Decades before the Civil War, Turkey Hill in St. Clair County, Illinois was a settlement of free Negroes.

Sarah Cato’s grandfather, Ruges Freeman, used to talk about her black ancestors coming to the Illinois Territory in 1818, but the St. Louis woman didn’t get the full story until recently. She was stunned to learn that her great-great-grandfather, Richmond Freeman, was not a slave trying to escape, but a free black man making the long journey from Virginia to St. Clair County on the back of a wagon with a group of pioneers.

“I think he came chasing a girl,” Sarah said, noting that Richmond later married Mary Graham, whom he likely met in Maryland or Virginia before the trip.

Sarah also got more information about a small settlement of free blacks at Turkey Hill, between Belleville and Freeburg, where the Freemans lived. It was protected by white families, some headed by ministers opposed to slavery.

This 1874 map shows property lines in the Turkey Hill area, near Belleville, including land owned by Richmond Freeman and the Hawes family, as well as the African school.

Richmond and Mary were able to buy farmland, build a home, raise livestock, attend church, rear 14 children and establish an “African school.” Eventually, Richmond accumulated 320 acres.

“They lived a good life,” said Mera Hertel, 45, of Belleville, a local historian who also has done research on the settlement. “They wouldn’t have been able to do that anywhere else.”

Slavery wasn’t abolished in the United States until after the Civil War in 1865. Illinois joined the union as a “free” state in 1818, but laws allowed slavery and indentured servitude to continue under a wide range of circumstances.

Throughout the country, free blacks were susceptible to being kidnapped and sold into slavery or losing their freedom by violating “Black Codes” and other regulations.

“You had to have papers proving you were free,” Sarah said. “You had to carry them on your person at all times, subject to challenge and surrender of those papers for examination by any white person who demanded them. That could be a drunk or a child.

“You couldn’t sell liquor. You couldn’t own a dog. You couldn’t own a gun. You couldn’t participate in a militia. You couldn’t serve on a jury or testify against a white person.”

CHALLENGING RESEARCH
Sarah is a retired attorney. She returned to school and earned a master’s degree in American culture studies at Washington University in 2013. Her thesis examined the lives of free blacks in the 1800s, using the Freemans as a case study.

But researching black family trees is a challenging process. Slaves were considered property, not human beings, so records are scarce. It was illegal for blacks to learn to read or write in most places.

Records that do exist often refer to slaves only by their first names, first names paired with last names of their white masters, African names or nicknames.

“Some enslavers thought it was comical to give their slaves classical names, so you’d have a woman named Cassiopeia or a man named Julius Caesar,” Sarah said. “But that wasn’t what they were called at home. That wasn’t what their parents named them.”

Historians in Botetourt County, Va., helped Sarah find Richmond’s parents, Abram (or Abraham) and Judea (or Juda) in the early 1800s registries of free Negroes. Abram was identified as a laborer on the farm of Edward Mitchell.

Edward and his brother, Samuel, were among the pioneers who traveled to St. Clair County with Richmond in 1818. The caravan included an estimated 60 people in several families.

“They left because of slavery,” Sarah said. “Edward and Samuel were Methodist ministers. They didn’t believe in slavery.”

Sarah also found handwritten indenture papers, showing that Richmond indentured himself to Edward for six months after arriving in Illinois, signing with an “X.” It may have been a way for him to borrow money in exchange for labor.

Sarah met Mera at a black genealogical conference in St. Louis while working on her thesis.

Mera already had done research on the Freemans. She had Mary’s 1874 obituary from the Belleville Weekly Advocate, reporting her death at 73 after a series of strokes.

“The thing that stands out in my mind is that Mary Graham Freeman walked all the way from Maryland barefoot, and that was the year without a summer,” Mera said. “A lot of people didn’t make it, but she did.”

Mera was referring to 1816 when North America experienced dramatic temperature swings and frost all summer in places. It was part of worldwide climate abnormalities, blamed on a volcano eruption in Southeast Asia the year before.

Mary came to St. Clair County with a friend of the Mitchells named Lloyd Belt. She was indentured to him, probably in exchange for room and board, until she wed Richmond on December 23, 1819. Edward performed the ceremony, according to their handwritten marriage certificate.

“It was unusual for ministers to marry slaves or ex-slaves back then,” Mera said. “Typically, they just jumped over a broomstick and said, ‘We’re man and wife.’”

HIDDEN CEMETERY
Mera is an employee of the Illinois State Archaeological Survey. She learned about the free black settlement at Turkey Hill about 10 years ago from the late Harold Miller, a farmer who knew the location of its old cemetery and African school.

Mera and local genealogist Judy Jennings walked the property, next to Julius J. Knobeloch Woods Nature Preserve, near Dunlap and Rentschler roads.

Historian Mera Hertel’s map shows the Freeman property in the 1800s, including the site of a cemetery and school for black children in the Turkey Hill area, near Belleville.

There were no tombstones, only boulders, daffodils, and yucca plants, which were typical grave markers in early black cemeteries.

“Slaves would often bring yucca seeds with them on their journey from the South and even the Indies,” Mera wrote in her report. “For the enslaved, it was something that could have been easily smuggled and ‘owned,’ in an affront to their bondage, as they were not allowed to own property of any kind.”

The curator for the St. Clair County Historical Society, also knew about the settlement. It came up when he was studying Napoleon Hawes, who moved to Turkey Hill as a child with his white father and mixed-race mother in the 1850s.

Mary tutored Napoleon at the African school. As an adult, he became an industrial worker and union activist. “Being a mixed-race individual in the decades after the Civil War, Napoleon Hawes likely faced discrimination in almost every facet of his life,” Will wrote in a newsletter article.

Sarah is finished with her thesis, but she plans to keep researching the Freemans. Her most pressing question now is whether great-great-great-grandfather Abram was ever a slave and, if so, how he earned his freedom.

Sarah suspects Edward and Samuel Mitchell’s father freed him, possibly for accompanying them into battle during the Revolutionary War and acting heroically, which would have been an acceptable reason for manumission in those days.

Descendants of Richmond and Mary Freeman include their son, Charles, one of 14 children, and his wife, Ruth, who are all buried in Greenwood Cemetery in North St. Louis.

“Trust and believe, if I find out it was because he served in the Revolutionary War, my next step will be the Daughters of the American Revolution,” she said.

By Terri Maddox
Edited by Neil Gale, Ph.D.

John L. Jones, born a free Negro, used his house and office as a stop on the Underground Railroad through Chicago, Illinois.

John L. Jones, apprentice tailor, writer, and politician, was born in 1817 in Green City, North Carolina to a German father and an Negro mother. Born a free man, he taught himself to read and write. Jones started his own tailoring business and eventually became one of the wealthiest Negroes in the ante-bellum United States.

John L. Jones

After moving to Chicago, Illinois, in 1845, Jones used his house and office, located on 119 Dearborn Street (today: 609 S. Dearborn), as a stop on the Underground Railroad through Chicago. His home was known as a meeting place for local and national abolitionist leaders including Frederick Douglass and John Brown. He also authored a number of influential anti-slavery pamphlets. 

Jones fiercely opposed an anti-immigration provision in the Illinois Constitution of 1848 which would prohibit “free persons of color” from settling in Illinois and bar slaveholders from bringing slaves into Illinois to free them.

Jones pursued the right of equal citizenship and equality before the law “whether his face be black or white,” citing the refusal of the founders to use the word “white” in the U.S. Constitution’s text. Pressure by Jones and like-minded Illinoisans was not enough to halt the provision’s inclusion in the Constitution.

But that setback did not weaken the resolve of Jones to fight Illinois’ black codes. Despite prohibiting slavery within its borders, Illinois kept a scrutinizing eye on its black population through the black laws. According to a contemporary article in Harper’s Weekly, the black laws “were as much a part of the code of slavery as any law of Arkansas or Mississippi.”

The draconian black laws, among other deprivations, prohibited black men from filing suit or being sued; barred blacks from testifying against whites; presumed a black person to be a slave unless he or she could prove to be free; prohibited a black or mulatto from another state from staying in Illinois beyond 10 days, subjecting offenders to arrest, a $50 fine and removal from the state; provided that offenders unable to pay the fine would be sold at auction into servitude until the debt was satisfied; denied black men the right to vote; and denied blacks the right to an education.

On November 4, 1864, John Jones distributes his pamphlet, “The Black Laws of Illinois and a Few Reasons Why They Should Be Repealed,” spurring the General Assembly to repeal all of them.

He called on the General Assembly “to erase (the black laws) from your statute book.” In the 16-page pamphlet, Jones discussed the laws’ evils, relying on legal, economic, moral, and constitutional arguments.

For example, Jones railed against arresting and forcing undocumented blacks “into involuntary servitude, without having committed any crime or offense except being born black” as a violation of due process and imprisonment without trial by jury.

Jones’ essay, according to the Chicago Evening Journal, “has exposed (the black codes) inhumanity and injustice in an able manner … He has the sympathy of all right-thinking men.”

A statewide petition drive followed, and by January, thousands of whites had succumbed to Jones’ campaign.

Within weeks, Gov. Richard J. Oglesby signed the bill repealing the black laws.

The day the repeal took effect, blacks throughout Illinois celebrated. In Springfield, Jones received the honor of igniting a cannon fuse symbolically ending the black laws.

Jones accomplished what no Illinois lawyer who opposed the black laws could. That Jones was black makes this story even more compelling.

Jones learned to read and write with the help of attorney Lemanuel C. Paine Freer, a vehement foe of slavery who befriended Jones soon after Jones arrived in Chicago. In 1869, when blacks in Illinois became eligible for political office, the governor appointed Jones as the state’s first black notary public.

Shortly after the ratification of the 15th Amendment in 1870, allowing blacks the right to vote in elections, Jones won his first of two terms as a Cook County commissioner, becoming the first black person elected to public office in Illinois.

The end of the black laws did not address the poverty caused by the years that African-Americans had to submit to them. Jones recognized this. He noted, “though the laws are gone, the effects are still visible.”

Jones dedicated his life not only to liberating his people from the curse of the black laws but also helping them surmount the terrible cost in terms of human suffering that the laws inflicted.

Reelected to a full three-year term in 1872, Jones was defeated in his 1875 reelection bid. John Jones died on May 31, 1879, and was buried at Graceland Cemetery in Cook County, Illinois.

Compiled by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.