Chapter 11
I Begin to Be Regarded as an “American Citizen”
we are each other’s harvest:
we are each other’s business:
we are each other’s magnitude and bond.
—from “Paul Robeson,” by Gwendolyn Brooks
In 1844, a restless pride of Lyons—Isaac, Isaac Jr., George, and Freeman—moved their families from Vermont to the northern New York wilderness and made their homes in Franklin, the Adirondack township whose southern half in this decade had a name for intractable terrain and dramatically bad roads. More Vermonters followed in their wake and, too weary for invention, called their settlement Vermontville. The new name worked no magic. While the Yankees briskly introduced the made-in-England town posts that organized their hamlets (poormaster, fence sitter, constable …), theirs was one imprint among many. Scatterings of Irish immigrants, woods-wise French-Canadians, New Yorkers washing up from the Hudson Valley, lumber magnates and their work gangs, mill hands, English adventurers, and, by midcentury, clusters of Black families from New York and beyond forged a frontier culture of marked social and cultural diversity. Things were harder, more unruly here than in Vermont. (On voting day, for instance, the good people of Vermontville customarily honored the results of an election with a lively round of bumping, or grabbing winners by the arms and legs and throwing them at walls.) If none could call this frontier lawless (no lynch law here, and banditry was rare), the pioneers of Franklin—peppered with stump-raw settlements, and a long pull from the county seat, Malone—were in the habit of sorting out their troubles for themselves.1
Isaac Lyon Jr. got his house up, bought a sawmill, and sold his chairs and tables all around. For running water, he stitched a pipe of augured cedar logs into a feedline one-third of a mile long from a hill spring to his house. The overflow filled an outside trough for anybody’s use. Lyon was a justice of the peace, town surveyor, and friend of education; the town’s first attempt to organize a school was in his home. By 1850, six years after his arrival, he had fifty of his seventy acres in production, crops to render for his larder and his horses, cows, and sheep. His sugar bush was fruitful; as a Vermonter, he knew to come with kettle, buckets, and spiles.2
The Marylander John Thomas, whose farm was near the Lyons’, had never tapped a maple tree or boiled sap to syrup. If he had sugar maples on his piece, he would need to find or make his gear. He had no barn back in Vermont, no close-by family with lendable supplies. Lyon’s Franklin kin were as thick on the ground as beechnuts. If he wrenched an ankle, his brother Freeman, an “eclectic physician,” made a poultice. If a loan was needed, a relative could help. Thomas’s new friends among the Black grantees could spare prayers and goodwill, but for sap buckets, spiles, credit, or tips on managing a one-act growing season, he was on his own.3
So it ought not to surprise us that by midcentury the white Vermonter had the jump on this new neighbor. Lyon’s tools and farm gear held more value than Thomas’s, and Lyon had two horses and two cows to Thomas’s one and one, and six sheep to Thomas’s none. What is notable is that for oats, potatoes, hay, rye, and buckwheat, Thomas’s production was twice as great as Lyon’s, and on less land overall. Resourcefulness on this order would not have gone unnoticed by the farmers from Vermont. This colored fellow held his own.4
In 1846, an Adirondack lumberman, Thomas Goldsmith, paid Gerrit Smith a dollar an acre for a wide tract of densely wooded land on the Saranac River in southeastern Franklin County. Goldsmith built a sawmill and boardinghouses for his workers. In time, a narrow-gauge railroad hauled lumber from his sawmill to a station at Loon Lake. The village that bore his name bloomed with barns, granaries, and workshops for a blacksmith, wheelwright, and cobbler. There was an inn, a store, a school, even a rough-cut ballroom. Yet ambition and achievement would not save Goldsmith from old debts. When he fell behind on taxes, New York sold his fourteen-thousand-acre property to a long-distance buyer at auction, and it was years before Goldsmith learned of this in 1864. By order of state law, he was a squatter. He could be evicted at any time.5
His much poorer Franklin neighbors were more vulnerable still. Isaac Lyon Jr. and many of his neighbors faced eviction for not paying taxes. Their appeals to redeem their land from the 1850s through the 1870s are housed in twenty cubic feet of tax sale and redemption records at the New York State Archives in Albany. These affidavits (brittle lashed-together packets that cover land dealings from the second half of the nineteenth century through the first quarter of the twentieth) are a trove of news about frontier farming in New York, since the more detail Adirondack farmers crammed into their appeals, the more credible their claims. Farmers needed to provide these fine-grained proofs, backed by their neighbors’ testimony, to document their residency and redeem their titles. And mostly, as we’ve seen, these bids worked.6
As to why appellants failed to pay taxes in the first place, sometimes for decades, Isaac Lyon Jr. spoke for hundreds. Never had he witnessed any “ ‘Notice’ of any Tax Sale on [his] Lot, and … never [was] any formal tax sale notice served on himself or his family on any day … in any shape, style, form or manner.” Nobody had clued him in, and if the local paper ran a notice, he missed it, or maybe didn’t read that paper, or didn’t read at all.7
And if Isaac Lyon Jr., a year-round resident who had owned and worked his land for decades, could miss this notice, what were the odds for a nonresident Smith grantee? Taking a cue from Gerrit Smith himself, critics of his giveaway were quick to fault the grantees for losing gift land for unpaid taxes: here, they felt, was proof of Black ingratitude, carelessness, and indifference to Smith’s plan. Yet if a farmer as entrenched and public-spirited as Lyon did not know what he owed, if he would need, like Thomas Goldsmith, to find witnesses to back his claim to his own farm in the hamlet he helped found, what about grantees in Brooklyn, Rochester, or Queens? How much fainter was the chance of any “formal tax sale notice” reaching them? How would they know the sale dates when these were published only in those papers serving counties where land was being sold? How many downstate grantees subscribed to the Franklin Palladium or Elizabethtown Post? How many could read?8
Resident grantees, who faced some of these same obstacles, would also say, like Lyon, that they never knew about the tax sales, never knew their land was at risk. John Thomas was twice threatened with eviction for failing to pay taxes. And twice, in 1863 and 1873, his Vermontville neighbors bore witness to his occupancy. The first set of affidavits was compelled by a tax sale in 1859, and the second by a sale in 1853. At the first hearing, two witnesses were on hand to back his claim. At the second, there were ten, including Isaac Lyon Jr. All were white, and almost all were middle-aged Vermonters, among them an innkeeper, a carpenter farmer, and Lyon Jr.’s homeopath brother. And when the Lyons and other locals needed witnesses to stand for them, John and Mary Ann Thomas stepped up.9
About neighbors standing for each other, finding common cause against unknown speculator-buyers and a distant (if forbearing) state bureaucracy, was nothing so remarkable. In North Elba and St. Armand, the Hazzards, Eppeses, and Carasaws sought and won the backing of white neighbors when they redeemed their land. What is notable is that their neighbors never—not once—mentioned race.10
This quiet but emphatic rural solidarity also revealed itself on Election Day. As early as 1849, in North Elba and the town of Franklin, Black grantee-settlers were casting votes. In the Saranac Lake Free Library are Town of Franklin poll lists which name seven Black grantee-settlers who voted, intermittently, from 1849 to 1889. Richard Williams voted in 1849 and 1850; Willis A. Hodges, Perry Weeks, and William A. Smith in 1850; John Thomas in 1860, 1863, 1864, 1867, and 1889; Wesley Murray in 1863, 1864, and the last year of his life, 1867; and the grantee’s son, Warren Morehouse, in 1869. And in 1855, the state census named ten of the eleven Black farmers of North Elba as voting-worthy, despite their documented poverty and the inability of most of them to meet the $250 property requirement. The 1855 New York census suggests that Avery Hazzard of St. Armand enjoyed the right to vote as well.
This was not the case in upstate villages like Union Village and Elizabethtown, very few of whose Black residents were named as voters in the census. And in Troy, a city with a good-sized Black population, Black voters, too, were rare. Why did Franklin and North Elba buck convention? Perhaps because there was no inherited or fixed convention; these towns were just that fresh. In late 1849, when the Essex County Board of Supervisors approved the carving of a new town out of West Keene, it named three locals to run North Elba’s first town meeting and keep a “poll list.” All three were farmers, each knew Gerrit Smith, and each in his own way had helped out one or some grantees. In this raw, emerging neighborhood, suffrage justice bolstered solidarity, and everybody gained. So poor Black men would be deemed vote-worthy who, strictly speaking, did not qualify. The new North Elba played by its own rules. And if St. Armand’s town records had survived a devastating fire, the odds are good we’d find a poll list for this hamlet that named Charles Henry and Alex Hazzard voters along with Avery, their father.11
After the Civil War, some Adirondack rhapsodists would go so far as to suggest that the Black Woods was color-blind. With its harshly volatile weather, whited peaks, and far spans of pure frontier, Adirondack country could seem to embody the drama and spirit of the freedom struggle and the obduracy of the radical abolitionists themselves. And after John Brown was hanged at Harpers Ferry and enshrined at North Elba, his posthumous residency only burnished the belief that this place was a stronghold of antislavery feeling. “With the mighty northern hills looking down upon him, the rush of strong rivers, and the songs of resounding tempests, and the mystery of the illimitable wilderness all around him,” was it not inevitable, intoned one nineteenth-century historian, that John Brown “should easily come to think himself inspired to descend like a mountain torrent, and sweep the black curse [of slavery] from out the land”? As went Brown, so, presumably, went the rustic hoi polloi: the self-appointed honor guard who kept stern vigil through the night over Brown’s casket in the Essex County Courthouse on Dec. 6, 1859 … homesteaders standing in the driving rain to hail the widow in her carriage bearing the plain box across the sleet-puddled Plains … stouthearted farm boys and millhands who thronged enlistment offices in Plattsburgh and Malone to whip all the “misguided people of the Southern States” into line. So, anyway, opined the New Yorker journalist Burton Bernstein, in his regional profile The Sticks: A Profile of Essex County, New York, from 1972. Bernstein packed his take on the Civil War–era Adirondacks into a sentence: “They were all good Republicans and they all supported Lincoln.”12
Well, they weren’t. And in fact, they didn’t. Pro- and antislavery positions were robustly represented in Adirondack politics before the Civil War. Local feelings about abolition, antislavery reform, the Fugitive Slave Act, and the Underground Railroad ran as hot and icy in the mountains as they did in Manhattan. And for every early founded antislavery society in Keeseville, Plattsburgh, or Malone, there was a fast-forming gang to bust it up. Antislavery publishers sparred with Democratic editors whose contempt for radical abolitionism was exceeded only by their disdain for Black people. Village worthies stood guard over Brown’s coffin in Elizabethtown to honor and defend his memory, but also to keep other locals from hacking it to bits. The fact that Essex as a county went three to one for equal voting rights for Black New Yorkers in 1846 gives no hint of the drastic range of opinion from one town to the next. In Wilmington and Jay, the pro-suffrage vote was twenty-five to one, but in Schroon, just south of Keene, the suffrage vote was three to one against. In the winter of 1860, Democratic editors from Albany to Alexandra were delighted to report that North Elba, alone among the towns of Essex County, and the home of the late abolitionist John Brown, voted Democratic. “Brown’s neighbors,” an Indiana paper crowed, “do not approve of that raid.”13
The economizing authors of high school history books may be forgiven for asserting that all the antebellum South was of one mind on abolition and all the enlightened North of another; textbook writers have to cover a lot of ground. But sentimental histories that simplify a rough-textured, fast-changing local scene by cloaking the Adirondack story with a flowing mantle of political solidarity obscure the granularity of life as it was lived. A North Elban I spoke with after the annual John Brown Day near Brown’s home and grave told me how much Brown had meant to his father, whose family had resided in the town since the mid-nineteenth century. Yet the old man, he confided, also went to local Klan meetings. Funny, right? He just didn’t see a problem there. He liked both. No less than Walt Whitman’s Brooklyn, the Adirondacks had its clashing multitudes—from one hamlet to another, and sometimes in the same unsettled heart.
Skin distinguished John Thomas in his white adoptive community, but what moved his Franklin neighbors to defend his right to keep his land was not color-blindness but something else. He was, like them, a keeper. Where hundreds of prospective Adirondack settlers were bailing out in these tough decades, Thomas had taken hold and hung on.
A Democracy of Need
“I should like to describe an Adirondack village, made up of some half-dozen log houses of the rudest description, with sometimes an unpainted frame-house, with the sign ‘Post-Office’ on it,” a travel writer offered in the English journal All the Year Round in 1860. The “sublime mountain scenery” was one thing, but this visitor deemed the human scenery rather less intoxicating:
The only appearance of thrift is seen at the smithy; no hotel, no “meeting house”; a school-house, falling to decay; “Cash Store,” in drunken letters over some doorway; a lazy deer-hound or two; some ragged, timid, tow-headed children playing in the road; a frowzy, gipsy-looking face peering through a window; a dense forest hemming in the whole. Sometimes we passed a pretty group of plastered cottages, with white window curtains, and women in snowy caps, belonging to French Canadians. Anon, one of Gerrit Smith’s Black settlements, the houses more dilapidated than the rest, with perhaps a laughing black boy, with a rim of old hat upon his wooly head, dancing in the doorway. We saw one village utterly deserted; a freshet swept away its mill several years ago, and the inhabitants abandoned it. It was called New Sweden. Then, we met a long train of waggons, drawn by mules, coming from the iron villages, the chief of which is Ausable Forks.14
The sloppy mishmash of the Adirondack scene left this London writer cold, notwithstanding the affection he had for his Black camp cook and marksman, the grantee’s son Warren Morehouse. But whether he liked what he was looking at is not the point. What matters is how he framed Gerrit Smith’s Black settlement as one poor, stubborn Adirondack enclave in a strand. And it is noteworthy that he did not remark on John Brown’s nearby home, though Brown’s trial and execution happened not long before his transatlantic visit. What compelled him were the people he encountered, this piebald Adirondack tribe.15
The writer was mistaken, though, when he suggested that these enclaves were distinct. Company towns aside, there was no segregation. John Thomas’s neighbors were French Canadian laborers and farmers, a smattering of newly settled Irish, and Yankee pioneers. After the Civil War, the last of these—the Lyons, Lamsons, Skiffs and Bryants—would assume the role of patriarchs, but at midcentury, they were all young impoverished farm families on the make, a little longer on their farms than their Black neighbors, and somehow still indifferent to the siren lure of the West that seemed to steal one able-bodied homesteader for every new arrival. For although the town of Franklin was growing (bolstered by a lumber boom, its population from 1850 to 1860 almost doubled), demographic stability was elusive. Consider the Black community alone: In 1850, twenty-nine Black people lived in Franklin. Ten years later, that number was down by half. Yet the giveaway still exerted an appeal. Fifteen of the sixteen Black household heads who migrated to this remote town between 1855 and 1860 came nine years or more after the giveaway was announced.16
Most left, of course, but not all. Louisa Brady made Franklin her last home, and descendants of the Morehouses, Thomases, and prolific Hazzards made the Adirondacks their home for generations. That’s why they won the loyalty of their white neighbors, and why, in one celebrated instance, those neighbors rallied to the side of one Black family when its existence was suddenly, appallingly, imperiled.
When this happened, we don’t know. Local memory gave no year. But sometime after his family’s midcentury move to Franklin, John Thomas was threatened with reenslavement. Whether the men who came for him were dispatched from Maryland, Malone, or Troy, or working for “Blackbirders” in New York City, we can’t say. But these bounty hunters meant business: they got as far as Franklin Falls, a village six or seven miles east of Vermontville and Negro Brook (as the crow flew; by wagon, the way was longer). This was J. & J. Rogers country, the western stake of an iron-making empire that stretched the length of the Ausable River watershed and once sustained as many as sixty rough-cut settlements. Stagecoaches stopped at the Franklin Falls hotel on route to the pristine interior; they did not linger. This hamlet was a world apart from nearby farm towns in spirit and appearance, the land around it raw and stumpy, kilns, sawmills, and sleepless forges souring the air. Strung along a deep ravine, it made a greedy funnel for the fire that surged its length and leveled all but two of thirty buildings in 1852. But home was home, and that same year the orphaned villagers rebuilt the settlement entirely, all shoulders to the wheel, wood choppers from Quebec, Irish millworkers and sawyers, unsentimental working people happy to vote Democratic if that’s what the bosses said they wanted and doled out enough beer. No zeal for abolition here.17
It was the right place, in other words, to start asking around. We’re looking for a Black farmer. One of Gerrit Smith’s holy fools. Property is property, and this man is an outlaw. We need to get him home.
A reminder here: in 1840, Thomas, then a slave on the Maryland plantation of Ezekiel Merrick, endured the wholly unexpected sale of his wife to a slaveowner in Georgia. The trauma of this loss, which thrust Thomas into a spell of “terrible dispair … and desolation,” also fixed his nerve to break for freedom, and that same year, he escaped from his Queen Anne’s County enslaver and got to Philadelphia. After this came seven years in Troy, New York, a sojourn brightened by a second marriage and the acquaintance of a charismatic minister, who had also fled enslavement in Maryland many years before. The gift deed that Reverend Garnet secured for Thomas in 1847 eventually enabled him to move his new family north to Franklin. Some ex-slaves felt a positive aversion to all things countrified and rustic, but farming was what John Thomas knew and liked. Did he worry about slave hunters? To Merrick he would always be a self-stolen asset, an investment gone awry. But surely, after all these years, his enslaver had moved on.18
The Malone journalist Frederick Seaver anticipated his readers’ incredulity. That’s why he made a point of all his fact-checking. In his 1918 county history, he claimed to have interviewed people in three Franklin villages, and all confirmed the story. Merrick’s unnamed kidnappers got as far as Franklin Falls—and on learning that John Thomas was aware of their approach, that he “was armed and would never be taken alive,” and, what’s more, that “the local whites would stand by him, with certainty that some one would be killed,” they gave up and went away.19
Could this be true? When I first read this, I was struck by all the markers of Underground Railroad fakelore: the high drama, the heroism of the white defenders, the eleventh-hour resolution. Like so many tales of its type, it seemed mainly to reveal a postbellum storyteller’s hopeful bid to stake out a local angle for the struggle between North and South and to claim a bold, preemptive role for a rural neighborhood at such a great remove from the sublime conflict to come. Yet evidence of antislavery activity in this part of Franklin County was weak, as Seaver himself noted. Among Thomas’s Vermontville neighbors were no names on the rolls of the Liberty Party lists or the Franklin County Anti-slavery Society, no antislavery convention-goers, no candidates for the abolition cause. In 1846, equal voting privileges for Black New Yorkers won the support of 58.8 percent of Franklin’s voters—hardly the grand showing of Essex’s 70.8 percent and Clinton’s 72.8 percent. Smith’s agent Jermain Loguen alerted the grantees to six white abolitionists in Essex County who could be relied on for support. For Franklin County, he could name but two. In 1850, no northern county delivered so few votes to the Liberty Party as Franklin: a mere ten abolition votes, compared with Essex’s seventy-seven and Clinton’s thirty-five. And in 1850 when Gerrit Smith dispatched an agent to northern New York to raise bail money for the Underground Railroad operative William Chaplin, then languishing in a Maryland jail, Franklin County yawned. In “especially Franklin,” Smith’s agent sighed, “there appears to be but little interest felt in the anti-slavery enterprise—and but little sympathy for the noble Chaplin.”20
But if we can’t know whether John Thomas’s Franklin neighbors were good antislavery men, we do know of their regard for Thomas as their neighbor. Had he once been enslaved? Well, that was somewhere else. Right now his farm flanked theirs, their youngsters and his warmed their palms at the same box stove in their Franklin school, and everybody’s backsides made the same sad peace with the hard benches at church. As for this new slave law about handing over fugitives— recall a temperance advocate’s unhappy summary of this hard-drinking corner of Franklin County at midcentury: “This region, so far back in the woods, was regarded as outside and beyond the reach of any law whatever, whether human or divine.” Laws in these parts got kept when they made sense. When they made hard lives harder (kept homesteaders from squatting on land nobody was using, fined them from taking cordwood from the huge estates of far-off speculators, penalized a father of five for bringing home an out-of-season buck), laws might be ignored.
Cockamamie legislation from long-distance lawmakers that wreaked havoc with Adirondack life was nothing new. In county newspapers, Thomas’s neighbors read about big-city magnates hogging profits from iron ore hauled out of mining hamlets in the region (“It pains us to see our county robbed of its very life blood to make non-residents rich,” an Essex County editor anguished in 1854. “Will our citizens never see their true interests?”) John Thomas’s neighbors knew all about the hated scrip system that kept Adirondack miners in thrall to the company store, bank, and barber. They saw the handiwork of logging gangs in their woodlots timber poachers in the pay of outside speculators who hogged the high-selling softwoods. Subsistence pilfering, a longtime Adirondack custom, was one thing, but these weren’t locals gathering stovewood and forsaken roof beams, but hired guns who roved around. And always, back of these turkey vultures, were the land barons of Troy, Plattsburgh, and Malone, all of them outsiders, interlopers, little loved. If Thomas’s neighbors could handle them, they could surely manage a few pesky man-thieves after one of their own.21
Arguing the Point. Lithograph, hand-colored, 1855. Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait, with Louis Maurer. Courtesy of the Adirondack Experience, Blue Mountain Lake, NY.
This, anyway, is how I make sense of Frederick Seaver’s story and justify the proposition that Thomas’s neighbors came to his defense. I don’t see a sudden bloom of antislavery conviction making rifle-grabbing minutemen out of Thomas’s neighbors. Maybe that was part of it, but I’m more persuaded by need. Why might a Black farmer have expected his white neighbors to defend him? Because on the agrarian frontier Thomas had made his presence felt. Recall Ray’s mantra: “Mutual assistance, mutual and equal dependence, mutual sympathy—and labor, the ‘common destiny of the American people,’ under such circumstance, yields equally to all, and makes all equal.” Much more than an abstract integrationist agenda, practical need prompted Iddo Osgood to urge McCune Smith and Ray to exchange their deeds for property closer to the struggling settlement of North Elba, where their medical and ministerial talents were wanted. Plain and pressing need made an overseer of roads out of Lyman Eppes, an inspector of elections out of James H. Henderson in North Elba, and a tax collector out of Willis Hodges in Loon Lake. Black settlers were asked to sign a petition for a new road because the more names on the list, the more effective the appeal. Volunteerism and collaboration steadied everybody’s boat.22
Need also helps explain the many racially mixed households in the midcentury Adirondacks: in Essex County, twelve of the twenty-eight homes with Black residents in 1850 were integrated households. Nor was it merely happenstance these were the homes of farmers. In chronically shorthanded frontier households, boarders, hired hands, and housekeepers were a boon. Black single laborers lived with farm families. White workers lived with Black families. Boarders looked after the elderly, took care of children, worked on “shares” for bed and fare, helping farm families get by. When Adirondack homesteading began to stale for the grantee Josiah Hasbrook Sr., he moved away, but his teenage children lingered, two boarding with Black North Elbans, one lodging with white neighbors. Silas Hicks, a grantee from New York City, spurned his remote gift from Gerrit Smith for a pallet in the crowded farmhouse of the Elizabethtown farmers Milo and Abigail Durand and their ten children. (A few years later, Hicks and his bride, Harriet, were in a log shanty of their own.)23
White homes took in Black women too. Hannah Dickson, a grantee’s wife, lived with John Brown’s daughter Ruth when Ruth’s husband, Henry Thompson, was away, and Harriet Hicks boarded with Irish immigrants when she was widowed, and then she joined the household of a white woman (two widows growing old together in a cabin in the woods, giving up only when a fire drove them out and forced Harriet to the poorhouse). Sometime after the death of the Smith grantee Isaac Craig, his widow, Jane, opened her cabin to an English farmer, Charles Willard, who had once worked for hire for John Brown’s daughter Ruth. Whether Jane and Charles, a widower, were romantically involved, the census does not say. But their joint occupancy of the farm surely relieved their isolation.24
It seems obvious that several of these integrated households reflected the equalitarian culture of their abolitionist owners, like the Liberty Party stalwarts Jesse and Elizabeth Tobey of Jay, who took in Avery Hazzard’s niece Eliza, or the antislavery Durands, who housed the grantee Silas Hicks and worked with John Brown to help fugitives get north, and of course, Brown’s own family, who for many months sheltered and employed Cyrus Thomas, a young fugitive from Florida. But while a racially progressive home culture prepared the way for integrated households, it’s not the reason they existed. Cyrus Thomas lived with the Browns because they were grievously shorthanded and needed live-in help. And not all farmers with integrated homes were white. In Elizabethtown, the grantee Lafayette Mason put up two white charcoal burners from Canada (one lived with the Masons for years). In 1855, George W. Bell, a Delaware-born grantee-farmer in Willsboro, shared his family’s home with a French Canadian woodcutter’s family of eight.25
These pieced-together Adirondack households defied conventions of segregation less from principle than from rank necessity. This was why the Franklin pioneers, white and Black, circled their wagons when the tax collector came to town, and why John Thomas’s neighbors sent the bounty hunters packing. Much more than hot talk from the pulpit or the antislavery press, it was the exigencies of pragmatic, place-based need that helped to integrate and, in John Thomas’s case, abolitionize the Adirondack frontier.
Labor, Which Makes All Equal
Pragmatism also drove the tacit argument for Black migration to the gift land in the antislavery paper the Impartial Citizen in 1849. At the request of Smith’s hard-traveling land agent Jermain Loguen, the Franklin pioneer Jerry Merrill sent the Citizen an appraisal of a typical Smith gift lot near his home. Loguen solicited the opinion of this white local because he guessed the grantees were tired of hearing about the land from city activists who did not farm and knew next to nothing about these woods so far from where they lived, and because the Merrills, like their neighbors the Wardners of Rainbow Lake, had the right eyes for the task. Merrill knew his trees and herbs (lady slipper root for nerves, thoroughwort for colds, horseheal for consumption …); he hunted (a shot pouch on one shoulder, a powder horn on the other, bullets tucked between his fingers); he was a surveyor, and his society was wide. The family inn in Merrillsville on the Hopkinton-Port Kent highway was as famous for the welcome it extended to perfect strangers (including some grantees) as for the heat that blasted from its huge stove. Ask Jerry Merrill for an opinion of a typical Smith Lot, and Loguen knew he’d get an answer.26
Merrill wrote:
I have this day been and examined the North East quarter of Lot No. 151, Township No. 10, Old Military Tract… . The said quarter is about one-half swamp, not so wet as swamps in general in this country, timbered with cedar, balsam, tamarack and spruce.—The other part, upland, [is] rather uneven, very heavily timbered with beech, birch, maple, spruce and hemlock, which denotes good soil, and not very stony. Said lot is the fifth lot directly South of my father’s. There is an improvement on the lot adjoining it on the North, which improvement borders on said quarter, and a passable road to it.
This early in April, the forest floor was still patched with snow, the maple leaves still stiff enough to crackle, but, to the point: “I should think the lot was about an average with lots in general in this town, and a thorough-going, smart man, acquainted with clearing land, might get a living on it.”27
The Impartial Citizen, the Black agent Samuel Ward’s abolition sheet in Syracuse, framed Merrill’s note to Loguen as a rebuke to Smith’s detractors: “Read it, you who defame this great man.” And maybe Merrill had this in mind too. For Gerrit Smith, his family had for years collected payments from contract farmers and negotiated sales. They put up the grantee Jonathan Mingo at the inn and alerted him to a sale lot much better than his gift land. They held mail at their post office for Willis Hodges and his pioneers.
But Merrill had another reason beyond family loyalty to Smith to push for the Black Woods. The “South Towns” of Franklin County—Brighton, Franklin, Harrietstown, and portions of Duane—were much slower to develop than the early settled, more populous villages to the north. This somewhat benighted district needed settlers badly. More farmers on the ground meant more state and county funds for roadwork and public services. More families meant more hands for shingle making, sugar boiling, and barn raising. Cleared land would make browse, more deer would bring city “sports” to the family inn, and locals would find work as guides. A practical urgency at least as much as a respect for Smith’s initiative explains Merrill’s obliging but blunt tone. The simple truth, he suggests, was not everyone was made to homestead. Would a settler work his land hard and steadily? Respect its limits and potential? In Franklin was no John Brown offering to school the first-time farmers in their work. All the Franklin grantees’ neighbors were disadvantaged by good-enough-but-not-great land that provided a living, little more. Not ideology but need, pragmatic, blunt, and steady, would suggest the common ground, and membership in this fraternity would come (Ray’s promise, once again), through “labor, which yields equally to all, and makes all equal.”28
Compare Merrill’s letter with Douglass’s purple exhortation about “the sable-armed pioneer” and “the glorious dawn of civilization.” Prosaic and precise, Merrill did not fancify. He reported what he saw. For those who’d had their fill of pomp, this measured view was better than inspiring. It was credible. It said, This is how it is up here. You can hack it, or you can’t.
Those who did persist, however meager their accomplishment, commanded neighborly respect. Some miles south of Merrillsville, in a cabin on the Essex County–Franklin County line, dwelt a pioneer named Daniel Thompson. It isn’t clear when this grantee first moved to this patch. From New York City but residing in Elizabethtown when he was deeded, Thompson lived alone on his gift lot, a mile from a road. By the mid-1850s he was a widower in his seventies, his children grown and gone. But his neighbors knew him. They looked out for him. They described him as “a devoted Christian” well known to “all the Christian community.” And they worried for him. “Many a cold morning” the farmer Augustus Porter “look’d to see if he could see the smoke rise from [Thompson’s] log cabbin during the winter past fearing he might have suffered from the cold so as not to be able to help himself.”29
Why did anybody care? Thompson was no community builder. He did little with his land (clearing only about eight acres), never built it up into a “fine cultivated farm” like John Thomas, or earned Thomas’s good name as an “honest, upright, and fair-dealing man, much respected in the community.” Nor would he cofound a library like Lyman Eppes or a village cemetery like Avery Hazzard’s sons. All he offered was tenacity. And for his neighbors, this was enough. For the simple feat of holding on when so many lost heart and packed it in, his small square in the fragile quilt would be defended, and woe betide the man who tried to rip it out.30
John Brigham considered trying. A lumberman from the Adirondack mill town of Clintonville, Brigham bought a batch of land in Franklin in 1854, only to discover that one of his new lots was occupied. More problematic still, the resident, Thompson, declared that the land was his own; he had a deed from Gerrit Smith, and this was surely true. But he had built his cabin on Lot 201, St. Armand, Essex County, southeast of his legal property. His gift piece, Lot 200, was just across the county line in Franklin (or ten rods north and west from where Thompson built his home). It was an honest error, and not at all unusual. Years before, the Franklin farmer Isaac Lyon, meaning only to be helpful, had led Thompson to Lot 201 and assured him this was his. (Lyman Eppes built his first home on land not his own but very near it, and a surveying error may have been the cause here too.)31
John Brigham had no wish to make this old man suffer. But in 1856 someone offered him $400 for Lot 201, and Brigham, who dreamed of a second home, hoped to “improve the opportunity.” He did not “feel justified in putting Mr. Thompson off,” he wrote Smith, because to “remove him” might well “far … shorten his days.” And yet! Brigham did not spell it out, but his expectation was plain. He wanted Smith to compensate him for what he stood to lose if he declined this offer, or to underwrite Thompson’s resettlement. For was it not a fact that without a gift deed from Gerrit Smith, Thompson would not be on this piece? Was Smith therefore not implicated in Thompson’s plight? After noting many reasons why Thompson might be better off elsewhere (so old, so poor, and his soil worn to nothing, his means exhausted, his farming no great shakes), “all” Brigham asked was “that the man may be cared for & provided for without an expense to me.”32
A colder man than Brigham might have served the squatter with a warrant and let the law take its course (though who knows if a court would find for Brigham after Thompson’s nine-year occupation). But Brigham was uneasy. A radical abolitionist and member of Keeseville’s antislavery First Congregational Church, he knew all about Smith’s effort to fight voter suppression by settling Black grantees on Adirondack land. He sometimes worked for Smith, serving warrants on his delinquent contract holders. He had helped Smith’s own longtime land agents buy back land in Township 10 from uninterested grantees. His politics were principled and bold; he once made a hopeless bid for Ausable town clerk on the Liberty Party line. But here was this old squatter, standing in the way of this speculator’s dream house. Could Smith please help?33
The issue was perceptual. Brigham saw Thompson in light of Gerrit Smith’s philanthropy of 1846, a perpetual beneficiary, a farmer of Smith’s making. But by 1856, Thompson had improved “his” property, made a home, joined a church, and earned the affection of his neighbors. In the Black Woods he had made good on Smith’s design to the point where he’d outdistanced it, and now it was up to the beleaguered Brigham to adjust his view of Thompson not as the object of Smith’s charity but as an aging woodsman who would not give up his piece, legitimate or not, without a fight.
This was a lot to ask of Brigham, or of anybody making a living dealing land. But if Gerrit Smith commiserated, he did not think enough of Brigham’s plight to note it in his letter book. What he wanted was to build communities, not weaken them. Nor was it his custom to bail out grantee-settlers or speculators in distress. Further, the idea of paying an abolitionist to do the right thing would have left him cold. Bad enough to have to compensate slaveowners for their human “property.” Those were necessary dealings with the helplessly benighted. John Brigham, good abolitionist, knew very well what he should do, and in the end, it seems, he did it. He did not sell this lot until 1864, by which time Thompson was lost to the public record. Maybe a young relative or friend took the old man away, or he died in his cabin, a plume of woodsmoke thinning to a whisker, a line of saplings already lifting at the edges of his field.
Not There Yet
The first time I read it, John Thomas’s 1872 letter to Gerrit Smith struck me like a vindication. For all that I could find to show that the Smith Land giveaway had a longer lifespan than supposed; that many Black grantee-farmers flourished in the Adirondacks; that John Brown’s enclave, Timbuctoo, was just one spoke of this far-flung rural community; and that the integration of this Yankee-settled frontier was in some ways quite profound, I had yet to read a Black grantee’s opinion of the gift land in his or her own words. A few white pioneers left their impressions, but this was not like hearing from the grantees. Black reformers who visited (Ray, McCune Smith, Loguen, and maybe Myers) spoke from the outside looking in and, in any case, had their agendas. Nor could I set much store by white-authored accounts like Seneca Ray Stoddard’s buffoonish take on Henderson’s sad death, or his caricature of the Eppeses, or Lyman Epps Jr.’s interviews with reporters, who much preferred to mine for anecdotes about his father’s friendship with the martyred Brown than to learn about the giveaway and anything it meant. John Thomas’s letter to Smith was a great boon, but in my wish to have it mean what I hoped it meant, I missed the fuller picture.
Overwhelmingly, that news was good. John Thomas had made out well, and a more stirring endorsement of Smith’s idea from a grantee (maybe the one such letter Smith received) is hard to imagine. Thanks to “your generous donation” of a deed, Thomas wrote, he had moved to Franklin County and built himself a home “which by labor and economy has been enlarged into a handsome farm of two hundred acres, with all necessary Stock and farming implements,” a farm that produced enough of a surplus to earn him “two or three hundred dollars every year.” Thomas and his wife and two daughters, he told Smith, “enjoy our rural home in peace and quiet: but advancing years notify me that the toils of life are nearly done… . I have breasted the storm of prejudice and opposition, until I begin to be regarded as an ‘American Citizen.’ Heartily thanking you for the interest you have always taken in the welfare of my people, and hoping to hear from you at your earliest convenience. I remain, Yours with Great Respect, John Thomas.”
But had farming “made all equal,” as Charles Ray and the Black agrarians hoped? When Thomas wrote his letter, he had been on his land for twenty-two years, with eighteen more to go (despite his certainty that his remaining days were few). From 1846 to 1860, electoral support for equal voting rights among the voters of Franklin, Essex, and Clinton Counties plunged. In 1863, the year of the Emancipation Proclamation, New York voters had yet to approve equal voting rights for Black residents of the state; the despised $250 property requirement was still in force. Nor would Lee’s surrender bind and heal this political divide. A decade after Appomattox, the Plattsburgh Republican was still railing at Black suffrage, calling it nothing but a crude ruse to beef up the Republican electorate, undermine white labor, and position enfranchised Black men to “hold office—as Jurors, Sheriffs, Aldermen, Representatives, and Governors!” And how long before they claimed the liberty to bed and marry whom they pleased? In the rural North no less than in the South, a horror of miscegenation drove objections to social and political equality.34
By 1872, John Thomas was saving money. He had already voted four times and he would vote again. Two of his grown children and a pack of grandchildren lived nearby. A tranquil neighborhood and relative security were his to savor. But this was not equality. Advancement, yes, and no disputing it. But he would never join an Adirondack jury. He might have tried to run for office. He could not have won. Nor could his daughters dream of teaching in a Franklin schoolhouse. Full equality in the armed forces would be denied his people for another seventy years. And to some of his white neighbors he would be a “Gerrit N——” until he died.35
Only in death, it seemed, could the Black Woods be called color-blind. Cemeteries in the hamlets of Vermontville, Bloomingdale, Wadhams, Westport, Whallonsburg, and North Elba hold the graves of Gerrit Smith grantees, their spouses, and their extended families, which mingle freely with the stones of their white neighbors. They face the same green, breezy views, survive the same heaping blizzards. The headstone here of one John Thomas, eighty-four, “Born in Queen Anna Co., Md., Oct. 30, 1810,” may cause a visitor to wonder how this old Southerner ever managed to end up in a remote rural cemetery in the Adirondack hills. But whose bones belonged to Black bodies is nowhere revealed.36