The Exodusters
In 1870s, after the failed promise of equality and opportunity under Reconstruction had ended, thousands of formerly enslaved Black Americans headed to Kansas and other Western states, hoping to take advantage of the opportunity to own land offered by the Homestead Act of 1862, which gave 160 acres of federal land to anyone who agreed to farm it.. The large-scale migration, which came to be known as “the Great Exodus,” predated the better-known Great Migration from Mississippi to Chicago by a quarter century. The people who participated in it were called “Exodusters.” Between 40,000 and 60,000 Black Americans left the South and migrated westward. Some were part of organized efforts to establish black settlements. Most settled in Kansas.
Why Kansas?
In part, the choice was practical. Getting to Kansas was simpler and less expensive than traveling further west or north, though still daunting .
There was also an emotional element to the choice of Kansas as the New Promised Land. Between 1855 and 1859, “Bleeding Kansas” was the site of violent conflicts in which abolitionists, supporters of slavery and free staters literally fought over whether the state would allow slavery or not. The most well known of these incidents was the raid led by John Brown against pro-slavery settlers on Pottawatomie Creek. In many ways it was a dress rehearsal for the civil war that would follow. The events gave Kansas the aura of holy ground for many Black Americans. As one made from Louisiana wrote in a letter to the governor of Kansas, “I am very anxious to reach your state, not just because of the great race now made for it but because of the sacredness of her soil washed by the blood of humanitarians for the cause of black freedom.”
The migration began in 1873, when Benjamin “Pap” Singleton, calling himself the “Moses of the Colored Exodus,” led the people he called “Exodusters” from Tennessee to found a small African-American town in Cherokee County called “Singleton’s Colony.” The gradual exodus turned into “Kansas Exodus Fever” in 1879, following political changes in Louisiana that threatened to escalate violence against former slaves. By early March, about 1500 “exodusters” had passed through St. Louis to Kansas. Thousands more crowded the wharves on the banks of the Mississippi waiting to get passage on a northbound steamboat. Many arrived in St. Louis with no resources and no idea how they would get across Missouri into Kansas. St Louis clergy and businessmen organized committees to collect food and funds to help them on their way.
Roughly 6,000 Black Americans arrived in Kansas in the spring of 1879, most of them from Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. Other Exodusters made their way to Oklahoma, Colorado, Ohio, Nebraska, the Dakotas, New Mexico, Arizona and Montana . The exodus began to slow down by early summer, but continued through the 1880s. By 1880, the Black population of Kansas had grown to some 43,000..
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An interesting side note: Although much of what we know about the Great Exodus comes from newspaper accounts of the Exodusters on the move—accounts that are laden with the racist language of the period even when sympathetic to the cause of the migrants, we also have first hand testimony from some of the Exodusters themselves in interviews taken as part of a n 1880 Senate investigation into the cause of the migration. These interviews are an earlier counterpart to the better-known Works Progress Administration interviews with formerly enslaved peoples recorded during the Great Depression. In addition to their personal testimony, many of the witnesses brought additional evidence to the stand in the form of letters and affidavits from other community members. Who knew? Not me.
Looking Forward to Juneteenth
Photo credit: Carol M Highsmith. Library of Congress
On June 19, 1865, Union General Gordon Granger read General Order No. 3, which announced the emancipation of enslaved people in Texas, from a balcony in Galveston Texas, or so the story goes. It was two and a half years after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation went into effect and 2 months after the Civil War had ended. Even if the enslaved people of Galveston had already heard the news, without the presence of Union troops to enforce it, the proclamation was largely theoretical at that moment.* I assume I don’t have to tell you that the anniversary of that event is now a federal holiday.
I’ve been thinking about Juneteenth a lot lately. Over the last few years, I’ve come to think of Juneteenth and the Fourth of July as bookends, marking out a space of time to think about the unfinished promise of the American Revolution, a promise we are still struggling to fulfill. More so today than ever.
One of the questions Clint Smith grapples with in the section on Juneteenth in his amazing book, How the Word is Passed, is the perception that Juneteenth is only a “Black thing.” One of the participants in the celebration in Galveston, a white Civil War re-enactor who has played the role of General Granger since 2015, summed up what I believe: “…it’s not ‘a Black thing,’ it’s an American thing. This is the final bit of freedom for all of us. And that’s just so important.”
Back in February, when I was reading my way through Black History month and visiting the George Washington Carver Museum in Austin, Texas , I told myself that we needed to find a Juneteenth celebration to attend—the same way we seek out Memorial Day services.** That didn’t work out. On Juneteenth I’m going to be headed to Minnesota to attend my college reunion. Unless there is a Juneteenth celebration in the Minneapolis airport, I’m going to miss out.
I think it is particularly important to mark that moment today. Since I won’t be attending a Juneteenth celebration in real life,*** I plan to re-read Annetter Gordon-Reed’s equally amazing On Juneteenth on the plane.
If you attend a Juneteenth celebration, I’d love to hear about it.
*It is worth remembering that the Emancipation Proclamation only emancipated enslaved people in the rebelling states. Slavery was not abolished in the United States as a whole until the 13th Amendment was passed in December, 1865. Even then, there was a cross-your-fingers-behind-your back clause that allowed involuntary servitude as a a criminal punishment.
**We attended an excellent one this year in the Chicago suburb of Blue Island. It had a small town feel in all the best ways. Highlights included:
• Two elderly members of the local American Legion post served as the color guard—an interesting change from the more familiar use of Boy Scouts. It may have been an expedient decision, but it added depth from the first moment of the service.
• A roll call of all Blue Island residents who had died in foreign wars since the Spanish American war, read by the American Legion chaplain. Each name was followed by the silvery peal of a small bell. I choked up even though I knew none of them.
• An open invitation at the end of the service to anyone who had lost a soldier in the wars to lay a rose at the foot of the flag pole.
• Taps. Always a part of these services. Always heartbreaking.
But I digress.
***Probably. Though the Minneapolis airport could surprise me.
Laundry Day (Not the Band)
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- 1730
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- 1897
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- 1900
In my last post, I made a casual reference to just how hard it was to do laundry in the mid-nineteenth century, but I didn’t bother to elaborate.* Time to correct that oversight.
Laundry in the mid-nineteenth century was a difficult job, one that most households undertook no more than once a week.**
Washing machines were a relatively new invention, first demonstrated at the 1851 Crystal Palace exhibition in London. They consisted of a ten- or twenty-gallon cylinder on top of a boiler that produced both hot water for the clothes and the steam that drove the engine. The operator would put clothes and soap in the cylinder, which then revolved for five or ten minutes. High-end versions had a second boiler for hot rinse water. The machines were expensive and found only in the wealthiest homes. In 1861 a basic machine cost $50—more than $9,000 today. (Realistically, anyone who could afford to buy a washing machine in 1861 also could afford to hire someone to wash the household linens. Maybe even more than once a week.)
Most people made do with wooden washtubs, large kettles for heating water, and plenty of elbow grease.
The first step, one most of us don’t think of as part of the laundry process today, was mending and patching. Once she finished mending torn clothing and bed linens, the laundress or housewife moved on to stain removal, which was a time-consuming process that could involve applying lemon juice to stains (a relatively expensive choice), exposing stained items to direct sunlight, or soaking them overnight in “blood warm water” (basically the same temperature as a baby’s bottle). Washable clothing (made from fabrics such a cotton and linen as opposed to silk, leather, velvet and some woolens), bed linens and rags were then washed in hot water using soft soap and a washboard,*** boiled to kill lice and insects, rinsed several times in hot water, allowed to cool, and then rinsed again in cool water.**** Wet laundry was hung out to dry on anything that would hold it off the ground: a clothesline if you were lucky enough to have one, bushes, a porch railing. A home laundry guide from 1902 pointed out that even drying clothing had its challenges. You needed a “grassy corner well open to the sun,…sheltered from high winds…the attentions of wandering poultry… and the incursions of pigs, puppies and calves…they not only soil the clothes, but will tear and even eat them.” Once dry, clothing would be ironed using a cast-iron metal iron heated on a stove or run through a mangle, a device made up of two rollers and a crank that used pressure to smooth wrinkles from the fabric.
All this sounds hard enough, but this description masks the layers of physical work involved in the process. Water had to be brought from sources with varying degrees of inconvenience: a stream or pond at some distance from a home, a shared pump in an urban neighborhood, a farmyard well. Once acquired, water was heated in large kettles on wood-or coal-burning stoves—the fuel for which had to be lugged as well— and carried from kitchen to washtub. Commercial soap was not yet widely available outside of major cities. Many families made their own.
From mending to folding, laundry was backbreaking work. There’s a reason why washerwomen are portrayed as physically powerful in popular literature and images of the time.
Makes you appreciate modern laundry equipment doesn’t it?
*In part because I assumed I wrote a blog post about this back in 2015 when I was writing Heroines of Mercy Street, a book about Civil War nurses in which laundry played a surprisingly large part.
**My description draws on research in the United States. The details may have differed in Europe but the big picture would have remained the same.
***I paused here to do a little dive into the question of washboards, which seem to have appeared in the early nineteenth century and were greeted as a serious technological improvement
****Though I’m willing to bet that some harried women skipped a few rinses on occasion.