The Bone and Sinew of the Land Read online

  Instead, the earth settled, and war broke out. The War of 1812 brought more death and terror, threatening the new nation’s existence.

  Somehow Elliott survived these traumatic years. Though he and his mother and brothers were still together, they were still in bondage, and their existence held no certainty at all. Years later, in 1850s Canada, a man by the name of Christopher Nichols recalled the terror of this aspect of enslavement. As he recounted, “I have seen parents and children, husbands and wives, separated by sale.… All the time I lived in slavery, I was in dead dread and fear. If I slept it was in dread—and in the morning it was dread—dread night and day.” And in March 1819, Cornelius Elliott had to face his worst fears: he was being sold and separated from most of his family, for Timothy Guard had come calling.14

  It was not unheard of for slave owners to bring enslaved people into a Northwest Territory state, though legally those people were supposed to be made free. Cornelius Elliott knew he was a valuable man and that his owner would drive a hard bargain, but he may have hoped to get his freedom out of the deal. Then again, Timothy Guard, and those like him in Illinois, knew just how to exploit every loophole and legal (or illegal) advantage to force people to work in bondage.15

  But Elliott may have had other reasons to hope. He knew that Timothy Guard badly needed his skills, and that fact alone would keep him from the deadliest and most dangerous work in the Salines. Also, Guard needed Elliott to be mobile while he worked the pipelines. Guard knew that people would run from the terrible labor he was forcing on them, and the wilderness offered them a place to hide. After all, this was not New Orleans or Providence, with people and an infrastructure in place to catch a runaway. So these salt-work owners used many means to ensure their forced laborers stayed put. Chaining them to their beds was not unheard of, and the ladders into the pits would have been closely guarded. But Guard knew he could not keep Elliott constantly chained, so he had to think of other ways. One may have been the promise of freedom, however expensive. And it would be very expensive.

  While Elliott’s value protected him from the pits and probably saved his life, it also meant that purchasing himself must have seemed almost impossible. But Elliott was undaunted, and Timothy Guard agreed that Elliott could buy his freedom. Guard’s agreement did not come cheap, however, for he insisted that Elliott reimburse him for every penny of the $1,000 he had paid for him.16

  This was the frontier, far from banks or any access to gold or cash. Even the owners of the salt works paid their taxes not in gold but in salt. A thousand dollars was an almost unimaginable sum. But Elliott dreamed of freedom, and nothing was going to dissuade him.

  But how does one buy oneself? There are the relatively straightforward challenges, like earning extra money while enslaved. Once that problem was solved, then where could one store the money? Only the rare bank would agree to hold money for such a business, and for most of the enslaved, their owners also owned the places they might hide money. Finally, the entire process rested on the notion that an owner could be trusted to uphold a promise.

  How could a negotiation between people with no legal rights and their owners ever be fair? To secure their own freedom, enslaved people would have to promise to work harder than ever, in unbearable conditions, to earn money that legally belonged to their owners. If an owner agreed to such an arrangement, the temptation to break a promise and keep the handsome profit must have been strong, and the enslaved person would have no recourse.

  The stories of such deals going bad were common. Alfred T. Jones knew this all too well. When he opened negotiations with his owner in 1833, he had lived all twenty-three years of his life in bondage in Kentucky. Here is how Alfred describes what happened next: “I made an arrangement with my master to purchase my freedom for $350.… But before the business was completed I learned that my master was negotiating with another party to sell me for $400.” Realizing that his owner had decided to steal his $350 and any hopes of freedom, Alfred Jones fled to Canada.17

  Luckily, he knew how to read and write. This meant that he could write his own pass, a document saying that he was traveling under the permission of his owner. Twenty years later, the owner of a successful apothecary shop in Canada, the entrepreneurial Alfred Jones admitted that the pass “was not spelled correctly, but nobody there [in the United States] supposed that a slave could write at all.”18

  The papers Alfred refers to were part of the powerful and complicated legal structure that protected the system of slavery and prejudice in America at that time in both the South and the North. A person held in bondage had to have a pass from his or her owner to move freely. By the nineteenth century, prejudice and the law had become firmly intertwined in America. The legal and social assumption across white America was that a person of African descent was enslaved unless proven otherwise. This meant that free people of African descent, especially on the Northwestern frontier, had to have “free papers,” legal documents proving that they were owned by no one but themselves.

  Every single one of the Northwest Territory states had white residents who created Black Laws requiring any person of African descent entering that territory to show such papers to any white authority who demanded them. And meeting those demands came at a great cost. These whites instituted anti-immigration laws often under the guise of so-called Black Code bonds. Only people of African descent had to pay them, and they were made cripplingly expensive to discourage free African Americans from settling in these territories and states. Most territories required a $500 bond, but Illinois demanded $1,000. Whites in Illinois were making it brutally clear that they did not mind having people of African descent in their state as long as those people were not free.19

  These bonds were not just a formality; they were a threat. Every free person of African descent in the Northwest Territory states would have known someone who had been forced to pay the bond, and those who hadn’t knew they could be financially destroyed at any moment if a local white person decided to enforce the bond law. In Elliott’s home county, a free man by the name of George Shockley had to submit a $1,000 bond when he arrived there to settle in 1834.20

  Of the three border states of the Northwest Territory, Illinois had the harshest Black Codes in place during the period that saw the highest migration into the Old Northwest, and a strongly pro-slavery elite created indenture laws that all but legalized slavery in the early nineteenth century. By 1810, African Americans made up 5 percent of Illinois’ territorial population. This was too many for some whites. So an 1813 code barred any new free African Americans from entering the state and required those who lived there already to register with local officials. Failure to abide by the code could result in a whipping of the offender “on his or her bare back not exceeding thirty-nine stripes nor less than twenty-five stripes.” Six years later, the state passed a law forbidding assemblage by any people of African descent—including for worship. Admittedly, in 1829, Illinois decided to allow African Americans to enter the state as long as they recorded free papers and paid a bond. While that bond was technically not raised to $1,000 until 1845, George Shockley’s experience showed that any county could decide to make the bond as high as it liked well before 1845.21

  If Elliott wanted to stay in Illinois or any portion of the free Northwest Territory, he would have to have his free papers and be prepared to pay that bond. Yes, he could flee to Canada, and many free people of African descent did. But Elliott must have seen himself as an American, and he wanted to stay in America, making his home and his future there. And he had another reason for wanting to be legally free in America—for only with freedom papers in hand would he be in a position to buy the freedom of the people he loved.

  So Elliott must have promised Guard he would stay in the salt works and labor to buy his freedom, hoping Guard would keep his word.

  But Guard now knew that Elliott had freedom on his mind, and this could make him more of a flight risk. Guard would have known of other freedom entrepreneurs like A
lfred T. Jones, who when cheated escaped to Canada. Guard meant to keep Elliott in Illinois for the time he needed him, even if Elliott came up with $1,000. So Timothy Guard bought some insurance—he purchased Guard’s little brother, Aaron.22

  Aaron Elliott was much younger than Cornelius and probably had no highly valuable skills to keep him out of the pit. The bond between these brothers would have allowed Guard to keep Cornelius Elliott close and compliant, for he could always send Aaron into the pit.

  How Elliott had the heart and the courage to hope in the face of all of this remains a mystery. But the deed books, massive and water-stained, smelling of old leather and mud, still sit in the county courthouse, telling the story of what he did. They show that Elliott must have worked very hard indeed, for in just two years he purchased his freedom for $1,000. The clerk was slow to record this fact, not entering it until 1829, but the words clearly read, “Timothy GUARD of Gallatin County, Illinois, having purchased CORNELIUS, age about 28 years of John ELLIOTT of Maury County, Tennessee for $1,000 in March 1819.” They go on to explain what Cornelius Elliott paid Timothy Guard for his freedom, Timothy Guard speaking the words to the clerk, confirming that “for the sum of $1,000 paid me I declare said CORNELIUS having lived from March 1819 to August 4, 1821 in Illinois and in consideration of same payment do free CORNELIUS.”23

  Cornelius Elliott was free.

  But there was a problem. In 1821, Timothy Guard’s pit was not yet finished. He wanted it deeper, more productive. He intended to get more money out of his salt works. So Guard kept Cornelius’s brother, Aaron Elliott, enslaved, promising Cornelius Elliott that he would sell him for $550 when Elliott came up with the cash. But where could Elliott earn that kind of money? He lived in a company town, and the company was owned by Timothy Guard. Whether Guard paid Elliott too little or just refused to sell Aaron, Elliott was not able buy his brother’s freedom for another six years. He finally did in 1827, a couple of years after the completion of Guard’s deepest pit.24

  Now, finally, Cornelius Elliott was truly free.

  Technically, Aaron was not. By law, upon purchasing his brother, Cornelius Elliott became a slave owner. He may not have been able to afford both the $550 and the $1,000 bond he knew that Gallatin County would charge him. He and Aaron also knew that Aaron had to pay Cornelius back. They were almost certainly in agreement on this, for their mother was still held in bondage, and they desperately wanted her free. She could not make the kind of money Aaron could, with his brother almost certainly training him up in the lucrative coopering business. So Aaron worked for five years, technically in bondage to his brother, before they could finally go to the courthouse and get his free papers. The purchase of a healthy, strong family member such as Aaron could provide valuable aid on the frontier, where land was more plentiful than labor. But Elliott, like most freedom entrepreneurs, bought not only the healthiest and youngest members of his family but also his elderly mother and others besides. For this was not the economics of greed; this was the ascendency of love.

  So while the salt mine owners kept to their math of misery and slave owners in the South turned a profit on the sale of their own children, Cornelius Elliott and the thousands of other freedom entrepreneurs like him in antebellum America honored their families. Of course there were a few free African American slave owners in the South. Some could not resist the profits to be made through enslaved labor, no matter their skin color.25

  However, Elliott and many other freedom entrepreneurs turned their backs on the financial temptations of owning human chattel. Some of these freedom entrepreneurs had experienced the ultimate betrayal: sale by their own white fathers. These African-descended freedom entrepreneurs rebelled against that culture. Instead of turning a profit from the sale of their own blood—or even just abandoning kin to focus on their own prosperity—they valued their families, protecting and preserving them by purchasing them, often at enormous expense and self-sacrifice.

  Not every African-descended person around the Northwest Territory states made this decision, of course. Armistead Lawless did not. He had been freed in Saint Louis in the 1830s when he was still a fairly young man. By the late 1840s he had amassed a fortune there, part of it in enslaved people whom he forced to work for him. After years in Saint Louis he ended up living in Illinois on a large piece of land he owned, proudly proclaiming his immense wealth when the census taker came calling in 1850.26

  Still, many recently enslaved people decided to build their families rather than their businesses. Just a few years after Elliott bought his brother, another freedom entrepreneur moved into Illinois, about 250 miles northwest of the salt works. His name was Frank McWorter, although many called him Free Frank. Frank’s mother may well have been born in Africa, giving birth to her son while enslaved in South Carolina. Frank’s white father almost certainly owned both him and his mother. Frank labored for years under his father’s ownership, including in the saltpeter mines of Kentucky. When he fell in love with Lucy, also enslaved, he married her, then worked to buy her freedom. Her owner, knowing of Frank’s interest, charged the atrocious sum of $800. But in 1817, Frank paid it before he himself was free.27

  Frank was now owned by the men who were possibly his half brothers, and they were not enthusiastic about the idea of their property being free, even if that property may have been family. Did they mock Frank with the amount he paid for his wife, Lucy? We may never know, but the records show that it took Frank two more years to earn another eight hundred dollars, and that eight hundred dollars finally convinced the white McWorter brothers to sell Frank to himself.28

  In the early 1830s, Frank and Lucy moved to Illinois, where he became the first African American in Illinois to legally found and plat a town, the community of New Philadelphia. Free Frank was brilliant at real estate transactions, and as he sold the land in New Philadelphia, often to whites, he bought another member of his family, bringing a whole new meaning to the term “property flipping.”29

  Such freedom entrepreneurs were by no means unique. Cornelius Elliott’s home county of Gallatin, Illinois, was full of them. County deed books from the earliest days before statehood record one freedom entrepreneur after another, some of them women. There was Susan, who earned $150 to buy her freedom in 1816, and Lilly who paid her enslaver, Samuel Givens, $300 for her freedom in 1819. Over and over again these enslaved people used their strength, their intelligence, and their lives to invest in their freedom, their future, and their families.30

  While many freedom entrepreneurs in the South came to the Northwest Territorial frontier by choice, some had the decision forced upon them. To discourage a free black population in the slave South, and fearful of any actions that might weaken slavery’s grip, some whites in those states created laws making the freeing of enslaved people more difficult. By the 1820s all the states of the upper South had passed legislation requiring any freed people to leave their territory within a year’s time or risk reenslavement. This was a hardship for many who had family members still held captive, and southern archives are full of heartrending court petitions from recently freed people begging to stay close to kin.31

  But Cornelius Elliott could stay in Illinois, and he wanted to, despite the fact that the salt works were not the only danger on the frontier.

  Away from the horrors of the salt works, the wilderness started, and people with every right to call that land their own still lived there—the Native Americans. The First Nations of the Northwest Territory states had been dealing with people from across the Atlantic for over 150 years by the time Cornelius Elliott arrived in Illinois. They had seen it all: trade and betrayal, cooperation and conflict, war and genocide.32

  And pioneers coming to the northwest frontier to clear lands and farm were not a welcome presence, no matter what the color of their skin. And as the territory was opened for sale, free African American pioneers were as vulnerable to Native American attack as whites, for they were a part of the same settlement movement that was destroying the
se First Nations’ homes and livelihoods. The slave registry book in Elliott’s own Gallatin County, shows that a free African American by the name of Alfred J. Jones, who had lived in the region through the War of 1812, requested his free papers in 1819. He was intent upon leaving because he had “suffered considerably from Indians.”33

  But then, the American frontier has always been infamous for its lawlessness, brutality, and violence. So maybe the horrors of the salt works and the attacks and counterattacks between pioneers and Native Americans are not all that surprising. The surprise is Cornelius Elliott and his family and all the other freedom entrepreneurs in the Northwest.

  Now, Cornelius Elliott was not just a freedom entrepreneur; he was also a brilliant entrepreneur on many fronts, with a sharp understanding of how he could succeed out there in that mess of a place. As he walked those miles of wooden pipes, doing his work for Timothy Guard, checking for leaks and repairing them, he must have noticed the soil under his feet. For while Elliott was a cooper, he also wanted to be a farmer. He did not want to own just himself; he wanted to own land—a piece of his nation. The burning of acres of woodland, while appalling, was clearing the trees. And he must have heard the rumors that the territorial government was planning on selling some of that land.

  Elliott had been saving up for just this opportunity, and in July 1829, when the government put up the first, best lots for sale, he walked into the land office to buy eighty good acres at a dollar an acre, cash on the barrel. The deed officer handed him his slip of paper noting that this was Federal Land Deed Number 1 for that region. Elliott was the first, and he knew his land was the best.34

  By the end of his long life, Elliott had worked to buy the freedom of four family members, including his mother. His brother named his son Cornelius in honor of the brother who freed him. Cornelius Elliott and his wife, Sarah, on the other hand, named one of their sons Amistad, almost certainly for the ship of enslaved people who had rebelled and won their freedom.35