If by chance The Black Woods: Pursuing Racial Justice on the Adirondack Frontier lands in your bookstore this November and you are bold enough to try to lift it without a small crane, you will be amused to know I first envisioned this production as a pamphlet. Maybe 50 pages max.
That’s how much I didn’t know about how much I didn’t know.
Because a story line as clear as this—how much was there to say? Land baron has a big idea, and it tanks. Adirondack history abounds with these. Morehouse, Gilliland, Macomb, the geniuses who dreamed up Castorland. My land-rich visionary was an antislavery reformer named Gerrit Smith who, in 1846, rolled out a plan to donate 120,000 of his Adirondack acres, in (mostly) Franklin and Essex Counties, to 3,000 Black New Yorkers. His goal: to get poor, landless families out of crowded and unhealthy cities and onto their own land. On 40-acre “gift lots,” Smith’s self-employed “grantees” would build the value of their new subsistence farms to $250. From 1821 to 1870, $250 in real property was how much a Black New Yorker had to own to qualify to vote. No other group—poor landless whites, non-English-speaking immigrants—faced this kind of restriction. This was a voter suppression law as pointed as they got.
Smith’s scheme offered a land route to the ballot for disenfranchised Black New Yorkers, and a way to beef up New York’s antislavery electorate when suffrage activists still held out hope that slavery could be abolished at the polls. On paper the plan seemed outright brilliant. Scores of Black reformers, Frederick Douglass, and even Horace Greeley, talked it up. But in practice? Only a fraction of the gift land was ever
