The Black Woods: Pursuing Racial Justice on the Adirondack Frontier

The Black Woods

Pursuing Racial Justice on the Adirondack Frontier

Amy Godine

Three Hills

an imprint of Cornell University Press

Ithaca and London

In memory of my folks, Morton and Bernice Godine, who loved history, and reading about it, and made sure I did too.

And I thought, It could have worked! This democracy, this land

of freedom and equality and the pursuit of happiness—it could have

worked! There was something to it, after all! It didn’t have to turn

into a greedy free-for-all! We didn’t have to make a mess of it and

the continent and ourselves! It could have worked! It wasn’t just a

joke, just a blind for the machinations of money!

—Ian Frazier, Great Plains

Contents

Preface

Notes on Language, Spelling, and Surnames

Abbreviations

Introduction

A Scheme of Justice and Benevolence

1. He Feeds the Sparrow

2. Gerrit Smith Country

3. Three Agents and Their Reasons

4. Theories into Practice

5. On Fat Lands under Genial Suns

6. Something besides Speechifying

The Black Woods

7. Trailblazers

8. The Second Wave

9. A Fluid Cartography

10. We Who Are Here Can See and Know

11. I Begin to Be Regarded as an American Citizen

12. If You Only Knew How Poor I Am

13. Nothing Would Be More Encouraging to Me

John Brown Country

14. To Arms! The Black Woods at War

15. An Empowering Diaspora

16. White Memory, Black Memory

17. Pilgrims

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Map of the Adirondack Gift Lands

Preface

For fifteen years before his death at sixty-eight in 2013, the youth worker and environmentalist Brother Yusuf Abdul-Wasi Burgess took teenagers from Albany camping in the Adirondack Mountains. Brother Yusuf supplied paddles, life jackets, and canoes; his first-time campers brought their wariness and disbelief. City kids from hard-used neighborhoods, they took a cool view of the six-million-acre Adirondack Park. Not only was it famously, unwaveringly white, but it seemed a land of grim dysfunctionality where nothing you relied on worked. You could not text a friend or parent. Nobody moved, dressed, or laughed in any way that made you feel at home. How this big green playpen, this so-called getaway, was anybody’s notion of a good time was a mystery you did not care to solve.¹

But Brother Yusuf, Brooklyn raised, never aimed to make his campers nature lovers. Learning bird calls, naming constellations—this was never the idea. The mission, always, was to challenge and relax his teenagers’ idea of their turf. With a wider sense of place comes the glint of interest in a world beyond the close-at-hand with its hard-defended codes. Some distant college or line of work may look more thinkable after overnighting in a tent by an icy stream. Test the comfort zone this once, and next time the kids would push it harder. A stretched-out sense of where they fit here may lead to a respect for their historical connection to it, their right to call it theirs.

For this reason, Brother Yusuf always took his campers to John Brown’s Adirondack home. He told them about the radical abolitionist’s assault on a federal armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia (West Virginia today), from October 16 to 18, 1859. With a hand-picked band of guerrilla fighters, Brown occupied the armory, aiming to deliver one hundred thousand muskets and rifles to nearby slaves who, he hoped, would join his effort to secure the territory between the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers, then push south to free more slaves, plantation by plantation. But stuck in a small engine house, Brown’s group was no match for militiamen and marines. His holdout fell in minutes. Ten men were killed, two sons of his among them. A Virginia jury convicted him of treason. On December 2, 1859, Old Brown was hanged.

The teenagers Brother Yusuf took to the park knew Brown’s name, but the impact of his raid, how Harpers Ferry blazed the road to the Civil War, and the war to the legal freedom for four million Black Americans, how Brown’s trial, the first to be reported nationally, has been judged the most important criminal trial in the history of the Republic—this was news for Yusuf’s charges. Also revelatory: learning that John Brown came to the Adirondacks to join a settlement of Black pioneers. Back in the day, said Brother Yusuf, a stretch of Adirondack wilderness ten times bigger than the city of Albany belonged to thousands of Black New Yorkers. They got this land (and Brown got his) from a New York abolitionist named Gerrit Smith. From the tiny town of Peterboro in upstate Madison County, this land-rich white man hoped his forty-acre Adirondack gift lots would pull poor Black families out of cities and put them on new farms. Back then, Black New Yorkers had to prove they owned land if they ever hoped to vote. No property, no ballot—a special rule for colored men alone. That’s why Gerrit Smith came up with his idea in 1846. With their new parcels, Black New Yorkers could get out of the city, start farming, and gain the franchise. They could vote for candidates who hated slavery, vote for equal rights for all. They would be empowered. Working citizens. That’s what land could do.

So, you think twice before you tell me this place is for white folks, Brother Yusuf urged his campers out of Albany. You think hard before you say this place has nothing to do with you. This is your patrimony, your business. You don’t have to buy this story. You own it. You’re stakeholders. This land is my land. This land is yours.

In 2000, Martha Swan, founder and director of the Adirondack social action group John Brown Lives!, invited me to curate a traveling exhibit about Gerrit Smith’s radical agrarian initiative, the plan that inspired John Brown to move to Essex County in 1849. At the time, what I knew about Smith’s scheme I mostly owed to antiquarian historians who considered it a lost cause from its conception. Twentieth-century historians were less dismissive, but their interest in it was still defined by the slit-like window of Brown’s residency. (Brown was away from his North Elba home much more than he was there, and did the work that gained him lasting fame far from New York State.) Brown’s Adirondack burial in 1859, and his surviving family’s removal to points west, cued the end of any deep historical concern with the fate of the Black Woods.

Swan, a civil rights activist in the Adirondack village of Westport, urged me to approach this story differently. The exhibit she asked me to develop, Dreaming of Timbuctoo, would focus on the Black pioneers. Would I find much? I didn’t think so. There was the inarguable fact that Gerrit Smith’s original idea, a Black farm settlement for thousands, was, for the great majority of Smith’s deedholders, unrealized. Hence that word Dreaming in the exhibition’s name. Smith’s colony was, for most of its beneficiaries, no more than an eager prospect. Nor, I knew, could I glean a thing from artifacts. The cabins and outbuildings that made up Timbuctoo and other Black enclaves in Essex and Franklin Counties were down to duff and moss. I would be working without ruins, pictures, or, really, anything very tangible except headstones. Epistolary evidence from the settlers’ side was scant. No images of the grantees on their farms remained. No pictures of women or children, period. Taken singly, clues that could be gleaned from census data, newspaper posts, legal cases, military pension files, tax reports, school rolls, and local memory seemed inconclusive. Any reconstruction of this history was going to be tough.

Other challenges revealed themselves to me more gradually. I had assumed, for instance, that what I knew about Adirondack ethnic history, something I’d been writing about for decades, could only help. There were a great many nineteenth-century Adirondack enclaves that had slipped through the cracks of antiquarian and twentieth-century regional history. Wasn’t Timbuctoo one of these? I figured the exhibit would reunite the Black homesteaders with all the rest of the great unseen and unremarked-on in the Adirondack region—migratory hired hands, Irish tanners, Italian railroad workers, Polish miners, loggers from Quebec… .

It didn’t. Timbuctoo was not another bright tooth on the cogwheel of diversity. For all the poverty, social precarity, and cultural invisibility it shared with white Adirondack settlements in its time, it also stood apart. What it meant for Adirondack memory—and how Blackness, more generally, resonated in the regional narrative—was not how poor white enclaves were remembered. It was not how they were disremembered. Here was an othering of a different order: more purposeful, intractable, and, for this writer, demanding. I would need to lose ways of thinking about Adirondack landscape and history that had seemed to work for me for decades. My idea of inclusivity, long bound to the documentable (evidence of ethnic enclaves, names in the census, work crew rolls, and other hard proofs of diversity), no longer struck me as sufficient. Did the way I research, the way I see, make room for the undocumented, the great ranks of the missing?

Many of Smith’s Black deedholders visited the Adirondacks and left without a trace. Thousands more never ventured to the Adirondacks at all. Why was this? Why, until quite recently, did regional accounts of the giveaway make room for one family only, with no notice of scores of others—almost two hundred Black people—who made the Adirondacks home? Also puzzling: the antiquarian emphasis on the Black Woods as a refuge for self-emancipated slaves, even while the influence of slavery in Adirondack life remained wholly unexamined. True, here was no slaveocracy, yet Southern enslavers and their Northern enablers put sugar in Adirondack teacups, cotton on the backs of Adirondack schoolboys, and tobacco in the tins of Adirondack farmers (not to speak of turpentine, indigo, cigars, molasses, palm-leaf hats, and quilt batting on the shelves of Adirondack crossroad stores). Did this not make enslaved people silent but emphatic influencers of Adirondack daily life? In the Black Woods, a veritable army of the unacknowledged and gone missing could pack a census of its own.

I understood the racialized accounts of Gerrit Smith’s pioneers in terms of racial bias in its own time. It would be a while before I recognized how the default racism of the mid-nineteenth century was steeped in white ideas about Blackness that took hold in the region maybe centuries before Gerrit Smith’s grantees went north. Also far from obvious to me: the shaping influence of white Adirondackers’ ideas about Redness on how Black people were perceived. Indigenous peoples had sojourned in the Adirondacks for millennia before its discovery by Europeans, but their claim on the land would be discounted by Euro-colonizers who measured their entitlement to this new world by very different standards: in-place year-round settlement, land grants, deeds and titles. Early on, then, an exclusionary paradigm pitted the deserving against the rest.

And that paradigm not only preceded the Black farmers of Timbuctoo but persisted long after they were gone. The late nineteenth-century convergence of the conservation discourse with scientific racialism gave the region’s members-only residential resorts, hunting lodges, sportsmen’s clubs, and other elite strongholds a pseudoscientific rationale for excluding Black people and other undesirables for generations. In the name of guarding and defending the new-claimed Adirondack Park, poor white subsistence farmers, immigrants, indigenous people, and migratory laborers were framed as vectors of impurity, and in strokes both offhand and explicit, racialized as lesser, and unworthy of the park’s bounty.

Given the fact that a legacy of enslavement was largely absent from the region, and that very few Black people lived in the Adirondacks from the first days of European settlement, this exclusionary culture baffled me. Why was it so entrenched? Why so well defended? I was looking for an answer in demography, which, of course, was not the place to look at all—though it took a book of literary criticism to redirect my focus. In her canonical Playing in the Dark, the novelist Toni Morrison argues for a shadowy Black Other as a shaping presence in our best-known American novels, even when—maybe especially when—these books feature no Black characters and evince no concern with race. This Other makes its imprint, offers Morrison, not directly so much as inferentially, in implication, in sign, in demarcation, and its work is oppositional; it reinforces authorial ideas of whiteness, offers a foil to the New American—self-made, resourceful, male, white—in many of our beloved novels.²

This writer’s words shook something loose for me. Her subject was great literature, but was there an insight here as well on how to puzzle out entrenched narratives of regional identity? For all its enduringly white populace, the Adirondacks was steeped in a palimpsestic memory of slavery that stood everywhere for degradation and incapacity. Only scan the racist representations of Black Americans, free and enslaved, in nineteenth-century Adirondack newspapers, where editorials, boys’ adventure stories, and dialect columns ensured that ideas about Black indolence and easy criminality stayed evergreen in white minds—and in towns where Black people could be numbered on one hand. As early as the mid-nineteenth century, blackface minstrel shows featuring white performers were a cherished mainstay of Adirondack small-town entertainment, and every time Rastus and Jemima cakewalked into Adirondack grange halls and opera houses (even into the 1950s), racial stereotypes about natural-born propensities and an inherent Black servility were reinforced.³

Freedom as the vested entitlement of whiteness was a point made and remade in low culture and high. Whenever an Adirondack county history introduced the courage and resourcefulness of a founding pioneer in terms of his (always) Puritan forebears, these qualities were conflated with his undiluted Anglo rootstock—no small point in a place where the fight for environmental purity defines regional identity. It was a desire to ensure the purity of New York’s water that made the winning case for the conservation of the Adirondack wilderness and the creation of the Adirondack Park, and it is the park’s achievement in defense of purity whose story has dominated the region’s history for the last century and a half. Eloquent dispatches extolled the region’s vaunted unspoiled beauty and healthful assets along with the cultural and racial purity of Adirondack Yankee founders. From the 1840s for another century, an emphasis on social purity—who belonged, who didn’t, who were stewards, who despoilers—gave this place a name for exclusivity that outshone all competitors (including the Massachusetts Berkshires, the New Hampshire White Mountains, and New York’s earlier-settled Catskills). And always against purity stood the Other, Toni Morrison’s contrapuntal shadow that lent the normative its clarity and frame.⁴

Even the memory of John Brown was enlisted in this cause. Brown’s Adirondack sojourn would be deracialized into a one-size-fits-all fable of courage and self-sacrifice without regard to means and ends. In these tellings, his single-minded focus expressed his purity of pedigree, that oft-noted Puritan ancestry so attractive to historians who were unnerved by what he did. This enshrinement in Adirondack memory and the devaluing of Brown’s concern for systemic racial justice should not surprise us. Historians like David Blight have documented how postbellum Blue-Gray commemorative events marginalized the brutal history of slavery in the name of sectional reconciliation. What happened to Brown’s memory was happening all over.⁵

And, of course, whatever happened to John Brown’s memory affected the memory of Timbuctoo—if only because it was Brown’s interest in Timbuctoo that explains history’s attention to it, sporadic and impatient as it was. I confess that when I was working on the exhibition, my focus on the Black grantees came as a relief; it spared me the mighty challenge of tangling with John Brown’s exacting legacy. But if the exhibit gave me a pass, this book was less indulgent. As I bushwhacked into the afterlives of the Black Woods in memory (lives, not life, because Black memory made one thing of Gerrit Smith’s idea, white memory another, and white memory, more confident and empowered, wrote the lasting script), Brown was everywhere, his energy and vision backlit by the presumed inaction of Black neighbors who declined to join him. They were the foil—the uninspired, uncompelled.

Research for this book, unlike the exhibition, gave me the freedom to consider the historiography of the Black Woods as a dramatic player in its own right. How did antiquarian historians and John Brown’s early biographers use Gerrit Smith’s initiative to argue for Adirondack exceptionalism and a racialized regional brand? Recall the suspicion and anxiety among Brother Yusuf’s campers. The reputation of the Adirondacks—no place for the dark complected—is deep-set.

In the last quarter century, Timbuctoo has roused the interest of artists, scholars, and racial justice activists alike. The year 1998 saw the publication of the Boston educator Katherine Butler Jones’s They Called It Timbucto, an intimate account in the environmental magazine Orion of this college teacher’s discovery of her ancestors’ gift of Adirondack acreage from Gerrit Smith. In that year, too, Russell Banks’s expansive novel Cloudsplitter plunged a wide readership into John Brown’s North Elba sojourn and his Adirondack world. Timbuctoo looms as well in the Harvard historian John Stauffer’s 2001 cultural history, The Black Hearts of Men, and four years later in David Reynolds’s definitive John Brown, Abolitionist, the first biography to give the Brown family’s Adirondack years their due.⁶

More recently, Timbuctoo has inspired book chapters and papers from scholars at Rice, Cornell, SUNY Potsdam, and Harvard. The anthropologist Hadley Kruczek-Aaron has explored the sites where the Black pioneer Lyman Eppes lived or farmed. The Rochester composer Glenn McClure gave Eppes, the best remembered of the Smith grantees, a lead voice in an Adirondack folk opera and oratorio produced and performed by the seventy-person Northern Lights Choir in Saranac Lake. Schoolchildren in Adirondack hamlets have turned stories of Black farmers into folk songs and school plays. The saga of John Thomas, the Smith grantee and self-emancipated slave, is a central feature of the permanent exhibition at the North Star Underground Railroad Museum in Ausable Falls. As for the John Brown Lives! exhibit, Dreaming of Timbuctoo: in 2015, after fifteen years on the road, setting up in granges, college galleries, museums, city halls, the New York State Library, an Adirondack correctional facility, and the state fair (twice), the state Historic Preservation Office gave it a permanent home in the big barn at the John Brown Farm State Historic Site (which gave me an opportunity to occasionally refresh the script with new findings).⁷

The charismatic luster of this story in this time makes sense. In New York’s northern wilderness before the Civil War was a subversive plan to challenge race-based voter suppression, a radical bid for environmental distributive justice, and a case for the bracing value of face-to-face connection as an antidote to bigotry—even if the often neighborly rapport between Black and white Adirondackers was never color-blind. A respect for racial justice did not crown this land (Brown’s egalitarian household notwithstanding). The postracial community the giveaway’s promoters promised would arise from the homesteaders’ recognition of a common good did not prevail.

Yet ground was gained. The exigencies of frontier life ensured it. Good neighbors, honest and dependable, were too few to take for granted. Necessity compelled suspicion to defer to a practical collegiality. The way a fellow tracked a wolf, laid a fire; a helpful pair of hands at childbirth—the human touch was felt. Race prejudice was a given in the Black Woods; it was not unassailable. White Adirondackers took pride in the relative absence of a slaveholding tradition, and if Yankees stamped the region with a racialized Anglo-Saxonism, they also brought their faith in small-r republicanism, and the trace memory of Great Awakenings that urged resistance to top-down religious rule and a greater trust in the inner light of conscience. These legacies did not rout Negrophobia, but between them and the subversive influence the Black grantees exerted through their own examples, some biases relaxed their vigil. The picture, we might say, was vexed.

And in this sense, not because it was utopian but because it was the opposite—imperfect, rangy, and adaptive—the story here suggests a model. There have been Black Woods, after all, all over the land. Vermont, Oregon, Indiana, California, Maine—they all have secret histories pasted thick with hegemonic folklore. But lost as they are, and often misconstrued, these scattered histories still had their triumphs—gains enabled by the common, hardworking love of place. The raw world of the frontier was just loose enough at the joints to let these gains occur. If we can take from them a glimpse, however fleet, of that promised arc that bends toward justice, we see why the Black Woods matters.

So we lean in, and we look hard. A glimpse may be all we get.

Notes on Language, Spelling, and Surnames

When I quote a historical document in this book or invoke a place name that reflects racist word usage at the time the name originated, I have chosen to retain the original spelling and capitalization that speaks for that history.

As offensive as this language is to me and, I suspect, to most readers of this book, I can't see easing my own discomfort by misrepresenting someone else's language whose values are at odds with my own or my readers’. My responsibility is to the unmediated representation of the record, and to the representation of the day-to-day Adirondack world the Black pioneers tried, and managed, to make their own.

This is not a choice every reader will embrace. I write this to explain my reasoning, and to acknowledge and thank my readers for their forbearance.

John Brown hewed to the spelling of Timbucto with one o; his son John Jr. spelled it with two. Artists and essayists like the two o’s better. Historians side with John Brown. Because Brown was an erratic speller, and Timbuctoo is more familiar with two o’s, and also because switch-hitting in this book between a one-o and a two-o Timbuctoo seems needlessly confusing, I go with Timbuctoo throughout. Context should make it clear when Timbuctoo signifies a small North Elba enclave where the name, or nickname, likely got its start, or the wider neighborhood of Black grantees in North Elba ( John Brown’s understanding of it), or the Black settlement in its wide-ranging entirety, a looser reading that includes the St. Armand and Franklin enclaves. In recent years, the name Timbuctoo is sometimes used to stand for all of these. I try to resist this, not always with success.

Dr. James McCune Smith’s last name was Smith. I refer to him as McCune Smith in this book to distinguish him from Gerrit Smith.

Several leading families in the Black Woods spelled their surnames in more than one way. Lyman E. Eppes, Gerrit Smith grantee, used two e’s in his surname—but not always. His son Lyman dropped the second e, except when he didn’t. Avery Hazzard used two z’s, and his son Charles Henry did also—for a while. Where a preference is very reliably suggested (as with Lyman Epps Jr.), I honor it. Otherwise, and for the sake of consistency, I hew to the more familiar spelling.

Abbreviations

Civil War Pensions

All Civil War pension files noted in this book—veteran, widow, and dependent—are in the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in Washington, DC.

Newspapers and Journals

Agents, Grantees, and Interested Parties

Historic Sites, Libraries, Archives, and Repositories

Introduction

In 1921, Alfred L. Donaldson, author of the two-volume History of the Adirondacks, summed up a wealthy abolitionist’s donation of 120,000 acres in New York’s northern wilderness to three thousand Black New Yorkers with a smirk: The attempt to combine an escaped slave with a so-called Adirondack farm was about as promising of agricultural results as would be the placing of an Italian lizard on a Norwegian iceberg. Donaldson was something. In a breath he managed to sectionalize, racialize, and discount the entire story of the Black Woods. So confident was his dismissal that it skewed the public understanding of this story for another eighty years.¹

But Donaldson got one thing right: the abolitionist reformer Gerrit Smith’s scheme of justice and benevolence of 1846 did not produce the crop of Black farmers Smith hoped for. The great majority of Smith’s Black grantees judged a removal to the wilderness an untimely, unaffordable idea. His deedholders who sampled life on the Adirondack frontier may, at best, have numbered around seventy, exclusive of family members and fellow travelers who brought the head count closer to two hundred. Most would not remain in the region. The descendants of those who did would not recall a family link to an antebellum strategy to win Black voting rights. By the usual yardsticks of success (longevity, prosperity, and local pride), the radical philanthropist Gerrit Smith had good reason to judge his plan a bust. So, on he pressed to more urgent, less parochial affairs: the campaign for a Free Soil Kansas, the battle for the Union, the abolition of slavery, and, toward the end of his life, the defense of civil rights for four million freed Black Americans in the South. Except for the New York City activist Charles Bennett Ray, all of the great reformers who touted Gerrit Smith’s little colored colony lost heart. Frederick Douglass, Henry Highland Garnet, Jermain Wesley Loguen, and James McCune Smith all let the coals of their enthusiasm cool to ash.²

And these coals had glowed so hotly, and warmed so many souls! The vision of forty-acre lots of land for thousands, land that spoke for economic independence and the right to vote, once held New York’s Black reform community in thrall. For twenty-five years since the state’s Constitutional Convention of 1821, free men of color in New York had been denied the ballot unless they could show proof of ownership of $250 in landed property. The race-specific property requirement aimed to hobble an emergent Black electorate. With statewide abolition scheduled for July 4, 1827, New York’s proslavery interests hoped to nip the threat of Black political empowerment in the bud. This they did, decisively. Notwithstanding the efforts of equal justice lobbyists to get the racist rule rescinded, it would be endorsed at the Constitutional Convention of 1846 and resoundingly reinstated at the polls.³

Hence the giveaway (my inelegant name for Smith’s land distribution scheme). Gerrit Smith from Peterboro, a small village in upstate New York south of the Mohawk River, had land to spare he did not need. His donation of three thousand Adirondack gift lots would, he reasoned, not only get land into the hands of Black New Yorkers and help them meet an onerous, for-Blacks-only property requirement, but would lure them out of cities and make them citizens of the republic through self-directed labor on their own backcountry farms. How Smith came up with this idea, how it expressed Romantic notions about spiritual regeneration and a conviction that the only hope for Black New Yorkers was to leave urban life behind—all this is taken up in the first part of this book, along with the good work of Smith’s adviser-scouts (agents) who vetted thousands of grantees. These Black reformers kept Smith informed about the rampant Negro-phobia in metropolitan New York that crushed any hope of Black economic gain. It was their and Smith’s belief that moving to the wilderness would not only ease his grantees’ access to the ballot but fire up their souls. On their own land, Smith’s deedholders would gain economic freedom alone and dignity, civic pride, community. With their eyes fixed on this prize, Smith and his agents enjoyed an interracial alliance that, while not unprecedented in New York, ranked among the earliest pioneering instances of Blacks and whites collaborating, working toward a shared progressive end.⁴

In this first section, too, are the first hints and rumbles of dissatisfaction with Smith’s plan from Black activists outside his inner ring of confidantes. Some had their own ideas about what they needed, plans that worked for them. An enterprising grantee from Albany, the activist Stephen Myers, had the temerity to organize a sort of countercolony for free Black settlers west of the Adirondacks in the Tug Hill region north of Utica. Smith’s discomfort with this plan revealed more than he intended about his uneasiness with Black initiative; it was always so much easier to go for Black empowerment when he fixed the terms.

The second section of this book steps down from the high stoop of aspirational rhetoric to the rubbled floor of work and action, and finds the grantees at home in the woods. The land Smith earmarked for his beneficiaries—about forty miles north to south and maybe fifteen miles across, or eight times the size of Manhattan—was not a solid swath. Smith scattered gift lots; he spread the wealth around. Picture the patchy profile of a half-finished Scrabble game, as many squares unoccupied as full. This is how the Smith Lands show up on an Adirondack map. Smith wanted his giftees to range a little, not huddle in defensive clusters. And he may have also wanted to introduce white land reformers to racially distributive environmental justice in action. Give up your proposition of a separate location for the colored people, he told the land reformer George H. Evans in 1844, and identify yourself with the whole human family, and have a heart big enough for every afflicted child of Adam to run into; and then you will have a reforming spirit. He was preaching to the resolutely unconverted, who were filled with horror, as he knew, at the thought of tessellated, piebald townships. But Smith would have his Adirondack checkerboard, and white land reformers would learn this could be done.⁵

The grantees, of course, saw something else: Smith’s scattering of gift lots was a recipe for social isolation and insecurity, and some of them would organize—their deeds be hanged!—Black enclaves that hinted at their old devotion to the memory of towns and cities they left behind. So grantees from Troy stuck tight, as did Brooklynites, and Hudson River Valley families too. Getting to know their new white neighbors would happen when it happened, if it happened, and this would take some time. (Smith’s Black land agents would not furnish grantees with the names of sympathetic white people until 1848.) Notwithstanding the Adirondacks’ progressive vote on Black voting rights in 1846 (Essex, Clinton, and Franklin Counties all went for equal suffrage), the grantees knew a laissez-faire rural racism was likely. On Election Day, no Black names on the ballot. In schoolhouses, no Black teachers scratching sums on slate. In stores, which doubled as ad hoc banks, no line of credit for the Black farmer looking to enlarge a home or build a business.⁶

Even so, there were locals who were openhearted and square dealing, who offered shrewd appraisals of the gift land and directed deedholders unhappy with their lots to better land nearby. History has recognized John Brown’s family for its sympathetic dealings with the grantees, but part two notes many more white people than the Browns who were allies and companions of the Black pioneers. White neighbors stood by an elderly grantee a speculator hoped to evict. White neighbors of a Black farmer, once enslaved, scared away a bounty hunter looking to take him back to the South. Black and white North Elbans founded two North Elba churches together, and a library, and a choir. Black and white homesteaders shared town appointments, brought potatoes to the same starch factory, buried their dead in the same cemeteries. Mountain hikes, ball games, Christmas feasts, and field work were shared pursuits. When the Union Army needed volunteers, Black Adirondackers stepped up, and after the Civil War, white Adirondackers supported the military pension claims of their Black neighbors. Several white households made room for Black boarders, and this worked the other way too. In the great commons of the unregulated wilderness, Black people and white hunted, fished, and foraged together, and bridled at new laws that deemed them poachers and their culture of subsistence something thieving and pathetic. The shared work of place making on this frontier was no perfect antidote for racism, but racism was challenged and subverted in a hundred unsuspected ways.

Strongest Champion and Truest Friend

A few days after Christmas in 1874, Gerrit Smith, seventy-seven, died of a stroke in his nephew’s home in Manhattan. Obituaries were long and lavish, praising public work and private deeds alike. Editors who scoffed at Smith’s politics and style while he lived put the barbs away to laud a moral icon. In newspapers and magazines, essays honored the equal rights reformer who, offered the New York Herald, was not great, as Clay and Webster and Calhoun were great—[and] was not even so profound a champion of his cause as Charles Sumner, but [who] united the aristocratic bearing of the gentleman with the simplicity of the servant of the bondman, giving to him as a brother, in such equal proportions that he earned for himself a title better than that of gentleman, better than that of philanthropist—that of a man. The Tribune, long a thorn in Smith’s side, was fulsome: The possession of great tracts of land makes common men conservative and monopolists. It made of Gerrit Smith one of the most radical and generous of men. Four articles on Smith’s career and funeral ran in the New York Times. An editorial mourned the end of the era of moral politics and reminded readers of the stubbornness of conviction and moral courage it took to be an ‘out-and-out Abolitionist’ (even worse than the cry of ‘Infidel’ in the Middle Ages) in the antebellum era when so much of New York’s trade and commerce was for slavery, and when a ‘nigger’s’ appearance anywhere near a Tammany meeting meant a broken head, if not an ornamented lamp-post. In Philadelphia, the Christian Recorder tolled the losses: One by one are passing away the noble band of men who were the nation’s truest leaders through the wilderness of the dark era of Slavery. Lovejoy, Giddings, Seward, Chase, Greeley and Tappan—all gone, and now, the prince of them all … , Gerrit Smith. Providence could not have given the cause a more efficient ally. He was just the man.⁷

Viewing hours at General Cochrane’s home where Smith’s body rested under ferns in an ice shell by a window were brief and little publicized. Still, word sifted out and crowds collected, and the reporter from the New York Times judged that fully one-fourth of those who called were colored people, whose grief on viewing the remains of their deceased benefactor was intense. Neither Frederick Douglass nor William Lloyd Garrison attended, but here was Smith’s old friend Henry Highland Garnet, and what the churchman offered spoke for thousands: The colored people without exception looked upon Mr. Smith as their dearest and even their only friend, such was … their affection for him. They know that in him they have lost their strongest champion and truest friend, and they keenly feel their loss.⁸

Other Black mourners in the room that day were Peter Porter, the Railroad Champion for Equal Rights (his fight for Black access to public transport thrice roused the wrath of mobs), and Charles Reason, a scholar-poet and school head. Elder Ray, Smith’s city land agent, was detained, but he sent two daughters in his stead, and all this was duly noted by the Times. What the reporter didn’t write, however (how could he know?), was that all the Black attendees he named had a tie to Smith’s land giveaway of 1846. Reason, Porter, and Garnet were deedholders. Charles Ray was, like Garnet, both agent and grantee. In fact, when Smith died, Charles Ray was still working for the giveaway and would keep working for it until his death in 1886, at which time his daughter Florence took up the baton.⁹

Ray’s devotion would have left Smith baffled. Why still bother? What meaning has this plan for anyone? Who remembers it? Who cares? Out of all the good I’ve done in my long life, why fix on the deed that so starkly failed to meet my expectations?

But Smith’s expectations are exactly what I’ve tried to push aside to see how his idea played out in ways he could not anticipate or imagine. He did not expect his grantees to squat on lots that weren’t the ones he gave them or guess they would develop mini-neighborhoods of their own. And they did. He did not foresee the interest of Black speculators, who, like Smith, recognized a bargain when they saw one and started trading in Adirondack gift lots as soon as they came up for sale. He may have guessed that the agrarian values he invoked to explain his project would be touted at Black political conventions from the 1840s to the 1860s, but maybe not that activists would obliquely reference the Smith Lands when they promoted farm colonies for fugitives in Canada. After the Civil War, Black reformers also tipped their hats to Smith’s great scheme of emigration when they urged Southern freedmen to put Ku Klux country at their backs and go west. White land reformers in the postbellum era recalled Smith’s gift land, too, when they courted his support and urged him to back a more sweeping land reform agenda. Indirectly, white progressives honored the giveaway when they spun great schemes to head south after the war and establish farm colonies for freed people, impoverished immigrants, or poor white families, honest and industrious. They knew what Smith tried to do in 1846. Now that slavery was over, maybe it was time to revive an old idea. They, too, were the heirs of Timbuctoo.¹⁰

Several deedholders, many prominent Black reformers among them, were inspired by their gift land not to move north but head instead for California, Michigan, and Canada West. One deedholder used Smith’s idea as a model for an upstate colony of his own (a repurposing from which Smith recoiled). Nondeedholders, beguiled by the rumor of a corner of New York where Black families were farming, ventured to the Black Woods and claimed it for their home. And none of this Mr. Smith saw coming. Nor would he extend his giveaway to out-of-staters, but they still came, and mostly from the South. The expectation that only free people of color would respond to his offer was never very realistic, as Smith himself may have understood. The line between the free Black New Yorker and the fugitive was too porous, and without fanfare, freedom seekers would head north. But neither Smith nor his agents likely guessed that enslavers still chafing at the loss of human property would send their hired guns in hot pursuit of one Black farmer who had lived free in New York for a decade. Smith no more anticipated this than he imagined his Black agents might consider setting up an enslaved person with a gift lot of his own. But it happened, and the legal dust-up that attended it would span two centuries, long after the enslaved grantee and Gerrit Smith were dead. Nor would Smith ever learn that a key goal of the giveaway he deemed a failure had been realized, if not as robustly as he’d hoped. It was his bitter conviction that almost all his deedholders failed to retain their land for its value at the polls. But he was wrong. In 1903, the New York Times revealed that after the Fifteenth Amendment was enacted in 1870, as many as four hundred downstate Black New Yorkers gave up or sold the gift deeds their parents or grandparents received from Gerrit Smith. They had retained them for twenty-four years, until the hated property requirement was nullified and their rights of citizenship were guaranteed. Then, and not until, they let them go. So the gift deeds helped them vote. This was Smith’s idea, and some part of it bore fruit.

If the first meaning of this book’s title invokes the settlers who responded to Smith’s offer, and the world they made with their white neighbors in the Adirondack woods, there is a second meaning too. There is the blackness of obscurity, of what cannot be seen. Since 1859, a vigilant and little-challenged narrative has kept this story in the shadows. John Brown Country, the third section of this book, takes up the shaping role of historiography. How and why was a Black agrarian initiative reduced to anecdotal marginalia? From the first days it was publicized, Smith’s giveaway was misrepresented in terms, here coded, there explicit, that racialized the Adirondacks as a country made and fit for white people. This prejudice shapes an image of the region even now.

This is not to say this whiting-out was special to this region. Scholars have delved deeply into forgotten or never-documented pockets of Black social history in Iowa and Indiana, Maine, Oregon and Alabama, and all the old Northwest Territory. A midnight mob, a vanished neighborhood, a once thriving country church put to the torch—no corner of the country lacks a lost-and-found or still-lost story of its own. What distinguishes the Black Woods is the legibility of the process. With its glib and frequent linkages of environmental integrity and racial purity, the Adirondack brand has informed a racialized literary culture for a century and a half. And for this reason, the Black Woods suggests a model for considering this process in many places, Northern, rural, and purportedly all white, where the Black story has been othered. Lost and othered aren’t the same. What happened in the Black Woods reminds us why the difference matters.¹¹

How did it begin? Smith’s plan was destined to be distorted; the pervasive racism of his time ensured this. But the shelf life of some fantasies-turned-facts has been very long indeed. Early on it was asserted that the giveaway was for runaways, and, even now, casual summaries of this effort frame New York as a land of refuge and redemption, not as the state whose strident racism was a driving reason for Smith’s plan. Another example along these lines: the insistence in antiquarian accounts that in a few years Black families on the ground thinned to one (in fact, the census reveals that as late as 1900, scores of deedholders’ descendants resided in the region). Or the offhand, popular assertion that only one Black settlement, Timbuctoo, ever saw the light of an Adirondack day, when, in fact, four communities (Freeman’s Home, Timbuctoo, Blacksville, and Negro Brook) were Black-founded, and Black families put down lasting roots in older hamlets founded by Canadians and New Englanders, such as St. Armand, Bloomingdale, and Franklin. Very sticky, too, has been the notion that when Black settlers left, they drifted home to cities they all came from and where they presumably belonged. In fact, when families moved from the Black Woods, they often migrated to small towns or other farm districts in upstate New York or New England.¹²

The most egregious historical distortion, the assertion of Black inferiority, did not originate with the sacralized terrain I call John Brown Country. Much older Eurocentric readings claimed this part of the New World for hegemonic narratives of white supremacy. John Brown himself stood for the opposite of this, of course, but the fierce antiracism he preached and practiced all his life would be much transformed—diluted and deracinated—after he was hanged and buried. The enshrinement of the antislavery martyr, which began with the gloomy trip that hauled his body home from Virginia to North Elba, an odyssey that pitched his widow Mary Ann and her companion, Wendell Phillips, from train to sail ferry, oxcart to wagon, and culminated in the sodden winter burial with its sparse mourners, put John Brown Country on the map. And as the allure of John Brown Country brightened with every visitor’s rapt account, so would Brown’s radical call for a world without caste or race hate grow fainter.

No grand tour of the Adirondacks in the late nineteenth century failed to include a stop at Brown’s home; no magic lantern show lacked a slide of his slim headstone in its protective case of glass. Accounts of the pilgrimage to the farm usually put the rigors of the journey on a par with visiting the grave itself, which underscored a hopeful likeness between North Elba and holy sites like Calvary and Jerusalem. In the next century, the faithful included civil rights activists, Cold War zealots, and political progressives. From the 1920s into the 1970s, schools closed and church bells tolled as North Elbans gathered at the grave on Brown’s May birthday, joining members of the John Brown Memorial Association from Boston, Worcester, Philadelphia, and New York. Speeches, prayers, and hymns were offered, and wreaths tipped tenderly against his stone. In local history and guidebooks, Brown was embraced as hometown hero and archetypal Adirondacker, resilient, blunt, God fearing, resolute.

But in these visits, the land gifts of Gerrit Smith, the part to do with equal voting rights, went unremarked. And if we have Brown to thank for forcing history to notice Timbuctoo at all, the blessing of his influence is mixed. The emphasis in shelves of Browniana on all the white man did for the grantees—the lot lines he set right, the lifesaving stores of food he supplied when famine threatened, the Scripture he intoned at Sabbath—did not extend to a concern with what his Black neighbors did for themselves or their impressions of their white neighbor. Except as conduits for John Brown anecdotes, they had no voice in his biographies. How they survived, or didn’t, and what the Black Woods meant to them, were subjects not explored. Not so the assumption of the grantees’ natural inadequacy, lack of mettle, staying power, or grit.

Why, biographers, historians, and memoirists loved to wonder, did so many of them abandon their gift farms? Why had none of them followed Brown to Kansas? Did they not see this was all for them? It is a fact that Brown moved to North Elba in part to find Black fighters for clandestine work to come, a goal he could not realize. The locals who joined his militant campaign were his sons (not all) and some white neighbors. The grantees in his neighborhood declined. The reason? They were obtuse. Unworthy of Brown’s vision. Even Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the Massachusetts abolitionist and Brown’s friend who found more things to praise about the Black farmers than most, embraced this judgment. When it came to the right stuff, said Higginson, Brown would find it only in his sons, reared to sacrifice and valor.¹³

Not to blame the poor grantees! Not to ask for what they never had to give! Asserted Smith’s biographer, Octavius Brooks Frothingham, in 1878, On the best land they would have done nothing. They had none of the qualities that make the farmer… . [Had] the land been the richest in the State they would not have responded, for they could not; it was not in them. Almost a half century later, E. P. Tanner dusted off the verdict for the state historical association, blaming the failure of Smith’s giveaway on the character of the colonists who naturally had neither the training nor the stuff in them for pioneering.¹⁴

Twentieth-century Black memory ought not to be censured for borrowing these essentialist conclusions. That W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1909 John Brown biography suggested that Brown alone was responsible for much if not all of [the giveaway’s] success, or that Zita Dyson, a Black scholar writing on the giveaway in 1919, declared the Black grantees had none of the qualities of farmers and moreover were disabled by infirmities and vices, reflected a necessary reliance on white antiquarian perspectives before primary sources became widely available (and before many libraries welcomed Black scholars). In the 1920s, the Black pilgrim-speakers of the John Brown Memorial Association ( JBMA) never once spoke proudly of Smith’s giveaway or acknowledged the Black settlements that brought their hero to North Elba. In fact, in 1978, the North Elba chapter of the JBMA joined ranks with white neighbors to crush a long-planned state initiative to bring a history center to the farm that would have fixed Brown’s Adirondack chapter in the context of Black voting rights and Timbuctoo.¹⁵

Black Americans who moved to the Adirondacks in the decades of the Great Migration, seeking jobs in the grand resorts, service industry, iron mines, blast furnaces, and foundries, learned nothing of it either. The miner’s daughter and social justice activist Alice Paden Green, whose family journeyed to the mining town of Witherbee from South Carolina after World War II, heard about the Black Woods only in her seventh decade. Black history at her Adirondack high school in 1948 was a ten-minute interlude on Booker T. Washington and Jackie Robinson, and if you missed that one class, that was it. For Alice and her siblings, the campaign for civil rights and racial justice belonged to blighted cities and a benighted South. Discovering a voting rights campaign that sired a nineteenth-century Black farm colony in her own Essex County thrilled her. But it also got her wondering: How was she never told? Did her teachers know? Did anyone? Why had this story gone away?¹⁶

It didn’t go away, of course. What the public record junks is never sheer caprice. The Black Woods was the staging ground of an unprecedented voting rights initiative and the home of a cherished abolitionist shrine, but it also was the stronghold of an Anglocentric narrative of purity and inviolability that saved a wilderness while clinching the region’s name as a place where nonwhite Americans did not fit, did not belong, feared they would never feel welcome, and suspect this even now.

We can’t resolve this contradiction. The side-by-sideness of this world, the fractured quality of a culture so internally at odds—here gains and there reversals, now boons and later blows—more than characterized Adirondack Country. It enabled it. It defines it still. Far from the ennobled landscape so dear to abolitionists, travel writers, environmentalists, and town historians, this was an all-American roiling mess, a world of stubborn paradox where people said one thing, did another, and then went and did something else. It looked like hypocrisy but that would mean one thing was false and the other true and this wasn’t how it was. Both sides were true; both sides were felt.

We chafe at this. The forward thrust of history clamors for coherence and progression but the lives as they were lived, up close, resist. And this confounds us. We want consistency. We ask, How could they manage? How did they bear it?

As if we were beyond this. As if this weren’t us.

A Scheme of Justice and Benevolence

Chapter 1

He Feeds the Sparrow

At Peterboro … it was all Abolition—Abolition in doors and out—Abolition in the churches and Abolition in the stores—Abolition in the field and Abolition by the wayside.

—Charles Wheeler Dennison, New York abolitionist, 1841

In late August 1872, Gerrit Smith, a radical reformer in upstate New York, got a thank-you letter from a flyspeck hamlet in the Adirondack Mountains. All in a day’s work. Smith, seventy-five, had a nation-spanning name for philanthropy as rich and deep as his own voice. A life of steady giving had earned him thank-you notes enough to paper every room in his mansion and the columns on his portico besides. He kept some, answered others, and threw away the rest. He spent as many as fifteen hours a day in his high-ceilinged study, whipping off letters in his swift, sometimes impenetrable hand to presidents, land agents, contract farmers, big-city editors, fellow reformers, and cousins twice removed. He wrote about temperance, Cuban independence, Italy’s freedom fighters, and the famine-making grasshoppers of Kansas. He had a lot to say.¹

In 1872, when Smith heard from the Adirondack homesteader John Thomas, he was in his land office near his Peterboro home, penning speeches on behalf of the presidential candidate Ulysses S. Grant. The powerful newspaper publisher Horace Greeley was running on a multiparty ticket against the war hero and incumbent, and though Grant had his liabilities (the chronic tippling, the blatant cronyism), most Republicans felt bound to defend him. Smith, who knew that civil rights for nearly five million Black Americans could happen, if it happened, only with a Republican in the White House, flogged Grant’s candidacy with a fervor near fanatic. A friend chided him for his unaccountable … relentless severity toward the Democrats: It would seem as if your philanthropy was leaking out. But Smith dug in, arguing that the Anti-Slavery battle is not yet fought out—and, until it is, we shall need Grant’s continued leadership.²

Still, caught up as he was in the campaign, Smith saved the letter from John Thomas. His old hopes for his Adirondack land giveaway were dead, and nothing Thomas had to say would brighten Smith’s view of it. Yet here was this full-hearted, unexpected thank-you note from one of Smith’s three thousand Black beneficiaries, still up there in the North Country, and still farming as Smith had hoped. Smith wouldn’t, couldn’t, give it to the coals.

Close to a million acres had come to Smith in early manhood upon the death of his father, Peter Smith, a fur trader turned spectacularly wealthy land speculator. Gerrit Smith then bought more land on his own, much of it at auction. But selling Adirondack land proved much less easy than inheriting or buying it. By 1846, he’d had enough. Why labor unavailingly to peddle wild land when he could make a gift of it to those unable to afford it? With 120,000 acres broken into 40-acre lots, Smith could give as many as three thousand Black New Yorkers a reason to leave the city, remake themselves as yeoman farmers, and enjoy the fruits of citizenship when they gained the right to vote. After the 1821 Constitutional Convention, New York law withheld the ballot from free Black men who could not show they owned $250 in taxable property. The point of this racialized voting requirement was to check Black enfranchisement before slavery was legally abolished in New York in 1827, and it worked. A Black electorate was administratively aborted before it could be politically empowered. When Smith announced his plan to give away a portion of his land in 1846, this mean and wicked exclusion had already kept a generation of Black New Yorkers from the polls.³

1846 was also the year of the first state Constitutional Convention in New York since 1821. Convention delegates from every county poured into Albany to debate a range of changes to New York’s constitution, including the question of Black enfranchisement. After a summer of rancorous debate, the issue remained unresolved. The weary delegates handed off the fate of equal suffrage to a plebiscite, and that November, New York voters (white men all) went two to one to keep the for-Blacks-only $250 restriction. When Smith announced his giveaway in August 1846, this outcome was not certain. But it loomed, and he knew what it would do. For decades free Black Americans had protested the suppression of a Black electorate. More than two hundred national and state Colored Conventions took place from 1830 into the 1890s, with Black rights and suffrage justice, the measure of full citizenship, at the head of the agenda. Smith foresaw how it would resonate for Black New Yorkers in 1846 when white voters, once again, kept them from the ballot. His land distribution effort was a preemptive strike that stood for hope. No one of his gift lots held the worth of the $250 voting requirement, but if land was cleared, fields planted, and holdings doggedly improved, the rising value of these gift lots would be noted by the town assessor, and the voting requirement might be met. Since the State has … determined [that] Black men … must become landholders that they may be entitled to vote they will become landholders, Smith reasoned. Vote they will, cost what it will.⁴

Hon. Gerrit Smith of New York. Matthew Brady, photographer, 1855–60. Brady-Handy Photograph Collection, LOC.

Land reform was the other great goal of his giveaway, and this Smith deemed quite as urgent as racial justice at the polls. "I am