University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER XII
NEGRO SETTLEMENTS IN OHIO AND THE NORTHWEST TERRITORY

A few miles west of Xenia, Ohio, is a quiet
little community of which one occasionally
sees the name in the newspapers, but in
regard to which very little is known by the outside
world, even among its immediate neighbours. This is
the Negro town of Wilberforce, which is, however,
not a town in the ordinary sense of the word, but
rather a suburb of Xenia, from which it is distant
an hour's walk and with which it is connected
only by stage.

What distinguishes Wilberforce from other communities
in the North is the fact that it is the home
of what is, so far as I know, the first permanent
Negro institution of learning established for Negroes
and by Negroes in the United States. A few years
ago, I visited this community in order to take part
in the semi-centennial celebration of the founding
of the University there. During my visit I was
especially impressed with the quiet charm of the
surroundings, the comfort and simplicity of the homes I visited, and the
general air of culture and

refinement which pervaded the whole community. I
doubt if there is any Negro community in the
United States in which, in proportion to the population,
there is so large a number of beautiful
and well-conducted homes. Besides that, there
was an air of permanence and stability about this
community which one does not meet elsewhere,
even in the quiet and orderly suburbs that one
frequently finds in the neighbourhood of a good
Negro school. Here, at any rate, it seemed to me,
a certain number of coloured people had found
themselves, had made a permanent settlement
on the soil and were at home.

The history of Wilberforce goes back to a time
before the War. In its origin, this is representative
of a number of other Negro communities that
were established in different parts of Ohio during
that period. Most of these communities have
disappeared and been forgotten, but there are
many coloured people in all parts of the Northern
states who trace their history back to one or another
of these little Negro settlements that were started
partly by fugitive slaves and partly by free coloured
people, who left the South in order to find a home
in the free soil of the Northwest Territory.

The thing that gives a peculiar and interesting
character to many of these ante-bellum Negro
settlements is that they were made by Southern
slave-holders who desired to free their slaves and

were not able to do so under the restrictions that
were imposed upon emancipation in the Southern
States. Many of the coloured people in these
settlements were the natural children of their
master. For example, John M. Langston, the
first coloured man to represent Virginia in the
Congress of the United States, was freed by the terms
of his father's will, in 1834. In his autobiography,
he has given a vivid description of the manner in
which he, in company with the other slaves who
had been freed at his father's death, made a long
journey across the mountains from Louisa County,
Virginia, to Chillicothe, Ohio. Before his election
to Congress from Virginia, Mr. Langston graduated
in 1849 from Oberlin University, had been admitted
to the bar of Ohio in 1854, and elected clerk of
several Ohio townships. He was the first coloured
man in Ohio, it is said, to be elected to any sort
of office by popular vote.

When John Randolph, of Roanoke, Virginia,
died, he gave freedom to all his slaves and provided
that they should be transported to some other
part of the country, "where not less than two thousand
and not more than four thousand acres of land
should be purchased for them." The Randolph
Freedmen went to Ohio with the purpose of settling
in Mercer County, but they were not allowed to
enter upon the land which had been purchased for
them, because the German settlers in that part of

the country did not want them there. The community
was soon after scattered, but descendants
of the Randolph slaves are still living in the neighbourhood
of Piqua and Troy, in Miami County,
Ohio. The most noted of them, as I have learned,
is Goodrich Giles, whose father was a member of
the original immigrants. Mr. Giles now owns four
hundred and twenty-five acres of land just out of
Piqua. He is said to be worth something over
$50,000. Two years ago, a sort of family reunion
of the descendants of the Randolph slaves was
held in Ohio, and, as a result of the gathering, an
organisation was formed among a few of the
descendants for the purpose of investigating their
claims to the land in Mercer County which was
purchased for them under the terms of John
Randolph's will, but of which they never secured
possession.

The little community at Wilberforce grew out
of a similar effort of a number of Southern planters
to secure a foothold in a free state for their former
slaves. In 1856 there was already a considerable
number of the free Negroes settled at what was
then known as Tawawa Springs. In that year
it was decided to establish at this place a school
for these coloured immigrants and refugees. At
the time of the breaking out of the War this school
had nearly one hundred pupils. Many of them
were the coloured children of the white planters

who had been sent North to be educated. With
the breaking out of the Civil War, however, the
support this school received from its Southern
patrons ceased. The institution soon fell into
decay and, in March, 1863, it was sold for a debt
of ten thousand dollars to the African Methodist
Episcopal Church. This was the origin of
Wilberforce.

Of the little colony of Negro refugees who settled
in this neighbourhood before 1861, there still remain
a few families. The memories of others are preserved
in the names of some of their descendants
who occupy farms in the neighbourhood. But
the community has continued to grow. A few
farmers, attracted by the advantages of the University,
have purchased farms in the neighbourhood;
a few former students, who have made a success
elsewhere, have gone back there to make their
home. The rest of the community is made up of the
officers of the school and their families,
together with some four hundred students.

One thing that has given character to this little
town, and made it attractive as a residence for
Negroes, is the number of distinguished men of
the Negro race who have lived and worked there.
Among others whose memories are still preserved
there is Bishop Daniel A. Payne, who was, more
than any one else, responsible for the existence of
the colony. He lived there for many years until

he died in 1892. Bishop Benjamin W. Arnett,
who was a real force in Ohio affairs during his
connection with Wilberforce, lived in this community
for thirty-five years. It is said that he
was the first coloured man in the United States
to represent a constituency where the majority
were white, and the first to be foreman of a jury
where all the other members were white. As
member from Green County to the Ohio Legislature
in 1886 and 1887, he was largely responsible
for the repeal of the remnant of what were known
as the "Black Laws."

Much was said during the anti-slavery agitation
of the efforts of the Southern Church to justify
African slavery. There was, in fact, a very serious
attempt to find justification in the Bible for slavery,
but any one who will study the history of Christianity
in the South and its influence upon slavery cannot
fail to see that, in spite of all that was said by
individual preachers and in spite of all that was
done by church organisations, there was always
a large number of white slave-holders in the South
who felt deep down in their hearts that slavery
was wrong. In his will, written in 1819, John
Randolph says: "I give my slaves their freedom,
to which my conscience tells me they are justly
entitled. It has long been a matter of deepest
regret to me that the circumstances under which
I inherited them and the obstacles thrown in the

way by the laws of the land have prevented me in
emancipating them in my lifetime, which it is my
full intention to do in case I can accomplish it."

These words pretty well express the deepest
sentiment of a great many people who held slaves
before the Civil War, but owing to the obstacles
thrown in the way of emancipation, did not go
so far as John Randolph and actually free their
slaves. I have often thought that the peculiar
interest which former slave-holders have manifested
in their former slaves was due to this feeling that
they had a special responsibility toward these
people whom they had held at one time under
conditions which their consciences could not entirely
justify.

As a matter of fact, the whole character of the
anti-slavery campaign in Ohio differed from the
anti-slavery movements in New York and in New
England from the fact that so large a number of
the people who were engaged in the movement
in Ohio were either themselves men who had
moved into a free territory in order to free their
slaves, or they were the descendants of people who
had been slave-holders.

Benjamin Lundy, the man who first interested
William Lloyd Garrison in the subject of abolition,
was a Southerner who had emigrated from Virginia
to Ohio, and started his first paper, The Genius
of Universal Emancipation, at Mount Pleasant,

Ohio, a little Quaker settlement. James G.
Birney, who, while he lived at Huntsville, Alabama,
was a member of the American Colonisation Society,
finally freed his slaves and moved with them to
Cincinnati, where he became the leader in the antislavery
movement of Ohio. Dr. John Rankin,
the famous pastor of Ripley, Ohio, whose house,
standing on a hill, and visible from the Kentucky
shores, was descended from the Southern abolitionists
of East Tennessee. Among the fugitives who
took refuge in Dr. Rankin's house was the original
of Eliza Harris, the character in "Uncle Tom's
Cabin," who crossed the Ohio River on the drifting
ice with her child, and was sheltered for several
days at this house on the hill.

Another Southerner who became a prominent
abolitionist was the famous Levi Coffin, the Quaker,
representative of a large number of Quakers who
left North Carolina at various times before the
Civil War because they had grown to feel that
slavery was wrong. Levi Coffin was the man who
bore the title of President of the Underground
Railroad, and in his reminiscences he has told
stories of hundreds of fugitives, whom he aided
to escape from bondage. It is said that he aided
no less than two thousand fugitives to make their
way through Ohio to Canada. Quakers coming
from North Carolina settled in an early day near
Steubenville, and in a little town called Smithfield

there still live descendants of the Negro colonists from
North Carolina settled there by Quaker masters.

Not only in Ohio, but in Indiana and in Michigan
there were scattered settlements of free Negroes,
many of whom had been sent thither by the Quakers
of North Carolina. In Hamilton County, Indiana,
a family named Roberts settled on about a thousand
acres of land in Jackson Township. These were
joined, afterward, by other families, until there
was a considerable settlement there, which finally
gained the name of Robert's Settlement. There
was another settlement very much like this, in
Randolph, and still another in Wayne County.

A recent investigator says:

The interesting thing about these settlements
scattered throughout the Northwest Territory is,
as I have suggested, that they represented to a
very large extent the efforts of the Southern people
to bring about the emancipation of their own slaves.
This is particularly true in the case of the Quakers.
Early in the eighteenth century the Quakers
began to consider the question of sinfulness of
holding other members of the human race in the
condition of servitude. As early as 1688, a small
body of German Quakers of Germantown, Pennsylvania,
presented a protest to the Yearly Meeting
against the "buying, selling, and holding of men
in slavery," and in 1696, the Yearly Meeting,
although not yet prepared to take action, sent
out the advice that "the members should discourage
the introduction of slaves and be careful of the
moral and intellectual training of such as they
held in servitude." From 1746 to 1767 the Quaker,
John Woolman, of New Jersey, travelled through
the Middle and Southern states teaching that
"the practice of continuing slavery is not right."
And that "liberty is the natural light of all men
equally."[2]

The minutes of the various Yearly Meetings of
the Quaker societies show a steady progress in
respect to the sentiment in regard to slave-holding,
and in 1776 the Eastern Quarterly Meeting of the

North Carolina Yearly Meeting advised Friends
to manumit their slaves. Friends were prohibited
from importing, buying, or selling slaves, and in
1780 they were prohibited by the Yearly Meeting
from hiring them. In 1818, it is recorded regarding
slaves that "none held them."

But under the laws as they then existed, it was
not without considerable difficulty that Friends,
who desired to emancipate their slaves, were permitted
to do so. In order to evade this law it
became the custom of Friends to confer upon their
slaves practical emancipation, allowing them to
hire themselves out and use for themselves the
money they earned, although their masters still
exercised a nominal control over them. In 1817,
a case came before the court in which William
Dickinson conveyed a slave to the trustees of the
Quaker Society of Contentnea to be held in a kind
of guardianship until he could be manumitted
under the laws of the state. When this case came
before the Supreme Court of North Carolina,
Chief Justice Taylor declared that this practice
of the Quakers was emancipation in everything
but name, and therefore contrary to the law. A
few years later another case occurred in which
Collier Hill left his slaves to four trustees, one
of whom was "Richard Graves of the Methodist
Church," with the injunction to keep the slaves
for such purposes as "they, the trustees, could

judge most for the glory of God, and the good
of the said slaves." The court held that, as it
did not appear that "any personal benefit to the
legatees," was intended, the will "was held to
constitute them trustees for the purpose of
emancipation and that such a purpose was illegal."

It was the difficulties which Southern slave-holders
who wanted to ameliorate the condition of their
slaves encountered when they undertook to assist
their servants to freedom that led the Quakers
and so many other Southern people, to found the
settlements I have referred to in Ohio and elsewhere
in the Northwest Territory.

In the early years of the Colonisation Movement
the Quakers, with other Southern abolitionists, had
supported the Colonisation Society, believing that
that was one method of solving the problem. But,
as experience proved that that was a wholly inadequate
remedy, and as many of the coloured
people did not desire to leave the country in which
they had been born and bred, people who desired
to free their slaves were more and more induced to
send them to the Northwest Territory.

In 1835, the Pennsylvania Young Men's Society,
a Quaker organisation, interested themselves in
promoting the emigration of free coloured people
to Africa. They looked at the matter in a very
practical way and sent out twenty-six Negro colonists,
all of whom were proficient in the trades.

The emigrants were blacksmiths, carpenters, potters,
brickmakers, shoemakers, and tailors. Altogether
one hundred and twenty-six emigrants were sent
out in this way, and these established themselves
at Port Cresson, on the coast of what is now Liberia.
These Negro colonists were, however, to such an
extent under the influence of the Quaker doctrine
that, when they were attacked by the native chiefs,
the head of the colony refused to resort to arms.
The result was that eighteen of the colonists were
killed, the houses were all destroyed and those
who were not killed were obliged to flee for their
lives.[3]

Some time in the early part of the last century
a number of Quakers, who were dissatisfied with
conditions in the Southern states, moved from
North Carolina to Cass County, Michigan. They
brought with them a number of their former slaves.
And these made the nucleus for a settlement of
free Negroes which was constantly recruited by
fugitives from the other side of the Ohio River. In
1847, this Quaker settlement had become so notorious
as a refuge for fugitive slaves that a determined
effort was made on the part of some of the slaveholders
to recapture their runaways. A number
of slave-holders, or their representatives, mounted
and well-armed, crossed the Ohio River in that
year and, riding across the intervening states, made

a bold and determined effort to regain possession
of their property. The effort to recapture the
fugitives was successfully resisted by the Quakers,
coloured people, and the other residents of the
community, and the only result was to advertise
Cass County, Michigan, as a place where Negroes
might live with a reasonable freedom from capture
by their former masters. After the raid a
still larger number of fugitives poured into the
county, the majority of them settling in Calvin
Township.

In 1847, the same year in which the Negro communities
in Cass County were raided, a large slave
holder by the name of Saunders, who lived in
Cabell County, Virginia—now part of West Virginia
—died, and when his will was opened it was
found that he had not only freed all his slaves
but had made a generous provision for the purchase
of a tract of land in some free State to be divided
among these people. The Saunders ex-slaves,
forty-one in number, started northward in 1849
and, after a long journey, attended by many
hardships, they finally reached Calvin Township,
Cass County, Michigan, a few days before
Christmas.

Sometime in the latter part of 1902, or the early
part of 1903, I visited Cass County and had an
opportunity to study, at first hand, the success
which the descendants of these Saunders ex-slaves

and the other fugitives had made in that county. At
this time, I found that Calvin Township contained
a population of 759 Negroes and 512 whites. In
addition to these a large Negro population had
overflowed into the adjoining county of Porter, and
to some extent all but two of the towns in the county.
Among the men I met there at that time was a
farmer by the name of Samuel Hawkes, who, I
was informed, on good authority, was worth something
like $50,000. Another farmer whose name I
recall was William Alien. He was born in Logan
County, Ohio, but his parents were among that
numerous class of free coloured people who moved
from North Carolina to the free soil, in order to
preserve their freedom. When I visited his farm,
I found he had fifty head of cattle, ten horses,
three hundred sheep, and twenty-five hogs. He
had paid taxes during the previous year to the
amount of $ 191.00, on property in the two townships
of Porter and Calvin. He had been a justice
of the peace for eighteen years, but resigned that
office, because, as he said, "it took too much time
away from the farm."

One of the supervisors of Calvin Township
was a farmer by the name of Cornelius Lawson. Of
the eight schools in Calvin, four of them were taught
by coloured teachers. As we drove through the
township, I discovered, posted up beside the road,
a notice of the annual school meeting. It was

signed by C. F. Northrup, director. Mr. Northrup,
as I was informed, is a Negro.

Among other things which attracted my attention
during my visit was the existence in Calvin of the
Grand Army Post, named after Matthew Artis,
who was one of the large number of coloured soldiers
who enlisted from this township during the War.
The commander of the Post at the time of my visit
was Bishop Curtis, who was a member of the 54th
Massachusetts Regiment, took part in the attack on
Fort Wagner and, it is said, was shot with a fragment
of the same shell which killed his commander,
Robert Gould Shaw.

At the present time, Negroes hold the offices
of supervisor, clerk, road commissioner, and school
director in the township of Calvin. There are
two highway commissioners, two justices of the
peace, two constables, two members of the Board
of Review, who are Negroes. None of these men,
I may add, are professional politicians, and none
of them were elected because of their colour. In
fact, as near as I could learn, there is no question
of colour, but merely of fitness for the duties of
offices in the politics of Cass County.

In a recent study of this township, under the
title of "Negro Governments in the North," Richard
R. Wright, Jr., says:

I have stated the facts in regard to this Negro
colony in Cass County at some length because
they illustrate what has gone on in a number of
other similar colonies in Ohio and neighbouring
states. They show, at any rate, the efforts of those
Southern people, who sought to give to their slaves
the advantage of freedom, were not entirely in vain.

The history of these efforts of Southern white
people and the Southern Negroes to lessen, to some
extent, the evils of slavery by emigration to the
free soil of the Northwest Territory, seems to me
one of the most important chapters in the Story
of the Negro. It should not be forgotten in this
connection that Abraham Lincoln was himself born
in the South and that many, if not most of the
leaders of the abolition movement in Ohio and Indiana,
were in full sympathy with that portion of the
Southern people who wanted to do away with
slavery. They represented the heart and conscience
of thousands of others whose voices were drowned
in the factional political strife which grew up as
a result of the anti-slavery agitation.

I feel a peculiar interest in the work of those
men because I believe that the men in the South,
who quietly, earnestly, and unostentatiously are
seeking to better conditions in the South to-day,
are, in a certain sense, the direct descendants of
those Southern anti-slavery people of Ohio and the
Middle West. At any rate, they are following
in the traditions and working in the spirit of these
earlier men.