A Chain That Pulled Itself

Smith’s apostles were men of overlapping interests, one cause locked to the next like links on a chain, church to temperance, temperance to uplift, uplift to political empowerment and reform. Any one of these would suggest a reason to support Smith’s plan. But was this chain attached to something bigger or did it pull only its shiny self-regarding self? No systematic strategy directed the grantees’ recruitment. Congregants at Reverend Garnet’s Liberty Street Church in Troy likely heard about it in a sermon. Black seamen staying at the Colored Sailors’ Home on Pearl Street may have heard their innkeeper, William P. Powell, preach Black enfranchisement and the uses of the gift lots at Philomathean Hall. Families squatting in Cow Bay, a cul-de-sac in Manhattan’s notorious Five Points, likely got the news from Elder Ray, who, like Smith, kept a notebook for all the names he’d culled. Ray’s “Receipt Book” also noted street addresses, which tell a story all their own. Families of three grantees shared one home at 17 Sullivan, eleven more grantees and their families shared rooms in a tenement at 55–59 Mercer, and blocks on Chrystie, Leonard, Little Water, and Mulberry Streets were home to congested enclaves of grantees as well.⁷

Doors opened dutifully for Elder Ray. Did hearts? Only two months after Smith’s announcement, agents were observing how hard it was for them to recruit prospective farmers who took issue with Smith’s temperance clause. James Duffin, Smith’s agent in Geneva, was at his wit’s end. Black men, he wrote Smith, balked at being ordered to give up their daily dram of beer or cider. Worse (in his view), on learning that their drinking made them ineligible, they blamed not their own “evil propensities” but the agents’ “partiality and a desire to crush the poor.” Syracuse’s Loguen, Cortland County’s Ward, and Albany’s William Chaplin all struggled to find enough rock-hard temperance men to meet Smith’s quotas. Even the downstate agents faced a shortfall. But Smith would not retract or modify his policy. The intemperance his agents lamented seemed only to vindicate the wisdom of his antidrinking provision.⁸

Were Black New Yorkers who flunked Smith’s stringent standard of eligibility necessarily drunkards? Was this the only way to read their resistance? Smith and his agents’ preoccupation with intemperance may say less about the drinking habits of Black New Yorkers than about the agents’ ignorance of the population they wanted to recruit. While drunkenness may have been as rampant as Smith feared, there were reasons besides love of drink why free men of color might resent a temperance clause. Not everyone bought the adamantine logic that a sip of beer was as wicked as a full-tilt dive in a river of rye. The rigidity of temperance evangelism could not dispel considerable anecdotal evidence that showed a fellow could drink without getting drunk or helplessly addicted. If John Calvin’s saint-or-sinner absolutism struck a chord with the heirs of Cotton Mather and an elite cadre of Black reformers steeped in this tradition, it did not resonate with Black New Yorkers unimpressed with Yankee pieties. What did they care for temperance when so many white temperance activists cared so little about them? Exceptions notwithstanding (Gerrit Smith and Arthur Tappan among them), many white temperance zealots showed as little love for racial justice as those white artisans and mechanics who banned Black men from their confederated shops and trades. As Frederick Douglass reminded a Scottish audience in 1846, “Such is the prejudice against the coloured man, such the hatred, the contempt in which he is held, that no temperance society in the [United States] would so far jeopardize its popularity as to invite a coloured man to stand before them.”⁹

Temperance men said that abstinence on the job could boost business profits by one-fourth. Well and good for employers. Bottom-rung Black laborers did not register the gain. Temperance moralists declared that drink “inflamed the passions,” but it was not drunkenness that frightened them. It was the prospect of public sexuality and, specifically, the bogey of miscegenation. That’s what brought reformers to Uncle Pete William’s joint on Orange Street. In the shadows they stood appalled (yet mesmerized) while patrons whooped and jigged, and what Black New Yorker would not recognize the prurience in this?¹⁰

The bards of temperance sang the virtues of fresh cold water, that “drink divine.” Did they know how hard it was to get fresh water in the slums? In wine, wisdom; in beer, freedom; in water, bacteria—so Benjamin Franklin had observed. New Yorkers with access to a private source were set. Some piped clean water into their homes. Gerrit Smith drew his from a gravity-fed system that directed water from the Oriskany Stream to his own water tower. But no law forced a New York City landlord to plumb the ramshackle dwellings of the poor.¹¹

The social reformer Charles Loring Brace was not thinking of Black tavern-goers when he described the lure of a city saloon, but Black or white, the appeal of a defiantly masculine world of “jolly companions, a lighted and warmed room, a newspaper, and, above all, a draught which … can change poverty into riches, and drive [out] care and labor and the thought of all his burdens and annoyances” was the same. Wrote Brace, “The liquor shop is [the tavern-goers’] picture gallery, club, reading room, and social salon, at once. His glass is the magic transmuter, of care to cheerfulness, of penury to plenty, of a low, ignorant, worried life, to an existence for the moment buoyant, contented, and hopeful.” Gerrit Smith had his picture gallery, club, reading room, and salon—all the assets of a salon except for firewater—at home in Peterboro. Not needing to leave home to work, he could not know the dramshop’s sociable allure. As for the agents he had tapped to round up his grantees, when they craved a collegial space outside their day jobs and home, they had book clubs, suffrage meetings, and conventions. Not so the Black laborer, shuttling between the work site and a verminous dim room he almost surely shared with others. No books for him; if he knew how to read (not likely), there was no light to read by. He might have liked to pray, but churchgoing meant church dues he couldn’t pay. And who had leisure time for meetings? Breathing space, a refuge of his own, was a smoky low room with gritty floors, a few mates, a boy behind the bar who recalled your poison without being told.¹²

When James Duffin wrote Gerrit Smith that some Black men felt the temperance clause was nothing but another way “to crush the poor,” he did not probe their reasoning. Duffin saw temperance as the road to respectability; they saw a blithe repudiation of the one pleasure that poor men could afford, and the solace of a place, however shabby, where Black working men could unwind. Duffin saw common cause with an antislavery elect; they discerned a bourgeois club they didn’t know or trust. Their suspicions struck Duffin as so ungrateful he could only note the “evil propensities” of those who voiced them.

The prospect of the “cold ingratitude of colored men,” and poor Black men especially, troubled James McCune Smith too. As early as December 1846, he could guess that Smith’s gifts might not raise the robust response Smith expected; Smith, the doctor feared, might not know his “colored friends” quite as well as he supposed. “Have you prepared yourself?” he asked the land baron. Poor Black grantees who rode the “tide of wealth-worship” might hate a man who let wealth go.¹³

The doctor’s well-intentioned letter revealed more than he intended. He was worried. Would the grantees be sufficiently appreciative? Would they get that this was heaven sent? Would they assume their part? Gratitude, to this well-schooled uplift abolitionist, reflected civility, respect, and piety, good bourgeois Christian values all the agents shared. The grantees’ morality was different. Gratitude, for many, painfully invoked the entitled expectation of the slaveowner and the forced deference of the enslaved. The word right from the gate was loaded, racialized, and implicitly demeaning. What had it to do with the progress or failure of the giveaway? To suggest that grantees might spurn their gift lots not for a range of solid, thoughtful reasons but because they were predisposed to ingratitude—here was a judgment that spoke less of the grantees than of the land agent’s fearful worry about Black men behaving badly, a bias that hinted at a cultural rift between Smith’s helpers and his beneficiaries that would beleaguer the giveaway for years.

Building Up the List

By the end of 1846, Smith’s agents had identified two thousand Black men ready to become Adirondack deedholders, and received signed deeds from Smith’s Peterboro land office. Most of these proud, unlikely, new-made owners of wild land were from metropolitan New York. Recruiting the remaining thousand would take much longer. Over the next few years, the agents would need to shuffle and adjust their quotas to favor more responsive counties over those where interest in Smith’s plan was weak. The agents got a boost from friendly coverage in the Whig papers, and it surely helped that every one of Smith’s agents worked or wrote for the abolition press: Garnet, Bailey, Chaplin, Ray, and Ward were newspaper publishers and editors; Wright, Loguen, and McCune Smith, columnists; Loguen, Ray, and Ward, drummers for subscriptions. Topp, McCune Smith, and Chaplin advertised in abolition papers for their businesses or shops. Further, among the loyal readers of these plain-printed broadsheets were publishers of other papers hunting for good copy: a piece about a Troy grantees’ meeting in the Albany Patriot would be picked up by the Cortland True American and Milwaukee’s American Freeman. What a New York City paper, the Ram’s Horn, had to say about grantees forming bands to venture north was grist for Rochester’s North Star. The urban editors Frederick Douglass, Stephen Myers, and Willis Hodges were not land agents by invitation, but they did the work of agents, and sometimes more.¹⁴

Others who pitched in: William P. Powell of the Colored Seaman’s Home in Manhattan vouched for sailors hungering for land (and when McCune Smith visited the Smith Lands in 1849, his friend Powell went with him). In Ray’s private “Receipt Book” of city grantees, Powell vouched for eight good men he knew. A Flushing farmer, Jonathan Mingo, “stood” for twenty hopeful deedholders; a city cartman, Anthony Provost, signed for six. The cohort of grantees who could not write their names was hefty: in Ray’s notebook, some five hundred men flagged their desire for a gift lot with a hard X dropped into the middle of their names, as in John “X” Dixon of 45 Anthony Street, or Henry “X” Butler of 7 Thomas Street. Almost half of Staten Island’s twenty-nine grantees signed with Xs. Their wives signed for them too. These middlemen weren’t necessarily more literate than the grantees they brought on board. (Provost, also represented in this notebook as Pervost, Prevost, and Prevolt, signed with an X.) What made their word good was a track record of political engagement at conventions, church rallies, and petition drives. The official agents trusted them to make smart picks.¹⁵

Black agents also prospected among their comrades in reform; hence the many uplift men whose names spangled the long list. Some of these were from New York City, like Charles Reason, a multilingual professor of belles lettres, his gifted brother Patrick, an engraver, Alexander Crummell, Garnet’s old school friend and a published theologian, and Rev. James W. C. Pennington, author, educator, and founder of the first Black missionary society. Buffalo’s pages included the barber, poet, and emigrationist James M. Whitfield, and among several Elmirans was the esteemed Baptist sexton John W. Jones, an organizer of his town’s Underground Railroad. It was unlikely these men asked for deeds because they planned to farm, but there were other reasons to participate. They could reward the good faith of a white ally, endorse a strategy for equal voting rights, and hope their sudden slice of wilderness would prove a usable investment.

White admirers of Gerrit Smith also volunteered the names of prospects. In Rochester, Smith’s friend the attorney Samuel Porter filled a page. The printer E. M. Griffing of Little Falls vouched for three “honest, industrious and sober” candidates, “and the quicker the better,” he wrote Smith; his men “would go right upon the lands, if they had it, and undertake the getting in of Corn and Potato crops.” A Delaware County farmer, Street Dutton, put in a word for four “worthy Industrious good Citizens,” and when Reverend Garnet needed names from Montgomery County, the Canajoharie merchant, John Snell, helped him out. In Washington County near Vermont, Dr. Hiram Corliss distributed Smith’s deeds to all of the grantees in his district and advised Smith to take note of Avery Hazzard, the grantee-settler whose surname threads this story from first to last. The giveaway had white friends in the villages of Holley, Cherry Valley, Oneida Castle, and Union Village, and in Middlebury, Vermont. Even the Berkshire County Whig gave it a plug.¹⁶

Perhaps the meager contribution of Smith’s white agents (as distinct from other white volunteers) was predictable. Their knowledge of the Black communities in their territories was thin, and for all their wish to please the great philanthropist, they may not have privileged Black voting rights over other work. Abolition, an end to slavery—was the battle that compelled, and the link between abolition and equal suffrage that glowed so hotly for Smith was a dimmer light for them. Fugitives were one thing; for the freedom seeker these white reformers would preach, petition, endure death threats and prison. In Washington, DC, in 1850, Chaplin spent five months in jail when he got caught helping the escaping slaves of a Georgia congressmen. Utica’s Alfred H. Hunt and George Lawson, as well as Albany’s Nathaniel Safford, were all Liberty men. Wesley Bailey’s Liberty Press was the leading abolition paper in central New York. But Black voting rights were not their cause, and their interest only went so far. “We have made all possible inquiry but have been able to find only a very few out of this city [Albany] that seemed trustworthy—I have not yet been able to get a name either from Warren or Franklin County,” William Chaplin sighed in November 1846.¹⁷

“God Bless Mr. Smith and All the Smiths”

When Smith made his last entry in his private inventory of grantees in 1853, he could take credit for something utterly unprecedented: a midcentury directory of virtually every Black reformer in New York State. Single causes like Black enfranchisement, uplift, abolition, and temperance may have generated sheaves of names as well, but nothing this inclusive and diversified. At issue was a time-specific land settlement proposal that offered a kind of paper commons for reformers of all stripes—emigrationists, anticolonizationists, authors of influential slave narratives, charismatic orators, suffrage lobbyists and moral suasion ideologues, abolition church dissenters, affiliated church officers—and all these names mingling with several thousand Black New Yorkers with no activist pedigree at all. For in Smith’s Land Book, front-row reformers did not preside. The some five hundred city deedholders who signed their names with an X in Ray’s Receipt Book were no more or less worthy of a deed than the physician McCune Smith. This is not to overstate class differences among free Black New Yorkers, where the rift between the manual laborer and an aspiring bourgeois could be no wider than a crack. The grantee Philip Bell may have run an employment office for Black domestics and coedited the nation’s leading Black newspaper, but he also peddled coal. Both Reverend Pennington and Dr. McCune Smith were blacksmiths before they took up middle-class careers, and if McCune Smith read three languages, he and his neighborhood chimney sweep still shared a legacy of enslavement and endured the daily slap of bigotry. But putting up with racists was shared ground for despair; Smith’s proposition offered a common ground for joy. Free land was part of it, of course, but so was the pride of membership in a picked fraternity of deedholders that put bootblack and professor, cartman and minister, on one level. With these deeds, the commonality of deprivation bloomed into its opposite—a hope of economic opportunity, a route to equal rights.

When the giveaway was publicized in the fall of 1846, delegates to Black conventions, large and small, saluted Gerrit Smith. At the invitation of Smith’s central New York land agents, Black men from nine central New York counties thronged a “Grand Convention of Gerrit Smith’s Grantees” in mid-December, in Ithaca. That month, too, grantees convened in Troy, Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Westchester. Their mood, reported McCune Smith, was hugely eager, emboldening him to chide his Peterboro friend for not venturing “to see a gathering of the grantees… . Tall, stalwart, hard-fisted, they embody a Hope of the Race.”¹⁸

In October of that year, with the Albany Patriot reporting, Troy grantees at Reverend Garnet’s Liberty Street Church raised a cheer to the benefactor they had not met. William Jones, a Troy grantee with a talent for the stump, declared that God “had opened a way for many, by touching the heart of Mr. Smith. Shame on the human who will not improve the opportunity.” Once, Jones said, he used to “drive the carriage of an old drunken slaveholder.” No more! “Soon I hope to drive my own team, and lead my own horse to water.” Once, Jones was “compelled to clear up ten acres for another, and do other work, and get thumped in the bargain.” No longer! “When I reach my little farm, with my liberty axe I expect to clear up fifteen acres annually.” Thanks to his new deed, swore Jones, “I will cut down my own tree—build my own cabin—plant my own grain—eat the fruit of my own stall.” And then, in a remark likely meant for this group only, Jones confessed, “I have received so much abuse from white people that once I thought all were my enemies.” Gerrit Smith proved him wrong. “God bless Mr. Smith and all the Smiths.” To the cheers of fellow Trojans, Jones exhorted, “Come off from the steamboats—leave your barber shops—leave the kitchen, where you have to live under ground all day and climb up ten pairs of stairs at night” (a scenario so recognizable, it brought down the house). “Tomorrow,” this ex-slave promised, “I intend to leave for Essex County to see for myself.”¹⁹

More meetings in 1847 ginned up good press for the giveaway. In March, the grantees of Monroe County gave thanks to their benefactor, and in May, the American Anti-slavery Society hailed Smith’s “munificent gifts of land” in the National Era. But much of what was done that year was the quiet, unsung work of agents: identifying qualified grantees, getting signatures, and sending names (“these presents,” Ray and McCune Smith called them) to Peterboro. And in July, Charles Ray did more. He headed north to Essex County to see his new land for himself—his, and the new lot, too, of his friend and fellow agent James McCune Smith.²⁰

Was his mood a little anxious? The Black minister, traveling alone, had no contacts in this wild place. But Smith’s land office had armed him with a note of introduction to ease his arrival and make sure his guide would be a good one, and the North Elba innkeeper Iddo Osgood was better than good. He knew this country cold. He had come to Essex County from New Hampshire forty years before, and when other settlers grew discouraged, he stayed put. Not even the catastrophe of 1816 discouraged him. In that infamous year, a volcano in the Indian Ocean dressed half the planet in a shawl of ash, including everything between the Atlantic and the Great Lakes, and nothing ripened and there was no food. Most of Elba’s ruined pioneers (only at midcentury would this hamlet gain its full name) slogged back to New England. But Deacon Osgood looked ahead. He took over old abandoned farms, opened up an inn, and sometimes agented for Gerrit Smith, whose antislavery beliefs he shared. He knew the gift lots well.²¹

Ray’s and McCune Smith’s lots were wretched—thinly soiled, rocky, hilly, and facing coldly north. But Ray’s dismay was Osgood’s inspiration. After conferring with his neighbors, Osgood expressed to Ray “a strong desire that we should settle … in the center of the settlement … out of their regard and wish for our professional services (being in need of a clergyman and Doctor).” Ray did not expect this invitation. It moved him deeply, as it would his friend the doctor when Ray, back in the city, filled him in. The land lot that Osgood was urging them to pursue was near a road, with a wide stream running diagonally across it, the start of a sugar bush, and a swampy part that promised springs. Writing Gerrit Smith about everything Ray had reported, McCune Smith asked that his and Ray’s hillside lots be swapped for the better piece near Osgood, and then described another lot they might like to buy as well. Nothing in this letter conveyed any information about the settlers on their land. Maybe what Ray found on that front was too paltry or distressing to report, or perhaps he (or the physician) was distracted by the bounty of Osgood’s warm suggestion. Real news about the welfare of the Black grantees would have to wait for the Syracuse land agent, Rev. Jermain Wesley Loguen, who toured the Black Woods in September. His report, published in the North Star, would tell a very different story.²²

“For Want of a Well Digested Plan”

As it worked out, neither minister nor physician ever moved to their North Elba land, or to the other lots Smith gave them in Peterboro and Oneida County’s Florence. City challenges—their day jobs, charities, Black uplift work, public service, and now, their labor for the giveaway—claimed every waking hour. Vetting grantees was slow going, and they were late getting Smith their lists. And in 1847 and increasingly in 1848, Smith, too, was distracted, all thoughts and worries now directed at the rapid-changing politics of his beloved Liberty Party, increasingly beset with warring factions. At issue was the platform: some abolitionists wanted a program more diversified and electable. Others, more traditional, felt the party should stick with antislavery work alone. Conciliation was Smith’s strength, but in this case he got nowhere, and his failure in this instance was a blow. He was slow to answer letters from his land agents and slow to send them back completed deeds, and he may have even allowed himself to wonder why he was bothering to build a new Black antislavery voting bloc when the party he hoped his Black grantees would back (hoped, never insisted) was bickering itself right off the ballot.²³

Perhaps the bleakest revelation of Smith’s mood in this spell was a letter he wrote Charles Ray when he received the formal resolutions of thanks for his philanthropy from delegates to the National Convention of Colored People in Troy, October 1847. These praiseful sentences, penned by Manhattan’s Ray and Willis A. Hodges from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, not only thanked Smith but discerned in the “God-Send” of Smith’s land gifts “a Divine Providence directing our people to this mode of life as well as opening the way to it.” They urged the deedholders to leave their cities, settle on their land, start farming, “and hereby build a tower of strength for themselves.” But another resolution made clear that Smith’s gift was one option among many. If deedholders could not head north, they could still “forsake the cities … and emigrate to those parts of the country where land is cheap, and become cultivators of the soil, as the surest road to respectability and influence.”

Were Smith’s Black allies already hedging bets, guessing the big plan might fail? If so, Smith’s gloomy answer brought no comfort. But for a curt acknowledgment of the “twenty or thirty” grantees who had “comfortably settled” on their land, he did not mention the giveaway at all, except to suggest that its failure to progress was yet another measure of the Black community’s inability to act in its own interest. And why was this? Why had so few grantees left the city? Why were Black leaders so slow to join the Liberty Party? Why did they stick with mainstream denominations that would not come out against the slave power? One thing only could explain it: “The free colored people of this country have lost their self-respect.” It took self-respect, self-faith, to break ranks with a culture that held you in contempt. The lack of it explained a raft of self-destructive choices Black New Yorkers made and just kept making, and Smith confessed the “gravest doubt of their redemption.”²⁴

That the better-known Black and antislavery papers chose not to run this screed is hardly a surprise. What is surprising is Smith’s evident impatience when so much of his land had yet to be distributed. He did not entertain the possibility that Black “self-respect” might be reflected in choices that displeased him, or that not moving to their gift lots was, for many impoverished deedholders, an informed choice. His implicit disavowal of Black agency said much less about the grantees than it did about his own ignorance of Black concerns. And the fact was, even as he vented, Black agency was being fervently, and multiply, expressed.

Not only were most grantees not streaming to the Promised Land up north, but Black entrepreneurs were hatching settlement proposals of their own, looking for investors and affordable raw land, and lightly patterning their plans on Smith’s. There was the Florence Association, the St. Lawrence Anti-slavery and Land Company, and the Temperance and Slavery Land Committee. The first of these sprang up in 1846, and three years later, they were still sprouting, thick as weeds.

Smith’s old ally Lewis Tappan, the abolitionist businessman in Manhattan, implored the land baron to look sharp. Things were getting very messy. “Some of the leading men of color put their names to these projects—and even to those of a contradictory character. I am very fearful,” Tappan confessed, “that for want of a well digested plan and able executive men, disaster will befall your beneficiaries. Instead of them accomplishing anything beneficial to themselves & families, I fear many will lose their land.” Tappan’s sources? None other than Smith’s own city agents. (Tappan’s Broadway office was their mail drop for Peterboro.)²⁵

Tappan was especially worried about the absence of a head man. “There seems to be no leading [friend] among [the grantees] who has practical knowledge of agriculture, and the best mode of proceeding to make your generous gifts availing,” he wrote Smith on April 15, 1848. And reports of these other unvetted, pop-up, half-cocked emigration parties were the last thing the Black Woods needed. What it did need, and at once, was “an experienced farmer … to go upon the ground and instruct the owners of the little farms in clearing and practical agriculture.” Then “a sufficient sum could be raised to purchase cattle, agricultural implements, feed, etc.” Reports of “what seems to be the incompetency of the owners of the land to go forward and convert it into little farms that will give them a living” had Tappan very worried.²⁶

Smith may have settled Tappan’s jitters with news of a recent meeting with a farmer-abolitionist, John Brown, whose plan to help the homesteaders in Essex County’s Township 12 offered a partial answer to Tappan’s prayers. But what the new colony proposals revealed was much more than the need for a leader for the grantees. Ray and Hodges had been right to hedge their bets about the gift lands at the 1847 convention: things weren’t going according to Smith’s plan because not everybody liked the plan. Some Black people wanted to pick or buy their own land. They wanted women in on it, or out-of-staters, and maybe fugitives as well. Some didn’t care for handouts. They didn’t share Smith’s politics. They didn’t like his rules. They wanted something more their own.