As Americans quarrel in public squares, real and online, writers are looking back at our history to make sense of it all. Caleb Gayle rises to the challenge in his eloquent, if discursive, “Black Moses,” chronicling activist Edward McCabe’s struggles against post-Civil War racism.
Raised free in the Northeast, McCabe (1850-1920) came of age in the flux of Reconstruction — whip-smart, a “problem solver and a doer” whose politesse and organizational skills masked a burning ambition. Our knowledge of his youth is sparse, but his adult résumé was atypical: While clerking on Wall Street and in Chicago he absorbed the protocols of capitalism and networking, which he applied to a vision of Black liberation.
McCabe and a friend, Abram T. Hall, Jr., focused on Oklahoma, then called Indian Territory. McCabe first traveled to Kansas, a base where he evolved his concept for a Black-only state. He married Sarah Bryant in 1881 and grew his role as a grassroots Republican politician. His mission: to help the formerly enslaved, known as “Exodusters,” out of the South.
“Salvation was collective, because it was for a coherent group: Black people in the South. It was terrestrial because they planned to find salvation in the real land of Kansas,” the author notes. “As Reconstruction collapsed, Black people had to act — and quickly.”
Gayle’s narrative braids his vigorous research with the work of scholars such as historian Nell Irvin Painter, skipping around as he fleshes out the context informing McCabe’s story: rampant violence surrounding the Kansas-Nebraska Act (to determine if there would be slavery in those states), Lincoln’s notion of repatriating freed slaves to Liberia and McCabe’s maneuvers among late 19th-century politicos like President Benjamin Harrison. This structure opens space to consider the confluence of events and ideology that inspire Gayle’s arc.
“No longer would McCabe prize equality but rather a nationalism, a supremacy of his race over matters in the state he hoped to make theirs,” he observes. McCabe was determined to “build another ‘Hayti.’”
McCabe joined forces with newspaperman William Eagleson to lobby Harrison for Oklahoma’s admission to the Union as a Black state. Gayle depicts this Washington interlude as grand theater, tinged with strife. McCabe “went about soliciting investments and donations (called subscribing) from elite Blacks and sympathetic white political power brokers to finance the operation.” Gayle, too, exposes McCabe’s colonist motivations in the service of a brutalized minority, seeking Native property.
He had manage to establish three towns before the notorious land run of 1891, when settlers swept across the plains at the behest of Harrison and others within the GOP. McCabe’s “hope in the Republican Party was evaporating. His frustration over the misalignment between his desired pace of progress and that of his white Republican colleagues had been simmering in the background.”