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 tells the extraordinary story of Peter Caulder, a free African American settler in the Arkansas Territory. After serving as a rifleman in the war of 1812, Caulder established a community of free-born African Americans in northern Arkansas and was largely accepted by his white neighbors until an 1859 expulsion law forced the community to flee the state and settle in Missouri. Like many frontier people, Peter Caulder was unschooled and signed his name only with a mark. To document such a man’s life, and to determine how he thrived within a slave society and came to join a free black backwoods community, Billy Higgins has skillfully interwoven oft-neglected primary sourcesmany of which are reproduced herefrom around the country; and through the information revealed in censuses, tax records, sutler’s account books, army returns, folk stories, land warrants, traveler’s journals, and newspaper notices, a fascinatingand groundbreakingaccount of Caulder, his family, his friends, and his community has emerged.

Billy D. Higgins has been a professor of history at the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith since 1993. This is his first book. His essays on African American culture before and after the Civil War have appeared in Freedom’s Odyssey: African American History Essays from Phylon and the Arkansas Historical Quarterly.