THE EXCERPT

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,