The Bone and Sinew of the Land Read online

  This meant much.

  Starting out as a pioneer is hard, no matter what the color of one’s skin. But doing so as a newly freed person brought its own challenges, even with friends nearby. There were no kin to come along and settle around, offering help with building a cabin or birthing a baby. There was no one back home who could hearten with letters or send support—in either money or food—when times got hard. And times always got hard.

  But this was 1818, and the Griers had hope for a good harvest. It must have been hard to plant on that hard-won ground without fearing frost and famine. These were some of the hardest farming times ever known, and the recent freezes would have scared everyone. Even finding starter seeds to sow in the spring would have been challenging.

  And both knew that even if everything went well, crops growing to ripeness in their fields, their work was barely begun. If they grew corn, then they had to pick each ear, making sure it was stored so that it stayed dry over the winter. True, some kept the corn in the fields, if they had a dog or two to keep the wildlife away, for the field of standing corn could become a pantry place, with the corn gathered when needed.

  But grain was the hardest work of all. Some pioneers were so eager to plant on the land they had cleared that they seeded too much and watched their bounty rot in the field, unable to harvest it quickly enough. Even the strongest and most skilled men could only harvest about a quarter acre a day, using a technology that had changed little in thousands of years. When the crop was ripe and ready for harvest, Charles and Keziah would sharpen their scythes and move out into the field, swinging low and hard to cut the stalks. But cutting the stalks was not enough; the stalks then had to be raked and bundled quickly so they could dry and be protected. It took at least two people to harvest grain. Often it was considered women’s work to rake and gather the fallen stalks, but necessity would have required that Charles and Keziah trade off, as shoulders burned and arms trembled from the hard hacking.24

  Yes, Keziah and Charles had strength and hope. They had created their own home and were creating their own lives rooted deep in their land. By summer the woods were full of racket, everything growing louder at twilight. As evening drew on, only the bats were quiet, flitting above the clearing Charles and Keziah had created near their cabin, while the fireflies glowed green above the growing buckwheat.

  Their plow was put away near to them in the cabin, safe and enclosed, for they had learned that creatures from bears to squirrels would gnaw on the handles soaked with their sweat and salt.

  They had planted in hope, and they hoped they would soon harvest.

  But something else was growing to the south of them that must have been troubling. That second frontier, the Louisiana Purchase, had been opened to slavery. Some had argued that it would thin slavery out to the point that it would disappear. After all, the nation had moved to ban the international slave trade in 1808, and many had dreamed that ending the importation of enslaved people would finally drive the tyranny of slavery out of the United States.25

  But it was coming back to life.

  And soon, Charles and Keziah would find themselves working to assure others could also be free, for they were an African American farming family close to the border of slave states that were fast filling with misery. More people were crossing the Ohio River, refugees from bondage, willing to grow their own liberty, even if many whites in the nation seemed intent on expanding slavery.

  2

  Interlude: “We hold these truths to be self-evident”

  Why was there a space called the Northwest Territory? And how did it start out as the largest piece of land in North America to be free of slavery and to allow equal voting rights for black and white men?

  It certainly did not seem like a place suited to nurturing high ideals, especially those connected to liberty and equality. The region later known as the Northwest Territory had long been a difficult frontier wracked by conflict—conflict that would lead to the birth of the United States in 1776. The French and Indian War raged there for years. The British defeated the roughly 60,000 French loyalists who lived in that region, along with their Native American allies, in 1763, allowing them to claim the French lands stretching to the Mississippi River. The British colonists had wanted to make this realm their new frontier. Already, colonists were moving in. But King George III snatched it from their grasp, setting aside a large portion of it for its rightful owners—the Native Americans. Powerful and wealthy fur companies, counselors to the king, saw the region as a source of fur rather than farmland.1

  Much has been made of a Tea Party in Boston, but the loss of the Northwest Territory infuriated colonists far outside that city, leading even the most loyal British subjects to consider rebelling. And when they did rebel, winning the Northwest Territory was considered one of the Revolution’s greatest triumphs, practically doubling the size of the new nation. Almost as soon as the British gave it up in 1783, the United States made certain that it would be available for settlement, and plans were soon being made to divide the entire region into plots and sell it.2

  But African-descended people had been living in this region long before the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Some of the earliest known people of African descent in this region were the enslaved people brought by the Frenchman Philip Francois Renault in 1720. Renault was well known to King Louis XV, who had given him permission to explore north up the Mississippi River. Renault hoped to make his fortune by forcing the hundreds of people he brought with him to dig lead mines in the wilderness of what would later be western Illinois. Renault may have been a sophisticated and successful French courtier, but the people he brought in chains may have also been well traveled. Renault had purchased them on the French colonial island of Saint-Domingue in the Caribbean, on his way from France to the American continent.3

  The people he purchased could have been born in Europe, the New World, or various nations on the African continent, for Saint-Domingue was home to people of many cultures and backgrounds. But in 1720 the people whom Renault brought with him held a common kinship—the chains of bondage and the success of survival.

  There is no record of how many of these people died or managed to escape from the mines and farms Renault tried to establish. As Renault must have found, forcing people to labor is much easier on an island flanked by weapon-wielding Europeans and surrounded by the sea. It was another situation entirely trying to keep people in bondage in the middle of a vast uncharted land that was home to various nations, many of them hostile to colonial ambitions. Philip Renault gave up in his attempts after a few years, heading back down the Mississippi and selling the last people he held enchained before heading back to France, where he must have been vague about just how many people he had lost in the New World.

  But people kept bringing enslaved African-descended peoples into what would become the Northwest Territory, and the region continued to be a haven for freedom seekers. Of course, because they intended to stay free, they would not have been eager to allow themselves to be counted by French officials wandering through that wild region trying to get accurate census counts of the non-Native peoples living there. By the late eighteenth century, people of African descent were scattered across this unsettled territory, fluent in French, English, and numerous native languages, adept at surviving and flourishing, often living closely with Native Americans.4

  When the first American surveyors came to plat the Northwest Territory, one even noted a settlement of free African-descended people in the Wabash River valley in today’s Indiana. The settlement was so extensive and established that he could not resist noting it—drawing a fancy curled circle around his notation with his quill pen.5

  And in a shocking move, in 1787 the Northwest Ordinance, the governing document of this region, ordered, “There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory,” making the territory the largest piece of the continent ever to be set aside for freedom since colonization. This was a hard-won and
difficult decision. Powerful white men knew the profits enslaved people could make in the New World, and men like them had been working people to death doing just that since the earliest colonial days. Instead, the Northwest Territory became a haven for freedom, although not in the way that many people imagine.6

  The iconic traveler of African descent moving into and through the antebellum Old Northwest has long been imagined as enslaved, a refugee in rags, relying on white people for help and for liberty. But most of the African American pioneers to the Northwest Territory and states—at least those who allowed themselves to be counted on the federal census—were already free. Indeed, they likely had to prove their freedom to settle and purchase land in this territory.

  True, millions of whites were joining them. The Northwest Territory states saw one of the largest movements of human beings from one region of the planet to another. Within fifty years of the territory’s opening for sale, it went from being the home to its original peoples—the Native Americans—and a few thousand immigrants from other lands to over 4 million settlers.7

  But in those early years of nationhood, the land that Keziah and Charles Grier were working was part of a larger project in the nation, a project worked through with words. Words that spread ideas like roots through this young nation, words that were growing ideas of something new and strange.

  From the first dawning of the human mind,

  Children should be instructed to be kind:

  To treat no human being with disdain,

  Nor give the meanest insect useless pain.…

  Our blessed Lord descended to unbind

  Those chains of darkness which enslave the mind;

  He draws the veil of prejudice aside,

  To cure us of our selfishness and pride.…

  The same eternal hopes to all are given,

  One common Savior and one common heaven.

  When these exalted views th’ascendant gain,

  Fraternal love will form a silken chain,

  Whose band, encircling all the human race,

  Will join the species in one large embrace.8

  These may sound like words to a nineteenth-century hymn written during the rise of a new abolitionist movement in the 1830s or during the difficult days of the Civil War, but they were written remarkably early—in 1805. They come from a poem written by a white woman, Isabella Oliver, who lived in Pennsylvania, and she was writing for an audience hungry for the themes of liberty and equality. For she was writing during a period that saw the new nation swept by a fervor for freedom.

  But this fervor was born of earlier poems, earlier writings. Beautiful, clever, and funny words that had very real power. One of America’s first great poets, the African-born Phillis Wheatley, had written these words while enslaved in 1773:

  No more, America, in mournful strain,

  Of wrongs and grievance unredressed complain;

  No longer shall thou dread the iron chain

  Which wanton Tyranny, with lawless hand,

  Has made, and with it meant t’enslave the land.9

  Phillis Wheatley wrote those words before the Revolutionary War, and now that war was over. The colonies had managed to survive and win it. But that bloody and nasty conflict had been riddled with division and prejudice. Some may well have been fighting to preserve and grow slavery, while many others were encouraged to fight by forming a hostile bond of hatred for those of African descent and Native Americans, even as those of African descent and Native Americans fought as patriots alongside them.10

  As the new nation emerged from that war, there was little solid ground left to stand on. There was not even a constitution. There was, however, the Declaration of Independence. And this was one of the most radical statements in that revolutionary document: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”11

  The men who crafted this document had been born into a world where most people assumed the exact opposite: that God had decreed that some men were born to rule and some to be ruled, that the order of the world was monarchy, not democracy, and that some people would always enslave others. While the men who actually signed the Declaration may not have had the imagination or courage to envision a nation where all men were truly free and equal, others around them were acting on these ideals, their imaginations sparked by a new way of thinking about people and societies, a movement called the Enlightenment.12

  Not all these Enlightenment thinkers were antislavery, but many were. And some of these thinkers opposed not just slavery but prejudice.13

  James Otis was one of the best-known and most influential American writers of the revolutionary period. He wrote formal letters of complaint to the British government that were printed and read throughout the colonies. In 1764 he wrote, “The Colonists are by the law of nature free born, as indeed all men are, white or black.… Does it follow that tis right to enslave a man because he is black?” He added with irony that people of prejudice liked to point to physical differences between Africans and Europeans as a reason for enslavement. But, he argued, “will short curl’d hair like wool, instead of Christian hair, as tis called by those, whose hearts are as hard as the nether millstone, help the argument?”14

  Otis also referred to the brilliant and satirical arguments against prejudice and slavery of the French philosopher the Baron de Montesquieu, whose work from 1748 was popular and well known in revolutionary-era America. Montesquieu was already familiar with the many arguments slavers made to defend their enslavement of people from Africa. And knowing this he wrote a devastating and very funny attack on every defense of slavery they put forth.

  One of Montesquieu’s arguments goes straight to the heart of a defense of slavery made by enslavers and their allies in the United States even a century after he wrote. Those prejudiced enslavers in America in the 1800s were hauntingly like their counterparts in the 1700s, arguing that slavery was not an evil but a kindness because those they enslaved were lacking in essential human traits that would enable them to care for themselves or live independently. Montesquieu addresses the argument at its face, stating that if slavery “is pretended to be beneficial” because enslaved people are at least “provided subsistence,” then it follows that only those people “incapable of earning their livelihood” should be enslaved. Montesquieu then asks why anyone would want to employ such a diminished worker. He does admit that babies could possibly fall into the category of those “benefitting” from slavery because they require assistance to live. But as he points out, “Nature” has supplied to infants “mothers with milk” for their food, so they need not become enslaved to be cared for.15

  And Montesquieu criticized not only slavery but prejudice based on skin color and ancestry, which he saw as dangerous to society because “prejudices eradicate every tender disposition.” He also led his readers to see both how ridiculous and how deadly prejudice was by presenting a story about the ancient Egyptians (whom he called “the best philosophers in the world”) being so prejudiced against people with red hair that they killed them.16

  In addition to these European and American writers, African-born and African-descended writers were also writing powerful critiques of slavery and prejudice. Olaudah Equiano, one of the most internationally renowned African-descended writers of the Enlightenment, wrote a moving narrative of his capture and enslavement as a child and his life in bondage. He knew that many Europeans defended enslavement of Africans on the grounds that they were “uncultivated.” But, as he wrote, “let the polished and haughty European recollect, that his ancestors were once… uncivilized, even barbarous. Did nature make them inferior to their sons? And should they too have been made slaves?”17

  These were not just fine and funny words. These were powerful new ideas, and they were being used to make revolutionary changes, for Americans were acting on those ideals in a way that the Wester
n world had never seen.18

  People started to give up slavery.

  When the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, there was no North or South. There were no slave and free states, there were just slave colonies. Every single colony allowed slavery and had enslaved people.

  The Declaration voiced an almost insane hope for a different kind of government, a different kind of nation, one ruled by the people, where all would be born with the opportunity for “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Some of the writers of that document had wanted even more. They wanted to condemn slavery. They knew that creating a truly free nation would not be easy. But they believed, with many Americans at the time, that slavery must end.19

  Indeed, many of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence thought that the system of slavery was evil. They may have thought it was essential but not good. Even Thomas Jefferson, already deeply prejudiced and hungry for the wealth that enslaved people could bring him, wanted to include the stain of slavery as a reason for the country to become independent. He wrote a statement later cut from the Declaration of Independence, accusing King George III of waging “cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred right of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating them and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain, determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold.”20

  Jefferson, like many Americans at that time, held conflicting views about slavery and equality. Unlike Jefferson, however, many Americans during these revolutionary times were moving beyond words and acting on the best ideals of the nation, moving it toward the goals of freedom and equality in concrete ways. And even before the war was won, the revolution for freedom had begun.