
A YEAR OF THE EXODUS IN KANSAS
ONE morning in April, 1879, a Missouri River steamboat arrived at Wyandotte, Kansas, and discharged a load of colored men, women and children, with divers barrels, boxes and bundles of household effects. It was a novel, picturesque, pathetic sight. They were of all ages and sizes, and every modulation of duskiness, these new comers; their garments were incredibly patched and tattered, stretched and uncertain; their "plunder," as they called it, resembled the litter of a neglected back-yard; and there was not probably a dollar in money in the pockets of the entire party. The wind was eager, and they stood upon the wharf shivering; and when the boat backed away, a sort of dumb awe seemed to settle upon and possess them. They looked like persons coming out of a dream. And, indeed, such they were, in more than casual fancy; for this was the advance-guard of the Exodus.
Soon other and similar parties came by the same route, and still others, until, within a fortnight, a thousand or more of them were gathered there at the gateway of Kansas -- all poor, some sick, and none with a plan of future action beyond the abstract, indefinite purpose somehow to find new homes. There was an element of wonder in the matter, which the hungry and undecided creatures themselves could not explain; they appeared to be as much surprised at being there as others were at seeing them there. They had not quitted the South because they wished to do so, they were mainly prompt to say; when questioned for the specific causes of their coming,
they were evasive and reticent. But they were not going back. That much they declared with one voice, and a resolute and convincing emphasis; and as for what lay ahead of them, well, "de good Lord" could be trusted.
The case was one to appeal with force to popular sympathy, even in its surface aspect alone; and when there was added the reflection that these patient and simple people, steeped in poverty, had left the clime of their nativity and choice, to search, however blindly, for a chance to better their condition, the heart of the observer had to own a special pity for the poor wanderers. And pity in the West is practical. So temporary shelter was speedily provided for them; food and the facilities for cooking it were furnished them in ample measure; and local philanthropists hastened to devise measures that should secure them homes and employment. Then came more of them. The tide swelled daily. Protests began to go up from the border towns, and that aroused public feeling throughout all Kansas, and brought meetings and speeches, committees and contributions. The sentimental view of the question quickly took precedence, as it could hardly fail to do under the circumstances. In a certain, effective sense, the very raggedness and misery of the immigration was accepted as its best excuse for being. The peculiar history of Kansas -- a history crowded with opportune and feverish memories -- was invoked, like a piece of holy writ, to vindicate and exalt the movement; there were not wanting, as there are never wanting at such times, those who saw in it the hand of Providence; and the Governor himself, speaking from the capital, welcomed the thickening freedmen, in impulsive and glittering rhetoric, to "the State made immortal by Old John Brown."
And still they came, hundreds upon hundreds of them, and reports announced thousands more on the way or about to start. So fast did they arrive, and so needy were they all, that some organized and systematic mode of dealing with them became a necessity. To such end there was incorporated, early in May, a State Freedman's Relief Association, composed of the State officers and a few other leading citizens, and having its headquarters at Topeka. It was not the design of this organization to invite or promote further immigration; the object was only the humanitarian one of ministering to the necessities of several thousands of poor people, thrown suddenly upon the charity of the State. At first it was thought that Kansas benevolence alone would be equal to the task; but a few weeks' trial served to refute this idea, and appeals for assistance were accordingly made to the country at large.
All through the summer months they continued to come, not from any one State or section in particular, but from nearly all parts of the South. Perhaps the welcome and assistance extended to such as had already reached Kansas operated to hurry others northward, and to take them to that friendly locality. Certain it is that designing agents of transportation lines, anxious only to secure passenger traffic and pausing at no deception, used this feature of the case to stimulate a general colored hegira to what was thus made to seem a new Canaan. All the Missouri River boats left St. Louis packed with them. Every train brought squads, companies, battalions of them. Not a few came through on foot, all the way from Alabama. The barracks were over-run, the resources of the Relief Association taxed to the utmost. Public sentiment grew critical and apprehensive; the emotional view of the matter gave way to considerations involving serious fears and perplexities. Six months had sufficed to stamp the movement -- the problem, as it was now seen to be -- with national importance. The Exodus was no longer a mere random interlude; it had become a profound and baffling study.
The closing autumn found at least 15,000 of these colored immigrants in Kansas. Such of them as had arrived early in the spring had been enabled to do something toward getting a start, and the thriftier and more capable ones had made homestead-entries and contrived, with timely aid, to build cabins; in some cases, small crops of corn and garden vegetables were raised. They had settled, as a rule, mainly in the vicinity of five or six
different points in the State where others of their race, who had gone out years before, were established; and it is not too much to say that, with the slender appliances at their command, they had so far done as well as could have been expected. But they were yet pitifully poor, and winter was close upon them -- their first winter in a climate of ice and snow and piercing winds. Their outlook was one to test sorely the fortitude and self-reliance, the fertility and endurance of any people. It was likewise an outlook that came home, with the significance of a menace, to the whole State. They could not be permitted to starve and freeze, but how were they to be fed, clothed and housed? To accept them as so many paupers and make them a public charge was impracticable, not to say impossible; to prolong the existing relief system, with its quasi-official character, and thus indirectly pledge the State to the oversight and maintenance not only of these, but of all who might choose to come, was neither right nor politic; to set them afloat all over Kansas and adjoining States, soliciting alms on their own account, was no less dangerous than inhuman and ridiculous. There seemed to be but one way out of the dilemma. The State officers withdrew from the Relief Association, and confided its work to representatives of the various churches, with immediate executive control in the hands of the Society of Friends; and the task was undertaken of carrying the burden as an organized and distinct Christian charity, having no political taint or affiliation, and relying solely upon the generosity of religious people everywhere. How this task was performed, and how the freedmen came through their first winter in Kansas, it is the chief object of this paper to relate.
The weather was on the side of the newcomers to begin with; such an open, friendly winter was never known in Kansas before. "God seed dat de darkeys had thin clothes," was the remark of one of their preachers, "an' He done kep' de cole off." Most of the time an overcoat could be dispensed with, and the general want of underwear was not so cruelly felt as had been feared; the fuel necessity, always an uppermost one in a prairie country, was reduced to a minimum; the almost utter absence of snow, so often a balk and terror to the border settler, made out-door work easy, and labor was in more than usual demand. Even plowing was possible a fair portion of the winter, and a good deal of it was done, though the scarcity of teams and plows stood constantly in the way: in one instance, in Graham county, a man "broke" five acres of raw prairie with a common spade. The business of house-building had little to interrupt it, and in this respect much was accomplished. Numerous cabins of stone and sod were constructed while the cold season lasted; that is to say, the walls were laid up, with ordinary black mud for mortar, and then they had to wait for roofs and floors, doors and windows, until money could be earned to buy lumber; in many cases, the women went to the towns and took in washing, or worked as house-servants to meet this exigency, while the men were doing the building. Those who could find employment on the farms about their "claims," worked willingly and for small wages, and in this way many supported their families, and procured now and then a calf, a pig, or a little poultry; others obtained places on the railroads, in the coal-mines, and on the public works at Topeka. Such as got work at any price, did not ask assistance; those who were compelled to apply for aid did it slowly, as a rule, and rarely came a second time. Not a single colored tramp was seen in Kansas all winter; and only one colored person was convicted of any crime.
It is impossible accurately to measure the succor afforded the freedmen during this period by the Relief Association, such a large share of it was in the way not so much of out-and-out gifts as of that better form of charity which helps people to help themselves. A prominent, if not the leading, feature of this relief work has been to procure homes and employment for all who could not begin farming. A kind of intelligence bureau was early organized, and applications for labor of all kinds were invited; and as fast as such applications were received (they came plentifully and from all quarters) selections were made of suitable parties to fill the places, and they were sent on, usually at the expense of the Association, to the persons desiring them, sometimes as many as two hundred in a day. In this way, it is estimated, quite 10,000 of them were provided for, at least for a time, 4,000 of the number going to other States, chiefly to Iowa and Nebraska. The number entirely supported by the Association has at no one time exceeded 500, and this included a daily coming and going average of 300 in the general rendezvous at Topeka. A considerable sum has been expended in lumber, farming implements, and horses and cattle; some purchases have been made of tracts
of railroad land, at low figures, and this has been set apart to families, in forty-acre lots, to be paid for from their crops; and quite a number of individual settlers have been supplied with funds to make the necessary payment on lands "taken up" under the homestead and pre-emption laws. The work of the Association has been done conscientiously, there can be no doubt, and, in the main, practically and with beneficent and justifying results; the mistakes and short-comings, if any, have been on the side of a possibly too considerate and sympathetic course of action.
This Relief Association received during the winter, in round numbers, $25,000 in money, and 300,000 pounds of merchandise, roughly valued at $100,000. It is a noteworthy fact that much of the money came in small sums, and was forwarded by the Christian women of America, through their mite-societies and sewing-circles; and it is also noticeable, as well as characteristic, that fully one-third of the entire amount was furnished by the Society of Friends. Ohio gave more than any other single State; New York and Pennsylvania next; then Massachusetts, Michigan, Illinois and Iowa, in the order named; and the other States in proportion, nearly every one sending something. Nor will it do to omit that several thousand dollars came from England. Another point; the inference is self-suggesting -- indeed, the records avouch it as a fact -- that the bulk of the personal contributions is to be credited to the industrial and laboring classes, and people in moderate circumstances. The largest individual gift was $1,000 from John Hall, a Quaker, of Westchester, Pennsylvania; the only known contribution by any man engaged in politics was $100 sent by Vice-President Wheeler.
The supplies received were principally made up of clothing, bedding and general household goods. One-fourth or more of the entire quantity came from England, and was forwarded, freight-free, from Liverpool to Topeka -- conspicuous among the larger shipments being several crates of crockery from the Staffordshire potteries, one of the most thoughtful and serviceable of all the donations. These supplies were distributed with care and economy, and upon personal acquaintance with each case. It was difficult, however, to go amiss. Few of the immigrants had furniture, bedding, stoves or dishes, and their wearing apparel was, as has been hinted, scant and threadbare; scores of the men were without coats or a change of shirts; most of the women had but one frock each and no wraps or stockings; half the children were barefooted, and clad only in single cotton garments. Much sickness resulted, of course, chiefly pneumonia and kindred affections; and there are plenty of graves to specify and consecrate that first winter of the Exodus in Kansas. But there was little grumbling, and less lamenting, and no talk at all of returning to the South. They ate their humble fare with thanksgiving and praise, and put away their dead with prayers. In truth, their devout manner of measuring privation and sorrow, and their unwavering faith in a direct over-ruling Providence, was a specially arresting and significant feature of the situation; they leaned on God as if He had been manifested to them in the flesh. Perhaps it was all a trick of mimicry, caught from association with the whites; none the less it was admirable and impressive, and who shall say it did not hush many a fear, save many a heartbreak?
There are, at this writing (April 1, 1880), from 15,000 to 20,000 colored people in Kansas who have settled there during the last twelve months -- 30 per cent. of them from Mississippi, 20 per cent. from Texas, 15 per cent. from Tennessee, 10 per cent. from Louisiana, 5 per cent. each from Alabama and Georgia, and the remainder from the other Southern States. Of this number, about one-third are supplied with teams and farming tools, and may be expected to become self-sustaining in another year; one-third are in the towns, employed as house-servants and day-laborers, and can take care of themselves so long as the market for their labor is not over-crowded; the other one-third are at work in a desultory fashion for white farmers and herders, and doing the best they can, but powerless to "get ahead" and achieve homes and an assured support without considerable assistance. The poverty of these people cannot be too strongly dwelt upon; for that has been their stumbling-block from the start, and is to-day the one paramount consideration of the Exodus. Neither must it be forgotten that, as a class, those who have so far gone to Kansas are ordinary plantation hands, unfamiliar with Northern agriculture and modes of life. The men cannot at once capably take hold of any but the rudest forms of work, however willing they may be; not one out of a hundred of the women can go into a Northern kitchen and, without teaching or oversight,
cook a common breakfast. This is no reproach to them, especially as they are anxious to learn, and do learn rapidly; but it is a drawback, and a peril. The mere fact that they have to begin their new and empty-handed life by dismissing all their old habits and traditions, and learning, for the first time, as it were, the simple art of making a living by their own labor, is one of deepest import. Poverty alone is enough to grapple with, particularly in a new country; add insufficiency to poverty, weakness to necessity, and the balancing of chances becomes more than doubly grave and difficult.
The area of land bought and entered by the freedmen during their first year in Kansas is about 20,000 acres, of which they have plowed and fitted for grain-growing 3,000 acres. They have built some 300 cabins and dug-outs, counting those which yet lack roofs and floors; and in the way of personal property, their accumulations, outside of what has been given to them, will aggregate perhaps $30,000. It is within bounds to say that their total gains for the year, the surplus proceeds of their own efforts, amount to $40,000, or about $2.25 per capita. This calculation includes those in the towns, and all those at work for daily and monthly wages, as well as those who are settled on the public lands and trying to make farms. But it does not take into account the exceptional cases -- one in twenty, at a guess -- where families that started with next to nothing now own little homesteads and are really prosperous. It should also be remembered that they have had to live all this time, and that the proverb of "a poor man for children" obtains among them to a distressing degree -- not to mention their numerous aged and infirm dependents; eight families, living in a single tenement-house only a stone's throw from where these lines were written, have forty-two children, the eldest not yet in its fifteenth year. Fortunately, they long ago learned to be content with a very meager diet, and seem able to make a feast on what would haunt white persons with visions of starvation. "Gimme a sack o' meal an' a side o' meat," said one of them, "an' my folks kin git along han'some," and many of them did get along throughout the winter with little more than corn-bread and bacon -- and there were chickens nightly roosting in the neighborhood, too. All things considered, they have given convincing evidence of their disposition to work, and to be honest, and sober, and frugal. Their savings are not remarkable, to be sure, but they are creditable, and not to be lightly passed over. The wonder is that they have anything whatever to show for their initiatory twelve months of hand-to-mouth hardship and embarrassment.
This does not solve the problem, however. They have yet to master the forces that dispute with them for the control of their fortunes. The ability and opportunity barely to escape actual suffering will not bring them independence; a gain of $2.25 a head per annum will not rapidly purchase horses and plows, and build houses and fences, and plant orchards, and put money in the bank for rainy days and seasons of ill-luck. At the lowest estimate, it requires $400, or its equivalent, to "take-up," improve, and make remunerative a farm in Kansas. If each colored family had that much, the prediction might reasonably be made that a large majority of them would ultimately succeed, and vindicate the Exodus as a wise, prudent and practical movement. But so long as they lack the advantage of means sufficient to go upon a homestead and develop and manage it without help, their immigration to Kansas or any other frontier State must remain hedged about with obvious and forbidding hindrances. A scheme is on foot among a number of wealthy and benevolent Eastern men to purchase large tracts of unimproved lands and sell them to the freedmen in small lots, on long credit, at the same time providing them with teams and implements to prosecute their farming. With proper supervision such a scheme could hardly fail to operate favorably, as limited trial in Kansas, by the Relief Association, has already shown. In the hands of sympathizing and liberal men, it might even be made profitable as a speculation; but unless chances of this or of similar character shall be opened to them, it is not easy to see how the most of these people are ever to get a secure foothold as tillers of the soil on the naked western prairies. White men, intelligent and experienced, could scarcely be expected to conquer such heavy odds; how much less can we look to see it done by these unknowing and new-fashioned pioneers. Grant that they have passed their first year safely and with credit; they had the friendly and untiring services of the Relief Association, and benefactions reaching nearly $150,000 to help them along, and they found a ready demand for their labor.
Take away the props and incentives of charity, and the future becomes almost as dark and precarious as ever to fully two-thirds or more of them. Increase their number by new accessions until the labor market is glutted and public kindness overtasked, and the inevitable result can but too certainly be foreseen.
And they are still coming. The influx continued, more or less, through all the winter months, mainly from Texas. Probably three or four thousand arrived between November and March; and since the first of March, an average of three hundred per week have reached Topeka. The flight increases instead of diminishing. Those in the best position to judge, say that it is not unlikely that as many as fifty thousand may come during the approaching summer. A year's experience has demonstrated that there is method, agreement, determination, in the movement. It is now an open secret that the question of a general removal to the North has been thought and talked of for several years by the freedmen in all the old slave-holding States. The first year's outcome has encouraged them, so reports allege; the infection is stronger and more pervasive than it was twelve months ago; and the shrewdest observer dare not venture to name the possible limit of the strange, risk-beset and problematic undertaking.
It is not within the writer's purpose to attempt an analysis of the causes of the Exodus -- least of all, to touch its political bearings or suggestions. Any survey of the subject would be incomplete, however, which omitted to set forth, candidly and inquiringly, the statements most commonly made by the freedmen in Kansas regarding their abandonment of the South. They assert that there is no security for their lives and property in their old homes; that the laws and courts are studiedly inimical to them and their interests; that their exercise of the electoral franchise is obstructed and made a personal danger; that no facilities are afforded or permitted them for educating their children; that their family rights and honor are scoffed at and outraged, as in slave days; and finally, -- and this is the most frequent complaint, -- that they are so unjustly and unfairly dealt with by white land-owners, employers and traders, that it is impossible to make a living. The facts they offer in support of these statements are not conclusive, to be sure, since they relate chiefly to special instances, and we cannot know how far such instances reflect the general sentiment in a given county or State. Isolated and individual acts of fraud and outrage are not alone sufficient, of course, to condemn a whole community, particularly without opportunity for explanation and defense; but truth requires the admission that these charges are too numerous, and the worst of them too well substantiated, to be disposed of as mere accidental grievances; they raise a valid presumption, to say the least, that there must be something radically wrong in the society where such things are permitted.
For instance, it is claimed, upon what seems to be good authority, that in the State of Mississippi, not a single white man has been convicted and punished for an offense against a colored man, or made to pay a debt due to a colored man, in the last five years. They tell of laws in Texas, Alabama and Georgia under which colored men are arrested for debt, and their labor (which is themselves, practically) sold at auction -- the standard bid being twenty-five cents per diem, with Sundays and rainy days deducted and board exacted for them. Contracts between white planters and colored renters are exhibited, in which the rates fixed for the use of land for one season run from $5 to $10 per acre -- more than its assessed valuation, and more than it would bring at public sale. Scores of landlords' and shopkeepers' bills have been carried to Kansas, in which the prices charged for articles of daily use are shamefully exorbitant; from one of these bills, a fair sample of them all, the following entries are copied: Hire of mule to cultivate crop, $30 (the mule was sold at the end of the season for $25); mess pork, $35 per barrel; corn meal, $9 per barrel; bacon sides and shoulders, 20 cents per pound; Rio coffee, 25 cents per pound; brown sugar, 12 « cents per pound; rice, 12 « cents per pound; molasses (common "black-strap"), $1.25 per gallon; tobacco (ordinary "dog-leg"), $1.50 per pound; cotton drilling, 40 cents per yard; domestic prints, 15 and 16 cents per yard.
and women degraded and despoiled -- which it is hard to believe, and yet impossible to put aside as wholly fictitious.
On the other hand, it is proper to say, there are intelligent and worthy ones among the freedmen who insist that they were themselves well treated in the South, and left there only because times were dull, and they hoped to do better; and that much of the misfortune of others is due to their own folly, impudence and cowardice. Some allowance must also be made for exaggeration, and for stories told and second-hand, and from hearsay. It should be kept in mind, too, that farming by colored men in the Southern States since the war has been done almost entirely on credit -- the landlord furnishing or becoming responsible for all that the renter needed to eat and wear while raising his crop -- and some share of their adversity is justly referable, no doubt, to that vicious system of doing business. But, after all has been said that can be, in explication and extenuation, there still remains a vivid sense of some rooted and potent defect in the general condition and tendency of affairs. Else why, to take the simplest view, are these people leaving there by thousands, and refusing to go back? They are not of an immigrating or venturesome nature; they prefer the South to the North, they will tell you; land is as plentiful and as cheap in Texas and other Southern States as it is in Kansas; in the nature of things, they should find better chances for homes and an easier way to make a living in the region they are quitting than in the one they are going to. It is idle to contend that a whole race, practically, would desert the country of their birth, preference and peculiar adaptation, with apparently no thought so strong as that of merely getting away, unless some vital and compelling cause bore them forward. They believe, at least, that it is best, if not imperative, for them to leave the South, at all hazards as to consequences; so much is self-evident. And they can be kept there, or induced to return there, only as they shall be convinced that their reasons of complaint and apprehension -- sound and sufficient in their eyes, however others of us may regard them -- have been thoroughly corrected and removed.
Assuming, then, that the Exodus is to continue (and such is clearly the fact), prompt efforts should be directed to so informing and shaping it that the immigrants may soonest acquire a start and become self-sustaining. Their right to go where they please and do what they will, as free men and citizens, is not to be questioned, of course; but there are some sections of the country to which they should not flock, some experiments that they should not trifle with, if they would keep the possibilities of success on their side, and avoid frittering away their strength and courage to no purpose. For one thing, and principally, they ought to keep away from Kansas. As many of them are there now as can hope to win homes and support in that State, unless they have money at the outset. The idea that the colored man -- or the white man, either, for that matter -- can go upon the public lands with a special dispensation of Providence in his favor, and make for himself a farm, without a team and tools and funds enough to provide for his family until at least one crop can be raised, is a specious and insnaring fiction, and cannot be too soon exploded. For abject poverty, like that which prevails among these drifting freedmen, there is no more unpromising refuge than the Western frontier. The progress accomplished by many of them in the last year only goes to show what they can and will do, with means sufficient to make a beginning; for so much they have all had given to them who are likely to succeed as homesteaders. But those who go there this year cannot expect to find such good fortune waiting for them; they cannot even expect to get work, at any price, as the first ones did; since the demand for labor in Kansas is limited, and the supply already quite equal to it. The ability of the State to turn to account and furnish chances for the twenty thousand now within her borders is far from certain; she surely has no room for more. And what is true of Kansas is relatively true of all the new and sparsely settled region west of the Missouri, where land is so cheap and so inviting. To send more of these indigent and inexperienced people in that direction, with only their empty hands to rely upon, is to make of the Exodus a mockery and a calamity.
The project of colonization in some allotted and remote quarter of the public domain has been suggested. It may be doubted if the freedmen would consent to that expedient; but it can hardly be doubted that, if tried, it would end in failure. The same causes that conspire to render personal settlement hazardous would not be lessened, but rather augmented, by huddling them together in crowds. Their poverty would still be present, their opportunities
narrowed and removed; they would gain little by experience, for they could teach one another nothing; and their slow ambition would miss that much-needed spur which comes of independent contact with the world. Any colony would be foredoomed which did not supply every man with a separate home and means for farming; and such an equipment would much better be furnished them as individuals than as colonists.
The true and only practical solution of the matter lies, not in keeping the freedmen together, but in judiciously scattering them; not in trying to set them up as farmers where they must have $400 apiece to start with, but in finding occupation for them where they can at once, and without help, earn their daily bread. They have no time to waste on experiments. What they need is an immediate assurance of enough to eat and wear -- not as a bounty, or even a loan, but as wages for the work of their own hands. The great, prosperous, agricultural States east of the Mississippi, in which productive land is largely rented, and in which farm-hands are never too numerous, could absorb them by thousands and make them a benefit: Indiana alone might readily utilize twice as many as there are in Kansas. They should be met, say at Cairo, and piloted from there to certain central points in different Northern States, and thence distributed among the farmers and others desiring to employ them; and they would require little further attention. As has been herein stated, 10,000 were sent out from Topeka in this way during the last eight or nine months, 4,000 of the number on solicitations from other States -- which goes to show that there are openings for them and a disposition to give them a chance, if only they will seek, or can be sent to, the proper localities. Charity will find its best occasion, prudence its foremost duty, in the use of all proper means to divert the freedmen from any one nook or corner of the country, and to disperse them generally over all sections where unskilled and cheap labor is desired, and where the laborer can at once get the upper hand of his poverty, and, as the philosopher says, "harmonize himself with his environment." With that much compassed, there need be no concern about the rest: the riddle of the Exodus will unravel itself.

