Word.ws English Dictionary

exoduster

Syllables: ex·o·dus·ter/ˈɛksəʊdʌstə/US/ˈɛksoʊˌdʌstəɹ/

exoduster noun: 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.

exoduster: an African-American who migrated from a state along the Mississippi River in the Southern United...
Image: Carroll's Art Gallery, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun (1)

exoduster (plural exodusters)

  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.1879 April 25, “Georgia in Congress”, in The Daily Constitution, volume XI, number 278, Atlanta, Ga.: Constitution Pub. Co., →ISSN, →OCLC, page 2, column 3
    • 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.1880 January 30, Julius A. Bonitz, witness, “Testimony of Julius A. Bonitz”, in Report and Testimony of the Select Committee of the United States Senate to Investigate the Causes of the Removal of...

Noun (2) capitalized: Exoduster

Exoduster (plural Exodusters)

  1. Alternative letter-case form of exoduster.
    • In the spring of 1879 occurred the rush from the South, to which was given the name of the "Exodus," and the "Exoduster" for a time became a prominent figure in Kansas. Great numbers of black people, men, women, and children, arrived by rail at Parsons, from Texas, and on steamboats at Wyandotte...1899, Noble L[ovely] Prentis, “The Centennial Year”, in A History of Kansas, Topeka, Kan.: Caroline Prentis, →OCLC, paragraphs 234–235, page 153
    • 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.2004 August, Andrew J. Wagenhoffer, “Briefings: Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era by Nicole Etcheson (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2004. Pp. 327, $35.00...

Examples of exoduster in a sentence

  • In the spring of 1879 occurred the rush from the South, to which was given the name of the "Exodus," and the "Exoduster" for a time became a prominent figure in Kansas.1899, Noble L[ovely] Prentis, “The Centennial Year”, in A History of Kansas, Topeka, Kan.: Caroline Prentis, →OCLC, paragraphs 234–235...
  • For perhaps ten seconds John contemplated a sudden and complete exodus with himself as the exoduster.1921 March 12, Octavus Roy Cohen, “Oft in the Silly Night”, in George Horace Lorimer, editor, The Saturday Evening Post, volume 193, number...
  • One group, the Exodusters, moved to the Kansas prairie during the mid-1870s. […] Like white farmers, the Exodusters fought with cattlemen.2017, James Oakes [et al.], “Reconstructing a Nation, 1865–1877”, in Of the People: A History of the United States with Sources, 3rd...

Forms of exoduster

pluralexodusters
alternative formExoduster
pluralExodusters

Origin of exoduster

From Exodus (“departure of the Hebrew slaves from Egypt recorded in the Bible”), exodus (“sudden departure of a large number of people”) + -ster (suffix denoting someone who is, is associated with, or does a specified thing) (see the 1899 quotation), alluding to the story of the exodus of Israelites from Egypt which is related in the Book of Exodus in the Bible.

Words formed from exoduster

Questions about exoduster

What does exoduster mean?
Exoduster means 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.
How do you use exoduster in a sentence?
In the spring of 1879 occurred the rush from the South, to which was given the name of the "Exodus," and the "Exoduster" for a time became a prominent figure in Kansas.
What part of speech is exoduster?
Exoduster is a noun.
How do you pronounce exoduster?
Exoduster is pronounced /ˈɛksəʊdʌstə/ (UK).
What is the plural of exoduster?
The plural of exoduster is exodusters.

Words near exoduster in the dictionary

  1. exoduses
  2. exodusing
  3. exodusses
  4. exodust
  5. exodusted
  6. exoduster
  7. exodusters
  8. exodusting
  9. exodusts
  10. exody
  11. exoearth

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: exoduster (page history and authors); Exoduster (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-exoduster.wav.

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