Daring to Dream: Edward McCabe’s Bold Post–Civil War Hope for African Americans

Caleb Gayle recounts McCabe's life story and quest for Black self-determination, while charting American history alongside it.

Posted on May 14, 2026 in Featured Reviews

As part of our efforts to support scholarly work in pursuit of racial justice, Choice regularly reviews important current titles that consider issues of race or racism, devoting additional space to these works through long-form reviews. Doing so, we hope to underscore the urgency of these issues and to highlight promising resources. Given the relevance of this endeavor to TIE‘s mission, we have decided to begin publishing these reviews exclusively under Toward Inclusive Excellence, moving them from the Choice Picks section of Choice360.org. We hope our readers find these reviews useful for developing their personal or institutional collections. The following review considers the book Black Moses (2025) by Caleb Gayle and appears in the August 2026 issue of Choice.

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Black Moses: A Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State, by Caleb Gayle. Riverhead Books, 2025. 286p ISBN 9780593543795 $33.00, ISBN 9780593543818

Gayle (Northeastern Univ.), who previously authored We Refuse to Forget (2022), has written a groundbreaking account of Black businessman and politician Edward Preston McCabe (1850–1920). Born in Troy, New York, as a free man, and educated in Providence, Rhode Island, and Bangor, Maine, he later went to work as a clerk on Wall Street in New York City before moving to Chicago and working for the Cook County Federal Treasury. McCabe became well known as one of the up-and-coming, post-Reconstruction Black politicians who believed that something more must be done to make the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments relevant to all citizens and to realize the hopes of Black Americans, especially in the South.

To achieve this dream, McCabe followed the promise of free land in the Western territories, seeking to build a state where Black people could govern themselves and escape racism. Gayle follows McCabe’s trail first to Nicodemus, Kansas, in 1878, when the territories were aiming for statehood. Along with fellow journalists and businessmen, he created a Black colony that was eventually overtaken by surrounding white settlers, post-Confederates, and Ku Klux Klan operatives. He became county clerk and later state auditor of Kansas, but was denied a third term largely due to racial animus. At this time, he turned his attention to the Oklahoma territories, where the U.S. government was allocating “lands that had previously been guaranteed to several Indigenous nations” to free settlers (“Black, white, and Indigenous”) in what became known as the Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889 (p. 2). McCabe and William L. Eagleson, a well-known Black newspaper editor, joined forces with Charles H. Robbins, a white land speculator, to establish Langston, Oklahoma, as an all-Black settlement. McCabe also influenced the establishment of the Colored Agricultural and Normal University, later Langston University, and today the only HBCU (Historically Black College and University) in Oklahoma.

In tracing McCabe’s life and quest for Black statehood, Gayle provides a broader picture of the United States before and after the Civil War.

Once McCabe settled in Oklahoma, he became active in state politics as chief clerk and then deputy territorial auditor, although he lost his position in 1907 to a Democrat-controlled legislature that was inherently opposed to Black expansion in the territories. He left Oklahoma in 1907, attempted failed business ventures in British Columbia, and later sponsored an attempt at Black colonization in Ghana, which also failed. He died in Chicago in 1920, aged 69, and was buried in Topeka, Kansas.

In tracing McCabe’s life and quest for Black statehood, Gayle provides a broader picture of the United States before and after the Civil War. Surprisingly, he passes over much of what Abraham Lincoln was attempting to do following the Lincoln-Douglas debates in Illinois (where he argued against extending slavery into the Western territories), the hard-fought four-way presidential election of 1860, and the eventual Emancipation Proclamation, which promised the end of slavery after the Civil War. He notes Lincoln’s support of the earlier settlement of Liberia by Black people from the United States as a potential pilot test to colonize other areas abroad, such as Haiti (an experiment that failed in 1863), with Black citizens—despite opposing the expansion of slavery in the United States, Lincoln had serious doubts about Black and white people integrating and living quietly together in a post–Civil War America.

Given this context, it was extraordinary that, at the time of post-Reconstruction, McCabe believed in the dream of building economically solvent enclaves in Kansas (Nicodemus) and later Oklahoma (Langston) where Black people could live around white people and Native Americans. For this, he envisioned mass immigration from the beleaguered post–Civil War southern states (e.g., Arkansas, Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, and elsewhere) to create a Black majority in Kansas and Oklahoma that could reap political and economic benefits. For that reason alone, he was considered a “Black Moses” of his time.

Despite gaining substantial political positions at both the local and state levels in Kansas and Oklahoma, McCabe was denied further advancement in Republican state and national conventions due to racial issues affecting the entire nation at the time. One must remember the tawdry bargain in the disputed presidential election of 1876, where a congressional committee maneuvered the last electoral votes away from Democrat Samuel Tilden to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in return for the de facto ending of Reconstruction in the South, which led to ninety years of discriminatory Jim Crow laws in schools, hospitals, residences, transportation, and restaurants, among other venues. It also encouraged the Ku Klux Klan’s violent racism, which continued apace into the 1920s, prompting a national march in Washington, D.C., in 1922, almost a decade after President Woodrow Wilson’s White House screening of the highly racist film The Birth of a Nation (1915).

Gayle does a sterling job in portraying an unequal post–Civil War America through the eyes of a Black man of legal instruction, bold ideas, and a pioneering spirit.

McCabe’s final stand for equality was his long-running court case for equal rights in railroad transportation, in which he sued the five major railroad companies in an attempt to make the U.S. Supreme Court overturn the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling on separate but equal (which was really unequal in practice) railroad cars for Black and white passengers. He was denied this satisfaction at every level under the Taft administration, causing his health and spirit to deteriorate.

In recounting this narrative, Gayle does a sterling job in portraying an unequal post–Civil War America through the eyes of a Black man of legal instruction, bold ideas, and a pioneering spirit. Despite his many travails, McCabe set the way for future generations after Brown v. Board of Education (1954) regarding equality in education, transportation, and housing through integration during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.

Summing Up: Recommended. All readers.
Interdisciplinary Subjects: Racial Justice, African and African American Studies
Subject: Social & Behavioral Sciences – History, Geography & Area Studies – North America

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Andrew M. Mayer is professor emeritus at the College of Staten Island, CUNY. Previously, he was the night librarian for The Washington Post, head librarian for the New York Law Journal, and senior research editor for Wenner Media and Condé Nast Traveler. He has published over 100 professional book reviews for newspapers and academic journals.

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Be sure to also check out Choice’s archive of featured reviews. We publish a new one every month. A few related ones are:

	Joel Wendland Liu’s review of Black Scare / Red Scare (2023): “Entangled Legacies of Exploitation: How Capitalism and Racism Converge in American History“
	Derek Charles Catsam’s review of The Internal Colony (2025): “The Colony at Home: How Decolonization Abroad Shaped Black Politics in Postwar America“
	Duncan Jamieson’s review of African Founders (2022): “A New Founding Narrative: African Influences in the Creation of America“

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Header image is a detail of This is Harlem by Jacob Lawrence. Courtesy of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. © 2021 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. For more information, click here.

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