African American westward migration patterns and history

African-Americans and Western Expansion

Prior to the 1960s and 1970s, very little was written about black participation in Western expansion from the colonial period to the 19th Century, much less about black and Native American cooperation against slavery. This history was not so much forbidden or censored as never written at all, or simply ignored when it was written. In reality, blacks participated in all facets of Western expansion, from the fur trade and cattle ranching to mining and agriculture. There were black cowboys and black participants in the Indian Wars -- on both sides, in fact. Indeed, the argument over slavery in the Western territories was one of the key factors in breaking up the Union in the 1850s and leading to the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. In the past thirty years, much of the previously unwritten and unrecorded history of the Americas since 1492 has been given serious academic treatment for the first time, so much so that neoconservative historians [footnoteRef:1]like Alan J. Levine argued that the process had gone too far in the other direction, and that while racism was "generally accepted in the Western world in 1900" this was no longer the case today. Therefore, social and cultural historians had been putting too much emphasis on "race-structured" narratives and theories, not realizing that "there is nothing unique, or especially bad, in the record of modern Western expansion."[footnoteRef:2] Perhaps the racially-motivated acts of genocide and slavery were not much different in effect than similar actions in other parts of the world motivated by religious, linguistic, ethnic or even political differences, but given that the lives of those blacks who participated in Westward expansion hardly seemed to exist in the historical record for thirty years, it will very likely require more than thirty years to correct the former imbalance. [1: Alan J. Levine, Race Relations within Western Expansion (Westport, CT: Greenfield Press, 1996), p. 1.] [2: Levine, p. 5.]

Black slaves and free persons took part in the expansion of the United States to the West from the very beginning of the colonial period, although they were literally written out of history by Frederick Jackson Turner and other scholars until fairly recent times. In traditional frontier history as well as popular culture, the West has been "lily white." Although popular culture has always been saturated with Western motifs, images and myths, from the Marlboro Man to Roy Rogers, John Wayne, Levi's jeans and Smith & Wesson revolvers, for most of U.S. history, blacks were simply written out of the narrative.[footnoteRef:3] Even so, blacks lived on the frontiers "as scouts and pathfinders, slave runaways and fur trappers, missionaries and soldiers, schoolmarms and entrepreneurs, lawmen and members of Native American nations."[footnoteRef:4] Crispus Attucks, the first man shot in the 1770 Boston Massacre, was a black Natick Indian, for example, although this was largely unknown to most whites until recent times.[footnoteRef:5] Contemporary historians estimate that 20-25% of cowboys in the Texas cattle industry in the 19th Century were black, while the "cotton kingdom" areas of Louisiana, Arkansas and east Texas could never have been developed without black slaves.[footnoteRef:6] Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, a famous fur trapper, was born in Haiti of a white father and African mother, educated in France, and founded the first permanent settlement in what later became Chicago in 1779.[footnoteRef:7] On the Lewis and Clark expedition, William Clark's slave and childhood friend York accompanies the famous explorer, and was of great help in negotiating with the Native Americans they encountered along the way.[footnoteRef:8] [3: Sara E. Quay, Westward Expansion (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), p. xiv.] [4: William Loren Katz, The Black West: A Documentary and Pictorial History of the African-American Role in the Westward Experience of the United States. (NY: Random House, Inc., 2005), p. xiii.] [5: William Loren Katz, Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage (NY: Simon & Schuster, 1986), p. 10.] [6: W. Sherman Savage, Blacks in the West (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976), p. 2.] [7: Katz, 2005, p. 32.] [8: Katz, 2005, p. 34.]

James Beckwourth fought against the Seminoles in Florida and then became an early pioneer in Nevada and California, where he was involved in the rebellions against Mexican rule. He was acquainted with famous military figures like the explorer James Fremont and William T. Sherman. He was later one of the leaders of the Crow Indians on the Great Plains, and settled in Denver, Colorado in 1859, when the city was still new. In 1864, Beckwourth was forced at gunpoint to take part in the Sand Creek massacre of Cheyenne Indians, but testified before Congress against Col. James Chivington, the commander of the Colorado Volunteers who ordered the slaughter. When he died in 1868, he was buried among the Crow Indians.[footnoteRef:9] [9: Katz, 2005, p. 37.]

From the earliest times in the 16th and 17th Centuries, black slaves and Native Americans cooperated in fomenting rebellions against white rule and in running away and forming maroon communities in Georgia, Florida and Louisiana. Blacks often settled and intermarried with Indians, and even though Native Americans signed treaties to return all runaway slaves, they almost never did.[footnoteRef:10] In the western hemisphere, the first slave rebellion occurred in 1522 on sugar plantations owned by Governor Diego Columbus in Santo Domingo, and "nearby native Americans joined the rebels."[footnoteRef:11] Frederick Doulgass, the great 19th Century abolitionist and civil rights leader, was of "mixed African, Indian, and white ancestry.[footnoteRef:12] So was Wildfire (Edmonia Lewis) whose father was a slave and mother a Chippewa Indian, and later went on the become a famous sculptress in the United States.[footnoteRef:13] Florida was a "perpetual harbor for our slaves," as Andrew Jackson put it in 1819, and had been since the 16th Century. Throughout the early-19th Century into the 1840s, the U.S. government fought wars against the Seminoles, who were the last Native American nation removed from the East to the Indian Territory -- or Oklahoma as it became known after 1907. Black slaves and their descendants were an integral part of the Seminole communities in Florida and Oklahoma, and "the Seminole alliance mounted the strongest maroon insurgency, and the most resolute armed resistance to human bondage in the United States."[footnoteRef:14] [10: Katz, 2005, p. 9.] [11: Katz, 1986, p. 33.] [12: Katz, 1986, p. 11.] [13: Katz, 2005, p. 11.] [14: Katz, 2005, p. 20.]

Charles Beard and his generation of historians thought that antislavery was almost irrelevant to the Civil War, which they regarded primarily as a struggle between North capitalists and Southern aristocrats. Since the 1960s and 1970s, however, this earlier understanding about the causes of the most destructive war in U.S. history has been modified greatly, with the conflict over the expansion of slavery into the Western territories in the 1850s again taking center stage. Blacks were only a tiny proportion of the Western population in 1860, numbering about 33,000, although this rose to 72,000 by 1880 due to post-Civil War migrations.[footnoteRef:15] Blacks who settled in the West even though they were often denied voting and citizenship rights, and were also excluded completely from states like Iowa, Illinois and Oregon. In most areas before the Civil War, they were not allowed to attend the public schools, petition the state legislatures, serve on juries, testify in court or run for public office. Even though whites generally shared the Free Soil views of the Republican Party in the West, "white Westerners vaunted antislavery views often stemmed not from idealism, but from racial hatred of black people, free and slave."[footnoteRef:16] [15: Savage, p. 4.] [16: Katz, 2005, p. 47.]

Eric Foner found that the 1850s were one of the most intensely ideological decades in U.S. history, and that the "two decades before the Civil War witnessed the development of conflicting sectional ideologies," each of which regarded the other as a threat to its future control over the West.[footnoteRef:17] For Republican politicians like Abraham Lincoln, Charles Sumner and William Seward, the aristocratic South was a Slave Power whose rulers intended to dominate the entire continent, sweeping aside the institutions of free labor and free market capitalism. They regarded the North as a democracy and "a dynamic, expanding capitalist society" in which free labor was the basis of all wealth and where ordinary white men had opportunities for advancement and upward mobility.[footnoteRef:18] All of this would be lost for both whites and blacks if the Southern planters succeeded in their plans to make slavery a national institution, while the Southern leaders were certain that if the North ended up dominating the new Western territories the balance of power would shift against them forever and slavery would be doomed to eventual extinction. [17: Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (Oxford University Press, 1970, 1995), p. 9.] [18: Eric Foner, p. 11.]

By the time the Compromise of 1850 was adopted, the South had already lost control of the House of Representatives due to the North's rapid increase in population, and with the admission of California as a free state, it lost the even sectional balance in the Senate as well. This was why it was prepared to secede in 1850, had Congress adopted the Proviso of David Wilmot banning slavery in all the territories annexed from Mexico in the recent war. In 1848, a new Free Soil Party organized to oppose any further expansion of slavery in the West had garnered enough support to cost the Democrats the election in the North, and many Free Soil supporters later joined the Republican Party after 1854. Henry Clay's Compromise held the Union together for another ten years by allowing the decision about slavery in Utah, New Mexico, Nevada and the other remaining territories in the Mexican Cession to be left to the "popular sovereignty" of the settlers, but in reality slavery never became significant in any of these regions of the Far West.[footnoteRef:19] In this Compromise, the Southern leaders believed they had gained little except a Fugitive Slave Law that many Northern states became increasingly unwilling to enforce as the decade wore on, due to popular opposition. [19: Philip S. Foner, History of Black Americans (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983), p. 3.]

Senator Stephen A. Douglas, who would be Lincoln's main opponent in the 1860 presidential election, was responsible for opening the next great debate in the issue of slavery in the Western territories when his Kansas-Nebraska Act left the decision about slavery in these new territories to popular sovereignty. This law repealed the 1820 Missouri Compromise, which had banned slavery in the northern regions of the Louisiana Purchase. He did this not so much because he was part of a Slave Power conspiracy as Lincoln and other Republicans charged, but in order to obtain Southern support for a transcontinental railroad that would link Chicago with San Francisco. Southerners had informed him very clearly that "they would not support any bill…that banned slavery from the territory," but shortly after Douglas had forced the Kansas-Nebraska Act through Congress, mass outrage led to the formation of a new Republican Party that opposed any further expansion of slavery.[footnoteRef:20] [20: Philip Foner, p. 190.]

At no time before the Civil War did the Republicans call openly for abolition of slavery where it already existed, and this remained Abraham Lincoln's stated position until he issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862. To be sure, millions of abolitionists supported the Republicans, although by no means all Republicans were abolitionists. Although Northern free blacks like Frederick Douglass were opposed to any compromise with slavery or to its continued existence anywhere in the world, they backed the Republicans on the grounds that the party was at least attempting to achieve some of their goals. They also noted that when Congress passed a Homestead Act in 1854 whose provisions excluded blacks completely most members who became Republicans in the future had opposed this.[footnoteRef:21] In his famous debates with Stephen Douglas in 1858, Lincoln merely expressed the hope that slavery would be gradually extinguished or abolished in the years ahead, and argued that the Founders of the United States in the 1770s and 1780s had had the same goal. Nor did he advocate giving blacks equal citizenship and voting rights, although in the right to work and keep the products of their labor he held that they were equal to whites. Douglas and other Democrats who remained in the party were far more openly racist and proslavery in their views. For Lincoln, however, slavery was a moral issue that could not simply be decided by an "up or down" vote as Douglas proposed.[footnoteRef:22] [21: Philip Foner, p. 199.] [22: Philip Foner, p. 217.]

As soon as the Kansas-Nebraska bill passed, Southerners immediately attempted to introduce slavery into the new territory, while Northerners organized free soil settlers to oppose them. Essentially, the Civil War began in Kansas in 1854-55, with pro- and antislavery settlers engaged in violent confrontations. John Brown, the fiery abolitionist from Ohio, got his start here by fighting regular gun battles against proslavery settlers and occasionally massacring them. Later, his attempt to take over the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia in 1859 and arm the slaves for a mass rebellion across the South would be one of the final straws that split the Union. Even though Republican leaders like Lincoln regarded Brown as an extremist, Southerners could not help noticing that he was considered a hero and martyr in many parts of the North. Meanwhile, Kansas had two constitutions and two territorial capitals, and applied for admission as both a free and a slave state. This made a mockery of the Douglas idea of popular sovereignty, especially since the majority of settlers preferred that it be admitted as a free state. To this the South would never agree, though, so Kansas was not finally admitted as a free state until 1861, when most of the Southern states had seceded and their Senators and Representatives had left Washington. The next year, Congress abolished slavery everywhere in the Western territories without compensation to the few slave owners in that region.[footnoteRef:23] [23: Philip Foner, p. 192.]

In the midst of intense public debate over the Kansas-Nebraska Act that nearly demolished the Democratic Party in the North, the Supreme Court weighed in, ruling in the 1857 Dred Scott case that Congress had no power to ban slavery anywhere in the Western territories. It went even further in declaring that blacks could not be citizens of the United States or sue in federal courts, and that they were not even human beings but only a kind of movable property. Since the Constitution declared that every (white) person had a right to property, then Southerners had the right to take their property with them wherever they traveled or settled. Dred Scott had been a slave of an army physician named Dr. John Emerson, who had taken him to Illinois and to other Western territories where slavery was not allowed under the provisions of the Missouri Compromise. Later, Scott had been returned to Missouri where he was still the property of Emerson's widow. After attempting to buy freedom for himself and his family, he then sued in state court and won at the trial level, but not at the Missouri Supreme Court.[footnoteRef:24] According to federal court precedents, the state courts had the final right to determine the status of a slave who had been in free territory but was then returned to a slave state, but in this matter, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney was determined to issue a ruling invalidating the Missouri Compromise and upholding the idea that slavery was a national institution. President James Buchanan, a pro-Southern Democrat, also urged Taney to do this from behind the scenes, believing it would lead to the admission of Kansas as a slave state.[footnoteRef:25] [24: Philip Foner, p. 215.] [25: Philip Foner, p. 217.]

Seward, Lincoln and other Republicans leaders changed that Taney, Buchanan and Douglas were part of a Slave Power conspiracy that threatened free labor and free institutions in the United States. They may not have had all the details, but they suspected that Buchanan had secret communications with Taney and other Supreme Court justices to declare that "Congress had no power to prohibit slavery in any territory."[footnoteRef:26] This was proven to be true many decades later when correspondence with Taney and other justices was discovered in the papers of Buchanan, although many historians up to that time had denied the reality of such a conspiracy. For the Republicans, only one more such decision was necessary and then the Northern states would be required to allow slavery within their borders as well, and in reality, many Southern leaders did intend to expand slavery everywhere that it had been banned or did not yet exist, while after 1857, Northern factory owners began threatening white workers on strike that they would be replaced with slave labor. After all, in the South, factory owners already used slave labor on a regular basis by the 1860s.[footnoteRef:27] To be sure, many Republicans were racists and their main concern was never to free the black slaves, much less grant them equality, but rather "to protect the Western states and territories from incursions of blacks, free or slave."[footnoteRef:28] By portraying the Slave Power conspiracy as a threat to white labor and small farmers, Lincoln and the Republicans carried almost all of the North in the election of 1860, while the Deep South quickly seceded afterwards. Although the resulting Civil War and Reconstruction era did lead to the abolition of slavery and the grant of citizenship and voting rights to blacks, these had never been deeply-held commitments for the majority of whites in the North and West at that time. [26: Philip Foner, p. 219.] [27: Philip Foner, p. 223.] [28: Philip Foner, p. 206.]