Hard Losses, Deep-Felt

But big losses still kept pace with these gains, and the Eppeses registered them all. John Brown had planned to give more time to his farm and Black neighbors after his return from Europe in the fall of 1849. But the business trip that was supposed to fix his economic woes did not. He failed to interest English brokers in buying wool from a consortium of New England sheep farmers, and as a consequence he and his Ohio business partner, Simon Perkins, found themselves $40,000 in the red. So full-time living in North Elba was out; he could not both live in Timbuctoo and hope to salvage his and Perkins’s troubled enterprise. He would need to shuttle between Perkins’s farm in Akron, Ohio, the warehouse in Springfield, and offices in Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, to settle his accounts. Adirondack farming would fall to his wife and children and the Brown’s young hired hand, Cyrus Thomas, a family friend and formerly a slave.⁴

Some sweet interludes would brighten this long, rather stressful spell. In September 1850, Brown witnessed the marriage of his daughter Ruth to her young neighbor, Henry Thompson, and at the Essex County Fair, Brown’s calves and oxen took nine awards in six categories, an achievement notable enough to earn a nod in the Essex County Republican. The new farmer on the scene would be praised for bringing “improved stock” to the region, and for “his public spirit and enterprise.” But by September 18, 1850, when the Fugitive Slave Act was passed, Brown was back in Springfield, meeting with the city’s many Black abolitionists and calling for an antislavery militia he named the League of Gileadites, a secret fraternity bound by oath to drive slave catchers from the city. Half a year later, Brown and the better part of his big family had returned to their rented home in Akron. Only the newly married Ruth remained in the Black Woods. Except for Ruth, and a few fleeting visits from her father, North Elba would not see the rest of this big family for three years. Brown’s Black neighbors had grown accustomed to Brown’s here-and-gone appearances, but the wholesale removal of his family was a loss.⁵

Then, in the winter of 1852, the Black Woods absorbed a new blow when Timbuctoo’s energetic shoemaker James H. Henderson perished in a blizzard. It happened just a few days before Christmas. Henderson was visiting a neighbor, the abolitionist schoolteacher Gilman Fay, when the snow outside began to thicken. Fay implored the shoemaker to spend the night. But back home was Henderson’s wife Susan, their children, and his octogenarian mother. They would be watching for him and getting worried. He stepped out.⁶

In a squall as thick as this, stars hid themselves, and familiar landmarks too. A white wind tossed the flakes in all directions. Henderson, unmoored, may have taken comfort in the thought of John Brown, who, a few winters earlier, had also been caught short on a long hike home in heavy weather, and became badly chilled and very tired, but persevered and made out fine, still had his toes and fingers. The idea, Henderson well understood, was not to panic, let the shivering shake out the cold, keep the head clear, eyes on the compass—no easy thing at night. He took a seat on a tree stump to ponder his next move. Then he dozed, and hypothermia slowed his heart, and stopped it. He was half a mile from home. John Fay, son of the schoolteacher who saw him last, reported, “He had torn his compass to pieces, become tired, sleepy and foggy, and he was sitting in what the searchers called a peaceful sleep.”⁷

As Adirondack ways of dying went, this was far from the worst, but it yanked a strong bright thread out of the fabric of Henderson’s community, and it showed. The Black Woods needed James H. Henderson. If John Brown was an advocate and friend, Henderson was something more, a watchman and defender. When Smith and Douglass promoted their big-talking surveyor, Wait Lewis, it was Henderson, the cobbler, who declared the white man to be as crooked as a dog’s hind leg. When Smith would not back a Liberty-Whig coalition to help Black suffrage at the polls, Henderson signed the letter that implored him to reconsider. While Smith’s advocates indulged fine fantasies about a “glorious dawn of civilization,” Henderson learned and shared the price of oats. He paid his taxes, stepped up to serve as a town inspector of elections, hung a shingle blazoning his trade in the heart of the frontier, and dressed his home in good milled lumber. A man of grit, and sudden as a March squall, stilled.⁸

As for his wife and children and his mother, Sally—what were their prospects now? Their oldest boy was hardly big enough to swing a hatchet. Their closest neighbors, the Jeffersons, were no great help. No sooner were their cabins up than one of them returned to Troy and the other moved to Westport. Henderson, who was renting land from them, was increasingly uneasy and, as early as the late 1840s, looked to Gerrit Smith for reassurance:

I have heard that one of them [Samuel or Thomas Jefferson] intends to sell the Lot if he can. I know that he has tried to do so and he has not said anything to me. I would like to have the lot and if you would let me … , I will be thankful for it, and will make my payments regular… . I have worked the farm this season, and … I would not like to lose my house and improvements. They [the Jeffersons] have not said anything to me that they intend to sell the lot, but I have seen them that want to buy the lot, and think that if the lot is to be sold, I ought to have it as I live on it.⁹

Clearly, Henderson was caught short. To maybe lose his neighbors, and on top of this to suspect they might sell his land from under him and leave his family unhoused, was horrifying. But no response from Gerrit Smith is recorded in Smith’s letter book; his priorities were elsewhere. As Henderson’s white neighbors had hinted, he had bigger worries in this season than a grantee’s five-acre farm that wasn’t even on his gift land. No time to quell a tempest this minute while he was running a congressional campaign, and maybe, too, Smith doubted Henderson’s ability to make payments on a contract. Whatever the case, on Henderson’s death, his young family was left with a patch to which they held no title, and no grown man to work it.

Susan Henderson might have brought her family to the county home, an airless building mobbed with paupers, many of whom were alcoholic or spoke no English, and who were permitted to mingle indiscriminately—old, young, foreign, native born, men, women, sane, demented, peaceable, and violent. In a place like this, would her small boys, Black boys, be safe? And how could she ask another household to take in all her children, or invite another family into her house when she could not know her home was hers?¹⁰

So back to New York the widow went with all her brood in tow. She found work as a nurse in the city’s Colored Orphan Asylum, where she was able to install all six children and deduct their three-dollar monthly boarding fee from her own pay. This institution had long accepted “half-orphans” whose single working parents could not raise their little ones at home. Some of these inmates were the children of Smith grantees. The grantee’s wife Susan Hasbrook had lodged a daughter and two sons in the orphanage when she went back to New York City. So would the grantees Samuel Drummond, Abraham Caldwell, and William Smith. It could not have escaped the notice of the asylum’s founder, Anna Shotwell, that James Henderson’s surviving family came to her establishment only a few years after Shotwell had asked Gerrit Smith to consider gift lots for her teenaged boys who hoped to farm. Smith had declined.¹¹

Susan Henderson was lucky on two counts. Most single parents were limited to visits of four hours a month. Because she worked where her children lived, she could see them with some frequency, and doubtless counted this a blessing. And it may have helped that the staff was mindful of her losses. “Father found dead in forest December 19th 1851,” the intake report offered. “A man of an excellent character, he was a shoemaker by trade, and resided on his little farm given to him by Mr. G. Smith the Colored Man’s friend.” But sympathy would bend no rules. From ages ten or twelve until twenty-one, her children might be indentured, likely to people outside the city. Finding ways to visit them was going to be hard.¹²

At least while they were on site, the children could count on schooling, clean clothes, Bible study, and, from Dr. McCune Smith, vaccines. But this was still a toxic city for poor Black children, as she well knew. In 1841, she and James had lost their firstborn son in infancy. In Troy and then in Timbuctoo, they had raised their little ones in health. Back again in Manhattan, Susan’s streak of good luck failed. Three of her six youngsters died: the baby Susan and five-year-old Benjamin very soon after they came to the orphanage, and thirteen-year-old James, her eldest, ten days after he was released in 1855. Charles would stay in the asylum five years, and Joseph and Sylvester four, before their mother could take them back.¹³

Blacksville and the Franklin Pioneers also lost a charismatic leader at midcentury. In 1851, Willis Hodges left Stephen Morehouse’s household and returned to New York City, and while he never spelled out why, some reasons do suggest themselves. His little colony at Loon Lake had failed to flourish. His good friend and adviser, John Brown, had moved away, and most of Brown’s family, too. And Hodges’s family’s situation in Virginia had been violently disrupted. In 1851, a lawyer had convinced Willis’s widowed mother and his brother Charles to sell the Hodgeses’ family farm and move away rather than contend with hostile neighbors. Far from Virginia, in William Hodges’s Brooklyn home, the lawyer argued, the family would be relieved of its tax burden and finally reunited. In time, the Hodges family would determine that this attorney was a swindler, and after the Civil War, they took him to court. In 1851, however, they were sufficiently intimidated to migrate to New York. Willis, always loyal to his family, likely left Loon Lake to help William get the family settled in.¹⁴

And while he may have visited the Black Woods, he never went to stay. In Brooklyn, the longtime bachelor met another emigrant from Virginia’s Princess Anne County, and in 1853, he and Sarah Ann Corprew Gray married. The next year, Hodges was ordained as a minister in Brooklyn’s Apostolic Church. He kept in touch with John Brown (and the fact that his wife was moved to burn most of their correspondence after Brown was seized at Harpers Ferry suggests it held more evidence of Hodges’s knowledge of Brown’s plans than was safe). Hodges also, in this antebellum decade, resumed his suffrage work and fervent advocacy for more public schools for Black children. But there would be no more urging Smith grantees to the Black Woods, and no talk of Gerrit Smith, at least not until Smith’s run for governor in 1858. Then, and with feeling, the Hodges brothers would offer up their thoughts.

The Grantee Points a Finger

In 1854, the year that the newly married Willis Hodges was setting up in Brooklyn and John Brown had moved back to Essex County only to decide, once again, to leave it, the farmer Lyman Eppes discovered that some of Gerrit Smith’s downstate friends were planning an event in North Elba, “a contemplated celebration … in honor of Gerrit Smith’s benevolence in the matter of lands donated to our colored brethren.”

Eppes was vexed. Stretching from Eppes’s farm in all directions was a wilderness, much of it the property of thousands of Black New Yorkers, hardly any of whom were here. Smith had pitched the giveaway seven years before. Where were the “sable-armed pioneer[s]” bound to make the North Woods ring with “the noise of falling trees”? What was there to celebrate? Would it not “be far more wise in us, as well as more pleasant to our honorable friend,” Eppes asked the North Star, “if, instead of making a vain show, spending our time and means, we should so husband those means as to be able to settle on those lands, or otherwise make them available in securing a homestead for ourselves and for our children after us?”¹⁵

If Eppes didn’t name the organizers of the proposed event, he could guess who they were. Reverend Garnet was living in Jamaica, doing mission work with his wife, Julia. The city agents McCune Smith and Ray were the only two positioned to make something like this happen. And the gulf between their agents’ notion of what was good for the Black settlement and Eppes’s own now seemed as wide as the divide between Timbuctoo and Brooklyn. “I wish to say there are some lands in this country (in the vicinity of the Saranac) densely covered with beautiful pine lumber,” Eppes wrote the North Star in 1854. “As the demand for this lumber increases, and as the supply is becoming scarce, these lands are rapidly increasing in value.” Had Smith’s city agents informed the grantees about the rising price of lumber since Reverend Loguen visited in 1848? Had anyone reminded the grantees about the tax sales of 1852? Did they understand that unless they paid their taxes “within two years from the day of sale,” fast approaching this December, they would lose their land forever, and that, as gallingly, “those who bid them in [would] realize from what they term ‘Nigger Lands’ handsome fortunes”? Surely, Eppes suggested, Gerrit Smith would deem an all-out effort to alert the grantees to the need to hold on to their land more useful than some costly commemoration!¹⁶

“Deeds and services, rather than … vain show and empty declamation”—that’s what Black New Yorkers needed, Eppes declared. As James Henderson had told Reverend Garnet years before, “We who are here can see and know.” Smith’s Black agents, who were not there and did not know, had failed to do their job. “It seems to me, Mr. Editor,” Eppes wrote, “that were the grantees apprised of the fact that these lands are very valuable, and still increasing in value, they certainly would redeem them.—I take this method to inform them of these facts.” (A letter to a Black newspaper was the one method available to a farmer in North Elba; the agents may have known others.) But then, Smith’s agents, conjectured Eppes, had “most probably” let their land go for taxes along with everybody else. They were done with it. They’d given up. That is how it seemed to him.¹⁷

Farm your land, log it, save it for speculative uses down the road—it little mattered to the pioneer. Just don’t lose it. And this was not about some sentimental agrarian ideal or a notion that the alchemy of rural living would transform Black and white neighbors into equal citizens and friends (in Eppes’s mention of what his white neighbors called “Nigger Lands” was cold intelligence indeed). This concerned the market. The state law of 1846 that made the Saranac River a public highway for saw logs had driven up the price of the standing timber on the riverbanks. Lumber merchants had taken note. Back in Troy, Eppes may have been drawn to North Elba by the dream of a self-sustaining freehold, but that old dream had found the market. Adirondack forests had gained value. Woodlot owners stood to profit. To this pioneer, the glory of an Adirondack freehold was no romantic abstraction but as real as the big logs bucking down the river to the mills.¹⁸

In October 1854, McCune Smith and Ray answered Eppes’s letter in the North Star with a circular, “To Gerrit Smith Grantees: Redeem Your Lands!!” Dispatched to Black churchmen all over New York who were urged to read it to their congregants for three consecutive October Sundays, the circular reminded the grantees that those lots sold for taxes due in 1849 might still be reclaimed in the last months of 1854. All a deedholder had to do to redeem his lot was to figure out his debt and pay it. “This done, your Land is saved,” the agents promised, “and the men who haven’t bought it, and are eager for it, and who are hoping that you will not redeem it, are defeated.” Grantees could write the state comptroller or get help from the land agents. And at the urging, maybe, of Eppes’s letter, this flyer stressed good reasons to hold on to gift land beyond the hope of a farm, such as new roads that would increase land values and the emerging market for good saw wood.¹⁹

This was not the first tax sale of the grantees’ land. The redemption period after land was sold for unpaid taxes was a roomy two and a half years. A grantee who had registered his deed in 1846 did not have to pay his taxes until late 1848, and if he missed that deadline and his land was claimed in the tax sale of 1849, he still had two years to redeem his property and get the purchase canceled. Hence the urgency of these land agents’ eleventh-hour appeal. For grantees who had failed to pay taxes for five years or so, 1854 was the end of the line.

Douglass Turns His Back

Frederick Douglass printed Eppes’s letter. He did not offer his support. Years before, he shared his misgivings about the giveaway, and by 1853 his concerns had only grown. That year, Harriet Beecher Stowe, the world-renowned author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, tapped him for ideas about projects she might fund that could lift the lot of free Black Americans. Anything but a Black farm project, he told her. Homesteading would never work for Black families, notwithstanding the brave hope of that “prince of good men, Gerrit Smith.” Husbandry, such a “noble and ennobling occupation,” might be a “remedy for the evils of poverty and ignorance among us,” but what good was a remedy when it could “not be applied”? Smith’s failed effort proved that Black people were city stuck: “From some cause or other … [they] will endure any amount of hardship and privation rather than separate and go into the country.”²⁰

Douglass still acknowledged the fateful impact of undercapitalization on the giveaway, but something else, worse even than a lack of funding, now cooled his view of Smith’s idea. The big issue, he believed, was lack of faith, confidence, and will. “Slavery, more than all things else,” he wrote,

robs its victims of self-reliance. To go into the western wilderness [and here Douglass meant not just the Smith Lands but all of the great frontier] and there to lay the foundation of future Society, requires more of that important quality than a life of slavery has left on us… . The Black man (unlike the Indian) likes civilization. He does not make very great progress in civilization himself, but he likes to be in the midst of it, and prefers to share its most galling evils, to encountering barbarism. The dread of isolation—the lack of adventurous spirit—and the thought of seeming to desert their “brethren in bonds,” are a powerful and perpetual check upon all schemes of colonization, which look to the removal of the colored people.

Generations of enslavement had robbed them of the habit of initiative, and the wilderness would not restore it. Whatever power Douglass once invested in the wilderness to work an awakening of Black manhood, he now disavowed. All a Black man could expect from the wild woods was loneliness and terror. White men might manage it; Black men, no. (Yet, oddly, in June 1854, Douglass’s paper ran an excerpt from S. H. Hammond’s Hills, Lakes, and Forest Streams, a rhapsodic Adirondack travelogue that extolled the very wildness and isolation that purportedly paralyzed Douglass’s Black readers with fear.)²¹

There were other points the influential editor might have made. He might have noted that for the grantees, an “adventurous spirit” was a luxury; that their preference for the city stemmed from a stern assessment of their means and the relative safety they felt in urban communities (especially after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act); and that four centuries of forced labor on white-ruled fields tinged the thought of farming with an enduring dread. He also might have called to mind a piece from his own paper by his activist-poet friend Joseph C. Holly. In 1851, Holly had offered tough ideas on how to harness white philanthropy to Black advantage. First would need to come the public recognition of centuries-deep white privilege at the expense of Black advancement. If “our friends” would only understand this simple economic truth, Holly felt, they would find much to do for colored people “besides expressing their abhorrence of slavery and disapprobation of prejudice.” With the capital and resources that white Americans had accrued along routes of economic gain “from which we have been almost entirely excluded,” white people were positioned to reward Black initiative with the preemptive means to become mechanics, merchants, professionals, and farmers. The American Colonization Society had done as much for Black Americans looking to move to Africa. Why not a society that underwrote Black enterprise at home, and not with charity but with investment strategies that allowed Black farmers to, say, repay startup loans for stock and tools “when their success enable[d] them”? Holly was a Smith grantee. He revered Gerrit Smith enough to write a poem about him; the North Star had published it. But admiration would not soften the analysis. Was preemptive capitalization exactly what was missing from the Adirondack plan?²²

Douglass himself had said much the same in his own newspaper in 1849. Insufficient startup funding had brought Smith’s project to its knees, he wrote. Stowe’s offer to invest in a Black initiative was an occasion to correct this. Though much of the Smith land had been taken and resold by the state for back taxes, a great many deedholders still retained their deeds. Fresh funding might encourage prospective farmers to make the move, and cover tools and taxes for those already farming. But Douglass would not invoke the cost of structural white racism. Instead, in his note to Stowe, he censured Black people, who, “from some cause or another,” were stuck, and needed, more than anything, job training in the “mechanic arts.” Not free farms they would not use (though the “zeal, industry, perseverance and self-reliance” of some Eppesian exceptions were acknowledged), and not schools for the professions (why read law if nobody hired Black lawyers? why read for divinity if it could not make a living?), but an industrial college “where colored youth can be instructed to use their hands as well as their heads… . At this moment, I can more easily get my son into a lawyer’s office to study law than I can into a blacksmith’s shop… . We must build, as well as live in houses—we must make, as well as use furniture—we must construct bridges, as well as pass over them… . We need workers in iron, wood, clay, and in leather.” No more “barbarism” in the woods! Practical, well organized, closely administered, a trade school could meet a range of needs. Its curricula would balance agricultural training on a community campus with trade craft in small cottage industries. Its alumni would disprove “the injurious opinion of our natural inferiority” with living proof. The Black worker’s “usefulness to Society” would be made plain as he “fasten[ed] himself to our countrymen through their everyday and cardinal wants.”²³

Well into 1855, Douglass flogged this notion, and the more he colored in the dream, the more confident his tone. Call the place the American Industrial School—a good solid name! Place it within one hundred miles of Erie, Pennsylvania. Make the budget a hefty $30,000, two-thirds in common stock, $10 a share. Douglass would be the agent stateside. Stowe could pass the hat abroad. McCune Smith might be trustee. Take the plan to the Black reform community, convention-goers, pundits; put a notice in his newspaper, and investors would sign on in force.²⁴

That, anyway, was the idea. But while Douglass’s plan won plaudits from Scotland to California, and a why-not shrug from Horace Greeley’s Tribune, many urban Black reformers (Willis Hodges, Philip Bell, James Duffin, and Charles Lenox Remond, among them) were unmoved. How far would agents need to travel for support? How could this school be self-sustaining? If Black men would not take their families to free land in the Adirondacks, why would any of them leave their families to go to school so far from their homes? And why invest so much in one initiative that would graduate so few, rather than underwrite apprenticeships in up-and-running Black-owned workshops or, for that matter, at Black farms?²⁵

Smith’s giveaway was not explicitly a part of the debate, but its function as a cautionary tale was plain. No more big plans like Gerrit Smith’s unless they were sure to thrive. No high-aiming failures, wrote Peter Clark in Cincinnati’s Herald of Freedom (echoing, ironically, Douglass himself, who, in the first issue of the North Star in 1847, had quietly warned, “Our race must be vindicated from the embarrassing implications resulting from former non-success”). Clark, a Black educator in Ohio, believed Douglass’s trade school plan was bound to fail, not because Black Americans were innately unambitious but because they had been made “apathetic … from the repeated failures of the high-wrought plans which their leaders have presented for their adoption. Forgetting the materials with which they must work, and the resources upon which they must rely, they [the leaders] have looked upon the enterprises of the whites, and laying their plans of the same scale … have called on an ignorant, poverty-stricken, and divided people to accomplish this work.” Was there ever a “high-wrought plan” that dramatized this “failure” as succinctly as a bid to seed the Adirondacks with Black pioneers?²⁶

Clark was a rising star on the Black convention circuit, and James McCune Smith, who took up Douglass’s plan for a school with the zeal he had brought to enlisting Smith grantees, resented Clark’s suggestion that Black leaders were to blame for the failure of bold initiatives. Under his pen name, “Communipaw,” McCune Smith shot back: Leaders? What leaders? “As essential to the idea of ‘leaders’ in relation to any people,” he wrote, “is the assumption that said people can be led. We have no ‘leaders among the common people.’ ” Black men of “public spirit” enjoy about as much influence with “the masses … as children sitting in the markets and calling unto their fellows and saying, We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced.” Why, it was practically “molecular,” this “repulsion” between Black “leaders” and “the masses,” the doctor fumed. Look what happens when a Black tradesman sets up shop “in a colored neighborhood; he will find that his brethren so far from supporting him … will, on the contrary, pass his door to trade with the whites.” Look how Black people treat their ministers, he continued—not one in the land is paid what he deserves. No wonder Black reformers move to England or Canada, sick of the “blame and ridicule” of their own people. Black “men of public spirit … zealous for the advancement of the down-trodden … alas! … have never had the masses to support them, nor even to give an approving cheer or God’s speed to their well-meant efforts.”²⁷

It was not the first time the frustrated physician had lit into a recalcitrant Black underclass. In 1846, he wondered whether Gerrit Smith was ready for the “cold ingratitude of colored men” whose “wealth-worship” made them mock those who defied it. More disappointment showed in his letter to Smith of February 6, 1850, when he reflected on the grantee-pioneers’ too-quick retreat to New York City. But those complaints were made in confidence. In Frederick Douglass’ Paper, what McCune Smith had to say about the rift between a Black political elite and the unschooled, working-class majority he called “the masses” was for anyone to read. And anyone would not. Hence his evident frustration: he was preaching to a converted Black elite. The “masses” either couldn’t read Black newspapers or simply wouldn’t care. Peter Clark blamed Black leaders for “ ‘forgetting the [human] materials’ with which they must work,” when, claimed the doctor, it was the wary and distracted masses who rejected them.²⁸

Nothing came of Douglass’s trade school. By 1855, two years after the project was cautiously endorsed at a meagerly attended Black political convention in Rochester, Douglass had yet to raise a penny, and Harriet Beecher Stowe was on to other things. But for the purposes of our story, the debate among leading Black reformers over Douglass’s hard-argued project offered some important news. It glimpsed significant mistrust in Black leadership, a retreat from Black agrarianism, and a tacit disavowal of the “scheme of justice and benevolence” from 1846. Far from forgotten in this conversation, Smith’s initiative was in active disrepute.

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

Eppes was surely troubled by Frederick Douglass’s disavowal of Black agrarianism in his newspaper. These words from a once-faithful ally could do the Black Woods no good. But the aforementioned rumor of a “contemplated celebration” was the news that provoked his letter to the editor in July, 1854. What the farmer may not have considered was that the celebration that seemed so off the mark (and that never came to pass) was probably conceived less to honor Smith’s philanthropy than to console and divert “Nature’s Nobleman” in the dog days of his congressional career.²⁹

A perennial candidate for office on a range of third-party tickets (if always with reluctance, and at other people’s urging), Smith ran four times for president, three times for governor, once for the US Senate, and again for the state assembly, losing every time. With wry wonder an Albany friend observed, “There is no doubt of one fact, that no man in the State, will draw to an audience so many approving listeners, and then get so few of their votes, as you.” But central New York’s loathing for the two-year-old federal Fugitive Slave Act swept the candidate into Congress on the Free Soil ticket in 1852, and come winter, the country radical went to Washington. The hosannas were downright giddy. Smith’s victory was deemed “but a beginning!” (Horace Greeley), “the greatest victory for the cause of humanity (if not in the world) that has been gained since the American Revolution” (John Brown), “among the most extraordinary political events of this most extraordinary age” (William Lloyd Garrison), and the herald of “a new era” in civil rights reform (Frederick Douglass).³⁰

Smith’s hopes were high as well. That first rancorous session, he waded stoutly into every controversy of the hour. Tolling out the oratory in his lovely bell-toned voice, he spoke on temperance, Hungary’s freedom fighters, a federal war school, and always, and for hours, slavery. But while the 219 legislators (78 Southerners among them) who Smith invited to his spirits-free Washington home freely ceded his likeability and warmth, these qualities won his hard-line antislavery position no new friends. Smith’s gift for making a connection, his talent for calling up a bond that cut through differences of faith, class, race, and politics, worked no magic here. The New York Times nailed it early on: “Mr. Smith will probably enjoy the personal respect of all … , but after the first curiosity which may wait upon his appearance … shall be satisfied, he will have less influence upon many of the great interests of the country, than the veriest cipher.” While Smith’s speeches (which, anthologized, ran to over four hundred pages) were noted for their eloquence, they hardly mattered when nobody was listening. Persuasion was impossible when the lines were so hard-fixed. Congressional debate, with its asphyxiating clouds of cigar smoke and eruptive curses, drunken taunts, and fistfights, was, by 1852, largely performative.³¹

Smith did make an impression, though, but not for what he hoped. A rumor that he had skipped a vote on the Kansas-Nebraska Act whipped up outrage among Whigs and radical abolitionists alike. This sly piece of proslavery legislation from the Illinois Democrat Stephen A. Douglas dispensed with the balance-keeping Missouri Compromise of 1820 and authorized settlers in Kansas and Nebraska to use majority rule to determine slavery’s territorial admissibility. Smith and the Northern abolitionists saw the act as part of an “atrocious plot” that would bend the nation to “the yoke of a slave-holding despotism.” But when Smith and five other “Ultra-ists” (a derisive term for radical abolitionists) published their concerns in advance of a congressional debate, they were charged with trying to preempt it and called spoilers and naïfs. And what better evidence of their incapacity for politics than Greeley’s insistence in the Tribune that Smith missed the Kansas-Nebraska vote because it came at a late hour and Smith, good man of steady habits, preferred to be in bed? Even after the Congressional Record showed that Greeley had it wrong, Whig papers painted Smith as an amateur unfit for realpolitik.³²

Particularly hurtful was the outrage of some Black abolitionists, Smith’s longtime allies, who, Smith felt, had been “befooled and bewitched by the Whig press.” Had one baseless rumor driven all his work from memory? For a quarter of a century Smith had labored for racial justice. In Washington, he had secured the emancipation of twenty-five enslaved people, and these but a fraction of the freedom seekers he had aided over the years from his Peterboro home. “ ‘A lie well stuck to’ can overcome almost any truth,” he despaired. “These plaguy Whigs are the ruin of me!—they have taken all the wind out of my abolition sails!” Even the Garrisonians were against him. When he treated Southern lawmakers with his usual (and helpless) cordiality, they were appalled.³³

With still half a year left in his two-year term, Smith returned to Peterboro. Abolitionist friends were disappointed, and critics would call his foray into politics a failure—he wasn’t tough enough; he couldn’t take the heat. It is true Smith wielded no great influence, but he was himself profoundly influenced by his congressional adventure, and it might be argued that the change in Smith would change the course of history. He left Congress, he wrote Frederick Douglass’s readers, bereft of any “hope of the bloodless termination of American slavery” through political means. Congress would do nothing for the enslaved millions. Smith returned to Peterboro not chastened but more resolute, and prepared for harder measures. This was not flight but reengagement. At home, at his desk, he could bring his words and deeds to the Jerry Level of utility. Home was where he did the work that mattered, and where the terms were his to set.³⁴

His Black agents understood this. Hence the idea of a reception, an event to welcome his return. Though Smith’s brush with politics was “unlucky,” they wanted him to know their loyalty. But Lyman Eppes was having none of it. Let them show Gerrit Smith their love by finishing what they had started. Get the grantees up here! Get them to their land!

Deeds for Votes: A Belated Vindication

In fact, numberless grantees were supporting Smith’s idea, but not with the hoes and hatchets Eppes was looking for. Their chosen tools were far from view. From 1849 to 1854, past-due bank notes from grantees packed the canvas-bound ledgers of the New York state comptroller, and many of these weren’t covering these deedholders’ back taxes. They covered neighbors, friends, and relatives. These notes trickled in from Brooklyn, Troy, and Manhattan, and also from Painted Post, Schoharie, Peekskill, Westport, and Ghent. A paper drama to be sure, but in these records is evidence of abiding interest in the gift land, of deals struck and tacit collaborations, fathers spelling sons, brothers stepping in for brothers, and wives and widows sending money in their husbands’ stead.³⁵

These proxy payments were made for many reasons, not all of them self-evident. Did John Tappan of Steuben County pay Samuel Mann’s back taxes to help Mann or himself? Was McCune Smith doing the antislavery lecturer Henry Bibb a good turn when he redeemed his lot while Bibb was in Canada, or hoping to add it to his own holdings? Several of Gerrit Smith’s Black agents paid back taxes on lots not their own. Charles Ray paid taxes on or redeemed Adirondack properties at least sixty times from the late 1840s through the 1850s. Nonagents who had long endorsed the giveaway, such as the wealthy restaurateur George T. Downing, the printer-teacher John J. Zuille, and the seaman’s advocate and innkeeper William P. Powell, tracked the tax sales and picked up gift lots at cheap rates.³⁶

In many cases, surely, these redemptions were driven by a concern with suffrage justice, and a desire to help poor Black New Yorkers retain the proof of ownership they required to claim the right to vote. But there is another explanation for these quiet interventions. As the cultural geographer D. W. Meinig has observed, all over the mid-nineteenth-century United States, the settlement process was “suffused in speculation,” and if you had the money and the price was right, you bit. Gerrit Smith’s secretary and land agent, Caleb Calkins, never missed a tax sale. In fact, so frequently were grantees’ lots conveyed to Calkins, and from purchasers who were Smith’s friends or subagents, that it seems clear that Gerrit Smith was nowhere near as done with Adirondack speculation as he liked to suggest. Well into the 1860s, he or his proxies bought Adirondack land at auction, some of which he’d deeded to grantees. So did many white abolitionists in the Adirondack region, and so did Adirondackers who called the gift lots “N—— Lands.” Lyman Eppes’s unhappy mention of this epithet conveys his certainty that speculation in his neighborhood was all the work of racists. Doubtless racists read the auction listings, too, but Eppes’s explanation missed a wider trend. Nonresident antislavery activists speculated in this land because it was a good way to make money, and money from these investments helped them do the work they loved—good work, lifesaving, but also costly. Charles Ray’s speculative investments helped him cover mission work in city slums, set up fugitives in safe homes, and get to civil rights conferences far from home. Ray’s partner McCune Smith, whose loathing for “wealth-worship” struck such a chord with Gerrit Smith, also knew the uses of a deal. By 1860, the physician set the value of his real property, much of it in rentals, at $25,000—income that bought him time to write, help fugitives, do suffrage work, and do battle with the emigrationists. Jermain Loguen and his wife, Caroline, may have helped more freedom seekers get to Canada than any other abolitionist couple in their time; some fifteen hundred fugitives streamed through their Syracuse home, each one needing food, clothes, housing, and transportation. Between those grantees who wanted to make money and those who wanted to do good works was no divide at all.³⁷

Were any of these speculators picking up gift lots at tax sales with an eye to settling fugitives? Many Black speculators with an interest in the gift land were active in their cities’ Underground Railroads. In addition to McCune Smith, Ray, and Loguen, John Z. Zuille speculated in the gift land. A city educator and printer, Zuille was rumored to have helped as many as 120 fugitives get north, sometimes by way of Adirondack hamlets. The “neat and gentle” Hawley Green, a hairdresser in Peekskill who captained his small town’s Underground Railroad activities and ran a day school for Black children, bought a slew of Adirondack lots. But no evidence has surfaced that joins the dots between these speculative forays and a master plan to get fugitives into the Black Woods. Right now, it is a teasing notion, and no more.

Not so vaporous, however, is evidence of another outcome of Black speculation in the Adirondack gift lands, and one that suggests that Smith’s scheme worked better and for longer than he ever understood.

An old friend of Gerrit Smith, the New York City restaurateur George Downing, never got a gift lot. He didn’t qualify. He had money of his own. But he revered the giveaway, and at a Black political convention in Rochester in 1851, he framed an Adirondack homestead as the alternative to African emigration, asking why Black New Yorkers would choose to move to “benighted Africa” when “there are large tracts of land in this country, fertile and beautiful, which the colored man can occupy … , thousands of acres … already owned by colored men in the State.” Downing was so enamored of this vision that he started buying gift lots as soon as grantees let them go for back taxes, and he kept at it for some twenty-five years. He evidently hoped his grown children would enjoy this sylvan bounty after he was gone.³⁸

His papers would reveal that 1870 was his biggest year for buying land, and this was no mere happenstance. That year, Congress ratified the Fifteenth Amendment. When federal legislation compelled New York to nullify its for-Black-voters-only $250 property requirement, and Black New Yorkers who’d held on to their land deeds for decades no longer needed them to vote, they released them. Downing likely bought some of these deeds from sellers in the city and purchased more at auction when they reverted to the state. Especially well represented was gift acreage in the Raquette Lake region in Hamilton County (a region where no Black deedholders are known to have settled). And then, it seemed, this busy reformer put his paper duchy out of mind, because his six children learned of this inheritance only after his death in Newport in 1903. A glorious discovery! But what to do about the fact their distracted father had failed to register his deeds with Adirondack county clerks?³⁹

Because his land was never registered, New York was free to claim it for nonpayment of taxes and not give Downing notice of the sale. After the 1880s, his paper kingdom was the rustic playground of the Gilded Age tycoons. On Downing’s canceled holdings, Alfred G. Vanderbilt, J. P. Morgan, and former New York attorney general Timothy Woodruff bought Great Camps both renowned and, in some circles, notorious for their ostentation and social exclusivity. (“Camps” was a pet name, really; these compounds were about as rough and rugged as Versailles.)⁴⁰

George Downing’s heirs had not been raised to dodge a challenge. Born to one of the most prominent Black activist dynasties in New York, they hired the boldest lawyer they could find. The erudite son of a Baptist minister and Africanist scholar, Brooklyn’s Rufus L. Perry Jr. told reporters he planned to argue that New York ought never to have transferred ownership of the land without first informing Downing about this impending tax sale. That the speculator had failed to claim title to his land was, Perry allowed, regrettable, but not a reason to strip Downing’s heirs of their due. Perry guessed this was the best case he’d taken on in his twenty-year career.⁴¹

By Thanksgiving, headlines from Boston to Seattle were blazoning the lawsuit that aimed to evict some of the richest families in the country from their wilderness estates. “Negro’s Heirs Claim Vast Game Preserves,” offered a front-page story in the New York Times, followed the next day by “Tale of Gerrit Smith behind Adirondack Suit.” The Times alone took pains to fix the “eccentric” Gerrit Smith’s land giveaway of 1846 in the context of voting rights and racial justice—and it is thanks to the Times that we know Downing was able to buy this land in the first place only because grantees held on to it until their voting rights were federally guaranteed. After 1870, and only after, as many as four hundred gift lots reverted to New York. “Mr. Smith, after having given away the land, naturally did not want to pay taxes on it,” Rufus Perry told the Times, whose reporter then observed, “It seems the colored men to whom he gave it did not go to the expense of doing so either after the property qualification had been removed.” The italics are my own.⁴²

So offhandedly, so breezily, did this news come to light that one could miss it in a blink. But here we have it: evidence that Smith’s grantees had used and kept their gift deeds to exercise the franchise, and kept them for a quarter of a century, until the right to vote was theirs. Smith likely never knew this, and if coverage of this high-profile dust-up hadn’t noted this detail, we wouldn’t know it either. At the time, it excited no attention. Democratic papers, indifferent to this backstory, preferred to focus on the prospect of a legal challenge to an insular, undemocratic, mercenary elite. That’s what sizzled in an age of glaring wealth disparity and populist unrest: a courtroom blow against a master class that withheld rights of access and usage, a takedown (sneered an upstate editor) of those “millionaires who have invaded the Adirondacks, buying from the State great tracts of wilderness. They have taken possession of the lakes and made camps which are in reality abodes of luxury.”⁴³

If Rufus Perry had pressed his case half a century before, and if his plaintiffs had themselves been Adirondack farmers, their bid for retroactive compensation might have had a fighting chance. Before and maybe a little after the Civil War, while an idealized Adirondack farmscape still held an allure, local and regional authorities were apt to favor tax-delinquent farmers over long-distance buyers, letting settlers redeem land that had been long sold for unpaid taxes. Farmers did God’s work with every axe stroke; it was in the public interest to keep them on the land their sweat and zeal had improved. But by the time Perry took this case in 1904, that narrative was decades out of step. What voters wanted weren’t freeholds in the woods but a healthy watershed that kept the Hudson River in good supply, and a wild park that promised not just recreation but regeneration and escape. Further, Downing’s heirs were bourgeois urbanites who didn’t know this purloined patrimony. The rapidity with which this lawsuit dropped from public notice suggests how decisively it was discredited. No resolution or compensation from the co-defendants was reported, and all public notice of the pending suit ceased within a month. In the summer of 1912, a couple of Adirondack papers ran a notice urging those “whom it may concern … in litigious possession of property in … Essex and Franklin Counties, belonging to the heirs of the late George T. Downing” to “procure clear titles by applying to the heirs who hold the original deeds.” But this legal notice was a formality. Somebody was clearing off his desk.⁴⁴

And so, we wheel back to 1854, the last year that Smith’s New York City agents urged the Smith grantees to pay their taxes and redeem their land, and the last time they spoke out publicly for Smith’s Adirondack initiative. Now and then, McCune Smith tipped his hat to the settlers in a column, proudly noting the several Black Adirondackers who “hold office in the gift of the people in Essex County,” or a “former boot-black … now … a self-relying farmer in Essex County.” But he would not take the prompt of the downstate reformer J. N. Still, who hoped he’d organize a gathering of Smith grantees at a World’s Fair in Brooklyn to revive public interest in the undersettled lands. “Shall such a good opportunity for sowing and reaping be allowed to pass?” Still asked. Yes, it would, and with no regrets. After 1854, McCune Smith and Ray launched no giveaway initiatives, called no meetings, and drafted no resolutions of support.⁴⁵

Lyman Eppes called this retreat neglect, and the Black land agents might not have disagreed, so great was their dismay at having parceled out so many deeds that were never put to use. But who in this new decade could say with confidence that more circulars and meetings would bring pioneers north to the woods? Between 1846 and 1854, the lot of Black New Yorkers had changed dramatically. Small towns and wild places in the backcountry that once seemed safe were now fraught with menace. And in the cities—Brooklyn, Albany, Syracuse—agents who once had time for Smith’s giveaway were now consumed with a looming crisis: namely, an influx of frantic fugitives needing shelter, sustenance, and guidance. A new political party that promised to do much more for Black rights than Smith’s pet party ever had was gaining prominence and power. (And in due time, Eppes himself would join the Republican Party, and never miss a vote.) The agents’ disengagement only mirrored, if much later, the example of the benefactor.

The grantee-settlers were on their own. Their few settlements would not grow, and their efforts would no longer be observed in the Black press. In a few years they had gone from exemplary to anomalous and perhaps even embarrassing, performers declaiming to an empty hall.

John Brown, their neighbor, adored the isolation of frontier life (the nearest neighbor two meadows and a sugar bush away, the blizzard swallowing the woodpile without a sound, a toppled headstone in the woods). The human puniness he felt in the woods was food for the soul. Living on the edge, waking to a brutally demanding world “where every thing you see reminds one of Omnipotence, and where if you do get your crops cut off once in a while, you will feel your dependence,” kept him humble, and any challenge that checked his vanity was a blessing. But his Black neighbors? Dependence—one way or another, on jobs they could not count on, landlords who overcharged, white voters who withheld the ballot—was what they came north to escape. And they hadn’t. Dependence—on a thieving storekeeper, sloppy surveyor, prying postmaster—dogged them still. Their dependence on the team of the late-arriving John Brown almost doomed them to starvation in 1849.⁴⁶

Their dependence on the false promise of Reverend Garnet’s “perfect system of agrarianism” would starve them, too, if they didn’t give it up. In these Adirondacks, the pioneers discovered, smart farmers improvised and scrambled, shoring up their fields with logging, guiding, teaming, and hiring out. Brown himself was no exemplar of a “perfect” self-sufficiency. Though one of the better farmers in the neighborhood, he still had to lean on wealthy city friends to keep his wife and family provisioned when he left for Kansas (and luckily, they all came through). Nor, it seems, did he pay Gerrit Smith the asking price for his farm near Timbuctoo. Smith forgave some or all of this outstanding bill.⁴⁷

But dependence, the grantees learned, was not always a liability. The pioneers may have felt marooned on what an Adirondack writer called the “Island of Northern New York,” but they could not fail to observe that isolation and discouragement were everybody’s portion. White neighbors had their own hard times. Whether friendly dealings between Blacks and whites were spawned by principles of racial justice or the cool prod of necessity was not, finally, as important as the outcome. The peculiar genius of frontier life was how it rustled people into common cause who might otherwise have kept their distance, and framed practical alliances firm enough to bear the weight of friendship and respect.⁴⁸