"Long before the Great Migration of the twentieth century, there had been another Great Migration that spanned the first half of the nineteenth century. This was a migration, in wagon trains and on foot, of tens of thousands of African American pioneers who became some of the earliest settlers of the Great West. Most of these pioneers had not come to cities; instead, they had flung themselves at the wildest edges of the frontier. Highly visible, assertive, and brave , they scattered themselves across the land in hundreds of farming settlements.
"But the full scope of these pioneers accomplishments has been lost, for even the best historians have assumed that there were very few successful African American farming settlements across the Northwest Territory ["Most of this region would become the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois , Michigan and Wisconsin."] before the Civil War.
"Of course historians have long known that by 1860 the federal census counted over 63,000 African Americans as living in the five Northwest Territory states. And as Steve Vincent pointed out in his important work on African American farmers in antebellum Indiana, 73% of those counted in 1860 were living in a rural setting.
"To put this number in context, the Northwest Ordinance, completed in 1787, stipulated that an area could become a state if it had 60,000 non-Native American settlers. This meant that by 1860, more than a state's worth of African -descended people were living in the Great West. Much has been written about the move of African Americans to the African colony of Liberia, starting the nineteenth century; yet by the early twentieth century descendants of those American immigrants only numbered around 15,000."
P. 1, 3, "Introduction ," THE BONE AND SINEW OF THE LAND (2018) by Anna-Lisa Cox
Friday, July 6, 2018
BONE AND SINEW
"Long before the Great Migration of the twentieth century, there had been another Great Migration that spanned the first half of the nineteenth century. This was a migration, in wagon trains and on foot, of tens of thousands of African American pioneers who became some of the earliest settlers of the Great West. Most of these pioneers had not come to cities; instead, they had flung themselves at the wildest edges of the frontier. Highly visible, assertive, and brave , they scattered themselves across the land in hundreds of farming settlements.
"But the full scope of these pioneers accomplishments has been lost, for even the best historians have assumed that there were very few successful African American farming settlements across the Northwest Territory ["Most of this region would become the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois , Michigan and Wisconsin."] before the Civil War.
"Of course historians have long known that by 1860 the federal census counted over 63,000 African Americans as living in the five Northwest Territory states. And as Steve Vincent pointed out in his important work on African American farmers in antebellum Indiana, 73% of those counted in 1860 were living in a rural setting.
"To put this number in context, the Northwest Ordinance, completed in 1787, stipulated that an area could become a state if it had 60,000 non-Native American settlers. This meant that by 1860, more than a state's worth of African -descended people were living in the Great West. Much has been written about the move of African Americans to the African colony of Liberia, starting the nineteenth century; yet by the early twentieth century descendants of those American immigrants only numbered around 15,000."
P. 1, 3, "Introduction ," THE BONE AND SINEW OF THE LAND (2018) by Anna-Lisa Cox