by Julie Winch
There were notable success stories among free people of color in the antebellum era, but how well African-American women and men in any particular community fared depended on a host of factors, most of which were beyond their control. When the economy was robust, they shared (although not equally) with whites in the general prosperity. When it took a downturn, they suffered disproportionately. Since they were invariably the last hired, they were the first fired. A family’s income obviously determined where and how well that family lived. Residential segregation existed in most urban areas in the antebellum era, but what separated people was less often race than money. “Middling” and affluent people of color lived alongside whites of the same social and economic status, and their interactions might be friendly or hostile, depending on circumstances. The urban poor, regardless of race, rented badly maintained homes in narrow alleys and courts where the sun rarely shone. Overcrowding and inadequate sanitation led to disease. It took time for local boards of health to accept that epidemics spread not because of race or ethnicity—they blamed Irish immigrants as well as free blacks—but because of deplorable living conditions. Malnourished, inadequately clothed, and lacking access to basic health care, the poor were more prone to illness, and when they contracted cholera, influenza, yellow fever, or any of a host of other ailments, they infected their less impoverished neighbors.
Joseph Willson had grown up in a wealthy mixed-race home in Augusta, Georgia. In the mid-1830s he moved to the North, trained as a printer, and distinguished himself as a writer. One of his goals was to enlighten white people about their black neighbors. It irked him that whites were “accustomed to regard the people of color as one consolidated mass.” As he explained, some free people lived “in ease, comfort and the enjoyment of all the social blessings,” some “in the lowest depths of human degradation,” and a great many “in the intermediate stages.” The free black population Willson described was complex and multilayered. Most of its members had hope for the future, and they expressed that hope not only within their own families but in the rich communal life they worked so hard to foster. If they were people “in between” in so many senses, they devoted a tremendous amount of energy to making that marginal space between slavery and full freedom as intellectually and spiritually satisfying as they could. Willson knew, though, that they could not afford to be complacent. Too many white people in both the North and the South did indeed see them as “one consolidated mass” and insisted that the nation would be better off without them.1
One of the fiercest battles free black people had to fight in the 1820s and beyond was over their right to remain in the United States. Their fears about the American Colonization Society proved well-founded. The conviction grew among whites that free blacks did not truly belong in the United States, and they began urging their state legislatures to appropriate funds to promote African colonization. They also called on lawmakers to restrict the rights of free blacks in order to reinforce to them the message that they had no future in America.
African Americans in the Upper South were as zealous in trying to thwart the Liberia scheme as those in the North were. In Baltimore, for example, people of color routinely followed white ACS agents around town, anxious to make sure that they did not find any recruits, and even coaxing would-be emigrants off ships in the harbor. The ACS did enlist some enterprising individuals, like John Jenkins Roberts, a Virginia-born merchant whose education and business contacts enabled him to do well in Liberia and eventually become its first president. However, while some free blacks did agree to go to Liberia, most wanted nothing to do with the ACS.
Not everyone who rejected the Liberia scheme opposed voluntary emigration. In the mid-1820s, Haitian president Jean-Pierre Boyer made lavish promises to induce American free blacks to settle in his country. Throughout the North, the Upper South, and the Midwest, free people enthusiastically endorsed the idea of moving to a nation that had come into being as the result of a successful slave uprising. Perhaps as many as ten thousand left for Haiti between 1824 and 1826. They left with high hopes, only to be bitterly disappointed when they discovered that they were pawns in a high stakes game of international diplomacy. Boyer reasoned that if he took in an unwanted segment of the American population he could persuade the United States government to recognize Haitian independence. Although some of the African-American emigrants stayed in Haiti and prospered, most found that they were as poor there as they had been in the United States and they soon returned home.
Despite the failure of the Haitian scheme, individually and collectively black people continued to leave the United States in search of brighter prospects elsewhere. An unknown number went to Canada. Some were runaways who knew that the Canadian authorities usually refused to hand over people whose only offense was seeking freedom. There were also groups of refugees who concluded that even though they were legally free they could not remain in the United States. In 1829, in response to growing violence from the city’s white street gangs, hundreds of free people in Cincinnati moved to Canada where they organized their own farming community with the encouragement of the Governor-General. Although they endured many hardships, their initial settlement grew and more settlements followed, attracting black émigrés not only from Ohio but from all over the United States. Other people of color who crossed over into Canada headed for urban areas like Toronto.
After Britain abolished slavery throughout its empire in 1833, some African Americans set sail for Jamaica, or Trinidad, or British Guiana (today’s Guyana). In all three colonies planters were crying out for labor and assuring settlers that in a year or two they could become independent landholders. As was the case with the Haitian scheme, most of the emigrants were disappointed, but a few did well. Back in the United States, black leaders hesitated to condemn resettlement programs in principle, insisting that free people had the right to go wherever they wished. What they denounced was the growing racism that was making emigration not so much a choice as a necessity.
Racial tensions had never been far below the surface, but during the 1820s and 1830s harassment and sporadic acts of violence exploded into full-blown race riots in the North and the Midwest. There was no shortage of white-on-black violence in the South. In the aftermath of Nat Turner’s slave rebellion in Virginia in 1831, whites vented their fury on free blacks, who, they insisted, must have conspired with the rebels. In Raleigh, North Carolina the authorities put every free black man in jail, a violation of their rights that probably saved their lives. Across the Upper South, scores of innocent free blacks suffered at the hands of white vigilantes, though what happened outside the South in the 1820s and 1830s was even worse. A verbal altercation or an unsubstantiated rumor about “unacceptable” behavior on the part of a black person or a group of people was usually all it took to inflame the mob. In 1824, rioters destroyed black homes in Providence, Rhode Island on the pretext that there was prostitution going on in the area. In 1826, white rowdies attacked black dwellings on the northern slope of Boston’s Beacon Hill. The 1829 Cincinnati riot was at least in part a response to job competition and the sense that black people were prospering at the expense of whites. Although many other places experienced episodes of violence, the epicenter was Philadelphia, which endured four bloody and destructive riots in fifteen years.
A major source of contention was access to public spaces. Black Southerners understood that only too well. Whites were far less likely to molest a slave going about his master’s business with the appropriate pass than they were a group of free blacks gathering for any purpose, however innocent. In cities like Baltimore and Washington, D.C., free people seldom assembled in large groups, even if they had the permission of the authorities to hold a parade or march in the funeral procession of a respected community leader. People in the Lower South exercised even more caution. African Americans outside the South were bolder. They persisted in claiming the same rights as whites. They had occasions, some of them solemn and others festive, that they wanted to mark by
taking to the streets, but the sight of such public displays of community strength often provoked an angry reaction from whites.
The violence of the urban mob was one aspect of white hostility free people had to confront. The passage of discriminatory laws was another. The legal restrictions African Americans faced in their everyday lives were both expensive and demeaning. In 1821, the District of Columbia required that all free blacks register annually and post a bond to ensure their “good behavior.” Free people in North Carolina were supposed to wear a shoulder patch with the word “Free” on it. Throughout the Upper South, free blacks were forbidden to trade in certain commodities, their interactions with slaves were closely regulated, and the list of occupations off-limits to them grew steadily. Not everyone complied. People neglected to register. They pursued trades officially closed to them, traveled where they were not supposed to, and associated with enslaved friends and family members. However, they always had to worry that the authorities would crack down.
Further south the situation was worse. In 1822, whites in South Carolina panicked when they learned what free black carpenter Denmark Vesey had planned—nothing less than the freeing of all the slaves in and around Charleston, and (so it was rumored) the slaughter of every one of Charleston’s white inhabitants. Vesey seemed an unlikely rebel. It never occurred to white Charlestonians that Vesey was free only because he had bought himself with his winnings from a lottery. Almost all of his family members remained enslaved. The authorities executed Vesey and the slaves he had plotted with, but they worried that the free community of color contained many more Veseys just waiting for an opportunity to subvert the slave system. Henceforth, they decreed, no free person of color who left South Carolina could ever return. As an additional safeguard, every free black male over the age of fifteen had to have a white guardian.
Throughout the South, free people resorted to all sorts of subterfuges to protect themselves and their families from discriminatory laws. James Thomas recalled how his mother had navigated around the Tennessee law that said that all newly emancipated slaves must leave the state. Sally Thomas ran a laundry in Nashville and she managed to save enough money to buy her son, although she herself was still a slave. She did not want the authorities to take James away from her once they learned he was free, so she enlisted the aid of a sympathetic white neighbor who assumed ownership of the boy in a fictitious “sale.” Years later, when James Thomas was a successful businessman, the neighbor “freed” him and endorsed his petition to the courts to be allowed to remain in Tennessee.
Even if a state did not act to control the free black community, a locality within that state might do so. For example, in St. Louis any free black person not born in Missouri needed a license to live in the city, and that could cost as much as one thousand dollars. The St. Louis court records reveal the intricate webs of friendship that developed as people assisted one another to get their licenses. In the early 1830s, Harriet Thompson, a Pennsylvania native, wed barber Henry Clamorgan. He was exempt from the residency law because he was a Missouri native, but Harriet was not, and the couple recruited several people to post cash bonds with the court on her behalf. Likewise, Henry helped Harriet’s sister Mary to obtain a license later when she married his best friend, Samuel Mordecai.
Robert Jerome Wilkinson, another member of the Clamorgans’ circle, learned what happened to those who refused to obey the law. Citing the “equal protection” clause of the U.S. Constitution, Wilkinson argued that if whites did not need a license, he should not need one. He was promptly arrested. After several weeks of incarceration he abandoned the fight, paid for his license, and settled down in St. Louis. He was lucky. The authorities could have expelled him, or even bound him out to pay his fine. In many parts of the South the courts routinely bound out black lawbreakers, some of whom ended up in slavery when unscrupulous employers sold them.
Wholesale kidnapping without the cover of the law was also a constant danger. Just as the Underground Railroad spirited slaves to freedom, so another, less well-known “railroad” conveyed free people into bondage in the South. Every year organized gangs and “freelancers” seized unsuspecting individuals and hustled them away. Sometimes black Northerners went to the South looking for work and were ensnared. That was the plight of New Yorker Solomon Northup, who endured twelve years of enslavement in Louisiana. It was the fate of scores of Northern black sailors whose vessels called at ports in the Lower South. The local laws stipulated that African-American sailors had to stay in jail while their vessels were in port. Once they were in jail, a dishonest captain or jailer might be tempted to sell them as slaves. Kidnappers would even seize white people and claim they were “bright mulattoes.” If an individual was reputed to be black, that made his or her evidence inadmissible against whites in most Southern courts.
The erosion of black people’s fundamental rights continued inexorably, but so, too, did the efforts of African Americans to challenge the discrimination they faced. They attacked segregation, especially on public transportation, which was a class issue as well as a racial one. Poor blacks did not travel much. If they had to go across town they walked, and if they needed to go further afield they could only afford the cheapest accommodations—precisely the ones white-owned shipping lines and railroad and streetcar companies earmarked for them anyway. Affluent people felt the sting of unequal treatment more intensely, so they campaigned against it. They refused to give up first-class seats and steamboat berths they had paid for. They pointed out that black servants could travel with white employers, but black fare-paying passengers were forced into the “colored car” or refused passage.
What stirred up even deeper resentment than segregation was the denial of rights by the state and federal governments. If black Southerners were more reluctant to speak up for fear of retribution than were Northerners, they were no less eager to secure their rights. The right on which free people focused most intently was the right to vote. This right, they contended, was the key to all others, and yet almost every new state that entered the Union after 1820 barred them from voting, while many of the older states disfranchised them. By 1850, only 6 percent of the nation’s free black men lived in states where they could vote on the same basis as whites.
When African Americans had leverage they used it. In an era before the secret ballot, those who employed whites, rented homes to them, or patronized their businesses could “advise” them about whom to vote for and hint at repercussions if they did not heed that advice. Of course, few black people could wield that kind of power, and indirect influence was no real substitute for the right to vote. Understandably, African Americans grew angry as they watched white immigrants become naturalized and qualify to vote while they could not.
The nation’s free people of color mulled over how to respond most effectively to the racial oppression they were experiencing—oppression that seemed to grow in intensity with each passing year. Black leaders from across the Northern and Midwestern states began holding meetings to review the situation of the entire black community, free and enslaved, and try to devise strategies for improving it.
What prompted the calling of the first black national convention in 1830 was the plight of Cincinnati’s African-American community in the wake of the previous year’s rioting. The consequent flight of hundreds of black people to Canada constituted a humanitarian crisis that people of color elsewhere could not ignore. Organizers dispatched invitations to different communities, and several dozen men gathered at Philadelphia’s Mother Bethel Church. They pledged to do whatever they could for the Cincinnati refugees and then they turned to what black people across the nation needed, namely an end to slavery and racial inequality. There was so much to discuss that they agreed to meet again the following year. The pattern of annual meetings continued through the early 1830s until the delegates began fighting among themselves over goals and tactics and the national convention movement weakened and died. In the 1840s, though, community leaders decided that they m
ust sink their differences and revive the movement. White hostility was growing and they needed to present a united front. Disagreements and personality clashes occasionally disrupted the proceedings, but through the 1840s and beyond the black national conventions were scenes of dynamic and energetic debate. Black people in individual states also organized their own conventions to discuss regional and local matters.
Beyond the national and state conventions, other meetings took place. The African Methodist Episcopal (AME) and the AME Zion denominations held regular assemblies of ministers and prominent laymen, and matters of church policy spilled over into discussions about civil rights. Beginning in the early 1830s, black men met with white men in the annual conventions of national and state antislavery organizations. For years women were excluded, so they held their own conventions. Just as the AME and AMEZ meetings were not limited to matters of religion, so the women’s antislavery conventions were not limited to abolition. Black and white women started to focus on their status as women and link the ending of racial oppression to the ending of gender discrimination.
The black men and women of the post-Independence era had seized on the power of the written word, and their sons and daughters built on the foundation they had laid. They wrote antislavery verse and personal memoirs, attacks on unjust laws, and treatises on everything from Christian theology to the role of African Americans in the Revolutionary War. By far the most inflammatory publication by a black writer, at least as far as the defenders of slavery were concerned, however, was David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens. When it appeared in 1829 it provoked outrage among slave holders while inspiring people of color by its boldness. Walker was from North Carolina, the son of a free woman and a slave. His Appeal, written long after he had relocated to Boston, demonstrated his voracious appetite for reading and his ability to construct devastatingly effective arguments. Why, he thundered, should black people endure the slave owner’s lash one moment longer? And why should any free person be satisfied with the “very dregs” of liberty, when they deserved nothing less than full citizenship?2 When copies of his Appeal surfaced in the South, lawmakers demanded that the authorities in Boston silence Walker. Boston’s mayor responded that Walker had not broken any Massachusetts law. In little over a year, however, Walker was silenced. Although rumors circulated that he had been poisoned, recent scholarship has uncovered the true cause of his death, tuberculosis. Perhaps Walker spoke out because he knew he did not have long to live under any circumstances. If his enemies did not kill him, the disease he was suffering from surely would.
