Martha Bayles at Salmagundi:
History is replete with catastrophes that destroy more lives than can ever be counted. The living build memorials and observe holidays, but also needed are stories—or better, histories—in which a few well-drawn individuals can stand in for the rest. Both Amy Godine’s Black Woods and David Nicholson’s The Garretts of Columbia are histories of this kind. By making vivid the experience of particular men, women, and children whose brief time on earth was blighted by slavery, civil war, and stony-faced injustice, they pay heartfelt homage to the many.
I say “heartfelt” because both books seem written out of love. In Godine’s case, the love appears to be her adopted home, the Adirondack Mountains, where in 1846 a wealthy landowner and philanthropist named Gerrit Smith offered 3,000 grants of 50 acres each to freedmen and fugitives living in New York City. The idea was to rescue Black families from urban vice, disease, and racism, and teach them to become yeoman farmers. A further goal was to enable them to achieve the amount of land equity—$250—required for Black men to be granted the franchise, and thereby encourage them to vote for Smith’s Liberty Party, which sought to end slavery by constitutional means.
more here.
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