Chapter 5
On Fat Lands under Genial Suns
In 1818, Gerrit Smith, not a half year out of college, bought an eighteen-thousand-acre upland tract in Tug Hill, Oneida County, to the west of the Adirondacks in what, before the American Revolution, had been the hunting territory of the Iroquois. Tug Hill was worse than raw. Every winter, cold winds whipping off Lake Ontario dumped enough snow on this high plateau to give Tug Hill the highest average snowfall in the country east of the Rocky Mountains. The soil here, thin, sandy, and rock cobbled, was no bargain either.1
This was Smith’s first outing as a land baron. Some were sure he’d rue the day. But the Florence township had its charms. Dense stands of hemlock ranged as far as the horizon, boding well for tanneries, and if wheat failed to flourish, sheep would claim a home on wild land just cleared. The freshman speculator underwrote Florence’s first church. He gave new settlers a cemetery lot and subsidized a blacksmith, gristmill, and village store. He recruited skilled mechanics. By the mid-1840s, these investments were paying off. Here were asheries and sawmills, and the prospect of emerging markets thanks to roads that led to Utica and Rome, and the Erie and Oswego Canals, which opened in 1825 and 1828.2
In 1846 and 1847, Smith parceled out Florence lots to some two dozen Black grantees. He did this, too, with lots of his in Fulton, Delaware, and Genesee Counties. Five lots here, ten lots there—he was whisking out crumbs. He did not have the same expectations for these gifts that he had for the Black Woods. On the contrary, a Black settlement in Florence, a town already mapped and tamed, was all wrong for what he had in mind—too done, too “found,” no kind of tough, transforming proving ground for Frederick Douglass’s “sable-armed pioneer” and his long-handled, busy axe.3
To one Albany grantee, however, Florence’s difference from the Adirondacks was the very thing that recommended it. Not that Stephen Myers, an antislavery reformer and suffrage activist, ever meant to move there. Albany was home. Gainful employment was no bitter hardship for this “indefatigable” multitasker (the adjective was Frederick Douglass’s). Steamboat captains wanted him to steward, wealthy clients to cater, fine restaurants to wait tables in high style. His newspapers (too many to name) always seemed to have their backers, and antislavery members of the state assembly respected him as well. Myers and his wife, Harriet, had made this city’s Underground Railroad operation the most efficient and effective one north of New York. Even the Charleston Mercury joylessly acknowledged Stephen Myers’s impact.4
Why had Gerrit Smith not made this Albanian a land agent? Myers was well connected; he would have gotten all his names. But he made Smith uneasy. He was a maverick—an antislavery activist who steered clear of the Liberty Party and sometimes worked with Whigs. Smith told Henry Highland Garnet he found Myers’s politics “truckling,” and he had no love for Myers’s irrepressible newssheets either—among them, the Elevator, the Telegraph and Temperance Journal, and the vexingly successful Northern Star and Freemen’s Advocate. The last of these was the rag that published the 1846 appeal from Black suffrage activists urging Smith to back a Whig-Liberty alliance for the Constitutional Convention. This was an unhappy memory for Smith, and it was made worse when Horace Greeley reprinted these activists’ appeal in the Tribune. Smith’s memory was long.5
Still, in the name of an impartial inclusivity, Smith made Myers a giftee, giving the Albanian a thirty-seven-acre lot in Florence. And Myers, learning of several Albany friends who got Florence land as well, discerned an opportunity. Guessing that this already established village in Tug Hill had some assets that the Adirondack wilderness did not, he broke his gift piece into quarter-acre lots for buyers who liked to keep their neighbors close, their farms and woodlots at their settlement’s perimeter. The first meetings with prospective investors were in the late fall of 1846. Myers talked up Florence in Albany and Stockbridge, Massachusetts (a town known to him from temperance visits). Interested parties were urged to scout for emigrants beyond New York in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and Bridgeport and New Milford, Connecticut. Unlike Smith, Myers was reaching wide and going public as fast as he could manage, and making sure that every meeting got some coverage. By January 1849, newspapers from Wisconsin to Louisiana were running versions of his eager dispatch, “Gerrit Smith’s Colored Settlement in Florence,” with its bold plans for grist- and sawmills and an almost finished dormitory for a slew of new arrivals to live in while they put up their cabins, school, and church.6
Myers also worked hard and fast to win regional and local buy-in for his project. On December 21, 1848, he spoke about his high hopes for the Florence Farming and Lumber Association to an audience of locals, and made quite a “very favorable impression,” one attendee wrote Gerrit Smith. The next week Myers was in Utica; he and the Black minister James Fountain, a Smith grantee, held forth for ninety minutes. Two months later, Myers unveiled his plan in New Bedford, Massachusetts (in the audience, the Boston reformer William Wells Brown listened closely and heartily approved). While a blizzard raged outside the Congregational church in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Myers spoke for hours.7
And always, he took pains to clarify that he and Gerrit Smith were not competing. On the contrary, his aim was to build on Smith’s idea. The out-of-staters he was bringing to New York would help the cause of equal suffrage everywhere. “Every colored man of Massachusetts who is a lover of political equality,” he said, will recognize his “political duty … to emigrate to [the] settlement … and join hands with their colored brethren of [New York] to break down … prejudices and political inequalities.” His praise for the giveaway and Smith’s Black Woods was warm. “We bid them God speed in their enterprise,” he wrote of grantees he met in the Hudson River Valley who were planning to move onto their land. He hoped “their industry will be rewarded by the speedy possession of a comfortable home.” Three Black newspapers published these remarks.8
But if Myers was hoping for Smith’s blessing in return, he would be disappointed. And when he intimated to reporters that Smith was an interested party, he pushed his luck too hard. Thanks be to Smith, said Myers in Pittsfield, for “appropriating certain amounts of land to the colored people of the State of New York, and the avenue which he has opened to the colored men of other States to come out and purchase, thereby forming among themselves a UNION.” And thanks again, he offered in New Bedford, for “the prospect opened to us by the benevolence of that great-hearted man, Gerrit Smith, in the gift lands, and those offered at such low prices, urging upon us to avail ourselves of this opportunity to purchase lands—occupy them—engage in farming …” He called his project “Gerrit Smith’s Florence Settlement,” pronounced “Florence … a favorite town of Mr. Gerrit Smith,” and called his company’s acreage “Smith Lands.” He made the Smith name pay. Framed as a Gerrit Smith production and backed (said Myers) by powerful and wealthy white men like New York’s Governor Hamilton Fish and Vice President Millard Fillmore, the Florence name ranged wide. In Wisconsin, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Louisiana, North Carolina, and Georgia, people read of “Gerrit Smith’s Colored Settlement in Florence, New York … now in full progress.” This was a mistake.9
Though antislavery papers still covered the progress of the Black Woods to the north, in the mainstream press it seemed that this brash, unauthorized Florence colony was hogging all the ink! Smith’s own agents were beguiled. Five of them, by January 1849, were soliciting donations for the Florence project, and Frederick Douglass had good words for it as well. Cortland’s Samuel Ringgold Ward was pushing it in the Northern Star and Colored Farmer and its successor, the Impartial Citizen; William Topp, Smith’s land agent in Albany, was all in, too. Myers had a new paper, the Florence Telegraph, talking up his plan. Even Greeley noted it. Why stop at Florence? he offered in the Tribune. Black New Yorkers “might club their means and buy a whole County in Iowa or Michigan, each man owning what he paid for … under a general agreement to sell only to men of their own race… . Such a colony would do more for the Race than any amount of ill-advised philanthropy.” He didn’t bother identifying the philanthropist. Anyone who shared his smirk would know.10
As Did the Israelites in the Desert
Myers’s Florence colony registered the first blow in January 1849, when Myers’s friend and ally, Rev. Samuel Ward, was preparing to address the New York State Assembly. Myers rather wonderfully had managed to secure a speaker’s slot for the eloquent agrarian; Ward had fully ninety minutes to talk up Florence and the value of Black husbandry. Myers, thrilled, flagged the coming speech in the Northern Star and Colored Farmer. He also named the assemblymen who hoped and failed to block the speaker, deeming them “political demagogues.” Two words! But when this column was read to the assembly, the Democrats pounced hard. The speech was canceled. And just like that, a first-ever opportunity to introduce white lawmakers to Black agrarian reform was crushed. It would not be revived.11
This was bad, and February delivered worse news still. The same North Star that described the eager turnout for Myers’s Florence talk in New Bedford, Massachusetts, included a letter from the antislavery activist Henry Bibb. On a speaking tour in western New York, this Smith grantee had paid Florence a visit. What he found fell far short of anything he’d read. This “humbug,” he wrote Frederick Douglass, will “doubtless do great injury to the anti-slavery cause if it is not exposed… . Be on your guard.” Bibb had never offered his letter for publication. Douglass ran it anyway. In the Impartial Citizen, an outraged Samuel Ward charged Douglass with crediting “mere innuendoes”; in the North Star, the Florence Farming Association threatened to sue the rattled Bibb for libel.12
And through all of this—Myers’s first eager trips to Florence, and the great bloom of press about the Florence Settlement in early January—Peterboro said nothing. But after Bibb’s revelation of a “humbug,” the gavel finally dropped. “There is a strong disposition in some quarters to have the colored people purchase the lands which I have left in Florence,” Gerrit Smith wrote the North Star. “But these lands are of very moderate fertility, are not favorably situated, and are held by my agent, who resides in that town, at prices probably quite equal to their value.” In other words, no bargain here, so “why should the colored people buy them?” It is one thing, argued Smith, for Black people to move to land they get for free, “even if it is of inferior value, as are most of the lands which I have given to them. But, when the colored people buy lands, and especially at their full value, I think they should buy such as are fertile, easy of cultivation, and advantageously situated.”13
Smith’s note was shrewdly parsed. He did not invoke Bibb’s concern. He did not mention Stephen Myers; he would not stoop to scold. But Myers was his target. If you buy this land, his note implied, you waste your money. Best keep your savings and stick with land you get for free—from me. Not from a brash pretender who suggests an intimacy with me he doesn’t have, affects a knowledge of my land he doesn’t possess, and inflates the value of my property beyond its worth.
And now Frederick Douglass, “undeceived,” yanked his backing, offering by way of reasons “the wildness of the country, the infertility of the lands, the distance and the difficulties of the way to market, and the entire absence of water power.” In the Impartial Citizen, the chastened Samuel Ward beat a retreat as well: “Inasmuch as arrangements are made for a settlement in Florence, we have no disposition to disparage it,” yet!—“we should not have counseled the settlement of a village in that part of the State. There are cheaper and better lands in the Counties of Tioga and Allegheny.” Then, the feisty Ram’s Horn took a potshot at Myers, “who has put himself at the head and front of this splendid humbug.” Douglass reinforced his disavowal when he urged prospective Florentines to recall that the Albany promoter was “a deeply interested party,” a front man for a pack of speculators (though who they were, Douglass never said).14
Stephen Myers. Drawing. Melissa Moshetti, 2020. Commissioned by the National Abolition Hall of Fame and Museum, Peterboro, NY. Courtesy of the NAHFM.
Enter Levin Tilmon, a Black minister who had heard Stephen Myers speak in New Bedford. To the North Star, he complained, Enough! “Though our means are various, let our aims be the same. Let us not fall out by the way, as did the Israelites in the desert.” The Florence plan made room for out-of-state settlers who weren’t eligible for Smith’s free land to the north. Why not accommodate their interest (and gain new Black voters in the process)? Perhaps Douglass, a loyal advocate of Adirondack pioneering, was “not disposed to favor the Florence enterprise”—but why malign a fresh idea? Look at the map, the numbers. Here was booming Oneida County, with twice the population of Essex and Franklin Counties and growing all the time. Look at “its large and flourishing towns,” its roads, waterways, and rail lines. “Why … throw obstacles in its way?”15
Myers, for his part, was equally bewildered. He had never said the land was first-rate farmland. He had represented it as “a heavily timbered country, stony soil, good oats and corn,” and also “good for grazing.” Local farmers had assured him that “cleared land” could “realize from twenty-five to fifty dollars per acre,” and Myers always said it would be two years before a farmer could turn a profit. Hence his emphasis on “forming a village, so as to get up an enterprising spirit.” As for rumors about profiteering backstage speculators, Myers had given Douglass accounts of his group’s meetings, which Douglass “might have published” and had not. “Your object is not to destroy the influence of good men,” Myers remonstrated. But his point did raise the question: why were Douglass and Gerrit Smith so dismissive of his plan?16
Myers Packs It In
Stephen Myers stuck with the Florence project through the spring and into that summer. In late May 1849, when sixty-two pioneers from Massachusetts detrained in Albany, he and a reporter from the Albany Argus welcomed these “mainly hearty, robust looking persons” to New York. But the emigrants’ enthusiasm would not survive the shock of Florence’s manifold deficiencies. By midsummer, Daniel Dorrance, Smith’s land agent, would report that half of them were gone. The management of the colony passed from Myers to Rev. Daniel H. Peterson, a minister from nearby Rome. As Myers had before him, Peterson scrupulously lauded white people in Florence and nearby settlements for their openhanded hospitality, and Dorrance “for his kindness to the settlers, and his exertions to promote the interests of the Association.” Thanks were also offered to those New Englanders who sent a pitchfork, shovel, Sunday school supplies, and plow. Peterson’s good manners would not keep Florence in the news, however. With Myers out, the North Star lost all interest. And Myers, for his part, back in Albany and stumping for Black suffrage, Free Soil, and temperance, looked strictly ahead. On August 18, 1851, the Oneida County sheriff seized Myers’s Florence gift lot for back taxes. It was auctioned off October 8 in a Utica hotel.17
Maybe Myers had to quit. His blunders had been careless. Overstating Smith’s interest was misleading; prophesying a six-hundred-family influx, grandiose; and failing to make timely payments to Elder Fuller, the local builder of the Emigrant House, impolitic and hurtful. But before the rush to judgment, let’s recall what Myers got right. He planned an exodus from city to country down to the lot lines, masterminded the mostly very warm publicity, spurred the interest of scores of homesteaders, and responded to his critics. Further, he encouraged the new emigrants to come in groups, not singly, so they would be inclined to work together on their arrival, and he cultivated local buy-in for the colony well before the colonists arrived. None of this had happened in the Black Woods to the north. And if Myers indulged, as Smith had not, a cultural preference among Black emigrants for a cohesive, familial, recognizable community over isolated freeholds in the wild, what was this but just smart marketing?18
Had Smith ever thought to build a boardinghouse for newly arrived North Elba settlers, as Myers aimed to do in Florence? He might have done. It might have helped. With more clarity than any of Smith’s agents, Myers articulated the link between land ownership and voting rights and, as Smith’s agents never did, observed that the voteless plight of Black New Yorkers was the rightful business of Black people in every state. And what difference did it make, really, if land was bought or gifted when land ownership, however managed, advanced Black enfranchisement? What Smith dismissed as an unaffordable distraction from the gift land in the North, Myers deemed an act of political solidarity. (Even McCune Smith would eventually urge Smith to consider an “enlargement” of the target area for the recruitment of Black grantees to a few “adjoining states”—not to populate Myers’s colony in particular but for the sake of agrarian enfranchisement overall.) There was more than one way to skin this cat, as Reverend Tilmon had observed.19
Smith’s longtime Florence land agent, Daniel Dorrance, faulted Myers for selling settlers plots half a mile from a water source. But that’s where Myers’s gift lot was; he began with what he had. Smith worked with what he had, too, giving grantees Adirondack land that was underwater, on mountaintops, or devastated by flood and fire, and figuring his grantees would trade up as they needed. Myers banked on this as well, and guessed that as the colony evolved, more and better land would be procured. Myers promised an influx of six hundred. He wound up with fifty families. Well, so did the Black Woods, with its head start of three thousand grantees, twelve agents, newspaper endorsements, conferences, and meetings all over the state. And as with the Black Woods, most of those fifty families would peel away. But not all. As late as 1860, several dozen Black people were still residents of Florence. The remains of their settlement have been identified by a dogged zealot for this story, the history teacher Jessica Harney of Rome, New York, working with the Albany archaeologist Mark Kirk. So much for Myers’s “humbug.” Orphaned and derided, Florence nonetheless apparently endured.20
A Gift Defiled
Gerrit Smith liked giving things away, but he did not care to see his gifts used in ways he thought were wasteful, inappropriate, or counter to his goals. And while he anticipated uses for the gift land beyond farming (he knew that some grantees would keep it for its timber value, or bequeath it to their children, sell it, see it seized for taxes, or retain it for the vote), he did not imagine deedholders following his lead and speculating on their own. Speculation was his department, and the business of his several land dealers and secretaries. As close as he was to James McCune Smith and Frederick Douglass, he shared with them few details of this day job. To fellow abolitionists, he cast himself as inadvertent heir to a land fortune he never made or asked for—less a land baron than, as his antislavery friend Samuel May put it, a “steward who would have to give an account of the estate entrusted to his care.” Liberty Party allies who read his 1845 diary in the Albany Patriot about touring northern New York met a country mapped by pockets of reform and reaction, not by news of auctions, land sales, and rent collection on the road. And when Smith referenced his estate in his third-person midlife autobiography, he did not mention the hundreds of thousands of acres he had bought, managed, and sold over his career, preferring to describe his holdings in terms of his inheritance, his youthful purchases, and his forays into “practical Land Reform.”21
Yet he was not a hypocrite. What other land baron in his time worked so doggedly, both before and after debts were paid, to give away his land? Far from taking pride in owning land in almost every county in the state, he offered that he would “count it a good bargain” if he could “exchange all the scraps and remnants of my father’s wild tracts for five farms, or even three.” Nothing, he wrote in 1848, could be “more obvious to him who will reflect upon it than that the right of every person to the soil is perfect—as perfect as to the sea, the light, the air.” In 1849, Smith gave away a thousand deeds to poor white New Yorkers, men and women both, then revised the plan so that female beneficiaries could get their gifts in cash and so buy land they actually might want. His land gifts expressed the same adaptive millenarianism that fired his antislavery sermons, emancipatory purchases of slaves, and political abolitionism. Each project promised to accelerate a ready-for-redemption world. And if, in striving for the world’s perfection, Smith won some measure of redemption for himself, so much the better.22
But with stakes as high as these, he did want things his way. The script was his to write, and at its heart was the idea that the gifted land grants remain gifted. Once a gift entered the marketplace, the sacred trust was broken. In his book The Gift, the poet-essayist Lewis Hyde explains this with a metaphor: “When gifts are sold, they change their nature as much as water changes when it freezes, and no rationalist telling of the constant elemental structure can replace the feeling that is lost.” The sweetness of Smith’s “scheme of benevolence” was that it eschewed the marketplace for the fluid realm of giving. No cash or contract, rent or mounting interest. Smith wanted to decant his wealth, to let it go as freely as his Redeemer sowed His blessings.23
So, what to do with Stephen Myers and his pretty map, his sales plan, his rumored (and possibly exaggerated) Whig backers? (For Myers never did say whether they gave him money or merely met his pitch outside a legislative chamber with a vague smile and a keep-us-posted nod.) What to do when Myers took a gift and carved it into stamp-sized parcels and yanked the whole benevolent affair down to a speculator’s hustle? Had Smith given away land so that Myers might profit? Even deedholders who never settled on their land but kept it as an investment honored the giveaway’s core values; their respect for economy kept the spirit of the gift alive, kept it generous and loving (as would Smith’s city agents when they described the grantees’ names they sent to Smith as “presents”). Smith could not see how a profit-seeking project and a “scheme of justice and benevolence” might work toward the same end. Myers was mixing up the gift land with the sale land to turn a profit. He was making a big mess.24
Admirers or Copycats?
Well, there were a lot of messes. But the others mostly collapsed under the weight of their ineptitude and overblown ambition. There was a land proposal from five Albanians, all Smith grantees, who hoped the land baron would sell them a 75,000-acre parcel in St. Lawrence County in 1846 (part of the 350,000-acre sale Smith was advertising that same summer at fire sale prices). The Albanians’ idea was to bust it into sale lots of one hundred to two hundred acres, but first Smith would need to take the parcel off the market while they raised the money to buy it. Since Smith held no land without an advance payment, that was the end of that.25
Also in the fall of 1846, George W. B. Wilson, a seaman and a Smith grantee in New York City, went to Peterboro to pique Smith’s interest in a land company that had its eye on Smith’s St. Lawrence County sale land rolling between Franklin County toward Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River. Smith liked Wilson, and he liked the New York Emigration Association’s constitution. But here, again, the directors wanted Smith to take sale land out of play while they raised funds to buy it. Smith would not oblige. “The rule of my [Land] Office,” Smith said, “is to reserve lands for no one… . To refuse to sell when persons offer to comply with these terms is to falsify my word.” Worse for Smith, the company’s head spokesman, Thomas Van Rensselaer, boasted in the Ram’s Horn that Gerrit Smith was his land company’s “originator.” Smith was livid. “That statement will give rise to the remark that I am endeavoring to make money out of my colored brethren.” Van Rensselaer stepped back.26
More credible was a proposal from a third group, also city based, among whose stockholders were Black reformers Smith quite admired. In addition to his old friend, the antiemigrationist activist and prospering caterer George Downing, were Samuel Cornish, ardent agrarian, and the esteemed African Methodist Episcopal Zion minister Christopher Rush (the first self-freed slave in the nation to become a bishop). Their Anti-slavery & Land Company had its eye on four thousand acres of Smith’s sale land in St. Lawrence County’s Township 5. Its board included women, and its directors, Abraham Caldwell and James Blair Webb, were Black city men of means who now and then engaged in racial justice work. But Smith didn’t know them, and could get no feel for their long-range plans. He asked his city agents to arrange an interview, which went uneasily, with the agents enduring something of “a little battering.” This company, however, did at least give Smith a $400 down payment and the assurance that all purchases were for the on-site use of Black buyers. (Hands-on usage, not long-distance profit, was Smith’s interest, not four thousand acres to be flipped for speculation.)27
Then Webb and Caldwell switched it up. Would Smith sell them another “20,000 acres more or less? [We] believe … that in a short time the same could be possessed and occupied by our people as tillers of the soil. Things are sitting so heavily upon us in this city and there is such an increase from the South here which must have an opening [somewhere] that we believe that an advantage like this would very soon be made use of.”28
New York City’s Black population had been dropping since 1840. Were these speculators expecting a fresh wave of self-freed slaves? Did they plan to make St. Lawrence County a home for fugitives? How would this work? Was this why the group was called the Anti-slavery & Land Company, and why it wanted land in this high corner of the state? In 1844, fifteen St. Lawrence County towns or hamlets had an abolition church (Essex County, in contrast, had four, and Franklin County one). Five St. Lawrence County towns boasted more than thirty Liberty Party voters each. Where the slave power had enemies, freedom seekers would find friends.29
But this alluring scheme fared no better than the others. Webb and Caldwell never settled on this land, and no records, letters, or local legends suggest that fugitives reached St. Lawrence County with their help. (North Elba, in contrast, fairly groans under anecdotal leads.) Their city company did broker a few Essex County purchases, among them a North Elba 160-acre lot intended for a school for aspiring A.M.E ministers. Named for Bishop Christopher Rush of New York City, the Rush Academy in “Twelfth Township, Essex County,” a “Connectional Manual Labor School,” was vested with an elaborate constitution, an extensive board of directors (Reverend Loguen among them), and, in 1865, a charter from New York’s Board of Regents. On paper, it lasted twenty-five years. It never did get built.30
Abraham Caldwell still had his uses for the North Country, however—even when he surfaced in the Black press as an avid back-to-Africa colonizationist in 1852. Just a few years after eyeing Smith’s wild acres for his Anti-slavery & Land Company, Caldwell was flogging a farm colony in Liberia as an alternative to Gerrit Smith’s alternative to Liberia. Smith’s gift land, Caldwell told the Tribune, was a fake mecca whose flaws and failures suggested the necessity of the real thing across the sea: “I hesitate not to say that colonization is the only thing to elevate the colored man. It is vain for many of us to talk of settling on Mr. Smith’s land, or of emigrating to Canada and settling on land without money, which, comparatively speaking, few have. Africa holds forth inducements whereby the colored man may be elevated without money and without price.”31
Payback hovered in these lines. Three years earlier, George Downing had invested $250 in Caldwell’s St. Lawrence County scheme. His money gone and his good faith abused, Downing was done with Caldwell and made no secret of his dislike. To Black activists in Rochester, he asked why anyone would choose Liberia when “there are large tracts of land in this country, fertile and beautiful, which the colored man can occupy—live an independent life where he can command respect and consideration— thousands of acres of which are already owned by colored men in the State.” The allusion to Smith’s gift land—an American Liberia, a Timbuctoo at home—was pointed. “We claim no affinity with … pestilential, inhospitable, benighted Africa,” Downing roared to clamorous applause. “This is our home.”32
When Gerrit Smith was in Congress, he called Liberia “a frightful graveyard” and the Colonization Society “the deadliest enemy of the Negro race.” Radical Black abolitionists like Downing spied a foe more deadly still: the race traitors who fronted the Liberia Emigration Association, “a false and deceptive movement because it is an ally of the Colonization Society—the colored man’s uncompromising enemy.” Anybody working, rooting, or raising funds for it (like Caldwell and his group) “deserves the opprobrium of the people.” But in the end, it wasn’t the anticolonizationist lobby that put a stop to Caldwell’s work. It was a virus he picked up on the mail boat from Monrovia to Sierra Leone in 1854. He got sick the day he went aboard; he went ashore and died. Two years later, a Black reporter took a stroll around his settlement. “There is no greater humbug,” William Nesbit wrote. “It consists of a one-story frame house, fourteen by sixteen feet … and four very small bamboo huts; and indeed, this description is about applicable to all these settlements, pompous in their representations, insignificant in their reality.”33
The Lesser Wilderness
Surely, Gerrit Smith’s exhaustion with fielding other people’s land company proposals while his own project languished explains some part of his impatience with Myers’s project. Then there was his long-standing dislike of this Albanian, and his certain fury at the Myers-driven rumor that Smith and the Whigs were now united in their love of Myers’s plan. But the main trouble with Florence was its own homely, practical, uncharismatic self. It wasn’t what Smith wanted for his Black pioneers. It could not regenerate them, or work a deeper change in them. In a letter to his land agents in 1846, Smith laid out his bold hopes for the gift land to the north. Though white opposition to suffrage justice was despicable, it might, he offered, yield good results. If it made the grantees leave New York City, if it got them to their wild land, they would there “begin a new life, and make for themselves a hard and honorable character.” And if the Black Woods were “colder and less fertile” than they liked, this, too, would be a blessing. As they “brave[d] the rigors of the wilderness,” they would “work out a far better character than they would were they to choose their homes on fat lands under genial suns.”34
And in Smith’s faith in the Black Woods as a proving ground for “better character” and a more perfected self, he had company. Many promotional comments from the giveaway’s best friends embraced a romantic faith in the regenerative promise of the wilderness encounter. From Emersonian transcendentalism to the poems of Burns and Byron (all of which Smith’s agents knew and loved), Romantic imagery informed the vision of the gift land as a crucible of manly mettle. And to the diverse currents of Romanticism, I’ll add the slipstream of Black pastoralism, for an idea of the yeoman farmer’s self-sovereignty informed Black agrarianism too. The shared struggle to survive, Charles Bennett Ray offered, would cauterize all trivial preoccupation with caste and race. There would be no place for Negrophobes under the closely tended vine and fig tree of the democratizing woods. The work of conquering the wilderness deracialized it—and the more rigorous the conversion of wild land into a managed kingdom of cabin, woodpile, kitchen garden, fence, and clearing, the more likely the grantees’ admission into that most American of clubs, the fraternity of pioneers. Unlike the machine shop or the jury box, the land itself was color-blind. As the activist William C. Nell observed in the North Star in 1848 (invoking Gerrit Smith), the land itself “has just as much respect for a Black man as it has for a white.—Let our colored brethren betake themselves to it.” Raw land modeled democracy in action. In the wilderness, Black people would get justice because the land itself enacted justice. It was its heaven-sent expression.35
Let the “sharp ax of the sable-armed pioneer … be at once uplifted over the soil of Franklin and Essex Counties, and the noise of falling trees proclaim the glorious dawn of civilization throughout their borders,” Douglass bugled in the North Star in February 1848. Late that spring, the Ram’s Horn echoed the appeal: “The occupation of these lands will form an era in the history of free colored men in this State. We would like to be among the first to occupy the wilderness and strike the first blow toward making it blossom like a rose.” In April, the Northern Star and Freemen’s Advocate asked its readers, “Who, among the … settlers of Essex and Franklin counties, will there fell the first tree? The North Star will hail the name and hand it down to posterity… . Hurrah for the Smith Lands! God speed the plough!”36
But no first trees would fall in Florence. Myers’s short-of-really-wild colony never fit that bill. “The glorious dawn of civilization” could not arise where the sun was halfway to noon. In the 1840s (and today), the Tug Hill Plateau lacked the brooding mystique of the Adirondack region. The Adirondacks was “The Great Wilderness,” Tug Hill the “Lesser” one. And thanks to Gerrit Smith, Tug Hill’s Florence was commodified. A market economy was gearing up; one of Myers’s stakeholders could buy, sell, or trade his quarter-acre lot like sale land all over. This was nothing like Smith’s gift land. This was just another deal.37
All along, the rhetoric of the Black Woods had been of clearing land with an eye toward economic self-sufficiency. The objective was not to engage the market but to transcend it, dispense with it (and this was a goal with deep, intangible allure for people who, for centuries, were commodified by the market-driven slave economies of the Americas). The farmer’s “primitive innocency,” extolled by Charles Bennett Ray in 1837, was defiled, not enhanced, by the encounter with a cash economy. Silver never crossed the palm of the self-providing grantee-farmer. He and his family would make, spin, grow it all themselves. When Myers hawked the benefits of nearby mills, factories, and towns, and offered parcels so small they would force their Black owners to have to do much more than farm, he muddied the great dream.
The Romantic prism that lent its glow to the Black Woods did Florence no favors. Its distorting lens made the village look inadequate, a backwater not harsh enough by half to test the grantees’ rigor. If the painter Thomas Cole had seen it, he might have judged it lacking in what his “Essay on American Scenery” called those “scenes of solitude from which the hand of nature has never been lifted,” scenes that “cast the mind into the contemplation of eternal things.” Presettled Florence was used goods. Cole’s “deep-toned encounter” might be savored in the pristine Adirondacks, a sylvan Eden where the Black pioneers could be “the first to strike a blow for civilization.” An exceptionalist Adirondacks would exceptionalize them too—make them agents of their destinies, make them men.38
This hopeful vision had its good side. It inspired, gave the Black agents and promoters a shared outlook on the project’s spiritual purpose, garbed the giveaway in the rhetoric of salvation, and staked its place in a long parade of divinely favored migrations, from forty years of desert wandering to the westward-swarming pioneers. Further, as the historian John Stauffer has suggested, it forged an unprecedented interracial intellectual alliance among Douglass, Brown, Smith, and McCune Smith. But what it meant for the grantees was something else. They would never find that promised Arcady. Restless Yankees from the worked-over hill farms of New England had been hacking into North Elba’s cold soil as early as 1800. Rough settlements peppered the territory—mining hamlets, tanneries, blast furnaces, loggers’ camps that rang with French; Irish immigrants in flight from cholera in Montreal; white subsistence farmers struggling to keep up with indentures to land barons from unseen parts, like Boston, Albany, and Peterboro. And none of this the pioneers expected, nor were they braced for another unassailable truth. No Adirondack farmer made a living just by farming. The agricultural economy eulogized by writers of the American scene like the Connecticut lecturer and essayist Rev. Horace Bushnell—that fine-tuned farm that thrived in perfect equilibrium, everybody pitching in, “the house … a factory on the farm, the farm a grower and producer for the house,” production and consumption neatly balanced, did not work here, and never had.39
Detail from Baker’s Farm. Eliphalet Terry, painter, 1859. Courtesy of the Adirondack Experience, Blue Mountain Lake, NY.
Later in the century, a state report on Adirondack farm initiatives was stark: “All attempts at settlement of the Adirondack plateau by an agricultural population … have resulted in disastrous failure… . Abandoned homes and fields are scattered everywhere along the borders of the forest, while the scanty population which … struggles to compel the inhospitable soil to yield it a miserable existence too plainly shows the hopelessness of the task.” Farmers quickly saw that they would need to work as well as loggers, trappers, miners, innkeepers, and, beginning with the rise of Adirondack tourism in the 1840s, furnishers of goods and services to nature lovers, convalescents, and sportsmen shopping for adventure. Further, Adirondack soil did not, in fact, respond equally to every hopeful pioneer. A work ethic and a good back mattered, but so did tools, church alliances, kinship links, bartering partners, credit access, and cartloads of experience. In 1857, Horace Greeley gave voice to what Yankee homesteaders had long understood: “No man born and reared in the city can remove to a farm at thirty and forty years of age and become immediately an efficient, thrifty, successful farmer.” The cost of bringing a forty-acre farm into production in the mid-1800s averaged $1,500, a figure well beyond the reach of Smith’s grantees, beyond the worth of the land itself, and beyond the means, it should be noted, of white wage earners making $1 to $2 a day. But the long familiarity of early Adirondack settlers from New England with the northern forest gave them a head start. Poor as they were, they knew how to twist a span of birch bark into a sap bucket, and when the pond ice was thick enough to walk on. The grantees were not only short on know-how, they lacked the safety net of cultural familiarity. The Vermont pioneer who bushwhacked into the Adirondacks may not have known the homesteaders he met en route, but when they compared family trees, they stood a chance of sharing second cousins once removed. Maybe they subscribed to the same farm journal or swore by the same almanac. The cherished nut of a New England patrimony was collateral that meant the difference between rebuff and welcome and, in the woods, between hopefulness and misery, and even life and death.40
And always, for white pioneers, there was the commonality of race. In his “What Is an American?” Hector St. Jean de Crèvecoeur wrote of “Andrew the Hebridean,” a composite settler-immigrant. When this Scotsman from the treeless Isle of Barra stepped onto a wharf in Philadelphia, he had never swung an axe or yoked a team of oxen. His family was penniless; their fate “depended entirely upon chance.” Yet at once Andrew and all the “pale and emaciated” arrivals were “pitched upon” by sympathetic locals, “citizens impelled either by spontaneous attachments or motives of humanity.” Housed, fed, and well advised, “honest Andrew … worked hard, lived well, and grew fat.” So ought every hopeful immigrant to be greeted, mused Crèvecoeur in 1782. “Landing on this great continent is like going to sea; they must have a compass, some friendly directing needle, or else they will uselessly err and wander for a long time, even with a fair wind.”41
The Black families who ventured to the Adirondacks needed friendly directing needles too. But Smith’s agents would not publish the names of trustworthy white locals until eighteen months after the giveaway was announced, and then only in response to news of grantees getting fleeced. As early as December 1846, McCune Smith had noted the grantees’ illiteracy. To Gerrit Smith he wrote that “of the first seventeen Deeds delivered” to Westchester County grantees, “but one grantee could sign his name—and he a runaway slave!” Surely, fraud and trickery against illiterate city Blacks was a danger Gerrit Smith foresaw. He knew he had enemies. Some locals would want to punish those who stood for his ideas. When William Jones stood up in Troy and told his fellow deedholders that he planned “to clear up fifteen acres annually,” someone knew, or should have known, that the average settler in the northern forest would clear no more than three acres a year, and that Jones and his “Liberty axe” would never reach his farm if he fell in with racist guides. And surely the necessity of seed capital was evident before 1849, when Douglass lamented in the North Star, “Houses cannot be built and farming utensils obtained without money.” Smart farmers well understood the necessity of startup money to float a first year in the woods. But the giveaway’s promoters were not farmers. And neither was Gerrit Smith.42
As the leaseholder of hundreds of indentures for small farms, however, Smith was familiar with the precarities of rural life. Every week his mail brought him news of failed crops, household crises, the crushing impact of a squall. The Adirondacks was no quilted middle landscape and no Edenic tabula rasa either, but an unforgiving, iron-backed terrain scuffed by messy clearings. So why did he not give his agents or grantees advice that might have made the difference between preparedness and ignorance, failure and success? Why deny the lessons of his experience? He had written that some parcels would be unfit for cultivation. This was not the same as telling his agents early on that even the best lots might not support their deedholders through husbandry alone.43
He would not let his experience sully his agenda. Florence’s commercial possibilities were as good as, maybe better than, what the Smith Lands had to offer, but Florence suffered from what Thomas Cole would call “a meagre utilitarianism.” It was too obvious, the land too fat, the sun too warm. It would not build a better character.44
The Lesser Wilderness left Smith cold.