Exodusters

From 1879 to 1880 the thousands of AfRiCAN AMERICANS who migrated from the Deep South to Kansas are known facetiously as “Exodusters.” True, their exodus was from a land of slavery and hardship, but the promised land of Kansas, while disappointing for many, offered more than dust. Although hard, life in the West was better than life in the South. The Civil War had brought freedom for slaves and hope for a brighter future for all African Americans. Like other Americans, they yearned for a farm of their own, which after generations of slavery they deserved. But only a fortunate few got farms on the handful of plantations that were confiscated and divided. Nevertheless, during the brief period of Radical Republican Reconstruction, black children were educated, their fathers could vote and participate in the political process, and the civil rights of African Americans were respected.

Then, in the 1870s, the planter aristocracy advocating white supremacy reasserted itself, and the political power of Radical Republican state governments in the South eroded, and with it black civil rights and economic opportunity. In states such as Mississippi, South Carolina, and Louisiana, where a majority of qualified voters were black, whites used violence, murder, and intimidation to gain control. The 1875 election, “redeeming” Mississippi, was the most violent election in U. S. history. Northern public opinion, which in the late 1860s sustained congressional Reconstruction, refused in the mid-1870s to use the army to uphold the Constitution in the South. The aspirations of African Americans were dashed; they were reduced to being tenant farmers, running deeper in debt through the crop-lien or sharecrop systems.

Given the situation of black southerners, the lure of Kansas, the land of John Brown and of ample acres, proved irresistible. A grass-roots mass movement developed and when black leaders such as Frederick Douglass either ignored or opposed the new movement, it produced its own new leaders. The outstanding Exoduster leaders were Benjamin (Pap) Singleton and Henry Adams.

By 1869 Singleton, who lived in Nashville, Tennessee, had explored homesteading in Kansas. He and other blacks preferred to stay in Tennessee, where they and their forebears had been born, but land there was expensive, at $60 an acre. In 1873, after some families successfully moved to Kansas, he made plans for the Singleton Colony for Tennessee blacks in southeastern Kansas on land that had been part of the Cherokee reservation. Serious migration, however, did not get under way until after mass meetings were held in Nashville in 1877 and 1878.

A former slave and Union veteran, Adams settled in Shreveport, Louisiana, and fearlessly struggled to educate black tenant farmers of their rights and worked to eliminate racial prejudice from the legal system. By 1875 continuing harassment and frustrations led Adams to embrace black migration to Liberia or to a western territory reserved for blacks. By 1877 Adams was the leading spirit of the National Colored Colonization Society. It signed up thousands, who wished to leave the South, but there was no money to finance immigration to Liberia. By 1879, believing it was imperative for blacks to leave the South, Adams backed the exodus to Kansas.

Singleton and Adams paved the way for the spectacular 1879 Kansas-fever exodus, but that migration was spontaneous. Critics referred to it as an “epidemic” or a “stampede,” but its origin was neither mysterious nor mindless. Within a few months in early 1879, 6,000 blacks from Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas went to Kansas. They were moved by a realistic fear of violence from their former masters and by an unrealistic faith that land and prosperity awaited them in Kansas. They were profoundly religious, and a perceptive contemporary observer noted their exodus was “a sort of religious exultation, during which they had regarded Kansas as a modern Canaan and the God-appointed home of the negro race.” In fact, they knew little about Kansas, steamboat and railroad fares, and the cost of homesteading even if the land was free, and they would not listen to black leaders and concerned whites who tried to dissuade them. In large numbers they flocked to Mississippi River landings, hoping for free transportation upriver to St. Louis and then by rail across Missouri to Kansas. Most were so poor they could not pay their fare and were left at the landing. To keep blacks from leaving the South, many steamboats would not stop, even for those who could pay. Some blacks pooled their resources and got part way upriver, where they were put off. Others made it to St. Louis and lacked rail fare to continue, but thousands nonetheless managed to get to Kansas.

Kansas was not the new Canaan. On the way the Exodusters learned there was neither free transportation nor free land that could be cultivated immediately. Yet, even when offered free transportation “back to Egypt” (the Deep South) virtually all Exodusters refused. A woman with a child at her breast, who was stuck in St. Louis, said she would rather starve than go back to the South. Exodusters were refugees from terrorism, not migrants. Their plight in St. Louis and before they found jobs in Kansas prompted nationwide charity efforts. In St. Louis local authorities were unfriendly, and charity was channeled through local black churches, but in Kansas, Governor John P. St. John declared his state a land of freedom, welcomed the Exodusters, and cooperated in relief efforts, as did the old abolitionist element in a Kansas Freedmen’s Aid Association.

Many of the migrants found work. A few families had enough money to farm, men got jobs in the building trades, and women often worked as domestics and washerwomen. The Freedmen’s Aid Association made a great contribution. It helped settle Exodusters in a colony in Waubaun-see County, helped start a school in a Singleton colony in Morris County, and, more important, became an effective employment agency. Although the Exodusters experienced great hardships, their migration was beneficial. It even helped those who remained behind, who were treated better, since the dominant planter class feared losing more laborers. But the Exodusters and their children were the big gainers from their inspired move.

Further reading: Nell Irvin Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1986).