by Julie Winch
In 1817, Missouri first applied for statehood. It was the most northerly part of the Missouri Territory to seek to join the Union, and it did so after a period of uncertainty about the question of black freedom. The federal government had initially put the entire Missouri Territory under the jurisdiction of the Council of the Indiana Territory. Slavery was illegal in the Indiana Territory, and French-speaking slaveholders in the Missouri Territory at first feared that they would have to emancipate their slaves, but their fears were unfounded. Although the Missouri Territory did not have as many free blacks as the Orleans Territory, and they had traditionally not had as many rights, whites did not want to see their numbers increase. They also enacted harsh new law codes which spelled out to the region’s free people of color that they were there under sufferance. In 1820, when the question of statehood for Missouri eventually came before Congress, an acrimonious debate ensued. If Missouri joined the Union as a slave state it would upset the balance between “slave” and “free” states. Eventually the different factions hammered out an agreement. Missouri joined the Union as a slave state, while Maine separated from Massachusetts to become a free state, thus maintaining the balance. The so-called Missouri Compromise also stipulated that slavery could not exist in any state organized north of 36o 30’ North (the southern boundary of Missouri), while any state created south of that line could choose freedom or slavery.
In the welter of rhetoric from white politicians no one gave much thought to the plight of free people of color in Missouri, but no sooner had Congress voted to admit the state than Missourians drafted a constitution that gave the legislature the power to exclude all free people of color from other states. Congressmen from several northern states protested that that provision violated the “equal protection” clause of the United States Constitution. Missouri had to agree never to deny entry to anyone who was a citizen of another state—but of course it was a moot point whether any state recognized black people as citizens. Missouri formally achieved statehood, and free people of color found that for all the talk about “equal protection” and “rights and immunities” they were not wanted in Missouri, any more than they were in any other state. They might insist that they had rights, in common with other Americans, but everywhere they looked their rights were being “compromised” out of existence.
Beyond Congressional compromises and restrictive law codes, beyond census figures and lines on the map that separated “free” and “slave” states, we are left with the fundamental question of what liberty actually meant for black men and women. Very obviously it meant different things depending on location and status. The outlook of an individual who was freeborn and lived in a major Northern city was very different indeed from that of the newly-emancipated slave or the person who had, as Frederick Douglass described it, “stolen” him- or herself and was passing as free and hoping to avoid recapture. Clearly, one individual’s experience of freedom was not that of another individual. Even people of the same age and gender, living in the same setting, experienced liberty differently. If we cannot know everyone’s life story, we can at least discover from the wealth of data available to us—everything from court cases and birth, death, and marriage records to very personal firsthand accounts—something of what it meant to be a free person of color in the United States in the generation after independence.
On achieving freedom, one of the first actions people of color often took was to change their names. For runaways that was a wise move, while those who were legally free wanted to shed fanciful slave names like Pompey and Dido, or diminutives like Bill and Sally in favor of William and Sarah. Men and women who had only ever had a first name acquired that hallmark of freedom, a last name, whether it be a craft name (Carpenter, Baker), a common “Anglo” name (Williams, Allen, Jones), or a name that reflected their new status, Freeman being especially popular. Few took their owner’s last name unless that owner had been exceptionally generous or unless they thought it might help them to claim a link to an influential white family.
Whether or not a man or woman stayed in a given locality once they were free depended on a host of different considerations. Some individuals went in search of long-lost family members. Others remained where they were because that was where their friends and relatives lived. People moved to hunt for work or stayed and put down roots because they believed their prospects were brighter in a place they already knew. The wider world was a threatening and lonely place for some ex-slaves, while for others it represented the chance to test the limits of their liberty. Although most free people remained close to the land, towns exerted a strong appeal for those who were inclined to try their luck in a very different environment. Urban life had its downsides, but in the generation after independence it was in cities and towns that a vibrant free black community life began to emerge.
Freedom meant the chance for black Christians to worship as they chose. While many African Americans continued attending churches their masters had compelled them to go to, now that they were free they expected better treatment than having to sit in the “Negro pew” and receive communion after everyone else. Some people stayed in the churches they were familiar with. Others searched for a spiritual experience that they felt had more relevance to their lives. They might find that within a church that welcomed all believers regardless of race, or they might opt to join an African-American church. To some white observers that freedom of choice signaled a profound change. The richness of black organized religion, and all the other aspects of black life that sprang from the churches, was something they found most disturbing. To the African-American women and men who filled the pews on Sundays and gathered on other days throughout the week to study, discuss their situation, and support one another in various endeavors, the churches were vibrant community hubs that “spoke” to their freedom.
A large part of the black church’s “creation story” occurred in Philadelphia, the effective capital of the nation until the federal government moved to Washington, D.C. in 1800. The city was also home to a rapidly growing free black community. Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, two of the men who had played a pivotal role in the formation of the Free African Society, were devout Methodists, and Allen, already a noted preacher, had come to Philadelphia at the invitation of the white elders at St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church to work with the scores of black people who were attending Sunday worship.
Although Allen and Jones began talking about establishing a separate black church in the mid-1780s, they did not initially find much support from either black or white Philadelphians. Within a few years, however, an ugly confrontation over segregated seating at St. George’s, the growth in size and independence of Philadelphia’s black community, and pledges of help from prominent whites led to a change. The fact that most of their white friends were Episcopalians posed a problem for Allen and Jones. At first both declared that they could not abandon Methodism because they believed in its egalitarian principles, even if some of the whites at St. George’s had shown that they apparently did not, but Jones eventually reconsidered and agreed to seek ordination as an Episcopal priest. St. Thomas’s African Episcopal Church opened for worship in 1794. That same year Richard Allen established Bethel (later Mother Bethel) as a black congregation within the Methodist denomination. By 1810, black Presbyterians and black Baptists in Philadelphia had organized their own congregations.
Black churches sprang up in other communities throughout the North. New York City, with its fast-growing free population, was home to a number of churches affiliated with various denominations. Congregationalists were especially strong in New England. New Haven’s Temple Street Church and Hartford’s Talcott Street Church were major centers of African-American religious life. Boston’s black residents went in fairly large numbers to the city’s Baptist churches, but they often encountered discrimination. Finally, in 1805, with help from some white sympathizers, they established the African Baptist Church. A year later they built their own meeting house, which
still stands today.
Tensions over white control of black Protestant congregations arose in many different settings and led to the founding of two new African-American denominations. In 1816, black Methodists from Philadelphia, Baltimore, and other communities in the North and Upper South assembled in Baltimore to form the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church. Richard Allen became the first bishop. Soon afterward, groups of black Methodists in and around New York City created the American Methodist Episcopal Zion (AMEZ) church.
The Catholic Church wrestled with many of the same problems as the Protestant churches. There were substantial numbers of black Catholics in places with strong French and Spanish traditions, notably New Orleans, St. Louis, and Mobile. The influx of gens de couleur from Saint Domingue also strengthened the black Catholic presence in Baltimore, Charleston, New York, and Philadelphia. Catholics did not organize separate black congregations, though, and no men who openly identified as black received ordination as priests. Black and white, free and slave, worshiped together, sometimes harmoniously and sometimes not.
Through the black churches, and sometimes independently of them, free black community life grew richer and more varied. More mutual benefit societies emerged along the lines of the Free African Society and the Newport African Union. In the period immediately after independence there were perhaps a dozen in major population centers in the North. By 1820 there were hundreds. All the societies worked in a similar way. A group of women or men who belonged to the same church or worked in the same occupation got together, chose a name for their society, crafted a set of by-laws, and began contributing regularly to a common fund. If a member became sick or was unable to find work, that member could draw on the fund. If a member or a member’s spouse or child died, the fund would pay for a decent funeral.
Organizing in the South posed more problems than organizing in the North because whites were suspicious of free people gathering together for any purpose, however laudable. People overcame those difficulties, though, and soon there were societies in Baltimore, New Castle, Delaware, and Washington, D.C. Further south, Charleston’s community of color split along lines of racial heritage. Light-skinned men formed the Brown Fellowship Society, while darker-skinned men set up their own society.
The societies did more than help members and their families through tough times. They became the arbiters of moral behavior. No one wanted to extend benefits to someone, for instance, who drank heavily and was more likely than an abstemious member to fall ill or lose a job. The societies disciplined members for transgressions of one kind or another, told them to mend their ways, and expelled them if they ignored the warnings. In this respect the mutual benefit societies reinforced the message the churches were spreading, namely that members must live lives that were irreproachable—for their own good and the good of the community.
Free black men in many cities and towns in the North and Upper South proudly identified themselves as “African” masons. Whites on both sides of the Atlantic had enthusiastically joined the “craft” of Freemasonry in the early eighteenth century, dedicating themselves to the quest for enlightenment and perfectibility across the lines of faith. The tenets of Freemasonry said nothing about it being exclusively white, and lodges in sailor towns like London, Liverpool, and Bristol often admitted African-American mariners as brother masons.
Back in America, however, white lodges routinely rejected black candidates. In the spring of 1775, just before the Revolutionary War began, a group of fifteen free black masons in Boston decided to approach a British military “traveling lodge” to see if the members of that lodge would recognize them as brother masons. Prince Hall and his friends convinced the lodge’s officers of their devotion to the principles of Freemasonry and received from them the necessary authorization to form their own lodge. Hall, a former slave, became the lodge’s “master.” In the postwar period the black masons of Boston secured a warrant from the Grand Lodge in Britain and with it the power to charter other lodges.
Free people in other communities sought Prince Hall’s help. A committee of black men in Philadelphia wrote Hall and explained that they and their friends had been assembling for some time and hoped to create a lodge, but the white lodges in Pennsylvania had rebuffed them, claiming that if they became masons, black men in Virginia would want the same privilege. Hall helped them establish their lodge and install their first officers in 1797, the same year that he chartered another black lodge in Providence, Rhode Island. Soon there were other lodges in New York City, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and Alexandria, Virginia, although that was as far south as African or Prince Hall Masonry spread for many years, given the prevailing hostility in the Lower South to independent black societies of any kind.
A major goal of the masons was the pursuit of knowledge, and that fit with many other initiatives free black people were taking—through the lodges, the churches, and through a host of self-improvement associations. Reading and writing were increasing in importance among Americans in general in the post-Revolutionary era, and for free people of color basic literacy held a special significance. It was a hallmark of liberty and independence. It was also a tool they could use to try to improve their situation in life. To be sufficiently educated to read the Bible and to be able to pick up a newspaper or a handbill and make out the letters said something about one’s connection to the wider world, while to be able to sign one’s name was as symbolic of freedom as having a name of one’s own choosing to sign. A priority for many of the newly-formed black community institutions was setting up schools for black children and organizing evening classes for adults. Whites in some localities in the North and the Upper South supported the efforts of black churches and charitable groups, donating money and books, and even volunteering to teach. However, if some white people encouraged the aspirations of their black neighbors out of a religious or humanitarian impulse, others were deathly afraid of the notion of black literacy and what it might lead to.
What it did in fact lead to was a flood of petitions and pamphlets as free people used the power of the written word to defend themselves and their communities from libel and slander and articulate their desires and goals. In doing so, they posed questions that white people did not always care to answer. In his 1791 letter to Thomas Jefferson, for example, the self-taught mathematician Benjamin Banneker asked how the author of the Declaration of Independence could speak of his love of liberty while “detaining by fraud and violence so numerous a part of my brethren, under groaning captivity and cruel oppression.”2 Two years later, Jefferson was one of thousands of white people who fled Philadelphia when yellow fever struck. Many more stayed behind because they had nowhere else to go or because they had already contracted the deadly disease. Richard Allen and Absalom Jones mobilized the Free African Society, and eventually many other black men and women, to try to relieve the suffering of their white neighbors, at grave risk to themselves. Despite assurances to the contrary, blacks were not immune to yellow fever, and hundreds sickened and died. Once the crisis was past, white publisher Mathew Carey downplayed the dangers black people had faced—he was convinced they were in fact immune—and he pilloried them as thieving opportunists who had exploited the epidemic for personal gain, stealing from those they had nursed and demanding excessively high wages for any services they rendered. Allen and Jones responded forcefully and eloquently in their Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People. Elsewhere black people refused to accept attacks upon themselves without answering back. In Boston, Prince Hall spoke out about the mistreatment of members of his community. In Baltimore, Daniel Coker laid out the arguments against slavery in his Dialogue Between a Virginian and an African Minister. Philadelphia’s James Forten used his own money to print his Letters from a Man of Colour, his personal protest against a series of discriminatory laws the Pennsylvania Senate was considering. In the 1790s and early 1800s black people came into their own as writers and orators. They also proved adept at using the political process. They
submitted petitions for redress of grievances to the state and local authorities and occasionally to the U.S. Congress. Even when those bodies refused to receive their petitions, as Congress did in 1799 when dozens of men of color in Philadelphia denounced the kidnapping of free people under cover of the fugitive slave law and asked for action on the part of the federal government to begin the nationwide abolition of slavery, black people succeeded in making their voices heard.
One intriguing aspect of free black life in this period is the extent to which people incorporated aspects of an African past into their various initiatives. Absalom Jones and Richard Allen and their friends had called their society the Free African Society, and people in Newport had called theirs the Newport African Union. As the number of groups grew, they took names like the Daughters of Africa, the Angola Society, the Baltimore African Female Society, the Daughters of Abyssinia, the Sons of Ethiopia, and so on. People organized “African” schools and “African” churches, and they spoke and wrote of themselves as “Africans.” Until the movement was renamed in Prince Hall’s honor after his death, black freemasonry was “African” freemasonry. How much this spoke to a shared memory of Africa on the part of those who had been born there or had parents who had been born there, how much to a feeling of pride in the greatness of Africa, and how much to a sense of separation from Americans of European ancestry is a matter of debate among scholars. In the 1830s, heated differences arose over naming practices, with some Northern black leaders urging the abandoning of “African” because that term, and others like it, perpetuated the notion among whites that black people were not truly “American.” For the women and men who experienced freedom in the 1790s and early 1800s, though, this posed no ideological or philosophical dilemma. “African” was what whites called them and it was what they called themselves. “African” was synonymous with “black,” and they had no quarrel with that. But the issue of “African-ness” and what it implied about a sense of racial and national identity became an increasingly complex one during the 1810s. The question of whether black people should leave America once they were free had sparked the debate between Philadelphia’s Free African Society and the Newport African Union in the 1780s. It resurfaced three decades later, generating a fascinating “paper trail” that helps us explore the question of how free people saw their future unfolding.
