Word spread across the southern farm country, and into the minds of
those who labored over cotton or sugar crops, that the day of
reckoning was near at hand, that the Lord had answered black
prayers with the offer of deliverance in a western Eden. In this
vast state where Brown had caused blood to flow in his righteous
wrath, there was said to be land for all, and land especially for
poor blacks who for so long had cherished the thought of a tiny
patch of America that they could call their own. The soil was said
to be free for the taking, and even better, passage to the prairie
Canaan was rumored to be available to all. . . . Thus began a
pell-mell land rush to Kansas, an unreasoned, almost mindless
exodus from the South toward some vague ideal, some western
paradise, where all cares would vanish. In Search of Canaan tells
the story of the Black migration from areas of the South to Kansas
and other Midwestern and Western states that occurred soon after
the end of Reconstruction. Working almost entirely from primary
sources-letters of some of the black migrants, government
investigative reports, and black newspapers-Robert G. Athearn
describes and explains the "Exoduster" movement and sets it into
perspective as a phenomenon in Western history. The book begins
with details of Exodusters on the move. Athearn then fills in the
background of why they were moving; relates how other people-Black
and white, Northern and Southern-felt about the movement; examines
political considerations; and finally, evaluates the episode and
provides an explanation as to why it failed. According to Athearn,
the exodus spoke in a narrower sense of Black emigrants who sought
frontier farms, but in the main it told more about a nation whose
wounds had been bound but had not yet healed. The Republicans,
without any issues of consequence in 1880, gave the flight national
importance in the hope that it would gain votes for them and, at
the same time, reduce the South's population and hence its
representation in Congress. Thousands of Black Americans, many of
them former slaves, were deluded by false promises made by
individual interests. As the hawkers of glad tidings beckoned to
the easily convinced, the word "Kansas" became equated with the
word "freedom." Emotional, often biblical, overtones gave the
movement millenarian flavor, and Kansas became the unwilling focus
of a revitalized national campaign for Black rights. Athearn
describes the social, political, economic, and even agricultural
difficulties that Exodusters had in adapting to white culture. He
evaluates the activities of Black leaders such as Benjamin "Pap"
Singleton, northern politicians such as Kansas Governor John P. St.
John, and refugee aid organizations such as the Kansas Freedmen's
Relief Association. He tells the Exoduster story not just as a
southern story-the turmoil in Dixie and flight from the scenes of a
struggle-but especially as a western story, a meaningful segment of
the history of a frontier state. His remarkably objective, as well
as suspenseful, account of this unusual episodes contributes
significantly to Kansas history, to western history, and to the
history of Black people in America.
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