The Forgotten Vision of “Black Moses”
In Black Moses: A Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State, Caleb Gayle uncovers a buried history of determination, betrayal, and unfinished dreams. At its heart stands Edward McCabe, a man whose fiery ambition to carve out a state governed by and for Black Americans flickered brightly in post-Civil War America—before being extinguished by white supremacy’s relentless grip.
Gayle’s biography is more than the story of one man; it is a meditation on an entire generation’s aspiration to escape the ruins of the South and claim both land and liberty in the West. The tale feels at once distant and painfully immediate—an echo of America’s rejected possibilities and its ongoing reckoning with democracy’s exclusions.
Exodus and Aspiration
Gayle situates McCabe’s vision within the Exoduster movement, when thousands of formerly enslaved Black families fled the violence and economic desolation of the South in search of safe haven in Kansas and beyond. In their migration, Gayle argues, lay both desperation and radical hope: salvation not in the heavens, but in land and community.
McCabe seized upon this yearning and sharpened it into a political project: the creation of an authentic Black polity. He cast Oklahoma as the “New Canaan of the Colored Race,” and through sheer charisma and relentless organizing, convinced hundreds to follow.
McCabe: The Dreamsmith
Born in Troy, New York, McCabe rose from Wall Street clerk to Republican kingmaker and eventually to self-styled national advocate for Black independence. Gayle paints him as a man of rare force: courteous yet relentless, a strategist cloaked in civility, whose ambition burned incandescently beneath the polished surface.
The momentum he generated carried him all the way to the White House, where he personally petitioned President Benjamin Harrison for support in making Oklahoma a Black-governed state. For a moment, the promise glimmered. Land, freedom, and democracy on Black terms—an unprecedented experiment in self-determination—seemed within reach.
Dreams and Their Discontents
But Gayle does not romanticize McCabe’s vision. The very land McCabe promoted was stolen from Native Americans through the violence of the Trail of Tears. In reaching for liberation, McCabe collided with another people’s dispossession—raising moral complexities that still haunt his story.
More devastating still was the backlash. With Oklahoma’s statehood came literacy tests, Jim Crow laws, and the swift disenfranchisement of Black voters. What once seemed like a promised land became yet another stronghold of white supremacy. Gayle crystallizes the loss with brutal clarity: “Formal emancipation was meaningless without actual political power.”
Lessons for the Present
Gayle’s writing is both elegant and unsparing, alternating between narrative propulsion and piercing critique. He insists that McCabe’s saga is not an obscure footnote but a warning and a mirror. The dream of a Black state failed, but the desire for freedom on one’s own terms—uncontested, untarnished—remains central to the American story.
Three observations in particular stand out:
- “As Reconstruction fell apart, Black people had to move—and in a hurry.”
- “Formal emancipation was meaningless without actual political power.”
- “McCabe’s dream is a cautionary tale about the dangers of one oppressed group attempting to colonize another rather than making common cause.”
An Unfinished Struggle
In the end, Black Moses is not just a biography. It is an indictment of unkept promises and an invitation to confront the silences in our national memory. Edward McCabe’s failed utopia reminds us that democracy has repeatedly been yoked to white power, and that freedom unfinished continues to reverberate.
Gayle’s work asks a hard but vital question: What happens to a nation when its most radical aspirations are left unrealized? For anyone grappling with the fractures in American democracy today, McCabe’s story carries a resonance impossible to ignore.
Because in many ways, McCabe’s dream is still America’s unfinished business.
