exoduster

noun

1. (US, also, attributive, historical)An African-American who migrated from a state along the Mississippi River in the Southern United States to Kansas, mostly between 1879 and 1881 during the Reconstruction era.

   “Ingalls [John James Ingalls?] wants congress to appropriate money for the colored exodusters. It strikes us that for a man who is holding on by a strip of his eye-brow, Ingalls is a little too unanimous.”

   “Q [by Zebulon Baird Vance]. Goldsboro is about the center of this movement of the colored people to the West?—A. Yes, sir; a large number of ‘exodusters’ have left my section.”

   “Kansas was diligently searched to find, if possible, some dissatisfied "exoduster," who, for the sake of his witness fees and mileage to Washington, would swear that he was dissatisfied with his new home, and wished himself back in Dixie. Perhaps a half dozen such were found, and their testimony has been paraded before the Senate with tremulous emotion by the Senator from Indiana.”

   “For perhaps ten seconds John contemplated a sudden and complete exodus with himself as the exoduster.”

2. (alt-of)Alternative letter-case form of exoduster.

   “Etcheson has written a remarkably thorough social and political history of the Kansas conflict, from the debates over the Kansas-Nebraska Act to the Exoduster migration in the decades after the war.”

   “Hoping to escape poverty and discrimination, some former slaves moved west. One group, the Exodusters, moved to the Kansas prairie during the mid-1870s. […] Like white farmers, the Exodusters fought with cattlemen.”