Discovering Black Vermont: African American Farmers in Hinesburgh, 1790–1890

4 | Prelude to War, 1850–1860

o chapter four Prelude to War, 1850–1860 Let men so interested . . . lend their influence in favor of giving us “liberty and equal rights” in the land of our birth. —Loudon S. Langley, letter to the editor of the Green Mountain Freeman, 1854 None but an American slaveholder could have discovered that a man born in a country was not a citizen of it. —William Cooper Nell, The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution From statehood to 1850, Vermonters had experienced political, geographical , religious and socioeconomic transformation. The old-growth forest had almost completely disappeared, and larger dairy farms were replacing mixed agricultural plots as milk products became important to the state’s economy. Sizeable Greek revival homes graced the streets of larger towns, and sprawling farmhouses began to replace earlier modest settler cabins. Political parties had come and gone, religious revivals had burned over the state, and textile mills and factories dotted the landscape . Trains now chugged along new tracks from Boston to Burlington and telegraph wires would soon arrive. Despite advancements in agriculture and industry, by mid-century Vermont was the slowest-growing state in the union. Many people took the advice of former Vermonter Horace Greeley in an 1851 New York Tribune article to “Go West!” A section of Rutland was nicknamed “Little Nebraska,” because so many people left that neighborhood for the Nebraska Territory. Not only were people migrating to the wideopen spaces of the west, but sheep were too. The U.S. government had lifted its protective tariff on sheep in 1846, and the price of wool Prelude to War o 89 plunged, causing merino farmers to slaughter their herds and sell the meat or sell living rams to western farmers. Those who could afford the shift to dairy did so, but they needed capital to expand their farms, since cows needed considerably more grazing acreage than sheep to be profitable . Wealthier farmers bought out those who went broke during the slump in the merino market. With an increase in landless people due to failing farms and the economy moving toward depression in 1857, two out of every five people born in the state risked migration to the west or to larger cities of the north to find jobs in industry.¹ At the same time, millions of immigrants were taking perilous trips across the ocean, many in steerage, with the Americas as their destination . By 1850, Vermont’s population included 11 percent who had been born in foreign countries, the largest groups from Ireland and French Canada. Many women and blacks lost their industrial or labor jobs, as Yankee employers preferred to hire from the widening pool of white, male laborers. “The housing patterns for black Vermonters indicated they had been steadily rejecting roles as live-in domestics and laborers in white households, but again returned to those roles in mid-century as immigration numbers swelled. Presumably, in the increasing competition among Irish, French, and Africans, the latter lost.”² This was not unique to Vermont. Frederick Douglass lamented, “Every hour sees the black man elbowed out of employment by some newly arrived immigrant whose hunger and whose color are thought to give him better title.”³ Because of the passionate abolitionist activity in the North, activist Martin Delany had hoped that white antislavery men would raise blacks from their menial positions by hiring them into their businesses. The only way to elevation, claimed Delany, who had been ousted from Harvard because of complaints about his color, was through the hiring practices of white antislavery men. “There was no other ostensible object [of antislavery] in view. . . . But in all this we were doomed to disappointment, sad, sad disappointment.”4 William Wells Brown, born enslaved in Kentucky in 1815 and considered the first African American playwright, took Americans to task because they welcomed millions of Europeans to their shores and into their businesses but kept native-born men and women in chains: If [Americans] would inspire the hearts of the struggling millions in Europe, they should not allow one human being to wear chains upon their own soil. If they would welcome the martyrs for freedom from the banks 90 o Discovering Black Vermont of the Danube, the Tiber and the Seine, let them liberate their own slaves on the banks of the Mississippi and the Potomac. If they would welcome the Hungarian flying from the bloody talons of the Austrian eagle, they must wrest...