Blacks Settling In Upstate New York

Excerpt taken from The Life and Letters of John Brown: Liberator of Kansas, and Martyr of Virginia edited by Franklin Benjamin Sanborn.

"On the anniversary of the West India emancipation, August 1, 1846, Gerrit Smith, the agrarian emancipationist of New York, had offered to give one hundred thousand acres of his wild land in that State to such [black] families, fugitive slaves or citizens of New York, as would occupy and cultivate them in small farms."

"Two years later (April 8, 1848) when a few of these families had established themselves in the Adirondack wilderness, John Brown visited Mr. Smith at Peterboro, New York.....".