ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: on the EDGE of FREEDOM: FREE
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ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: ON THE EDGE OF FREEDOM: FREE BLACK COMMUNITIES, ARCHAEOLOGY, AND THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD Cheryl Janifer LaRoche, Ph. D., 2004 Dissertation Directed By: Professor Paul A. Shackel, Department of Anthropology “On the Edge of Freedom” is an interdisciplinary study of five free black communities that functioned as Underground Railroad sites along the southern borders of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Small rural free black communities along the borders of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers were situated in the landscape to offer sanctuary to runaways as first points of entry within often violent and racially hostile southern regions of the northern border states. I worked with National Forest Service archaeologists, universities, and private non-profit preservation groups. By combining archaeology, with oral and documentary history, genealogy, and cultural landscape studies, I contribute new comparative and theoretical models for explicating African-American history, and identifying and mapping undocumented Underground Railroad sites. The resulting geography of resistance reveals the risks African Americans endured in the cause of their own liberation. Blacks who participated in the subversive work of the Underground Railroad knew the level of violence to which whites would resort in response to black defiance in the face of oppression. Interrelated families played a central role in the establishment of the frontier settlements. Exclusive and independent of white abolitionist activities, virtually every nineteenth-century black settlement, urban or rural, offered some form of assistance to those escaping slavery. African-American, as well as white, Underground Railroad workers were loosely organized to offer assistance within their separate religious denominations although they worked across racial lines. For four out of the five sites, I demonstrate the relationship between the independent black church and the Underground Railroad. Methodist minister and fourth bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, William Paul Quinn, who was instrumental in the spread of Methodism to the northwest, established two churches associated with Underground Railroad sites in this study. Maps, in conjunction with archaeological techniques, are crucial to the identification and recovery of these enclaves. By mapping free black settlements, and black churches, new Underground Railroad routes emerge from the shadows of larger, nearby, better-known Quaker and abolitionist sites. Mapping little known African American Underground Railroad routes has implications for African American preservation initiatives and heritage tourism. ON THE EDGE OF FREEDOM: FREE BLACK COMMUNITIES, ARCHAEOLOGY, AND THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD By Cheryl Janifer LaRoche Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2004 Advisory Committee: Professor Paul A. Shackel, Chair Distinguished Professor Ira Berlin Professor A. Lynn Bolles Associate Professor Elsa Barkley Brown Professor John Caughey Associate Professor Mary Sies © Copyright by Cheryl Janifer LaRoche 2004 PREFACE “History became legend and legend became myth.” Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring At best, informal interviews reveal the Underground Railroad as poorly understood beyond the network of scholars, African-American studies students, and experts working in the field. Harvard graduates appear no more knowledgeable than high school students, blacks no more than whites. For more than a century and a half, a mythic story of kindly Quaker Friends1 helping brave yet frightened fugitive slaves dominated America’s retelling of this historic episode. Harriet Tubman, perhaps the country’s best known and least understood historic figure, is most closely and consistently identified with the movement.2 On the Edge of Freedom reinterprets romanticized representations of the Underground Railroad. The image of the solitary man, escaping slavery on foot, aided by white abolitionists working within a loosely organized network, gives way to nuanced understandings of the elastic, reticulated network of routes, and methods of subterfuge employed by African Americans and their accomplices required to sustain the Underground Railroad movement. Project Overview In this study, I examine the relationship between pre-Civil War northern free black communities and the Underground Railroad. I combine historical, ii archaeological, and cultural landscape methods, to provide a comparative analysis and a geographically informed understanding of Underground Railroad activities, settlement patterns, land use, and self-determination strategies employed by African Americans who lived in five rural communities: Rocky Fork, New Philadelphia and Miller Grove in Illinois, Lick Creek, Indiana, and Poke Patch, Ohio. In addition to placing the sites in historical context, I incorporate recent histories by presenting contemporary interpretations and preservation initiatives. Heritage tourism occupies an influential position within the field. As public, institutions, and the Nation seek less confrontational venues for discussions of race, interpretation of the Underground Railroad as an interracial, interdenominational effort among nineteenth-century Americans becomes a vehicle through which contemporary racial harmony can be imagined. For the sites in this study, renewed interest in African American history as a cultural, historical, and tourist commodity, also drives preservation efforts, reflecting the partnership between history and archaeology, and heritage tourism. Through preservation of the landscape, the recently formed Rocky Fork Historic District Project in Alton, Illinois seeks to preserve the history of pristine park-line Rocky Fork and thwart encroaching development that would erase fleeting traces of Underground Railroad history. Local historians, private preservation groups, researchers and archaeologists representing the University of Maryland, College Park, the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, the Illinois State Museum, and the New Philadelphia Association are partnering to study New Philadelphia in Pike County, IL. National Forest Service (NFS) archaeologists conduct ongoing archaeological initiatives and iii educational programs at the remaining sites. Through the NFS Passport in Time program, the public is learning about the Underground Railroad, archaeology, black history, and preservation associated with sites within Forest Service jurisdictions. With the exception of New Philadelphia, the archaeological sites are situated in the southern portions of Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, along the Ohio River. New Philadelphia in Pike County was situated near the west central Illinois border, 13 miles north east of the Mississippi River. Autonomous, strategic communal activism among the rural free black population in the North remains poorly understood. Running away constituted the most direct means of confronting and challenging slavery.3 Key questions in Underground Railroad research center on the role of free blacks in effecting their own freedom and the freedom of their enslaved brethren, although some families had been freed for generations. Dozens of flourishing black farming communities were founded in Ohio and Indiana, for example, between 1808 and the Civil War.4 Free blacks, some of who had escaped slavery, exhibited a deep commitment to the project of self- determination. The little communities that existed in the rural mid-western and northern states in the antebellum period represent a unique stratum of African- American history beyond traditional themes of southern plantation slavery, and life in northeastern cities. Rural communal lifeways of this population stand as a discourse on freedom and self-determination as well as interracial cooperation, often within a surrounding environment of violent racial hostility. Free blacks understood the consequences of both enslavement and freedom and willing took extraordinary risks iv to help family members still held in bondage and to relieve the plight of the enslaved whenever and wherever possible.5 I use Rocky Fork, Miller Grove, New Philadelphia, Lick Creek and Poke Patch to support the assertion that small rural free black communities along the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers were situated in the landscape to offer sanctuary and function as firsts line of defense along hostile and violent southern regions of Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio.6 I impose an interdisciplinary structure that adds spatial dimension to historical analysis and incorporates the role of the landscape in Underground Railroad activities. At the inception of the study, establishing a strong relationship between the Underground Railroad and free black border communities along the Ohio River in represented my primary research goal. The research expanded, however, as issues related to race, emancipation, political action, denominational religion, moral authority, legal status, migration, racial uplift, and liberty associated with these small settlements paralleled the larger collective realities of black life in the nineteenth century. Through collective and individual action, free blacks risked their freedom in a country often violently opposed to their decisions to work toward emancipation through the Underground Railroad. Preface Endnotes 1 As a point of clarification, Friends, when capitalized refers to a member of the Quaker sect