Anna-Lisa Cox

When I first picked up this book, I thought that it was about African American pioneers in what is now the Great Plains. Since I live in the Great Plains now, I checked out the book from my library with some excitement - but I was even MORE excited when I got home and realized that it was actually about African American pioneers in the Northwest Territory (now Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin [along with a piece of Minnesota]). I'm originally from the state of Ohio, and I love reading about my home state's history, and this book promised to illuminate a part of history that, honestly, I don't know much about (black pioneers in the Northwest Territory, to be specific).

The material itself is amazing. I, for one, was not taught about most of this in school, and I've been a little neglectful about this time period in my own reading. Basically, in fourth grade we had one history class dedicated only to Ohio history. Looking back, it was "white Ohio history." There was practically no mention of African-Americans at all in Ohio, except that slavery was forbidden once the Northwest Territory was set aside and that southern Ohio (where I'm from) was an important stop on the Underground Railroad (even this information was couched in terms of what white people did, and not the contributions that African Americans made - and don't even get me started on what we were taught about Native Americans in that class; basically it was made to appear as if Ohio was just this vast empty place where no one was living at all until white settlers came along, which I know as an adult is far from true).

The actual story is much more complex, and the book partially dives into this. It's true, for example, that slavery was outlawed in the Northwest Territory - but what I didn't know was that people found ways to get around that. Slaves were reclassified as "indentured servants" with terms of 90+ years - a life sentence, in other words. And some states (the author seems to focus particularly on Illinois) just didn't care and openly allowed slavery in spite of the laws. Apparently, southern Ohio was still a racist hellhole then, much like it is today (and I feel like I can say that with authority after living there for thirty years).

Also, unbeknownst to me until now, there was a big shift in how African Americans, particularly free ones, were viewed by white people. After the Revolution, when thoughts about liberty and equality were running high, apparently a lot more people had abolitionist leanings (latent or open). But as the 1800s progressed, the tide began to turn, and even people and states that had been pretty pro-abolitionist began to turn into colonizationalists (African Americans should be freed from slavery but sent to Liberia or "somewhere else" that wasn't the United States) or even pro-slavery (some people argued, IN the "free" Northwest Territories, that slavery was a GOOD thing for everyone, including slaves - whaaaaaat). And the horrors of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 (where pretty much any person of color could be stolen and sold as a slave, even if they had been born free) and the Dred Scott decision (African Americans weren't considered as citizens of the United States and therefore had no rights) was brought to life in chilling detail.

This was mostly news to me. I suppose it shouldn't have been, except, like I said, the only "Ohio history" I had been exposed to was the incredibly white-centric stuff I'd been taught in school, my college reading (which mostly focused on pre-1787 Ohio and the Native Americans that had lived in what would become Ohio), and my family stories. I'm descended from a long line of socially-forward Quakers on my maternal grandfather's side, staunch abolitionists who were heavily involved in the Underground Railroad (and that is how my great-great-great grandfather met my great-great-great grandmother, actually - she was an escaped slave who got sick on the way to Canada and had to be sheltered by my g-g-g grandfather's parents for a few months until she got well, and by that time they had fallen in love).

There were hints, of course, that not everything in Ohio's history was rosy for African Americans. There are stories of my hometown's founder, John McIntire, owning slaves (true or not, I can't sa, although he was originally from Virginia so it seems plausible). And then there was the incident in the 1850s when a group of people from Zanesville (pro-slavery and still pretty damned racist to this day) tried to tar and feather a prominent abolitionist who was staying in Putnam (now swallowed up by Zanesville, but a hotbed at the time for abolitionists). But until I read this book, I had NO IDEA how deficient my knowledge was about this time in history. I hope to remedy that lack soon (does anyone have good recommendations about the African American experience in the north pre-Civil War?).

But while the material was amazing, the writing was not, and that's what brought down my review to three stars. The writing style came across as very disorganized, and I wasn't sure if the author was trying to make it more "accessible" to non-academics or what, but I found it completely distracting. There was a lot of rambling and disjointed parts smashed together in an attempt to make a whole, and it fell short.

And then there were the attempts at jokes. The author refers to satire as "funny" a few different times (p. 26). I'd call satire a lot of things - ironic, sarcastic, blistering - but not "funny." And the works she referred to were definitely not meant to be "funny" in the conventional sense, but to draw attention to the absurdity of the arguments that people used to defend slavery.

But that pales in comparison to the completely insensitive "joke" she made on page 73. After talking about the horrors of having to not only buy your own freedom, but to attempt to save up enough money to buy your family members' freedom as well, the author could have transitioned into a brief discussion about the morality of having to "own" your relatives until you were able to raise the money to pay the bond that would at last set them free (most Northwest Territory states required free African Americans to pay a "bond" to register as free - until they could afford to do so, they were "owned" by the relatives who had bought their "freedom" but could still not afford the bond). Instead, the author makes a crass joke about how selling plots of land to buy enslaved relatives brought "a whole new meaning to the term 'property flipping.'" Umm, really? Not funny. Not satire. Just rude.

In the hands of a more competent writer, this book would have been AMAZING. As it is, I'm left looking for something that has more meat to it that deals with the same era in time. Suggestions welcomed.… (lisätietoja)

Much has been written about the Civil War and the Reconstruction period afterward, but the decades just prior to the war, particularly in black history, are often glossed over or ignored by historians and history classes. Anna-Lisa Cox breathes life into this period, showing us the everyday heroes in the early struggle for civil rights.

The writing style is narrative nonfiction, as if the author is telling us the story. This works well in that we're placed in the era, experiencing life during a tumultuous time. We get to know specific people, and we see their successes and struggles as their rights are slowly taken away. The problem I had was that sometimes the writing is too lax, reading more like a stream of consciousness than professional writing. The author uses an excess of conjunctions as sentence starters, particularly "and", "but" and "so", to the point where it grated on my nerves.

This book is short, at only 210 pages without the end notes. Within that short span, the author covers a lot of years and chronicles a lot of people's lives. In this respect, the content feels light. We don't have time to go deeply into the various aspects or really explore this heavy topic.

Despite my grumbling points, this book is well worth reading, offering a profound glimpse into life for free black pioneers prior to the Civil War.

*I received a review copy from the publisher, via Amazon Vine, in exchange for my honest review.*… (lisätietoja)