stories of fugitives moving through the Champlain Valley toward Canada, it has also explored the stories of undocumented immigration in the region, and human trafficking today.

Introduction

1.Donaldson, History of the Adirondacks, 2:6.

2.GS to TW, CBR, and JMS, Peterboro, NY, 8/1/1846, GSP. Unless otherwise indicated, Smith’s letters, speeches, discourses, and circulars referenced in this book are housed in the Gerrit Smith Papers at Syracuse University. Pamphlets, broadsides, speeches, and news articles are identified as such. The names of sender and recipient indicate a posted letter. When Lyman Epps Jr. mentioned Smith’s land gifts, he did not invoke an equal voting rights campaign for Black New Yorkers. “ ‘John Brown’ by Gerrit Smith,” broadleaf, 8/15/1867, JB/BBS Coll./WVMP, and Frothingham, Gerrit Smith, 253–59.

3.Gellman and Quigley, Jim Crow New York, 73–78, and Ned Benton, “Dating the Start and End of Slavery in New York,” 2017, https://nyslavery.commons.gc.cuny.edu/dating-the-start-and-end-of-slavery-in-new-york/#:~:text.

4.On Smith’s life and career, see Frothingham, Gerrit Smith; Harlow, Gerrit Smith; Dann, Practical Dreamer; Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men, 1–7.

5.GS, “Gerrit Smith’s Reply,” Peoples’ Rights, 7/8/1844.

6.Field, Politics of Race, app. B, 236–37. In 1846 Franklin County voters went 58.8 percent for suffrage, Essex County 70.6 percent, and Clinton 72.8 percent, the highest equal rights vote in New York. In 1860, New York voters, once again, shot down equal suffrage, and in these three Adirondack counties, support for Black voting rights was also in decline.

7.Editorial, New York Herald, 12/29/1874; editorial, New York Daily Tribune, 12/28/1874; “Obituary,” “The Late Gerrit Smith,” “The Era of Moral Politics,” “Local Miscellany: The Late Gerrit Smith,” NYT, 12/29–31/1874; “Gerrit Smith,” Christian Recorder, 1/7/1875.

8.“Late Gerrit Smith”; Henry Highland Garnet, “Obituary,” New York Herald, 1/1/1875.

9.“An Old Abolitionist Dead,” NYT, 7/26/1884. Likely the two daughters who came to view Smith’s body were Florence and Henrietta Cordelia. At this time, Ray’s daughter Charlotte was in Washington, DC, practicing law.

10.Chaplain E. O. Glavis to GS, Newark, 7/15/1865; George W. Jennings to GS, NYC, 9/26/1873; Rhys Jones to GS, Utica, 8/2/1870; Godine, “Abolitionist and the Land Reformer.”

11.See Cox, Bone and Sinew, on nineteenth-century Black settlements in the Old Northwest Territory; Vincent, Southern Seed, Northern Soil, on Black and mixed-race communities in Indiana; and “Malaga Island,” Maine: An Encyclopedia, accessed 1/17/2023, https://maineanencyclopedia.com/malaga-island.

12.On historians and writers who claimed that Smith’s 1846–47 land distribution plan was meant for Southern fugitives, see chap. 5, note 30.

13.Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “A Visit to John Brown’s Household in 1859,” in Contemporaries, 219–43.

14.Frothingham, Gerrit Smith, 112–13; Tanner, “Gerrit Smith,” 32.

15.Du Bois, John Brown, 111; Dyson, “Gerrit Smith’s Effort,” 358. In 1923, this rote narrative was reinforced when the Black historian Carter Woodson ascribed the failure of Smith’s giveaway to “the infelicity of the soil and the lack of initiative on the part of the Negroes” (Chicago Defender, 4/28/1923). On the routing of the New York State Historic Site’s plans for an interpretive center at the John Brown farm in the late 1970s, see chap. 17, and Godine, “Ambushed.”

16.Alice Paden’s afterword to Svenson, Blacks in the Adirondacks, 247–74; and Alice Paden, interviews by the author, 1/31/2011, 12/9/2010.

1. He Feeds the Sparrow

1.Chapter 4, “Humanity,” in Frothingham’s Gerrit Smith, abounds with details of Smith’s work routines and largesse.

2.John Thomas to GS, Bloomingdale, Essex County, 8/26/1872; L. D. Tanner to GS, NY, 7/21/1872; GS to President Andrew White, Cornell University, 5/8/1872.

3.In early 1846, Smith published a booklet advertising his sale land, much of it in northern New York. Smith, Gerrit Smith’s Land Auction; ECR, 3/14/1846, 4/18/1846, and 4/25/1846; Gellman and Quigley, Jim Crow New York, 73–78; GS to TW, CBR, and JMS, 8/1/1846. The “mean and wicked” voter suppression ruling for Black New Yorkers would continue to keep them disenfranchised until the federal ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, when New York’s property requirement was nullified and equal voting rights for all New Yorkers was assured.

4.Gellman and Quigley, Jim Crow New York, 249–59; “About the Colored Conventions,” https://coloredconventions.org/about-conventions/; GS to TW, CBR, and JMS, Peterboro, 11/14/1846.

5.GS to TW, CBR, and JMS, 8/1/1846.

6.“Gerrit Smith’s Tour through Saratoga, Warren, Essex and Clinton,” AP, 6/25/1845.

7.“The Suffrage Question—Who Are the Best Friends to the Negroes,” ECR, 4/18/1846.

8.“Gerrit Smith’s Response to the Colored Citizens of Albany,” AP, 3/13/1846; GS to E. S. Bailey of Brookfield, A. Raymond of Eaton, and F. Rice of Cazenovia, 4/10/1846; Volpe, “Liberty Party”; and Kraut and Field, “Politics versus Principles,” 102–3. On June 10, 1846, the Albany Evening Journal opined, “The admission of Texas, and the question of Free Suffrage, were in the hands of Abolitionists. The Liberty Party in this State could have given the country an Anti-Texas President in 1844; and in 1846 they could have obtained the Right of Suffrage for the colored man. But Mr. Smith and his ‘editors and orators’ strangely refused to act with the opponents of Texas and the friends of Free Suffrage… . As the fifteen thousand abolitionists amongst us gave the state to Polk—Polk to the People—Texas to the nation, and slavery to Texas, so they may now give a majority of the members of Congress to the loco focos, and California to Slavery!”

9.Hyde, Gift, 56.

10.Douglas Strong’s Perfectionist Politics offers an elegant history of “Bible politics” in the Burned-Over District and its call for antislavery political engagement in daily life. Also see Gerrit Smith’s “Discourse on Creeds, and Ecclesiastical Machinery,” Peterboro, 2/21/1858, on the value of a place-based spiritual community unburdened by “creeds and churches and a clerical order of men.”

11.Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men, 103–5.

12.See Frothingham, Gerrit Smith, 44–93, on Smith’s conversion to “Bible politics” and the founding of the Church of Peterboro; GS, Be Natural! A Discourse, a twenty-four-page treatise, 11/20/1864.

13.Friedman, “Gerrit Circle,” 23. Friedman notes that Smith and his upstate allies were cut from the same homespun: small-town men of middle age, descended mostly from New Englanders, educated, pious, friends of temperance, and compelled by the potential of local political action.

14.GS to Elder Kingsley, 9/1/1845; Sernett, North Star Country, 294n68; George Thomas, Esq., “Personal Recollections of Gerrit Smith,” 1/5/1875, Onondaga County Public Library, NY; GS to “Mr. [Ba---son],” Peterboro, 3/16/1845; W. J. Wilbur to GS, Peterboro, 7/3/1871; GS to James Barnett, Peterboro, 4/14/1862; GS to Laura Bosworth, Peterboro, 2/27/1847.

15.JMS to GS, NYC, 2/6/1850.

16.JB to Owen Brown (his father), Springfield, MA, 1/14/1849, in Ruchames, A John Brown Reader, 67.

17.John Thomas to GS, Bloomingdale, 8/26/1872. John Thomas’s thirty-three-line obituary in the Malone Palladium in 1895 identified Ezekiel Merrick of Queen Anne County as his enslaver. Thomas names Merrick as his enslaver.

18.Fields, Slavery and Freedom, 18, 174; Minutes of the National Convention, 39.

19.The Emancipator, 3/14/1842; Pasternak, Rise Now, 38; Calarco, Underground Railroad, 90, 196–97; Grover, Make a Way Somehow, 80.

20.GSLB, 88; Seaver, Historical Sketches, 173. Thomas’s gift lot was at the northern border of Franklin Township on the town of Bellmont line. So plodding was the pace of settlement in Bellmont that in 1822 the state assembly offered land to anyone who cleared fifteen acres and built a house in Bellmont in five years’ time. No other town in Franklin County made such an offer, perhaps because no other was so innocent of charm. Smith, Map of Franklin County.

21.John Thomas to GS, Bloomingdale, 8/26/1872.

22.Kezier King to GS, McGrawville, NY, 8/16/1861; Harriet Sykes to GS, Hannibal, NY, 10/26/1858; Mary Pryne to GS, Warners, Onondaga County, NY, 7/11/1870; John Lagrow to GS, New York Central College, McGrawville, NY, 8/12/1852; J. B. F. Walker to GS, Lincoln, VT, 4/4/1860; Robert Spring to GS, Philadelphia, 10/23/1871.

23.GS to Gov. Washington Hunt, 3/5/1852; Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men, 105–9. Though Smith broke with the Millerites after the “Great Disappointment,” Stauffer discerns a lasting influence on Smith’s thinking. His immersion in Millerite apocalyptic theology “contributed to Smith’s acceptance of violence,” thus easing Smith’s eventual allegiance to John Brown.

24.On Smith’s Congressional career, see chap 10; Douglass, NS, 5/18/ 1849.

25.“Proceedings of the New York Anti‑slavery Convention, held at Utica, October 21, and New York Anti‑slavery State Society, held at Peterboro, October 22, 1835,” GSP. For a summary of this transformative moment in upstate abolition history, see Sernett, North Star Country, 49–53; Frothingham, Gerrit Smith, 164–68.

26.Burdick and Dann, Heaven and Peterboro; Frothingham, Gerrit Smith, 98.

27.Harrold, Rise of Aggressive Abolitionism, 123–39. Smith told convention-goers that the letter he read aloud was penned by a fugitive, knowing this would especially outrage and alarm proslavery Southerners. “The ‘Black’ Convention,” NASS, 9/26/1850. See Humphreys, “Agitate! Agitate! Agitate!”; “Sinbadism Outdone,” Poughkeepsie Journal, 8/24/1850. Among Southern newspapers that denounced Smith’s convention were the Clarksville (TN) Jeffersonian, the Tarboro (NC) Press, the Mississippi Free Trader (Natchez), and the Baltimore Sun (Maryland).

28.“The ‘Black’ Convention,” Gallatin Tenth Legion, Gallatin, TN, republished in the National Anti-Slavery Standard, 9/26/1850.

29.Sernett, North Star Country, 136–45; GS, Address Reported by Gerrit Smith to the Jerry Rescue Convention: Held in Syracuse, October 1, 1857.

30.GS, “Address of the Liberty Party”; GS, “Anti-Fugitive Slave Law Meeting” (printed document), Syracuse, NY, written 1/9/1851, Gilder Lehrman Collection, https://www.gilderlehrman.org/collection/glc0471716. Also see GS to CBR, 11/16/1848, and GS circular, 12/29/1848, GSP.

31.[GS], “Autobiographical Sketch of the Life of Gerrit Smith,” n.d., 1856. For an inquiring reading of the essay-length autobiography Smith penned in middle age, see McKivigan and McKivigan, “ ‘He Stands Like Jupiter”; Editorial, New-York Tribune, 8/3/1857; “Letter from Gerrit Smith,” 8/10/1857; GS to L. P. Brockett, Esq., 10/9/1861.

32.Salmon Brown to F. B. Sanborn, 8/8/1901, Portland, OR, JB/BBS Coll./WVMP. Early biographies of Brown tear through his Adirondack chapter the sooner to plunge into his dramatic, insurrectionary career. Twenty-first- century biographies have accorded Brown’s North Elba stay more respect. See Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist; Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men; Sernett, North Star Country; DeCaro, “Fire from the Midst of You”; and Laughlin-Schultz, Tie that Bound Us, on the Browns’ years of homesteading and intermittent community building in North Elba.

33.“Gerrit Smith, on Kansas,” speech, 8/8/1856; “Kansas,” New York Daily Times, 7/11/1856. Smith addressed a Kansas convention at Kremlin Hall, Buffalo, NY, on July 10, 1856.

34.See Renehan, Secret Six, 122–23, 141–44, 153, 162–63, on Smith’s contributions to this group and to Brown. Lead funders of Brown’s militant agenda are described as well in Oates, To Purge This Land, 226–31; Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist, 248, 254–55, 258–59, 266, 283, 290; Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men, 198–200; and Sernett, North Star Country, 208–13.

35.Brown’s warriors wounded nine men and killed four. His party lost ten men in the raid, including Brown’s sons Oliver and Watson. Two more raiders were hanged with Brown: John Anthony Copeland Jr. and Shields Green. The historian Merrill D. Peterson notes four reasons why Brown’s trial struck many as both spurious and rushed: Brown, badly injured, was not offered his own choice of lawyer. Nor was he in shape to mount his own defense. The State of Virginia was charging him with treason, but treason was a crime against a nation. And he could never hope for an impartial jury in Charles Town, only seven miles from Harpers Ferry. Peterson, John Brown, 12–13.

36.McKivigan and Leveille, “ ‘Black Dream.’ ”

37.GS to Charles Sumner, 6/7/1860; McKivigan and Leveille, “ ‘Black Dream.’ ” Smith’s case manager during his stay at the Utica Psychiatric Asylum was John Perdue Gray, MD, a radical innovator in biological psychiatric theory and the esteemed director of the asylum from 1854 to 1886.

38.GS, speech in Albany, 2/27/1863, in GS, Speeches and Letters, 1:1864; “Letter to Mrs. Stanton on the Presidential Question,” 6/6/1864, in ibid., 2:14–18; “Speech at Young Men’s Mass Convention,” Syracuse, 9/3/1863, in ibid., 1:45–51; A. L. Scott to GS, Oswego, 11/28/1863; Donna Burdick, “The Village Green,” Snippets: From the Hills of Smithfield, Smithfield Community Association., 1995, vol. 2; “To-Day’s Report,” Janesville (WI) Daily Gazette, 3/20/1863.

39.GS to President Andrew Johnson, 4/24/1865; GS to Charles Sumner, 2/5/1866; “Speech of Gerrit Smith (to His Neighbors),” Peterboro, 6/22/1872.

40.“Gerrit Smith on the Duty of the North to the South,” Richmond Whig, 7/19/1867; GS, “On the Fort Pillow and Plymouth Massacres, April 26, 1864,” in GS, Speeches and Letters, 2:7–13.

41.Blight, Race and Reunion, 57–63.

42.Blight, Race and Reunion, 57–63.

43.“Southern Sentiment,” St. Lawrence Plaindealer, 11/3/1874; GS to George T. Downing, “Equal Rights for Blacks and Whites,” 3/6/1874. Smith published this letter to his friend as a one-page flyer for widespread circulation. See Syracuse University Libraries, Digital Collections, https://digitalcollections.syr.edu/Documents/Detail/gerrit-smith-to-george-t.-downing-on-equal-rights-for-blacks-and-whites/2513.

44.“ ‘John Brown’ by Gerrit Smith,” broadleaf, 8/15/1867, JB/BBS Coll./WVMP. Smith’s secretary, Caleb Calkins, visited the Browns’ home; Smith apparently did not. Alexis Hinckley to GS, 7/24/1864, and “The Truth about John Brown’s Farm,” ECR, 2/29/1896; Charles M. Sherman to GS, Chenango County, NY, 6/15/1873; Frank M. Terry to GS, Liverpool, NY, 12/9/1873; William J. Fowler to GS, Rochester, NY, 12/12/1873; Victor Kingsley to GS, Onondaga County, NY, 8/14/1866; Robert Spring to GS, Philadelphia, 10/23/1871.

45.“Tale of Gerrit Smith behind Adirondack Suit,” NYT, 11/19/1904.

2. Gerrit Smith Country

1.Sumner Stebbins to GS, Unionville, PA, 5/14/68; Frothingham, Gerrit Smith, 33.

2.GS to W. L. Chaplin, Saratoga Springs, NY, 5/26/1845, published as “Gerrit Smith’s Tour through Saratoga, Warren, Essex and Clinton,” AP, 6/25/1845; Frothingham, Gerrit Smith, 29–34; Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men, 102–3, 315; GS, “Gerrit Smith’s Tour.” Several of the land agents Smith visited on this tour were pioneers who had bought acreage from him years before. From Duxbury, Vermont, Thomas Nash took his family to the Plains of Abraham in 1839. Smith sold him land, and by 1857, Nash was urging Smith to float North Elba a loan for a road extension that might “open up a large tract of feasible land for farming purposes which will enable the [emigrant] to push back into the woods without all the disadvantages of a pioneer life,” and would “not only help to make sales [of Smith’s unsold land] but will greatly enhance the value.” T. S. Nash to GS, NE, 7/20/1857.

3.Smith, History of Essex County, 660; GS, “Gerrit Smith’s Tour.”

4.GS, “Gerrit Smith’s Tour”; Sterngass, “African American Workers”; Smith, History of Essex County, 663; Donaldson, History of the Adirondacks, 1:347; White, Adirondack Country, 195–96.

5.Brown, Reverend Abel Brown; Calarco, Underground Railroad, 84, 89–90. So impressed was Smith with the antislavery scene in Clinton County that he declared it would be “the first [county] in our State to throw off its political shackles and stand forth for the slave.” GS, “Gerrit Smith’s Tour.”

6.John L. O’Sullivan on “manifest destiny,” in New York Morning News, 12/27/1845, quoted in Meinig, Shaping of America, 2:211; William H. Prescott to Charles Sumner, 5/15/1846, in Wolcott, Correspondence, 596, 597; Meinig, Shaping of America, 2:222; Wilentz, Rise of American Democracy, 585.

7.Wilentz, Rise of American Democracy, 585–86, 594–601.

8.Wilentz, Rise of American Democracy, 598; Meinig, Shaping of America, 2: 299–301; Horton and Horton, In Hope of Liberty, 102–3; Hon. James Harlan, New York, speech, US Senate, 1/4/1860; Meinig, Shaping of America, 2:300–302; Wilentz, Rise of American Democracy, 594–601, 605–10, and DeVoto, Year of Decision, 297–99; Wilentz, Rise of American Democracy, 597; Foner, Free Soil, 266–67.

9.Frothingham, Gerrit Smith, 99–101; DeVoto, Year of Decision, 214.

10.DeVoto, Year of Decision, chap. 1, 4–48.

11.GS to TW, CBR, JMS, CBR, Peterboro, 8/1/1846; GS, Address to the Three Thousand Colored Citizens; William Tyson, Ulysses Vidal, Patrick Reason, Newport Henry, James McCune Smith, Theodore S. Wright, Charles B. Ray, and John Zuille to Wesley Bailey, “A Central Committee of Colored Citizens Organized for the Extension of the Right of Suffrage,” Utica Liberty Press, 2/5/1846. Later in 1846, each of these signatories received a gift deed from Gerrit Smith.

12.GS to TW, CBR, and JMS, 8/1/1846; Lewis Tappan to GS, NY, 7/27/1846. James McCune Smith’s many elegant and soulful letters to Gerrit Smith are collected in Stauffer, Works. Also see Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men, 68–69, 125–27, 144–55, 198–99, 275–77.

13.GS to TW, CBR, and JMS, 8/1/1846, 9/9/1846.

14.GS to TW, CBR, and JMS, 8/1/1846.

15.GS to TW, CBR, and JMS, 8/1/1846.

3. Three Agents and Their Reasons

1.Harris, Shadow of Slavery, 76. On disease and morbidity among Black city families at midcentury, see Freeman, Free Negro, 170–71; Hodges, Root and Branch, 194–96, 230–31; Litwack, North of Slavery, 169; and Harris, Shadow of Slavery, 265–66.

2.On McCune Smith and his work, see Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men, 65–69, 123–27; Stauffer, Works, xix–xlii; Peterson, Black Gotham, 130–32, 156–58, 168–70, 219–22; Blight, “In Search of Learning”; Charles Bennett Ray, “Black Churches in New York City, 1840,” CA, published in African American Religious History: A Documentary Witness, ed. Milton C. Sernett (Duke, 1999), 220; Davis, Problem of Slavery, 216–25; JMS to GS, 12/17–18/1846, 12/28–31/1846.

3.Morgan, “Education and Medical Practice”; Litwack, North of Slavery, 154–55, 180. Litwack shares a story from Henry B. Fearon’s 1818 Sketches of America: “After witnessing the ouster of a prospective Negro customer from a New York barber shop, an astonished English visitor requested an explanation from the Negro barber. ‘Aye, I guess you were not raised here,’ the barber replied. ‘Now I reckon you do not know my boss [also a Negro] would not have a single gentleman come to his store … if he cut colored men.’ ”

4.AICP, First Report, 8. Also see Coleman, Going to America, 163; Freeman, Free Negro, 166; Green, Glance at New York, 175, quoted in Anbinder, Five Points, 82; New York Tribune, 7/1/1847, in Coleman, Going to America, 119; Clay McShane and Joel Tarr, “The Centrality of the Horse to the Nineteenth Century American City,” in Mohl, Making of Urban America, 105–30.

5.Granick, Underneath New York, 16, 33, 40–41; Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 787; Joseph Patrick Byrne, Encyclopedia of Pestilence, Pandemics, and Plagues (Greenwood, 2008), 101.

6. Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men, 66, 69;“Report on the Social Condition of the People of Color around New York City,” NS, 4/10/1851; “Flight from the City,” NYT, 6/3/1852; Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 774.

7.CBR, “Prejudice,” CA, 9/26/1840; Work, “Life of Charles B. Ray,” 365–66; Freeman, Free Negro, 298–303; Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 556–60, 596–98; CBR, Eighth Annual Report of the City Missionary to the Destitute Colored Population (1852), 2. Biographical information about Charles Ray is substantially drawn from a short memoir by his daughters Henrietta Cordelia Ray and Florence Ray (Sketch of the Life of Rev. Charles B. Ray) and the scholarly essay “The Life of Charles B. Ray,” by M. N. Work.

8.Thomas Dresser, African-Americans on Martha’s Vineyard: From Enslavement to Presidential Visit (Arcadia, 2010), 29, 43–44; Harris, Shadow of Slavery, 275; Ripley, et al., Black Abolitionist Papers, 3:470, 484n, 2n; Swift, Black Prophets, 19–46; Rights of All, 5/29/1829 and 6/12/1829; “Agricultural Pursuits,” CA, 11/4/1837.

9.Harris, Shadow of Slavery, 275; Ripley et al., Black Abolitionist Papers, 3:95n6, 277n2; Swift, Black Prophets of Justice, 19–46; Rights of All, 5/29/1829 and 6/12/1829; “Agricultural Pursuits,” CA, 11/4/1837. From 1837 to 1841, the Colored American published over fifty articles promoting farming, gardening, and country living. (See index in Jacobs, Antebellum Black Newspapers.) Many pieces were by the Quaker abolitionists Augustus and John Owen Wattles. Augustus Wattles was the chief purchaser and land agent for a thirty-thousand- acre colonization effort in Ohio, and a close friend of John Brown.

10.New Yorker, 6/3/1837; Meinig, Shaping of America, 2:222–36.

11.“Important Letter from Augustus Wattles,” CA, 10/28/1837; “Ohio Memorial Extract No. 2,” CA, 3/22/1838; ibid.; “Can’t Take Care of Themselves,” CA, 3/15/1838.

12.CBR, “Emigration of Colored People to Canada,” CA, 11/18/1837.

13.CBR and Willis Hodges, “Report on Agriculture,” Troy Colored Convention, Liberty Street Church, 10/6–9/1847; “Resolutions,” Model Worker, 5/18/1848. Also see “Agricultural Pursuits,” CA, 11/4/1837; “Domestic Habits,” CA, 4/19/1838.

14.Paris Young, Caroline Draper, and Amanda Tuttle-Smith, “Freedom Seekers: Henry Highland Garnet,” Slavery and Freedom at Washington College, accessed 2/9/2023, https://slaveryandfreedomatwashingtoncollege.org/freedom-seekers-3/; and “Henry Highland Garnet,” Historical Society of Kent County, accessed 2/9/2023, https://kentcountyhistory.org/Henry-Highland-Garnet.pdf.

15.Among biographers who have tracked Henry Highland Garnet’s epic odyssey from Maryland enslavement to leading advocate for Black militant abolitionism and Black rights are Joel Schor (Henry Highland Garnet) and Earl Ofari (“Let Your Motto Be Resistance”: The Life and Thought of Henry Highland Garnet). Also see chapter 6 (“Henry Highland Garnet, Charles Ray, and Black Action Programs in New York State in the 1840s”) in David E. Swift’s Black Prophets of Justice, and Garnet-focused chapters in Sterling Stuckey’s Slave Culture.

16.TW to New York State Anti-slavery Society, CA, 7/8/1837; Scott Cady and Christopher L. Webber, A Year with American Saints (Church Pub., 2006), 108. On Garnet at the Noyes Academy, see Swift, Black Prophets of Justice, 117–18; and Stuckey, Slave Culture, 145–47, 161.

17.On Black students’ experiences at the Oneida Institute, see Milton C. Sernett, “Common Cause: The Antislavery Alliance of Gerrit Smith and Beriah Green,” The Courier 21, no. 2 (Fall 1986): 68.

18.“Religious Societies,” Hart Cluett Museum, 2/3/2021, https://www.hartcluett.org/rensselaer-county-blog/religioussocieties?rq=%22Religious%20Societies; HHG, speech, published in National Negro Convention, Buffalo, 1843 (J. H. Tobitt, 1848). Garnet’s influential speech may be read in full at the Colored Conventions Project, https://coloredconventions.org/garnet-address-1843; Ofari, “Roots of Black Radicalism.”

19.Frothingham, Gerrit Smith, 57–63.

20.“Report, on the Best Means for the Promotion of the Enfranchisement of Our People,” Minutes of the Fifth Annual Convention of the Colored Citizens of the State of New York, Held in the City of Schenectady, on the 18th, 19th, and 20th of September, 1844, published in the introduction to Garnet’s Memorial Discourse, 37. In Troy, on August 1, 1846, Garnet again urged a Black retreat from urban life. AP, 9/1/1846.

21.“Extract from a Sermon, Preached at Troy, N.Y., to a Company of Mr. Gerrit Smith’s Grantees, on the Eve of Their Departure to Their Lands, by Henry Highland Garnet, Pastor of the Liberty Street Church,” NS, 5/12/1848.

22.JMS, introduction to Memorial Discourse.

23.GS to John Thomson Mason, 10/19/1846 and 11/6/1846; GS to George Thompson, 11/6/1846; GS to W. E. Whitney, Esq., 11/6/1846; GS to Mason, 10/19/1846.

24.GS to TW, CBR, and JMS, Peterboro, 9/10/1846; New York Journal & Advertiser (Auburn), 9/23/1846. The column would be referenced in the Oswego Advertiser and the Rochester Advertiser. The Cortland County Whig, 10/22/1846, reprinted derogatory reports from the Oswego and Rochester Advertisers. ECR, 10/10/1846.

25.GSLB, 119–22. In these last pages of his Land Book, Smith registered the final tweaks and additions—some as late as 1853—that brought his count to the requisite three thousand. GS, Address to the Three Thousand Colored Citizens.

26.TW, CBR, and JMS to Smith grantees, AP, 10/28/1846.

27.Marx, Machine in the Garden, 23, 104–5, 113–15, 121–30; ibid., 127: “All of this makes more sense once we recognize the noble husbandman’s true identity: he is the good shepherd of the old pastoral dressed in American homespun.”

28.TW, CBR, and JMS to Smith grantees, AP, 10/28/1846.

29.TW, CBR, and JMS to Smith grantees, AP, 10/28/1846.

30.GS to TW, CBR, and JMS, Peterboro, 11/14/1846. In Gerrit Smith: Philanthropist and Reformer (246), Ralph Harlow suggests that Smith’s land gifts were devised to “bring new strength—numerically at least—to his Liberty Party. Not only the grantees but their friends, relatives, and dependents would be under the strongest obligation to follow the political leadership of Gerrit Smith. Land grants in other words might be considered a substitute for the patronage as an element of party strength and solidarity.” But Smith never imposed an obligation, and neither did his agents (though Garnet dropped hints). Harlow’s assumption of Black indebtedness to Smith underestimates the independence of the Black electorate and distorts the publicly disinterested nature of Smith’s benevolence. Hoping for Liberty votes (and Smith hoped hard) was not the same as openly demanding them.

31.See “Husbandry,” CA, 3/22/1838. Colored American editor Samuel Cornish urged Black pioneers to respect “the privileged order of the land, and be careful that there are but two or three families of our people in any one place.” In this same issue, the Geneva barber J. W. Duffin (later a Smith agent) implored Black homesteaders to “scatter ourselves over the country with our white brethren.” Smith’s giveaway of 1846, which gifted Black grantees with lots near white-owned farms, implied this same commitment to a thoroughgoing rural integration, a goal that likely took a cue from Black agrarians like Ray, Garnet, Cornish, and Duffin, and challenged the segregationist land policies of many white radical reformers.

32.Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men, 136–38.

33.Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men, 136–38. For years, the radical reformer Thomas Ainge Devyr clung to the hope that Gerrit Smith would bankroll the land reform movement of radical agrarians. Other white land reformers dreaded Smith’s interest in their cause, predicting that it would estrange their backers in the South. Godine, “Abolitionist and the Land Reformer.”

34.Godine, “Abolitionist and the Land Reformer.”

4. Theories into Practice

1.Duffin to GS, Geneva, 9/7/1846; Jacob Benjamin to GS, Albany, 2/1848; Shotwell to GS, NYC, 9/21/1846; Mary E. Mills to GS, 9/18/1846; Amos Beman to HHG, from a letter HHG wrote Samuel Ringgold Ward, 3/2/1849.

2.GS to Cornish, 10/1/1846; Van Rensselaer to GS, 12/7/1846.

3.Samuel G. May to GS, 9/24/1846 and 10/12/1846; GS to Samuel Porter, 12/2/1846; Abel Seaton to GS, 12/10/1850; Jonathan Walker to GS, Ferrisburg, VT, 7/26/1852. John Greenleaf Whittier’s poem “The Man with the Branded Hand” tells Walker’s story.

4.GS to Samuel Cornish, 10/1/1846; GS to Porter, 12/2/1846. Among the women to whom Gerrit Smith gave grants in his giveaway of 1846 were Mary Kantine of New York City, Rebecca Hornbeck of Onondaga, Harriet [illeg.] of Williamsburg, Flora Fry of Gouverneur, and Elizabeth J. Mann of Suffolk County (GSLB, 86, 121, 82, 96, 100). Publicly identified fugitives who received gift lots were Frederick Douglass, still a Massachusetts resident when he got his deed from Smith (GSLB, 72), the antislavery lecturer Henry Bibb of Boston (37), Utica’s antislavery preacher James Fountain (71), the fugitive Richard J. Eusti[ss], Little Falls (29), Lewis Haydn, a “fugitive from Kentucky” (37), and the antislavery sibling lecturers and fugitives from Kentucky, Lewis, Milton, and Cyrus Clark, who were not living in New York when they got their deeds. Morgan, “Education and Medical Practice,” 609–10. In 1846, Maryland’s John Thomson Mason “let” Smith emancipate his property for $3,000, and then only if the judge could keep the freedmen on as his indentured servants for two years. It is unlikely that they were given gift lots in 1848. Stauffer, Works, 303, 323–24n12.

5.Amos Beman and Charles Beman of New Haven, CT, got deeds from Smith; CBR to GS, [3]/31/1848; CBR and JMS to GS, 7/1/1847; Jermain Wesley Loguen to GS, 7/2/1847; CBR and JMS to GS, 12/2/1847; Wesley Bailey to GS, 5/22/1847; CBR to GS, [3]/31/1848; CBR and JMS to GS, NYC, 7/27/1847; GS to TW, CBR, and JMS, 10/3/1846.

6.Dann, Practical Dreamer, 127–33.

7.Cooper, “Elevating the Race,” 619. Cooper notes that Benjamin Quarles’s pioneering history, Black Abolitionists, was “for the most part the record of the activities of a couple of dozen men.” On the midcentury insularity of New York’s Black reform elite, see Hutton, Early Black Press, 103–28; Anbinder, Five Points, 91–93; Peterson, John Brown, 181–82, 127–29; CBR, Receipt Book (“Receipt Book of land grants from Gerrit Smith to ‘colored and poor white slaves from the South,’ 1846,” A1352), NYSA.

8.J. W. Duffin to GS, Geneva, 9/7/1846.

9.At their yearly meeting, New York’s Black stewards and marine cooks toasted the temperance advocates William Lloyd Garrison and Arthur and Lewis Tappan with wine. CA, 5/2/1840, quoted in Harris, Shadow of Slavery, 203; FD, “Temperance and Anti‑slavery,” Renfrewshire (Scotland) Advertiser, 4/11/1846.

10.Anbinder, Five Points, 198–99.

11.Dann, Practical Dreamer, 102; Koeppel, Water for Gotham, 287.

12.The male tavern culture at midcentury held particular appeal for Black laborers in an era when so many more Black women were finding jobs as domestics than Black men were finding work. Harris, Shadow of Slavery, 99; Charles Loring Brace, The Dangerous Classes of New York and Twenty Years Work among Them (1872), 64–65, quoted in Anbinder, Five Points, 194.

13.JMS to GS, 12/17/1846.

14.GS, Address to the Three Thousand Colored Citizens, 7; GSLB, 119, 4/18/1851/ 119. “My Committee in the City of New York [JMS and CBR], informed me that they cannot find in [each] County as many suitable persons for temperance as I have called for. Hence, I permitted them to go into other Counties to supply the lack.”

Most of the slots that had been held for takers in Putnam, Suffolk, Queens, and Richmond Counties went to Albanians, and residents of New York County and Brooklyn picked up gift deeds that were redirected from Westchester, Ulster, and Dutchess Counties. (Among the beneficiaries of the expanded search was “Lewis Pierce of North Elba,” who got his second Adirondack deed in this exchange). From 1839 into the early 1840s, Henry Highland Garnet wrote and published the Clarion, an antislavery newspaper in Troy. Wesley Bailey, son and father of newsmen, merged the highly regarded Friend of Man with the smaller Madison and Onondaga Abolitionist to create the Liberty Press in 1842. William Chaplin of Massachusetts took over the Albany Patriot in 1846 when its editor, Charles Torrey, went to jail for helping fugitives. Charles Bennett Ray, a cofounder of New York City’s Colored American in 1836, took it over in 1839 and remained its editor in chief until it folded on Christmas Day 1841. Samuel Ringgold Ward produced two radical abolition newspapers, the True American and Religious Examiner, from Cortlandville in central New York, ca. 1845–48, and the Impartial Citizen, from Syracuse and Boston, ca. 1849–51.

15.WPP to GS, 10/2/1847, 3/28/1848, 4/28/1848.

16.“Acknowledgment to Gerrit Smith,” NE, 4/15/1847, and GS to Samuel Porter, 12/2/1846; E. M. Griffing to GS, Little Falls, 5/12/1848; Street Dutton to GS, Meredith, NY, 5/20/1850; Hiram Corliss to GS, Union Village, 10/28/1850 (so outraged was the radical abolitionist Corliss by John Brown’s capture at Harpers Ferry that he urged Smith to fund a raid to spring Brown from the Charles Town jail); May, Our Anti-slavery Conflict, 325; William T. Torrey to GS, Holley, NY, 12/15/1846; Jabez Hammond to GS, Cherry Valley, NY, 10/30/1846, 4/6/1847; Timothy Jenkins to GS, Oneida Castle, 11/22/1849; William Slade to GS, Middlebury, VT, 7/31/1847; “Forty Families of Colored People,” Brooklyn Eagle, 3/30/1848.

17.“The Chaplin Meeting,” Liberator, 1/24/1851, and Sernett, North Star Country, 130. The 1840 Liberty Party slate included the senatorial candidate Nathaniel Safford, Hunt for state assembly, and the gubernatorial aspirant Gerrit Smith. CA, 10/10/1840. Two years later, Hunt ran for lieutenant governor on the abolition ticket; he got one vote. Oneida Whig, 11/22/1842. The erudite Lawson attended radical abolition conventions in Syracuse and organized the Free Democracy (Free Soil) Party in Oneida County. Syracuse League, 1851, n.d., and FDP, 9/10/1852; John Howard Brown, ed., Lamb’s Biographical Dictionary of the United States (Boston, 1900), 162. The antislavery educator Beriah Green’s response to Smith’s giveaway was typical of many reactions from Smith’s white admirers. A few lines of solemn praise (“I rejoice to hear of your … designs towards our Colored fellow-citizens. God bless you… . May their acres be well-cultivated under the guidance & with the blessing of Him who ‘hath given the Earth to the children of men’!”) briskly segued to the main concern: abolition politics, abolition above all. Beriah Green to GS, Whitesboro, NY, 8/28/1846; William Chaplin to GS, Albany, 11/26/1846.

18.“Grand Convention of Smith’s Grantees,” AP, 12/9/1846; JMS to GS, 12/17/1846; “Gerrit Smith, Esq. GREAT MEETING OF THE COLORED PEOPLE OF TROY,” American Freeman, 11/17/1846. Also see Bell, Negro Convention Movement, 91–94.

19.“On Meeting of the Colored People of Troy,” AP, 10/28/1846.

20.“Acknowledgment to Gerrit Smith,” NE, 4/15/1847; “these presents”: JMS and CBR to GS, 3/27/1848; CBR to GS, 5/24/1847.

21.CBR to GS, 5/24/1847; MacKenzie. Plains of Abraham, 17–19, chap. 15, 76–79.

22.JMS and CBR to GS, 7/27/1847.

23.Friedman, Gregarious Saints, 118–21.

24.“Gerrit Smith,” Model Worker, 12/29/1848. The four resolutions praising Smith’s land gifts were passed at the 1847 Colored Men’s Convention, held in Troy from October 6 through 9. In late May 1847, Charles B. Ray shared these with Smith. Smith wrote his screed on November 16, 1847, and the Model Worker, a short-lived abolition paper in Utica, ran the convention resolutions and Smith’s grim response the next month.

25.Lewis Tappan to GS, NYC, 4/15/1848.

26.Lewis Tappan to GS, NYC, 4/15/1848.

5. On Fat Lands under Genial Suns

1.Frothingham, Gerrit Smith, 29, and Tanner, “ ‘Foe to Sad Oppression’s Rod,’ ” 106, 11; Durant, History of Oneida County, 447; Osborn, “Tug Hill.”

2.Jones, Annals of Oneida County, 149–50; ibid., 147; Wager, Our Country, 434; Riley, Florence in History; Jones, Annals of Oneida County, 149, 154.

3.FD, NS, 2/18/1848.

4.Ripley et al., Black Abolitionist Papers, 3:178–79n3; Quarles, Black Abolitionists, 172–73, 219–20; Paul Stewart, “Myers, Stephen (1800–1870), and Myers, Harriet (1807–1865),” in Hinks and McKivigan, Encyclopedia of Antislavery, 486–87; Stewart, “Underground Railroad”; “Runaway Slaves,” Charleston Mercury, 2/12/1858.

5.GS to HHG, 6/10/1843. In 1843, Gerrit Smith regarded the influence of Myers’s Albany Whig-supported broadsheet as so pernicious that he set up Reverend Garnet in Troy with a newspaper that would challenge it. (Myers’s paper was the Northern Star and Freeman’s Advocate; Garnet’s was the Clarion.) Other papers Myers edited and copublished were the Elevator, the Northern Star and Colored Farmer, the Pioneer, the American Reporter, the Impartial Citizen, the Telegraph and Temperance Journal, and the Voice of the People. “To Gerrit Smith, Esq., and Other Leaders of the Liberty Party,” Northern Star and Freemen’s Advocate, 2/27/1846.

6.GSLB, 10. Among Albany activists who received Florence gift lots near Stephen Myers’ lot were the tailors Thomas Vogelsang and William Topp and the newspaper publisher Charles Morton, GSLB, 10; “The Colored Settlement at Florence,” from the New York Evening Post, 12/22/1848, was picked up by the Baltimore Sun, 12/27/1848; the Farmer’s Cabinet (Amherst, NH) and Times-Picayune (LA), 1/1/1849; the Lancaster (PA) Examiner, 1/3/1849; the Indiana State Sentinel, the Pennsylvania Freeman and National Era, 1/4/1849; the American Courier (Washington, DC), 1/6/1849; the Daily Constitutionalist and Republican (GA) (“This settlement is doubtless intended as a sort of asylum for runaway negroes from the slave states”); the Prairie du Chien (WI) Patriot, 1/24/1848; and the Tarboro (NC) Press, 2/3/1849.

7.DD to GS, Florence, 2/21/1848; IC, 5/23/1849 (Myers’s meeting with Black Uticans occurred on 12/26/1848); NS, 2/16/1849 and 2/23/1849.

8.Myers’s endorsement of Smith’s plan for the Black Woods in the Northern Star and Colored Farmer was approvingly republished in the North Star (1/4/1849) and the Ram’s Horn (2/25/1848 and 3/10/1848). DD to GS, Florence, 2/21/1848; IC, 5/23/1849; NS, 2/16/1849; NS, 2/23/1849.

9.NS, 2/23/1849; IC, 5/23/1849, covering Myers’s speech in New Bedford on 12/26/1848; NE, 1/4/1849; NS, 2/16/1849; DD to GS, 3/21/1849.

10.Lewis Tappan to GS, 4/15/1848; “Florence Convention,” NSCF, n.d., cited in NS, 1/26/1849. Gerrit Smith’s Black land agents Ray, McCune Smith, Loguen, Ward, and Topp each agreed to promote or seek donations for Myers’s Florence settlement (and Douglass, early on, endorsed it too). Smith had given several of his agents gift lots in both the Adirondacks and Florence (GSLB, 56), and they may have felt their Florence acreage would gain the greater value if Myers’s project caught fire. When the Albany agent William Topp was offered gift land in either Florence or the Adirondacks, he chose Florence. GSLB, 74; “The Florence Telegraph,” NYDT, 1/30/1850.

11.Wm. H. Topp to FD, 1/10/1849, NS, 1/19/1849; Journal of the Assembly, 81, 117–18; NSCF, n.d., quoted in NS, 2/16/1849.

12.NS, 2/16/1849; IC, 3/4/1849; NS, 3/2/1849. Even before Bibb shared his concerns, Douglass had misgivings about Florence and its promoter. He had agreed to serve on a finance committee, but Myers had given him no details of the work. “We ought to know our duties if we are expected to act,” Douglass grumbled to his readers. NS, 1/26/1849.

13.GS to FD, 2/24/1849, in NS, 3/2/1849.

14.“The Florence Settlement,” NS, 3/30/1849; FD to Stephen Myers, NS, 3/16/1849; IC, 3/28/1849. Samuel Ringgold Ward, editor of the Impartial Citizen, softened his own retreat from Myers’s settlement scheme with a potshot at the Ram’s Horn, which, like the North Star, backed away from Myers’ plan: “The Ram’s Horn is edited by Thomas Van Rensselaer, and that is enough to indicate the importance of the denunciation.”

15.Levin Tilmon to FD, NS, 3/30/1849.

16.Stephen Myers to FD, NS, 3/30/1849.

17.Albany Argus, 5/29/1849; “The Settlers on Smith’s Lands in Oneida County,” NS, 11/2/1849; “Sheriff’s Sale,” Oneida Morning Herald, 8/18/1851, 10/8/1851.

18.DD to GS, 2/16/1849 and 3/21/1849.

19.“Florence Settlement,” NS, 2/23/1849; JMS to GS, 9/11/1850.

20.DD to GS, 2/16/1849. I am indebted to the independent scholar and history teacher Jessica Harney of Rome, New York, for sharing much of what she and her students have learned about the Florence colony after Stephen Myers left the scene and it fell from public view. Jessica Harney, “Index of Florence, NY Tax Assessor Records, 1853–1857” and “Black Residents of the Town of Florence, 1860 US Census” (unpublished); and Wellman, “We Took Ourselves to Liberty,” 151–52, 171.

21.May, Some Recollections, 323; GS to W. L. Chaplin, Saratoga Springs, NY, 5/26/1845, published in the Albany Patriot as “Gerrit Smith’s Tour through Saratoga, Warren, Essex and Clinton,” AP, 6/25/1845; McKivigan and McKivigan, “ ‘He Stands Like Jupiter,’ ” 193.

22.GS to L. A. Hine, 9/21/1852; FDP, 10/8/1852; GS to J. K. Ingalls, The Landmark, 8/15/1848; GS, letter and circular to John Cochrane, William L. Kenney, Isaac T. Hopper, George H. Evans, and Daniel C. Eaton, of NYC, 5/1/1849, published in NYT and NE, 5/17/1849.

23.Hyde, Gift, 21.

24.JMS to GS, NYC, 3/27/1848.

25.C. J. Morton, Benjamin Latimore, Peter Crummell, J. P. Anthony, Richard Thompson to GS, 11/4/1846.

26.On Wilson, see Ripley et al., Black Abolitionist Papers, 4:14n9; GS to Thomas Van Rensselaer, 2/11/1847; Van Rensselaer to GS, 5/26/1847.

27.James Blair Webb, George T. Downing, Samuel Cornish to GS, 6/1/1847. On the Black businessman and reformer George T. Downing, see Ripley et al., Black Abolitionist Papers, 4:312–14, 317–18n16; Quarles, Black Abolitionists, 219–20; Peterson, Black Gotham, 277–80; Logan and Winston, American Negro Biography, 187–88. On Webb and Caldwell’s modest forays into justice activism, see the Proceedings of the National Convention, 3, 10, 12, and “Important News from Trinidad,” CA, 4/18/1840; on Caldwell’s wealth, see “The New York Expedition for Liberia,” FDP, 11/25/1853. On Samuel Cornish’s agrarianism and his dealings with Smith, see Cornish to GS, NYC, 3/24/1834 and 12/18/1834; GS to Cornish, 10/1/1846; Other stockholders in Webb and Caldwell’s group were John A. Williams, a Wesleyan Methodist minister in Newark, New Jersey, who sometimes worked on suffrage issues with Troy’s Garnet (CA, 6/27/1840, 11/20/1841), and the New Haven minister Samuel T. Gray (Ripley et al., Black Abolitionist Papers, 4:313, 321n24). The three female investors were Lydia Bosly, Sarah Augustus, and Lucy Harris. CBR and JMS to GS, 5/22/1847; CBR and JMS to GS, 5/20/1847; CBR and JMS to GS, 5/25/1847.

28.James Blair Webb, George T. Downing, and Samuel Cornish to GS, NYC, 6/1/1847.

29.Harris, Shadow of Slavery, 274–75; Calarco, Underground Railroad, 230; Strong, Perfectionist Politics, 178–79.

30.Among the Adirondack historians and memoirists who assumed that Timbuctoo was a hideout for fugitives were Sylvester (Historical Sketches, 137, 140; Bowditch (“Trips to the Adirondacks—Visit to John Brown’s Grave,” 1879, in Bowditch, Life and Correspondence, 2:79–80); Donaldson (History of the Adirondacks, 2:6); Brewster (“John Brown of North Elba,” New York History, 10/1952); White (Adirondack Country, 195–96); Boyer (Legend of John Brown, 391); Bernstein (Sticks, 63); and Villard (John Brown, 73). James Blair Webb and Abraham Caldwell’s land company initiated purchases of Adirondack land for George Wilson, Dennis Washington, William Smith, and Enos Cuthbert. George Wilson to GS, 12/6/1847; Wilson and Webb to GS, 3/10/1848). Also see “Gerrit Smith’s Grants,” NS, 6/23/1848, and Harris, Shadow of Slavery, 277. On the never-built Rush Academy, see D. D. Moore, John Jamison, History of the A.M.E. Church in America (Teachers’ Journal Office, 1884), 308–14. See https://docsouth.unc.edu/church/moorej/moore.html; 78th Annual Report of the Regents of the University of the State of New York, made to Legislature, 2/16/1865 (G. Wendell Pub., 1865), 11.

31.“Brethren … ,” New York Tribune, 12/1/1852. On Gerrit Smith’s conception of Timbuctoo as an American alternative to African colonization, see Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men, 141.

32.“Convention of Colored Citizens,” NS, 4/10/1851 (in this article, Caldwell was misidentified as Abraham Colville, an error he likely did not race to correct); FDP, 6/17/1853.

33.“Convention of Colored Citizens,” NS, 4/10/1851. On the colonizationist Abraham Caldwell in Africa, see Daniel H. Peterson, The Looking Glass: Being a True Report and Narrative of The Life, Travels, and Labors of the Rev. Daniel H. Peterson, a Colored Clergyman; Embracing a Period of Time from the Year 1812 to 1854, and Including His Visit to Western Africa, 1851; Moses, Liberian Dreams, 39–54, 74–75; “Missionary Intelligence from Africa,” Jersey City Sentinel and Advertiser, 3/11/1854; William Nesbit, “Four Months in Liberia: or African Colonization Exposed,” 1855, in Moses, Liberian Dreams, 91.

34.In 1849, press releases titled or concerning “Gerrit Smith’s Colored Settlement” ran in papers from Albany to Alabama, and in many of them, Florence was said to enjoy the support of the prominent Whig politicos “Messrs. Fillmore, Fish, Morgan, Spencer, etc.” Though Millard Fillmore, Hamilton Fish, Edwin Morgan, and John Spencer were none of them proslavery, neither were they ardent abolitionists or champions of the rights of free Black men. The radical abolitionist Gerrit Smith would have bridled at the suggestion of an alliance; GS to TW, CBR, and JMS, 11/14/1846.

35.On the shaping role of Romantic literature on the vision of the Black Woods, see Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men, 149–52, 182–86. Sturges, “Consumption in the Adirondacks,” documents the geographic exceptionalism that shaped the Adirondack wilderness narrative from the early 1800s to the twenty-first century; William C. Nell, “Convention of Colored People,” NS, 10/20/1848. The convention was in Cleveland, Ohio, 9/6–8/1848. It is hard to know whether the source of this quote was Nell (named as the article’s author), Gerrit Smith (one of his subjects), or the editor George Bradburn (his paper, the Lynn Pioneer, was the source of the North Star’s clip).

36.NS, 2/18/1848; RH, 2/25/1848; Northern Star and Freemen’s Advocate, quoted in NS, 4/1/1848.

37.Thompson, Geography of New York State, 374.

38.Cole, “Essay on American Scenery,” 5.

39.Terrie, Forever Wild, 26; Stilgoe, Common Landscape in America, 206–7; Rev. Horace Bushnell, “The Age of Homespun,” Scribner’s, 1851, quoted in Bidwell, Rural Economy, 371.

40.New York Forestry Commission Report, 1885, quoted in Terrie, Forever Wild, 25–26; New York Tribune, 4/8/1857; Billington, America’s Frontier Heritage, 33.

41.Crèvecoeur, “What Is an American?” (letter 3), in Letters from an American Farmer, 91–105; Slotkin, Fatal Environment, 72.

42.JMS to GS, 12/28/1846; FD, NS, 1/5/1849; Albers, Hands on the Land, 107.

43.On Gerrit Smith’s dealings with his Adirondack contract farmers, see Godine, “Occupied Territory”; “From the Model Worker,” NS, 1/12/1849. Douglass reprinted two letters in this column. The first was Charles Ray’s letter to Gerrit Smith of 5/18/1848, thanking him for his land gifts on behalf of the 1847 Troy Colored Men’s Convention, and listing the delegates’ four resolutions that honored him as well. The second letter was Smith’s belated and unhappy answer of 11/16/1848.

44.Cole, “Essay on American Scenery,” 3.

6. Something besides “Speechifying”

1.Hodges, Free Man of Color, xxii–xxv, 9–14, xxvi–xxvii. Hodges shared his memoir with his family. He did not publish it himself. In 1896, his son Augustus Hodges serialized it in the Indianapolis Freeman. In 1982, the University of Tennessee Press produced the authoritative edition with an introduction by Willard Gatewood.

2.Hodges, Free Man of Color, 16, xxviii, 38.

3.Hodges, Free Man of Color, 38–39; Douglass, My Bondage and Freedom, 335–41.

4.Hodges, Free Man of Color, 40–49.

5.“Troy Colored Men’s Convention,” CA, 9/11/1841; “Proceedings of the National Convention of Colored People and Their Friends,” 10/6–9/1847, in Bell, Minutes of the Proceedings, 1–17; Hodges, Free Man of Color, 46.

6.Hodges, Free Man of Color, 78, xli–xlii, Villard, John Brown, 659–61, and Ruchames, John Brown, 69–72; Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist, 56–57; Hodges, Free Man of Color, 50–53.

7.Hodges, Free Man of Color, 53–55, xxix, 60–64, 58, 64–69, 58.

8.Hodges, Free Man of Color, 74, xliv, 50; RH, 2/25/1848; Hodges, Free Man of Color, xliv, 80.

9.USFC 1850, NE, Essex County; “J. H. Henderson Boot and Shoe Manufactory,” CA, 3/30–5/11/1839; CA, 7/18/1840; CA, 10/17/1840; Freeman, Free Negro, 296; “Virginia or Vermont?,” USFC 1850, NE, Essex County. Circumstantial evidence suggests that Henderson’s mother was born in Virginia, but the census taker’s spellings of “Vt.” and “Va.” are very much alike; On the same page of the Colored American that ran the ad for Henderson’s “Manufactury” were many more ads from Black tradesmen, artisans, and reformers who all eventually got deeds from Gerrit Smith. Below Henderson’s plug is a line about Dr. James McCune Smith’s office hours. At the column’s top is an alert for the Brooklyn rooming house of William J. Hodges, Willis Hodges’s brother, who would get a gift lot too. In another column is a notice from Elizabeth Appo, a dressmaker and milliner whose husband, William Appo, a Philadelphia musician, bought land from Gerrit Smith in 1848. Near it is a notice from one of Smith’s future land agents, J. W. Duffin. The co-owners of the paper, Samuel Cornish and Philip Bell, were Smith grantees, and Charles Bennett Ray, the paper’s agent and frequent contributor, was a grantee and an agent. On Henderson’s church work and his teaching in the city, see Freeman, Free Negro, 296; and CA, 7/18/1840 and 10/17/1840.

10.CA, 8/28/1841; Spann, New Metropolis, 123; “W. P. Johnson to the Editor,” CA, 7/17/1841.

11.Schor, Henry Highland Garnet, 34–72; Henry Highland Garnet, “Call to Rebellion,” National Negro Convention, Buffalo, NY, 8/1843.

12.Records, Liberty Street Presbyterian Church, Troy, NY. Minutes and membership lists for Troy’s Liberty Street Church are accessible at the Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia, https://www.history.pcusa.org. “Mrs. Henderson” was admitted on 5/25/1844, and her husband on 3/11/1847. “Rensselaer County Convention,” CA, 11/20/1841; “Colored Citizens of Troy,” Christian Freeman, 5/5/1843; NASS, 1/26/1846; “To Gerrit Smith, Esq., and Other Leaders of the Liberty Party,” NASS, 3/14/1846; HHG to GS, Troy, 9/20/1848, 9/16/1848; HHG to FD, 2/5/1849, and in NS, 2/16/1849; GSLB, 88–89. Deedholders with ties to Troy who settled in the Adirondacks were William Carasaw, Lyman Eppes, Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Jefferson, John Thomas, Wesley Murray, James H. Henderson, George Hamilton, and Stephen Warren Morehouse. Settler John Vinson held no deed, but was Troy-based. Stephen Warren Morehouse was a Saratoga County deedholder who in the early 1830s had made his home in Troy.

13.“On Meeting of the Colored People of Troy,” AP, 10/28/1846 (also published in American Freeman, 11/17/1846). For all their early zeal, the grantees who made this exploratory trip never did settle on their land. “Address to Grantees by TW, CBR and JMS,” AP, 10/28/1846; NS, 2/18/1848.

14.Ray and Hodges, “Report of the Committee on Agriculture,” 1847, 29. Charles Ray’s background may have informed his expectation that the farmer’s life could “cauterize” racial divides, but Willis Hodges’s Maryland experience suggested otherwise. In 1829, a reign of terror besieged his world when white farmers mobbed and vandalized the farms and homes of the Hodgeses and their Black neighbors. GSLB, 88–89.

15.“Extract from a Sermon, Preached at Troy, N.Y., to a Company of Mr. Gerrit Smith’s Grantees, on the Eve of Their Departure to Their Lands, by Henry Highland Garnet, Pastor of the Liberty Street Church,” NS, 5/12/1848; Grover, Make a Way Somehow, 80; Swift, Black Prophets of Justice, 169.

16.Diantha Gunn to fiancé, 7/29/1856, in Calarco, Underground Railroad, 123; Perry, History and Genealogy, 72–81.

17.Calarco, Underground Railroad, 117; Perry, People of Lowly Life, 219; Court Docket Book, 1848, Washington County Archives, Fort Edward, NY, 275; Tefft, Story of Union Village, 70.

18.Lemuel Knapp to GS, St. Armand, 4/10/1848; William Lathrop to GS, 11/22/1847; E. D. Culver to GS, Greenwich, 11/30/1849. On Culver’s steadfast antislavery career, see “Erastus D. Culver,” Wikipedia, last edited December 27, 2022, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erastus_D._Culver. Former congressman Culver’s letter was endorsed by William H. Mowry, a leading founder of Union Village’s integrated, antislavery Free Congregational Church, and a vice president of the Eastern New York Anti-slavery Society.

19.General Index, 426, 537, 586; Hurd, Clinton and Franklin Counties, 505; William Cowper, “The Task,” in Poems of William Cowper, Esq.: With a New Memoir (1869), 62; GSLB, Washington County, 106.

20.“Family Name,” Hasbrouck Family Association, accessed 10/17/2022, https://www.hasbrouckfamily.org/family-name/; John W. Barry, “Slavery’s Hidden History in the Mid-Hudson Valley Coming to Light,” Poughkeepsie Journal, 4/25/2018; Eric Roth, “Relations between the Huguenots of New Paltz, N. Y. and the Esopus Indians,” Huguenot Historical Society, 3/15/1999.

21.“Historic House Tour along ‘The First Highway’ in New Paltz,” Hudson Valley One, June 1, 2017, https://hudsonvalleyone.com/2017/06/01/historic-house-tour-along-the-first-highway-in-new-paltz/.

22.From Adirondack independent historians John Sasso and Mark Friden I learned that South Mountain was an early, now-forgotten name for the small mountain that today honors an Adirondack pioneer and trail builder, Henry Van Hoevenberg. Josiah Hasbrook, GSLB, Newburgh, Orange County, 78; USFC 1840, Fishkill, Dutchess County; 1850; NYSC 1855, NE. The Black laborer Charles Hasbrook, his wife, and his young son, Charles Jr., lived in Newburgh in 1840. Ten years later, Charles Jr. was living with Leonard Worts, a Smith grantee, and his wife, Diana Worts, in the Adirondack town of Keene. To the census taker Leonard Worts named Virginia as his birth state, but an 1885 death notice reported that he was born enslaved in New York (“Obituary,” VWSJ, 8/26/1885). Hasbrook family genealogist, Donna Hasbrouck, has identified kinship ties between the slaveholding white Worts (or Wurtz) and Hasbrook families in and around Newburgh.

23.GSLB, 78; “The Founding of New Paltz,” Hasbrook Family Foundation, 1999–2017; “Dutchess County,” in Eisenstadt, Encyclopedia of New York State, 480; Washington, Sojourner Truth’s America, 9–47. Washington’s vivid portrait of daily life for enslaved African Americans in New York’s Dutch-controlled Hudson River Valley makes plain why a fresh start on the Adirondack frontier held an allure for some grantees. Groth, Slavery and Freedom, 147–48. In the 1840s, the construction of the Hudson River Railroad attracted hundreds of Irish immigrants to Dutchess County. Relations between the newcomers and Black families in this neighborhood were strained and fractious. This, too, suggests a reason why the Adirondacks seemed to hold more promise.

24.To a census taker in 1855, the North Elba pioneer Lewis Pierce said that Virginia was his birth state. Long after his death, his daughter Lucy Pierce Miles disputed this. Her father, she told census takers, was from Louisiana. See Lucy Miles [LPM], USFC 1880, 1900, 1910, Middlesex, Washington County, VT; “The Philadelphia Slave Case,” NYHT, 10/25/1848; NE, 11/2/1848; and NS, 11/3/1848.

25.See LPM, USFC 1880, 1900, 1910, Middlesex, Washington County, VT; “Thomas Earle,” in The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography . . . , ed. James Terry White ( J. T. White, 1901), 11:145–46, and GS to “My Dear Brother [unnamed],” 10/9/1840 (the Philadelphia abolitionist to whom Smith wrote did not like Thomas Earle, but Smith defended him, calling Earle “a gentleman of great moral character and a decided enemy of slavery”); “Philadelphia Slave Case.”

26.New York Tribune, 10/20/1848, and “The Philadelphia Slave Case,” NYHT, 10/25/1848; GSLB, 101, 105, and 119; NYSC 1855, NE. Pierce is listed as a Suffolk County grantee for both gift lots, but his place of origin is given as North Elba. Maybe, even after his self-emancipation was confirmed, Pierce felt at risk and sought to keep his Louisiana backstory out of sight. In Smith’s Land Book, he is listed as a Suffolk County grantee, in one case living in North Elba, and elsewhere in Manhattan. (Smith gave Pierce two lots.)

27.CBR to GS, 5/18/1848, 6/5/1848; Joseph Romeo, “A Genealogical and Biographical Record of the Appo Family,” n.d., unpublished, 12–26, and Southern, Music of Black Americans, 109–10, 112, 114; Payne, Recollections of Seventy Years, 236; Southern, Music of Black Americans, 109, and Morning Post, 12/13/1837; Delany, Condition, Elevation and Destiny, chap. 14.

28.“Appeal of the Philadelphia Association,” NS, 7/13/1849; “Day of Thanksgiving,” Pennsylvania Freeman, 4/29/1847; “Great District Meeting,” CA, 10/2/1841; CA, 3/28/1840; Troy City Directory (Tuttle), vol. 14 (William and Elizabeth Appo lived at 282 River Street, near the home of James Henderson, their future neighbor in North Elba); “Colored Citizens of Troy,” CF, 5/5/1843; NASS, 1/26/1846, 1/29/1846; “Notice–Public Exhibition,” CA, 9/14/1839.

29.RH, 2/25/1848 and 3/10/1848. The eight men (many of them with families) who moved to Blacksville were Willis Hodges, George W. B. Wilson, Samuel Drummond, W. B. Smith, E. H. Smith, G. W. Lott, Charles C. W. Brown, and Perry Williams (possibly Perry Weeks). The first four of these had deeds.

30.Villard, John Brown, 222; JB to GS, 4/8/1848.

7. Trailblazers

1.“Gerrit Smith’s Land,” Jermain Loguen to JMS, NS, 3/24/1848. In this letter, Loguen indicates that he left Syracuse for the gift lands in August 1847 and returned to Syracuse in September after seven weeks away. For the first leg of this he was a circuit rider, stopping here and there to preach to Methodist congregations in the Mohawk River valley before the great swing north. He came home, he wrote McCune Smith, to find his family “in deep affliction.” A young daughter had died in his absence, and this loss “took entire possession” of his thoughts. This was why McCune Smith did not get a report from Loguen until mid-March 1848.

2.“Gerrit Smith’s Land.”

3.Loguen’s white Adirondack helpers were, in Essex County, Alfred Spooner and Jesse Gay, Esq. (Elizabethtown), Uriah H. Mihill (Keene), Jesse Tobey Jr. ( Jay), Wendell Lansing (Wilmington), and William Flack (Ausable Forks), and, in Franklin County, the Merrill family (Merrillsville), and Rensselaer Bigelow (Malone).

4.Hodges, Free Man of Color, 8.

5.“Mad Dogs—Hydrophobia,” New York Daily Herald, 7/1/1848; “City Items—Hypothermia,” NYDT, 7/1/1848; NYDT, 7/4/1848; “Incidents Connected with the Great Dog War of 1848,” New York Daily Herald, 7/29/1848; JMS to GS, 7/7/1848.

6.JMS to GS, 7/7/1848.

7.CA, 1/20/1838. Provost’s “fair living” would not ensure his family’s security. Notwithstanding his prominent role in the city’s “uplift” cohort (see “Philanthropic Order of Sons of Temperance,” NASS, 7/16/1846; “Evening School,” CA, 9/14/1839; “Right of Suffrage,” CA, 12/30/1837), the Provost family moved at least five times during the 1830s and early 1840s. In 1846, the year he received his gift deed, Provost was living near the notorious Five Points. In Charles Ray’s receipt book, Provost’s address was in the Eighth Ward, a neighborhood favored by city cartmen. Hodges, New York City Cartmen, 160. Hodges’s monograph explores the daily lives of cartmen, white and Black, with scrupulous and steady care.

8.On Anthony Provost’s legal travails, see CA, 9/16/1837 and 5/9/1840, and New York Globe, 4/15/1846. Provost’s experience is described as well in Hodges, Root and Branch, 233, and Harris, Shadow of Slavery, 217–19. On the city world of cart men in the first half of the nineteenth century, see Isaac S. Lyon, The Recollections of an Old Cartman (Newark, NJ, 1848), in Hodges, New York City Cartmen, 157–59.

9.Coleman, Going to America, 168, 274n.

10.“Excerpts from the Debate on Suffrage … , 1846,” in Gellman and Quigley, eds., Jim Crow New York, 252–59. Quoted here are the city paint dealer, John A. Kennedy, 255: John Hunt, a city printer, 256–57; and the attorney Bishop Perkins from New York City, 258.

11.Swift, Black Prophets of Justice, 139–42; Field, Politics of Race, 61, 62, 236–37; Dodson, Moore, and Yancey, Black New Yorkers, 72.

12.Harris, Shadow of Slavery, 217–18; Doggett’s New York City Directory (New York) lists Anthony Provost, “col’d,” as a porter in 1846/47, a “laborer” in 1848/49, and again as a “porter” in 1853/54; “Stealing a Horse,” New York Tribune, 7/12/1850. The reported theft of Provost’s horse and wagon in 1850 by Lewis B. Brown (who was convicted) reveals that Provost did, at times, cart for a living, notwithstanding the city’s attempt to stop him. Gellman and Quigley, Jim Crow New York, 257.

13.“Arrest for Receiving Abolition Papers,” Albany Evening Journal, 1/9/1847. The arrest of John C. Pulley for picking up a New York abolition paper at his post office in Baltimore was reported in newspapers both pro- and antislavery. Penn, Afro-American Press, 62–65.

14.JMS to GS, 7/7/1848; “Gerrit Smith’s Grants,” NS, 6/23/1848.

15.Communipaw [James McCune Smith], “Moving in May in the City,” FDP, 4/29/1859, cited in Stauffer, Works of James McCune Smith, 176.

16.JHH to GS, North Elba, 10/15/1850, 8/13/1851.

17.JB to Willis A. Hodges, RH, 3/10/1848; JB to Owen Brown, 1/10/1849.

18.JB to WH, 2/28/1848, reprinted in New York Evening Post, 12/20/1859; JB to WH, 1/22/1849, 12/20/1859. The Post published six letters that John Brown sent to Hodges while he was ensconced in Blacksville. The other letters Hodges got from Brown were reportedly destroyed when Brown was seized at Harpers Ferry.

19.Adams, “Black Flies,” 7; Harold Weston, Freedom in the Wilds: An Artist in the Adirondacks (Syracuse, 1971), 3–5.

20.“Troy Grantees Meeting,” NS, 11/10/1848; “Religious Societies,” Hart Cluett Museum, 2/3/2021, https://www.hartcluett.org/rensselaer-county-blog/religioussocieties.

21.JMS to GS, 5/12/1848.

22.Hodges, Free Man of Color, xliv, 80. Three times cited in the Hebrew scriptures, most famously in the Book of Micah (“Everyone will sit under their own vine and under their own fig tree, and no one will make them afraid, for the LORD Almighty has spoken”), this phrase captivated abolitionists and land reformers alike. Jamie Bronstein, Land Reform and Working-Class Experience in Britain and the United States, 1800–1862 (Stanford, 1999), 64–65; Hodges, Free Man of Color, xlvii, 80, and Augustus M. Hodges in the Indianapolis Freeman, 10/24/1896.

23.Hodges, Free Man of Color, 82.

24.Baumann, “Goldsmith.”

25.“Gerrit Smith’s Land,” NS, 12/8/1848; “Meeting of the Rochester Grantees,” NS, 12/15/1848.

26.FD, NS, 1/10/1849.

27.FD, NS, 1/5/1849.

28.“From the Northern Star and Colored Farmer, Essex County, Town of Keane [sic],” NS, 2/2/1849.

29.JHH to HHG, 1/29/1849, and “Mr. Waite [sic] J. Lewis and the Smith Lands,” NS, 2/16/1849, with introductory letter by HHG to FD, 2/5/1849. Garnet’s remarks implicitly reproached Douglass for not publishing Henderson’s first letter. The jab was one more parry in a long-standing quarrel between these strongheaded power brokers, who for years took pains to challenge and discredit each other. Schor, Henry Highland Garnet, 105; Blight, Frederick Douglass, 222–23.

30.JHH to HHG, 1/29/1849, and “Mr. Waite J. Lewis.”

31.Ruth Brown Thompson, “Pioneer Life in the Adirondacs,” in Sanborn, Life and Letters, 101.

32.Higginson, “Visit to John Brown’s Household.” Higginson suggested that by this surveyor’s “villainy the colony was almost ruined in advance, nor did it ever recover itself”; Smith, History of Warren County, 221–22. Keene school minutes and local newspapers document Wait Lewis’s public service (ECR, 2/6/1847, 12/25/1847), and notwithstanding the grantees’ concerns about his skill, his survey of a gift lot for the city grantee William Thomas was no different from another, older survey of the same lot by the respected Adirondack surveyor Stephen Thorn. See Adirondack Surveys Collection, LPPL; Norman Van Valkenburgh, interview by the author, 4/29/2005. Head of New York’s Division of Lands and Forests from 1978 to 1986, Van Valkenburgh authored The Forest Preserve of New York State in the Adirondack and Catskill Mountains and several “Land Surveyor” mysteries set in northern New York.

33.HHG to FD, NS, 2/16/1849.

8. The Second Wave

1.Ripley et al., Black Abolitionist Papers, 3:302–3n; Philip Foner, “William P. Powell: Militant Champion of Black Seamen,” in Essays in Afro-American History, 88–111, and Peterson, Black Gotham, 180–81, 195–96, 204–5, 237–39; JMS to GS, 2/6/1850, and Ripley et al., Black Abolitionist Papers, 4:42–47.

2.JMS to GS, 2/6/1850.

3.JMS to GS, 2/6/1850.

4.Ruth Brown Thompson, “Pioneer Life in the Adirondacs,” in Sanborn, Life and Letters, 99–101.

5.Dana, “How We Met John Brown.”

6.JMS to GS, 2/6/1850.

7.JMS to GS, 2/6/1850.

8.Thumbnail descriptions of these pioneering households in North Elba are corroborated or suggested in state and federal censuses, legal documents, local maps, and Gerrit Smith’s Land Book.

9.MacKenzie, Plains of Abraham, 139–40.

10.NYSC 1855, NE; JB to Ruth and Henry Thompson, 10/6/1851, in Sanborn, Life and Letters, 108.

11.USFC 1850, Franklin, Franklin County. The Maryland origins of the Moore, Weeks, Morehouse, and Murray families are noted in this census; Stephen Morehouse lived in Troy, New York, in the early 1830s (Troy City Directory, 1832, 1834, and 1835), and got his gift deed from Gerrit Smith in 1847 while working as a boatman in Waterford, Saratoga County (GSLB, 92–93). Twelve men from Waterford received land from Gerrit Smith. Only the Morehouses moved north. On Stephen Morehouse’s wife’s names, see 398n3. On the grantee Daniel Thompson, see chapter 11.

12.USFC 1850, Duane, Franklin County, Atlas of Franklin County, 41.

13.McCune Smith’s allusion to his daughter’s death in his letter to Gerrit Smith echoed the bad news in Jermain Loguen’s letter after his trip to the Black Woods the previous year. Like the city doctor, the Syracuse minister was late with his report because of a personal catastrophe; a child of his had died while he was away from home.

14.NYSC 1855 reveals Black children attending school in Essex County’s North Elba and in Franklin County’s towns of Franklin and Bellmont; JMS to GS, 12/17/1846.

15.CBR to GS, 12/2/1847; Meinig, Shaping of America, 328, 332, 346, 307.

16.USFC 1850, Raisin Township, Lenawee County, MI; R. I. Bonner and William A. Whitney, History and Biographical Record of Lenawee County, Michigan (W. Stearns, 1879), chap. 15; Bonner, Memoirs of Lenawee County, 279–95, and Fuller, “Settlement of Michigan Territory”; Lindquist, Antislavery-Underground Railroad Movement; USFC 1850, Raisin Township, Lenawee County, MI; Lindquist, Antislavery-Underground Railroad Movement, 74; USFC 1860, Albion, Calhoun County, MI; Rev. John. W. Robinson, “Jonathan Mingo,” Albion Recorder, 6/4/1869. The shape-shifting Mingos changed more than their address when they left New York. In Albion, Michigan, the slave-born Mingo identified his ancestry as Native American; his Black ancestors were not acknowledged. (Leslie Dick of the Local History Room, Albion Public Library, MI, provided me with details of Mingo Street and Mingo’s Albion reputation.) At his funeral, Mingo was described as the “uneducated, barefoot Indian boy” who made good. Federal censuses in Michigan in the late 1800s represent the Mingo family as “Narraganset Indians.” Mingo’s sons served in white regiments in the Civil War. Nothing in this family’s file in the Albion historian’s office recognizes the Gerrit Smith grantee who attended Black uplift meetings, read the Colored American, and dreamed of farming in the Black Woods.

17.GS to Samuel Cornish, 10/1/1846, and GS to CBR, JMS, and TW, 10/3/1846; Freedom’s Journal, 3/23/1827, 5/4/1827, 6/22/1827, 8/31/1827, 11/9/1827; Rights of All, 5/29/1829 and 6/12/1829; CA, 4/12/1838, 4/19/1838, and 6/22/1839; Samuel E. Cornish, GSLB, 56; Lapp, Gold Rush California, 69; Swift, Black Prophets of Justice, 31 and 31n. Within a year Cornish was back in New York City. While he did not farm his gift lot, he put it to use, speculating in the Smith Lands like many of his friends. Reuben Ruby, GSLB, 44; New York Tribune, 8/17/1849, cited in Lapp, Gold Rush California, 14; “Colored Association in California,” Samuel I. Davis to William Lloyd Garrison, Liberator, 2/15/1850; P. Brown to Alley Brown, 12/1851, from the California-Oregon Collection, Missouri Historical Society, cited in Lapp, Gold Rush California, 23; “Items—for the Gold Fields,” Essex County Reporter, 2/8/1849, New York Tribune, 11/21/1849, Lapp, Gold Rush California, 13, 39, 276n.

18.JMS to GS, 2/6/1850.

19.Wardner, “Footprints on Adirondack Trails,” chap. 8, “First Winter in the Adirondacks.” Years before he moved to the Adirondacks, Wardner wrote, “I studied every farm I saw, the house, the barns, the arrangement of fences and all such details. In my mind I had a clear picture of my intended future home, even to the row of apple trees near the house with a dozen white bee hives on the ground near the apple trees. Also I had pictured a spring up in the woods, with a steady flow of water through pump logs down to the kitchen.” Ibid.

20.E. M. Griffing to GS, 5/12/1848; CBR to GS, 5/12/1847.

21.“From the New York Tribune. A Christian Philanthropist,” NE, 5/17/1849; circular, GS to John Cochrane, William L. Kemeys, Isaac T. Hopper, George H. Evans, and Daniel C. Eaton, Peterboro, 5/1/1849.

22.FD, NS, 1/5/1849; JMS to GS, 12/17/1847.

23.Work, “Life of Charles B. Ray”; Morgan, “Education and Medical Practice”; JMS to GS, 12/17–18/1846: “It is very sickly here. In addition to my ordinary practice, I have 17 children ill with measles.” McCune Smith’s note let Gerrit Smith know why he would not, could not, move to the Black Woods. Every day, his good work made the difference between life and death. JMS to GS, 4/9/1858; Peterson, Black Gotham, 156–58; Harris, Shadow of Slavery, 157; Ripley et al., Black Abolitionist Papers, 3:350–51; “Forgotten Books,” 293; JMS, “A Dissertation on Influence of Climate on Longevity,” Office of Merchants’ Magazine, 1846, and “Physician’s Report to the Managers of the Colored Orphan Asylum,” 11/23/1851, Colored Orphan Asylum Records, NYHS.

24.James McCune Smith, “Convention of Colored Citizens,” report, NS, 4/10/1851.

9. A Wider Cartography

1.Jacoby, Crimes against Nature, 33. There were, of course, exceptions. In the 1820s, the New York speculator Peter Smith bought North Elba acreage at auction and told the longtime squatters he would not sell them the land they had worked so hard to tame. Suddenly reduced to tenants, many moved away. That land baron was Gerrit Smith’s father, whose hard-dealing legacy Gerrit labored to reverse. See Smith, History of Essex County, 663; MacKenzie, Plains of Abraham, 20–22.

2.Frederick Brown to “Brother Watkin” Brown, Osawatomie, KS, 11/10/1855, JBjrKS.

3.A comparison of gift lots in Gerrit Smith’s Land Book with home locations noted in the state and federal censuses from 1840 to 1865 is one way to document the grantees’ preference for land more to their liking than what they’d legally received. Mary MacKenzie tracks these moves in The Plains of Abraham (129–40), and in Blacks in the Adirondacks, Sally Svenson expands the reach of this inquiry to Franklin; Baumann, “Goldsmith.” The first Hunter’s Home near Loon Lake was a farmhouse that the innkeeper Paul Smith rented in 1848. Four years later, he bought two hundred acres and built the better-known hotel of the same name. Tyler, Story of Paul Smith, 13–17; F. L. Turner, “Early Days in the Town of Franklin,” AR-EP, 2/1930; Census takers knew Stephen Warren Morehouse’s wife by many names, including Mary, Laura, Lara, Laney, and Lura. In the 1870s, she moved in with her daughter Jane Morehouse Jones in Malone, and lived with her for years. NYSC 1875, Malone, NY.

4.A speculative map of Timbuctoo is at the John Brown farm. The cartographer (maybe long-time site manager Ed Cotter) used J. H. French’s 1858 town map as a base on which to flag the deeded land of eleven Black North Elba pioneers. Parks historian Maurice O’Brien included this map in his paper, “‘Timbuctoo’: An Attempt at Negro Settlement in the Adirondacks.” 0/1/1977, PIA.

5.When Susan left her family, it wasn’t from their first isolated cabin at South Mountain. In 1855, their home was a log cabin nearer to the frame home of Henry and Ruth Brown Thompson and handy to the home of Lyman Eppes as well. See Josiah Hasbrook, NYSC 1855, NE. Leonard Worts and Lewis Pierce’s hunting excursions are documented in Worts’s Vermont obituary, along with Worts’s claim that he and Pierce got lost, then “found and rescued by John Brown.” VWSJ, 8/26/1885.

6.Records of the Association for the Benefit of Colored Orphans, Series III, Admission Records, vol. 23, 174–76, vol. 24, #484, #485, #348, NYHS; LPM, widow’s pension appeal, NARA. Lucy Miles (née Pierce) was born on 8/3/1859 in New York City.

7.LPM widow’s pension; Susan Hasbrouck, USFC, 1860, Manhattan.

8.LPM widow’s pension.

9.Jane Thompson to Belle Brown, 11/14/1865. Cited in Mackenzie, Plains of Abraham, 151.

10.MacKenzie, Plains of Abraham, 150–51; USFC 1870, NE; LPM widow’s pension; JM military pension, deposition, 8/9/1898.

11.“Elizabethtown, the Oldest Adirondack Summer Resort, Still Stands at the Head,” EP, 5/18/1899. Several Black North Elbans moved to Westport for short spells between 1850 and 1874. Among them were Josiah and Jane Ann Hasbrook, Samuel and Jane Jefferson, William and Jane Carasaw, Silas and Jane Frazier, Susan Hasbrook Pierce and her daughter Lucy, Jeremiah Miles, and Leonard and Deanna Worts. USFC 1850, 1860, 1870; NYSC 1855, 1865, 1875; and LPM widow’s pension. On the migration of the Weeks family to Westport and points north, see Jones, “They Called It Timbucto.”

12.Joseph James, USFC 1850, 1860, 1870, Westport, and GSLB, 33 and 104; “Mrs. Adeline E. James,” EP, 1/7/1915. Westport history buffs Morris Glenn and Bill Johnston also generously shared with me their research on this family in 2001.

13.George W. Bell, GSLB, 79. Already an Essex County resident when he received his lot, George Bell crops up in Willsboro census reports from 1845 to 1875. On January 22, 1879, the seventy-five-year-old farmer left his log house for the county poorhouse, a not-unusual removal for poor, aging Adirondackers in winter. Bell’s place of birth, variously identified as Delaware, Washington, DC, and Maryland, hints at an early life in slavery.

14.Alexander Hasbrook is identified as a guide for the innkeeper Paul Smith in a photograph, “Guides at Paul Smith’s Boathouse,” SLFL. Josiah Hasbrook’s neighbors note his several jobs besides farming in their affidavits for his military pension. On Carasaw, see MacKenzie, Plains of Abraham, 159; Edward Cotter to BBS, NE, 2/7/1966, JB/BBS Coll./WVMP; Merle D. Melvin to Norman Dann, 3/4/2005 (courtesy of Norman Dann, Peterboro); Egel, Kirshenbaum, and Malo, Santanoni, 37; Josiah Hasbrook, NYSC, 1865, Sag Harbor, NY.

15.USFC 1870, Franklin, Franklin County; Wardner, “Footprints on Adirondack Trails,” 116–17; “Shooting in the Adirondacks” (1860, 1899); Tyler, Story of Paul Smith, 41–42. Local historian Helen Escha Tyler reports that the teenaged Warren Morehouse cooked for hunting parties led by the great guide Paul Smith in the early days of Smith’s first inn, Hunter’s Home. Morehouse also cooked at the nearby Rainbow Inn (Wardner, “Footprints on Adirondack Trails,” 117–18), and, with his mother, helped out at Paul Smith’s second inn before he went to Massachusetts to join his regiment (USFC 1860, Franklin). Back in Franklin after the war, Morehouse was a “waiting man” for the Franklin innkeeper Sarah Hill (NYSC 1865, Franklin). I am grateful to the independent scholar Don Papson for details of Morehouse’s employment.

16.“Shooting in the Adirondacks.”

17.Hardy, “Iron Age Community,” 37; HHG, “Preached at Troy, N.Y., to a Company of Mr. Gerrit Smith’s Grantees,” NS, 5/12/1848.

18.TS, 8/16/1894; ECR, 3/1/1888; NYSC 1855, NE; USFC 1860, NE. Mary MacKenzie was the first historian to identify and honor Eppes’s achievements beyond his friendship with John Brown. See MacKenzie, Plains of Abraham, 131–36; GSLB, 89. Eppes, like James Henderson, received his deed in Smith’s distribution in 1847; EP, 3/29/1894.

19.David Rhinelander, “From Past to Present,” Hartford Courant, 4/23/1999; Barbara W. Brown, “School for African American Children, Colchester,” 2008, New London County Archives Society; Douglass Harper, “Slavery in Connecticut,” Slavery in the North, 2003, http://slavenorth.com/connecticut.htm; Peter P. Hinks, “Gradual Emancipation Reflected the Struggle of Some to Envision Black Freedom,” Connecticut History, 1/2/2020, https://connecticuthistory.org/gradual-emancipation-reflected-the-struggle-of-some-to-envision-black-freedom/; LEE to John Brown Jr. and Owen Brown, NE, 11/10/1885, JBjrOH, Frohman Coll., Rutherford P. Hayes Presidential Library, OH; NE school reports, 1857, ECCO. In 1857, five Eppes children attended school. A Worts and a Carasaw were the other Black youths in this class.

20.Brumley, Guides of the Adirondacks, 118, and Street, Indian Pass, 14; LEE to FD, NE, 7/12/1854, in FDP, 7/21/1854; BBS to George Marshall, 4/19/1962 (“power of Attorney executed by Silas Harris, NYC, to Lyman Eppes Sr. granting authority to control and supervise landed property in Franklin County, NY,” 7/19/1888), JB/BBS Coll./WVMP; JB to Ruth and Henry Thompson, 12/29/1852, JB/BBS Coll./WVMP; “Excavation Reveals Clues about Timbuctoo,” LPN, 7/31/2009.

21.EP, 7/21/1916; Ben F. Lewis, Plattsburgh, NY, to Marjorie Lansing Porter, 3/26/1955; MacKenzie, Plains of Abraham, 134: Ruth Brown Thompson to Wealthy Brown, 3/10/1850, NE, JBJr.

22.Porter, Lem Merrill, 15, reports that some neighbors of the Black grantees used this racial slur. Circumstantial evidence (headstone epitaph, age and census records, state of origin) intimates that Alexander Hazzard’s wife was the same teenaged Mary Elizabeth Bailey who came north to Franklin with James, Louisa, and Samuel Brady in the 1850s.

23.MacKenzie, Plains of Abraham, 133. Federal and state censuses, 1850–1880, suggest the slave-state origins of Virginia-born Sally Henderson, and in Franklin, the southern roots of James and Louisa Brady, Mary Elizabeth Bailey, and Wesley Murray; On the early enslavement of Thomas and Jane Jefferson, see “She Was Once a Slave,” Troy (NY) Northern Budget, 5/27/1888. This information is courtesy of the independent scholar Christopher Philippo, Troy, NY; SH military pension, affidavit, Josiah Hasbrook Jr.; “Bloomingdale,” Malone (NY) Palladium, 3/8/1894; see chaps. 1 and 8; Sanborn, Life and Letters, 100, 131–32. Brendan Mills, JBF site manager, estimates that the fugitive Cyrus Thomas lived with the Browns for eighteen months. Mills to author, 11/9/2018; On Adirondack writers who saw the Black Woods as a destination for fugitives, see ch. 5, note 30.

24.The letters of Jermain Loguen, James H. Henderson, John Brown, and Brown’s daughter Ruth Brown Thompson all document bigotry on the frontier. It should be noted, however, that in the thirteen years between the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act and the start of the Civil War, no Black Adirondacker was seized by bounty hunters. No evidence suggests that Southern-born grantee-settlers were directly threatened by their neighbors. The charcoal wagons that reportedly trundled fugitives through the Adirondacks to Canada were not attacked. No Essex County deputy marched to North Elba to claim the fugitive Cyrus Thomas in the several seasons he was with the Browns. Bounty hunters who pursued the grantee-fugitive John Thomas to Franklin were deterred by his white neighbors, who warned them that if they tried to take this farmer, he would fight, and they would help. See chap. 11 in this book; Seaver, Historical Sketches, 6; and Papson, “The John Thomas Story.”

25.“Honor to Gerrit Smith!,” Signal of Liberty, 10/3/1846, and “Gerrit Smith’s Donation,” Signal of Liberty, 12/5/1846. This paper also promoted Black husbandry in Michigan, but the Washingtons needed more than Michigan’s rich soil; they wanted a community representing principles of racial justice. The Black Woods fit that bill. D. Washington, “For the Voice of the Fugitive,” Ann Arbor, 1/13/1852, in The Voice of the Fugitive, 1/29/1852. By March 1857, Dennis Washington had lost confidence in the leadership of the Refugees Home colony, his home in Chatham, Canada West. See the following in PF: “Refugees in Canada,” 2/21/1857; “Letter No. 1,” “Letter No. 2,” 3/14/1857; “A Communication from Dennis Washington,” 3/7/1857; “Correspondence,” 4/18/1857; and “For the Provincial Freeman,” 4/25/1857. Also see James Blair Webb to GS, 3/1848. The land broker Webb sent Smith forty dollars from Ann Arbor’s Dennis Washington for “a deed for 40 acres in Township 11”; Dennis Washington to Henry Bibb, Voice of the Fugitive, 1/29/1852.

26.Bibb, Life and Adventures. On this charismatic reformer-activist, see Cooper, “Fluid Frontier”; and Bordewich, Bound for Canaan, 380–88; GSLB, 37. Bibb’s forty-acre gift lot (near the lots of Douglass and the Boston activist William Wells Brown) was in Township 12, Old Military Tract, Lot 24, in Essex County; Henry Bibb to GS, 12/30/1848; Henry Bibb, “Florence,” NS, 3/23/1849; “Correspondence,” PF, 3/2/1857, 3/4/1857, 4/18/1857, and 4/25/1857. Winks, Blacks in Canada, 204–8, describes the work of Bibb’s Refugee Home Society. For a wide-ranging cultural context for these settlements, see introduction, Ripley et al., Black Abolitionist Papers, 2:3–46; Out of slavery for nine years when the Fugitive Slave Act was enacted, Walter Hawkins recollected that he might have stayed to “fight it out” were it not for the risk to his family. But, “What if he was killed in battle? What would become of his wife and children?” If he were slain or seized, “there was a chance of them being taken south and sold on the auction block.” Better to “enjoy his own liberty [and] secure the same for his wife and children than to live in fear.” Edwards, S. J. Celestine, with Walter Hawkins, From Slavery to a Bishopric, or, The Life of Bishop Walter Hawkins of the British Methodist Episcopal Church, Canada (John Kensit, 1891), 112–22.

27.“On Meeting of the Colored People of Troy,” AP, 10/28/1846.

28.See Bordewich, Bound for Canaan, chap. 15; ibid., 168–70; R. J. M. Blackett, “Freemen to the Rescue! Resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850,” in Blight, Passages to Freedom, 133–47; Christianson, Freeing Charles, 69–70, 88–103; Campbell, Slave Catchers, 110–47, 199–207; Quarles, Black Abolitionists, 200; Lois Horton, “Kidnapping and Resistance: Antislavery Direct Action in the 1850s,” in Blight, Passages to Freedom, 161; Quarles, Black Abolitionists, 200.

29.The Fugitive Slave Law and Its Victims, American Anti-slavery Society, NY, 1856; Douglass H. Shephard, “The 1851 Recapture and Trial of Harrison: A Compilation of Accounts between 1851 and 1944,” 2014, https://chqgov.com/county-historian/underground-railroad; John P. Downs and Fenwick Y. Hedley, History of Chautauqua County, New York and Its People (American Historical Society, 1921).

30.“Moses Viney, Negro Bodyguard of Dr. Nott for Many Years, Continues Active and Reminiscent,” DG, 1904; “Aged Moses Viney Claimed by Death,” DG, 1/11/1909; Yetwin, “ Odyssey of Moses Viney”; GSLB, 92; Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 143–44, 361–65. While Viney was in Canada, Eliphalet Nott covered the fugitive’s taxes on his gift lot (County Treasurers Sales in 1852 for Outstanding Taxes from 1849, 1609, NYSA). After Nott purchased Viney’s freedom for $250, Viney returned to Union College and resumed his work as Nott’s teamster and valet. On Van Pelt, see Durkee, Reminiscences of Saratoga, 11; Samuel G. Boyd, In the Days of Old Glens Falls—as I Remember It (Zonta Club of Glens Falls, 1927); and “Another Fugitive Slave Case,” Glens Falls Free Press, 9/17/1851.

31.Hunter, 331–35; Ripley et al, BAP, v. 4, 144n10, 402n8; On strategies and instances of kidnapping, see Siebert, Underground Railroad, 240, 295–96, 318; Bordewich, Bound for Canaan, 135–43, 172–78; and Foner, Gateway to Freedom, 60–70, 108–9; Curry, Free Black, 229–31.

32.Carl Beckwith Smith, conversation with the author, Loon Lake, NY, 5/13/2005; ECR, 10/25/1907; MacKenzie, Plains of Abraham, 151, 139; “Essex County, Town of Keane,” NS, 2/2/1849; “A Talk by C. Walter Goff Given to the Lake Placid–North Elba Historical Society—circa 1965,” typescript, Special Collections, LPPL.

33.Charles H. Peck, Plants of North Elba, Bulletin of the New York State Museum, vol. 6, no. 28 (6/1899): 69, 81; H. Possons, “Mountains and Lakes,” Troy Daily Times, 4/26/1890; Hayes, Lake Placid, 15; “A Talk by C. Walter Goff … ,” LPPL. Franklin, too, held the trace memory of the Black Woods in the spoken map. A hundred years after Lt. Alfred Skiff brought the once-enslaved Walter Scott to Franklin, and long after the Scotts had moved away, neighbors called their farmstead the Scott place. See Tyler, “… In Them Thar Hills,” 63.

34.MacKenzie, Plains of Abraham, 14; “The Old Slavery Days,” PR, 3/28/1903, and “Reference to Gerrit Smith,” EPG, 4/2/1903.

35.Andrew Williams, Map to Accompany a Description and Historical Guide to the Valley of Lake Champlain and the Adirondacks, Tourists’ Edition (R. S. Styles, 1871), Special Collections, University of Vermont; Wardner, “Footprints,” chap. 10, “Early Days at Rainbow,” 6; Ahaz Hayes, NYSC 1855, St. Armand, Essex County.

36.“Spike” [Spike Schmeele], “Highlights of the Game,” LPN, 3/31/1944. The derogatory local nickname for this cemetery, reportedly near Bear Cub Road in Averyville, south of North Elba, was confirmed by the Adirondackers Nathan Farb and Greg Furness, who heard it from older Placidians. The site of the cemetery is unknown today, and likely will remain so. No law requires the upkeep or protection of unmarked burial sites in New York. In an email (11/28/2000), retired historical interpreter Furness told me he “repeatedly” heard the “John Brown Farm referred to as ‘The N—— Site’ or ‘The N—— Farm.’ ”

37.Letter. Mary MacKenzie to Mary Hotaling, 4/28/1994, Mary MacKenzie Collection, LPPL. J. F. French, “North Elba, 1858,” from The Map of Essex County, New York (E. A. Balch, 1858).

38.JB to WH, Springfield, MA, 5/22/1848, 10/28/1848, and 1/22/1849, published in the New York Evening Post, 12/21/1859; JHH to HHG, Timbucto, West Keene, 1/29/1849, in NS, 2/16/1849; and John Brown Jr. to his mother, Mary Ann, Springfield, MA, 10/15/1849 (“We reached Keene a week ago… . [We] visited most of the important places. Such as Timbuctoo &c.”), JBJr.

39.John Brown may not have known the more familiar spelling of “Timbuctoo.” Spelling was not his strength. (Among words misspelled in letters to his wife are “verry,” “hapiness,” “immagination,” “boddy,” “equl,” “kneed,” and “midling.”) On the mystery of Timbuctoo’s first naming, see Caleb McDaniel’s online essays “In Search of John Brown’s Timbucto, Part I,” 8/11/2010, https://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~wcm1/john-brown-timbuctoo-part1.html, and “In Search of John Brown’s Timbucto, Part II,” 9/3/2010, https://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~wcm1/john-brown-timbuctoo-part2.html.

Among the surnames these new marriages introduced to the Black Woods were Langley, Scott, Prince, Gardineer, Johnson, Smith, Anthony, and Miles (mostly Southerners and Vermonters). And some Black names belonged to hired hands and servants who lived in the homes of white people—interracial households that were compelled by frontier necessity. But the inclusivity of Black families represented something more. Invoking Herbert Gutman’s research, George Frederickson notes that the “consciousness of being part of an extended family—including spouses, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins—provided Afro-Americans with the foundations for a sense of community that could extend over time and across space. When in the nineteenth century original families were broken up and individual members carried [away], the effect was of course traumatic; yet the kinship ideal was not lost. When blood relationships were lacking … fictive kinship arrangements tended to take their place until a new pattern of consanguinity had time to develop.” Frederickson, Arrogance of Race, 120.

In the Black Woods in 1855, Louisa and James Brady of Franklin made room for young Mary Bailey (very possibly a relative), and young Charles Hasbrook was the “adopted son” of Leonard and Deanna Worts. Five years later, the elderly Wortses took in the youthful Harriette Hasbrook and her older brother Josiah, whose parents had split up and moved away. After the Civil War, Private Josiah Hasbrook housed his half-sister Lucy Pierce (who for a while took his surname for her own). When he remarried, Charles Henry Hazzard made a home in St. Armand for his new stepdaughters. Genevia and Clara Smith (Southern-born and, like their mother, likely once enslaved). After Genevia’s death and her husband’s removal to Manhattan, Charles Hazzard and his wife took in their teenage grandchildren (and their descendants may live in Saranac Lake even now).

40.Donaldson, History of the Adirondacks, 2:6; MacKenzie, Plains of Abraham, 167–68. “They called it Timbuctoo?” was MacKenzie’s stern response to both Donaldson and the Boston writer Katherine Butler Jones’s essay on Timbuctoo in Orion, Winter 1998; Monmonier, Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow, xi, 37, 69; JHH to HHG, Timbucto, West Keene, 1/29/1849, published in NS, 2/16/1849. In this letter Henderson reported, “I have been here for eight months,” or since June or July 1848. Another letter dates his residency on Lot 93 in Township 12 to mid-May 1848. JHH to GS, 10/15/1850.

41.“Timbucktoo,” Hartford Courant, 11/5/1879. Of the four newspapers indexed in Donald Jacobs’s inventory Antebellum Black Newspapers, Freedom’s Journal took the strongest interest in sub-Saharan Africa, covering European exploration, African culture, the slave economy, tribal life, and tribal governance. The Timbuctoo explorers Hugh Clapperton, Alexander Laing, and René Caillié invited multiple mentions, and more than a dozen columns were devoted to the Timbuctoo-born lecturer and Africanophile Prince Abdullah Rahaman. For articles regarding European exploration (and Timbuctoo), see Freedom’s Journal, 3/16/1827, 4/6/1827, 12/26/1828, 10/10/1829, 2/26/1829, and 2/28/1828; for news of Africa’s geography and tribal culture, 3/28/1829 and 4/6/1829; and for Rahahman’s report on Timbuctoo, 10/24/1828. Appiah and Gates, Dictionary of Global Culture, 644–45; Lila Azam Zanganeh, “When Timbuktu Was the Paris of Islamic Intellectuals in Africa,” NYT, 4/24/2004; de Gramont, Strong Brown God, 33.

42.McDaniel, “John Brown’s Timbucto, Part I,” offers a discerning summary of the imagery of Timbuctoo in early nineteenth-century poems, explorers’ letters, colonization appeals, and articles in the Black press.

43.Kryza, Race for Timbuktu, 229–36; Howe, Afrocentrism, 151. In the nineteenth century, one to two thousand slaves were transported annually every year from Timbuctoo across the Sahara. Homer, The Iliad, I-429; HHG, Past and Present Condition, 8; Moses, Afrotopia, 47–48.

44.Jacobs, Antebellum Black Newspapers, 542, 50n; Cooley, Negroland of the Arabs; Armistead, Tribute for the Negro; HHG, Past and Present Condition.

45.McDaniel, “John Brown’s Timbucto, Part I.”

46.Randall Rohe, “The Geography and Material Culture of the Western Mining Town,” Material Culture 16, no. 3 (Fall 1984): 114–15; “Timbuctoo, Yuba County,” San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, 11/28/1857; “Mining about Timbuctoo, Yuba County,” San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, 1/14/1859; Lyght, Path of Freedom, 38–40, 68, 79. At “Global Timbuktu: Meanings and Narratives of Resistance in Africa and the Americas,” a conference at Rutgers University, 3/24/2017, Guy-Oreido Weston, a genealogist and historian from Mount Holly, New Jersey, and the great-great-grandson of a founder of the New Jersey Timbuctoo, shared his research on this colony, represented, in a deed of 1829, as Tombuctoo, before this name was changed. Wood and Hageman, Burlington and Mercer Counties, 500–506.

10. We Who Are Here Can See and Know

1.John Warren, “A Short History of Adirondack Beaver,” New York Almanack, 8/24/2021, https://www.newyorkalmanack.com/2021/08/a-short-history-of-adirondack-beaver/; Terrie, Wildlife and Wilderness, 59–60; Hurd, Franklin and Clinton Counties, 209. In The Adirondack; or, Life in the Woods (Baker, 1849), Joel T. Headley confidently asserted that “game of all kinds swarm the forest: bears, wolves, panthers, deer, and moose.” Quoted in Terrie, Wildlife and Wilderness, 59; Brumley, Guides of the Adirondacks, 118.

2.NYSC 1855, NE, and MacKenzie, Plains of Abraham, 132–33; “The Late Elijah Simonds … ,” EP, 7/21/1916; “Old-Time Adirondack Christmas Recalled,” Elizabethtown (NY) Times, 12/26/1940; untitled news clipping, n.d., Adirondack newspaper, 7/1940, George Marshall Papers, SLFL.

3.Ruth Brown to Mary Ann Brown, West Keene, 10/31/1849; ECR, 1/7/52; ECR, 2/3/1850; Keller, Adirondack Wilderness, 91; “Laws Reached by the Board of Supervisors in Their Annual Meeting of 1849,” ECR, 2/23/1850, and “Proceedings of the Board of Supervisors,” ECR, 1/21/1854. The Saranac River was declared a public highway in 1846, the upper waters of the Hudson in 1849, and the Ausable River in 1853.

4.Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist, 89–91.

5.Carvalho, “John Brown’s Transformation”; “The John Brown House,” Summit County Historical Society of Akron, Ohio, 2020, https://www.summithistory.org/john-brown-house; JB to Mary Brown, Akron, 12/27/1852. Brown/Gee Collection, Hudson Library and Historical Society, Hudson, OH.

6.“Dear Editor,” John G. Fay to LPN, 12/11/1942. In this same letter, Fay noted that his father, Gilman Taylor Fay, taught Black and white farm children in his North Elba schoolhouse.

7.Late in life, Josiah Hasbrook Jr. recalled his father’s rescue, after “three days in the deep gorges and snowdrifts,” by a party organized by John Brown (Springfield Daily Republican, 7/28/1915). But it is unclear whether this happened before or after Henderson’s own death. In her recollection of her father’s near-fatal brush with hypothermia, Ruth Brown Thompson dated it to the winter of 1850 (Villard, John Brown, 73–74). Whether Henderson in his last distracted hour actually called to mind Brown’s providential arrival at Robert Scott’s cabin is, of course, unknowable. But he very likely heard about it, and perhaps it gave him hope.

8.“Dear Editor,” LPN, 12/11/1942; JB to Ruth Brown Thompson, in Sanborn, Life and Letters, 104; “Colored Citizens of Troy,” Christian Freeman, 5/5/1843, “Appeal for Rights,” NASS, 1/29/1846; JHH to HHG, NS, 2/16/1849; “Evening School,” CA, 10/17/1840; Mackenzie, Plains of Abraham, 144; JHH to GS, NE, 10/15/1850.

9.JHH to GS, NE, 10/15/1850; JB to GS, 11/8/1849. On one side of the 11/8/1849 letter from Brown to Smith is the agreement between Pliny Nash and Smith for the ten-installment payment plan for this land, and a note describing Samuel Jefferson’s assumption of this payment plan from 8/29/1851 to 12/23/1853. JHH to GS, NE, 10/14/1848. The history of Lot 93 is tangled and somewhat troubling. James and Susan Henderson built their home on land that their white neighbor, Pliny Nash, owned and let them use while Nash was buying it on time from Gerrit Smith. The obliging Nash would have sold it to them, too, but a year before James Henderson died, John Brown devised a plan to buy the contract to all of Lot 93 from Smith directly, and to split it up between himself, his son Jason, the Hendersons, and the Jeffersons, with separate deeds for all. That was a good plan, but for some reason never stated, John Brown changed his mind and opted for another lot, transferring the purchase plan of 93 to the Jeffersons. This left Henderson in the lurch. John Brown had assured him that Gerrit Smith would sell him his piece in installments, and on the strength of this suggestion Henderson had built his farm. But white locals with long dealings with Peterboro told Henderson the rich man would never break up a forty-acre lot (Smith dealt in five-thousand-acre parcels, not five-acre shards), and Smith’s secretary, Caleb Calkins, confirmed this.

10.Report of Select Committee, 44–45; Godine, “Poor View.”

11.Colored Orphan Asylum Records, Association for the Benefit of Colored Orphans Records, series 3, vol. 23, 349–52, NYHS, https://digitalcollections.nyhistory.org/islandora/search/Colored%20Orphan%20Asylum%20Records?type=edismax&cp=islandora%3A130602; Harris, Shadow of Slavery, 136.

12.Harris, Shadow of Slavery, 160, 278; Henderson intake report, Colored Orphan Asylum Records, vol. 23, 349; Harris, Shadow of Slavery, 136, 158–59; Colored Orphan Asylum Records, 230, 58, 62–65; Anna Shotwell to GS, NYC, 9/21/1846, and Harris, Shadow of Slavery, 277; Colored Orphans Asylum Records, vol. 3. Susan Henderson’s six children were admitted to the orphanage on 11/26/1852 and immediately determined to be “enjoying good health.” Tellingly, while all six were admitted to the asylum on the same terms and day, the death of two of them within weeks of each other caused the record keeper to disavow the younger, Susan Henderson, an infant, as a legitimate inmate of the institution, “she being irregularly received … not recorded—[and] sick upon entering.” The orphanage did not want the death of this infant on its books. On infant mortality in the orphanage, see Harris, Shadow of Slavery, 162–65.

13.Harris, Shadow of Slavery, 162; JMS to GS, NYC, 2/6/1850; “DIED,” CA, 8/28/1841; Harris, Shadow of Slavery, 278, 336n. Benjamin Henderson died on 11/12/1852, less than two weeks after his infant sister, Susan A. Henderson. And after three years in the asylum, thirteen-year-old James G. Henderson was only ten days out of it when, on 4/29/1855, he “gave up the Ghost.” Colored Orphans Asylum Records, vol. 23, 329. In light of the orphanage’s response to his baby sister’s death in 1852 (see note 12), one wonders if the orphanage wanted him out before he died.

14.“Charles E. Hodges (1819–after April 15, 1910),” Encyclopedia Virginia, 12/22/2021, https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/hodges-charles-e-1819-after-april-15-1910/. Charles Hodges, executor of his late father’s family farm of 143 acres, owed taxes on the property and was urged by his attorney to get out of Virginia before creditors filed suit. Hodges, his mother, and some siblings moved to William Hodges’s home in Brooklyn in 1851.

15.LEE to “Mr. Editor,” FDP, 7/21/1854.

16.LEE to “Mr. Editor,” FDP, 7/21/1854.

17.LEE to “Mr. Editor,” FDP, 7/21/1854; FD, NS, 2/18/1848; JHH to HHG, “West Keene, Timbucto, Essex County,” 1/29/1849, in NS, 2/16/1849. On slavery’s effect on nineteenth-century Black America’s relationship to land and farming, see Smith, African American Environmental Thought, 7, 8, 14, 66–67.

18.Fox, “Lumber Industry,” 17; Meinig, Shaping of America, 246; “Northern Guide,” ECR, 7/1/1852.

19.CBR and JMS, “To Gerrit Smith Grantees.”

20.FD to Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rochester, 3/8/1853; “From the Minutes of the Colored National Convention,” FDP, 12/2/1853.

21.FD to Stowe, 3/8/1853; “Hills, Lakes and Country Streams, or A Tramp in the Chateaugay Woods,” excerpted in FDP, 6/9/1854.

22.“Help for the People of Color,” FDP, 10/9/1851, from the New York Independent; Joseph C. Holly, GSLB, 32.

23.“News,” BDE, 4/2/1853. In this issue, the Eagle’s readers would learn that “hundreds if not thousands of the parcels of land given away by Hon. Gerrit Smith to poor & worthy white & colored people in this State were advertised to be sold for taxes”; FD to Stowe, 3/8/1853; “From the Minutes of the Colored National Convention,” FDP, 12/2/1853.

24.“Plan of the American Industrial School,” FDP, 4/15/1854, 3/16/1855.

25.“The American Industrial School,” New-York Tribune, n.d., in FDP, 5/26/1854; Oberlin Times, n.d., quoted in FDP, 4/15/1853; “The U.S. National Council,” Provincial Freeman (Toronto), 8/5/1854; “Selections, from New York Tribune, National Council of the Colored People,” FDP, 5/18/1855; “Scioto” to FD, Columbus, OH, 4/24/1854, published in FDP, 5/26/1854; “The Industrial School,” FDP, 6/1/1855.

26.Peter Humphries Clark, Herald of Freedom, n.d., 1855, quoted by “Communipaw” [JMS] in FDP, 8/10/1855 and 9/21/1855. Clark’s opposition to Douglass’s proposed industrial college pained McCune Smith deeply. A barber’s son in Cincinnati, the activist and writer Peter Clark once supported Liberian colonization but later embraced an ardent antiemigrationism. As the principal of a Black high school in the 1850s, Clark opposed desegregation (integrated schools, he felt, would be taken over by whites). “No man was truer to his oppressed people than Peter H. Clark,” wrote the reformer William Wells Brown in 1882. Brown, Rising Son, 524. See Philip Foner on Clark’s political career in Foner, Essays in Afro-American History, 155–77; and David A. Gerber’s essay “The Dialogue of Hope and Despair,” in Litwack and Meier, Black Leaders, 173–90.

27.Ripley et al., Black Abolitionist Papers, 3:345–51, 350n. In the 1850s, James McCune Smith used the pseudonym “Communipaw” (from Communipaw Flats, in New York City) in columns for FDP and NASS.

28.JMS to GS, NYC, 12/17/1846; JMS to GS, NYC, 2/6/1850; JMS to FD, “Our Leaders,” FDP, 9/21/1855.

29.LEE to “Mr. Editor,” FDP, 7/21/1854.

30.McGowen to GS, Albany, 10/1/1859; “Gerrit Smith,” New-York Tribune, in FDP, 11/12/1852; John Brown to his children, 11/5/1852; BBS to Mary E. Cunningham, 6/5/1948; “Election of Gerrit Smith,” Liberator, quoted in FDP, 11/19/1852; FD to GS, 11/10/1852; “Gerrit Smith,” from NYT, in FDP, 11/12/1852; “Congressional Speeches,” NE, 6/15/1854; “Speech of Gerrit Smith,” Daily Morning Advocate, in FDP, 6/9/1854.

31.“Speed of Speech,” Semi-weekly Eagle (Brattleboro, VT), 7/17/1848 (“Some of the reporters state that Daniel Webster speaks at the rate of eighty to one hundred and ten words per minute; Gerrit Smith from seventy to ninety … ; Mr. Clay one hundred and thirty to one hundred and sixty; … Mr. Calhoun from one hundred and sixty to two hundred”). Other details of Smith’s congressional career are drawn from Frothingham, Gerrit Smith, 212–26, and Harlow, Gerrit Smith, 312–25. In The Field of Blood, Joanne Freeman describes a culture of physical violence and intimidation in the antebellum halls of Congress as far from Gerrit Smith’s calm domestic work culture as a battlefield.

32.“Letter from Gerrit Smith to Wm. Goodell,” Peterboro, FDP, 11/1/1854; “The Appeal of the Independent Democrats in Congress, signed by Senators Salmon P. Chase and Charles Sumner, and U.S. Representatives Gerrit Smith, Joshua Giddings,” NE, 1/14/1854. Other signatories included Edward Wade and Alexander De Witt. “The Appeal” was also published in the Cincinnati Gazette and the New-York Tribune. See https://web.archive.org/web/20070926214925/http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=945. Holt, American Whig Party, 815–16.

33.GS to Wm. Goodell, FDP, 11/10/1854. Smith had cause to worry. In his aggrieved letter to Goodell, he quoted a resolution from a National Colored People’s Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, earlier in August 1854. “[We] hope, on due reflection,” the delegates wrote, that Gerrit Smith “may yet consent to lose a meal of victuals, or an hour’s sleep, for the cause of down-trodden and suffering humanity.” “Letter from Hon. Gerrit Smith,” FDP, 9/1/1854.

34.Harlow, Gerrit Smith, 334; “Letter from Gerrit Smith to Wm. Goodell,” Peterboro, FDP, 11/1/1854; “Letter from Hon. Gerrit Smith,” FDP, 9/1/1854. Clues to Smith’s later sanction of antislavery militancy and violence animated the reformer’s aggrieved defense of his congressional career in “Gerrit Smith to His Constituents,” FDP, 8/18/1854: “Let it be remembered, that it is only while and where I am inside of the Government, that I acknowledge myself bound to bow to the will of the majority. I bow to it in the legislative hall and in the court-room; and every where and always do I bow to it; until the purposed execution of the decree that is intolerable. Then I rebel.” Out of Congress, and facing a repugnant law “which wrongs me greatly,” he claimed every right “to decide whether to rebel against the Government, and to resist the enforcement.”

35.In New York, most legal documents concerning nineteenth-century land tax sales by the state comptroller or the county treasurers, including notices of tax sales and redemptions, lists of tax-delinquent deedholders, appeals to redeem land from tax sales, applications to cancel tax sales, register of bids and sales, etc., are housed in the state archives in Albany. In 1999, the NYS Comptrollers Office transferred much of this documentary material to the state archives. For a summary of these holdings, see Jim Folts, “Land Title Records in the New York State Archives,” draft 11, 17–19, at https://docslib.org/doc/1178699/land-title-records-in-the-new-york-state-archives-new-york-state-archives-information-leaflet-11-draft. Among the files I reviewed at the archives in Albany were A1352, “Receipt book of land grants from Gerrit Smith to ‘colored and poor white slaves from the South,’ ” 1846, carbon copy of transcription of original records; BO846, Published Notices of Land Sold for Unpaid Taxes and Unredeemed, 1826–1905; BO847-85, Applications to redeem property from tax sales [Hamilton, Essex, Franklin Counties], 1846–1860; BO918, Certificates of land for sale for unpaid taxes, 1815–1928; B0934, “Lists of non-residents lands with unpaid taxes ca 1810–1850; BO940, County Treasurers’ Statements of Non-Resident Lands Sold for Unpaid Taxes, 1849–1854; BO941-85, County Treasurers’ Sales Tax Returns; A1411–77, “Applications for Cancellation of Tax Sales, 1841–1925,” Comptroller’s Office Land Tax Bureau; B1605–99, folder, “1852 Sale on 1849 Taxes, Vol. 1”; B1617 and B1619, Redemption Diaries, Comptrollers Office, NYSA, Albany, NY.

36.Nineteenth-century comptroller’s records, now in the New York State Archives, document numerous Smith grantees and agents making up back taxes on gift lots not their own. B1605–99, “Registers of Non-Resident Lands Sold in Tax Sales by County Treasurers, 1852–1896, Vol. 1” and folder, “County Treasurer’s Sale of 1853 Outstanding Taxes, Vol. 4”; B1609–99, “Daybook of Taxes and Redemption Payments to County Treasurer, 1850–1855” and folder, “County Treasurer’s Sale of 1854 [for] Outstanding Taxes 1851, Vol. 1,” NYSA.

37.Meinig, Shaping of America, 244. Eric Foner suggests that Charles Ray’s zeal for speculation inflamed a rift between Ray and Lewis Tappan, one of Ray’s codirectors on the New York State Vigilance Committee. Tappan suspected that committee head Ray used funds intended for a family of fugitives for a personal real estate investment of his own. Ray disputed these charges. Foner, Gateway to Freedom, 170–71; Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men, 146–48.

38.“Convention of Colored Citizens,” NS, 4/10/1851.

39.“Tale of Gerrit Smith behind Adirondack Suit: Downing Heirs’ Story Runs Back to Eccentric Philanthropist.” NYT, 11/19/1904. Charismatic rumors about Underground Railroad activity on Gerrit Smith’s land beguiled Adirondack Park historian Harold Hochschild (see Hochschild, Township 34, 61–62), and they continue to inspire research. In 2022, Pete Nelson, a lay historian and Adirondack activist, dove deep into Gerrit Smith’s correspondence in hope of documenting an Underground Railroad water route that might have floated fugitives to Canada by way of Eagle, Blue Mountain, and Utowana Lakes. Hard proof proved elusive, but Nelson’s spirited talk on his quest, “Diversity in the Adirondacks: The Underground Railroad in Blue Mountain Lake,” held an audience in thrall at the Blue Mountain Lake Art Center (8/24/2022).

40.“Tale of Gerrit Smith behind Adirondack Suit: Downing Heirs’ Story Runs Back to Eccentric Philanthropist.” NYT, 11/19/1904.

41.J. Clay Smith Jr., Emancipation: The Making of the Black Lawyer, 1844–1944 (University of Pennsylvania, 1999), 38, 440.

42.“Tale of Gerrit Smith.” See, among others, “The Adirondacks,” Boston Herald, 11/17/1904; “Negroes Claim Big Estates,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 11/18/1904; “Negroes Claim Adirondacks,” Fall River (MA) Evening Herald, 11/18/1904; “Deeds in Hand,” NYDN, 11/19/1904; and “Afro-American,” Seattle Republican, 12/9/1904.

43.“Alleged Brooklyn Heirs to Adirondack Tracts,” Times Union (Brooklyn), 11/16/1904. This piece ran in the Commercial Advertiser (Canton, NY), 11/29/1904, and the Malone (NY) Farmer, 11/23/1904. By the 1930s, new roads and state-built campgrounds in the Adirondack Park, along with rental cabins and other affordable tourist amenities, were democratizing the wilderness vacation and softening resentment of the region’s old exclusionary social culture. Further, many of those old exclusive clubs and camps had fallen on hard times and closed.

44.These weekly legal notices appeared in the Malone Farmer and the Elizabethtown Post and Gazette. To the Lake Placid Kiwanis Club thirty years later, local attorney Robert F. Isham noted the “considerable trouble” that Gerrit Smith’s “generosity” was still making for landowners seeking “clear title” to their lots. See “Clear Title of Land Goes Back to Slave Days,” LPN, 4/11/42.

45.Communipaw [JMS] to FD, “Heads of Colored People,” FDP, 4/15/1852; J. N. Still to “Mr. Editor,” FDP, 4/22/1852.

46.Jason Brown, quoting JB to John Brown Jr., 2/15/1853, JBJr.

47.“Extract from a Sermon, Preached at Troy, N.Y., to a Company of Mr. Gerrit Smith’s Grantees, on the Eve of Their Departure to Their Lands, by Henry Highland Garnet, Pastor of the Liberty Street Church,” NS, 5/12/1848; Salmon Brown to F. B. Sanborn, Portland, OR, 8/8/1909, JB/BBS Coll./ WVMP.

48.Sylvester, Historical Sketches, 1877.

11. I Begin to Be Regarded as an “American Citizen”

Epigraph: Excerpt from “Paul Robeson” by Gwendolyn Brooks reprinted by consent of Brooks Permissions.

1. Helen Tyler, “This ‘n That,” ADE, 8/10/1972: Galen Crane, “Our Towns: Vermontville,” AL, February 1997.

2.Details of Isaac Lyon’s Adirondack life are culled from mid-nineteenth-century US federal and New York censuses (1850–70); Helen Escha Tyler’s history column, “This ‘n That,” in ADE, 4/7/1956, 4/29/1961, 5/24/1961, 8/10/1972; FP, 12/25/1851; and MP, 12/11/1862.

3.Tyler, “Early Days in Franklin,” 22.

4.USFC 1850, Franklin, Franklin County.

5.Baumann, “Goldsmith,” 110–12, and Teresa R. Eshelman, “Goldsmith’s Continued,” in They Told Me So . . . , vol. 2, August 1987; “Redemption Sale of 1859,” Franklin County, Township 9, Old Military Tract, Lots 36 & 37; Township 10, Lots 99 & 100; and affidavits of Thomas Goldsmith and Simon Stickney, 6/30/1864, box 12, paper 41, CTSR (BO847).

6.James Folts, “Records Relating to Comptroller’s Sales of Non-Resident Lands for Unpaid Taxes, 1786–1955,” appraisal, n.d., NYSA.

7.Affidavit, Isaac Lyon Jr., CTSR (BO847).

8.“Redemptions—Sale of 1850,” affidavits regarding Lot 282, Township 10, Old Military Tract, Franklin, Franklin County, CTSR (BO847).

9.“Redemptions—Sale of 1859” and “Redemptions—Comptroller’s & Co. Treasurers Sales of 1853,” CTSR (BO847); affidavits, J. J. Alexander and B. F. Lamson, 9/4/1863, defending John Thomas’s right to his land on the east half of Lot 284, Township 10, Old Military Tract, Franklin, Franklin County. In the late fall of 1873, affidavits from nine white residents of Franklin, including Isaac, Freeman, and Richard Lyon, again confirmed Thomas’s longtime occupancy of his farm. USFC 1850, 1860, 1870, Franklin, Franklin County; affidavit, John and Mary Ann Thomas, 1/29/1874, defending Isaac Lyon Jr.’s occupancy of his land on Lot 282, SE, CTSR (BO847). Lyon Jr. also had a village home in Vermontville. His contested farm was a few miles away.

10.“In matter of Lot 87, To. 11, O. M. Tract, Affts for Cancellation of Tax Sales of 1853–,” Essex County, 6/5/1877, CTSR (BO847). In this year, affiants Judson C. Ware, a North Elba veteran of the Ninety-Sixth New York Infantry, Company K, and Joseph A. Titus, St. Armand town clerk and supervisor, confirmed the long-standing residency of grantee Avery Hazzard.

11.Town of Franklin Records, Adirondack Collection, SLFL. Local historian Shirley Morgan of Saranac Lake unearthed these important poll lists, and was good enough to share them with me. I am in her debt; NYSC, 1855, NE, Essex County. The citizenship category in this census confirmed a voter’s eligibility. In St. Armand, in 1855, the NYSC identifies Avery Hazzard as a voter. That same year, in the Washington County village he left behind, only three Black residents out of sixteen were permitted to vote. None of the five Black male residents of Westport or the seven Black men in Elizabethtown are described in this 1855 census as voters, though a Black Westporter owned property in excess of $250. In Ward 3 of Troy, home to two dozen African Americans, three exercised the franchise in 1855.

The Black Woods stood out. Perhaps the antislavery culture of its poll keepers had something to do with this. The three white North Elbans who served as poll keepers in North Elba in 1849 were Iddo Osgood, the abolitionist who invited two Black land agents to move to his young hamlet, the farmer Timothy Nash whose extended family did business with James Henderson, and Robert Scott, who was putting up a Black grantee in his home. See “Laws Reached by the Board of Supervisors at Their Annual Meeting of 1849,” ECR, 2/23/1850. By 1855, Iddo Osgood’s son, Dillon, had taken over as North Elba’s census enumerator and election manager.

12.Sylvester, Historical Sketches, 139–40; Bernstein, Sticks, 65.

13.Calarco, Underground Railroad, 41, 42; ECR, 11/14/1846. On responses to the North Elba election after Brown’s hanging and burial, see Daily Citizen and News (Lowell, MA), 11/20/1860; Providence Evening Press, 4/5/1860; Alexandria (VA) Gazette, 3/26/1860; and New Albany (IN) Daily Ledger, 3/24/1860. If Democrats rejoiced, Republicans were outraged. John Thompson (of the abolitionist North Elba clan that sent two sons to Harpers Ferry) blamed the election of the Democrat Milote Baker, lumberman, on “intoxicating drinks, bullyism, and border-ruffianism,” and claimed that “outsiders from lumber jobs turned the scale against us, being armed with slugshots, which were exhibited and flourished with threatening aspect.” “Town Elections,” NS, 3/15/1860, and EP, 3/24/1860.

14.“Shooting in the Adirondacks,” 585.

15.See chap. 9 on Charles Dickens’s unnamed stringer and Warren Morehouse.

16.USFC 1850, 1860, Franklin, Franklin County.

17.Hardy, “Iron Age Community,” 51–52. Map, “Settlements Founded And/Or Largely Nurtured by the Iron Industry, 1846–1850.” Source: John Moravek, “Iron Industry,” fig. 15. 91–90; Seaver, Historical Sketches, 361; Tyler, “Early Days in Franklin.”

18.John Thomas to GS, Bloomingdale, Essex County, 8/26/1872, Cotter Collection, Special Collections, Feinberg Library, SUNY Plattsburgh. See chaps. 1 and 17 for more about this story. Family history records, Notre Dame Church, Malone, NY.

19.Seaver, Historical Sketches, 644–45.

20.Calarco, Underground Railroad, 158. Calarco notes that the turnout in Malone for abolition speakers in 1856 was sparse, and that town churches declined to host them, PR, 11/14/1846. In 1846, Franklin County gave a 225-vote majority to the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Silas Wright. The Republican, John Young, won Essex County with a 650-vote majority. L. King to GS, 11/1/1850.

21.“Bloomingdale,” ECR, 10/15/1871; Jacoby, Crimes against Nature, chap. 3; “Our Mines and Our Forests,” EP, 3/14/1854; Hardy, “Iron Age Community,” 89–91.

22.Town records, NE, 1851, and MacKenzie, Plains of Abraham, 144.

23.USFC 1850, Essex County. When he left North Elba, Josiah Hasbrook Sr. moved to New York City, Connecticut, and the village of Sag Harbor on Long Island. Susan Hasbrook joined another Smith grantee, the Louisianian Lewis Pierce, and they, too, lived briefly in Manhattan. (See chapters 6 and 9). Simeon, Josiah Jr., and Harriette Hasbrook lingered in North Elba when their parents moved away, and lived with neighbors, white and Black. On Silas Hicks, see JMS to GS, 3/37/1848; GSLB, 59; USFC 1850, 1860, 1870, Elizabethtown, Essex County, NY; and NYSC 1855, 1865; GSLB, 26; USFC 1850, 1860, 1870; and NYSC 1855, Elizabethtown, Essex County. On Harriet Hicks, see “Misc. Papers,” ECCO.

24.JB to Ruth Brown Thompson, Akron, OH, 8/10/1852. Sanborn, Life and Letters, 152; NYSC 1855, 1865; USFC 1860, NE, Essex County. In 1850, forty-four-year-old Charles Willard lived with Charlotte Willard, twenty-six. Charlotte died a few years later. In 1855, Willard joined the abolitionist household of Henry and Ruth Brown Thompson. By 1860, he was living in the home of a grantee’s widow, Jane Craig. The substance of this interracial relationship is unclear. Willard was head of household in the census, but the cabin was Craig’s. Sometime after 1865, Craig migrated to her sister’s farm near Saratoga, and the aging Englishman went to Put-in-Bay, Ohio, perhaps at the urging of his former employers, Henry and Ruth Thompson, who had settled there and were cultivating grapes.

25.Jay’s antislavery zealot, Jesse Tobey, was on Reverend Loguen’s list of white Adirondack abolitionists whom Loguen judged trustworthy. Ruth Thompson recalls Cyrus Thomas in North Elba in Sanborn, Life and Letters, 100, 132; Lafayette Mason, NYSC 185, Elizabethtown, NY; George W. Bell, GSLB, 79, and NYSC 1855, Willsboro, NY.

26.For details of the Merrills’ inn and Jerry Merrill’s skills and reputation, see Porter, Lem Merrill, 10–11.

27.“Franklin County Land,” IC, 7/25/1849. The preface to Merrill’s letter was written by Impartial Citizen editor Samuel Ringgold Ward, Liberty Party zealot and one of Smith’s agents. Another agent, Jermain Loguen, had appealed to Merrill for this report on March 20, 1849, and Merrill got the letter ten days later. On April 2 he answered Loguen, but not until July 25 would the Citizen publish Merrill’s note. This was almost half a year after it was solicited—well past the spring moving season. Delays like this beleaguered the progress of the giveaway from its inception.

28.Teresa R. Eshelman, “Beginnings of Merrillsville,” in They Told Me So . . . , vol. 2, 1987.

29.John Brigham to GS, Keeseville, 4/10/1856.

30.“Died,” MP, 5/10/1895.

31.“Jacob Lane and Wife Caroline of Troy New York, Plaintiff First Part to Loring Ellis and John Brigham of Clintonville, NY, Plaintiff Second Part, for $660 … , ” Book 00, p. 539, ECCO.

32.John Brigham to GS, 4/10/1856.

33.In 1859, Brigham and Caleb Calkins paid fifty dollars to the Poughkeepsie grantee William Vanderbilt and his wife for fifty acres of gift land, and twenty dollars for the lot of the Fishkill grantee Robert Williams. Index of Deeds, Franklin County, Book 30, FCA.

34.After 1846, a new voting bloc of naturalized immigrants in Essex, Franklin, and Clinton Counties drove “the sharpest proslavery declines in the state.” Field, Politics of Race, 134.

35.Marjorie Lansing Porter reported the use of a racial epithet to describe the Smith grantees. Porter, Lem Merrill, 15.

36.Smith grantees are buried in many Adirondack cemeteries. Eppes and Appo family members are in the North Elba Cemetery in Lake Placid. In the Union Cemetery in Vermontville are Morehouses, Thomases, and Murrays. The Hazzard clan favored the Brookside Cemetery in Bloomingdale (see Svenson, “Brookside”). The Wortses and Fraziers rest in the Hillside Cemetery in Westport. Joseph and Adeline James are buried in the Riverside Cemetery in Wadhams, and in the county poorhouse cemetery in Whallonsburg are Harriet Hicks and a Willsboro grantee, George W. Bell. In none of these burial grounds is racial identity suggested, except regarding military service. The headstones of Stephen Warren Morehouse (Union Cemetery) and Charles Henry Hazzard (Brookside) honor their service in the US Colored Troops in the Civil War.

12. If You Only Knew How Poor I Am

Chapter epigraph from the Gerrit Smith Papers.

1.NYT, 8/29/1856 and 9/7/1856, quoted in Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist, 195.

2.ECR, 9/8/1854; USFC, 1850, St. Armand, Essex County; “Movements in Favor of Freedom,” FG, 6/10/1854.

3.Michael Fellman, Inside War: The Guerrilla Conflict in Missouri during the American Civil War (Oxford University Press, 1989), 15–19. For a proslavery perspective on the Emigrant Aid Company, see Johnson, “Emigrant Aid Company.”

4.W. O. Lynch, “Population Movements in Relation to the Struggle for Kansas,” Studies in American History (1926): 381–404, cited in Harlow, “Kansas Aid Movement,” 25, 25n.

5.Chestina Bowker Allen, “Journey from Massachusetts to Kansas,” unpublished manuscript, 1854–58, Kansas Historical Society, https://www.kshs.org/archives/6839; George O. Willard to (Boston) Journal, 1/7/1855, quoted in Kansas Territorial Clippings, 1:53–55, cited in Barry, “Emigrant Aid Parties.”

6.Kansas Land Trust Company, advertisement, n.d., Kansas Memory (Kansas Historical Society), accessed 2/15/2023, https://www.kansasmemory.org/item/90770/page/1; Lemuel Knapp, “Testimony of Lemuel Knapp,” recorded by National Kansas Committee, 1/5/1857, Kansas Memory, https://www.kansasmemory.org/item/90631; Lemuel Knapp, “Experiences of Lemuel Knapp,” 1/5/1857, in Adams, Martin, and Connelley, Transactions, six pages. Thaddeus Hyatt Collection, Kansas Historical Society.

7.“Testimony of Lemuel Knapp.”

8.“Experiences of Lemuel Knapp”; USFC 1870, Grant, Riley County, KS.

9.ECR, 9/8/1854.

10.USFC 1850, St. Armand, Essex County; “Board of Supervisors Report, St. Armand,” ECR, 12/16/1848; Lemuel Knapp to GS, St. Armand, 4/2/1860; LK to GS, 2/26/1850; “Peterboro,” EP, 2/18/1892; LK to GS, 4/10/1848.

11.LK to Caleb Calkins, 2/26/1850.

12.“Gerrit Smith,” ECR, 10/10/1846, and “Land for the Landless,” ECR, 5/28/1849; GS, “To the Persons Who Derive Title from Myself or My Late Father to Land in Charlotte River and Byrne’s Tracts, in the Counties of Delaware, Otsego, and Schoharie,” circular, 5/24/1844; Godine, “Abolitionist and the Land Reformer.”

13.Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men, 102–4; Harlow, Gerrit Smith, 31–33.

14.Harlow, Gerrit Smith, 242; Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men, 138.

15.McKivigan and McKivigan, “ ‘He Stands Like Jupiter.’ ” Smith’s unpublished fourteen-page manuscript was not dated, but internal references suggest he wrote it in 1856 in Saratoga Springs, NY.

16.Chester Converse to GS, Schroon, 4/8/1847; William Griffing to GS, 3/15/1847. The spelling and punctuation in these appeals have been corrected.

17.Andrew Micklejean to GS, Fulton, 1/26/1846; Patrick Rine to GS, Rome, 12/22/1845; Merrit Fowler to GS, Butler, 5/1/1847.

18.Alden Speer to GS, Moriah, 4/22/1850.

19.Mason Whiting, Esq., to GS, Binghamton, 8/26/1845; GS to Whiting, Peterboro, 8/30/1845.

20.S. Huntington to GS, Franklin, n.d.; Sherburn brothers to GS, Keene, 3/9/1850; W. S. Sherwood to GS, Glens Falls, 6/14/1848; Joseph [illeg.] and Josephus Marshall to GS, Pottersville, 12/23/1847; W. F. Whipple to GS and Caleb Calkins, Johnsburg, 2/8/1848; Phineas Norton to Calkins, Keene, 4/23/1850; John Brown (not the abolitionist) to GS, Johnsburg, 2/14/1846; J. H. Van [illeg.] to GS, Pottersville, 2/15/1847; S. Huntington to GS, Franklin, 3/19/1847.

21.GS, “To the Persons Who Derive Title”; GS to TW, CBR, and JMS, 10/1/1846.

22.GS, circular, Peterboro, 5/1/1849; Daniel Cady to GS, 6/13/1849, quoted in Harlow, Gerrit Smith, 250. The pragmatic Cady bluntly doubted “whether a favor can be done to a poor man, black or white, by tempting him to emigrate to settle upon your northern lands. A poor man who has energy and enterprise enough to settle upon those lands and clear up a farm had better go west—a poor man without energy had better keep out of the northern lands … [and] the expense of removing from a southern county to a northern part of the state will equal the value of 50 acres of land.”

23.Jabez Parkhurst, Henry B. Smith, and Sidney Lawrence, all Smith- appointed Franklin County appraisers of worthy white recipients for Smith’s land in 1849, lived at an arduous remove from the “South Towns” (Franklin, Brighton, Harrietstown, Duane), and their choices reflected their preference for giftees who were easier for them to reach. In all of Franklin County, no white person from the southern townships got free land, LK to GS, St. Armand, 4/2/1850. St. Armand’s Lemuel Knapp had much in common with his Kansas-bound neighbor, John Brown. Both men were Yankee homesteaders, friends of Gerrit Smith, small-time speculators who lost more money than they could spare, members of the New England Emigrant Aid Company, and helpers to the Black grantees. But what divided them bears noting too. When Brown left the Adirondacks in 1854, his monied friends made sure his Adirondack home stayed his. Knapp had no rich backers, and when he left, he left for good. “Gerrit Smith,” SL, 9/11/1847; Harlow, Gerrit Smith, 239.

24.GSLB, 26. Born in 1822 to William Mason and Diana Robinson Mason in the Clinton County mining hamlet of Ellenburgh, Lafayette Mason was a collier before he took up farming. Contract, 1/23/1860, Box R-9, “Misc. Papers,” ECCO. The price of this lot, No. 24 in Roaring Brook Tract, was $702. New York Town Clerk’s Register, NYSA.

25.From Civil War Draft Registration Records and Civil War Muster Roll Abstracts, NYSA: Lafayette Mason enlisted on 12/21/1863, in Elizabethtown, NY, for Company G, 118th Infantry. In a hospital in Albany, he was transferred to the Ninety-Sixth Regiment in 1865, and honorably discharged because of disabilities. His son Lewis enlisted in Brooklyn on 12/10/1863 with the Twentieth US Colored Infantry for three years. See also LM military pension; CM widow’s pension; and MCM widow’s pension.

26.“Notice of Motion and of Judgment/Foreclosure,” 7/27/1869, Banker Box Q-37, ECCO.

27.“Notice of Motion and of Judgment/Foreclosure”; USFC 1870, Vernon Springs, IA; MCM widow’s pension; Iowa affidavits, George W. Combs, 12/22/1892, and Job W. Hood, 12/27/1892, and “Homestead Proof,” Bureau of Land Management, Federal Land Office Records, US Department of the Interior, NARA; LM military pension; CM widow’s pension; MCM widow’s pension; affidavit, M[…] Brown, Michigan, 7/31/1888.

28.“Board of Supervisors—2nd Session,” ECR, 12/15/1849.

29.Jermain Wesley Loguen to JMS, NS, 3/24/1848; Watson, General View, 78, and Watson, Military and Civil History, 217–18. Don James McLaughlin explores the cultural history of the term “Negrophobia” in “The Anti-slavery Roots of Today’s ‘-Phobia’ Obsession,” New Republic, 1/29/2016; “North Country,” in Eisenstadt, Encyclopedia of New York State, 1119; Terrie, Contested Terrain, 16.

30.North Country,” Encyclopedia of New York State, 1119; Terrie, Contested Terrain, Ch. 1, “A Broken, Impracticable Tract”; Hardy, “The Iron Age Community of the J.&J. Rogers Company,” 99.

31.“Summons & Warrants,” Business and Land Files, GSP. Smith sued Wait Lewis on 1/25/1853, Monroe Hall on 3/11/1852, and Samuel Warner on 3/27/1850. In the Warner (Cram) Cemetery near Crown Point, Warner’s tombstone reads, “A Revolutionary Soldier and a Friend of the Slave.” AP, 10/29/1845; FDP, 10/23/1851 and 8/12/1853; “Henry Clay and Slavery,” Samuel Warren [sic] to FD, FDP, 5/6/1852.

32.GS, journal entry, 11/30/1843, Gerrit Smith Letter Book L, 1848–1871, GSP; SW to GS, Crown Point, 4/20/1850. Smith characterized land monopoly as slavery in speeches at Syracuse, 1/20/1848, Troy, 4/14/1851, Buffalo, 9/17/1851, and Washington, DC, 2/21/1854.

33.GS to SW, Peterboro, 4/24/1850; “Moses Clough,” in Nathaniel B. Sylvester, History of Rensselaer Co., New York (Everts & Peck, 1880), 132.

34.“Gerrit Smith’s Tour,” AP, 6/25/1845, and JMS to GS, 2/6/1850; Marjorie Lansing Porter, “Earlier Day Essex and Clinton County Newspapers,” ECR, 7/6/1951; “The Late Wendell Lansing,” PS, 5/27/1887; “Wendell Lansing,” in Hurd, Clinton and Franklin Counties, 130–33; ECR, 3/21/1924.

35.ECR, 10/16/1844; “The Offices,” ECR, 7/26/1846; ECR, 4/11/1846, from the Troy Whig; Mr. Editor—:,” Essex County Times, 10/31/1844; Marjorie Lansing Porter, “Earlier Day Essex and Clinton County Newspapers,” ECR, 5/25/1951, 6/8/1951, 6/15/1951, and 7/6/1951; “The Late Wendell Lansing” and “Wendell Lansing,” in Hurd, Clinton and Franklin Counties; “A Distinction to Be Remembered,” ECR, 9/2/1854. Abolitionists would be blamed by Whigs like Tarbell not only for Polk’s victory, but for the war with Mexico, the Texas land grab, and the ascension of Southern racists to federal positions. In the Civil War, Tarbell had a raucous career as a brevet brigadier general (only President Lincoln’s intervention reversed his court martial for judging another officer “a Damned fool and Illiterate Whelp”). During Reconstruction, Tarbell took charge of a plantation in Mississippi and served locally as town marshal and circuit judge—and here his white rage flared. He opined on Black “depravity … universal thieving and lying,” declared “Negro suffrage … a measure of the most stupendous wildness and humbug of this or any other age,” and dismissed Black soldiery as “a poor burlesque.” Perhaps signaling his old contempt for Smith and his initiative, he offered, “Give the blacks the best State in the Union, with teams, seed, grain, farming tools, a year’s supply of all things, and five hundred dollars in money each, and they would starve to death the second year, and relapse into barbarism in half a century.” Thomas P. Lowry, Curmudgeons, Drunkards, and Outright Fools, Court Martial of Civil War Union Colonels (Lincoln, 1997), 213–18; “Northern Views of the Qualification of Negroes to Vote,” Fayetteville Observer, 11/29/1866; ECR, 9/26/1872, 10/2/1872, and 10/24/1872.

36.While not dominant, the names of French Canadians and Irish are conspicuous in the “Summonses and Warrants” that Gerrit Smith dispatched to his Adirondack contract farmers at midcentury. (See reels 24 and 74, GSP.)

13. Nothing Would Be More Encouraging to Me

1.“Receipts,” FDP, 11/2/1853; ECR, 8/13/1853. In a review of Northup’s book, the Essex County Republican stressed the valor of Northup’s white rescuer, Henry Northrop. In contrast, Frederick Douglass’ Paper emphasized the kidnapped Northup’s twelve-year ordeal and the brutality of slavery itself. ECR, 11/26/1853.

2.Quarles, Black Abolitionists, 187–90; Ripley et al., Black Abolitionist Papers, 4:153, 6n; William J. Watkins to FD, “Are We Ready for the Conflict?,” FDP, 2/9/1855.

3.Watkins to FD, “Are We Ready?”

4.Watkins to FD, “Are We Ready?”; William Watkins to GS, 9/27/1858. “Like the great majority of Americans, white or Black, Douglass wanted his vote to count for something more than the affirmation of an abstract principle, however noble,” observes Quarles in Black Abolitionists, 188.

5.“1856 presidential election: Revision History,” Wikipedia, last edited 2/3/2023. Ripley et al., Black Abolitionist Papers, 4:401n. Perkal, “American Abolition Society,” provides a sharp analysis of Gerrit Smith’s failed bid for the governorship in 1858.

6.Perkal, “American Abolition Society,” 63. Smith’s campaign newssheets in 1858 were The Hour and the Man (Albany), the State Leaguer (Syracuse), and the Gerrit Smith Banner (New York City). Perkal, “American Abolition Society,” 64. In 1858, the Republican incumbent and victor was Edwin D. Morgan. Amasa J. Parker stood for the Democrats.

7.Resolution No. 7, from the “Suffrage Convention of the Colored Citizens of New York, Troy, Sept. 14, 1858,” Liberator, 10/1/1858, Colored Conventions Project Digital Records, accessed 1/4/2023, https://omeka.coloredconventions.org/items/show/239; Bell, “Some Reform Interests”; Quarles, Black Abolitionists, 187–88; “Supporting the New Republican Party, 1858,” in Aptheker, Documentary History, 410–11.

8.An issue of Voice of the People (no. 5, 1858) is in the library of the New-York Historical Society, NYC.

9.“Wm. J. Watkins,” Troy Daily Times, 10/12/1858 (and in Voice of the People, no. 5, 1858); HHG and James Duffin to GS, 9/16/1858; Ripley et al., Black Abolitionist Papers, 4:398–99 (“Watkins, poor Watkins, went over to the enemy, and is employed as their agent to stump the State for the Republicans”); Troy Daily Times, 10/12/1858.

10.William J. Watkins to GS, 9/27/1858; Ripley et al., Black Abolitionist Papers, 4:399–400.

11.Harlow, Gerrit Smith, 380.

12.Wm J. Hodge [sic] to Stephen Myers, Voice of the People, no. 5, 1858. Hodges’s letter is dated 10/25/1858. The Democratic Brooklyn Eagle doted on Hodges’s speeches with a gleeful condescension apparently due a Black minister who delivered sermons “in the classics, then in the French, and so on to the Timbuctoo dialect and the ‘unknown tongue.’ ” See BDE, 11/26/1853, 12/16/1854, 12/28/1854, 6/8/1855, 9/24/1856, 8/2/1858, 9/29/1858, 12/27/1859, 1/5/1860, 6/6/1860, 8/2/1860, 8/3/1860, and 8/23/1860.

13.S. R. Scottron Jr. to Myers, Voice of the People, no. 5, 1858; Myers, “One Word More,” Voice of the People, no. 5, 1858. The date of Scottron’s letter, 10/25/1858, suggests that Myers cranked out the final issue of his campaign sheet just before the November 2 election. Scottron’s manifold accomplishments as an activist, inventor, churchman, and Civil War soldier are noted in Willard Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880–1920 (Indiana University, 1990), 224–25, 305; and Taylor, Black Churches of Brooklyn, 18.

14.Smith’s disdain for Myers was evident in a letter to Henry Garnet in June 1843. About Myers’s Whig-favored Albany paper, the Northern Star and Colored Farmer, Smith griped, “Were this paper true to the holy cause of liberty its proslavery patrons would shrink from it, as from a snake.” GS to HHG, Peterboro, 6/10/1843; Samuel Scottron, GSLB, 61. At a meeting of Black voters in Williamsburgh in late September 1858, “speeches were delivered by Wm. H. Hodges and Willis A. Hodges, both of whom denounced Gerrit Smith and the abolitionists generally, and advised colored voters to support the Republican ticket.” “The Colored Voters,” BDE, 9/29/1858.

15.Editorial, New-York Tribune, 8/3/1857.

16.“Letter from Gerrit Smith,” 8/10/1857. In the weeks after Smith’s disavowal of his land distribution scheme in the Tribune, papers picked it up in Wisconsin, Ohio, Illinois, Massachusetts, western New York, and Canada.

17.“Gerrit Smith and His Colored Friends,” NYT, 10/7/1858.

18.“1858 New York State Election,” Wikipedia, last edited 4/30/2022, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1858_New_York_state_election.

19.Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist, 104, 111; JB to James Redpath, quoted in Redpath, Public Life, 206; Villard, John Brown, 55; JB to “Wife & Children every one,” St. Catherine, Canada West, 4/6/1858, JB/BBS Coll./WVMP.

20.JB to “Wife & Children every one,” 4/6/1858, JB/BBS Coll./WVMP; JB to “Wife & children every one,” 5/1/1858. Beinecke Library Collection, Yale University, New Haven, CT.

21.“How John Brown Came—Reasons Which Brought Him to This State,” PS, 10/31/1902; Potsdam Commercial Advertiser, 11/5/02; and other papers. In Thomas Higginson’s essay about Brown, “His Family at North Elba” (Webb, Life and Letters, 224), the same point is made; Charles Dudley Warner, Hartford Press, 11/24/1866.

22.Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist, 193–96; “Pottawatomie Creek, Jan. 17th,” EP, 3/27/1857.

23.Untitled typescript about Lyman Eppes by the Adirondack historian and folklorist Marjorie Lansing Porter, Special Collections, Feinberg Library, SUNY Plattsburgh. Porter interviewed Epps Jr. in 1939, a few years before he died. In her column, “Neighbors across the Lake” (Burlington Free Press, 7/28/1939), she wrote, “When visiting his North Elba home for the last time, he [John Brown] urged Lyman Epps Sr. to go with him on his departure. Mrs. Epps objected, but added that if $200 could be raised so that she could take the entire family back to New York, her former home, she might change her mind.” Sanborn, Life and Letters, 497–98; JB to John Brown Jr., West Newton, MA, 4/15/1857, JB/BBS Coll./WVMP; JB to F. B. Sanborn, 5/15/1857, Peterboro, JB/BBS Coll./WVMP.

24.“Races at Lake Placid,” ECR, 1/23/1896. Lyman Epps (son of the grantee) had poor luck that day. His horse, Prince E., which ran against three others in four races, placed fourth in every one.

25.Wells, “Lake Placid Childhood”; MacKenzie, Plains of Abraham, 133–34; and typescript on Lyman Eppes by Marjorie Lansing Porter. “Music was [the] most important thing in their lives. They formed a family singing group: Lyman Sr., tenor, Mrs. Eppes and Amelia, soprano; Albert and Lyman, Bass, and Evaline, also. They sang at weddings, funerals, kitchen parties, church affairs, and Sunday school.” MacKenzie, Plains of Abraham, 134–35; Godine, “Noteworthy Mr. Appo.”

26.JB to John Brown Jr., Akron, OH, 8/21/1854, quoted in Ruchames, John Brown Reader, 86; Villard, John Brown, 73; JB to GS, 6/20/1849, JB/BBS Coll./WVMP; “Want Memorial to John Brown,” Watertown Daily Times, 8/30/1915; Sanborn, Life and Letters, 101; Dana, “How We Met John Brown”; Ruth Thompson to Franklin B. Sanborn, in Sanborn, Life and Letters, 99–101; JB to John, Jason, Frederick, and Daughters, Springfield, MA, 12/4/1850, quoted in Ruchames, John Brown, 81; Ruth Thompson to Wealthy Brown, NE, 4/16/1850, JBjrKS; Ruth Thompson to John Brown Jr., NE, 8/13/1851, JBjrKS; JB to WH, Springfield, MA, 1/22/1849, quoted in Villard, John Brown, 72–73; Ruth Brown to Mary Brown, 9/7/1849, JBjrKS; JB to Ruth Thompson, 8/10/1852, quoted in Sanborn, Life and Letters, 152; Ruth Thompson to John Brown Jr., NE, 8/13/1851, JBjrKS; Villard, John Brown, 72; Ruth Brown to Wealthy Brown, NE, 3/10/1850, JBjrKS.

27.Brendan Mills, site manager of the John Brown Farm, bases this estimate on his review of the Brown family’s correspondence. Conversations with the author, 2015. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, quoted in Redpath, Public Life, 68.

28.JB to Ruth Brown Thompson, Akron, 8/10/1852, quoted in Sanborn, Life and Letters, 152; Ruth Thompson to Sanborn, quoted in Sanborn, Life and Letters, 104; JB to Mary Brown, Springfield, MA, 11/28/1850, quoted in Ruchames, John Brown, 79–80; JB to Ellen Brown, Boston, 5/13/1859, in Ruchames, John Brown, 123.

29.Ruth Thompson to John Brown Jr., 5/30/1854, JBJr.; Henry and Ruth Thompson to Wealthy Brown and John Brown Jr., 5/7/1854, JBJr.; Henry Thompson to John Brown Jr., 8/15/1852, JBJr.

30.Abraham Lincoln, “Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address,” 3/4/1865, Lincoln Memorial website, https://www.nps.gov/linc/learn/historyculture/lincoln-second-inaugural.htm.

31.Oates, To Purge This Land, 75–77.

32.JB to Brown family, 9/30/1854, Akron, OH, quoted in Ruchames, John Brown, 94–95.

33.Villard, John Brown, 714; Ruchames, John Brown Reader, 87; Boyer, Legend of John Brown, 527.

34.JB to Brown family, 9/30/1854, quoted in Ruchames, John Brown, 94; Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist, 121–28.

35.JB to Mary Ann Brown, Springfield, MA, 1/17/1851, quoted in Ruchames, John Brown, 83; John Brown, “Words of Advice,” resolution presented to the League of Gileadites, Springfield, MA, 1/15/1851, quoted in Ruchames, John Brown, 85; HHG, “An Address to the Slaves of the United States,” speech, National Convention of Colored Citizens, Buffalo, NY, 8/16/1843, Blackpast, 1/24/2007, https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/1843-henry-highland-garnet-address-slaves-united-states. Also see Henry Highland Garnet, Walker’s Appeal, with a Brief Sketch of His Life: And Also Garnet’s Address to the Slaves of the United States of America ( J. H. Tobitt, 1848), 89–96. John Brown helped underwrite the cost of this publication.

36.Bondi, August, from “With John Brown in Kansas.” Quoted in Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist, 189; JB to Mary Ann Brown, Springfield, MA, 1/17/1851, quoted in Ruchames, John Brown, 83; Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist, 270–71.

37.“Sambo’s Mistakes,” RH, 1847 or 1848, and published in Villard, John Brown, 659–61. No issue of the Ram’s Horn that ran this essay survives. The Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore has Brown’s handwritten copy; JB to George L. Stearns, 1/29/1859, Ruchames, John Brown: The Making of a Revolutionary, 163.

38.Katherine Mayo, “Brown in Hiding and in Jail,” New York Evening Post, 10/23/1909; Ruchames, John Brown, 248.

39.Boyer, Legend of John Brown, 459; NYSC 1855, NE, Essex County. The 1855 New York census reported two Black settlers (Isaac Craig and Thomas Brown) in their fifties, one twenty-year-old ( John Vinson), four men in their thirties (Thomas Jefferson, William Carasaw, Josiah Hasbrook, Silas Frazier), five in their forties (Leonard Worts, Lewis Pierce, Lyman Eppes, Henry Dixon [Dickson], and Samuel Jefferson), and three sixteen-year-old boys (Simeon Hasbrook, Charles Worts, and William Jefferson). The Hazzards of St. Armand (by 1855 well ensconced), had three young men at home ages twenty to twenty-seven: Leonard, George, and Charles Henry. Alex, not on hand for this census, was of age to fight as well. And that year in Franklin, five Black males between seventeen and forty-seven were in the census, too.

40.Higginson, “His Family at North Elba.”

41.Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist, 66.

42.Obituary, Adaline Boynton, MF, n.d., 1902; “From Article in the Springfield Union,” n.d., in “John Brown’s Body,” typescript, Vergennes Town Historian’s Office, Vergennes, VT; Oates, To Purge This Land, 241; Brewster, “John Brown of North Elba,” New York History, 10/1952; Villard, John Brown, 413.

43.Gordon Sherman to Kristin Gibbins, 8/2/1984, New York State Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation; “Thomas H. Peacock Expires; Recalled John Brown Vividly,” AR-EP, 6/13/1942; MacKenzie, Plains of Abraham, 113–17.

44.Wardner, “Footprints on Adirondack Trails,” chap. 13, p. 2; ibid., chap. 10, p. 5.

45.Wardner, “Footprints on Adirondack Trails,” chap. 13, p. 2.

46.Laughlin-Schultz, Tie That Bound Us, 52–53; Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist, 180–81, 293–95.

47.William Phillips, “Special Correspondent of the New York Tribune,” in Conquest of Kansas, 332–42; Peterson, John Brown, 6–9.

48.Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist, 277, 279. On the Pottawatomie massacre, see Oates, To Purge This Land, 133–37; and Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist, 170–74. On the response to the massacre in the press, see ibid., 174–78. For all of Eppes’s and other Black men’s disinclination to join Brown in the field, I know of nothing that indicates any lessening of their respect or affection for John Brown or his family. See Hasbrook’s obituary in the Springfield Daily Republican, 7/28/1915 (“Death of Aged Negro—Was Friend of John Brown”); MacKenzie, Plains of Abraham, 134.

49.Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist, 114.

50.JMS to FD, 5/4/1854, published in Ripley et al., Black Abolitionist Papers, 4:220.

51.“Lyman E. Epps, Sr.,” from “Essex County, N.Y. Newspaper, March, 1897,” in W. E. Connelley, John Brown Scrapbook, JB/BBS Coll./WVMP; “The Late Elijah Simonds,” EP, 7/21/1916; LPN, 6/14/1940; P. F. Schofield to H. S. Harper, 11/29/1918, SLFL; Brumley, Guides of the Adirondacks, 118; “Lyman E. Epps, Sr.”; “Negro with a History Dead, Lyman Epps Was Taken to Elba, N.Y. by John Brown,” NYT, 3/27/1897.

14. To Arms! The Black Woods at War

1.“Death of an Aged Negro,” Springfield Daily Republican, 7/28/1915; Ed Cotter to BBS, 5/23/1953, Edwin Cotter Collection, SUNY Plattsburgh.

2.Quarles, Negro in the Civil War, 26–29.

3.For details of Levi Hazzard’s military service, see Revolutionary War Pension Applications, Washington County Archives, Fort Edward, NY.

4.Quarles, Negro in the Civil War, 30, and McPherson, Negro’s Civil War, 163–66; campaign badge, 1868, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, NYPL, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/62a9d0e6-4fc9-dbce-e040-e00a18064a66.

5.On Willis Hodges in the war, see Richard Lowe, “Willis Augustus Hodges,” in Charles W. Calhoun, ed., The Human Tradition in America from the Colonial Era through Reconstruction (SR Books, 2002), 302; On the war service of the sons of the grantees Thomas and Samuel Jefferson, see “Jefferson, Garrett,” New York, Civil War Muster Roll Abstracts, http://www.archives.nysed.gov/research/res_tips_004_civilwarabstracts.shtml; “Political Paragraphs,” Troy Daily Times, 8/24/1880, 11/10/1888, 8/30/1892, and 7/22/1901; and William H. Chenery, The Fourteenth Regiment Rhode Island Heavy Artillery Colored, 1861–1865 (Providence, 1898), 61, 216. When the war broke out years after their return to Troy, Thomas Jefferson’s son Garrett enlisted with the Thirty-First New York Colored Volunteers and was made sergeant. Injured at Petersburg, Virginia, he lost his arm, but on his return to Troy he worked for decades as a teamster, campaigned for the Republicans, and promoted his city’s chapter of the Grand Army of the Republic, a fraternal organization of Union veterans. His brother Samuel, much less fortunate, served with the Fourteenth Regiment, Rhode Island, Colored, Heavy Artillery. In Plaquemine, Louisiana, he and his two comrades were ambushed by Texas Rangers and stripped, shot, and left unburied where they fell.

6.William Appo, NE, Essex County, New York, U.S., Registers of Officers and Enlisted Men Mustered into Federal Service, 1861–1865, 6 vols. (NY Bureau of Military Statistics, 1865), NYSA, https://digitalcollections.archives.nysed.gov/index.php/Detail/collections/36, https://ancestry.com.

7.“30th Infantry Regiment,” in Phisterer, New York, New York State Military Museum and Veterans Research Center, Saratoga Springs, NY, 2078–87, https://archive.org/details/phisterernewyork03fredrich/page/2078/mode/2up; Sam Smith, “Moments in Time: The Battle of Second Manassas—a Battle in Five Parts,” American Battlefield Trust, accessed 10/20/2022, https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/moments-time-battle-second-manassas-battle-five-parts.

8.Mary MacKenzie, town and village historian, Lake Placid and North Elba, to Victor Roy, commander, American Legion, Lake Placid, 5/22/2001, and to Charles Thomas, Lake Placid, 5/31/2001, Mary MacKenzie Collection, LPPL.

9.Greg Furness, email to the author, 11/11/2022.

10.Seraile, New York’s Black Regiments, 18–25; Gero, Black Soldiers, 23–24, 29–40.

11.USFC 1850, Franklin, Franklin County; Warren Morehouse, USCT Military Service Records, “Declaration of Recruit,” NARA; Matthews, Freedom Knows No Color, 56; William Sidney Mount, The Power of Music, 1846, oil on canvas, Cleveland Museum of Art, https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1991.110.

12.“Black Soldiers in the U.S. Military during the Civil War,” NARA, last reviewed 9/1/2017, https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/blacks-civil-war#:~:text=By%20the%20, educator resource; Seraile, New York’s Black Regiments, 59–64; Rosters of the New York Infantry Regiments during the Civil War, New York State Military Museum and Veterans Research Center, https://museum.dmna.ny.gov/unit-history/conflict/us-civil-war-1861-1865/rosters-new-york-volunteers-during-civil-war/rosters-new-york-infantry-regiments-during-civil-war.

13.J. Marsh to GS, NYC, 7/21/1863; Pasternak, Rise Now and Fly, 81; Bob Davern, “Surgeon and Abolitionist James McCune Smith: An African American Pioneer,” Readex Blog, 4/17/2012, https://www.readex.com/blog/surgeon-and-abolitionist-james-mccune-smith-african-american-pioneer; McGruder, “ ‘Fair and Open Field’ ”; Hodges, Root and Branch, 26.

14.“Lewis Henry Douglass,” Wikipedia, last edited 5/15/2022, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Henry_Douglass; Lears, Rebirth of a Nation, 14; FD, “Should the Negro Enlist in the Union Army?,” speech, DM, 7/6/1863.

15.“Robert Gould Shaw,” National Park Service, accessed 10/20/2022, https://www.nps.gov/people/robert-g-shaw.htm. Several of Private Morehouse’s Adirondack neighbors—Louisa Brady, John Thomas, Lewis Pierce, and Josiah and Susan Hasbrook—were once enslaved (and Morehouse would encounter more ex-slaves on his return to the Black Woods after the war). Bowditch, Life and Correspondence, 43–47.

16.Emilio, Brave Black Regiment, 255.

17.On Gerrit Smith’s stumping for the Union during the war, see chapter 1, note 37. Emilio, Brave Black Regiment, 166, 301; Egerton, Thunder at the Gates, 284; Mass. Fifty-Fourth Regimental Records, NARA; “In Memoriam, Asa P. Isham, MD,” Lancet-Clinic 107 (March 1912): 334; August V. Kautz, Customs of Service for Non-Commissioned Officers and Soldiers (Lippincott, 1864).

18.CHH military pension; U.S. Civil War Draft Registrations Records, 1863–1865, NY, Ancestry.com, accessed 1/7/2023, https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/1666/; Alexander Hazzard of St. Armand registered for army service on 7/1/1863.

19.EC widow’s pension; JH military pension; U.S. Civil War Draft Registrations Records, 1863–1865, NY; SH military pension; Whaling Crew List Database, New Bedford Whaling Museum, accessed 1/15/2023, https://www.whalingmuseum.org/online_exhibits/crewlist/search.php?term=simeon+hasbrook&by_name=on&by_vessel=on. Sanford Hasbrook, Josiah and Simeon’s younger brother, also joined the navy (Navy pension, 310710). Sanford was ship’s cook on the revenue cutter Cuyahoga. Like his brother Simeon, he stayed a seaman for years after the war. USFC 1870, Glastonbury, CT.

20.Private William Carasaw, NYCT, Carte-de-Visite, Cady Photo Gallery, Canal Street, NY, n.d., New York State Military Museum, Saratoga Springs; Seraile, New York’s Black Regiments, 24–27; JMS, introduction to Memorial Discourse by Henry Highland Garnet (Washington, DC, 2/12/1865), 57–58; Hunter, To Set the Captives Free, 204. McCune Smith survived the war, but congestive heart disease diminished his activity in these years, and he died in 1865. Stauffer, Works, xxviii.

21.Dyer, Compendium, 1727–28; EC widow’s pension. Carasaw’s military physician used the catch-all term “Southern fever” for a range of illnesses. What saddled Carasaw with lasting asthma and a weak heart may have been the long-term effects of malaria, yellow fever, typhoid fever, or influenza. CHH military pension; JH military pension.

22.JSH widow’s pension; ibid., and JSH, deposition for JH military pension; JH military pension; William Carasaw, affidavit for JH military pension; JH, CHH, and Eugene D. Chilson, affidavits for EC widow’s pension.

23.Egerton, Wars of Reconstruction, 98–101; contract between Jeremiah Miles and Rienzi Bennett, Beaufort, 4/23/1866, in JM military pension; Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction, 223–28; Foner, Reconstruction, 51–54; Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction 68; Egerton, Wars of Reconstruction, 116; White, Republic, 42–55; Egerton, Wars of Reconstruction, 117–18, 107–8, 112–13, 102–12, 126–27; Williamson, After Slavery, 80–81.

24.“A South Carolina Senator Murdered,” NYT, 10/19/1868; Archie Vernon Huff, “Political Assassination in South Carolina,” keynote address, 70th Annual Meeting of the South Caroliniana Society, Columbia, SC, 4/29/2006; and Foner, Reconstruction, 351, 548.

25.USFC 1850, Newburgh; NYSC 1855, NE, and MacKenzie, Plains of Abraham, 157–58; USFC 1860, Non-population Schedule, NE, Essex County; JF widow’s pension; MacKenzie, Plains of Abraham, 151.

26.JF widow’s pension; Civil War Pension Index: General Index to Pension Files, 1861–1934, NARA. In April 1874, the Bureau of Pensions granted Jane Frazier a widow’s pension of eight dollars a month. Her pension notes reveal that her late husband was a “Cabin Cook” on the gunboat and cargo ship Augusta Dinsmore from 1864 to 1865.

27.The circumstantial evidence that suggests this party’s roots in slavery was this: Louisa, James, and Samuel Brady, and Louisa’s father, Josiah Bunion, all were Marylanders (Bailey came from Delaware) and all born decades before Emancipation. Louisa’s 1894 obituary described her as a former slave, and anecdotal sources said her father had been enslaved as well. Her second husband, James Brady, could not name his parents when a Franklin town clerk interviewed him for the army (a response explainable by a childhood ruptured by enslavement). Further, New Jersey’s Salem County, where the Brady clan resided when they left Maryland, was a hub of Underground Railroad activity, bustling with Quaker abolitionists and laced with routes for fugitives heading north. See LB dependent mother’s pension; 1860 USFC, Franklin, Franklin County; USFC 1850, Mannington, Salem County, NJ; New York Town Clerk Registers of Men Who Served in the Civil War, Franklin, Franklin County; “Bloomingdale,” MP, 3/8/1894; Seaver, Historical Sketches, 644–45; Kelly Roncace, “Three Major Underground Railroad Routes Were in South Jersey,” South Jersey Times, 2/6/2011.

28.USFC 1850 and 1860 and NYSC 1855, Franklin, Franklin County. State and federal census records and tax records from midcentury and after reveal the residencies of the Thomases, Murrays, Morehouses, and Bradys, and the Bunion/Holland cabin. George Holland was a grantee from Westchester’s White Plains, whose gift land (never used) was in Township 3, Totten & Crossfield Patent, Hamilton County (GSLB, 109.) In Franklin County, Holland squatted.

29.JBr military pension, and “U.S., Civil War Soldier Records and Profiles, 1861–1865,” Ancestry.com, https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/1555/; LB dependent mother’s pension; Landon, History of the North Country, 1:441–42; USFC 1860, Franklin, Franklin County.

30.LB dependent mother’s pension; Lewis Paye, affidavit, LB pension, 4/29/1891; Samuel Brady to LB, LB pension file, n.d; New York State Town Clerks’ Registers, NYSA.

31.Matthews, Freedom Knows No Color, 55; Seraile, New York’s Black Regiments, 59–60, 34; James McCune Smith, “Sketch of the Life and Labors of Rev. Henry Highland Garnet,” introduction to Garnet, Memorial Discourse, 17–68.

32.Seraile, New York’s Black Regiments, 35–42, 50–53; “The Twentieth U.S. Colored Regiment,” Harper’s Weekly, 3/19/1864; “The Fete to the 20th U.S. Colored Infantry,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 3/26/1864; “Grand Ovation to a Black Regiment in New York,” NYT, 3/12/1864; Atlantic Monthly, 3/19/1864.

33.Seraile, New York’s Black Regiments, 82–83, 60–63, app. 10, 144; Chaplain George Washington LeVere, “From the Twentieth Regiment U.S. Colored Troops,” AA, 7/30/1864; “General Order No. 44,” 9/2/1864, in AA, 10/22/1864; Terry L. Jones, “Brother against Microbe,” NYT, 10/26/2012.

34.Samuel H. Brady military pension, USCT muster roll, NARA; and LB dependent mother’s pension. Brady’s headstone in the Chalmette National Cemetery is number 10716.

35.LB dependent mother’s pension; Sara A. Muzzie to Private James Brady, 2/28/1865, courtesy of Susann Hoskins, Brady family genealogist, Binghamton, NY.

36.See USFC 1870, 1880, 1890, 1900, and NYSC 1875, 1885, and 1890 Veterans Schedules, Malone, NY; New York State Town Clerks’ Registers, NYSA. In this document, James Brady is described as “Mulatto,” with a white parent and a Black one. And while this enlistee told the registrar he and Louisa were Samuel’s parents, he gave her last name not as Brady but as Bunyan, her maiden name. Susann Hoskins, email to the author, 2/12/2006.

37.Hoskins, email, 2/12/2006.

38.From Willsboro on Lake Champlain, Long Island–born Horace Mingo enlisted with the Second New York Cavalry in 1864 (military pension, 109.846, 70391). The Adirondack-born grantee Lafayette Mason of New Russia enlisted with the 118th NY Volunteers in 1863. (MCM widow’s pension.) The year before, the grantee Joseph James’s son, Adolphus, also from Willsboro, joined Company F of the 118th. His brother, Harvey James, of the First Vermont Cavalry, died in an army hospital in Virginia in 1864.

Some upstate Black New Yorkers who weren’t Adirondackers and served in white regiments were Ira Brum of Ithaca, an 1864 enlistee with the 185th NY Volunteers. Brum was “the only colored man in his company,” his obituary reports. “[He] possessed the confidence and good will of his officers and comrades” U.S., Union Soldiers Compiled Service Records, 1861–1865, NARA, at ancestry.com, and Carol Kammen, “African American Men in White NY Civil War Units,” New York History, 1/4/2012, https://www.newyorkhistoryblog.com/2012/01/african-american-men-in-white-ny-civil.html. From Delhi, William S. Law and Reuben Dyer joined the 89th NY Volunteers (Matthews, Freedom Knows No Color, 140–41), and Virgil Jackson of the Hudson River hamlet Fort Ann served with his neighbors in Company F, NY 169th, Troy Regiment. Perry, People of Lowly Life, 122.

The historian Carla Peterson observed the sometime humanizing influence of neighborly propinquity in a NYT online contribution, “Black Elites and the Draft Riots,” 7/13/2013. https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/13/black-elites-and-the-draft-riots/. The many documented accounts of “unnamed neighbors who decided to help, to protect, to rescue” Black Manhattanites during the rioting “proved,” Peterson suggests, “that if being a neighbor could unleash hatred and violence, it could also elicit acts of pure kindness. In fact, it seems that being an integral part of a neighborhood community was the one thing that could trump race.”

39.MacKenzie, Plains of Abraham, 115. Among Adirondack officers with strong abolitionist convictions were Colonel George Hindes of the NY 96th, son of James Hindes, a Liberty Party candidate for Ausable supervisor in 1845 (ECR, 2/19/1845); and Colonel Oliver Keese Jr. of the 118th “Adirondack Regiment,” part of a Quaker-descended Adirondack clan that helped numberless fugitives to Canada. The historian Tom Calarco suggests that as many as twenty-seven Clinton County abolitionists were Keeses by birth or marriage, and almost all belonged to antislavery societies (Calarco, Underground Railroad, 143). Elizabethtown’s Captain Robert Livingston of the 118th shared a legal practice with the Liberty Party zealot Jesse Gay (Smith, History of Essex County, 483). The son of a farmer and a schoolteacher in Ausable Forks, both ardent abolitionists, Sergeant Myron A. Arnold of the 118th was poised to take command of a Black company when he was killed in 1864 at Drewry’s Bluff (author’s correspondence with Arnold family genealogist Barbara B. Lewis, Simi Valley, CA, 11/2000). Captain Rowland Kellogg, also of the 118th, was the son of Orlando Kellogg, one of the four Adirondackers who stood vigil over John Brown’s coffin when it rested overnight in the Essex County Courthouse.

40.Seaver, Historical Sketches, 125; Phisterer, New York, 6:3095–97. Perhaps reflecting the reconciliationist convictions of his era, the late nineteenth-century historian H. Perry Smith deemed Wardner’s abolitionism divisive. While acknowledging that Wardner was “a very zealous worker for the colored man,” his antislavery church took “members from both of the other churches which left all three societies weak.” (Smith, History of Essex County, 719). Untitled news clipping, n.d., 96th Regiment New York File, NYS Military Museum and Veterans Research Library.

41.1860 USFC, Westport, Essex County; MacKenzie, Plains of Abraham, 158; USFC 1850, Philadelphia; NYSC 1855, Essex County; Civil War Muster Roll Abstracts, NYSA; and Civil War Draft Records, NARA; LM military pension. An affidavit that Lewis Mason submitted to the pension office when he was sixty-three suggests he was fourteen when he enlisted.

42.CA, 4/1/1837, 8/4/1841, 8/21/1841, 9/4/1841, and 11/20/1841; USFC 1860, Albion, MI; Mingo obituary, Albion Recorder, 6/4/1869. The light-skinned descendants of James McCune Smith disavowed their Black ancestry. See Stauffer, Works, xvi–xix. Stauffer’s preface includes an essay by McCune Smith’s descendant Greta Blau, titled “How James McCune Smith Became White.”

43.“John Brown’s Birthday,” Burlington Free Press, 5/22/1885; USFC 1920, Fresno, CA; BBS to Marjorie L. Porter, 9/9/1955, and BBS to E. N. Cotter, 8/27/1965, JB/BBS Coll./WVMP; Albertine Enid LaFollette, death certificate, City and County of San Francisco, and Joseph A. Romeo to Mary MacKenzie, 9/10/1992, Mary MacKenzie Papers, Lyman E. Eppes Collection, LPPL.

44.BBS to Marjorie Porter, 8/9/1955, BBS to George Marshall, 4/29/1962, BBS to E. F. Cotter, Lake Placid, 8/27/1963, Edwin N. Cotter Jr. Collection, Special Collections, SUNY Plattsburgh; Cotter to BBS, 6/13/1967 and BBS to Cotter, 7/5/1967, JB/BBS Coll./WVMP.

15. An Empowering Diaspora

1.MacKenzie, Plains of Abraham, 150. Private Hazzard returned to St. Armand with Julia Smith Hazzard and Julia’s daughters, Clara and Genevia. Svenson, Blacks in the Adirondacks, 28–29; JSH widow’s pension and JM military pension.

2.Tyler, “… In Them Thar Hills,” 63; NYSC 1875, Franklin, Franklin County; Howard Riley, “The Town of Franklin’s Black History,” ADE, 6/6/2020. The movement of Black veterans and refugees into the Adirondack region is noted in town histories of Westport, Warrensburgh, Mayfield, Port Henry, Indian Lake, Wilmington, and Whitehall. Also see Svenson, Blacks in the Adirondacks, 46–52, and Perry, People of Lowly Life, 121, 133, 146–47, 169–70.

3.TE/TT military pension; USFC 1870, NE, Essex County; Mary MacKenzie, “The North Elba Men and Their Fates,” LPN, 11/28/1997; JH military pension, affidavit, Benjamin Demmon, 7/28/1881. The farmer’s son Ben Demmon reports that he and his young neighbor, Josiah Hasbrook Jr., worked together at Intervales, the Demmon farm, before the war and after; North Elba school records, ECCO; William W. Patton, “John Brown,” marching song. In John Brown, Abolitionist, David Reynolds documents the surge of violence after Harpers Ferry that was directed at Southerners who supported Brown.

4.USFC 1870, NE, Essex County; TE/TT military pension, affidavits.

5.Shaffer, After the Glory, 104. Shaffer writes, “To be a real man was to be a legally married man, asserting the most basic of manhood rights—the authority of a household head—as a first step to asserting other manhood rights.” Marriages among Black veterans in Essex and Franklin Counties are documented in military pensions for Civil War soldiers, their widows, and their dependents. Seven women in the Black Woods who got married after the war were Jane Ann Hazzard, Adaline Hazzard, Rachel Caroline Thomas, her sister Charlotte Ann, Mary Elizabeth Bailey, Harriette Hasbrook, and her sister-in-law, Lucy Pierce Hasbrook. On James Brady’s marriages, see chapter 14. On William Appo’s late-life marriage, see Godine, “Noteworthy Mr. Appo”; Howard Riley, “The Town of Franklin’s Black History,” ADE, 6/6/2023; LPM widow’s pension; JH military pension. NARA military pension files note the marriages of the grantee Avery Hazzard’s children.

6.On William Carasaw, see USFC 1880, Vergennes, VT; EC widow’s pension, statements, Lewis Mott, 9/11/1888, and Eugene D. Chilson, 9/12/1888; and “Vergennes,” Middlebury Register, 7/16/1880, 9/24/1886.

7.The Vermont Historical Society librarian, Paul Carnahan, and the Middlesex town historian, Patricia Wiley, confirmed Josiah Hasbrook’s role as commander of GAR Hall Post 39 in 1893 in Worcester, Vermont; Malone Palladium, 5/29/1902, Malone Farmer, 1/18/1905, 11/14/1906; Carnahan and Wiley, emails to the author, 5/12/2015; CM widow’s pension.

8.On Jane Craig, see USFC 1860 and NYSC 1865, NE, Essex County; on Jane Frazier, see NYSC 1865, Westport, Essex County, and JF widow’s pension; on Louisa Brady, see LB dependent mother’s pension; on Julia Hazzard, see CHH military pension and JSH widow’s pension.

9.Pension appeals for the Black Adirondack veterans Miles, Hasbrook, Hazzard, Morehouse, Carasaw, and Lafayette and Lewis Mason attest to war-induced rheumatism. JM military pension, affidavits, C. H. Hazzard and Josiah Hasbrook. Private Hasbrook took lasting pride in how he nursed and revived his army friend Jerry Miles with poultices of “mayweed” (chamomile), a healing herb in lotions, salves, and teas. JH military pension; CHH military pension, affidavit, William Martin; Godine, “Battle after the War.” Thanks to my editor, Annie Stoltie, from Adirondack Life, for permission to excerpt language from this article in this book.

10.Shaffer, After the Glory, 123–24, 127–31.

11.Shaffer, After the Glory, 123–24, 127–31, 132, 137; Pencak, Encyclopedia of the Veteran, 1:7–10, 95–96; SH military pension, statement, JH, 10/12/1904; JH military pension; CM widow’s pension, claimant’s affidavit; Pencak, Encyclopedia of the Veteran, 1:10, 95; JH, military pension, depositions, C. F. Branch, MD, Amherst, MA, 11/15/1902, and Capt. Carlos P. Lyman, Esq., Amherst, MA, to Pension Bureau, 12/3/1903 and 2/17/1905; recommendation, Sam Houston, Medical Referee, to Pension Bureau, 9/8/1904.

12.Shaffer, After the Glory, 55–56; Pencak, Encyclopedia of the Veteran, 1:10, 95–96.

13.CHH military pension, affidavits, Special Examiner Clement Sullivane to Commissioner of Pensions, Plattsburgh, 3/15/1889, and James E. Pipes, 3/11/1889.

14.JH military pension, affidavits, Samuel Dickinson, 7/26/1881; Betsy C. Torrance, 7/28/1881; Linton Deming, 7/27/1881; Dennis Dewey, 1/28/1891.

15.CAM widow’s pension, affidavits from Joseph C. Merrill and Alburn Hathaway, 1/17/1891; Jane Bombard and Eunice Swinyer, 1/20/1892. Although pediatric hydrocephalus was not named as Henry Morehouse’s affliction, his enlarged head, paralysis, and history of seizures point to this diagnosis.

16.If white Adirondack veterans suffered more than Black veterans, it was because they could; they had the opportunity to fight. Even after Black men were allowed to bear arms for their country, they saw much less combat than white soldiers. “Indeed,” notes Donald Shaffer, “some Union authorities felt that African-American troops were suitable only for fatigue duty.” Shaffer, After the Glory, 15. “Manly” warfare was deemed a privilege for white men alone.

17.CHH military pension, affidavit, Sylvester Reid, 3/5/1891; CAM widow’s pension, affidavit, Eunice Swinyer, 1/20/1892.

18.The idea of an innate capacity that made Black people unfit for Adirondack pioneering pervades the Adirondack canon. See (among many others) Watson, General View, 78; Richards, Romance of American Landscape, 235–36; Sylvester, Historical Sketches, 140; Stoddard, Adirondacks, 68–69; Smith, History of Essex County, 188–89; and, most influentially, Donaldson, History, 2:3, 6.

19.NYSC 1855, Brooklyn, NY; “Willis A. Hodges (1815–1890),” Encyclopedia Virginia, 1/12/2022, https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/hodges-willis-a-1815-1890/. Hodges returned to New York City no later than 1853, the year he married Sarah Ann Corprew Gray.

20.Josiah Hasbrook to Pension Bureau, 12/6/1888, in JH military pension. Not the census but Josiah Hasbrook’s Civil War pension file is my source of information about his family’s many moves. In a letter detailing his need for medical attention, Hasbrook named his doctors and addresses. Censuses, loose-woven sieves at best, did not pick up his years in Westport or Wadhams.

21.“The Homestead Act, May 20, 1862,” National Archives, last reviewed 7/22/2019, https://www.archives.gov/legislative/features/homestead-act; “African-American Homesteaders in the Great Plains,” National Park Service, accessed 10/21/2022, https://www.nps.gov/articles/african-american-homesteaders-in-the-great-plains.htm; Daniel P. Barr, “Westward Migration,” Dictionary of American History, accessed 10/21/2022, https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/westward-migration.

22.Josiah Hasbrook Jr.’s stint in Glastonbury with his father revealed no migration. Only a few weeks after the census found him in Connecticut, another census taker recorded him at home with his family on his North Elba farm. Josiah Hasbrook Jr., USFC 1870, Glastonbury, CT, and NE; JF widow’s pension; USFC 1870, Westport; Jane Craig, USFC 1870–1910, Saratoga; George Holland, USFC 1870–1900, Canandaigua, Ontario County.

23.In his town history, Mostly Spruce and Hemlock, the Tupper Lake historian Louis J. Simmons mentions the early residency of Black pioneer and Smith grantee Enos Brewer. By 1875, Brewer was living in northern Franklin County, where he farmed and hired out. Enos Brewer, NYSC Census, Dickinson, Franklin County; James Brady, USFC 1870, 1880, Malone, and Malone Farmer, 11/14/1906; Alexander Gordon, USFC 1880, Monmouth County, NJ; Wesley and Phebe Murray, residential poll tax records, Town of Franklin Archives, Franklin County. (Wesley Murray died in 1867. His Franklin poll taxes were paid in 1863, 1864, and 1867.) Avery Hazzard’s children who took up full- or part-time farming were Charles Henry, Alexander, Lovinia, Jane Ann, and Adaline. Josiah Hasbrook’s half sister Lucy Pierce married Private Jeremiah Miles; they farmed in Middlesex, Vermont. Private Alexander Butler, husband of Josiah’s sister Harriette, was a sometime farmer in Connecticut. And Harriette’s daughter Hester married a farmer, Private Henry Prince of the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Volunteer Infantry. Before he took up cooking in earnest, and ten years after he left his own farm in North Elba, Josiah Sr. picked up farm work in Connecticut. USFC 1870, Glastonbury, CT; and NYSC 1865, Sag Harbor, Easthampton, NY.

24.“Black Abolitionists and the Republican Party,” in Ripley et al., Black Abolitionist Papers, 4:402n8.

25.Sojourns in Wadhams and Vergennes after the Civil War are documented in Josiah and Jane Ann Hasbrook’s applications for pension relief. The Hasbrooks’ first home in Middlesex may have been a farmhouse rented from their neighbor, Charles Pierce. “The Late Middlesex Shooting Affray,” VWSJ, 9/1/1875.

26.In Discovering Black Vermont, Elise Guyette argues that Vermont’s well-burnished antislavery reputation is exaggerated. While Vermont outlawed slavery early on, the state constitution sanctioned the gradual emancipation of children, which stretched out Vermont’s enslavement long after slavery was presumably abolished. Guyette, Discovering Black Vermont, 6–7, 120–21; Tom Calarco, “The Fresh Air of Freedom: The Underground Railroad in Vermont,” accessed 10/21/2022, https://www.academia.edu/42782201/The_Fresh_Air_of_Freedom_The_Underground_Railroad_in_Vermont.

27.GAR membership book, Hall Post 39, Worcester, VT (X369.151 H14), Vermont Historical Society, Montpelier. Hasbrook was commander of this post in 1893. “Was Friend of John Brown—Death of Josiah Hasbrook, Once of Bear Swamp Section of Middlesex,” Montpelier Evening Argus, 7/29/1915.

28.“Was Friend of John Brown”; EC widow’s pension, statement and affidavit from JH, 1888, 1889; VWSJ, 11/7/1883.

29.“A Silver Celebration,” VWSJ, 11/15/1893; Ray and Hodges, “Report of the Committee,” and “Resolutions,” Model Worker, 5/18/1848.

30.See note 43, below; USFC 1930, Amherst, MA; “Frank L. Miles Dies,” Burlington Free Press, 11/8/1934; VWSJ, 12/12/1894.

31.A&P, 10/14/1896; JH military pension.

32.Gallagher, Breeding Better Vermonters, 45–46; Walter M. Rogers, “Vermont’s Deserted Farms,” Stray Leaves from a Larker’s Log, 1897, quoted in “Vermont Eugenics: A Documentary History,” https://www.uvm.edu/~eugenics/roots.html (Nancy Gallagher also explores this in her online essay “Vermont Eugenics,” ibid.); A&P, 10/14/1896.

33.“Shady Rill,” Vermont News, 11/9/1897.

34.“Notice of Foreclosure,” VWSJ, 1/26/1898.

35.Amherst (MA) Directory, 1905; Massachusetts, U.S. Death Notices, Amherst, 1901, https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/3659/; JH military pension. A picture of Josiah Hasbrook Jr., cropped from a group photograph of Civil War veterans at a GAR parade (photographer unknown), hangs in the Jones Library in Amherst.

36.A&P, 4/6 /1887; VWSJ, 7/27/1887, 11/15/1893; Springfield Daily Republican, 7/29/1915.

37.MacKenzie, Plains of Abraham, 163–64.

38.USFC 1870, NE, Essex County. Elliott, age twenty-four in 1870, was twenty when he mustered out, and sixteen when he escaped enslavement and joined the army in Virginia; Hardy, “Iron Age Community”; Moravek, “Iron Industry,” fig. 15, “Settlements Founded and/or Largely Nurtured by the Iron Industry, 1846–1860,” 91–90; Seaver, Historical Sketches, 361; Tyler, “Early Days in Franklin”; Smith, History of Essex County, 721; Deed Book 84, 3/15/1882, 252, ECCO.

39.Hardy, “Iron Age Community,” 138–234; NYSC 1875, North Hudson and New Russia, Essex County. On different days in 1875, census takers found Elliott living in these towns. USFC 1880, Elizabethtown, Essex County.

40.TE/TT military pension. Thomas Thompson was not the only Black person who left the Adirondack region to find a Black spouse. Lyman and Annie Eppes’s daughter Kate met her spouse in New York City. Lyman Epps Jr. told a reporter that he might have married if he had met a Black woman in North Elba who was available, but since he didn’t wish to move, marriage was not an option. He recognized bachelorhood as the price of living in a community where interracial marriage was apparently unthinkable. Margaret Bartley, “Researching Adirondack Diversity,” lecture, Adirondack History Museum, 10/12/2018. Bartley’s census work on Black households in Essex County from 1840 to 1930 reveals that while interracial marriages were not frequent in Essex County’s eastern half, neither were they unheard of. “Fred. Douglass Married,” EPG, 1/31/1884. Many newspapers made Douglass’s wedding an occasion to stoke white fear of race mixing. Blight, Frederick Douglass, 650–51.

41.TE/TT military pension, including affidavits. The US Bureau of Pensions assessed the legitimacy of claims from Union veterans who used aliases, including fugitives-turned-soldiers who hoped a name change would make it hard to track their old enslavement, veterans who dropped old slave names during or after the war for new identities as free men, and repeat “bounty jumpers” who enlisted, claimed their pay, deserted, and reenlisted under false names (in this fashion, one enterprising huckster collected thirty-two bounties; see Murdock, “New Civil War Bounty Brokers,” 266).

42.TE/TT military pension, including affidavits; Martha [Riddick] Thompson, widow’s pension; MacKenzie, Plains of Abraham, 212–15. Three antislavery families owned this property: John Brown’s good friends the abolitionist Thompsons, who bought their land from Gerrit Smith; Palmer Havens, a radical reformer and speculator; and the Demmons, Elliott’s employers. The Brewster clan, who bought it next, sold the whole place to the Lake Placid Club in 1905. Weigand, Irrepressible Reformer, 324, 352. The Lake Placid Club Stores, Inc., was buying up former properties of Black grantees and their children as late as 1950. Legal notices soliciting descendants of Maud Eppes Appo with regard to a parcel in Lake Placid ran in the Lake Placid News in April and May of 1950.

43.MacKenzie, Plains of Abraham, 163–65.

44.Vaughan, Abandoned Farm Areas, 8–12, and Stradling, Nature of New York, 63–65; Hedrick, History of Agriculture, 438; Beatty, Age of Betrayal, 105, 108; Guyette, Discovering Black Vermont, 120–21.

45.Military pensions show that for long spells, the veterans Miles, Hazzard, Hasbrook, and Frazier were confined to bed by war-caused illness. In these hard seasons and beyond, their wives and mothers and older children ran their households and took jobs.

46.Laughlin-Schultz, Tie That Bound Us, 80–90, and Special Collections, Concord Free Public Library, Concord, MA. According to Laughlin-Schultz, offers of help for Annie and Sarah’s schooling came from Rebecca Spring, Parker Pillsbury, Theodore Weld, and Franklin Sanborn. In the end, it was Sanborn, Gerrit Smith, and Wendell Phillips who paid for the Brown girls’ tuition at Sanborn’s Concord School. On Lucy Pierce’s youthful marriage to Jerry Miles in Wadhams, see LPM widow’s pension, affidavit, 7/20/1913.

47.Rural Vermonter, 6/18/1886; VWSJ, 5/9/1894; Montpelier (VT) Morning Journal, 3/13/1906; Montpelier (VT) Evening Argus, 4/21/1913; Montpelier Morning Journal, 4/21/13; Patricia Wiley, “Middlesex Residents’ Memories and Stories about the Hasbrook and Miles Families,” 8/2021, courtesy of Middlesex (VT) town historian.

48.Federal and state censuses from 1880 into the Depression identify these jobs with John Thomas’s descendants. See Svenson, Blacks in the Adirondacks, chap. 5; Vincent, Southern Seed, Northern Soil, xiii–xv; David A. Gerber, “Local and Community History: Some Cautionary Remarks on an Idea Whose Time Has Returned,” in Kammen, Pursuit of Local History, 217–18.

49.Menand, Metaphysical Club, 49–69, 97–148. Scientific racialism is not the focus of Menand’s intellectual history, but his pages on American scientists who embraced theories of racial hierarchy expand the context for considering the racialized social culture of the postbellum Adirondacks. “Professor Agassiz on the Negro,” EP, 6/27/1867. Whether about mummies, coral reefs, or “negro body types,” the Harvard scientist Louis Agassiz’s opinions were well represented in Adirondack newspapers until his death in 1873.

50.Rosa Scott, USFC 1900, Franklin, NY, and USFC 1920, Englewood, NJ; Richard Scott, USFC 1910, Franklin, USFC 1920, Tupper Lake, and World War II draft registration card, 1942, Hightstown, NJ, https://www.ancestry.com/discoveryui-content/view/7413359:1002; John Carasaw, USFC 1880, Vergennes, and USFC 1900, Burlington; James Carasaw, USFC 1880, Vergennes, Troy City Directory, 1901, 1907, 1911, and USFC 1930, NYC; Frederick Carasaw, USFC 1800, Vergennes, and USFC 1910, Worcester; CM widow’s pension; Dabel, Respectable Woman, 66–74, and Jenny Carson, “Laundry,” in Eric Arnesen, ed., Encyclopedia of U.S. Labor and Working-Class History (Taylor & Francis, 2007), 777–83. US and state census records link the following descendants of grantees to laundry work and housecleaning in the first third of the twentieth century: Rosa Scott, Mary Hazzard, Elizabeth Hazzard, Mary Morehouse, Kathleen Morehouse Prince, and Libby Morehouse Hazzard. Laundry work paid badly in the first place, and no laundresses were paid as poorly as Black women, who were typically restricted to flatwork ironing and pressing. Carson, “Laundry,” 781; “Marshall Morehouse,” ADE, 3/4/1964; my own phone conversations with Robert Lagroome, 2010–20, Baltimore; “George Hazzard Dies; Native of Saint Armand,” ADE, 9/29/1948.

51.James Morehouse, World War II draft registration card, 1942, https://www.ancestry.com/discoveryui-content/view/411183:1002; USFC 1930, Corona, Queens.

52.CM widow’s pension; MP, 5/10/1894; Adirondack Chronology, https://digitalworks.union.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=arlpublications.

53.JMS to GS, 7/27/1847. Susan Clark and Woden Teachout explore the role of mutual need and collaboration in small communities in Slow Democracy. Invoking the small-town culture of citizen participation that distinguished an earlier United States, they make a spirited defense of place-based local activism as an agent of effective change.

54.“Johnson vs. Hazzard,” ECCO, and Record of Commitments, Essex County Jail, Archives, Adirondack History Museum, Elizabethtown. Charles Henry Hazzard, farmer, age sixty, went to jail on March 17, 1886, for “debt,” and was released on May 14 of that year.

55.Record of Commitments.

56.Svenson, “Integrated Cemetery”; EP, 12/14/1893; “James H. Pierce,” Historic Saranac Lake LocalWiki, accessed 1/9/2023, https://localwiki.org/hsl/James_H._Pierce; “Captain Pierce,” ADE, 3/16/1964; “Judson C. Ware,” obituary, EP, 10/29/1908; Annie Brown to John Brown Jr., 7/18/1857, JBjrKS.

57.“Affidavits for Cancellation of Tax Sale of 1853 … In Matter of Lot 87, To. 11., O.M. Tract,” Redemptions, Tax Sales, Box 11, #36, NYSA; Byron Pond to GS, 1/12/1854. Pond litigated a complicated sale of family property belonging to the extended Hazzard clan in 1861. “Charles H. Hazzard and Juliana Hazzard agnst. Margaret Ann Hazzard, Alexander Hazzard [etc.],” Supreme Court, 9/4/1861, ECCO; NYHT, 3/12/1896; “Ex-Assemblyman Alembert Pond,” NYT, 3/12/1896; EP, 3/2/1899, 2/6/1903; AR-EP, 4/22/1926.

58.Byron Pond to Franklin Rowe, n.d., ECCO.

59.Clark and Teachout, Slow Democracy, 27–30.

60.Jacoby, Crimes against Nature, 39; William F. Porter, Jon D. Erickson, and Ross S. Whaley, eds., The Great Experiment in Conservation: Voices from the Adirondack Park (Syracuse University, 2009), 51. In this compendious 2009 anthology of environmental essays on the Adirondack Park, contributors do not consider the relevance of small-scale agriculture to the park’s conservation mission. A long-standing bias against farming in this region is ripe for interrogation, especially in light of the contributions of community-supported family farms to the Adirondack economy.

61.Fifteen-year-old Richard N. Thomas died on June 24, 1860, and was buried in the Union Cemetery, Vermontville, Franklin County. Smith, History of Essex County, 667; “Indenture,” John Thomas to Orin Otis, 1/7/1889, Deed Records, FCA; USFC 1900, Franklin, Franklin County; MacKenzie, Plains of Abraham, 133.

62.Thompson, Body, Boots and Britches, 304; Marjorie Lansing Porter, “Neighbors across the Lake,” Burlington Free Press, 7/28/1939; TS, 1/30/1908; Ben Lewis to Marjorie Lansing Porter, 3/26/1956, Feinberg Library, Special Collections, SUNY Plattsburgh; “John Brown’s Old Home to Be Made Memorial,” AR-EP, 8/5/1921, and “Sang at Brown’s Funeral, and Again Yesterday,” LPN, 5/10/1938.

63.“Editorial Notes,” PR, 9/2/1899; Katherine McClellan, “John Brown, His Raiders and Their Resting Place,” EP, 8/31/1899; “43rd Anniversary of Battle of Osawatomie” and “John Brown’s Men Reburied,” NYT, 8/31/1899.

64.Thomas Featherstonhaugh, “The Final Journey of the Followers of John Brown,” New England Magazine, 4/1901, JB/BBS Coll./WVMP; McClellan, “John Brown”; Pamela Merritt, “John Brown’s Other Bodies,” Saranac Lake, 10/27/2015, https://www.saranaclake.com/story/2015/10/john-browns-other-bodies.

65.As many as seven clubs and fraternal organizations in New York called the gregarious Potter a member. George Hodges, Henry Codman Potter, Seventh Bishop of New York (New York, 1915). No advocate for racial justice, this John Brown Day speaker enraged Black activists with his advocacy of African colonization and his refusal to condemn lynch law in the South. Michael Bourgeois, All Things Human: Henry Codman Potter and the Social Gospel in the Episcopal Church (University of Illinois, 2010), 78–82; “Summer Retreats When Old Money Was New,” NYT, 8/12/2010.

66.“Blow Ye the Trumpets Blow,” PS, 9/1/1899; Oates, To Purge This Land, 164–65.

67.McClellan, A Hero’s Grave in the Adirondacks.

68.“Saranac Lake, Spring Resorts,” BDE, 5/4/1902; “Hazzard agst. Hazzard,” Supreme Court, Franklin County, NY, 7/22/1904, Franklin County Records; William A. Langley, NYSC 1905, USFC 1910, St. Armand; EP, 11/2/1911, 11/19/1911, 11/23/1911, and 11/30/1911; A Tuberculosis Directory (National Association for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis, 1916), 86.

69.McClellan, A Hero’s Grave in the Adirondacks.

70.Charles W. Linnell, Albany, to Commissioner of Pensions, Washington, DC, 3/6/1899, in CHH military pension file; JM military pension; LPM widow’s pension. Seeking to validate the claim of Lucy Miles, Linnell interviewed Lucy’s Adirondack neighbors, including Lyman E. Eppes. Linnell would conclude that Hazzard “has the best of reputations. He owned two farms earned by his labor, and is respected by the white people of his neighborhood.” On 9/27/1899, three weeks after the ceremony at John Brown’s farm, Charles Henry Hazzard died. TS, 12/14/1877, 2/17/1898.

71.Martin Luther King Jr. used this phrase in his “I Have a Dream” speech on 8/28/1963, and again at Riverside Church in New York City on 4/4/1967, in his sermon “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.”

16. White Memory, Black Memory

1.Stoddard, The Adirondacks Illustrated [1874 edition]. This travel memoir not only inclined lawmakers to approve the Adirondack Park, noted Banks, but “made the region in the public imagination a permanent part of the state.” “New York State Writers Institute Announces First Ten Selections of Its ‘25 Uniquely New York Books’ List,” press release, SUNY Albany 11/16/2009.

2.Stoddard, Adirondacks, 68–69.

3.MacKenzie, Plains of Abraham, 11.

4.Stoddard, Adirondacks, 70, 66; LEE to “Mr. Editor,” FDP, 7/21/1854; “Sang at Brown’s Funeral and Again Yesterday,” LPN, 5/10/1935.

5.Watson, General View, 725; “John Brown as Farmer,” Syracuse Daily Courier, 11/10/1859. This editorial, which deemed Smith’s effort “an utter failure” and observed the “sorrow and suffering” it inflicted on the grantees, shows the reach of Watson’s harsh assessment of 1853. While more gentle, Katherine McClellan’s A Hero’s Grave in the Adirondacks (1896) also invoked “inherent causes” for the giveaway’s demise (“As these negros … had been taught only indoor pursuits, they could not cope with nature in this rugged clime, and gradually they fell sick, became discouraged, died, or returned to their former homes, with one notable exception [Lyman Eppes].”); “Gerrit Smith’s Insanity,” Baltimore Sun, 11/14/1859, quoted in the Troy Budget, n.d.; “The Insanity of Gerrit Smith,” Baltimore Sun, 11/17/1859, quoted in the Albany Journal, n.d.

6.“Historians and Other Writers,” in “John Brown (Abolitionist),” Wikipedia, last edited 2/14/2023, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Brown_(abolitionist)#Viewpoints; GS, Manifesto, Peterboro, 8/15/1867, GSP, and in Frothingham, Gerrit Smith, 258.

7.Charles and William Mali to GS, NY, 8/28/1867; Charles Calverley to GS, NYC, 4/9/1873; George L. Brackett to GS, Albany, 5/26/1862; Louis Ransom to GS, Utica, 9/15/1860; James Edgerly to GS, Great Falls, NH, 9/21/1874; Dr. C. D. Griswold to GS, Columbus, OH, 9/25/1862 (before he moved to Ohio, Griswold published the Sunbeam, a Spiritualist newspaper in Buffalo, NY); George W. Gandry to GS, Vergennes, VT, 8/28/1863. In 1798, John Brown, a Quaker shipping magnate from Rhode Island, paid $33,000 for 210,000 acres in the southwestern Adirondacks. On many New York maps, this swath of land was named “John Brown’s Tract.” Though well south of the land that Gerrit Smith gave his grantees, it was frequently mistaken for Smith’s gift land, and Smith’s land agents lamented the confusion. Z. Eastman to GS, Elgin, IL, 2/3/1874. Franklin William Scott reports that Eastman edited several antislavery newspapers in Illinois before the Civil War, among them the Genius of Liberty (1840–42), the Western Citizen (1845), and the Daily Times (1852). Scott, Newspapers and Periodicals.

8.“Rally Round the Flag! The People’s National Convention!,” PS, 6/14/1872.

9.Frothingham, Gerrit Smith, 258; Quarles, Allies for Freedom, 4.

10.Reynolds, John Brown, 188, 472.

11.Isaac A. Gates to GS, Cresco, IA, 1867.

12.“ ‘John Brown’ by Gerrit Smith,” broadleaf, 8/15/1867, JB/BBS Coll./WVMP, and in Frothingham, Gerrit Smith, 253–59; Alexis Hinckley to GS, 7/24/1868 (“I am about to offer the John Brown Farm for sale & I should prefer to sell it to some of the friends of John Brown, or friends of the antislavery course. Would it not be the best way to [have/handle] the place owned by the Society or friends of the Society. Please do consider this & talk with some of your friends. Mrs. Brown would greatly prefer to have the place sold in that way. Respectfully, Alexis Hinckley, NE”); ECR, 3/5/1896.

13.Whiting, Kate Field, 224.

14.Kate Field to William Claflin, Newport, RI, 9/7/1869, in Kate Field: Selected Letters, ed. Carolyn J. Moss (Southern Illinois University, 1996), 50; R. W. Emerson to Field, in Whiting, Kate Field, 243.

15.Field’s bold bid to save Brown’s North Elba home is closely tracked in Scharnhorst, Kate Field, 68–75; Schecter, Devil’s Own Work, 326–28, 337–38. After the withdrawal of federal protection, atrocities against Black civilians in the South stepped up markedly. Between 1877 and 1950, over four thousand Black Southerners were lynched. Laura Bliss, “A Comprehensive Map of American Lynchings,” Bloomberg CityLab, 1/17/2017, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-17/this-map-of-u-s-lynchings-spans-1835-to-1964.

16.“Drives among the Mountains and Lakes,” PS, 6/30/1879, and “John Brown’s Adirondack Farm,” BDE, 8/2/1896, both laud the bloodless triumph of historic preservation.

17.Gobrecht, National Historic Site.

18.Travelers’ impressions of the caretakers at the John Brown Farm ranged from rattled to disgusted. A visitor in 1875 shrank from the resident farm family’s “mercenary” entreaties and the “entrancing inscription” of their entrance sign (“John brown Farm, chicken or trowt 50 cents and loging [sic]”). Express and Standard (Newport, VT), 6/22/1875. In “Camp Lou” (Harper’s Magazine, 5/1881), Marc Cook derided locals who knew less about their hometown hero than did visitors from afar. Margaret Sidney (Adirondack Cabin, 248–51) was more impatient still. The caretaker’s wife, wrote Sidney, pressured pilgrims to buy pictures and candy, regaled them with misinformation about Brown’s life, then worried they might vandalize the site. The state built a site manager’s cottage in 1926. Chamberlin, John Brown, 34; John O. Collins, Four-Track News, 5/1903; “In the North Woods,” New-York Daily Tribune, 6/3/1903; Henry W. Shoemaker, “John Brown the Lumberman: An Address Delivered by Henry W. Shoemaker to the Freshman Class at the State Forest School, Mont Alto (Funkstown) Pennsylvania, March 1, 1929,” Times Tribune Press (Altoona, PA), 1931, 22 pp.; Shaw, “John Brown.”

19.“The Virginia Rebellion,” John Brown to “A Quaker Lady,” NYT, 11/7/1859. This spare headstone from Connecticut honored five of the Browns: John Brown’s grandfather, who shared his name; Brown himself; his son Frederick, who was killed and buried in Kansas in 1856; and Oliver and Watson, who died at Harpers Ferry. In “Manufacturing Martyrdom: The Antislavery Response to John Brown’s Raid,” the historian Paul Finkelman documents the unavailing efforts of abolitionists to “canonize Brown as a crucified martyr for the cause of the slave” and get Brown buried at the storied Cambridge cemetery where, as Henry C. Wright wrote, “an appropriate monument might be erected to him.” Wright to the Liberator, 8/31/1860, and “Arrival of JB’s Remains at Troy,” NYT, 12/6/1859. See Finkelman, His Soul Goes Marching On, 41–66.

20.Nineteenth-century travelers’ accounts that give stress to the difficulty of simply getting to the farm include “Among the Adirondacks,” NYT, 8/5/1867; Mayo, “Adirondacks in August”; Dana, “How We Met John Brown”; Gould, “John Brown at North Elba” (on Adirondack pilgrimage patterns from the antebellum era to our time, see Sturges, “Consumption in the Adirondacks,” which considers how the pilgrimage as a literary trope shaped an image of the region and eased its transformation into the excursionist’s parkland and preserve); “Letter from Henry C. Wright,” Liberator, 8/1860 (“No monument … could so fitly … perpetuate the memory of such a man as the bold, stern, defiant mountains”); “Celebration at North Elba,” DM, 9/1860; Charles Dudley Warner, “Adirondack Notes,” The Press (Hartford, CT), 11/24/1866 (“The whole region seems somehow consecrated with his spirit”); Street, Indian Pass (“Old Whiteface, and … the great Tahawus [were] truly two grand grave-stones … between which John Brown sleeps, reared in everlasting rock by the great God himself”); “Celebration,” DM, 9/1860. In his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial, Martin Luther King Jr. declared, “Let Freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.” The environmental activist Peter Bauer suggests that King wrote this with Brown’s Adirondack resting place in mind. Peter Bauer, “From the Mighty Mountains of New York,” Lake George Mirror, 1/2009.

21.“Letter from Henry C. Wright.”

22.George S. Hale, “Ode to John Brown,” ECR, 3/19/1896, from an article by Francis W. Lee, “Why Is a State Monument Necessary?,” Boston, 3/12/1896.

23.“Celebration at North Elba,” DM, 9/1860; “Funeral Oration of Wendell Phillips,” New York Tribune, 12/12/1859; “Celebration at North Elba”; “Distribution of the John Brown Fund,” DM, 10/1860; “All Compromises Useless,” Liberator, 12/28/1860.

24.“Proceedings of the Board of Supervisors,” EP, 12/11/1858; “Annual Fair of the Essex County Agricultural Society,” ECR, 8/5/1854. On John Brown’s wide-ranging Adirondack network: marriage ties hitched his family to the Thompsons, Brewsters, and Hinckleys, all longer-rooted in North Elba than Brown’s clan. Warner, “Adirondack Notes”; Stoddard, Adirondacks, 79; Street, Woods and Waters, 325; Hoffman, “Pilgrimage.” In 1898, New York assemblyman Martin Ives made a grand tour of the Adirondacks. In his chapter about John Brown’s home, not a sentence notes the Black pioneers Brown came to help or any part of Brown’s antislavery career outside his “foolhardy,” “hopeless and rash” plans for Harpers Ferry. Ives, Adirondacks in Eighteen Days, 41–47.

25.For apolitical celebrations at Brown’s home and grave, see “A Tramp and Tarry among the Adirondacks and Lakes,” NYT, 7/24/1866; “His Soul Is Marching On,” NYT, 9/29/1890; Nichols, “Adirondack Pilgrimage.”

26.Warner, “Adirondack Notes”; GS, “Among the Adirondacks,” NYT, 8/5/1867.

27.Smith, “William Cooper Nell”; Nell to GS, Boston, 6/7/1860; Nell to GS, Rochester, NY, 12/28/1847.

28.Susann Owens to GS, New Haven, 8/6/1861; T. D. Trumbull to GS, Ausable Forks, 1874 nd; John J. Jenkins to GS on behalf of Rachel Webb, NYC, 8/12/1869. James Blair Webb was the city speculator who, in 1849, partnered with Abraham Caldwell to buy wilderness land from Smith and resell lots to Black New Yorkers (see chap. 5). One Adirondack lot was sold to Dennis Washington, an escaped slave in Michigan. When Washington never claimed his land, the property reverted to Webb, and on Webb’s death his widow, unable to find the title, asked Smith to replace it. William Wells Brown to Wendell Phillips, London, 9/29/1849, 9/1/1852, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

29.“Willis A. Hodges (1815–1890),” Encyclopedia Virginia, accessed 2/18/2023, https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/hodges-willis-a-1815-1890.

30.“Affidavit” for “literal transcription of the Nelson-Hodges lineage and records … as researched and compiled by Alexander Augustus Moore, 5/21/1876–9/18/1959, a descendant.” Notarized in Kings County, NY, 7/6/1973, Edwin Cotter Collection, Special Collections, Feinberg Library, SUNY Plattsburgh. Also see Karl Beckwith Smith III, “Loon Lake, Franklin County, New York, An Introduction,” 2001, http://loonlakehoa.org/llhistoryks.pdf.

31.Algernon F. Jones to GS, East Brooklyn, 4/23/1855; John J. Johnson to GS, NYC, 4/28/1874; Nathan Johnson to GS, New Bedford, 2/18/1873.

32.A white surveyor-speculator, Lem Merrill, bought this lot (it was his grandfather, the surveyor “Jerry” Merrill, who described a “Smith Lot” for the Impartial Citizen in 1849. See chap. 11). Deeds (power of attorney assigned by Silas Harris, NYC, to Lyman Eppes, NE, witness James Pierce, 7/19/1888), FCA and JB/BBS Coll./WVMP.

33.GSLB, 105; CBR, “Receipt Book of Land Grants from Gerrit Smith to Colored and Poor White Slaves from the South,” A1352–77, vol. 1, Comptroller’s Office, NYSA.

34.GS, “To the Slaves of America,” address to the Anti-slavery Convention of New-York, Peterboro, 1/19/1842.

35.Blackett, Beating against the Barriers, 1–87; Swift, Black Prophets of Justice, 204–43; Phipps, Mark Twain’s Religion, 172; Blight, Frederick Douglass, 84–85; GSLB, 63; Pennington, Fugitive Blacksmith, xv.

36.CBR, Receipt Book, NYSA. The 1850 USFC names no Stephen Pembroke, white or “col’d,” living in Ulster County; Smith gave James Pennington the north two-thirds of the west half of Lot 157, Township 11, Old Military Tract, in Essex County. These forty acres were within a few lots of his brother Stephen’s bigger lot.

37.Foner, Gateway to Freedom, 22–23.

38.Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg), from Fragmente und Studien: Die Christenheit oder Europa (1922); Roth, Why Write? Collected Nonfiction, 1960–2014 (Library of America, 2017).

39.Webber, American to the Backbone, 244–49. Webber’s pages offer a lively, deft account of the Pembrokes’ escape and capture.

40.Webber, American to the Backbone, 244–49.

41.Webber, American to the Backbone, 244–49.

42.“Story of Stephen Pembroke,” PF, 8/5/1854; FDP, 6/2/1854, 6/9/1854, 6/16/1854, 6/23/1854, 3/16/1855, and 5/11/1855; “Slave Catching Revived,” FDP, 6/2/1854; Stephen Pembroke to James Pennington, Sharpsburg, MD, 5/30/1854, in FDP, 6/16/1854; Herrin, “From Slave to Abolitionist”; “Letter from J. W. C. Pennington,” FDP, 5/11/1855; Thomas H. S. Pennington to William Still, Philadelphia, “Capture, Trial, and Return of the Fugitives Stephen Pembroke and His Two Sons to Slavery, Brother and Nephew of the Rev. James W. C. Pennington, D.D.,” Lancaster County (PA) Historical Society, 1893; May, Fugitive Slave Law, 37–38. Pennington’s attorney was the antislavery Whig Erastus D. Culver, formerly of upstate Washington County (and an advocate for the grantee Avery Hazzard). In his New York City practice, Culver defended several fugitives. After the horrific outcome of the Pembrokes’ case, his antislavery militancy hardened. “The Late Fugitive Slave Case,” NYT, 5/29/1854.

43.“A Slave Made Free,” Salem (MA) Register, 7/3/1854, “Stephen Pembroke, the Returned Fugitive,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, 7/7/1854; U.S. City Directory, Brooklyn, 1868; NYDT, 7/1/1854 and 7/29/1854; on taxes paid on Pembroke’s lot, see note 52 below; NYSC 1865, Brooklyn; “Personal,” BDE, 5/22/1869. The McCray brothers, who never saw their father after they were reenslaved, told Mary Abel’s agent that Pembroke died in 1859 (“Abel v. Brewster,” New York Supplement, vol. 12, Containing the Decisions of the Intermediate and Lower Courts of Record of New York State, 1891, 332). William Still, who tracked the movements of fugitives after they were freed, put Pembroke in Florida as late as 1870 (“Transcription of Capture, Trial and Return of the Fugitives, Stephen Pembroke and His Two Sons, to Slavery,” Lancaster County Historical Society, n.d.). The Abels suspected that Pembroke died in New York City in the 1880s, but their inquiries in the Christian Recorder brought no replies (“Information Wanted of Stephen Pembroke,” Christian Recorder, 2/14/1889 and 2/21/1889).

44.GSLB, 105. As a witness for the plaintiff (Mary Abel), Oliver Abel Jr. recalled camping on Lot 177. “Supreme Court … , Mary E. Abel v. Benjamin Brewster, Case on Appeal,” 12/9/1889, ECCO. Further details of this fight for prime Adirondack land may be found in “Abel v. Brewster, Misc. Records, T‑20,” 5/17/1887, ECCO; and “Abel v. Brewster,” New York Supplement, 333. On Oliver Abel’s family history of Adirondack innkeeping, and his and Mary’s forays into backcountry hospitality, see EP, 6/4/1914; and ECR, 10/26/1923, 1/29/1939.

45.CHH, military pension file, St. Armand.

46.New York Tribune, 10/24/1885; Foner, Gateway to Freedom, 227.

47.William E. W. Yerby, History of Greensboro, Ala., from its Earliest Settlement (Paragon, 1908), 127–28.

48.In the 1870, 1880, and 1900 federal censuses, Robert and Jacob McCray of Greensboro, AL, were farm laborers. When Greensboro attorneys deposed Robert McCray in the late 1880s, he shared details of his livelihood, his arrival in Alabama, and his parents’ stories. ( Jacob was not part of these proceedings.) See “Abel v. Brewster, Misc. Records,” 1887, 1889, ECCO; CBR to James E. Webb, 1/25/1883; “Abel v. Brewster,” ibid. In his letter to Webb, Ray clarified his “anxious” expectation that the McCrays would be served “with promptness and [illeg.] with no expense.”

49.Eric Taunton, “Over 800,000 Alabamians Live below Poverty Line; Sixth Poorest State in the Nation,” Birmingham Times, 6/14/2018 (in 2022, this ranking had not changed); Donna J. Siebenthaler, “Hale County,” last updated 7/20/2022, Encyclopedia of Alabamahttp://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/h-1330; James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Houghton Mifflin, 1941); and “Of Poor Farmers and ‘Famous Men,’ ” NYT, 11/26/2011. The website for the Safe House Black History Museum (https://safehousemuseum.org) describes the modest home in Greensboro where King took refuge with his movement allies.

50.Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name; “The Rich Blacks of New York,” New-York World, reprinted in Buffalo Morning Express, 12/11/1876. The withdrawal of federal oversight of Klan activity was catastrophic. In 1882 alone, forty-nine Black Southerners were lynched, five of them in Alabama. See “Lynching in Alabama,” Alabama Memory, accessed 1/10/2023, https://alabamamemory.as.ua.edu/source/lynching-in-alabama/.