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chapter 9 Reconstruction: The Making and Unmaking of a Revolution
hoped to claim cheap public land available under the Homestead Act of 1862. In 1865–1877
1876, the Hartwell family of Pulaski, Tennessee (which had been the birthplace
of the KKK in 1866), migrated to Kansas because Tennessee was “no place for
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colored people.” In Kansas, black migrants built all-black towns that promised
freedom from white persecution and an opportunity for self-government. Nicode-
mus, incorporated in 1877, was the most famous of these towns. “Nicodemus is the
most harmonious place on earth,” proclaimed one of the town’s newspapers in 1887.
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“Everybody works for the interest of the town and all pull together.” It grew out of
a development proposal by W. J. Niles, a black businessman, and a white land devel-
oper named W. R. Hill. The first black settlers came from Lexington, Kentucky,
and by 1880, the thriving town, which serviced a growing county, had almost 260
black and almost 60 white residents, a bank, general stores, hotels, a pharmacy, a
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millinery, a livery, and a barbershop. One resident was Edward P. McCabe, a tal-
ented and ambitious New Yorker and an active Republican who, upon moving to
Nicodemus, became a farmer, an attorney, and a land agent. During the years he
served as state auditor (1883–1887), he was the highest-ranking black officeholder
in the country.
Benjamin “Pap” Singleton, who detested sharecropping and promoted black
landownership as the most viable basis for black self-improvement, became the most
important proponent of the black migration to Kansas. Operating out of Edgefield,
Tennessee, his Edgefield Real Estate and Homestead Association spread word of avail-
able land and a hospitable environment for blacks in Kansas. Black newspapers, mass
meetings, circulars, and letters home from migrants also inspired “emigration fever.”
Singleton became known as “the Moses of the Colored Exodus.” In the spring and sum-
mer of 1879, more than 6,000 blacks from Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi — called
Exodusters — migrated to Kansas, where they were able to settle on land that became
theirs. John Solomon Lewis of Louisiana described the feeling: “When I landed on
the soil, I looked on the ground and I says this is free ground. Then I looked on the
heavens, and I says them is free and beautiful heavens. Then I looked within my heart,
and I says to myself I wonder why I never was free before?” 40
Landownership made the difference, and the Exodusters established four all-
black farming communities that grew into towns with businesses, churches, and
schools. Most Exodusters decided for themselves to take a chance on the West,
although grassroots leaders such as Singleton and Henry Adams from Shreveport,
Louisiana, helped inspire them. Adams’s activities in politics and black labor organiz-
ing were indicative of a growing grassroots black nationalism. Involved in a variety of
regional networks along the Mississippi River, Adams promoted migration to Kansas
and also supported the Colonization Council, which sought federal funds for black
migration to Liberia.
Between 1865 and 1920, more than sixty all-black towns were created in the West,
some fifty of them in Oklahoma, where new settlements of southern freedmen joined
with former slaves owned by Native Americans were established in what had been

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