From Troy to Timbuctoo

There is no way to know just when James H. Henderson arrived in New York City, how he got there, or where he came from. One New York census indicates that he hailed from Vermont, but another gives his mother’s birthplace as Virginia. Since she was born in 1780, she was probably enslaved. Might James and his mother have escaped enslavement? No hint of a backstory is revealed in the bold, straightforward notice for the J. H. Henderson Boot and Shoe Manufactory that ran for three months in the Colored American in 1839. The paper trail tells us only that New York was home, and a home that let him thrive. His and his wife Susan’s church was the Second Presbyterian Church of Color on Canal Street, which, while nothing on the grand scale of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church or First Colored Presbyterian (later known as Shiloh, it held 1,600 people in its great hall), still claimed the Hendersons’ devotion. James Henderson, church secretary, penned the notices in the Colored American for the church’s thrice-weekly coed night school, Sabbath School, and Bible study, all “highly calculated to improve the mind and render each scholar eminently useful to himself and society.” Rock solid in his faith that racial justice could be won through a resolute display of piety, respectability, and self-betterment, Henderson was the very model of an “uplift man.”⁹

Then in August 1841, the Hendersons lost their baby, William Henry. A notice in the Colored American supplied no explanation. Many poor city children who perished in these years were poisoned by “swill milk” from cows feeding on waste products from decrepit urban distilleries. Yellow fever was also storming the metropolis and scything a wide swath. As Dr. McCune Smith documented, the medical challenges that afflicted urban Black New Yorkers were legion. The Hendersons’ migration to less congested upstate Troy so soon after their boy’s death may have impressed this couple as an environmental necessity. While no less racist than Manhattan, Troy was cleaner, safer, and healthier, and also, offered the Colored American, more welcoming. For Troy’s Black lodging houses’ “spirit of hospitality,” a reporter wrote, “it might appropriately be called the stranger’s HOME.”¹⁰

Troy also boasted a vigorous reform scene, due in good part, the Hendersons discovered, to the work of the minister-activist Henry Highland Garnet of the Liberty Street Presbyterian Church. Only a few years out of the Oneida Institute, Garnet plunged into the campaign for equal suffrage. He made his church a safe house for fugitives, headed up a slew of meetings, published newspapers, and wrote and said things that in the South would have seen him burned alive. Wild, brazen, unthinkable proposals: The slaves should rise! Should fight outright! “Now is the day and the hour. Let every slave throughout the land do this, and the days of slavery are numbered… . Rather die free men than live to be slaves!”¹¹

The Hendersons arrived in Troy a few years after the young pastor, and Susan joined Garnet’s church at once. James would too, eventually, but the first conversion, a bracing plunge into Troy’s Black justice activism, was political: Old-fashioned “rising up” might get him into heaven, but organizing, petitioning, and lobbying—here was work that mattered now. At an 1841 Black political convention in Troy, Henderson was Garnet’s secretary and a county delegate for a statewide “Appeal for Rights.” In 1846, Black activists from Troy invited Henderson to sign their letter to Gerrit Smith that urged a Whig-Liberty Party antislavery coalition. Then, in 1847, Garnet made Henderson one of his twenty-two “Pick’d Men” for free land in the woods. (The year before, he named forty-three.) Henderson’s gift lot was the southwest quarter of Lot 83, Thorn’s Survey, Old Military Tract, Township 12, Essex County, a mouthful of a title with an exhilarating specificity. Ten of Garnet’s Troy grantees who got Adirondack land moved north, which, out of sixty-five giftees, may seem a meager showing. But if this same proportional response were reflected in the overall migration of Smith’s three thousand grantees, the Black Woods would have held five hundred men instead of one-sixth of that. Reverend Garnet picked his pioneers with care, sometimes even retracting recommendations (William Hill, he decided, was “a notorious blockhead,” John Adkins was “unworthy,” and Moses Philips “a drunkard”). But James Henderson he never doubted. He wanted him on board.¹²

What the charismatic Garnet could not give his grantees were specifics. For these, he and his congregants relied on grantees who visited the Smith Lands in the fall of 1846. Brandishing their spoils (Adirondack potatoes, wheat, corn, a cornstalk cane for their pastor), the returned Trojans offered their impressions. And no fine rhetoric would there be on the “noise of falling trees … proclaim[ing] the glorious dawn of civilization.” The news here was of water, soil, and weather. Were the white people up there friendly? Was there a blacksmith, sawmill, store? Henderson made shoes. Would white North Elbans buy them?¹³

The next fall, Henderson, with scores of other Smith grantees, served as a delegate at the National Convention of Colored People in Troy. The nine-state assembly honored Gerrit Smith with speeches and a vote of thanks for Charles Ray and Willis Hodges’s earnest “Report on Agriculture.” Henry Highland Garnet and the silver-tongued delegate from Massachusetts, Frederick Douglass, praised both giveaway and benefactor. But as ever at these speechfests, hard facts about the land were wanting. On behalf of the delegates, Ray and Hodges urged Black New York to welcome Smith’s donation as a gift from God, “not to be slighted,” and the route not to voting rights alone but to more social equality as well. “An Agricultural Life tends to equality in life. The community is a community of farmers. Their occupations are the same; their hopes and interests are the same; … the one is not above the other, whether of the proscribed or any other class, they are all alike farmers. And as it is by placing men in the same position in society that all castes fade away, all castes in this case will be forgotten, and an equality of rights, interests and privileges only exist.”¹⁴

This was good, and surely inspiring, but more welcome still for pragmatists like Henderson was learning which Troy grantees owned land near his own. The sobersided, long-faced William Carasaw and his wife, Eliza, had gift land in North Elba, along with the devout and stalwart teamsters Samuel and Thomas Jefferson. In 1847, Henry Dickson and his family, and the new-to-Troy Lyman Eppes and his brood, got North Elba gift lots too. So the Hendersons would know some folks. His children would see other children who looked like them. The common history in Troy—ties to Garnet, to certain neighborhoods—would solace the adults.

In May 1848, Henry Highland Garnet blessed the Troy grantees “on the eve of their departure” and, as it happened, his departure too. The Garnets were leaving Troy for Geneva, a lakeside town in western New York and only a day’s coach ride from Gerrit Smith’s Peterboro, a town the Garnets adored. Geneva would be a challenge. Its Black community was on the rise but its Black church was in the doldrums. Garnet’s marching orders from the American Missionary Association were stiff: Bring it up as you did Troy. Revive the Sunday school. Start a day school. Garnet was ready. Starting fresh was nothing new. He’d left a forced labor camp, two great cities, and several tough northern towns. But his first flock in Troy—his friends!—he’d miss. “My mind reverts with pleasure to the profitable and sweet communion which we have had together,” he told his congregants. He expected them to stay in touch. They would be making a new world up there, pioneering their redemption.¹⁵

From Washington County to St. Armand

Avery Hazzard wasn’t looking for redemption. He and Margaret just wanted their own farm. When he received his gift deed from Gerrit Smith, he was laboring, as ever (it could seem), for white people. The chance to work his own land, free and clear, was an unexpected boon. But Hazzard was fifty. Younger bones than his might make a farm from scratch, but wise farmers knew their limits. He would build on someone else’s start, a farm already begun, with clearings, outbuildings, and a house. This, Hazzard felt, could work. It would be challenging, giving up long-settled Washington County for land so raw and unfamiliar. Avery Hazzard and his family weren’t long in this rustic region—the eight of them had moved to Washington County from Queens in the mid-1840s—but the Hazzard clan had deep hooks in the long-cultivated borderland between New York and Vermont, and in New England generally. Hazzard’s father, Levi Hazzard, from Granville to the east, had fought for three years with a Massachusetts regiment in the Revolutionary War. The Hazzards’ antislavery church in Washington County’s Greenwich (Orthodox Free Congregational) welcomed congregants of color and preached a Bible politics that would have made Gerrit Smith feel right at home. The Hazzards themselves lived in Jackson, to the east of Greenwich. Quakers had found this country early, and their imprint had given the wider neighborhood a name among reformers for its “many warm hearted abolitionists, true friends to the colored man,” as one of these, Diantha Gunn, observed in 1856.¹⁶

But slavery’s defenders were a bold cohort too, especially in Washington County’s river-powered mill towns, and strong feeling on both sides could boil over into a bad brawl. One such clash in 1848 in the hamlet called Union Village (today part of Greenwich) involved three of Avery and Margaret Hazzard’s teenaged sons. Each was arrested and found guilty of assault. Their accuser, the self-named “Riot Victim” Moses White, turned his account of getting beaten in a street fight into a reason to vote for him for town collector, and in the overwhelmingly Republican community, this Democrat won handily. Friends of the Hazzards from the antislavery church posted the three boys’ bail, but this wouldn’t keep them out of jail. Charles Henry, twenty, served three months in the county jail, his eighteen-year-old brother, Alexander, got sixty days, and George, fifteen, was dispatched to a reformatory.¹⁷

This happened during harvest time, when Avery Hazzard, father of eight, was likely counting on his boys to help him get in the crops. To see them jailed was a misery; to lose them in this season was calamitous. Was this the blow that emboldened them to move? In 1850, the Hazzards got word of a working farm for sale in St. Armand, Essex County, thirty miles north of Timbuctoo. One William Lathrop, a white contract farmer who had hoped to buy this property on installments from the owner, Gerrit Smith, was badly in arrears and despaired of catching up. When Lathrop made to sell, Avery Hazzard made his offer. Recommended by no less than Greenwich’s (and later Brooklyn’s) esteemed antislavery attorney and former US congressman Erastus D. Culver, and vetted by Gerrit Smith’s St. Armand land agent, the “industrious and respectable” Hazzard bought Lathrop’s farm contract on manageable terms. In 1851, Avery, Margaret, and several of their children put Jackson to their backs and headed west toward the fifty-seven square miles of water, rock, and woods in northwest Essex County named by a pioneer from Canada for an obscure Belgian saint.¹⁸

St. Armand had a newly named hamlet, Bloomingdale, hard by the northeast-slashing Saranac River, which since 1846 had been deemed a “public highway” whose passengers were logs. Here, in what the county history, invoking the poet William Cowper, called a “boundless contiguity of shade,” the Hazzards made a home, one household among fifty in the township, most of them Vermonters pulling west of New England. For the isolated Hazzards, the temptation to return to New York’s Washington County to the east was likely very strong. They’d left behind some family members, their old antislavery church, and Black friends too. Gerrit Smith’s Washington County contacts had given Smith the names of twenty-one grantees, twelve of them from Union Village and nearby Easton. The Hazzards were surely gratified when the Murrays, a young Black family, also Marylanders, moved from their old neighborhood to Franklin, just across the county line. But in St. Armand, for some seasons, Smith’s great plan was represented by the Hazzard name alone. Did this get lonely? Did this place, even more than their old home, revive the old uneasy double-consciousness, and their awareness of the rift between how they were seen and how they saw themselves? Or was all that nothing next to this great marvel, a new farm all their own, fields waiting for them, no boss in sight, their plans, prospects, failures too, all theirs to name and claim?¹⁹

From the Hudson River Valley to South Mountain

Hasbrook—also Hasbrock, Hasbrouck, Hasebreucq—has been a reverenced name in the Hudson River Valley for four hundred years. It sailed to the region with the Protestant Huguenots who fled France in the 1600s, when their refusal to convert cost them their freedom, property, and lives. Earlier Dutch Protestant settlements along the Hudson Valley had made this part of New York a safe and hopeful destination, and the fertile soil along the banks of the great river deepened its appeal. With other Huguenot refugees, the Hasbrooks negotiated the purchase of a thirty-thousand-acre patent from the Esopus Indians, launched a multifamily colony, and started farming and then studding this rolling country with their windmills and steamboat landings, flour mills, and churches. Today, the house museums, parks, streets, and college buildings called Hasbrook reflect the luster of the name.²⁰

But not everyone who bore it felt the pride. In Europe, Huguenots had no history of slaveholding. Once in New York, however, they followed the example of their proslavery Dutch neighbors, and as early as 1674 began purchasing enslaved Africans at auction. And for Black slaves and their descendants who were assigned the Hasbrook name, there would be no association with a heritage of defiance, exodus, and North American recovery. In their case, the name of Hasbrook stood for an erasure, a rubbing out of language, history and self-sovereignty. The name blazoned their bondage like a brand.

When Josiah Hasbrook was born in 1813, some three thousand enslaved people lived in Dutchess County. In some parts of his district, one-third of the residents were slaves. Politics was driven by proslavery interests, and except for pockets of the county that were Quaker, abolitionist ministers and speakers were reviled. Slavery ended in New York in 1827, and Black New Yorkers in the Hudson Valley who got free land from Gerrit Smith were, like Josiah Hasbrook, at least two decades out of bondage. But behind his decades as a free New Yorker were ten generations steeped in slavery. Stories from those lost generations are not often or easily recovered. Legal documents—estate inventories, bills of sale, wills—offer the commodifying vantage of white enslavers on the outside looking in. How Black people experienced enslavement for themselves, in their own skin, was a very different story. Unschooled and illiterate, slaves were denied the means to keep and steward their own history. Today, a guide at Abraham Hasbrouck’s historic home in New Paltz may lead us to the low, lightless cellar and dutifully urge us to consider how things were for the four slaves who lived there, and we imagine what we can, but their view of it, their own truth, we can’t presume to know.²¹

We don’t know, either, exactly why Josiah Hasbrook, thirty-four, of Fishkill and sometimes next-door Newburgh, moved his large family to his North Elba gift lot near South Mountain in 1847 (today it is called Mt. Van Hoevenberg). He left no record. Around a hundred Black men from these two Hudson River Valley towns were Smith grantees, but those who ventured north were very few, among them, the Hasbrooks and their friends Leonard and Deanna Worts (whose surname, like the Hasbrooks’, bore the imprint of Dutch bondage). What made these families migrate when so many balked? It was not the better farming; they knew they’d never coax the crops out of North Elba that flourished along this river. Nor could it have been the promise of Adirondack scenery. With its orchards, river landings, and fine stone walls as long as last week’s sermon, the Hudson River Valley was no less picturesque.²²

But those winding walls between estates were built with fieldstones that had been dug and hauled by slaves, and slaves had felled, hewn, and hauled the great pines for the river landings, and the work that Hasbrook did on the river profited not himself but the sons and grandsons of his ancestors’ enslavers. In November 1846, voters in Essex County went for Black voting rights five to one. White voters in Dutchess County rejected equal suffrage by a vote no less emphatic. Where slavery had flourished for so long, Negro hate was in the soil.²³

The Hasbrooks would go north.

From New Orleans to Freeman’s Home

Lewis Pierce was a slave in New Orleans, Louisiana, when his master, Robert Tilghman, took him to Philadelphia in 1848. The wealthy Tilghman was an invalid; he came north for his health. For some months Pierce served as his “body servant.” Then, one fall day, he went missing, and not long after, Tilghman was summoned to the Philadelphia County Court of Common Pleas. There Lewis Pierce waited, two attorneys at his side.²⁴

Had Lewis Pierce fled to Pennsylvania on his own, had he not been brought to this state by his white master, he would have had no case. He would then have been a fugitive, and federal law would have compelled Pennsylvania to return him to his “home.” But Pierce broke no law at all. It was his owner who was in trouble. The year before (and likely unbeknownst to Tilghman), Pennsylvania had revised a fifty-eight-year-old act, and now any enslaved person “brought [by his or her enslaver] within her territory [became] ipso facto a freeman.” Tilghman had unmeaningly enabled Pierce’s emancipation the moment he and Pierce entered the state. Pierce’s lead attorney, Thomas Earle, a Quaker lawyer of repute and an old hand on the antislavery circuit, suggested that Pierce submit a writ of habeas corpus to the court and ask it not to free him but rather to confirm his freedom under the new law. In a ruling that ran in newspapers from Alabama to Ohio, Judge Edward King pronounced Lewis Pierce a free man and “at liberty to go where he pleases.” Reported one witness about this “important slave case,” Pierce “was hurried out of Court in double-quick time, and before the lawyers could gather up their papers was out of sight.”²⁵

Pierce’s hot-stepping triumph was widely noted. Abolitionist papers like the National Era and the North Star jumped on it, and the Times-Picayune in New Orleans gave it a long column. Gerrit Smith undoubtedly took note. Here was reaching for the “Jerry Level”! What spine Pierce had! He knew what punishment awaited him if the ruling went against him, but he trusted a never-tested law to take the side of freedom. Once Pierce had moved north to New York State, Smith gave him land as hopefully as he had given it to the out-of-staters-turned-New Yorkers Frederick Douglass and Henry Bibb. Pierce received two lots in Township 12. The one he built his home on, up on Cascade Pass north of a scattering of Black cabins called Freeman’s Home, put him near the first home of John Brown. A hike south brought him to the Hasbrooks near South Mountain, a big family who became his friends (and eventually something more). Pierce’s Adirondack cabin was so modest it was valued at ten dollars. But his one-man farm—flush with sheep, horses, pigs, and the most potatoes of any of his Black neighbors—was worth $300. On off hours, resting, considering his gains, he may have matched the two Lewis Pierces in his mind and marveled at the ease of this conversion of the man another called his property into the new-made Adirondack pioneer.²⁶

Fellow Travelers

In 1848, Charles Ray received a letter from a Black musician in Philadelphia. William Appo wasn’t fishing for a gift deed (on two counts he was unqualified: he had money of his own, and he resided out of state). Appo planned to buy land, and he knew what he wanted: 148 acres in North Elba. Elder Ray, delighted, wrote Gerrit Smith, “I wish more men would do in this like manner, and purchase thereabouts.” Appo, forty, had performed for twenty years in the marching bands and traveling ensembles of the popular Black bandleader Frank Johnson. New York City, London, Saratoga, Newport, White Sulphur Springs, Cape May—Johnson’s celebrated band from Philadelphia played them all. Appo was Johnson’s brother-in-law; their wives owned a city hat shop. Horn player, violinist, and a wizard on the melodeon, Appo won a mention in the 1888 memoir of the esteemed A.M.E. Bishop Daniel A. Payne as “the most learned musician of the race.” In November 1837, twelve years before John Brown went to England hoping to woo buyers for his wool, Appo and four band mates sailed to London. The concert series of these “Self-Taught Men of Colour” featured “national music” and light classical favorites. So strong were the reviews that Queen Victoria granted them an audience. And then they sailed home.²⁷

Ray exulted when Appo took an interest in an Adirondack farm. The well-connected Appo might have bought a home in Newport or Saratoga, grand resort towns with year-round up-and-coming Black communities. Instead he fixed on swarming, stinging, hard-to-reach North Elba. It was a gesture of solidarity, a vote of good faith in Smith’s idea, and an expression of Appo’s brand of quiet activism. In Philadelphia, he and his wife Elizabeth backed abolition fundraisers. In New York, he attended Black political conventions and supported the Colored American. And when the Appos lived in Troy, William co-ran an abolitionist meeting at Reverend Garnet’s church (was it at this 1843 meeting that he met the secretary-shoemaker who would be his Adirondack neighbor some years on?). In Utica, Appo stood for Oneida County on a suffrage petition in the Tribune. A hymn he wrote, “Sing unto God,” premiered at a city fundraiser for Black captives on the Amistad. So he knew what the Black Woods stood for. He was investing in a new community birthed by a belief in voting rights, racial justice, and abolition. He was saying, This cause is mine.²⁸

Accounts of Timbuctoo have tended to neglect the significance of nondeeded pioneers like William Appo, but these fellow travelers were on the scene from the first. They came from Maryland to Vermontville, and from Ulster County to North Elba. In 1848, the Ram’s Horn named thirty-eight New Yorkers who hoped to move to the Smith Lands. Only eight were Smith grantees. The rest were women, children, and deedless enthusiasts as keen to share in Smith’s great plan as the deedholders themselves. When Hodges named the eight men living with him in the enclave he called Blacksville, four were deedless. It didn’t bother Hodges, and it didn’t bother them.²⁹

Both Hodges and Appo were also intimate with the one fellow traveler who did not escape public notice. Like Appo, the angular, sunbaked white man who appeared at Smith’s Peterboro home in April 1848 did not qualify for gift land. But John Brown, the name stark as the man himself, had read all about Smith’s initiative. An abolitionist whose horror of slavery (“the sum of all villainies”) was as fierce as Smith’s, Brown hoped to move his large family to North Elba to “take one of your farms myself, clear it up and plant it, and show my colored neighbors how such work should be done.” Would Gerrit Smith sell him a piece?³⁰

Smith liked everything about this man. He was planful and direct, and knew his scripture cold. There was no vanity about him either. Cone Flanders’s farmhouse, which Brown rented for his brood, was not big enough by half, but the family would make do until Brown and the bigger boys could built a new home of their own. And Smith would help with that project as gamely as he enabled so many of Brown’s other plans over their ten years’ acquaintance, from buying rifles for antislavery militants in Kansas to a plot to seize a federal arsenal in Virginia and deliver guns to slaves. Brown’s attempt to arm enslaved people would polarize a marveling and shaken nation. Now there, as Brown’s Adirondack neighbor, Willis Hodges, might have put it, was something besides speechifying, though the speechifying that followed the failed raid, whether for it or against, thunders ever on.