Growing Up with the Country: Family, Race, and Nation after the Civil War

In the decades after the Civil War, African-descended people were on the move. Formerly enslaved people sought reunification with long-lost family members, opportunities to own land and to exercise their political rights, and refuge from the constraints of a social order that increasingly relied on race rather than status to organize society. Kendra Field’s new book offers her own family as a lens through which to examine this “series of unbound migrations” of people in the post-Emancipation era (137). Field traces the movement of three families of freedpeople, devoting a chapter to each, to reveal that there were often multiple migrations and to link western migration (to locales such as Indian Territory) with overseas migrations to Canada, Mexico, and especially Africa. She pushes back the timeline for the “back to Africa” movement so that it begins not with Marcus Garvey but with Chief Sam.Field begins with Thomas Jefferson Brown, born to an Irish woman and an African-American man in Arkansas, who migrated to Indian Territory in the 1870s. Once there, he successively married two women, one African Creek and the other African Seminole, which despite Brown’s own status as an intruder in Indian Territory gave him access to land that would become the basis for the community of Brownsville. Brown’s life encapsulates multiple strands of the westward migration story: Indian Territory as a separate, sovereign location in which Americans were foreigners or intruders; American expansion’s demand for Native land dispossession; women’s authority over land in many Native societies; and tensions between freedpeople formerly owned by Natives and by Americans.Monroe Coleman arrived in Indian Territory in 1904. Because the records for Coleman are sparser, Field deftly weaves in information from Coleman’s contemporaries such as Ransom Edmondson and Jack Townsend. Field finds that Indian Territory was attractive to the mixed-race sons of southern white planters and suggests that their white connections sometimes came with material benefits. As Indian Territory moved from Native control to statehood, racial lines hardened, and the distance between Natives and African-descended people grew, even as, or perhaps because, all-black towns were built on Indian allotments (95). Furthermore, the new racial order left little space for mulattoes such as Coleman, Edmondson, and Townsend.Coleman’s cousin Alexander Davis is the subject of chapter 3. Davis first migrated to the all-black town of Mound Bayou, Mississippi, before seeking a similar town in Oklahoma. Eventually, he would make his way to the Gold Coast of Africa in his search for a “‘potential black space’” (105). Davis’s story is perhaps more representative of the majority of African-descended people who migrated at this time because of the poverty and intra-racial tensions he experienced. And while his circumstances differed from those of Brown and Coleman, Field points out that all three men turned to migration, to a desire to move “beyond the bounds of racial or national constraints” (118). Moreover, Field argues that such domestic and international migration was the cause and not the result of Booker T. Washington’s famous Atlanta Compromise speech of 1895.The final chapter explores Chief Sam’s back-to-Africa movement (1913–15), not as a precursor to Marcus Garvey and the Great Migration, but as “the culmination of what Carter Woodson once called ‘a century of negro migration’ within and beyond North America” (136). The movement failed not because Chief Sam was a swindler; rather, the migrants ran headlong into American and British bureaucracy and World War I (153).Field’s intensely personal account blends family lore and deep archival research. Using a micro-historical approach to illuminate larger demographic trends, Field provides an intimate look at the meaning of freedom, which for many newly emancipated people meant “the freedom to ‘move about’” (16).

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