A white mob in Ohio denied land to hundreds of former slaves, a lawmaker wants to right that wrong

Rep. Dontavius Jarrells, D-Columbus, standing next to the canal in New Bremen. (Photo by Nick Evans for Ohio Capital Journal.)

During the height of summer, 1846, a mob of white Mercer County residents surrounded a group nearly 400 Freedpeople who’d just taken a boat up the Miami Canal to New Bremen. The former slaves had been traveling for more than a month, making a nearly 300-mile trek across Virginia and the Allegheny mountains on foot, before taking a boat to Cincinnati and following the canal north.

The day before, the members of that mob had celebrated Independence Day. Now, they were posting guards around the Freedpeople’s impromptu camp and warning them to post a $500 bond each or leave by 10 o’clock the following morning.

When the Randolph Freedpeople piled onto southbound canalboats, historian Gregory May describes, “white men armed with muskets and bayonets” followed them down the towpath out of Mercer County.

Once across the county line, however, they didn’t just disappear. The group settled in nearby counties and many of their descendants still live in Ohio.

Now, Rep. Dontavius Jarrells, D-Columbus, is calling on the state to right a historical wrong. He argues dispossessing the Freedpeople of their land deprived them of an essential economic foothold and the chance to build generational wealth for their descendants.

How the journey began

The Randolph Freedpeople get their name from their former owner, John Randolph. Born a few years before the Revolutionary War, he was the scion of Virginia nobility. Randolph spent more than two decades in the U.S. House, and served briefly in the U.S. Senate and as the American minister to Russia. His second cousin Thomas dabbled in politics and diplomacy, too, not to mention architecture, before becoming the third president of the United States.

The family’s money came from tobacco, and that meant slaves. While Randolph opposed the idea of slavery, that didn’t stop him from perpetuating it.  He didn’t free his own until his death.

The problem is, Randolph wrote multiple wills and had a reputation for eccentricity. Disputes over his estate were tied up in court for more than a decade. May’s book, A Madman’s Will, details that case and the Freedpeoples’ odyssey to Ohio.

At the time, Virginia law required Freedpeople to leave the state. So, in addition to freeing his slaves, Randolph’s will directed his executor to set aside money to purchase land and supplies for them as well as cover travel.

Ohio’s laws weren’t very welcoming either. Despite being a “free” state, Ohio had Black codes requiring two landowners to post a $500 bond to ensure a Freedperson would not be a drain on public funds. As May explains, that was more than the cost of most farms at the time.

When Randolph’s executor, Virginia Judge William Leigh, came to Ohio scouting land, local leaders assured him those laws were rarely enforced. Leigh settled on Mercer County after hearing about a small but blossoming Black community there called Carthagena. The town was laid out in 1840 and, according to May, “the place soon had a wagonmaker, blacksmith, mason, and tanner as well as weavers, shoemakers, barbers and even a hatter.”

In addition, Carthagena drew the interest of Quakers who set up an agricultural and mechanical trades school called the Emlen Institute nearby.

Leigh purchased about 3,000 acres of land on which the Freedpeople were to settle, aiming for 40 acres per family with additional money for housing, tools and other supplies. Even before those purchases were complete, however, there was an inkling of the coming opposition. After hearing rumors about the land sales, state lawmakers passed resolutions to consider banning Black migrants outright.

A road sign leading to the Rossville settlement. (Photo by Nick Evans for Ohio Capital Journal.)

After the mob

After being denied their land in Mercer County, the Freedpeople first set up camp on a large farm outside Piqua, Ohio. That city and the Miami County seat of Troy were better established settlements, with bustling commercial and industrial interests. White residents there didn’t oppose the Freedpeople as vehemently because they could use the labor.

Still, they weren’t welcomed with open arms.

Those that settled in Piqua built homes across the river in an unincorporated settlement called Rossville. And while that boundary was porous and softened over time, Kris Lee said the distinction persisted.

“I was growing up in the 70s,” he explained, “but we knew our place. We knew what to say, we knew where we could go and couldn’t go.”

Lee is one of the Randolph descendants and he grew up in Rossville. “I lived up on the hill,” he said, pointing up the road. With a broad grin, he described how their home had dirt floors and an outhouse, but he grew up happy.

Lee is now the mayor of Piqua.

“Neither of my parents are alive today, but they would have been tickled pink,” he said. “A kid that was born in Rossville, a descendant of the Randolph slaves, is now mayor of the city of Piqua — it’s a great story.”

Piqua Mayor Kris Lee speaking at the African Jackson Cemetery in Rossville. (Photo by Nick Evans for Ohio Capital Journal.)

Over the years, the people who settled in Rossville built a community, but they had to start from zero. As May writes, Leigh was eventually able to sell the Mercer County land, but what he was able to get for the Freedpeople was far less than the 40 acres he was aiming for. Instead of starting out in Ohio together, the group was spread out across two counties. And in places like Rossville, the Freedpeople often worked as domestic servants or manual laborers rather than working for themselves on their own land.

Lee, a few other descendants and local historians met at the African Jackson Cemetery in Rossville last week. The sloping lawn has a few trees and a historical marker, but there are only a handful of headstones.

Gravestones at the African Jackson Cemetery in Rossville. (Photo by Nick Evans for Ohio Capital Journal.)

“There are about 130 people interred in the ground,” Larry Hamilton explained. He’s a local historian and retired teacher who spent 30 years teaching Black history at Piqua High School.

“The headstones were vandalized, and people came through and kicked them over and all kinds of things happened,” Paisha Thomas explained. Her seventh great-grandfather was Johnson Crowder, one of the Randolph Freedpeople, and she sits on the board of a group working to rehabilitate the cemetery. They recently received a $75,000 grant from Miami County to carry out that work.

“The restoration will restore the honor dignity of all of them,” Thomas said.

“At least those that we know are buried here,” Hamilton added. “There may have been some burials that may not have been totally marked.”

Later, standing in the church she came to as a girl, Thomas explained “my hope would be complete restoration, and an opportunity for the descendants of John Randolph’s Freedpeople to experience land ownership at its fullest.”

“I understand that this is America,” she added, “So I get that that’s not going to be easy. I think, though, that we have already won because now everyone is aware of an erased story.”

Paisha Thomas in her childhood church. (Photo by Nick Evans for Ohio Capital Journal.)

Back to Mercer County

There’s a park now at the New Bremen canal lock where the Freedpeople arrived back in 1846. A sculpture of a boy with a mule sits along the banks on the old towpath, and there are massive timber gates built to match the originals.

Speaking on a small footbridge, Rep. Jarrells compared the incident to coming home from a vacation and finding some stranger had taken possession of your home.

“What if they were given what they rightfully deserved?” he asked, “How (much) further would they have been as a people?”

While Jarrells is unequivocal about the repugnance of what happened here, he struggles to wrap his arms around the magnitude of the injustice. The way he himself wrestles with how to respond highlights of the difficulty of the task he’s set himself.

“The first step is acknowledging that it happened,” Jarrells argued.

He insisted simply putting up a historical marker doesn’t cut it and won’t “relieve the cruelty” of what occurred.

But after acknowledging the incident, the state’s path gets complicated. The 3,200 acres Judge Leigh purchased amount to a scattered checkerboard of parcels near Carthagena, about eight miles west of New Bremen. Researchers contend it’s possible to track them down, but it’s not clear yet who owns them and what they’re doing with them.

All the same, Jarrells argued, “there has to be some land there that we own as a state.”

Could it be handed to a non-profit, he wonders aloud, to build a memorial or a museum? What about transferring title to a foundation that would rent it back to the state? The organization might use those dollars to provide scholarships for descendants or give them seed funding to start a business.

Larry Hamilton speaking in the African Jackson Cemetery in Rossville. (Photo by Nick Evans for Ohio Capital Journal.)

Added to the challenge of tracking down land and settling on what to do with it is the question of finding descendants. Hamilton’s guess? There are tens of thousands who could trace their heritage to those initial 383 freed people. Some of them might now even know it.

Hamilton described the descendants of one Freedman named Henry Clay finding out only after getting their DNA tested. Clay was so light that his freedom papers described him as “bright.”

“And he was consequently able to pass,” Hamilton explained. “He entered the Civil War before Black people were actually able to enlist, and after the war, he didn’t come back to Piqua, he went to Iowa.”

Clay’s descendants had never known his heritage, and they’d never heard of the Randolph Freedpeople story.

What’s more, Jarrells faces the challenge of convincing Ohio’s conservative supermajority that it’s a good idea in the first place.

In a written statement, Gov. Mike DeWine’s spokesman Dan Tierney said “we have had initial conversations with him about this issue. We look forward to working with the representative on ideas to honor the legacy and history of the Randolph Freedpeople.”

But while the governor’s office lands somewhere close to supportive but noncommittal, Republican lawmakers have been less inclined to wrestle with the long tail of slavery. In current session, for instance, they’ve have advanced legislation prohibiting diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, and altering curriculum to avoid “divisive concepts.”

Jarrells rejected an argument that could come from critics of his idea, that correcting a historical wrong might look like other efforts to reckon with the impacts of systemic racism: reparations.

“It’s not reparations, right?” he insisted, “It’s about justice, because any other family who went through the same thing, they would have received it.”

“You’re not giving somebody a handout,” he went on. “You’re giving them what they already had. I think that that’s important — to make sure we paint (that) in this conversation. This is what was already theirs in the first place.”

The aftermath

Rather than burning off frustrations, the mob standoff in New Bremen only gave white residents license for further racial animus.  After chasing off the Randolph Freedpeople, they turned on the Black residents already living in Mercer County.

Gregory May describes how in August of 1846 local white leaders met and passed a resolution stating, “every African American in the county was settled in violation of the bond requirement in the Black laws and ‘contrary to the wishes of the white population.’”

The assembly called for state laws outright prohibiting Black migrants in Ohio and warned Mercer County’s Black residents to leave by March 1 of the following year.

“We have fully determined that we will resist the settlement of Blacks and mulattos in this county to the full extent of our means,” they wrote, “the bayonet not excepted.”

A contemporary newspaper was quick to dismiss the assembly’s concerns over bond as absurd, May noted. The combined value of their property was about $2,000, “far less than the value of the land that belonged to the freedmen arriving from Virginia.”

The Randolph Freedpeople’s story was later twisted into an argument for the futility of compensating newly emancipated slaves. In this telling, offered by a Mercer County congressman named William Mungen in 1868, the Randolph Freedpeople got their land. They got cattle, tools, provisions and money, too. They were no longer on the land, Mungen said, because they were “too lazy” to work it.

That version of the story conflates the Randolph Freedpeople with the existing Black community near Carthagena, May writes, while “conceal(ing) the white violence against Black settlers.”

The Carthagena Black Cemetery with the St. Aloysius Church cemetery in the distance. (Photo by Nick Evans for Ohio Capital Journal.)

A few miles down the road from New Bremen, a Carthagena graveyard, like Rossville, offers a stark physical reminder of racial divisions. Behind a church sits row upon row of well-kept headstones. A small black fence separates that graveyard from the scattered markers that make up the Carthagena Black Cemetery.

“Well,” Hamilton said, “these are the kinds of stark examples of discrimination and exclusionary kinds of behavior or conduct on the part of people who have been privileged, and think that they have been afforded a different station in life.”

Still, even if it’s detestable, Hamilton argued, it’s part of our history. And it’s important to “acknowledge it, and try to document it and move on.”

Larry Hamilton speaking with Rep. Dontavius Jarrells, D-Columbus, at the Carthagena Black Cemetery outside New Bremen. (Photo by Nick Evans for Ohio Capital Journal.)

“And not repeat it,” Jarrells added.

Looking around the cemetery Paisha Thomas wrestles with what should be done. On the one hand, she believes descendants deserve something for 180-plus years’ worth of land ownership they lost out on. But on the other, the prospect of someone like her moving here is fraught.

“When they have to get groceries and do their living,” she said, “they’re going to be in a world that was intentionally set up for them to stay out.”

“You know, I don’t know,” she said, surveying the rolling farmland nearby. “I wouldn’t want to live out here. But I wouldn’t turn down the chance if I knew that I had protection.”

Looking forward

Whether Jarrells’ proposal takes the form of handing over land or adding a line-item in the budget, there will be some who view it as unjust. Even if the Randolph Freedpeople were wronged, it may be argued that asking the current generation to pay for an earlier one’s transgressions misplaces culpability.

It’s a familiar argument. It comes up anytime policymakers try to make good on past misdeeds. But atonement is possible. The federal government, for instance, compensated Japanese families interned during World War II.

And while some neighbors might be affronted, Piqua mayor Kris Lee’s experience suggests others wouldn’t. He explained the people of New Bremen have been nothing but receptive to him.

“Currently I’m a part-time police officer in New Bremen,” he said with a grin. “The only Black officer there.”

Before becoming mayor of Piqua, Lee spent 22 years on the city’s police force. After retiring in 2016, he picked up part-time work with the department in Anna, a few miles north, and wound up following his chief to New Bremen a few years later.

“I’m a Randolph descendant and was denied property there,” he chuckled, “and here I am patrolling the streets.”

Follow OCJ Reporter Nick Evans on Twitter.

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