“Over two decades before the country—at least the Union—declared the issue of slavery settled, two Black men, Frederick Douglass and Henry Highland Garnet, both formerly enslaved, had a vigorous debate in a northern church in 1843. The question before them: “How can we be truly free?” That question animated the next sixty years of debates—what ought we to do with the Black people enslaved before Emancipation and, most important, after it? And it took nearly forty years for Edward McCabe to answer this question with his own innovation: escape the North as vigorously as a Black person would want to escape the South and begin again on the western frontier. Beginning again for McCabe would mean establishing a state run by Black people for Black people, with their white counterparts tolerated only at a minimum.”