Southern Seed, Northern Soil: African-American Farm Communities in the Midwest, 1765-1900

Abstract

Southern Seed, Northern Soil: African-American Farm Communities in the Midwest, 1765-1900. By Stephen A. Vincent. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Pp. xvii, 244. Illustrations, maps. $35.00.) Stephen A. Vincent has helped to close the gap in the historiography of African-American migration to the Midwest. His new book, Southern Seed, Northern Soil, describes in great detail, the migration of African-American farm families from Northampton, Greensville, and Halifax counties, North Carolina to Indiana. Vincent's work focuses upon the Beech and Roberts families, whose free status and land ownership can be traced back to the late eighteenth century. Although both families were able to amass a substantial amount of property, circumstance and the quality of life began to change drastically for many free blacks in early nineteenth-century North Carolina. As rebellion swept across Santo Domingo, heightened levels of fear and insecurity initiated the tightening of slave codes in the South. The rigidity of the atmosphere in nineteenth-century North Carolina simultaneously restricted the rights and privileges of free blacks. With a scarcity of open land to purchase, the future of black farmers in North Carolina did not look promising. By the end of the first few decades of the nineteenth century, the Denmark Vesey conspiracy and the Nat Turner rebellion prompted the intensely hostile treatment of free blacks, which in turn made migration to the Midwest much more attractive. By the 1840s, the Beech settlement in Ripley township and the Roberts settlement in Jackson and Adams townships began to function as selfsufficient and semi-autonomous free black communities. In close proximity to Quaker settlers, both settlements were able to purchase a substantial amount of land and eventually to build their own churches, schools, and mutual aid organizations. However, the decades following the Civil War proved to be extremely difficult for the African-American settlers. High land prices, industrialization, and technology virtually destroyed the Beech and Roberts settlements, facilitating black migration to urban cities such as Cincinnati and Chicago. Vincent's meticulous account of these settlers provides the reader with a clear idea of difficulties of life on the frontier. Helpful maps and charts, along with a sharp depiction of agrarian life on the frontier, add clarity to the Roberts-Beech journey from North Carolina to Indiana. At times, however, the narrative is a bit redundant, in particular as it recounts the relationship between Quaker and African-American communities in Indiana. …