“A (White) House Divided” — The Abolitionist Challenge to Whiteness
Chapter Six of A Family History of Whiteness: American Roots of Racial Injustice
Nikki Haley’s waffling non-response to a simple question about the cause of the Civil War was a recent reminder of the care contemporary Republican politicians take to avoid voicing even a hint of a challenge to the ideology of White supremacy.[i] Her unwillingness to name preservation of chattel slavery as the root cause of the secession of the Confederate States is an example of the way GOP leaders consistently divert attention away from racial politics and from racial injustice as central driving forces of American history.
In a play to secure the votes of White Christian Nationalists and White Supremacists, Haley and other Republican presidential candidates have embraced the “Lost Cause” revisionist history of the Civil War. When Haley said “…the cause of the Civil War was basically how the government was gonna run, the freedoms, and what people could and couldn’t do…” she was toeing the MAGA line by ignoring the pervasive presence of racial injustice in the American past and present. She was also taking great care to avoid frightening away White Republicans who might interpret any mention of the history of slavery in America as an attack on Whiteness.
Republicans (and others) who remain in thrall to White supremacist ideology are easily frightened — as they should be. Throughout American history the dominance of Whiteness has been challenged repeatedly and persistently, primarily by political movements led by people of color. People of color in America have always resisted the subordinate roles and status assigned to them by the ideology and institutions of White supremacy. However, for White people, episodes of active resistance to the hegemony of Whiteness and racial injustice have been relatively rare events in American history.
Several periods in American history stand out as particularly strong challenges to Whiteness. The current Black Lives Matter movement is one such moment. The Civil Rights movement of the mid-1950s to the late-1960s was another such moment.[ii]
The Abolition movement which grew in strength in the first half of the nineteenth century was the most enduring and perhaps the strongest challenge to White supremacy in American history. Following the Civil War, during the relatively brief interlude of Reconstruction, from 1865 to 1877, it appeared that White racial despotism might have been permanently, if not completely, subverted. But the racial equity gains for emancipated Black people in the wake of the Civil War were short-lived as White supremacist ideology adapted and regained strength in the post-Reconstruction era.
The reassertion of White supremacy in the post-Reconstruction era has filtered and obscured our memories of the full extent and impact of the anti-slavery activism that preceded and precipitated the Civil War. Growing up as a White child in the rural Midwest in the 1960s, I learned the names of John Brown and Harriet Tubman and almost nothing else about antebellum anti-racist heroes. The buried history of radical actions by Black people in the decades before the Civil War and the success of those actions in drawing support from sympathetic White people is exactly the kind of history contemporary Republicans are eager to censor and remove from public education.
In the course of researching a critical family history of my ancestors in America I uncovered what seemed, at times, to be an endless series of acts of racial violence and suppression perpetrated against Indigenous and Black peoples by the White communities my ancestors inhabited. I began to think there had never been a time in my family’s past when my ancestors were involved in any form of anti-racist activism.
Thus, it was a pleasant surprise for me to learn some of my early nineteenth-century Stites ancestors had inhabited a rural community in southeastern Indiana that was known to be a hotbed of abolitionist fervor and an active station in the Underground Railroad.
In the 1820s, my fourth great-grandfather Stephen Stites and his brother Jonathan and their families left Columbia, Ohio (now part of Cincinnati) to move down the Ohio River about eighty miles to the vicinity of Madison, Indiana. The area where they settled, in Jefferson County, on the banks of Neil’s Creek in Lancaster Township, became known as the “Yankee settlement” because so many of the families who settled there were migrants from New England and also because those families openly championed the cause of abolition.
In 1839, a group of farm families in Lancaster Township formed the Neil’s Creek Anti-Slavery Society. The founders of the group, including the Hoyt, Nelson, Nay, Wells, and Walton families, among others, were my Stites ancestors’ closest neighbors. Many of these abolitionist families were also, like my Stites ancestors, Baptists.
Learning that my Stites ancestors had, at the very least, lived in close contact with a strongly abolitionist White community in the 1840s in Lancaster Township, Jefferson County, Indiana gave me my first real hope of finding ancestors who might have questioned the superiority and dominance of Whiteness.
But by no means were all of the White folks in Jefferson County in the decades leading up to the Civil War supporters of abolition. There were many White families from Kentucky and others with roots in the south who were pro-slavery and strongly opposed to abolition. There were also many White people, perhaps the majority of the White population of the region, who simply wanted to avoid taking any stance on the issue of slavery.
From the mid-1830s to 1860, Lancaster Township became an important part of the Underground Railroad. It is wrong to assume, as some historians have misled us into thinking, that the Underground Railroad was established and managed by White abolitionists. White people did assist in important ways, but it was Free Black men and women who took on leadership and risked their freedom and lives in order to aid Black people escaping from slavery.
The work of the Underground Railroad in Lancaster Township and elsewhere in southeastern Indiana was dependent upon the presence of a relatively large population of Free Black men and women in the Georgetown neighborhood of the town of Madison on the banks of the Ohio River.
Leading members of the Free Black community who kept the Underground Railroad running in and around Madison, Indiana included the families of Elijah and Mary Anderson, George and Lucinda DeBaptiste, David and Mary Lott, John and Ann Carter, and Rev. Chapman and Ann Harris, among others. The historical documentation on these people is not extensive. They have gotten far less attention than they deserve. Collectively, over the course of more than three decades, Black Underground Railroad managers and “conductors” in Jefferson County enabled freedom for several thousand enslaved people.[iii]
The White abolitionists of Lancaster Township also did their part, though at far less risk to themselves than the Black people who sought their assistance. It remains unclear to me whether my ancestors who lived in Lancaster Township participated or were even aware of the Underground Railroad activities of many of their neighbors. Chapman Harris frequently turned to people in Lancaster for help. In the 1840s and 1850s, the homes of at least nine White families in Lancaster were considered “safe houses” offering temporary shelter and aid to Black people escaping slavery.[iv]
Beyond providing clandestine support for the Underground Railroad, the abolitionists of Lancaster Township also spoke out publicly against slavery. In 1846, an Anti-Slavery Baptist Church was founded in Lancaster and in 1848, the church and its pastor, Thomas Craven, founded the Eleutherian Institute (later, Eleutherian College) to provide education to all, regardless of race or gender. Within two years, Eleutherian (from the Ancient Greek eleutheria, meaning liberty or the personification of liberty) was offering elementary through college-level instruction.
News of the new college offering integrated instruction to women as well as men, to Blacks as well as Whites, soon spread south. In 1856, a three-story stone edifice was constructed to serve as space for classrooms and a chapel. The goal was to enroll as many as three hundred students, and, at its peak enrollment in 1860, the integrated institution had two hundred students, including fifty black students, most of them former slaves.
Both the Underground Railroad operations of the Black community of Madison and the anti-slavery activities of the White community in Lancaster Township attracted attention and incited violent reactions from pro-slavery White people in the region. The Georgetown District of Madison was attacked many times by mobs of pro-slavery White people forcing many Black families to leave town for their safety. In 1850, the Eleutherian College was also attacked by a White pro-slavery mob which burned three cabins on the grounds of the college.
Although it had no Black students after 1861, Eleutherian College continued as a school until 1937. When I visited the site in 2019, I found a vacant and derelict building on a weed-strewn lot. The site is open to the public only one day a year or by appointment. A local organization, Historic Eleutherian College, Inc. (HEC), was created in 1995 and was able to purchase the one surviving college building and get the site designated as a National Historic Landmark by the National Park Service.[v]
The HEC continues to raise money in hopes of restoring the building on College Hill and to turning it into a museum. Progress in doing so has been slow and this landmark of rural anti-racist activism in nineteenth-century southern Indiana remains obscure and far off the beaten path.
I don’t know whether or not any of my Stites ancestors and relatives in Lancaster Township in the 1830s to the 1850s had any involvement with the Anti-Slavery Baptist Church, or Eleutherian College, or the Underground Railroad. It would be nice to imagine that they were radical abolitionists like so many of their close neighbors, but I suspect they were not.
The Columbia Baptist Church, the one in Ohio that my fourth great grandfather Stephen Stites attended as a young man before he moved to Indiana, struggled over its stance on slavery. The January 2, 1798 minutes of the meeting of the Columbia Baptist Church elders reports the following as its first order of business: “1 — Little or nothing done to take up the Subject contained in a letter from a church in Dearborn County [Southeastern Indiana] under the care of James Sutton respecting slavery.”
Subsequent notes in the minutes show the church elders repeatedly postponing discussion of the “Subject” of the letter from James Sutton, his call for the church to take a public stand against slavery. Eventually, the Columbia Baptist Church elders put the issue to a vote by the congregation. The majority of the congregation preferred to remain silent on the issue of slavery to avoid alienating members who lived across the Ohio River in Kentucky and owned slaves.
The decision of the Columbia Baptist Church congregation to avoid taking a stance on slavery is the only real clue I have on how my Stites ancestors of the time might have felt about slavery. I suspect my Baptist Stites ancestors in Lancaster Township supported the idea of abolition, but it seems likely they tolerated rather than actively engaged in their neighbors’ anti-slavery work. They probably would have been kept in the dark about any Underground Railroad activities in their immediate vicinity. They could not have been unaware of very public activities of the Neil’s Creek Anti-Slavery Society or the Anti-Slavery Baptist Church or Eleutherian College, but whether or not they were ever participants or supporters is unclear.
At a moment in American history when my ancestors had ample opportunity to take a firm stand against racial injustice, it appears most likely that they chose to remain safely on the sidelines. I find I must also ask myself now, what is it that I can do, at this critical moment in American history, to get off the sidelines and to actively contribute to the subversion of White racial hegemony?
After all, even now, the fight for abolition is incomplete. The Thirteenth Amendment outlaws slavery “except as a punishment for crime” and today a disproportionate number of Black men are incarcerated and subjected to involuntary servitude in U.S. prisons. And, as the Black Lives Matter movement will not let us forget, far too many Black men, women, and children continue to fall victim to police violence.
Not allowing the memory of anti-racist heroes of the nineteenth century to fade or be intentionally erased by far-right extremists is just one of the many small steps we all should be taking to support the ongoing struggle to subvert White supremacy and promote racial equity. There can be no bliss in ignorance. Denying our history only makes us complicit in the maintenance of White supremacy.
NOTES
[i] This occurred in December 2023 at a campaign event in New Hampshire. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUc2B9AKN9U
[ii] The time frames given here for political movements challenging the dominance of Whiteness are imprecise. See Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s book, Racial Formation in the United States (Third Edition, New York: Routledge, 2015) for a full discussion of “racial politics” and stages in what they describe (p.132) as the still incomplete process of “…transition from racial despotism to racial democracy….” across U.S. history.
[iii] A brief historical sketch of operations of the Underground Railroad in the Georgetown District of Madison, Indiana is available online from the Indiana Department of Natural Resources at https://www.in.gov/dnr/historic-preservation/files/georgetown.pdf
[iv] The most extensive research on Underground Railroad sites and operations in southeastern Indiana, with a special focus on Jefferson County, can be found in the survey work done by Diane Perrine Coon for The Freedom Trails Initiative, Southeastern Indiana’s Underground Railroad Routes and Operations (Indiana Department of Natural Resources and National Park Service, 2001) available online at http://npshistory.com/publications/ugrr/se-in.pdf
[v] The HEC got the National Park Service to list the nearby Lyman and Asenath Hoyt House in the National Register of Historic Sites and to include Eleutherian College and the Hoyt House in the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom database.
