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Terra Nullius: Guilford College before Guilford College

Damon Akins History Department Guilford College 31 August 2018

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Guilford College is a hard place to pin down. It’s Quaker settlement in the slaveholding south in the eighteenth century makes it distinct both from other Quaker settlements in Indiana and Pennsylvania, and from much of the rest of the south. But its elusiveness precedes that.

Prior to the settlement of the Pennsylvania Quakers, the area was sparsely and seasonally inhabited by the Keyauwee and the Saura (often spelled Cheraw, and occasionally applied to the Keyauwee as well). Both groups shared dialects of the Siouan language group, a testament to long ago migrations and cultural contact between indigenous peoples from the northern plains and the upper southeast. Keyauwee territory was further south in present-day Randolph County, while the Saura held territory along the Dan and Haw Rivers in present-day Rockingham, Stokes and Guilford County. The two most important Saura settlements were called, appropriately, Upper Sauratown (near present day Walnut Cove, Stokes County) and Lower Sauratown.1

The idea of fixed, bounded territories unified under a centralized political system is a European import to the Americas, and often a poor tool to describe indigenous expressions of territoriality. Indigenous peoples organized themselves into a variety of polities, from villages, bands, tribes, nations, to confederacies. They usually cohered around a shared language, but not always. The Saura and Keyauwee were Siouan-speaking, along with the Saponi, Tutelo, and Catawba to the east and south. Sharing a language did not make them allies, but it did suggest some general cultural affiliation. In some ways this echoes the much more well-documented Muskogee (Creek), whose territory was in present-day Alabama and Georgia. Among the Creek, one’s talwa (or tribal town) defined one’s identity. Talwas were grouped into clusters — Upper and Lower Creek, and identity was reckoned maternally, creating a fairly ‘open’ culture that nonetheless retained a strong sense of Creek identity.

European settler colonial practices altered indigenous life, often forcing nations or tribes to relocate, break into smaller bands, or join together into larger confederacies. In the case of the Saura and Keyauwee, all of these seemed to have happened. The web of economic and cultural ties between towns and peoples formed by seasonal rounds, discrete agricultural and hunting areas, and shared cultural practices connected people to the land in ways that was often invisible to European expectations of fixed territories with clear boundaries. It also helped indigenous people adapt in order to survive. As European settlement and the indigenous conflicts it had ignited pushed south and west into western Virginia and the Piedmont region in the eighteenth century, the indigenous people of the region formed a series of confederacies, shifting alliances, and cultural intermixing to survive the population loss brought by war and disease. The Saura and Keyauwee faced raids by the Iroquois to their north, forcing them to move south around 1711. In 1715, the outbreak of the Yamasee War, which swept up many of the Native tribes and nations of the region, forced the Saura and Keyauwee to move further south and seek shelter with the Catawba, their enemy. The war decimated their numbers. From over 1,000 (maybe 1,200), by the end of the war, the Saura and Keyauwee numbered around 500. They formalized their alliance with the Catawba after the war to protect themselves from renewed attacks by the Iroquois, but the alliance was insufficient to protect them. Over the fifty years following the war, their population declined to about 50-60.

Historian Ethen Arnett, writing in the 1970s claimed that "only a few of [the Saura and Keyauwee] were seen walking around after the 1740's and the 1750’s,” and those populations centered around the Buffalo Church area.2

We have to treat such observations skeptically given the deep trope in US history of the disappearing Indian. It is a useful fiction, serving both to “honor” Indians, but only as victims of modern society, whose purported disappearance justified settler colonialism. But in this case, it also seems to depict a historical reality — that directly and indirectly, European settler society fundamentally disrupted Saura and Keyauwee life with devastating demographic effects.

Lore has it that the Quakers purchased the land where they established New Garden Meeting from the Saura, but records are elusive. Hiram Hilty described it this way: “In 1764, a committee was appointed to investigate any Indian claims against lands occupied by New Garden Friends, but after two fruitless months the matter was dropped. The Indians had long since gone. In 1791, however, as Friends pressed westward, a minute was adopted that "no Friend settle ... on Indian land unpurchased.”3 [emphasis added]

So, how do we assess the claims made by the Quaker settlers of the region? First, the Quakers were asking questions others were not. They wanted to acquire the land honestly, which can’t be said for most settler societies. But they encountered a greatly weakened polity, making it difficult to fit indigenous communities into their understanding of the authority of territoriality. Even beyond the often incommensurable differences in the ways Europeans and Natives thought about land ownership, in this case, Native land tenure was in a state of rapid, defensive flux.

But at the same time, almost certainly, a group of people or peoples in the region, who understood the land that Guilford College now occupies to be theirs — whether in outright ownership, or in usufruct — came to find it controlled by someone else as a result of a transaction they weren’t party to. And it is this process that is so easy to miscast as inevitable. Hilty wrote, “It was to this ancient Indian settlement, now rapidly filling up with Euro- Americans, that Thomas Beals came to make a home for his family sometime after 1748.” Hilty, writing in the 1980s, casts Indian settlement as “ancient,” rhetorically locating Indians in the past, while naturalizing the process of settler colonialism by describing it like water, “rapidly filling up” an empty and open space. It is important to point out that, while the Saura and Keyauwee no longer exercise political control over the region, their ancestors continue to live in the region, first as refugees, now as kin among the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation (Orange / Alamance Counties), the Waccamaw, (Bladen / Columbus Counties), the Catawba in South Carolina, and numerous other indigenous communities.4

There is no way to easily assess the Quaker’s relationship with the indigenous people of the area now occupied by Guilford College. Quaker settlers in the mid-eighteenth century wanted to purchase land legitimately from its Indian “owners,” but they found that the effects of settler colonialism (of which they were a part) had reached the Indians of the region before they did.

Footnotes:

1 The exact location of Lower Sauratown is somewhat elusive. It set along the southern (right) bank of the Dan River, east of (what is now) Eden, NC. I really just wanted to work “East of Eden” in there.

2 Ethen Arnett, The Saura and Keyawee in the Land that became Guilford, Randolph and Rockingham (1975).

3 Hiram Hilty, New Garden Friends Meeting: The Christian People Called Quakers (1983, revised edition, 2001) siting New Garden Monthly Meeting Minutes, January 28, 1792.

4 I have included this sentence because of the importance of emphasizing, in Gerald Vizenor’s rich term, the survivance of indigenous people. The narrative trope of the disappearing Indian is so powerful that if we say nothing, we assent to its power. However, I am somewhat uncomfortable of too casually linking tribal communities in the present with those of the past. Polities pass; people survive.

Ecologies of Resistance: The Underground Railroad Ethnobotany Project

By Tony N. VanWinkle June 14, 2022 -

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The Underground Railroad by Charles T. Webber, 1893 (Cincinnati Art Museum/ Wikimedia)

“Gone are the century-old definitions of the Underground Railroad dominated by images of shivering, frightened fugitive slaves. Fading away are the biased images of solitary men, criminalized for escaping slavery, usually on foot, and aided by sympathetic White abolitionists working within a loosely organized network dominated by kindly Quakers.” – Cheryl Janifer LaRoche.

The above passage from Cheryl Janifer LaRoche’sFree Black Communities and the Underground Railroad: Geographies of Resistance (2014) is particularly fitting for the engagement that follows. The Underground Railroad Ethnobotany project is a nascent framework for investigating and interpreting ethnobotanical agency among freedom seekers at the site of the Guilford College Woods, in Greensboro, North Carolina, a well-known “station” in the Underground Railroad network. Guilford College was founded by the Society of Friends (Quakers) in 1837. Uncomplicated historical narratives centering the abolitionist

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heroics of “kindly Quakers” have, until recently, “written African American agency out of one of the central episodes of their historical being,” as LaRoche asserts (10). This tendency has recently been challenged from within a small liberal arts college reckoning with this past, through an institutional lineage of critical scholarship and student engagement, as well as multi-institutional collaboration through the Universities Studying Slavery Consortium. This work contributes directly to the destabilization of such stories through its insistence on the agency of freedom seekers and their free black accomplices, people whose names have been mostly invisible in the “century-old definitions” of the Underground Railroad. A recent manifestation of these efforts is the dedication, on March 25, 2022, of a historical marker commemorating the legacy of Lavina Curry, who as free black woman employed as a washerwoman at New Garden Boarding School (becoming Guilford College in 1888), used her husband’s “free papers” to aid at least fifteen unfree men in their refusal to live as the property of another.

The Underground Railroad Ethnobotany project is a parallel public intervention, one that similarly seeks to challenge the “images of shivering, frightened fugitive slaves,” in this instance, through the multi-stranded legacy of ecologies of antislavery resistance and the associated botanical agency asserted by freedom seekers, gained through collective experience and struggle within the greater African diasporic community in the Americas. To begin, however, it should be said that this is not to suggest that freedom seekers were never frightened, nor does their deep knowledge and understanding of wild plants and animals suggest they never felt the pangs of hunger. Like LaRoche’s geographies of resistance, wherein “landscape, terrain, landforms and natural shelters, as well as settlements and houses” (2) form a palimpsest of known landmarks that freedom seekers actively and expertly navigated along escape routes, ecologies of resistance indicate the exercise of knowledge and agency at the more intimate species level. Human-plant solidarities formed in historical relationships and deployed in acts of refusal become one of many autochthonous tools in the enactment of what Katherine McKittrick (2013) calls a “differential mode of survival.” Such a mode, McKittrick explains, “must be understood alongside complex negotiations of time, space, and terror” and the “interlocking workings of dispossession and resistance” (3). Through understanding ecologies of resistance as negotiated spaces of freedom and agency, we can begin to see counter-histories forged in partnership with other species, comprising a reservoir of eco-cultural resourcefulness available to freedom seekers.

A deep knowledge of gastronomic and medicinal properties of plants (combined with hunting, trapping, and fishing skills) constituted a major instrument of survival and resistance (“survivance,” to borrow Gerald Vizenor’s phrase) for freedom seekers traversing the natural ecosystems along routes of the Underground Railroad. This knowledge was accumulated over two hundred years of adapting the flora and fauna of the Americas to the ethnobotanical systems of African-descended peoples. While this occurred in part through extended interactions with the Native American populations, it was also facilitated through translating North American flora through the lens of preexisting African ethnobotanical understandings.

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As Judith Carney’s work (2003) points out, several genera of plants are common to both Africa and the Americas, and as such would have been identifiable to enslaved peoples newly arriving in the latter. Furthermore, through the Columbian Exchange initiated a century before the Transatlantic Slave Trade, peoples of West Africa would have been familiar with many New World crops and weed species from direct interaction and experience.

The ethnobotanical praxis of freedom seekers had its antecedents in maroon subsistence systems and in the provision grounds of enslaved communities. Maroons, runaway enslaved peoples, often located their free settlements in harsh and agriculturally marginal peripheral ecologies, including mountainous areas, swamps, and deep forests. They could of course maintain that precarious freedom only if they could take care of their own subsistence needs. This they did with decided expertise and elegance, as the work of Carney & Rosomoff (2011) demonstrates. In the Caribbean and Brazil, livestock often played a key role, but so too did a complex mixture of crops (of both African and American origins) and wild plant foods and medicines. As Carney & Rosomoff assert, “The synthesis of knowledge systems from the Old and New World tropics, initially forged in plantation food fields and then adapted to swamps, jungles, and mountains of their secluded refuges, was indispensable for maroon efforts to remain free” (98). This is analogous to what archaeologist Daniel Sayers (2016), in studying the historic maroon communities of the Great Dismal Swamp, straddling the present border of North Carolina and Virginia, calls a “Praxis Mode of Production.” This mode of wresting sustenance from the margins of the plantation world is constitutive of a constellation of counter-plantation strategies that stood in opposition to the capitalist market values of a plantation system that reduced bodies and ecologies alike to logics of exploitation and extraction.

Swamp and mountain settlements offered an opportunity to reassert generative multi-species entanglements–ecologies of resistance–in which “persons . . . gained agency by combining with ecological forces” (Allewaert 2013: 30). Telescoping between the micro and macro levels, between “complex negotations of time, space, and terror,” landscapes and their plant assemblages constituted spaces in which to engage in the “praxis mode of production,” a practical application of knowledge and skill that served simultaneously as a habitus of freedom. Defining these embodied and emplaced entanglements, Hosbey & Roane (2021) “locate ongoing shared cultural histories of resistance through the matrix of Black ecologies in ‘untamed’ spaces. In swamps and in forests, the enslaved formed a fleeting Black commons, whereby they used their unique knowledge of the landscapes and waterscapes to extend a fugitive and transient freedom” (70). To these “untamed spaces,” closer to the core of the plantation system, we might also add what great Jamaican scholar Sylvia Wynter (1971) calls the “dual relation” of plantation and provision ground, where the latter served as yet another site of inter-species resistance. There, as Wynter writes, the “culture [of the plot, or provision ground] recreated traditional values — use values. This folk culture became a source of cultural guerilla resistance to the plantation system” (100).

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The online “micro-site” accompanying the Senator John Heinz History Center’s exhibit, From Slavery to Freedom, explores utility of these knowledge systems and skills as they served freedom seekers engaged in a complex praxis of self-liberation along the Underground Railroad network. Chapter five of the exhibit site, titled “Surviving Off The Land,” examines some specific human-plant relationships, but more generally presents evidence for ethnobotanical agency as a tool of resistance. Indeed, the authors write, “Our findings proved that there exists the skills and knowledge of plants, flora, and the environment to be a factor in the quest for freedom. It also strengthens the notion that black agency played a major part in the freedom seeker experience and that these brave souls were not totally dependent upon white help to find freedom.”

The Underground Railroad Ethnobotany Project at Guilford College is an effort to bring these strands of evidence and analysis together, to map this larger body of work on African- diasporic ethnobotany in the Americas onto the college’s 240-acre mixed forest preserve, a stretch of woods that freedom seekers actively traversed between 1819 and the end of the Civil War. In their common passage through these woods, many would have deployed the kinds of botanical agency discussed here, enlisting familiar plant allies in the service of their efforts toward freedom. The project, now in the early planning stages, will incorporate an ethnobotanical inventory of known ethnobotanical species, supported by historical and archaeological research conducted by students and faculty mentors, to produce exhibits and interpretive signage to complement the college’s already existing Underground Railroad Educational Trail. Through such work, we hope to continue recent efforts to make legible and celebrate the strength, perseverance, intelligence, and skill exercised by freedom seekers in their refusal to accept conditions of oppression and unfreedom. One of the tools through which this refusal was realized was an active deployment of the very ethnobotanical knowledge that this project hopes to make visible through the preservation and interpretation of this legacy of inter-species resistance.

USS Afternoon Plenary Slideshow African American Guilford college workers before 1962

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Presented by Gwen Gosney Erickson

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Levi Coffin’s “Reminiscences”

David Caldwell- Greensboro

The Rev. David Caldwell, while living in what is now known as Greensboro, North Carolina, is known to have owned 8 to 9 slaves, according to the 1790 and 1820 U.S. census. The price of one slave was approximately equal to 100 acres in 1800. It is unknown precisely what were his reasons for owning slaves. Perhaps indentured servants and plentiful supply of labor were unavailable, and slaves were far more economical. An alternative reason might have been to own slaves so that he could allow them as much liberty as the law would allow. The so-called slaves were in actuality free to leave should they express that desire. In 1808, Greensboro Quakers were prosecuted and convicted for liberating slaves but not compelling them to leave the State, as required by statute. Thereafter, the Quakers, and many in David Caldwell’s congregations, owned slaves, but treated them as family, and allowed them as much freedom as they desired. (Peter Kent Opper,“North Carolina Quakers: Reluctant Slaveholders,” North Carolina Historical Review 52 (January 1975): 20-36.) Families of slaves were not broken up. Any who wanted to leave for a free state could. The majority of David Caldwell’s congregations adopted this practice. (Samuel Meek Rankin, History of Buffalo Presbyterian Church and its People, privately printed, 1910.)

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http://caldwellgenealogy.com/library/biography-of-rev-david-caldwell-1725-1824-by-david-a-caldwell/⁠

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Additional Readings compiled by the National Park Service Network to Freedom Website/Underground Railroad Handbook-

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Five Steps to Understanding Freedom Seekers by Anthony Cohen – Underground Railroad Online Handbook (dickinson.edu)⁠

- Anthony Cohen

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US Constitution & Fugitive Slave Laws by Paul Finkelman – Underground Railroad Online Handbook (dickinson.edu)⁠

- Paul Finkelman

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State Laws and Freedom Seeking by H. Robert Baker – Underground Railroad Online Handbook (dickinson.edu)⁠

- H. Robert Baker

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The Abolitionist Underground by Manisha Sinha – Underground Railroad Online Handbook (dickinson.edu)⁠

- Manisha Sinha

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Religion and the Underground Railroad by Cheryl Janifer LaRoche – Underground Railroad Online Handbook (dickinson.edu)⁠

- Cheryl LaRoche

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Women on the Underground Railroad by Kate Clifford Larson – Underground Railroad Online Handbook (dickinson.edu)⁠

- Kate Clifford Larson

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Violence and Black Resistance by Kellie Carter Jackson – Underground Railroad Online Handbook (dickinson.edu)⁠

- Kellie Carter Jackson

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The Politics of Fugitive Slaves by James Oakes – Underground Railroad Online Handbook (dickinson.edu)⁠

- James Oakes

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Civil War “Contraband Camps” by Chandra Manning – Underground Railroad Online Handbook (dickinson.edu)⁠

- Chandra Manning

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Readings

Terra Nullius: Guilford College before Guilford College

Done reading? Click here. → ⁠⁠

Footnotes:

Ecologies of Resistance: The Underground Railroad Ethnobotany Project

Done reading? Click here. → ⁠⁠

USS Afternoon Plenary Slideshow African American Guilford college workers before 1962

Done reading? Click here. → ⁠⁠

Levi Coffin’s “Reminiscences”

David Caldwell- Greensboro

Additional Readings compiled by the National Park Service Network to Freedom Website/Underground Railroad Handbook-

Done reading? Click here. →
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Done reading? Click here. →
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Done reading? Click here. →
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