Emancipation's Diaspora: Race and Reconstruction in the Upper Midwest (review)

Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin rarely spring to mind as centers of nineteenth-century African American history. With their overwhelmingly white populations and distance from the slaveholding South, these states seem far removed from the drama of slave emancipation and struggles over civil rights. Yet, as Leslie Schwalm demonstrates, the upper Midwest was significantly affected by slavery and its aftermath, and in the wake of the Civil War, African American men and women created vibrant cultural and political institutions there. This book's regional focus and its attention to gender and women's experiences make it a crucial contribution to an ongoing reevaluation of black history, racial politics, and sectional identity in the nineteenth-century North.

Emancipation's Diaspora begins with an exploration of the antebellum history of race and slavery in the region. From the earliest days of white settlement, Schwalm argues, white midwesterners understood their own citizenship in relation to what they saw as the degraded status of Native Americans and people of African descent. Race-based slavery and indentured servitude were familiar features of life in the upper Midwest, setting the stage for the chilly reception of African American migrants during the Civil War.

Amid the disruptions of war, the small trickle of black migrants into the region became a rushing stream. In riveting chapters on the war years, Schwalm deftly uses archival and published military records to explain how slaves made their way north as Union armies advanced into the South. The regional specificity of the upper Midwest is clearest in these chapters, as Schwalm shows how the Mississippi River became a highway for escaping slaves and for the military men who often facilitated their travel north. Emerging from camps in places like Helena, Arkansas, and Cairo, Illinois, escapees found their way to towns such as Keokuk, Iowa, and points farther north.

The men and women of "emancipation's diaspora" comprised a tiny racial minority in a society saturated by negative stereotypes about non-white people. Their dignity insulted at every turn, black migrants were relegated to low-paying and unstable jobs and found it exceedingly difficult to acquire land of their own. Yet, just as African Americans of the South and border states avidly built institutions and constituted communities after slavery, so too did their peers in the upper Midwest, who forged family ties, cultivated churches and Masonic societies, and demanded the rights and privileges of citizenship. With special concentration on Iowa, Emancipation's Diaspora follows the region's African Americans as they sought access to public schools, the vote, and other perquisites of citizenship. Its final chapter draws on a rich array of sources to show how black midwesterners refused to allow the crime of slavery to be erased by a mainstream culture increasingly invested in "forgetting" the roots of Jim Crow.

In addition to revealing the impact of emancipation on the upper Midwest, this book is particularly valuable for its attention to gender and the experiences of women. The author of an award-winning book on South Carolina freedwomen, Schwalm extracts information about black women's experiences and perspectives from census data, veterans' pension files, church records, and newspapers. Among the many areas where this effort proves fruitful is in her discussion of intriguing shifts in black women's activism between the 1860s and the turn of the twentieth century. Until the mid-1880s, women focused on building and sustaining church communities and secular societies such as women's auxiliaries to Masonic associations. They also demanded equal access to public accommodations and (often with children) public schools. Yet, Schwalm argues, faced with setbacks such as the Supreme Court's 1883 Civil Rights Cases decision, black women turned to new strategies. In the 1880s and the 1890s, they collaborated with white women in the woman suffrage movement, played unprecedented public roles in a burgeoning nonpartisan black political movement, and poured great energy into club activities...