A Stranger and a Sojourner: Peter Caulder, Free Black Frontiersman in Antebellum Arkansas.

A Stranger and a Sojourner: Peter Caulder, Free Black Frontiersman in Antebellum Arkansas. By Billy D. Higgins. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2004. Pp. xviii, 349. $34.95, ISBN 1-55728-777-5.)

In his noteworthy chronicle of the life of Peter Caulder, a mulatto soldier and frontiersman, Billy Higgins makes the most plausible case to date that it was possible for a modest number of free blacks in the antebellum rural South to live independently alongside white yeomen in a spirit of harmony and fruitful exchange. Undeterred by the woodsman's illiteracy and his appearance in but a single private source, the author tracks his career with a tenacity and patience worthy of Caulder himself. From such rough logs as public documents, sutler account books, travelers' journals, and local histories Higgins fabricates the flavor and texture of his subject's existence.

By this reckoning, Caulder lived predominantly in a milieu of racial toleration from his birth in 1795 in the sand hills of Marion County, South Carolina, through his more than fourteen years of military service and his thirty-five-year residence in the White River hills of Marion County, Arkansas. At age nineteen, during the War of 1812, he enlisted in the army and afterward won retention in the whittled-down peacetime forces. Posted to the trans-Mississippi frontier, he was integrated into an elite unit of riflemen "without documented objections" (p. 33). As he became a skilled guide and chimney builder, poled wild rivers, helped to explore the mid-continent and establish Fort Smith, and fended off Indians and ruffians on the Arkansas frontier, Caulder worked closely with white peers. But this seemingly exemplary soldier never received a promotion or pay hike, surely a result of discrimination and a factor in his eventual decision to desert.

The fugitive attached himself to the redoubtable Hall family and their free, all-mulatto community in northern Arkansas. Yeoman to the bone, he hunted varmints and sold furs and hides, cultivated a corn crop, and tended his livestock. And with Eliza Hall, who at 14 became his wife, he raised seven children on their own self-sufficient ground. In 1859 Arkansas passed a free Negro expulsion act, the sole state to do so. Within a year Caulder and his family departed for Missouri where, apparently, he soon died. All but 8 of the more than 120 other African Americans in the community also fled.

"Race did not seem an important issue on the frontier," the author argues (p. 141). There may well have been a multi-faceted interracial dynamic at work in the White River hill community, but Higgins, for all his ingenious scholarship, finds but little support in the archival record. The debate between Ira Berlin's rather bleak depiction of free African Americans and that of more recent scholars who subscribe to C. Vann Woodward's contention that racial barriers in the rural South were more ambivalent than uniform and rigid is far from over.

Higgins's unique focus on a yeoman farmer and soldier in the frontier South sets his work apart in the still slender body of literature on free persons of color. A model bibliographical essay complements the gracefully written text. This is an admirably ambitious undertaking, rich in context and intelligent surmise.

WILLIAM CHEEK

AIMEE LEE CHEEK

San Diego State University