The Exodus to Freedom

"When I landed on the soil, I looked on the ground and I says this is free ground. Then I looked on the heavens, and I says them is free and beautiful heavens. Then I looked within my heart, and I says to myself I wonder why I never was free before?"
John Solomon Lewis, on his arrival in Kansas

After the Civil War, the post-war political process of "Reconstruction" began social, but not economic reforms in the South. By the 1870s, fourteen years after emancipation, African Americans in the South faced a bleak future. The process some white southerners called "Redemption" began when the Federal Government withdrew their military forces from the South in 1877.

Friction began in earnest between African Americans and whites in the South after the withdrawal of Federal troops. African Americans were no longer slaves, and refused to act the part, despite the fact that this was what many of the landholders of the South wanted. But African Americans would no longer submit to the whims of whites, or to beatings and other degradations.

The 1865 Freedman's Bureau Act recognized the need of free blacks for land ownership. However, the Southern legislatures during the "Redemption" period passed laws forbidding black land ownership. As a result of white oppression, blacks formed self-help groups. Whites, who feared a possible insurrection and "payback" for years of slavery, formed hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, making already bad conditions even worse for black southerners.

Some began to feel that true freedom could be gained only through emigration out of the South. The exodus had no leader, no Moses who urged them to emigrate westward. There were two men however who were important to the general emigration of blacks westward from the Louisiana and Tennessee regions. They were Henry Adams and Pap Singleton.

Adams was born a slave, served in the Civil War, and organized a committee to improve conditions for blacks in the post-war South. In a meeting in New Orleans in 1875, several suggested a general black migration to the new territories, or to Liberia in Africa. This group became the Colonization Council. For them, leaving the South was imperative:

God of high heaven will put a curse [on us] should we continue to live with our former masters and ex-slaveholders, who are not enjoying the same rights as he has ordained that we shall enjoy in our own native soil; for God says in His Holy Work that he has a place and land for all his people, and our race had better go to it....

Adams made speeches advocating emigration from the South, and prepared a petition that was eventually signed by 98,000 people in the deep South and sent to President Rutherford B. Hayes. The petition asked:

If that protection cannot be given and our [Constitutional] rights [cannot be] restored, we would respectfully ask that some Territory be assigned to us in which we can colonize our race; and if that cannot be done, to appropriate means so that we can colonize in Liberia or some other country, for we feel and know that unless full and ample protection is guaranteed to us we cannot live in the South, and will and must colonize under some other government, and we put our full trust in God that our prayers and petition will be speedily answered.

Neither Hayes nor Congress ever took action on the petition.

Benjamin "Pap" Singleton

Benjamin Singleton lived in Nashville, Tennessee. He was a fugitive slave before the Civil War, and by trade a carpenter and coffinmaker. Singleton, 70 years old in 1879, and Adams, 36 in the same year, never met, although they both encouraged settlement in Kansas. Singleton made coffins for many victims of racial violence, and knew of African American hardships first hand.

At the Tennessee State Convention of Colored Men in 1875, he made a speech advocating migration out of the state, and repeated this message at the 1876 National Convention of Colored Men in Nashville. At first, Singleton tried to relocate within the state of Tennessee, but land was expensive at $60 an acre. In 1870, a handful of men went to Kansas and returned with a favorable report on homesteading possibilities. Singleton himself visited Kansas in 1873 and again in 1877. He put notices in the newspapers saying that he would provide information on Kansas migration to interested people free of charge.

The Edgefield Real Estate and Homestead Association was formed in 1877, and the following year conducted the first set of African American families to Kansas from the Tennessee area. They incorporated the Singleton Colony in Morris County Kansas in 1879. A group called the "United Colored Links" was organized to improve the lives of African Americans everywhere. He continued to encourage black migration through the 1880s. They later founded the Trans-Atlantic Association, which promoted the re-settlement of Africa.

In 1870, the black population of Kansas was 16,250. By 1880, it had jumped to 43,110, of which the "Kansas Fever Exodus" accounted for 6,000.

In the 1878 election, African Americans were prevented from voting in the South. This, coupled with the bad economy and oppressive conditions for blacks in the south, prompted many people to change their lives by moving westward. The emphasis shifted from thoughts of going to Liberia to the Kansas exodus movement.

In a sudden, spontaneous mass migration, people from the area of the lower Mississippi River left their homes and crowded the riverbanks, looking for passage on northbound riverboats. The movement baffled whites who, afraid of losing their workforce, tried to get the riverboats to stop transporting the Exodusters upriver. This slowed but did not stop the movement. It was noted that the Exodusters reaching St. Louis "seem to regard themselves as refugees from some impending calamity rather than as emigrants seeking new homes."

One observer commented:

"[The exodus] started among the black people themselves, how or when nobody knows, and the Negroes keep their own counsel about it.... The migration of blacks having begun, it is not easy to tell where it will end. Something much like panic seems to have set in."

Many southern whites believed that the Exodus was a plot hatched by northerners to take away the southern work force.

Even the African American leader Frederick Douglass could not comprehend the mass-migration, and felt that the blacks of the South should stand their ground, eventually winning their rights, rather than migrating from their homes:

"...We cannot but regard the present agitation of an African Exodus from the South as ill timed, and in some respects hurtful. We stand today at the beginning of a grand and beneficent reaction. There is growing recognition of the duty and obligation of the American people to guard, protect, and defend the personal and political rights of all the people of the States.... At a time like this, so full of hope and courage, it is unfortunate that a cry of despair should be raised in behalf of the colored people of the South...."

Once they reached Kansas, the Exodusters stayed poor. Generally, however, they felt better off in Kansas than they had in the South. Migrations and relocations occurred throughout the west during the 1880s and 90s. Some African Americans relocated several times in Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, and other regions before settling permanently. Most stayed in Kansas.

By 1900, despite hardships, African Americans in Kansas were generally far more prosperous than their counterparts who stayed in the South. They enjoyed the privilege of owning their own land, and had better political advantages regarding voting rights and even elective office.

The Exoduster movement proved that African Americans did not quietly accept the political or economic order of the "redeemed" South. They cared about their basic civil rights, economic victimization and the education of their children. They sought a new life on the western frontier, just as so many people, white and black, had before them. They were willing to risk everything to move west and begin a new life in the "promised land" of Kansas.