by Julie Winch
Learning a trade often enabled a slave to work his way out of bondage, but he might well not be able to pursue that trade as a free man. Frederick Douglass’s master had leased him out to work in Baltimore’s shipyards as a caulker. After he escaped in 1838, Douglass headed to the port of New Bedford, Massachusetts, only to discover that no shipbuilder would employ him. In New Bedford, so he learned, skilled labor was the preserve of white men. That was the case in most communities in the North and the Upper South.
Despite the uphill battles they faced, free black men did work in the skilled trades and some of the more enterprising discovered that the best way to make money was to diversify. A carpenter might make coffins and then graduate to funeral directing, especially in localities where white undertakers scorned to touch black bodies. Plasterers might branch out and offer a range of decorating services. Plumbers and glaziers undertook all sorts of home repairs. Shoe- and boot-makers tackled other kinds of leatherwork. Sailmakers like Philadelphia’s James Forten made tents and fire hoses. The list went on and on. One of the ironies of free black life was that there was often greater scope for black artisans in the Lower South. The tradition of white men establishing their biracial children in business meant that places like Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans had more than their share of “free colored” craftsmen, and those craftsmen thrived in trades that men of color elsewhere could not enter. The shortage of white competitors also helped. Immigrants did not move to the Lower South in large numbers. White “gentlemen” recoiled at the idea of working with their hands, but they wanted fashionably tailored clothes, well-maintained carriages, elegantly catered social events, and so forth, and they turned to free people of color to provide those services.
Black people looked for opportunities wherever they could find them. So much depended on prevailing white attitudes about what occupations were appropriate for free people. Possibly because it resembled domestic service, whites in every part of the country were happy to let African Americans cook and retail food. Black street vendors abounded. Women sold pepperpot soup, a spicy delicacy that urbanites purchased by the cup. They baked cakes and pastries, sweet and savory pies, tarts and cookies. In coastal cities black men operated oyster cellars, shucking and preparing oysters in many different ways and supplying their white customers with copious amounts of whiskey to wash the oysters down.
A number of African Americans distinguished themselves as caterers. In Philadelphia, Robert Bogle, John Appo, Henry Minton, and the Duterte clan were famous for their culinary skills. In Salem, Massachusetts, anyone wanting to host a fashionable dinner party engaged John Remond. In New York, the Esteve and Downing families provided fine food and impeccable service. Caterers moved into event planning. Robert Bogle, for instance, garnered praise from upper-class whites for tackling anything from a wedding to a funeral with equal finesse.
Astute individuals parlayed their expertise into various endeavors. Robert Roberts, the butler to a prominent white family in Massachusetts, published a book that guided household staff through everything from how to carve a duck to how to sober up an intoxicated gentleman. On the steamboats that plied the nation’s great rivers, black stewards oversaw an extensive patronage network as they shopped for provisions to feed the passengers on their elegant “floating palaces.” In Charleston, South Carolina, the Jones family ran a hotel that upper-class whites praised as the epitome of gracious living. African-American hoteliers operated fashionable hotels in other Southern cities, including the nation’s capital. Of course, they could never think of renting a room to a person of color, however rich and respectable. If they did, they would lose all of their white guests.
Barbering was a mainstay of thousands of black men. Whites felt comfortable with black barbers. Somehow it seemed fitting that African Americans should be dutifully attending to the personal needs of whites. The occupation of “barber” covered everyone from the man with a few combs and razors to the likes of the Clamorgans of St. Louis, who oversaw an upscale establishment where they not only shaved their male customers but bathed them and sold them fine imported soaps and perfumes, razors and strops, mirrors, and hair tonics. Ladies could not enter the part of the premises where brothers Louis, Henry, and Cyprian Clamorgan superintended a small army of bath attendants and masseurs, but they could shop in the front section of the store, where Harriet and Julia Clamorgan helped them select hair ornaments, home furnishings, and toys for their children.
Black people opened stores in communities large and small, although few enjoyed the same degree of success as the Clamorgans. Neighborhood groceries attracted both black and white patrons, especially if they sold alcohol. African Americans also entered the secondhand clothing trade. Cast-off clothing functioned as a supplement to servants’ wages. A lady’s maid or a gentleman’s valet expected to receive an employer’s unwanted apparel, which they promptly sold to a dealer. A middle-class white patron browsing a used clothing store like the one David Walker ran in Boston in the 1820s could pick up last season’s fashions at discounted prices.
Some enterprising black women operated “intelligence offices” or employment agencies, relying on their connections to elite white families to place people in domestic service. Others generated extra cash by taking in boarders. If a woman was already cooking and cleaning for her own family, having one or two extra household members did not greatly increase her already heavy workload. African-American women did laundry. Washing and ironing mounds of clothing was labor-intensive, but it was also work a woman could do at home while she watched over her children. The same was true of sewing. Seamstresses earned a pittance, though, and trying to sew a straight seam in poorly-lit rooms cost many their eyesight.
The talented needle-woman who advanced from seamstress to modiste, or designer, was in an entirely different class. As a slave in St. Louis in the 1840s, Elizabeth Keckley supported her master’s entire family, so great was the demand for her gowns. Eventually Keckley amassed the extravagant sum her owners insisted on for her own and her son’s freedom. Then she headed to Washington, D.C., where she knew that politicians’ wives would pay handsomely to dress in the height of fashion. Some African-American women became noted milliners, copying the latest styles from Paris and London from illustrated newspapers. Others were in demand as hairdressers. They did “hair work,” supplying affluent white women with false ringlets and curls in an era when a society lady expected her hair to be truly a work of art. The Remonds of Salem, Massachusetts—Nancy Lenox Remond and her daughters—were skilled coiffeurs, while New York native Eliza Potter trained in France and England and regularly spent the “season” working at Saratoga Springs and other exclusive resorts before settling in Cincinnati and opening her own salon.
White men often sought the status that came with being lawyers or physicians, but black people could seldom enter the learned professions. There were only two black lawyers in the antebellum era, Robert Morris and John S. Rock, both of them based in Boston. Prospective lawyers usually studied the law by apprenticing with a practicing attorney. However, few white attorneys were prepared to take on African Americans as law clerks, let alone make them partners once they passed the Bar.
As for formal medical education in this period, an aspiring doctor often learned from an established physician, serving an apprenticeship in much the same way as a young lawyer would. However, if he had the money and the inclination to do so, he might also enroll in one of the nation’s growing number of medical schools. Those were the options for a white man planning to become a medical doctor. The choices were far more limited, though, for a black man who wanted a career in medicine. Medical schools routinely refused to admit African-American students and most white doctors did not want to risk alienating their white patients by taking on black trainees. James McCune Smith coped with those exclusionary policies in the 1830s by studying in Scotland, while John S. Rock found a sympathetic white doctor to train with (and achieved the distinction of qualifying as both a doctor and a
lawyer). Even with the coveted M.D. in hand, a black physician still had to set up a practice. Only in a city with a large black middle class could he hope to succeed. For black women the challenges were even greater. Nevertheless, a courageous few refused to be deterred. One brave pioneer was Philadelphia’s Sarah Mapps Douglass. Appalled that so many black women were ignorant of the basics of reproductive and pediatric health, Douglass talked her way into the Quaker-sponsored Female Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1853. Then she purchased an anatomically correct “French mannequin” and began giving lectures to all-female audiences.
Although few black women and men became full-fledged M.D.s, many were respected healers. The annual trade directories of communities in the North and the Upper South listed dozens of black purveyors of “cures” of one kind or another, most derived from a mix of traditional African, Native-American, and European “folk” remedies, but as likely to work as the treatment licensed physicians offered, and certainly cheaper. People in need often consulted these “doctors” out of desperation without regard to race.
Black midwives sometimes attended white women as well as black women. Although they were not “licensed” in the strict sense of the word, they enjoyed a reputation in their neighborhood for their skill and compassion. While midwifery was the exclusive preserve of women, African Americans of both sexes provided other medical services. In an age when even the most highly regarded white physicians touted bleeding as a cure-all, some blacks trained to take blood by applying blood-sucking leeches or using “scarifying” blades to open a vein. The Pennsylvania Abolition Society’s 1838 Register of the Trades of the Colored People of Philadelphia listed more than a dozen bleeders. One of them, Jacob C. White, kept detailed accounts of his practice in the 1830s and 1840s, and those accounts reveal that he treated men and women, black and white. His patients could not afford the services of an M.D., but they knew that “Doctor” White provided good care and his fees were reasonable.
In addition to bleeding people, Jacob C. White worked as a dentist. He was not the only African-American man to do so. At the most basic level, that of tooth-pulling, a dentist only needed a strong wrist. However, dentistry was evolving, with fillings, false teeth, and (most horrifying of all in an era before anesthesia or antisepsis) dental implants. Some black men became proficient, and the people who patronized them were likely to be as pleased with the results as those who went to white dentists.
The church drew hundreds of talented men of color, but whether a clergyman belonged to a predominantly white denomination or one of the emerging black denominations, he could seldom support himself and his family just by ministering to the spiritual concerns of his parishioners. A few, like future AME bishop Daniel Alexander Payne, ran private schools. Others doubled as shoemakers and carpenters, barbers and common laborers. A wife who was a wage earner was a real asset. Marriage was about more than setting a good example to one’s flock. It required the income of a wife, and often a couple’s older children, to enable a minister’s household to survive financially.
Teaching attracted African Americans as it did whites, but finding job openings was far from easy for black men, and even more challenging for black women. Some people began their own fee-paying schools, and white antislavery organizations like the New York Manumission Society and the Pennsylvania Abolition Society made efforts to recruit black instructors for the schools they sponsored. The reality was, though, that there were many more qualified black teachers than there were positions available.
Other people of color tried to establish themselves in the arts, with varying degrees of success. Robert Douglass Jr. was an accomplished portrait painter who studied in London before returning home to Philadelphia and opening his own portrait studio. Most of the commissions he received were not for portraits, though, but for tavern signs and other ornamental work. To make a living Douglass took whatever came his way. There were African-American composers and musicians as well as painters. Philadelphia’s Francis (Frank) Johnson composed music for elite white social events and he traveled extensively with his orchestra. He even went on tour to Europe in the mid-1830s—after an unsuccessful bid to get a passport. The State Department informed Johnson that it could not issue him one because he was black and hence not an American citizen. While the lack of a passport did not prevent Johnson from traveling overseas and reentering the United States, it denied him the services of the local American consul if he ran into trouble abroad. Johnson made his European tour anyway and, American citizen or not, in England he was invited to play for Queen Victoria. As for the theater, white audiences in America would not accept black actors, even in the lowest of comedy roles. In 1821, a couple of black impresarios in New York City made a small dent in that racial barrier when they opened the African Grove Theater. The fate of the theater is shrouded in mystery. It may have burned down, been closed by the authorities, or failed financially. Whatever the case, no other black-owned theater replaced it. Its most gifted performer, Ira Aldridge, found fame as a Shakespearean actor, but he had to go to Europe to do so. Few men of color could contemplate a career like Aldridge’s or Johnson’s. They lacked the formal education to enter the professions, or the money to begin their own businesses. The difficulty of securing apprenticeships, combined with the prejudices of many of their white neighbors, put all but the most menial work beyond their reach.
However, in a setting in which job discrimination was the rule rather than the exception, one occupation was open to all. Seafaring was tough and dangerous, but captains usually hired crew members based on experience, not skin color. Racial segregation was impossible on even the largest merchant ship, and sailors knew their lives depended on getting along with one another. While shipboard life was not immune to the racial tensions that were so common ashore, in the seafaring fraternity the major division was between officers and men, not between blacks and whites. A few black men, like New Englanders Paul Cuffe and Absalom Boston, even became ship owners and merchant captains. What no man of color could do, however, was to enlist in the U.S. Navy. Although black sailors had served with distinction in the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, by the 1820s the official Navy policy was that blacks could only be cooks or stewards.
Back on land, African-American men took whatever work they could find. What they often got, if they were employed at all, was work that was unpleasant, strenuous, and poorly paid. An especially unpalatable form of employment in the days before flush toilets was removing the contents of privies. Because they carted sewage through the streets at night, people referred to them euphemistically as “night soil men.” The complaints of white householders in New York and elsewhere centered on two aspects of the “trade”—the tendency of “night soil men” to wheel their stinking carts past their homes (the carts had to go somewhere) and their habit of calling out as they went along to advertise their services.
Black men also did much of the heavy lifting in urban communities. They worked as porters and stevedores. They cleaned streets and dug graves and privies. They groomed horses and blacked boots. They toiled at anything and everything, and some turned to crime when they could find no other way to make money. For every free man who established a business or entered a skilled trade, a hundred more were common laborers. If they were fortunate, they were hired by the week or the month. Many, though, were day laborers. They would turn up before dawn to wherever they heard someone was hiring workers, though all too often employers passed them over in favor of whites. They could only hope that they would be luckier the next day.
In common with black men, most free black women found themselves relegated to low-paying and onerous “day work.” In their case that meant domestic work, and that entailed juggling family responsibilities with the demands of one’s employers. An added burden came from prevailing notions of female propriety. “Ladies” seldom ventured outside their homes, unless in the company of male relatives. “Women” were in a different category. A woman hurrying through the streets on her w
ay to and from work frequently received insults from white men who assumed that any unaccompanied woman, especially a black woman, was a prostitute.
In truth, selling sex was something that some women, regardless of race, resorted to. Every town had its red light district, where women and girls bartered sex for money in dingy alleyways and in upscale bordellos. A few grew rich as madams. Generally, though, violence, disease, and harassment by the officers of the law were the lot of those who plied the sex trade.
At the other end of the spectrum was the woman of color who lived with a white man in a long-term relationship. In and around New Orleans, plaçage was a recognized social institution. A white man would select a young mixed-race placeé or “companion” at one of the city’s famed “quadroon balls” and offer to provide for her and any children their relationship produced. The arrangement might endure lifelong or terminate when he married or tired of her.
New Orleans was notorious for the extent of “race mixing” that went on there, but it was common in other Southern communities as well. Free women of color might be coerced into sexual relationships that had little to do with mutual attraction and everything to do with money and power. Others chose freely to live with well-to-do white men. The mother of the enterprising Clamorgans of St. Louis parlayed her youth, her beauty, and her wit into cash. Although Apoline Clamorgan was legally free, her white father had left her very little to live on. As she saw it, she had two options—she could accept an offer of marriage from a free man of color and most likely end up as a household drudge for a white family, or she could take a white lover. Apoline chose cohabitation and comfort over marriage and poverty. She entered into a series of liaisons and her children inherited from her the money to start their own business.
