| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Southern Seed, Northern Soil: African-American Farm Communities in the Midwest, 1765–1900. By Stephen A. Vincent. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. xx, 224 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-253-33577-9.)

This finely crafted, solidly researched study focuses on the origins, life, and commemoration of two nineteenth-century agricultural communities founded by African Americans on the Indiana frontier. The founders of the Beech and Roberts settlements were free people of color largely from the Northampton region of North Carolina who migrated to the Old Northwest as racial antagonisms increased after 1820. Stephen A. Vincent demonstrates clearly that land ownership was the chief characteristic that united those free blacks. Free long before the American Revolution, in which they fought on the Patriot side, the Roberts family prospered during the postwar period. Vincent argues that their mixed-race status enabled their progress. Though they quickly adapted to the new cotton culture, free blacks in North Carolina experienced harassment from whites who angrily responded to external threats of slave revolt and decreasing local land opportunities. . . .

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