What He Said, and What He Did

This was a good question, and more white homesteaders than the exhausted Lemuel Knapp would ask it. Why not us? Are we not worthy? Poor Adirondackers read about the land or money the philanthropist gave to downstate Blacks, indigent widows, impoverished Irish immigrants, and needy residents in Smith’s own Madison County. They also recalled his dealings with his Hudson Valley leaseholders in 1844. In these years, while the Anti-Rent War was at its peak, poor farmers camouflaged in calico and war paint protested the long-term leases of the patroons, and sheriff’s posses roamed the hill country, brandishing eviction papers, wrecking crops, and breaking into homes. Gerrit Smith, alone among the prominent Hudson Valley landholders, gave his restive Delaware, Columbia, and Otsego County leaseholders six months rent-free to collect and furnish legal proof that showed that his title to their land was invalid, telling them that if they got him evidence, he would release them from all claims.¹²

In the North Country, too, Smith counseled leniency, often urging land agents to scale back interest fees and defer rent collection for a season. But the same generosity of spirit that inclined Smith to treat tenants with forbearance also meant he sometimes couldn’t: his passions were so many, his priorities so jealous and demanding, that his land work (what he bought, sold, and managed, not what he gave away) would always seem encumbering, the thief that pilfered from the holy work he loved. So prolific was his abolition work that it moved his biographer Ralph Harlow to “wonder how the man ever found time for anything else.” Smith found it with the help of his secretary, managers, and land agents, as well as his own driving work ethic. (Railroad, canal, and highway investment schemes intrigued him quite as much as they did other mid-nineteenth-century land barons. His youthful purchases in Oneida and Oswego Counties were prescient.) His own debt, especially what he incurred in the Panic of 1837, he had worked for many years to shed, not only because he wanted to reclaim the fortune he had inherited and almost lost, but because debt embarrassed him, putting him at odds with his own eager perfectionism.¹³

In 1846, Smith still owed creditors close to $500,000. Selling land he didn’t need at fire sale prices, and giving some of it away outright, would at least reduce his tax burden. Three years later, his debt was down to $100,000. But cutting back the debt meant calling in his chits. Each of his thousand farm contracts with his buyers was a legal version of a vow between consenting parties. Benjamin Franklin had taught generations of Americans, “The Borrower is a Slave to the Lender.” To give while he still owed made Smith worse than thriftless. It made him a kind of thief. By 1849, bankruptcy no longer loomed, but he would toughen up on debt collection. He could be a big-hearted philanthropist or a big-hearted landlord. When either undermined the other, he could not be both at once.¹⁴

With the exception of the historian Ralph Harlow, still unmatched for his zealous focus on Smith’s complex pecuniary culture, Smith’s biographers have preferred to follow Smith’s own lead and dwell on his philanthropic deeds and efforts. And with reason! Smith the land baron and rent collector was one in a crowd; Smith the philanthropist was in a league all his own. Smith himself discounted the income- generating “day-job” that enabled his largesse. In his third-person autobiographical essay, he crushed the land work into a sentence: “He soon took upon himself the care of his father’s immense property, the charge and improvement of which, though naturally a very industrious man, have made his life a very busy one.” Money was an accident of birth. Smith took no credit for making it (beyond the loaded word “improvement”); he wanted only to give it up; he had a great estate but never meant to; he would be happy with much less. Fair enough—Smith’s public face was his to groom. What makes less sense is why history let Smith’s emphasis on what he wished were otherwise to count for more than what he did.¹⁵

But if the gap between what Smith preached and what he practiced has been largely lost on Smith’s biographers, it was not lost on poor contract farmers who, like Knapp, pled earnestly, and sometimes hotly, for better terms, more patience, one more break. Perhaps because these appeals are so drably classified in the microfilms of Smith’s papers, they have not enjoyed the scrutiny that favors, say, reel 75 (“GS and John Brown: Correspondence”) or Smith’s letters from other celebrated allies. But the hard-labored notes in “Land Sales” are newsworthy. They reveal a Smith we rarely meet, the sort of market-minded manager from whom Smith himself professed to recoil. Not the land giver but the debt and rent collector, the enforcer with the resolve to send the sheriff to the cabin and put a delinquent homesteader out of doors. Never mind that this was a muscle Smith rarely flexed, that he was comparatively openhearted. Smith’s good name would not obscure the recognition of an imbalance of power, or stifle the resentment of a seeming double standard in which one impoverished cohort was advantaged with gifts of land and money while his own contract farmers were ignored.

From a lessee in Schroon, Essex County, 1847: “I have seen a number of very liberal donations to help the oppressed and of late another to help the poor Irish and I was glad to see it for I do not believe in oppression in none of its forms. I am poor and hope that you will not make me unnecessary expenses for I am trying to pay you as fast as I can.” From another in Athol, Warren County, 1847: “Sir—I have paid your father $175.34 and I have paid yourself $85 and have done business for you to the amount of about $25 and that is more than the lot ever was worth and I do feel as you are a rich man and I am a poor one … that you would not be desiring more than what would be right if you should discharge your payment you hold against me and take your land and fill me out a deed.”¹⁶

To Smith’s Peterboro land office came letters from the Catskills, the Mohawk and Hudson River Valleys, Lake Champlain, Cherry Valley, the Tug Hill Plateau, and, of course, the Adirondacks, where Smith owned so much land. From Franklin, St. Armand, Keene, North Elba, Elizabethtown, and Westport, all hamlets where Black giftees settled, came appeals for Smith’s forbearance from poor whites. Farmers wrote of epidemics, fire, flood, arson, theft, and their own botched investments. A homesteader had bought land only to find that when the snow went, it was a swamp. Health crises abounded: “A reason for my not paying you sooner is that my wife has laid under the doctor’s hands for 11 months & finally died the 23rd last—& left me a widower with 6 children.” “I was taken with the fever & ague at a very severe rate & my oldest son was taken eight days after with the same complaint. I was obliged to use up the money I intended for you.” Bad things happened on the frontier. It was Smith’s Christian duty to make allowances. In these letters, regret was signaled, but no remorse, and never shame.¹⁷

“If you only knew how poor I am and how much trouble I have had you would not think hard of my sending you so small a sum,” wrote the farmer Alden Speer from Moriah in 1850. If Smith could see Speer’s iron-threaded hamlet, walk his fields, step into his low-roofed home, understanding would surely bloom and charity prevail. But as striking as this farmer’s assumption of Smith’s empathy was his resignation: Smith could not know how poor he was because Smith, in Peterboro, was paring down his sinful debt by trawling for back payments from his contract farmers so that the springs of his largesse might flow as lavishly as ever. Stealing time from his great work to tour a scratch farm in Essex County was a theft he could not justify. It was hard enough managing an estate this large at such a distance from his home. In Potterville, Warren County, vandals wrecked his mill. Lumber thieves were rustling logs from Johnsburg lots and hauling them to tanneries in Thurman. Several hundred cords of firewood went missing from a Keene lot, and though poachers said they’d stop, who was there to make them? A contract farmer died, and Smith, distracted, sued his corpse. Another farmer hoped to learn why he was being penalized when so many lumber thieves had not paid Smith “the first shilling.” Inefficiency, inconsistency, out-of-touchness—such were the liabilities of the nonresident rent collector.¹⁸

So when Mason Whiting of Binghamton begged Smith to repurchase a piece of land Whiting had bought on contract, Smith would not bail him out. “I am greatly embarrassed by my foolish and sinful liabilities for friends and in great need of a large payment from you,” he wrote. Assuming debt and then enabling it in others from a sentimental leniency was not merely a legal problem; it was impious. Smith owed it to the grantees, to all his needy beneficiaries, to make the gifts he gave his own.¹⁹

When he started cracking down, however, what made perfect sense to him came as a hard shock to longtime contract holders. “I have paid you nothing for nearly 6 years,” a Franklin farmer fretted. Why all at once this note “saying that your patience is exhausted”? Wrote a baffled lumberjack in Keene, “We have heard from you and it come very unexpected to us although I acknowledge we were in the rear.” A frantic Glens Falls lumberman told Smith in 1848, “I cannot raise $1,000 to save my soul now… . You promised me that you would hold off until June. Will you hold this note until June and not sue me?” Some pressed for understanding (“I am sorry you sued me for I was doing as fast as [I] possibly could”; “I have done the best that I could since I have been on the place… . I want to pay the remainder as much as you want it.”). Others, quite as sick of Smith as he was of his debt, came back swinging. “Finding myself unable to pay,” wrote S. Huntington of Franklin, “I have sold my right to John & Hugh Collins, brothers … from the Emerald Isle, that land of oppression, who have paid me $26 and promised $10 more all told… . You see [what] I realize for my $82.50 which I paid you, and 7 years of toil, hardship and privation.” A few years earlier, Smith gave $2,000 to the victims of the Irish famine, and now two Sons of Erin were the proud new owners of a Franklin County farm that “7 years of toil” failed to deliver to a contract farmer in chronic debt to Gerrit Smith.²⁰

Smith sympathized with his debtors. The letters to them that he copied in his letter book are respectful, even warm. But even when Smith gave his Hudson Valley contract farmers half a year rent-free to search for defects in their titles, he never offered to turn leasehold assets into freeholds, or to forgive outstanding debts before or after the six-month respite. If his leaseholders’ titles were legally unassailable (and overwhelmingly, they were), the old despised arrangements stood. As to those radicals who urged leaseholders to challenge the patroons, Smith was so repelled by their “lawless, violent and bloody Agrarianism” that he invoked it in his initial letter on the giveaway, taking pains to distinguish his agrarian initiative (orderly, legally admissible, and voluntary) from land reform forced by mobbism and fear. His insistence on this point suggests that his Adirondack giveaway was conceived in part as a response and a rebuke to the Anti-Renters’ challenge.²¹

Smith also spurned a chance to forgive long-standing debt among his contract farmers in 1849, when he gave one thousand land lots, mostly in the Adirondacks, to poor white men from all over New York. But why not, this time, make poor Adirondackers your giftees? wondered his ever-sensible uncle and adviser, Daniel Cady. A veteran lawyer in Fulton County (he was practicing law when George Washington was in the White House), Judge Cady pointed out that “poor men who are already in the northern counties—and who wish to remain there—might be benefitted by your bounty—but the expense of removing from the southern country to the northern part of the state will equal the value of 50 acres of land”—and what poor prospective pioneer could afford that? Cady urged him to gift the people already living there. They liked the place and would use it. Cady’s exasperation with his nephew’s unconcern with the disabling poverty of his giftees invoked similar complaints from Frederick Douglass and McCune Smith, though they were never so direct.²²

But Smith stuck to his new plan, scattering this new batch of Adirondack gift deeds to takers all over the state for the sake of fairness and, perhaps, his own visibility. He asked county judges and supervisors to make his choices, and to the poor white men of Essex County, he allotted ten gift deeds, and to Franklin County, eight. No poor Franklin contract farmer in his debt benefited from the giveaway of 1849; no town of Franklin, St. Armand, or North Elba farmer got a gift deed, period. The letter Lemuel Knapp wrote Gerrit Smith about lightening his debt—“as Mr. Smith is giving land to the poor that have none, and that are needy”—went unanswered. And the next time this St. Armand farmer wrote Peterboro, it was to tell Smith he had leased his home to a minister and contracted for another piece nearby. “So, I shall not leave the woods yet,” he reported, “but will make one more trial to pay you for a lot of land, don’t know as I can”—and he couldn’t, as we know. The move to Kansas followed.²³

A Grantee’s Forced Diaspora

One of Smith’s Black grantees would also find himself caught short by Smith’s adamantine respect for contracts. Lafayette Mason received his gift deed when he was living with his wife and young family in New Russia near Elizabethtown. One of the very few native-born Adirondackers on Gerrit Smith’s long list, Mason was from Clinton County, south of Canada, and was likely born enslaved. A collier and scratch farmer when Smith sent him a gift deed, Mason was surely pleased; he’d just gotten married, and this new deed would make it easier for him to vote. But starting fresh on a Franklin gift lot held no appeal for this laborer. New Russia, in the long-settled stretch of eastern Essex County along Lake Champlain, was ablaze with kilns, furnaces, sawmills, and forges. Work crews and their bosses needed all the milk, charcoal, venison, and eggs that Mason could provide. This subsistence farmer had a sugar bush; a rum distillery would buy his syrup. He knew where to drop a line; the fresh-caught fish he brought to Hiram Putnam’s store got him tobacco, flour, and seed. On every side, the prospects rose like cream, and with them his ambition. In 1860, Mason put a hundred dollars down on a 351-acre wooded lot in Roaring Brook Tract, where he and his young family were raising wheat, oats, corn, turnips, and potatoes, and tending milk cows, chickens, and a pig. Gerrit Smith, the seller here, gave Mason ten years to pay a $600 balance in annual installments.²⁴

Then the long shells found Fort Sumter, and Mr. Lincoln asked for men. A few weeks shy of Christmas in 1863, Mason’s fourteen-year-old son, Lewis, left New Russia for Brooklyn to join the Twentieth Volunteers, USCT. Lafayette Mason, who was light enough to pass for white, earned a $350 bounty when he joined a local company of the 118th Infantry Regiment, or the “Adirondack Regiment,” as it was proudly known. Private Mason (the elder) fought at Petersburg, Richmond, and Fair Oaks. At the last of these, in late October 1864, he was taken prisoner with six hundred Union troops. It is likely Mason counted himself lucky: Union casualties at Fair Oaks were 1,603, and Confederates fewer than a hundred. But Mason, once “a man of iron constitution,” emerged from the long hell of a prisoner-of-war camp a ruin, or, as his doctor wrote, “a skeleton of his former self.”²⁵

Reunited with his family in New Russia in 1865 (Lewis, back home as well, was still recovering from dysentery and a racking cough), Mason tried to pick up where he’d left off, but with his soldier’s bounty spent and his contract payments in arrears, he could not keep pace. A year after his and Lewis’s return, Mason’s land contract was annulled. Gerrit Smith sold Mason’s contract lot to a secretary’s niece in New York City. The abolitionist who had given a Black pioneer free land in the name of political empowerment and economic freedom bowed to the speculator/landlord who yanked a farm contract from a war-disabled, late-paying veteran and father of fourteen, and sold it to a white, long-distance city buyer with no intent to settle. And from Gerrit Smith’s perspective, this made sense. He gave Mason land, and he took land back, and in each case his reasoning honored a perfectionist resolve to honor charity and justice and live in and up to God’s exacting image. No contradiction here.²⁶

At wit’s end, the Black contract farmer took Gerrit Smith to court—a desperate move; he had no case. He had paid nothing to his leaseholder beyond his first deposit. Not only was his plea dismissed, but he now faced court costs and eviction. In 1866, the un-cabined Masons moved to Iowa. Singly and together, they farmed in Vernon Springs and Steamboat Rock. Then, in 1877, Lafayette and Mary pushed west to Minnehaha County in the new Dakota Territory and claimed a 160-acre plot under the Civil War Homestead Act. Their new frame house measured twelve by fourteen feet. When Lafayette died in 1879, he and Mary had broken eighteen acres and planted four hundred fruit trees. And here the widow stayed, tending her young orchard, keeping faith with the old self-providing agrarian idea, until solitude and need compelled her to move to Minneapolis, where her son Lewis, disabled by the asthma he had picked up in the war, worked as a janitor and a deacon for his church. No farming for him.²⁷

“You and I Want No Controversy”

Class shaped local responses to Smith’s idea much more than historical accounts of it admit. Class allegiance, inflected by culture, church allegiance, and local politics, influenced how poor white Adirondackers understood Smith’s giveaway and his defense of it. In fact, if Smith concerned himself too little with how a projected wave of poor Black metropoles might impact Essex County, white Adirondackers did the opposite. Since 1839, the cost of poor relief in Essex County had risen every year, and by 1849 the Essex County Republican judged it “the great pecuniary burden of the county.” Would Smith’s grantees end up as public charges? And would public oversight of such an influx result in higher taxes? The prospect of this outcome raised considerable alarm.²⁸

Rev. Jermain Loguen, reporting on the gift lands to McCune Smith and the readers of the North Star, was keenly attuned to racism on the frontier, but neither he nor the other agents plumbed the boiling working-class anxiety that stoked Negrophobia, too, especially when powerful opinion makers fanned the flames. In 1853, the Adirondack Democratic legislator Winslow C. Watson asserted in his Essex County history that Smith’s munificence had “exercised a depressing and sinister influence upon the prosperity and reputation of the country. The Negro [has become] in many instances an impoverished and destitute object of public or private charity.” No evidence suggests that the fledgling enclaves of the Black Woods flooded county poorhouses as Watson claimed. Decades later, a very few aging grantees or their spouses repaired to these facilities (as was the long-standing country custom among poor Adirondack whites), but at midcentury, lists of recipients of poor relief who lived in North Elba, Franklin, and St. Armand included no Black pioneers. Watson also predicted a power grab by Black radicals whose “ulterior” ambition was to seize political control of North Elba, an effort, he predicted, that might result in “the anomalous spectacle … of an African supervisor occupying a seat in the county legislature.” This did not come to pass. But Watson’s rumor only ramped up the anxieties of poor Adirondackers long predisposed to fret about the influence of “outside interests” on their lives.²⁹

They weren’t wholly paranoid. Outside interests muscling in—from colonial-era military strategists in Albany or Montreal to fur brokers, land barons, lumber magnates, tannery tycoons, iron ore speculators, and stockholders in upstate mills—were an Adirondack tradition, helming the regional economy since the first days of the European discovery. And despite the fondness of antiquarian historians (Winslow C. Watson among them) for the Adirondacks’ “rootstock” in next-door Vermont, this was no replicate New England. From the first days of non-Native settlement, other influences staked a claim. Wars and skirmishes between the French and English and their respective Indian allies along the Champlain Valley had famously delayed the region’s settlement, so infrastructure here was raw and markets slow to mature. Add to the poor soil (some choice bottomlands aside) a harshly corrugated topography, a blackfly habitat of singular efficiency, and winters longer-seeming than New England’s by a month, and the shadow of Vermont grows fainter. Extractive industries—tanning, mining, charcoal-making, and logging—dependent on migratory or immigrant labor gave great swaths of this region a demographic profile at sharp odds with Vermont’s (or, at least, with Vermont’s hard-defended brand). In 1850, for example, one in three residents of Clinton County was foreign-born.³⁰

After the Civil War, invisible strings hitched hundreds of tiny Adirondack settlements to a far-flung network of nonresident investors, bosses, speculators, and developers, and very early on, their interest in the region’s industrial potential lent it the character of a dependency. In the Gilded Age, proprietors of the famed Adirondack Great Camps and elite clubs constituted a potent outside interest too. The conservationists and legislators who devised the Adirondack Park and the tough laws that protected it would also be long-distance overseers of the region’s destiny, inviting the resentment that off-site bosses always will.

This is not to suggest that in the mid-nineteenth century, thousands of Yankee farmers no longer toiled in the Adirondack woods, or that they had given up on farming as a good use of their land. But many who had once hoped to buy now rented or bought on contract, and between those who owed and those who collected was the hard divide that turned nonresident landlords like Gerrit Smith into yet another kind of outside interest suggesting a despised dependency—and never mind if leaseholder and lessee shared all the same convictions. Let one of Smith’s antislavery land agents miss sufficient contract payments, and all the shared values in the world would not buy him a pass. Smith was an equal opportunity enforcer; neglect a debt, and legal action loomed.

Smith sued the abolitionist surveyor Wait J. Lewis of Keene (despite Lewis’s blustery insistence that Smith would someday occupy the White House). He sued Monroe Hall, an antislavery storekeeper and speculator in Jay. He sued the aging abolitionist Samuel Warner of Moriah, who had convened the first meeting of Essex County’s Liberty Party in 1845, subscribed to Frederick Douglass’ Paper, and called for an armed “revolution” after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act—strong medicine from an Adirondack farmer in 1852. “Is there any remedy for the slaver or colored Americans?” Warner asked. He saw “but one, and that is revolution. Sad and awful as it is, the thing will come… . Arouse, then, from your lethargy, my colored friends. If you would be free, you must strike the blow.” And when it came to picking a side, Warner recognized his duty: “I will help the oppressed.”³¹

This was fire-breathing after Smith’s own heart. But Warner’s zeal could not paper over debt. He had bought several lots on time from Smith, and seven years after he signed for them, not one was fully paid for. From Peterboro, Smith assured him, “You and I want no controversy with each other.” Still, Smith sent a summons, and Warner counterstruck at once. Was Smith aware, he wondered, that when he bought these lots, one of them was occupied by a squatter? The man was on the land for decades—even before the purchase of this lot by Peter Smith, Gerrit’s father. Knowing “your liberality in relation to giving away land,” Warner assured Smith he had never tried to move him. But if he did pursue eviction, he supposed the squatter would “contest it strongly, and I fear with success.” The message was as bright as noon: If I’m in trouble here, so, Mr. Smith, are you. Warner, no innocent, knew that Smith’s name for “liberality” would suffer if the rich man’s claim drove Warner to evict a homesteader three decades on his farm. Had Smith not said that in a just world, no person would own more than “his needed portion of the soil”? That money would be made irrelevant, and every household would sustain itself? Had he not declared the soil no more purchasable than air and light, but a thing more “like salvation … ‘without money and without price’ ”? Warner’s counteroffer: if Smith dropped his suit, Warner would send him sixty-two dollars for two lots and drop his complaint that Smith had sold him land that was already occupied.³²

Warner liked to end his notes to Smith with a nod to common ground (“The fire of freedom cannot be smothered. Take courage, brother. Let the course be onward and upward”), and Smith was no less comradely (“We had rather fight slaveholders than fight each other—I send you a pamphlet …”). But in the end, Smith would prefer a bank note to Warner’s courage, and a pamphlet would not fix Warner’s debt. So when Smith served Warner with papers, the debtor got himself a lawyer, a tough one: the former Essex County district attorney, and a Democrat to boot. For this world was not perfected. Not just yet.³³

Smith’s Bespoke Fraternity

That long-distance land barons like Gerrit Smith preferred to work with local agents who shared their way of seeing things, their values and morality, was only natural. Like called to like. Long-distance land magnates needed people on the scene they could trust, and it made sense that Smith was drawn to Adirondack brokers who shared his antislavery vision. Who better in North Elba than Squire Iddo Osgood, or the radical newspaper publisher Wendell Lansing in Wilmington, or, in Keene, Phineas Norton, that “ornament to our cause”? Smith had a man, it seemed, in every town, and this far-flung fraternity of like-minded community builders, many of them descended from the early Yankee pioneers, provided his trusted portal to local goings-on. But was their window on the scene wide enough to represent it?³⁴

At midcentury and after, Smith’s Adirondack abolitionist allies held no great influence. They were mocked and marginalized by mainstream public servants and editors, and their old name as political spoilers stuck fast. After the 1844 defeat of the Whig candidate for president, Henry Clay, Whig pundits insisted that Clay, not the proslavery James Polk, would be in the White House if the Whigs had carried New York State—but the hated Liberty Party of New York, which siphoned votes from Clay, and in so doing handed state and then the nation to the slave power, effectively installed the enemy. “Go it slavedom! How proud northern abolitionists and doughfaces must feel at the result of their labors!” Jonathan Tarbell, Whig editor of the Essex County Republican, fumed in 1844, and would keep calling out the abolitionists for their “treason” for a decade. In 1854, the brazen Tarbell went so far as to liken abolitionists to slaveholders, and Adirondack Whigs to their oppressed lackeys who “have not dared to speak of them above a whisper, and have stooped and crouched before them like a slave to his master.” He added, “It is the time now to put an end to this disgraceful submissiveness. Whigs have crawled around the feet of Abolition leaders long enough.”³⁵

Imagery that framed the Adirondack abolitionist as a slaveholder was ludicrous, yet Tarbell’s ugly imagery may have resonated with Adirondackers on the losing end of a summons from Gerrit Smith. When the fellow brandishing a warrant that threatened homelessness and destitution was also, as it happened, the local face of Bible politics, you might not love the cause he stood for. To the immigrant Tierneys, Ryans, and Volins facing eviction, the Bible-quoting, New England–rooted land agents stood for another world.³⁶

And what would the Black grantees have known of this? Smith’s introduction to the giveaway, the agents’ too-few published reports, and Jerry Merrill’s land appraisal described the land, but the grantees would learn nothing of the local population and its rent worries, ethnic rifts, town-to-town rivalries, and doctrinal dustups. Reverend Loguen warned of racist knavery in the North Star, which was helpful, but racism was just part of what accounted for local fears. Class aggrievement mattered too, and not because the grantees were less impoverished than their neighbors. They had, however, been privileged (as white Adirondackers were not) by a rich man so hugely favored by an accident of birth that he could hand out land he’d never seen to perfect strangers who never hoped or asked for it and had no notion of where it was, land that had been pictured to those strangers as a tabula rasa, as if their own cabins, stone walls, sawmills, foundries, kilns, churches, orchards, roads, barns, and workers’ shanties were not as real as the wilderness itself.

The grantees had a lot to learn. The Black Woods the agents promised them was gauzed in gorgeous, wishful generalities. The passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 compelled more interest in the social culture of this destination, but things were still vague and hazy, more rumored than understood. And what the settlers found when they got there and bore down was just the opposite. Here was a land of hard, jostling specificity, where hamlets only miles apart were as unalike as people, and where from one cabin to the next was all the irreducible originality and human mess their white friends would discern in them.