1869, Ep. 141 with Amy Godine, author of The Black Woods

2:32PM Nov 15, 2023

Speakers:

Jonathan Hall

Amy Godine

Keywords:

adirondacks

adirondack

family

grantees

black

gerrit

white

book

new york

land

farm

new yorkers

amy

neighbors

farms

exhibit

hope

farming

lyman

history

Welcome to 1869, The Cornell University Press Podcast. I'm Jonathan Hall. In this episode we speak with Amy Godine, author of the new book, The Black Woods: Pursuing Racial Justice on the Adirondack Frontier. From Saratoga Springs, New York, independent scholar Amy Godine has been writing and speaking about ethnic, migratory and black Adirondack history for more than three decades. She has curated several exhibits, including "Dreaming of Timbuctoo" at the John Brown Farm State Historic Site in North Elba, New York. We spoke to Amy about the history surrounding the gift of 120,000 acres of Adirondack land from upstate abolitionist, Gerrit Smith, to 3000 Black New Yorkers in the 1840s; the families who took Smith up on his offer and moved north to settle and farm in the Adirondacks; and, how the very presence of these Black farming families effectively abolitionized the region. Hello, Amy, welcome to the podcast.

Delighted to be here. Jonathan. Thank you.

Well, I am excited to talk to you about your new book, The Black Woods: Pursuing Racial Justice on the Adirondack Frontier. Tell us the backstory to this book—I know that we tend to think of New York being a leader in voting rights and things like that, but it wasn't always the case. Your book talks about of voter suppression restrictions against Black New Yorkers in 1821. That set up a whole chain of events that led to the history that you detail in your book. Tell us this history.

That legislation of 1821 that the New York Assembly passed, rewarded poor white New Yorkers with the vote without any restriction. But Black New Yorkers were suddenly for the first time saddled with a draconian restriction of $250 that they had to prove they owned in property, in land, or they could not vote, which effectively disenfranchised Black New York. And this was very calculated because abolition was coming up statewide. And this would enable the emergence of a new Black electorate that would vote the antislavery ticket. And this was something that downstate interests that had strong dealings with the South had no interest in seeing emerge. So this was one way to sort of scuttle that in advance and repress that— this is real voter suppression early on before we knew the words for it. And it came as a shock, something quite this strict and terrible to Black reformers and white abolitionists in New York. And the horror was that this would stand and could not be challenged for another 25 years until the next statewide constitutional convention. So that's a whole generation that has to sit on its hands and wait, and strategize and lobby for a change of heart among New York's white assembly when it comes up again in 1846 on schedule. Again, there's a heated long debate, racist attitudes among the white delegates, not all of them, but many of them are even more entrenched than ever, and have grown more specifically racialized than ever now. Pseudoscience is emerging that seems to justify a tough line on Black voting rights and keeping Black New Yorkers non-citizens. And, indeed when it goes to the state for a public election, a statewide election, except for Northern New York, and several counties in Northern New York and a few to the west, the state resoundingly defeats any hope for a retraction of this voter rights restriction for Black New Yorkers. So the mood in 1846, when the abolitionist and very wealthy land Baron Gerrit Smith is thinking about this is, very dark, very discouraged. And he comes up with this plan as a way to not just invigorate the hope of his Black friends that there could be some way around this, but a way that sort of both accommodates the awful restriction and meets it on its own terms. He says, Okay, if you need land to vote, I'm going give you land to vote. I have land to spare. I don't need this land. I don't want to pay taxes on it anymore. Let it be your land. I've got a lot of it. I've got 120,000 acres of it and I'm going to ask friends of mine in the white and Black community to search for eligible grantees who are worthy of this gift. And he gives away 3000 Lots, mostly in 40 acre pieces to 3000 Black New Yorkers from all over the state. It's quite a gift.

Yeah, that's amazing. That's amazing.

Yeah. Yeah.

You call it a scheme of justice and benevolence?

That's right.

And it was ahead of its time—it preached affirmative action, environmental, distributive, justice, agrarian, and community building before any of those concepts were even known or even there were even words for them.

It's really a forerunner of everything to come, which is another reason I think it should be of such interest to educators today. It's a story that seems lost in the mists of the past, but it has currency for our present moment. And it's hopeful. It suggests these things were in play in New York for a long time and in the sticks, in the Adirondacks.

Yeah, not just in the city.

Yeah, that's right.

So he invites around 3000 landless Black New Yorkers to farm in the Adirondacks.

Mm hmm.

How many grantees actually go there? And then this is a big question like, how many how many actually went to the Adirondacks? Who were the families, and where did they settle? And what happened?

This is where most accounts of this, which are very, very short indeed, usually end. I would say...most people said no one came, or maybe just a few families came and left. I would wager that my best research tells me that as many as 200 to 250 people came in response to this gift, whether or not they were themselves giftees—a lot of people came as sort of what I'd call fellow travelers who were supporting this effort. Some of them were white people, or one of them was white people, John Brown and his family came most famously and they would put it on the map. That also includes women and children who of course, can't vote. And it includes as well, because I use it very liberal— that here for my own purposes of storytelling—it also includes people who come just before and after the Civil War, long after Gerrit Smith has lost interest in it, but they can't because they want to be in an integrated, safe farming community. And they've heard of it. And whether or not they know about Gerrit Smith, Gerrit Smith is who brought the Black original pioneers there that created this community, and gave rise to the hope among later people that they can be safe there and have a future there. So it's, I'm stretching the limit when I say 250, but and most of those don't stay, most of them go away. Really. We're down to scores of families and the different sections where they settled that stay for a while and then we're down to fewer than that.

Okay.

Yeah.

I mean, you have so many stories in the book. Is there one particular family or one particular story that is illustrative of these grantees?

Well, there are a couple and they're good because they're in different parts of the North Country, the Eppes family, best known because they were the closest friends to John Brown's family neighbors, and he strongly hoped that the grantee Lyman Eppes would join him when he left the Adirondacks to go fight slavery firsthand where slavery was alive. And he's looking at his neighbors and Lyman Eppes is the guy who wants to come. Lyman Eppes says, No, I've got a farm here. And this is where I'm going to stay. This is where I'm fighting my fight, but his family lasts in the region until the 1940s, the early 1940s. They have deep roots, his son lives on, stays and continues to be involved in various types of farm work and outside work. And they also were community builders, which is significant. The Eppes help found the town library, they are active in the Sunday school. They have a small family town choir that sings at all kinds of public events. He's a guide who cuts a trail to a pass, he serves on town appointments as do several of the Black grantees. When they come to these fledgling hamlets and communities everybody goes to work together to serve on the roads committee, the fire committee, the tax collection committee, the elections oversight guy, I mean really, it's a very integrated scene early on. The other fellow I'd name who was also just honored recently with a sign that names him. He (John Thomas) was a former slave as self-emancipated slave from Maryland who comes up, eventually makes his way to Troy. And then from there comes into the Adirondacks, like almost all of the grantees who gets land, he sees his land and thinks I can do better than this. I'm going to go for a plot nearby, I'll buy something or trade up with Gerrit Smith, who's always game to do that. He buys better land in the town of Franklin, which is north of where Lyman Eppes and John Brown lives and he raises a family there, they raise their families there, that family's descendants, some of them are still on the ground there, some of them are still there. He has a terrific reputation and his community and is known in one regional history for having warned away through his neighbors a slave catcher who reportedly came to find him and bring him back to his so-called home and the South. And the word is that John Thomas is armed and will not go without a fight. He'll fight to the end and his neighbors tell the slave catcher once more, we'll fight for him. So you best get gone. And the guy leaves. That makes it into one county history. And it looks like it might actually have happened from what we can see. That's an exciting story. Are anything left of these black settlers farms? Nothing really, maybe some foundations in the woods, places where new forms have emerged. But the material culture is very thin. It's very hard to find any relics or signs of the community beyond their names in a range of cemeteries, which is a testament, again, to the integrated nature of this frontier.

Interesting, interesting. I like that. You were saying that, in essence, just the very presence of these black pioneers in the Adirondacks—you know, free people working schooling, their kids eventually voting— that effectively abolitionized the Adirondacks way before the rest of the country.

Yeah, it's a strong word. But I think the hope of Gerrit Smith and of his Black agents, really the Black land agents did it, the white land agents did virtually nothing, it was the Black land agents who did all the real on-the-ground work of identifying grantees and visiting them in their homes. Their hope was that face to face dealing would be the thing that changed men's hearts, you had to have community it had to be small scale, rural communities had a much greater promise of that than urban ones, which were catastrophic for Black New Yorkers, especially in the city. And once you got people who needed each other, the quality of farming is that you need your neighbors, farmers need help from their neighbors and farming was the avenue to that mutuality, that common cause that distinguishes that trade. Once you had families getting to know each other, then you would have recognition of each other as people. And as equals. And in fact, what I found in my archival searches, testified to the rightness of that, both in the tax records, which show Black farmers going to bat for white neighbors and vice versa, in their mutual hope to redeem land that had been seized for back taxes that hadn't been paid. They show enormous knowledge of each other's properties, the improvement of their properties and devotion to each other's farms, and their willingness to put their name on depositions and affidavits supporting each other. And the same thing is true after the Civil War, when Black veterans are seeking pension reflief from the military pension Bureau, and they need proof that they were indeed very disabled when they got back from the war. So they appeal to their neighbors, mostly white, and say, Can you can you describe who I was before the war, and how I am outfitted now to work and disabled -- and everybody comes through. Some of these guys looking for help from their neighbors have 9-10 people going to bat for them. It's very moving. All those records are not part of the public record but they ought to be because they really testify to the integrity and integration of small town life at mid-century and after.

Wow. Where were you able to find these records?

The National Archives in Washington have those folders and my husband and I went down there and spent a very happy couple of days running through these things. That was fun.

Sounds like fun. Yeah. So you had said that as far as you know, material or physical evidence, there's not much left. But do you know if any of the farms or the plots of land that were farmed are any of those still workable land? Or does anyone know?

I don't know about that. That's a good question. I think there might be some farming done on one family's estate in Franklin, or in St. Armand, most of this land falls away for when the settlers give up or move elsewhere. They don't always give up on farming and often they move to better farm country, and try again in other parts of New York and Connecticut, even in Vermont. Even in the Dakotas, the Dakota territory, there are Black grantees going out to farm so they aren't giving up on the agrarian ideal. But when they leave, they leave and their land falls back to the county or the state for unpaid taxes. It goes up for auction. And then you start seeing it getting bought up by it richer interests, people who are looking for places to recreate or looking for farms to consolidate into big market oriented farms and their old identities—subsistence farms is subsumed in this new economic paradigm in the Adirondacks. And it's privileging recreation and big hotels and industry and another kind of settler and looking away increasingly from farming, because farming is better elsewhere.

Yep, yep. Yep. That being said that there is a revival of some small farms in the Adirondack area and community supported agriculture in the Adirondacks. What can today's farmer in the Adirondacks learn from the black Adirondack farmers of the past?

Well, first of all, that farming has always been part of the Adirondack experience, even while the environmental discourse sort of insinuates that farming's time has come and gone. And the new celebration of land, in the 6 million acres of the park, ought to be recreational and well, let's just stop with that. And about environmental sustainability and the gorgeousness of the wilderness on its own terms. There's also a place in that, that I don't think has been fully recognized or acknowledged for small scale farming, wherever it's possible, and that we're seeing a revival of that. That is an Adirondack-rich tradition. So when we look to return to the Adirondacks to how it was, we can look to those small farms as part of the picture along with those gorgeous forests and beautiful rivers and mighty summits, the small farm and the small, locally oriented market farm and subsistence farm are part of the glorious legacy of Adirondack life. That's one happy, happy thing to think of that I love to think about that when I go to farmers markets in the Adirondacks, which are booming right now. And it's wonderful.

It's great. That's great.

Yeah, I guess the other thing is that farmers in coming back in the day were activists. They were fighting for a principle of equal justice and farmers today in the Adirondacks can look to that heritage and claim it as one of their banners, too, and say they're looking toward sustainability and the right use of the land and the relationship of what they're doing to climate change. And so they're keeping up a political tradition for farmers as well as an economic one.

I like that. I like that. Yeah. And it's not a major focus of the book, but you do have some discussions of the Underground Railroad. What were some of the connections with the Underground Railroad in the Adirondacks?

Oh, that's a really interesting story, because I had a great learning curve there. When I started the research, I took it on faith that historians before me who claimed there was no such thing in the Adirondacks and were probably right. It had been romanticized and inflated and exaggerated and had more to do with white longing to be part of the Civil Rights rescue narrative than any real truth. Other scholars have proven clearly that there was an active Underground Railroad in the region. Whether it went through the area where the Black grantees and their followers settled is another question. But I do know that a number of the grantees, when you look deep at their genealogy, were only a generation out of slavery, and undoubtedly had family memories and connections to slavery that were very profound. Several families brought elder members of their families to live with them who had been enslaved. Some of the grantees themselves had been born enslaved, not just John Thomas, but several others. And so I discovered that the line was really quite porous, though the land that Smith gave away, was intended for free Black New Yorkers, nobody was checking who was coming. And a number of the free Black New Yorkers who came would have been regarded as self-stolen property by their former owners in the South. So their status was a little muddy. And you have to be really respectful of that muddy line and not insist they were all free, or they were all runaways, as early histories insisted--it was a lot more complicated than that. Everybody had allegiances to both experiences. That's important to see when I wrote this book, I think.

That makes sense, that makes sense. Yeah. Within your new book The Black Woods, there's a great map. It's a rough guide showing some of the key black pioneers who settled in the area. And, you obviously know this, back in August, there's a there was an official New York history sign that was just unveiled, celebrating the town of Blacksville. So if someone who has this great map, and they're heading to the Adirondacks, what would you recommend they do? Are there places they can visit or?

There's nothing left to Blacksville except a sign. There's nothing left in John Thomas's farm that we know of except, no original building, I don't think, but there is a sign honoring his presence there. Where there used to be a racially derogatorily named brook. And that name has now been changed to the John Thomas Brook. So that's a very happy new installation that just occurred recently. There's the new sign for Timbuctoo the original settlement, or enclave, it's not clear whether it was...how big it was, but it's what got John Brown to move to his second home in the Adirondacks. There's no sign for Freeman's Home, but there should be some day and there is a Negro Hill maybe that will become renamed some day and but that's... Visiting signs isn't very gratifying, if you're talking about something more substantial. I'd urge people to go to the John Brown Farm, and learn what his relationship was to this story. He's not the hero of my book, but he's a big player in it. And also go to the exhibit called "Dreaming of Timbuctoo," which is about this story that gave rise to my books. If I hadn't done the curating and research for that exhibit, I never would have had an idea to write a book that consumed a whole lot more time than I ever guessed it might.

And where's that exhibit?

It's at the John Brown Farm in the barn in the upper level of the barn. And there's also the Underground Railroad Museum in Ausable Chasm, which is a terrific place to visit. And I think in a few years, The Adirondack Experience, the great museum of the region will have a dedicated exhibit to Black history in the region and Timbuctoo. And this whole "scheme of justice and benevolence" will have a big part in that exhibit, I'm sure. So there'll be several places at the end of the day where people can go. And right now I know there are a lot of groups organizing visits to the region by city, people who have not gone there before, including a lot of Black groups of families of children of college students. And that's an exciting change. And the Adirondack Museum is very active in that as well.

That's great. All right. Very cool. Are you having some talks out there as well?

Yeah, if you go to my website, which is amygodine.com, there's an events page that lists what's coming up for me.

That sounds great. So I would encourage anyone who is planning on going to the Adirondacks, even if you're not planning on going into the Adirondacks, definitely pick up Amy Godine's new book, The Black Woods: Pursuing Racial Justice on the Adirondack Frontier. It was great talking with you, Amy.

It was fun. Good questions. Thanks.

Thank you. You bet. That was Amy Godine, author of the new book The Black Woods: Pursuing Racial Justice on the Adirondack Frontier. You can purchase Amy's new book in hardcover or as an ebook at our website, cornellpress.cornell.edu and use the promo code 09POD to save 30% off. If you live in the UK, use the discount code CSANNOUNCE and visit the website combinedacademic.co.uk. Thank you for listening to 1869, The Cornell University Press podcast.