The Physician: “Our Lives Are Much Shortened”

In 1820, a deadly strain of typhoid ran amok in New York City. Seven-year-old James McCune Smith, son of an enslaved Black woman and a white merchant, was too young to measure the gap between Black and white mortality rates. But he experienced it. In the earthen cellars of one tenement, Bancker Street Fever infected thirty-three of forty-eight Black residents, fourteen of whom died; no illness troubled the 120 white people in the rooms above. Smallpox struck in 1823, and six years later, when McCune Smith was a teenager, yellow fever once again filled unmarked graves. By the time cholera ravaged the city in 1832, he could anticipate the outcome. Whether by an outbreak of the above, or tuberculosis, pneumonia, influenza, rickets, dysentery, or bronchitis, Black New Yorkers in the city were disproportionately imperiled. More got sick than their white neighbors, and more died. In the mid-nineteenth century, death rates for Black city dwellers matched mortality rates for enslaved people in the South. And McCune Smith, who had spent five years in a medical school in Glasgow when no American university would have him, knew why. Negrophobia enabled the disparity. Viruses and germs were the bullets, but racism aimed and fired the gun.¹

When Gerrit Smith tapped McCune Smith to be an agent for the giveaway, he was one of two Black doctors in New York. Between a private practice and his work as staff doctor at the Colored Orphan Asylum, he covered a lot of ground. He had an integrated practice, and was co-owner of a pharmacy at 193 Broadway in the neighborhood now called Tribeca. He and his wife, Malvina Barnet, a graduate of the Rutgers Female Institute, worshipped at St. Philip’s Episcopal, where McCune Smith was a vestryman, no small honor in a congregation-owned church with a capacity of two thousand. From his brick home, he and Malvina could stroll to St. John’s Park, where two hundred trees cooled their corner of the city. This was an enviable life. But when he signed on to recruit grantees for Smith’s initiative, this doctor’s mood was bleak.²

McCune Smith could publish his incisive columns about racism and the city’s racially skewed death rates in the Colored American. He could hobnob with the enlightened likes of white radical reformers like Lewis Tappan. But conversation was not action. It worked no lasting change. The laws that kept him out of streetcars meant that bad weather clipped his rounds. When he could not work, his patients suffered, his orphans most of all. The rules that barred him from city medical societies meant he could not keep up with recent scholarship and research, or build a readership for his own. He could not audit anatomy lessons at city hospitals or collaborate with other researchers and physicians. Professional advancement was a sham, while breaking news of treatments, protocols, and medicines was out of reach. It was the iron clamp of prejudice that constrained all Black New Yorkers of ambition. If his friend Thomas Downing tried serving Black diners at his oyster house, the merchants and European tourists who thronged his venue would desert it in an hour. Black barbers who tried taking in the “colored custom” would see their white trade die that day.³

There was simply no part of urban life where “caste” did not rule with the confidence of law. Complexion pinned the young Black men of New York City to the worst-paid jobs, with little promise of advancement. Homes were frigid shanties, and some tenements were as shoddy as the single-layer brick facades that fronted them. Rent for city Blacks ran 25 to 30 percent higher than what white New Yorkers ever paid, and this for “rooms” the size of a doghouse, a broom closet, a coffin. For bodily relief there were privies without sewers, or alleys boggy and impassable with excrement. No missing or uneven cobbles to complain of—there were no cobbles, and if there were, how could it matter? In Five Points, the cultural historian Tyler Anbinder describes an aged woman encountering a cobble-cleaning effort in her nook of the city: “Where in the world did all those stones come from? I never knew that the streets were covered with stones before.” Garbage, a witches’ brew of offal, ashes, litter, animal waste, and trash, was consumed by roving packs of pigs and dogs, and so disruptive were the latter that in 1847 the city hired four Black men to hunt and kill them by the hundreds. Each day every workhorse dosed the streets with a quart of urine and up to thirty-five pounds of excrement, and these horses, gaunt and weary, were ubiquitous, dragging carts and omnibuses until they toppled in the street. Manure stuck and dried to a fine dust that powdered pedestrians and shop windows alike, and toxified the groundwater that spread the typhoid whose long reach McCune Smith knew so well. The proof of poverty’s impact on sickness and early death for poor Black people was as tangible as it was irrefutable.⁴

Some illnesses that seemed to target city Blacks were so little understood that they had no name—but McCune Smith saw how they rampaged. Though the Croton waterworks brought running water to Manhattan in 1842, this was no use to poor renters whose landlords would not pay for Croton’s installation fee or spring for hookups to the trunk line; tenement and shanty dwellers got their drinking water from wells, cisterns, and hydrants, and risked their health with every sip. Hydrants froze in winter and sputtered dry in summer, coal dust and bird feces befouled cisterns, and, as for wells, when city numbers surged and water usage with it, the water table rose as well, mingling sewage and spring well water to murderous effect. In 1849, cholera, a waterborne disease, claimed five thousand city lives.⁵

McCune Smith, a voracious reader, knew his Emerson, Burns, and Byron (and had his knuckles rapped by a Black columnist for the “idle time” he devoted to “readings of that sort”). He knew all the vaunted uses of Romantic nature, how it imaged God’s originality, revived the spirit, salved the soul. But much more than a passion for Romantic poetry made the Black Woods look good to the doctor. City life, he argued in his Report on the Social Condition of the People of Color around New York City, was more than hard on Black people. It was killing them. “Our lives in the city are much shortened,” he declared. “Look at the preponderance of widows and children among us. They so far exceed the calamities of mere sickness that our benevolent societies have been obliged to cut off the widows and orphans, in order to heal the sick.” Middle-class Black professionals like McCune Smith were buffered from these scourges; they had access to more space, cleaner water, better food, and prompt medical attention. But not for them, for any Black city dweller, the mobility of their white neighbors. When white people got wind of a looming epidemic, they packed up for the country to sit out the latest plague. Even poor whites enjoyed this option; cheap hotels and boardinghouses abounded in Long Island and New Jersey. Rich or poor, Black health seekers need not apply.⁶

The Leveler: “Something in It Paradisiacal”

“It almost possesses ubiquity; it is everywhere, doing its deleterious work wherever one of the proscribed class lives and moves,” said the churchman Charles B. Ray of the “Monster, Prejudice. One needs to feel it, and to wither under its effects, to know it.” Elder Ray, the most devoted of Smith’s land agents, was on close terms with the Monster. It assailed his working-class parishioners and hobbled the prospects of his church. With Black clergymen laboring at half the wages of their white counterparts and taking second and third jobs to get by, church pulpits were undermanned, prayer meetings sporadic, and attendance unreliable. Ray himself could not afford to do his job full-time. (Church work was his calling. For a living, he made shoes and copublished a newspaper, the Colored American, which he edited and peddled town to town until publication ceased in 1841.) But at least Ray kept his flock. Many Black churches that had been torched in New York’s antiabolition riot of 1834 never recovered. And the next year’s sweeping fire—“a thirteen-acre ocean of burning waves,” the worst blaze in the city’s history—took a toll too. Churches were not rebuilt, and Black churchmen could not afford to rent or buy. By 1852, most of Ray’s congregants had lost all “relish for God’s house.” They were numb, and spent. Ray grieved, “The Sabbath is an irksome day to them.”⁷

In the country, this could change. There would be a schoolhouse for the children. The invigorating labor and deep slumber of the farmer would rout perennial fatigue. Relish, not resentment, would welcome the day of prayer. And for Ray, this was more than theoretical. His faith in the special power of the small, farm-based community was steeped in early memory. His first home, Falmouth, Massachusetts, was a seaside village south of Boston on the Nantucket Sound, ringed with modest hills, old sheep pastures, and cranberry bogs. His mother arrived there as a girl; she was brought by her enslaver. Ray grew up with the story of townspeople hiding her in the post office cellar the day she was supposed to leave. She stepped out into her new life only when the white man tired of the hunt and sailed away for good. Taking a new name, Annis Harrington joined the Methodist church and married Joseph Ray, the part-Black and part-Native postman who ran the mailboat between Falmouth and Nantucket. Charles Bennett Ray was the first of their seven children.⁸

Before the move to New York City, Charles Ray worked on his grandfather’s farm in Westerly, Rhode Island, and apprenticed with a Martha’s Vineyard bootmaker. And this, too, bolstered his agrarianism; he knew what northern small-town and rural life might offer that city life withheld. As early as 1829, Ray’s old friend Samuel Cornish, the publisher of the newspaper The Rights of All, was urging freed slaves to “escape contagion of the vices” and “command a more respectable standing in society” by farming, and later, in the Colored American, Ray and Cornish kept beating this same drum. Cornish went so far as to buy a two-thousand-acre riverfront parcel in New Jersey for a farm colony for city Blacks. Cornish aimed to spare his Black friends and family the “corruptions of a city life… . If parents would have their children be a comfort to them and a blessing to the world, they must separate them from the snares and abounding wickednesses of our large cities.” The project was abandoned when hoped-for colonists did not invest and Cornish’s young son drowned in the Delaware River. Back in New York City, the Cornishes put the wretched interlude behind them. Yet the promise of Black farming still compelled. From 1837 to 1842, Colored American copublishers Ray, Cornish, and Phillip Bell churned out a wagonload of articles with titles like “Self-Denial, Enterprise, Husbandry,” “Brethren, Go to the Country,” “Encourage the Colored People to Become Farmers,” “The Charms of the Farmer’s Life,” and “Importance of Agriculture.” In 1837, this paper asked its readers, “What is more honorable than husbandry? To till the soil, to be a producer of corn and wheat, and a grower of flocks and herds, has something in it paradisiacal. If there be any calling in the world allied to primitive innocency, it is husbandry… . This will honorably connect us with the prosperity, and make us participants in the glories of the American Republic.”⁹

Also working to promote the cause of frontier farming was the white press, which in the wake of the devastating national depression of 1837, found solace in a vision of a generative American frontier. “We say, then, Mechanics, artisans, laborers … Fly—scatter throughout the country—go to the Great West—rather than remain here, consuming the pittance which is left of your earnings,” urged the New Yorker magazine in 1837. Black New Yorkers read these columns too, and learned about newly opened territories (secured by laws and treaties that swept Native Americans out of the way). Along with whites, they marveled at the long reach of the canal system and new railroad routes, noted the proliferating land offices, and registered the impact of the self-scouring plow. Between 1800 and 1850, half a million square miles were opened to settlement, an expanse larger than any European state west of Russia. Exclusionary “Black laws” were discouraging, but were they enforceable on every acre? Surely in this imperial swath were some safe patches for Black pioneers.¹⁰

That, anyway, was the determined message of the Colored American in the late 1830s, as its westward-faring correspondents filled long columns with proud accounts of new Black enclaves. Working for the American Anti-slavery Society, the Quaker brothers Augustus and John Owen Wattles visited numerous Black midwestern settlements between 1837 and 1839. Here in Cabin Creek, Indiana, was a Virginia shoemaker who bought his wife’s freedom and a town lot with what he made cobbling shoes and working a small farm. In Springfield, Ohio, were “30 families, containing 200 individuals… . 14 are farmers, 4 are wagoners who drove their own teams, 4 own real estate, and 4 have bought themselves and paid $1,000 for their freedom.” Zanesville, Ohio, boasted “a large settlement,” and one landowner there had “the name of being one of the best farmers in the county. He settled here when the country was new … 17 years ago. Besides … bringing up a family of 12 children, he has during the last year purchased and paid for one thousand acres of government land.” Smith Township, Columbiana County, Ohio, held a Black settlement numbering “264 individuals, owning 1860 acres of land, valued at $29,200, 70 horses … , 213 head of cattle … , 328 sheep,” plus two schools and four preachers.¹¹

Charles B. Ray did not need western testimonials to shore up his agrarianism. He had his grandfather in Rhode Island. He had the Black farmer he met in the Mohawk Valley in 1837, who “lives among an intelligent farming community; he nor his children know very little about prejudice; and suffer nothing on account of it… . If we would run away from prejudice, it is not necessary that we should run out of the United States; but scatter thousands of us all over the country; and buy up the soil, and become cultivators of it. In this way, better than in any other, can we get rid of prejudice.” Ray offered this almost a decade before Gerrit Smith opened the Black Woods.¹²

Ray also lobbied for farming and the country life at Black political conventions. “Become possessors of the soil,” Ray and Theodore Wright told delegates in 1840 at a meeting in Albany, New York. And in Buffalo a few years later, Ray and convention delegates confidently pictured farming as “the shortest, surest road to respectability and influence.” There was simply no better, faster way to win white hearts. Farming, Ray insisted, “puts the one farmer … upon the same level with his neighbors—their occupation is one, their hopes and interests are one; his neighbors see him now, not as in other situations they may have done as a servant; but an independent man; … they are not above him nor he above them; they are all alike upon a level; … and as it is only by placing men in the same position in society that all cast[es] are lost sight of; all cast[e] in his case, were he previously of the proscribed class, will fade away and be forgotten.” The power of the farmer here was close to alchemical. Subsistence farming on fresh land enabled true distributive justice. Start with level ground, and all the rest—trust, respect, even friendship—would follow.¹³

The Perfectionist: “A Perfect System of Agrarianism”

When George Trusty got word of his enslaver’s death in 1822, he knew what was coming. Maryland’s Colonel William Spencer was heavily in debt. His heirs would want to settle his estate. Assets would be sold, among them some of his twenty-four slaves. George Trusty, his cobbler, would bring good money. Hence the haste with which his family made its getaway from Spencer’s 1,100-acre Kent County plantation. Within two months of Spencer’s burial, a covered wagon holding ten breathless fugitives, Trusty’s immediate family of four and six other relatives, made a break for freedom. There was no time to lose. As soon as their escape was reported, they would be pursued.¹⁴

Six of Trusty’s relatives were discovered in Delaware and New York. The more fortunate Trustys made it to Quaker-settled New Hope, Pennsylvania, and from there, after a few years, to Manhattan, where the family surname was changed to Garnet, and some first names too. George Garnet resumed making shoes, and his wife, Elizabeth (formerly Henny), enrolled their son in the African Free School on Mott Street. Arithmetic, geography, rhetoric, and navigation were Henry Highland Garnet’s portion, and he may have liked the last the best; he went to sea when he was a young teen. On vessels bound for Washington, DC, and Cuba, he was a ship’s cook, cabin boy, and steward. Tough work and meager pay, but at least as long as he was boat-bound, “man-thieves” in the pay of Spencer’s heirs could not track him down.¹⁵

His family was less lucky. In 1829, slave hunters broke into the Garnets’ Manhattan home. On his return, the young seaman found his family scattered, their rooms in shambles. And though the Garnets weathered the crisis (Henry’s sister Eliza persuaded authorities to release her, and Elizabeth was freed with the help of abolitionist family friends), they knew their luck could fail at any time. The bounty hunters were still looking. So again, Henry, now fifteen, left the city, this time contracting with a Quaker farmer in Jericho, Long Island. He liked this labor and might have made it his life’s work, but a grievous injury killed that prospect, and back he went to Manhattan, this time to enroll in school at First Colored Presbyterian, the second-largest Black church in the country. Here, the leading pastor, Theodore S. Wright, newly graduated from the Princeton Theological Seminary, preached a fearlessly wholistic activism that waged a hands-on war on Negrophobia. He hid fugitives in his Broadway home, lobbied for Black voting rights, argued for Black uplift, denounced the colonizationists, condemned the sin of slavery, called out abolitionists, both white and Black, who defended segregation—and made sure his students grasped the indivisibility of these concerns.

Garnet had been enslaved, and Reverend Wright, born free in New Jersey, had never known the lash. Yet they felt each other’s story. As Wright told a New York antislavery assembly in 1837, “We are still slaves—everywhere we feel the chain galling us,” whether freeborn or not. “The spirit of slavery … is withering all our hopes. [Its] influence cuts us off from everything; it follows us up from childhood to manhood.” It was simply inescapable, like “the atmosphere, everywhere felt.” Garnet knew what he meant. He had choked on this same atmosphere in Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York City, and in Canaan, New Hampshire. At the last of these was a new school, integrated, where Garnet, nineteen, hoped to study. But only weeks after Noyes Academy welcomed Garnet and his companion, the younger student Alexander Crummell, white farmers wagoned to the campus, hitched the little schoolhouse to teams of oxen, dragged it to a swamp, and torched it.¹⁶

The next move augured better. Garnet and Crummell’s city mentor, Reverend Wright, urged his protégés to head west to Oneida County, New York, where a radical white abolitionist had launched an integrated school in Whitesboro. Beriah Green’s academy promised to steep its scholars in the manual trades, Greek and Hebrew, and the tenets of radical perfectionism. And this place locals left alone. At the Oneida Institute, Garnet cultivated the gift for oratory that early on distinguished a long pastoral career. It would be Gerrit Smith’s eventual great fortune that young Garnet’s first assignment in the field was in Troy, the city closest to the gift lands in the Adirondack wilds.¹⁷

Garnet assumed the ministry at Liberty Street Presbyterian in 1839. He was its first pastor, and the congregants his first parishioners. In five years, his vigorous, audacious oratory had more than doubled the church’s membership. Four years later, Garnet, only twenty-eight, spoke for ninety minutes at a National Negro Convention in Buffalo. It would be the speech that made his fame and notoriety. In clear, emphatic, scrupulously reasoned terms, Garnet’s “Address to the Slaves” called for armed resistance to slavery in the North and South alike. Its eloquence was matched by its unexpectedness, and at its close, the hall full of convention delegates erupted. Garnet’s old mentor, Theodore S. Wright, glowed with pride. Elder Ray was on the fence, and Frederick Douglass enraged. Delegates put Garnet’s resolution to a vote; this hot call to rebellion lost the day by one vote. But the winds of Garnet’s appeal gusted well beyond Buffalo, New York. Antislavery papers quoted him in Ohio, Boston, and New Hampshire. At a Colored Convention in Ohio in 1849, delegates endorsed this six-year-old address and urged its widespread circulation (Garnet had published it himself, along with the late Black militant David Walker’s 1830 Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World). John Brown invoked Garnet’s address in 1859 before his hanging. At the height of the Black Power movement in the 1960s, the Black World/Negro Digest declared Henry Garnet “the first black leader in America to call for a National Liberation Struggle [whose] ideas clearly conform to many of the feelings held by black leaders today.”¹⁸

In 1848, Garnet broke with the Albany Presbytery and declared his Troy congregation beholden only to “God and His Son Jesus Christ”; this way, he could preach his antislavery Bible politics without fear of reproof. (Gerrit Smith may have inspired this; in 1843, Smith left the Peterboro Presbyterians to found his nonsectarian abolition church.) Garnet knew he risked the loss of some parishioners. Not all of his flock were keen on Bible politics. But risk and Garnet were old friends. He took a risk when he left Maryland, went to sea, and attended Noyes Academy, and he took a risk in Troy preaching antislavery in a city jealously protective of its trade with Southern clients. Risk was his daily fare.¹⁹

The risk he ran in 1846, when he signed on to get Smith “pick’d men” for a new life in the woods, was failure. Some of Smith’s agents simply could not meet their quotas. Garnet not only met his, but when he discovered that some of his choices were unworthy, he made Smith scratch them from the list. Some of his devotion to this task reflected his own respect and love for Gerrit Smith himself; for Garnet more than the others, Peterboro was like a second home. But mostly, Garnet was motivated by his own passionate agrarianism. Like Ray, he had been urging Black families to get out of the city for years. The vote was more achievable in small towns where it was easier to save money. To a Black audience in Schenectady in 1844 he pointed out that “in the towns of Syracuse and Geneva, among a colored population of some eight hundred, there are more voters according to the odious $250 qualification, than there are in New York City, which has eighteen or twenty thousand.” Prejudice, he added, was “so strong in cities, and custom is so set and determined, that it is impossible for us to emerge from the most laborious and least profitable occupations.” Work hard in the country, however, and “there is no prejudice so strong as to be able to roll back the tide of our enfranchisement.”²⁰

Note the goal here: not Charles Ray’s equalitarian pastoral (agrarian hardship as an equalizer), and not McCune Smith’s regenerative frontier, but voting rights—civic power enabled by a perfectionist agenda. In a sermon to the Troy grantees before they headed north, Garnet set the standard high. To the deedholders would fall the work of “set[ting] an example of independence” for other Black people and demonstrating “the falsity of the old doctrine, that we are doomed to be the hewers of wood, and drawers of water.” “God’s design that every man shall have a home” was theirs to claim, “a perfect system of agrarianism” their duty to install. Take your Bibles, Garnet told them. Keep the Sabbath. Save money, and turn away from “rum jugs … and whiskey barrels.” Rather than join a church whose leaders shrank from damning slavery, start your own church. Remember Bible politics and stay engaged, “interested in the political affairs of the nation.” This, to the perfectionist, was key. “Refuse to vote for those who will give honor to oppressors. O, brethren, be faithful to your duty at the ballot box. There, give expression to your prayers.” Infusing politics with faith, faith with political resolve, was the Black settler’s charge. Garnet’s Black Woods would be perfected. Where McCune Smith emphasized the antiurban angle, and Ray dreamed of small, integrated communities driven to egalitarianism by pragmatic need, Garnet saw a sanctified utopia, a city on a hill.²¹

This message would be heard. While Ray and McCune Smith signed up takers by the thousands, it was Troy’s Garnet, the preacher with the voice of “one who wrestled with an angel,” who inspired the most grantees to move onto their land. McCune Smith confirmed this twenty years after the giveaway was launched. Not his and Ray’s work but his old friend Henry Garnet’s “influence and teachings” and his “judgment in selecting beneficiaries” resulted in “the largest number of actual occupants of these lands, the best men in overcoming the difficulties in the new and laborious field, and the only men who yet remain … successful cultivators of the soil.” This is not to say that these Trojans all stayed put and prospered. But they went; they took the chance. True, Garnet’s cohort was advantaged by geography, his Rensselaer County so much nearer to the Adirondacks than New York City or points west, and his giftees’ exodus more manageable, their destination not so distant as to seem unreal. But before they went, they had to feel this was better than a good idea. They had to feel it as a destiny, a spiritual duty. That’s where Garnet delivered. He promised the more perfect world.²²

The Big Pitch

In the month after Smith divulged his plan, his enthusiasm brimmed. He talked it up to friends, and even to a Maryland enslaver who wanted Smith to buy and free his slaves. You free them, Smith countered. “I am now engaged in settling three thousand colored men of this State on lands I own in this State—about 40 to 60 acres each.” Emancipate your slaves and I will set them up with gift lots, was the gist of Smith’s offer. The Marylander balked.²³

But talking up his plan in private was one thing. Public scrutiny was another. Smith hoped to “keep this whole business out of the newspapers.” He couldn’t, and, as early as September, his plan, he felt, was being “grossly misrepresented.” In Auburn, Ossining, Cortland, Rochester, Elizabethtown, and Manhattan, New Yorkers read that the gift land was in Hamilton County, where “the woods are so dense as to be almost impervious to the axe of the settler, and even when by almost superhuman effort they are finally leveled to the earth and their trunks cleared away … , there appears naught to reward the woodman’s anxious toil but an interminable field of stones.” Add to this fake news the dark reports of “flies, punckies, gnats, gallinippers and musquitoes” as bad for “bloodthirstiness” as anything a pioneer might find “on the banks of the Rio Grande”—insects that could “draw blood” through the woodman’s “very boots”—and ponder the donor’s folly! The Smith grantee, “unused to self-dependence,” did not stand a chance. Whig newspapers across the state called the giveaway a rich man’s ploy to dump bad land and dodge taxes. Skepticism soured judgments in the Essex County Republican, too.²⁴

Smith had parceled out about 350 land grants in Township 3, a part of the old Tottenham and Crossfield Patent that straddles Hamilton and Herkimer Counties—hard land to reach, and harder still to farm. This stood for a fraction of the gift land overall. But if misinformation did the giveaway no favors, it did jolt Smith into preparing his deeds in record time; as soon as late October, he had two thousand of them ready and waiting for his agents to fill in names. The next thousand would be distributed when all lingering debt on this acreage was resolved, and when his agents identified the last thousand giftees. Smith also penned a robust explanation of the giveaway for his favorite antislavery paper, the Albany Patriot. This “Address to the Three Thousand Colored Citizens of New York who are the owners of one hundred and twenty thousand acres of land, in the state of New York, given to them by Gerrit Smith, Esq., of Peterboro, September 1, 1846,” incorporated not only Smith’s first long letter to his New York City agents of August 1 but a follow-up letter he sent September 9, and the agents’ gracious, hopeful, and highly tactical response. Smith recognized that Black readers especially would value the agents’ perspective, and he knew he could count on the Patriot’s publisher, William C. Chaplin, one of Smith’s Albany agents, to print this appeal for the cause. Then, Smith guessed, Horace Greeley’s Tribune would scoop it up “as cheerfully … and as correctly” as the Patriot, and the little papers that spiced their pages with Greeley-vetted dispatches would surely run it too.²⁵

The agents’ essay, twice as long as Smith’s address, made its own argument for agrarianism, and in terms much more ambitious than its value for Black suffrage. Only farmers could hope to achieve lasting self-reliance, Ray, Wright, and McCune Smith declared. Only husbandry could release Black people from “dependent employments at reduced wages … thus creating that feeling of dependence and uncertainty which ever … deadens the faculties of men.” Set us on “our own land,” they predicted, “we will be our own masters, free to think, free to act.” Once free men of color had land they could work, white neighbors would respect them, and concede their shared humanity. To the agents, it was this simple. “There is no life like that of a farmer, for overcoming the mere prejudice against color,” they declared. “The owners of adjacent farms are neighbors… . There must be mutual assistance, mutual and equal dependence, mutual sympathy—and labor, the ‘common destiny of the American people,’ under such circumstances yields equally to all, and make all equal.”²⁶

The farmer as the ideal citizen of the republic, self-made, unbeholden, happy lord of the vaunted “middle landscape” that straddled wilderness and town—this was nothing fresh. Like Crèvecoeur and Jefferson before them, the erudite Black agents of the New York City Committee knew the classical texts from which the archetype derived. By 1846, the self-providing freehold as an image of American independence (an image, really, of America itself) was an icon of popular and literary culture (never mind the growing irrelevance of the pastoral ideal that, even as Smith pushed it, had begun to breathe its worn-out last). In their homage to the giveaway, Ray, Wright, and McCune Smith, shepherds garbed in native homespun, took their places in a long line of Romantically inspired writers enamored of this cultural cliché.²⁷

But that’s not all they were after, not all Black agrarianism was up to. The Black farmer would be to his white neighbors a beacon and a catalyst. Farmers were obliged by the nature of their work and isolation to lend a hand to other farmers in times of need. Farmers who’d been helped were bound to repay the favor. And this occupational parity was only the beginning. Living and working near other farmers on the frontier would slowly bless the Black frontiersman with the influence to free white neighbors from the sin of a reflexive prejudice. In aiding himself, he saved the world. In the woods, on his land, he gained the power to change men’s hearts.

This was not the first time the Adirondack wilderness was vested with close-to-magical transforming powers, but it was surely its first outing as an agent of racial equity and Black pride. The farmer’s life on the Adirondack frontier would more than foster “elements of character” among the grantees and their white neighbors; it would compel them. No good farmer could succeed without these qualities, the agents promised. They are as crucial to success as land ownership itself. First came organization, or what the agents called “Mutual system”: “Without system you can effect but little, with it, you can accomplish any desirable and practicable undertaking.” The role of thrift, or “economy,” invited more attention still: “The very uncertainty of a large portion of our present employments … have produced amongst us that negative, slipshod economy, which consists in barely making the income eke out the expenditure. If we would be successful farmers, we must abandon this careless mode of living, and substitute therefore a rigid economy of our time and of our means.” This, the agents warned, would be the stiffest challenge for the grantees, “the point in which we will have to make the greatest and most thorough revolution in our present habits.” Were the grantees up to it? If they meant business, they had better “begin at economy now.” Start organizing parties of fifteen or twenty, aim for “about one hundred dollars” per grantee. Pool this, and the fund would buy the group “a sufficient number of horses or oxen, farm tools for all, and the means for each to stock his own farm.” How to raise the cash? The agents knew exactly: “By avoiding in the winter months the expense of balls, parties and fruit entertainments, you can readily save one hundred dollars each.” This way, they promised, you will never have to borrow on your land and thus betray the friend who has given it to you in good faith that you will hold on to it debt free.²⁸

After economy came “Self-Reliance” and “Mutual Reliance,” two qualities lacking among Black New Yorkers thanks to the “false education” that had gotten them to “regard our own faculties as inferior.” More self-trust, beseeched the agents. If white people could follow a “trail of 3 or 4,000 miles over an almost trackless wilderness,” downstate Blacks could manage traveling by “steamboat and railroad and stage routes” to New York woodlots that were, they guessed, not more “than 2 miles from well-traveled roads.” Black deedholders who worked this land with their “free labor” would live to see their children “cluster round [the] hearth in the robust health of a country life.” They could “exert this power, do for yourselves what other men have done for themselves.” Hadn’t they “the same physical and intellectual power which other men have”? And as you help yourselves, the agents wrote, you will begin to help each other. “Away with mutual distrust!” Live planfully, don’t drink, work hard, pool earnings, and in time you’ll gain a role in “a great experiment in behalf of long suffering, long crushed, down-trodden and bleeding humanity … an experiment for the RACE! not of Africa, nor of Cush, but for the race of mankind! The cause of our common race is, in a manner, entrusted to our hands.”²⁹

Smith’s hope for the giveaway was nothing next to this. He “would that every man who desires a farm, might have one,” and if getting a farm could edge a Black New Yorker closer to the ballot, so much the better. As Smith himself was often running for office, some biographers have described this as self-serving. If so, it was an antislavery strategy he was in a very good position to promote. “Since they must become landowners that they may be entitled to vote,” he declared, “they will become landowners. Vote they will, cost what it will.” The tone was weary (he wrote this a few days after the devastating antisuffrage vote in November), but Smith was no cynic. He was a pragmatist, a “practical dreamer,” as his biographer Norman Dann observes. And the city agents, suffrage fighters all, found his logic sound.³⁰

But their pitch in the Patriot aimed higher still. What they emphasized was how Black settlers on their farms might influence whitevoters, and, specifically, the pioneers’ new neighbors. Remember, wrote the agents, how white people welcomed Black families headed to a temperance meeting in 1846? They swarmed the Hudson River banks to cheer steamships bearing Black men to the jubilee. Let Black people take up farming and it would be the same. White New Yorkers would, “in like manner, hail our self-emancipation from the drudgery of the cities, and … glory in the prosperity which two or three thousand additional tillers of the soil will bring to the Empire State.” And with white respect for Black uplift would come white votes for voting rights. The ballots that Black men gained as a result of owning land were welcome, but just as thrilling, maybe more so, would be the power to change the hearts of white men by the force of personal example. This was more than the promise of self-rule. This was the hope of influence, the tiller all your own.³¹

Smith had not flagged these specific expectations in the Patriot, but they came as no surprise. Black agrarianism, much like Black suffrage activism, was a river running long before Smith launched his boat on its bold current. And when Smith’s distracted vessel drifted, the river kept on flowing, bearing farmers, miners, Exodusters, to Ontario, Michigan, Kansas, and Ohio. Smith had been an agrarian for a while, but not as long as his Black agents had. That, after all, is why he picked them and why they signed on for this work. His vision for the giveaway drew in good part from Black imaginings and dreams.

And there was another quarter he borrowed from—though its response was somewhat less ecstatic. Two years before Smith gave up land, he found himself the target of a feisty takedown from the land reformer George Henry Evans, editor of the city paper The People’s Rights. Evans charged the land-rich Smith with enslaving white laborers in northern cities by default. Smith had the power, Evans offered, to liberate legions of the working poor by giving land to them he did not need, use, or plan to farm. Not exercising that power was criminal. Hopeful farmers were denied a crack at self-betterment. Families starved who might be fed. Smith could change this. He had not. Where was the philanthropy in this?³²

Evans’s gamble—that Smith would choose to defend himself—paid off. He and Smith exchanged several letters, all published in Evans’s newspaper, and their bright debate on land reform would conclude with Smith conceding that Evans’s notions about land distribution to the poor made some sense. Indeed, following this exchange, Smith declared himself a land reformer, inspiring some of that camp to hope he’d prove a benefactor and an ally.³³

But the kind of voluntaristic land reform Smith practiced when he gave land to poor Black New Yorkers was not what George Evans had in mind. And a philanthropy indebted to the arguments of white land reformers was not what Black agrarians expected either. Smith’s plan of 1846 borrowed gratefully from both camps to come up with something entirely and boldly new. Did they welcome this? In one case yes, and in the other, likely no. Either way, it hardly mattered. White and Black agrarians alike would see their mission widened, deepened, and enriched—whether they asked for this or not.³⁴