FREE NEGROES
In the colonial period slaves were freed as a rule only when generous
masters rated them individually deserving of liberty or when the negroes
bought themselves. Typical of the time were the will of Thomas Stanford of
New Jersey in 1722 directing that upon the death of the testator's wife
his negro man should have his freedom if in the opinion of three neighbors
named he had behaved well,[1] and a deed signed by Robert Daniell of
South Carolina in 1759 granting freedom to his slave David Wilson in
consideration of his faithful service and of £600 currency in hand paid.[2]
So long as this condition prevailed, in which the ethics of slaveholding
were little questioned, the freed element remained extremely small.
[Footnote 1: _New Jersey Archives_, XXIII, 438.]
[Footnote 2: MS. among the probate records at Charleston.]
The liberal philosophy of the Revolution, persisting thereafter in spite of
reaction, not only wrought the legal disestablishment of slavery throughout
the North, but prompted private manumissions far and wide.[3] Thus Philip
Graham of Maryland made a deed in 1787 reciting his realization that the
holding of his "fellow men in bondage and slavery is repugnant to the
golden law of God and the unalienable right of mankind as well as to
every principle of the late glorious revolution which has taken place in
America," and converting his slaves into servants for terms, the adults
to become free at the close of that year and the children as they reached
maturity.[4] In the same period, upon his coming of age, Richard Randolph,
brother of the famous John, wrote to his guardian: "With regard to the
division of the estate, I have only to say that I want not a single negro
for any other purpose than his immediate liberation. I consider every
individual thus unshackled as the source of future generations, not to say
nations, of freemen; and I shudder when I think that so insignificant an
animal as I am is invested with this monstrous, this horrid power."[5]
The Randolph estate, however, was so cumbered with debts that the desired
manumissions could not then be made. At Richard's death in 1796 he left a
will of the expected tenor, providing for a wholesale freeing as promptly
as it could legally be accomplished by the clearance of the mortgage.[6] In
1795 John Stratton of Norfolk, asserting his "full persuassion that freedom
is the natural right of all men," set free his able-bodied slave, Peter
Wakefield.[7] Robert K. Moore of Louisville mingled thrift with liberalism
by setting free in 1802 two pairs of married slaves because of his
conviction that involuntary servitude was wrong, and at the same time
binding them by indenture to serve him for some fourteen years longer in
consideration of certain small payments in advance and larger ones at the
ends of their terms.[8]
[Footnote 3: These were restricted for a time in North Carolina, however,
by an act of 1777 which recited the critical and alarming state of public
affairs as its occasion.]
[Footnote 4: MS. transcript in the file of powers of attorney, I, 243,
among the county records at Louisville, Ky.]
[Footnote 5: H.A. Garland, _Life of John Randolph of Roanoke_ (New York,
1851), I, 63.]
[Footnote 6: _DeBow's Review_, XXIV, 285-290.]
[Footnote 7: MS. along with many similar documents among the deed files at
Norfolk, Va.]
[Footnote 8: MSS. in the powers of attorney files, II, 118, 122, 127, at
Louisville, Ky.]
Manumissions were in fact so common in the deeds and wills of the men of
'76 that the number of colored freemen in the South exceeded thirty-five
thousand in 1790 and was nearly doubled in each of the next two decades.
The greater caution of their successors, reinforced by the rise of slave
prices, then slackened the rate of increase to twenty-five and finally to
ten per cent. per decade. Documents in this later period, reverting to the
colonial basis, commonly recited faithful service or self purchase rather
than inherent rights as the grounds for manumission. Liberations on a large
scale, nevertheless, were not wholly discontinued. John Randolph's will set
free nearly four hundred in 1833;[9] Monroe Edwards of Louisiana manumitted
160 by deed in 1840;[10] and George W.P. Custis of Virginia liberated his
two or three hundred at his death in 1857.[11]
[Footnote 9: Garland, _Life of Randolph_, II, 150, 151.]
[Footnote 10: _Niles' Register_, LXIII, 245.]
Still other large proprietors while not bestowing immediate liberty made
provisions to bring it after the lapse of years. Prominent among these were
three Louisianians. Julien Poydras, who died in 1824, ordered his executors
to sell his six plantations with their respective staffs under contracts to
secure the manumission of each slave after twenty-five years of service
to the purchaser, together with an annual pension of $25 to each of those
above sixty years of age; and years afterward a nephew of the testator
procured an injunction from the supreme court of the state estopping the
sale of some of the slaves by one of their purchasers in such way as would
hazard the fulfilment of the purpose.[12] Stephen Henderson, a Scotch
immigrant who had acquired several sugar plantations, provided as follows,
by will made in 1837 and upheld by the courts: ten and twenty slaves
respectively were to be chosen by lot at periods five and ten years after
his death to be freed and sent to Liberia, and at the end of twenty-five
years the rest were to fare likewise, but any who refused to be deported
were to be kept as apprentices on the plantations.[13] John McDonogh, the
most thrifty citizen of New Orleans in his day, made a unique bargain with
his whole force of slaves, about 1825, by which they were collectively to
earn their freedom and their passage to Liberia by the overtime work of
Saturday afternoons. This labor was to be done in McDonogh's own service,
and he was to keep account of their earnings. They were entitled to draw
upon this fund upon approved occasions; but since the contract was with the
whole group of slaves as a unit, when one applied for cash the others must
draw theirs _pro rata_, thereby postponing the common day of liberation.
Any slaves violating the rules of good conduct were to be sold by the
master, whereupon their accrued earnings would revert to the fund of the
rest. The plan was carried to completion on schedule, and after some delay
in embarkation they left America in 1842, some eighty in number, with
their late master's benediction. In concluding his public narration in the
premises McDonogh wrote: "They have now sailed for Liberia, the land of
their fathers. I can say with truth and heartfelt satisfaction that a more
virtuous people does not exist in any country."[14]
[Footnote 11: _Daily True Delta_ (New Orleans), Dec. 19, 1857.]
[Footnote 12: Poydras _vs_. Mourrain, in _Louisiana Reports_, IX, 492. The
will is quoted in the decision.]
[Footnote 13: _Niles' Register_, LXVIII, 361. The original MS. is filed in
will book no. 6 in the New Orleans court house.]
[Footnote 14: J.T. Edwards ed., _Some Interesting Papers of John McDonogh_
(McDonoghville, Md., 1898), pp. 49-58.]
Among more romantic liberations was that of Pierre Chastang of Mobile who,
in recognition of public services in the war of 1812 and the yellow fever
epidemic of 1819 was bought and freed by popular subscription;[15] that of
Sam which was provided by a special act of the Georgia legislature in 1834
at a cost of $1,800 in reward for his having saved the state capitol from
destruction by fire;[16] and that of Prince which was attained through the
good offices of the United States government. Prince, after many years as
a Mississippi slave, wrote a letter in Arabic to the American consul at
Tangier in which he recounted his early life as a man of rank among the
Timboo people and his capture in battle and sale overseas. This led Henry
Clay on behalf of the Adams administration to inquire at what cost he
might be bought for liberation and return. His master thereupon freed him
gratuitously, and the citizens of Natchez raised a fund for the purchase of
his wife, with a surplus for a flowing Moorish costume in which Prince
was promptly arrayed. The pair then departed, in 1828, for Washington _en
route_ for Morocco, Prince avowing that he would soon send back money for
the liberation of their nine children.[17]
[Footnote 15: D.W. Mitchell, _Ten Years in the United States_ (London,
1862), p. 235.]
[Footnote 16: Georgia Senate _Journal_ for 1834, p. 25. At a later period
the Georgia legislature had occasion to reward another slave, Ransom by
name, who while hired from his master by the state had heroically saved
the Western and Atlantic Railroad bridge over the Chattahoochee River
from destruction by fire. Since official sentiment was now hostile to
manumission, it was resolved in 1849 that he be bought by the state and
ensured a permanent home; and in 1853 a further resolution directed the
chief engineer of the state-owned railroad to pay him just wages during
good behavior. Georgia _Acts, 1849-1850_, pp. 416, 417; _1853-1854_, pp.
538, 539. Old citizens relate that a house was built for Ransom on the
Western and Atlantic right of way in Atlanta which he continued to occupy
until his death many years after the Civil War. For these data I am
indebted to Mr. J. Groves Cohen, Secretary of the Western and Atlantic
Railroad Commission, Atlanta, Ga.]
[Footnote 17: "Letter from a Gentleman of Natchez to a Lady of Cincinnati,"
in the _Georgia Courier_ (Augusta), May 22, 1828. For a similar instance in
colonial Maryland see the present work, p. 31.]
Most of the negroes who procured freedom remained in the United States,
though all of those who gained it by flight and many of those manumitted
had to shift their location at the time of changing their status. At least
one of the fugitives, however, made known his preference for his native
district in a manner which cost him his liberty. After two years in Ohio
and Canada he returned to the old plantation in Georgia, where he was
welcomed with a command to take up the hoe. Rejecting this implement, he
proposed to buy himself if a thousand dollars would suffice. When his
master, declining to negotiate, ordered him into custody he stabbed one of
the negroes who seized him. At the end of the episode the returned wanderer
lay in jail; but where his money was, or whether in truth he had any, is
not recorded.[18] Among some of those manumitted and sent out of their
original states as by law required, disappointment and homesickness were
distressingly keen. A group of them who had been carried to New York in
1852 under the will of a Mr. Cresswell of Louisiana, found themselves in
such misery there that they begged the executor to carry them back, saying
he might keep them as slaves or sell them--that they had been happy before
but were wretched now.[19]
[Footnote 18: Cassville, Ga., _Standard_, May 31, 1858, reprinted in the
_Federal Union_ (Milledgeville, Ga.), June 8, 1858.]
[Footnote 19: _DeBow's Review_, XIV, 90.]
The slaves manumitted for meritorious service and those who bought
themselves formed together an element of substantial worth in the Southern
free colored population. Testamentary endorsement like that which Abel
P. Upshur gave on freeing his man David Rich--"I recommend him in the
strongest manner to the respect, esteem and confidence of any community in
which he may live"[20]--are sufficiently eloquent in the premises. Those
who bought themselves were similarly endorsed in many instances, and the
very fact of their self purchase was usually a voucher of thrift and
sobriety. Many of those freed on either of these grounds were of mixed
blood; and to them were added the mulatto and quadroon children set free by
their white fathers, with particular frequency in Louisiana, who by virtue
oftentimes of gifts in lands, goods and moneys were in the propertied class
from the time of their manumission. The recruits joining the free colored
population through all of these channels tended, together with their
descendants, to be industrious, well-mannered and respected members of
society.
[Footnote 20: William C. Nell, _The Colored Patriots of the American
Revolution_ (Boston, 1855), pp. 215, 216. For a similar item see Garland's
_Randolph_, p. 151.]
Each locality was likely to have some outstanding figure among these. In
Georgia the most notable was Austin Dabney, who as a mulatto youth served
in the Revolutionary army and attached himself ever afterward to the white
family who saved his life when he had been wounded in battle. The Georgia
legislature by special act gave him a farm; he was welcomed in the tavern
circle of chatting lawyers whenever his favorite Judge Dooly held court
at his home village; and once when the formality of drawing his pension
carried him to Savannah the governor of the state, seeing him pass, dragged
him from his horse and quartered him as a guest in his house.[21] John
Eady of the South Carolina lowlands by a like service in the War for
Independence earned a somewhat similar recognition which he retained
throughout a very long life.[22]
[Footnote 21: George R. Giltner, _Sketches of Some of the First Settlers of
Upper Georgia_ (New York, 1855), pp. 212-215.]
[Footnote 22: Diary of Thomas P. Porcher. MS. in private possession.]
Others were esteemed rather for piety and benevolence than for heroic
services. "Such," wrote Bishop Capers of the Southern Methodist Church,
"were my old friends Castile Selby and John Bouquet of Charleston, Will
Campbell and Harry Myrick of Wilmington, York Cohen of Savannah, and others
I might name. These I might call remarkable for their goodness. But I use
the word in a broader sense for Henry Evans, who was confessedly the father
of the Methodist church, white and black, in Fayetteville, and the best
preacher of his time in that quarter." Evans, a free-born full-blooded
black, as Capers went on to relate, had been a shoemaker and licensed
preacher in Virginia, but while journeying toward Charleston in search
of better employment he had been so struck by the lack of religion and
morality among the negroes in Fayetteville that he determined upon their
conversion as his true mission in life. When the town authorities dispersed
his meetings he shifted his rude pulpit into the woods outside their
jurisdiction and invited surveillance by the whites to prove his lack
of offence. The palpable improvement in the morals of his followers led
erelong to his being invited to preach within the town again, where the
white people began to be numerous among his hearers. A regular congregation
comprising members of both races was organized and a church building
erected. But the white attendance grew so large as to threaten the crowding
out of the blacks. To provide room for these the side walls of the
church were torn off and sheds built on either flank; and these were the
conditions when Capers himself succeeded the aged negro in its pulpit in
1810 and found him on his own score an inspiration. Toward the ruling race,
Capers records, Evans was unfailingly deferential, "never speaking to a
white but with his hat under his arm; never allowing himself to be seated
in their houses.... 'The whites are kind to me and come to hear me preach,'
he would say, 'but I belong to my own sort and must not spoil them.' And
yet Henry Evans was a Boanerges; and in his duty feared not the face of
man." [23]
[Footnote 23: W.W. Wightman, _Life of William Capers_ (Nashville, 1858),
pp. 124-129.]
In the line of intellectual attainment and the like the principal
figures lived in the eighteenth century. One of them was described in a
contemporary news item which suggests that some journalists then were akin
to their successors of more modern times. "There is a Mr. St. George,
a Creole, son to the French governor of St. Domingo, now at Paris, who
realizes all the accomplishments attributed by Boyle and others to the
Admirable Creighton of the Scotch. He is so superior at the sword that
there is an edict of the Parliament of Paris to make his engagement in any
duel actual death. He is the first dancer (even before the Irish Singsby)
in the world. He plays upon seven instruments of music, beyond any other
individual. He speaks twenty-six languages, and maintains public thesises
in each. He walks round the various circles of science like the master of
each; and strange to be mentioned to white men, this Mr. St. George is a
mulatto, the son of an African mother."[24] Less happy was the career of
Francis Williams of Jamaica, a plaything of the human gods. Born of negro
parents who had earned special privilege in the island, he was used by the
Duke of Montague in a test of negro mental capacity and given an education
in an English grammar school and at Cambridge University. Upon his return
to Jamaica his patron sought his appointment as a member of the governor's
council but without success; and he then became a schoolmaster and a poet
on occasion in the island capital. Williams described himself with some
pertinence as "a white man acting under a black skin." His contempt for
his fellow negroes and particularly for the mulattoes made him lonely,
eccentric, haughty and morose. A Latin panegyric which is alone available
among his writings is rather a language exercise than a poem.[25] On
the continent Benjamin Banneker was an almanac maker and somewhat of an
astronomer, and Phyllis Wheatley of Boston a writer of verses. Both
were doubtless more noted for their sable color than for their positive
qualities. The wonder of them lay in their ambition and enterprise, not in
their eminence among scientific and literary craftsmen at large.[26] Such
careers as these had no equivalent in the nineteenth century until its
closing decades when Booker T. Washington, Paul Laurence Dunbar and W.E.B.
DuBois set new paces in their several courses of endeavor.
[Footnote 24: News item dated Philadelphia, Mch. 28, in the _Georgia State
Gazette and Independent Register_ (Augusta), May 19, 1787.]
[Footnote 25: Edward Long, _History of Jamaica_ (London, 1774), II,
447-485; T.H. MacDermott, "Francis Williams," in the _Journal of Negro
History_, II, 147-159. The Latin poem is printed in both of these
accounts.]
[Footnote 26: John W. Cromwell, _The Negro in American History_
(Washington, 1914), pp. 77-97.]
Of a more normal but less conspicuous type was Jehu Jones, the colored
proprietor of one of Charleston's most popular hotels who lived in the same
manner as his white patrons, accumulated property to the value of some
forty thousand dollars, and maintained a reputation for high business
talent and integrity.[27] At New Orleans men of such a sort were quite
numerous. Prominent among them by reason of his wealth and philanthropy was
Thomy Lafon, a merchant and money lender who systematically accumulated
houses and lots during a lifetime extending both before and after the
Civil War and whose possessions when he died at the age of eighty-two were
appraised at nearly half a million dollars.[28] Prosperity and good repute,
however, did not always go hand in hand. The keeper of the one good tavern
in the Louisiana village of Bayou Sara in 1831 was a colored woman of whom
Anne Royall wrote: "This _nigger_ or mulatto was rich, owned the tavern and
several slaves, to whom she was a great tyrant. She owned other valuable
property and a great deal of money, as report said; and doubtless it is
true. She was very insolent, and, I think, drank. It seems one Tague [an
Irishman], smitten with her charms and her property, made love to her
and it was returned, and they live together as man and wife. She was the
ugliest wench I ever saw, and, if possible, he was uglier, so they were
well matched."[29] One might ascribe the tone of this description to the
tartness of Mrs. Royall's pen were it not that she recorded just afterward
that a body-servant of General Ripley who was placed at her command in St.
Francisville was "certainly the most accomplished servant I ever saw."[30]
[Footnote 27: W.C. Nell, _Colored Patriots_, pp. 244, 245.]
[Footnote 28: New Orleans _Picayune_, Dec. 23, 1893. His many charitable
bequests are scheduled in the _Picayune_ of a week later.]
[Footnote 29: Anne Royall, _Southern Tour_ (Washington, 1831), pp. 87-89.]
[Footnote 30: _Ibid_., p. 91.]
The property of colored freemen oftentimes included slaves. Such instances
were quite numerous in pre-revolutionary San Domingo; and some in
the British West Indies achieved notoriety through the exposure of
cruelties.[31] On the continent a negro planter in St. Paul's Parish, South
Carolina, was reported before the close of the eighteenth century to have
two hundred slaves as well as a white wife and son-in-law, and the returns
of the first federal census appear to corroborate it.[32] In Louisiana
colored planters on a considerable scale became fairly numerous. Among them
were Cyprien Ricard who bought at a sheriff's sale in 1851 an estate in
Iberville Parish along with its ninety-one slaves for nearly a quarter of
a million dollars; Marie Metoyer of Natchitoches Parish had fifty-eight
slaves and more than two thousand acres of land when she died in 1840;
Charles Roques of the same parish died in 1854 leaving forty-seven slaves
and a thousand acres; and Martin Donato of St. Landry dying in 1848
bequeathed liberty to his slave wife and her seven children and left them
eighty-nine slaves and 4,500 arpents of land as well as notes and mortgages
to a value of $46,000.[33] In rural Virginia and Maryland also there were
free colored slaveholders in considerable numbers.[34]
[Footnote 31: Reverend Charles Peters, _Two Sermons Preached at Dominica,
with an appendix containing minutes of evidence of three trials_ (London,
1802), pp. 36-49.]
[Footnote 32: LaRochefoucauld-Liancourt, _Travels in the United States_
(London, 1799), p. 602, giving the negro's name as Pindaim. The census
returns of 1790 give no such name, but they list James Pendarvis in a group
comprising a white man, a free colored person and 123 slaves, and also a
Mrs. Persons, free colored, with 136 slaves. She may have been Pindaim's
(or Pendarvis') mulatto daughter, while the white man listed in the
Pendarvis item was perhaps her husband or an overseer. _Heads of Families
at the First Census of the United States: South Carolina_ (Washington,
1908), pp. 35, 37.]
[Footnote 33: For these and other data I am indebted to Professor E.P.
Puckett of Central College, Fayette, Mo., who has permitted me to use his
monograph, "_Free Negroes in Louisiana_," in manuscript. The arpent was the
standard unit of area in the Creole parishes of Louisiana, the acre in the
parishes of Anglo-American settlement.]
[Footnote 34: Calvin D. Wilson, "Black Masters," in the _North American
Review_, CLXXXI, 685-698, and "Negroes who owned Slaves," in the _Popular
Science Monthly_, LXXXI, 483-494; John H. Russell, "Colored Freemen as
Slave Owners in Virginia," in the _Journal of Negro History_, I, 233-242.]
Slaveholdings by colored townsmen were likewise fairly frequent. Among the
360 colored taxpayers in Charleston in 1860, for example, 130, including
nine persons described as of Indian descent, were listed as possessing 390
slaves.[35] The abundance of such holdings at New Orleans is evidenced by
the multiplicity of applications from colored proprietors for authority
to manumit slaves, with exemption from the legal requirement that the new
freedmen must leave the state.[36] A striking example of such petitions was
that presented in 1832 by Marie Louise Bitaud, free woman of color,
which recited that in the preceding year she had bought her daughter and
grandchild at a cost of $700; that a lawyer had now told her that in view
of her lack of free relatives to inherit her property, in case of death
intestate her slaves would revert to the state; that she had become alarmed
at this prospect; and she accordingly begged permission to manumit them
without their having to leave Louisiana. The magistrates gave their consent
on condition that the petitioner furnish a bond of $500 to insure the
support and education of the grandson until his coming of age. This was
duly done and the formalities completed.[37]
[Footnote 35: _List of the Taxpayers of Charleston for 1860_(Charleston,
1861), part 2.]
[Footnote 36: Many of these are filed in the record books of manumissions
in the archive rooms of the New Orleans city hall. Some were denied on the
ground that proof was lacking that the slaves concerned were natives of
the state or that they would be self-supporting in freedom; others were
granted.]
[Footnote 37: For the use of this MS. petition with its accompanying
certificates I am indebted to Mr. J.F. Schindler of New York.]
Evidence of slaveholdings by colored freemen occurs also in the bills of
sale filed in various public archives. One of these records that a citizen
of Charleston sold in 1828 a man slave to the latter's free colored sister
at a price of one dollar, "provided he is kindly treated and is never sold,
he being an unfortunate individual and requiring much attention." In the
same city a free colored man bought a slave sailmaker for $200.[38] At
Savannah in 1818 Richard Richardson sold a slave woman and child for $800
to Alex Hunter, guardian of the colored freeman Louis Mirault, in trust for
him; and in 1833 Anthony Ordingsell, free colored, having obtained through
his guardian an order of court, sold a slave woman to the highest bidder
for $385.[39]
[Footnote 38: MSS. in the files of slave sales in the South Carolina
archives at Columbia.]
[Footnote 39: MSS. among the county archives at Savannah, Ga.]
It is clear that aside from the practice of holding slave relatives as a
means of giving them virtual freedom, an appreciable number of colored
proprietors owned slaves purely as a productive investment. It was
doubtless a group of these who sent a joint communication to a New Orleans
newspaper when secession and war were impending: "The free colored
population (native) of Louisiana ... own slaves, and they are dearly
attached to their native land, ... and they are ready to shed their blood
for her defence. They have no sympathy for abolitionism; no love for the
North, but they have plenty for Louisiana.... They will fight for her in
1861 as they fought in 1814-'15.... If they have made no demonstration it
is because they have no right to meddle with politics, but not because they
are not well disposed. All they ask is to have a chance, and they will
be worthy sons of Louisiana."[40] Oral testimony gathered by the present
writer from old residents in various quarters of the South supports the
suggestion of this letter that many of the well-to-do colored freemen
tended to prize their distinctive position so strongly as to deplore any
prospect of a general emancipation for fear it would submerge them in the
great black mass.
[Footnote 40: Letter to the editor, signed "A large number of them," in the
New Orleans _Daily Delta_, Dec. 28, 1860. Men of this element had indeed
rendered service under Jackson in the defence of the city against Pakenham,
as Louisianians well knew.]
The types discussed thus far were exceptional. The main body of the free
negroes were those who whether in person or through their mothers had been
liberated purely from sentiment and possessed no particular qualifications
for self-directed careers. The former slaves of Richard Randolph who were
colonized in accordance with his will as petty landed proprietors near
Farmville, Virginia, proved commonly thriftless for half a century
afterward;[41] and Olmsted observed of the Virginia free negroes in general
that their poverty was not due to the lack of industrial opportunity.[42]
Many of those in the country were tenants. George Washington found one of
them unprofitable as such;[43] and Robert Carter in 1792 rented farms to
several in spite of his overseer's remonstrance that they had no adequate
outfit of tools and teams, and against his neighbors' protests.[44] Not a
few indeed were mere squatters on waste lands. A Georgia overseer reported
in 1840 that several such families had made clearings in the woods of
the plantation under his charge, and proposed that rent be required of
them;[45] and travellers occasionally came upon negro cabins in fields
which had been abandoned by their proprietors.[46] The typical rural family
appears to have tilled a few acres on its own account, and to have been
willing to lend a hand to the whites for wages when they needed service.
It was this readiness which made their presence in many cases welcome in a
neighborhood. A memorial signed by thirty-eight citizens of Essex County,
Virginia, in 1842 in behalf of a freedman might be paralleled from the
records of many another community: "We would be glad if he could be
permitted to remain with us and have his freedom, as he is a well disposed
person and a very useful man in many respects. He is a good carpenter, a
good cooper, a coarse shoemaker, a good hand at almost everything that is
useful to us farmers."[47] Among the free negroes on the seaboard there was
a special proclivity toward the water pursuits of boating, oystering and
the like.[48] In general they found a niche in industrial society much on
a level with the slaves but as free as might be from the pressure of
systematic competition.
[Footnote 41: F.N. Watkins, "The Randolph Emancipated Slaves," in _DeBow's
Review_, XXIV, 285-290.]
[Footnote 42: _Seaboard Slave States_, p. 126.]
[Footnote 43: S.M. Hamilton ed., _Letters to Washington_, IV, 239.]
[Footnote 44: Carter MSS. in the Virginia Historical Society.]
[Footnote 45: _Plantation and Frontier_, II, 155.]
[Footnote 46: _E. g_., F. Cumming, _Tour to the West_, reprinted in
Thwaites ed., _Early Western Travels_, IV, 336.]
[Footnote 47: J.H. Russell, _The Free Negro in Virginia_, p. 153.]
[Footnote 48: _Ibid_., p. 150.]
Urban freemen had on the average a somewhat higher level of attainment than
their rural fellows, for among them was commonly a larger proportion of
mulattoes and quadroons and of those who had demonstrated their capacity
for self direction by having bought their own freedom. Recruits of some
skill in the crafts, furthermore, came in from the country, because of
the advantages which town industry, in sharp contrast with that of the
plantations, gave to free labor. A characteristic state of affairs is shown
by the official register of free persons of color in Richmond County,
Georgia, wherein lay the city of Augusta, for the year 1819[49]. Of the
fifty-three men listed, including a planter and a steamboat pilot, only
seven were classed as common laborers, while all the rest had specific
trades or employments. The prosperity of the group must have been but
moderate, nevertheless, for virtually all its women were listed as workers
at washing, sewing, cooking, spinning, weaving or market vending; and
although an African church in the town had an aged sexton, its minister
must have drawn most of his livelihood from some week-day trade, for no
designation of a preacher appears in the list. At Charleston, likewise,
according to the city census of 1848, only 19 free colored men in a total
of 239 listed in manual occupations were unclassified laborers, while the
great majority were engaged in the shop and building trades. The women
again were very numerous in sewing and washing employments, and an
appreciable number of them were domestic servants outright.[50]
[Footnote 49: _Augusta Chronicle_, Mch. 13, 1819, reprinted in _Plantation
and Frontier_, II, 143-147.]
[Footnote 50: Dawson and DeSaussure, _Census of Charleston for 1848_,
summarized in the table given on p. 403 of the present work.]
In the compendium of the United States census of 1850 there are printed in
parallel columns the statistics of occupations among the free colored males
above fifteen years of age in the cities of New York and New Orleans. In
the Northern metropolis there were 3337 enumerated, and in the Southern
1792. The former had 4 colored lawyers and 3 colored druggists while the
latter had none of either; and the colored preachers and doctors were 21
to 1 and 9 to 4 in New York's favor. But New Orleans had 4 colored
capitalists, 2 planters, 11 overseers, 9 brokers and 2 collectors, with
none of any of these at New York; and 64 merchants, 5 jewelers and 61
clerks to New York's 3, 3 and 7 respectively, and 12 colored teachers to 8.
New York had thrice New Orleans' number of colored barbers, and twice as
many butchers; but her twelve carpenters and no masons were contrasted
with 355 and 278 in these two trades at New Orleans, and her cigar makers,
tailors, painters, coopers, blacksmiths and general mechanics were not in
much better proportion. One-third of all New York's colored men, indeed,
were unskilled laborers and another quarter were domestic servants, not to
mention the many cooks, coachmen and other semi-domestic employees, whereas
at New Orleans the unskilled were but a tenth part of the whole and no male
domestics were listed. This showing, which on the whole is highly favorable
to New Orleans, is partly attributable to the more than fourfold excess
of mulattoes over the blacks in its free population, in contrast with a
reversed proportion at New York; for the men of mixed blood filled all the
places above the rank of artisan at New Orleans, and heavily preponderated
in virtually all the classes but that of unskilled laborers. New York's
poor showing as regards colored craftsmen, however, was mainly due to the
greater discrimination which its white people applied against all who had a
strain of negro blood.
This antipathy and its consequent industrial repression was palpably more
severe at the North in general than in the South. De Tocqueville remarked
that "the prejudice which repels the negroes seems to increase in
proportion as they are emancipated." Fanny Kemble, in her more vehement
style, wrote of the negroes in the North: "They are not slaves indeed,
but they are pariahs, debarred from every fellowship save with their own
despised race, scorned by the lowest white ruffian in your streets, not
tolerated even by the foreign menials in your kitchen. They are free
certainly, but they are also degraded, rejected, the offscum and the
offscouring of the very dregs of your society.... All hands are extended to
thrust them out, all fingers point at their dusky skin, all tongues, the
most vulgar as well as the self-styled most refined, have learned to turn
the very name of their race into an insult and a reproach."[51] Marshall
Hall expressed himself as "utterly at a loss to imagine the source of that
prejudice which subsists against him [the negro] in the Northern states, a
prejudice unknown in the South, where the domestic relations between the
African and the European are so much more intimate."[52] Olmsted recorded
a conversation which he had with a free colored barber on a Red River
steamboat who had been at school for a year at West Troy, New York: "He
said that colored people could associate with whites much more easily
and comfortably at the South than at the North; this was one reason he
preferred to live at the South. He was kept at a greater distance from
white people, and more insulted on account of his color, at the North than
in Louisiana."[53] And at Richmond Olmsted learned of a negro who after
buying his freedom had gone to Philadelphia to join his brother, but had
promptly returned. When questioned by his former owner this man said: "Oh,
I don't like dat Philadelphy, massa; an't no chance for colored folks dere.
Spec' if I'd been a runaway de wite folks dere take care o' me; but I
couldn't git anythin' to do, so I jis borrow ten dollar of my broder an'
cum back to old Virginny."[54] In Ohio, John Randolph's freedmen were
prevented by the populace from colonizing the tract which his executors had
bought for them in Mercer County and had to be scattered elsewhere in the
state;[55] in Connecticut the citizens of New Haven resolved in a public
meeting in 1831 that a projected college for negroes in that place would
not be tolerated, and shortly afterward the townsmen of Canterbury broke up
the school which Prudence Crandall attempted to establish there for colored
girls. The legislatures of various Northern states, furthermore, excluded
free immigrants as well as discriminating sharply against those who were
already inhabitants. Wherever the negroes clustered numerously, from Boston
to Philadelphia and Cincinnati, they were not only brow-beaten and excluded
from the trades but were occasionally the victims of brutal outrage whether
from mobs or individual persecutors.[56]
[Footnote 51: Frances Anne Kemble, _Journal_ (London, 1863), p. 7.]
[Footnote 52: Marshall Hall, _The Two-fold Slavery of the United States_
(London, 1854), p. 17.]
[Footnote 53: _Seaboard Slave States_, p. 636.]
[Footnote 54: _Ibid_., p. 104.]
[Footnote 55: F.U. Quillin, _The Color Line in Ohio_ (Ann Arbor, Mich.), p.
20; _Plantation and Frontier_, II, 143.]
[Footnote 56: J.P. Gordy, _Political History of the United States_ (New
York, 1902), II, 404, 405; John Daniels, _In Freedom's Birthplace_ (Boston,
1914), pp. 25-29; E.R. Turner, _The Negro in Pennsylvania_ (Washington,
1911), pp. 143-168, 195-204, containing many details; F.U. Quillin, _The
Color Line in Ohio_, pp. 11-87; C.G. Woodson, "The Negroes of Cincinnati
Prior to the Civil War," in the _Journal of Negro History_, I, 1-22; N.D.
Harris, _Negro Slavery in Illinois_ (Chicago, 1906), pp. 226-240.]
In the South, on the other hand, the laws were still more severe but the
practice of the white people was much more kindly. Racial antipathy was
there mitigated by the sympathetic tie of slavery which promoted an
attitude of amiable patronage even toward the freedmen and their
descendants.[57] The tone of the memorials in which many Southern townsmen
petitioned for legal exemptions to permit specified free negroes to remain
in their communities[58] found no echo from the corresponding type of
commonplace unromantic citizens of the North. A few Southern petitions were
of a contrasting tenor, it is true, one for example presented to the city
council of Atlanta in 1859: "We feel aggrieved as Southern citizens that
your honorable body tolerates a negro dentist (Roderick Badger) in our
midst; and in justice to ourselves and the community it ought to be abated.
We, the residents of Atlanta, appeal to you for justice."[59] But it may
readily be guessed that these petitioners were more moved by the interest
of rival dentists than by their concern as Southern citizens. Southern
protests of another class, to be discussed below, against the toleration
of colored freedmen in general, were prompted by considerations of public
security, not by personal dislike.
[Footnote 57: Cf. N.S. Shaler, _The Neighbor_ (Boston, 1904), pp. 166,
186-191.]
[Footnote 58: _E. g_., J.H. Russell, _The Free Negro in Virginia_, pp.
152-155.]
[Footnote 59: J.H. Martin, _Atlanta and its Builders_ ([Atlanta,] 1902), I,
145.]
Although the free colored numbers varied greatly from state to state,
their distribution on the two sides of Mason and Dixon's line maintained
a remarkable equality throughout the antebellum period. The chief
concentration was in the border states of either section. At the one
extreme they were kept few by the chill of the climate; at the other
by stringency of the law and by the high prices of slave labor which
restrained the practice of manumission. Wherever they dwelt, they lived
somewhat precariously upon the sufferance of the whites, and in a more or
less palpable danger of losing their liberty.
Not only were escaped slaves liable to recapture anywhere within the United
States, but those who were legally free might be seized on fraudulent
claims and enslaved in circumvention of the law, or they might be kidnapped
outright. One of those taken by fraud described his experience and
predicament as follows in a letter from "Boonvill Missouria" to the
governor of Georgia: "Mr. Coob Dear Sir I have Embrast this oppertuniny of
Riting a few Lines to you to inform you that I am sold as a Slave for 14
hundard dolars By the man that came to you Last may and told you a Pack
of lies to get you to Sine the warrant that he Brought that warrant was a
forged as I have heard them say when I was Coming on to this Countrey and
Sir I thought that I would write and see if I could get you to do any thing
for me in the way of Getting me my freedom Back a Gain if I had some Papers
from the Clarkes office in the City of Milledgeville and a little Good
addvice in a Letter from you or any kind friend that I could get my freedom
a Gain and my name can Be found on the Books of the Clarkes office Mr Bozal
Stulers was Clarke when I was thear last and Sir a most any man can City
that I Charles Covey is lawfuley a free man ... But at the same time I do
not want you to say any thing about this to any one that may acquaint my
Preseant mastear of these things as he would quickly sell me and there
fore I do not want this known and the men that came after me Carried me to
Mempears tenessee and after whiping me untill my Back was Raw from my rump
to the Back of my neck sent me to this Place and sold me Pleas to ancer
this as soon as you Can and Sir as soon as I can Get my time Back I will
pay you all charges if you will Except of it yours in beast Charles Covey
Borned and Raized in the City of Milledgeville and a Blacksmith by trade
and James Rethearfurd in the City of Macon is my Laller [lawyer?] and can
tell you all about these things."[60]
[Footnote 60: Letter of Charles Covey to Howell Cobb, Nov. 30, 1853. MS. in
the possession of Mrs. A.S. Erwin, Athens, Ga., for the use of which I am
indebted to Professor R.P. Brooks of the University of Georgia. For
another instance in which Cobb's aid was asked see the American Historical
Association _Report_ for 1911, II, 331-334.]
In a few cases claims of ownership were resurrected after a long lapse.
That of Alexander Pierre, a New Orleans negro who had always passed as
free-born, was the consequence of an affray in which he had worsted another
black. In revenge the defeated combatant made the fact known that Pierre
was the son of a blind girl who because of her lack of market value had
been left by her master many years before to shift for herself when he had
sold his other slaves and gone to France. Thereupon George Heno, the heir
of the departed and now deceased proprietor, laid claim to the whole Pierre
group, comprising the blind mother, Alexander himself, his sister, and
that sister's two children. Whether Heno's proceedings at law to procure
possession succeeded or failed is not told in the available record.[61] In
a kindred case not long afterward, however, the cause of liberty triumphed.
About 1807 Simon Porche of Point Coupée Parish had permitted his slave
Eulalie to marry his wife's illegitimate mulatto half-brother; and
thereafter she and her children and grand-children dwelt in virtual
freedom. After Porche's death his widow, failing in an attempt to get
official sanction for the manumission of Eulalie and her offspring and
desiring the effort to be renewed in case of her own death, made a nominal
sale of them to a relative under pledge of emancipation. When this man
proved recreant and sold the group, now numbering seventeen souls, and
the purchasers undertook possession, the case was litigated as a suit for
freedom. Decision was rendered for the plaintiff, after appeal to the state
supreme court, on the ground of prescriptive right. This outcome was in
strict accord with the law of Louisiana providing that "If a master shall
suffer a slave to enjoy his liberty for ten years during his residence in
this state, or for twenty years while out of it, he shall lose all right of
action to recover possession of the said slave, unless said slave shall be
a runaway or fugitive."[62]
[Footnote 61: New Orleans _Daily Delta_, May 25, 1849.]
[Footnote 62: E.P. Puckett, "The Free Negro in Louisiana" (MS.), citing the
New Orleans _True Delta_, Dec. 16, 1854.]
Kidnappings without pretense of legal claim were done so furtively that
they seldom attained record unless the victims had recourse to the courts;
and this was made rare by the helplessness of childhood in some cases and
in others by the fear of lashes. Indeed when complexion gave presumption of
slave status, as it did, and custody gave color of ownership, the prospect
of redress through the law was faint unless the services of some white
friend could be enlisted. Two cases made conspicuous by the publication of
elaborate narratives were those of Peter Still and Solomon Northrup. The
former, kidnapped in childhood near Philadelphia, served as a slave some
forty years in Kentucky and northern Alabama, until with his own savings he
bought his freedom and returned to his boyhood home. The problem which he
then faced of liberating his wife and three children was taken off his
hands for a time by Seth Concklin, a freelance white abolitionist who
volunteered to abduct them. This daring emancipator duly went to Alabama
in 1851, embarked the four negroes on a skiff and carried them down the
Tennessee and up the Ohio and the Wabash until weariness at the oars drove
the company to take the road for further travel. They were now captured
and the slaves were escorted by their master back to the plantation; but
Concklin dropped off the steamboat by night only to be drowned in the Ohio
by the weight of his fetters. Adopting a safer plan, Peter now procured
endorsements from leading abolitionists and made a soliciting tour of New
York and New England by which he raised funds enough to buy his family's
freedom. At the conclusion of the narrative of their lives Peter and his
wife were domestics in a New Jersey boardinghouse, one of their two
sons was a blacksmith's apprentice in a neighboring town, the other had
employment in a Pennsylvania village, and the daughter was at school in
Philadelphia.[63]
[Footnote 63: Kate E.R. Pickard, _The Kidnapped and the Ransomed, being the
personal recollections of Peter Still and his wife Vina after forty years
of slavery_ (Syracuse, 1856). The dialogue in which the book abounds is,
of course, fictitious, but the outlines of the narrative and the documents
quoted are presumably authentic.]
Solomon Northrup had been a raftsman and farmer about Lake Champlain until
in 1841 when on the ground of his talent with the fiddle two strangers
offered him employment in a circus which they said was then at Washington.
Going thither with them, he was drugged, shackled, despoiled of his free
papers, and delivered to a slave trader who shipped him to New Orleans.
Then followed a checkered experience as a plantation hand on the Red River,
lasting for a dozen years until a letter which a friendly white carpenter
had written for him brought one of his former patrons with an agent's
commission from the governor of New York. With the assistance of the local
authorities Northrup's identity was promptly established, his liberty
procured, and the journey accomplished which carried him back again to his
wife and children at Saratoga.[64]
[Footnote 64: [David Wilson ed.], _Narrative of Solomon Northrup_ (New
York, 1853). Though the books of this class are generally of dubious value
this one has a tone which engages confidence. Its pictures of plantation
life and labor are of particular interest.]
A third instance, but of merely local notoriety, was that of William
Houston, who, according to his own account was a British subject who had
come from Liverpool as a ship steward in 1840 and while at New Orleans had
been offered passage back to England by way of New York by one Espagne de
Blanc. But upon reaching Martinsville on the up-river voyage de Blanc had
ordered him off the boat, set him to work in his kitchen, taken away his
papers and treated him as his slave. After five years there Houston was
sold to a New Orleans barkeeper who shortly sold him to a neighboring
merchant, George Lynch, who hired him out. In the Mexican war Houston
accompanied the American army, and upon returning to New Orleans was sold
to one Richardson. But this purchaser, suspecting a fault of title, refused
payment, whereupon in 1850 Richardson sold Houston at auction to J.F.
Lapice, against whom the negro now brought suit under the aegis of the
British consul. While the trial was yet pending a local newspaper printed
his whole narrative that it might "assist the plaintiff to prove his
freedom, or the defendant to prove he is a slave."[65]
[Footnote 65: New Orleans _Daily Delta_, June 1, 1850.]
Societies were established here and there for the prevention of kidnapping
and other illegal practices in reducing negroes to slavery, notable among
which for its long and active career was the one at Alexandria.[66]
Kidnapping was, of course, a crime under the laws of the states generally;
but in view of the seeming ease of its accomplishment and the potential
value of the victims it may well be thought remarkable that so many
thousands of free negroes were able to keep their liberty. In 1860 there
were 83,942 of this class in Maryland, 58,042 in Virginia, 30,463 in North
Carolina, 18,467 in Louisiana, and 250,787 in the South at large.
[Footnote 66: Alexandria, Va., _Advertiser_, Feb. 22, 1798, notice of the
society's quarterly meeting; J.D. Paxton, _Letters on Slavery_ (Lexington,
Ky., 1833), p. 30, note.]
A few free negroes were reduced by public authority to private servitude,
whether for terms or for life, in punishment for crime. In Maryland under
an act of 1858 eighty-nine were sold by the state in the following two
years, four of them for life and the rest for terms, after convictions
ranging from arson to petty larceny.[67] Some others were sold in various
states under laws applying to negro vagrancy, illegal residence, or even to
default of jail fees during imprisonment as fugitive suspects.
[Footnote 67: J.R. Brackett, _The Negro in Maryland_, pp. 231, 232.]
A few others voluntarily converted themselves into slaves. Thus Lucinda who
had been manumitted under a will requiring her removal to another state
petitioned the Virginia legislature in 1815 for permission, which was
doubtless granted, to become the slave of the master of her slave husband
"from whom the benefits and privileges of freedom, dear and flattering
as they are, could not induce her to be separated."[68] On other grounds
William Bass petitioned the South Carolina general assembly in 1859,
reciting "That as a free negro he is preyed upon by every sharper with whom
he comes in contact, and that he is very poor though an able-bodied
man, and is charged with and punished for every offence, guilty or not,
committed in his neighborhood; that he is without house or home, and lives
a thousand times harder and in more destitution than the slaves of many
planters in this district." He accordingly asked permission by special act
to become the slave of Philip W. Pledger who had consented to receive
him if he could lawfully do so.[69] To provide systematically for such
occasions the legislatures of several states from Maryland to Texas enacted
laws in the middle and late fifties authorizing free persons of color at
their own instance and with the approval of magistrates in each case to
enslave themselves to such masters as they might select.[70] The Virginia
law, enacted at the beginning of 1856, safeguarded the claims of any
creditors against the negro by requiring a month's notice during which
protests might be entered, and it also required the prospective master
to pay to the state half the negro's appraised value. Among the Virginia
archives vouchers are filed for sixteen such enslavements, in widely
scattered localities.[71] Most of the appraisals in these cases ranged from
$300 to $1200, indicating substantial earning capacity; but the valuations
of $5 for one of the women and of $10 for a man upwards of seventy years
old suggest that some of these undertakings were of a charitable nature.
An instance in the general premises occurred in Georgia, as late as July,
1864, when a negro freeman in dearth of livelihood sold himself for five
hundred dollars, in Confederate currency of course, to be paid to his free
wife.[72] Occasionally a free man of color would seek a swifter and surer
escape from his tribulations by taking his own life;[73] but there appears
to be no reason to believe that suicides among them were in greater ratio
than among the whites.
[Footnote 68: _Plantation and Frontier_, II, 161, 162.]
[Footnote 69: _Ibid_., II, 163, 164.]
[Footnote 70: In the absence of permissive laws the self-enslavement of
negroes was invalid. Texas Supreme Court _Reports_, XXIV, 560. And a negro
who had deeded his services for ninety-nine years was adjudged to retain
his free status, though the contract between him and his employer was not
thereby voided. North Carolina Supreme Court _Reports_, LX, 434.]
[Footnote 71: MSS. in the Virginia State Library.]
[Footnote 72: American Historical Association _Report_ for 1904, p. 577.]
[Footnote 73: An instance is given in the _Louisiana Courier_ (New
Orleans), Aug. 26, 1830, and another in the New Orleans _Commercial
Advertiser_, Oct. 25, 1831. The motives are not stated.]
Invitations to American free negroes to try their fortunes in other lands
were not lacking. Facilities for emigration to Liberia were steadily
maintained by the Colonization Society from 1819 onward;[74] the Haytian
government under President Boyer offered special inducements from that
republic in 1824;[75] in 1840 an immigration society in British Guiana
proffered free transportation for such as would remove thither;[76] and in
1859 Hayti once more sent overtures, particularly to the French-speaking
colored people of Louisiana, promising free lands to all who would come as
well as free transportation to such as could not pay their passage.[77] But
these opportunities were seldom embraced. With the great bulk of those to
whom they were addressed the dread of an undiscovered country from whose
bourne few travellers had returned puzzled their wills, as it had done
Hamlet's, and made them rather bear those ills they had than to fly to
others that they knew not of.
[Footnote 74: J.H.T. McPherson, _History of Liberia_ (Johns Hopkins
University _Studies_, IX, no. 10).]
[Footnote 75: _Correspondence relative to the Emigration to Hayti of the
Free People of Colour in the United States, together with the instructions
to the agent sent out by President Boyer_ (New York, 1824); _Plantation and
Frontier_, II, 155-157.]
[Footnote 76: _Inducements to the Colored People of the United States
to Emigrate to British Guiana, compiled from statements and documents
furnished by Mr. Edward Carberry, agent of the immigration society of
British Guiana and a proprietor in that colony_. By "A friend to the
Colored People" (Boston, 1840); The _Liberator_ (Boston), Feb. 28, 1840,
advertisement.]
[Footnote 77: E.P. Puckett, "The Free Negro in Louisiana" (MS.), citing the
New Orleans _Picayune_, July 16, 1859, and Oct. 21 and 23, 1860.]
Their caste, it is true, was discriminated against with severity. Generally
at the North and wholly at the South their children were debarred from the
white schools and poorly provided with schools of their own.[78] Exclusion
of the adults from the militia became the general rule after the close of
the war of 1812. Deprivation of the suffrage at the South, which was made
complete by the action of the constitutional convention of North Carolina
in 1835 and which was imposed by numerous Northern states between 1807
and 1838,[79] was a more palpable grievance against which a convention
of colored freemen at Philadelphia in 1831 ineffectually protested.[80]
Exclusion from the jury boxes and from giving testimony against whites was
likewise not only general in the South but more or less prevalent in the
North as well. Many of the Southern states, furthermore, required license
and registration as a condition of residence and imposed restrictions upon
movement, education and occupations; and several of them required the
procurement of individual white guardians or bondsmen in security for good
behavior.
[Footnote 78: The schooling facilities are elaborately and excellently
described and discussed in C.G. Woodson, _The Education of the Negro Prior
to 1861_ (New York, 1915).]
[Footnote 79: Emil Olbrich, _The Development of Sentiment for Negro
Suffrage to 1860_ (University of Wisconsin _Bulletin_, Historical Series,
III, no, I).]
[Footnote 80: _Minutes and Proceedings of the First Annual Convention of
the People of Colour, held in Philadelphia from the sixth to the eleventh
of June_, 1831 (Philadelphia, 1831).]
These discriminations, along with the many private rebuffs and oppressions
which they met, greatly complicated the problem of social adjustment which
colored freemen everywhere encountered. It is not to be wondered that some
of them developed criminal tendencies in reaction and revolt, particularly
when white agitators made it their business to stimulate discontent.
Convictions for crimes, however, were in greatest proportionate excess
among the free negroes of the North. In 1850, for example, the colored
inmates in the Southern penitentiaries, including slaves, bore a ratio
to the free colored population but half as high as did the corresponding
prisoners in the North to the similar population there. These ratios were
about six and eleven times those prevalent among the Southern and Northern
whites respectively.[81] This nevertheless does not prove an excess of
actual depravity or criminal disposition in any of the premises, for the
discriminative character of the laws and the prejudice of constables,
magistrates and jurors were strong contributing factors. Many a free negro
was doubtless arrested and convicted in virtually every commonwealth under
circumstances in which white men went free. The more severe industrial
discrimination at the North, which drove large numbers to an alternative of
destitution or crime, was furthermore contributive to the special excess of
negro criminality there.
[Footnote 81: The number of convicts for every 10,000 of the respective
populations was about 2.2 for the whites and 13.0 for the free colored
(with slave convicts included) at the South, and 2.5 for the whites and
28.7 for the free colored at the North. _Compendium of the Seventh Census_,
p. 166. See also _Southern Literary Messenger_, IX, 340-352; _DeBow's
Review_, XIV, 593-595; David Christy, _Cotton Is King_ (Cincinnati, 1855),
p. 153; E.R. Turner, _The Negro in Pennsylvania_, pp. 155-158.]
In some instances the violence of mobs was added to the might of the law.
Such was the case at Washington in 1835 when following on the heels of a
man's arrest for the crime of possessing incendiary publications and his
trial within the jail as a precaution to keep him from the mob's clutches,
a new report was spread that Beverly Snow, the free mulatto proprietor of
a saloon and restaurant between Brown's and Gadsby's hotels, had spoken in
slurring terms of the wives and daughters of white mechanics as a class.
"In a very short time he had more customers than both Brown and Gadsby--but
the landlord was not to be found although diligent search was made all
through the house. Next morning the house was visited by an increased
number of guests, but Snow was still absent." The mob then began to search
the houses of his associates for him. In that of James Hutton, another free
mulatto, some abolition papers were found. The mob hustled Hutton to a
magistrate, returned and wrecked Snow's establishment, and then held an
organized meeting at the Center Market where an executive committee was
appointed with a view to further activity. Meanwhile the city council held
session, the mayor issued a proclamation, and the militia was ordered out.
Mobs gathered that night, nevertheless, but dispersed after burning a negro
hut and breaking the windows of a negro church.[82] Such outrages appear to
have been rare in the distinctively Southern communities where the racial
subordination was more complete and the antipathy correspondingly fainter.
[Footnote 82: Washington _Globe_, about August 14, reprinted in the _North
Carolina Standard_, Aug. 27, 1835.]
Since the whites everywhere held the whip hand and nowhere greatly
refrained from the use of their power, the lot of the colored freeman
was one hardly to be borne without the aid of habit and philosophy. They
submitted to the régime because it was mostly taken as a matter of course,
because resistance would surely bring harsher repression, and because there
were solaces to be found. The well-to-do quadroons and mulattoes had
reason in their prosperity to cherish their own pride of place and carry
themselves with a quiet conservative dignity. The less prosperous blacks,
together with such of their mulatto confrères as were similarly inert,
had the satisfaction at least of not being slaves; and those in the South
commonly shared the humorous lightheartedness which is characteristic of
both African and Southern negroes. The possession of sincere friends among
the whites here and there also helped them to feel that their lives lay in
fairly pleasant places; and in their lodges they had a refuge peculiarly
their own.
The benevolent secret societies of the negroes, with their special stress
upon burial ceremonies, may have had a dim African origin, but they were
doubtless influenced strongly by the Masonic and other orders among the
whites. Nothing but mere glimpses may be had of the history of these
institutions, for lowliness as well as secrecy screened their careers.
There may well have been very many lodges among illiterate and moneyless
slaves without leaving any tangible record whatever. Those in which the
colored freemen mainly figured were a little more affluent, formal and
conspicuous. Such organizations were a recourse at the same time for mutual
aid and for the enhancement of social prestige. The founding of one of
them at Charleston in 1790, the Brown Fellowship Society, with membership
confined to mulattoes and quadroons, appears to have prompted the free
blacks to found one of their own in emulation.[83] Among the proceedings
of the former was the expulsion of George Logan in 1817 with a consequent
cancelling of his claims and those of his heirs to the rights and benefits
of the institution, on the ground that he had conspired to cause a
free black to be sold as a slave.[84] At Baltimore in 1835 there were
thirty-five or forty of these lodges, with memberships ranging from
thirty-five to one hundred and fifty each.[85]
[Footnote 83: T.D. Jervey, _Robert Y. Hayne and His Times_ (New York,
1909), p. 6.]
[Footnote 84: _Ibid_., pp. 68, 69.]
[Footnote 85: _Niles' Register_, XLIX, 72.]
The tone and purpose of the lodges may be gathered in part from the
constitution and by-laws of one of them, the Union Band Society of New
Orleans, founded in 1860. Its motto was "Love, Union, Peace"; its officers
were president, vice-president, secretary, treasurer, marshal, mother, and
six male and twelve female stewards, and its dues fifty cents per month.
Members joining the lodge were pledged to obey its laws, to be humble to
its officers, to keep its secrets, to live in love and union with fellow
members, "to go about once in a while and see one another in love," and to
wear the society's regalia on occasion. Any member in three months' arrears
of dues was to be expelled unless upon his plea of illness or poverty a
subscription could be raised in meeting to meet his deficit. It was the
duty of all to report illnesses in the membership, and the function of the
official mother to delegate members for the nursing. The secretary was to
see to the washing of the sick member's clothes and pay for the work from
the lodge's funds, as well as the doctor's fees. The marshal was to have
charge of funerals, with power to commandeer the services of such members
as might be required. He might fee the officiating minister to the extent
of not more than $2.50, and draw pay for himself on a similar schedule.
Negotiations with any other lodge were provided for in case of the death of
a member who had fellowship also in the other for the custody of the corpse
and the sharing of expense; and a provision was included that when a lodge
was given the body of an outsider for burial it would furnish coffin,
hearse, tomb, minister and marshal at a price of fifty dollars all
told.[86] The mortuary stress in the by-laws, however, need not signify
that the lodge was more funereal than festive. A negro burial was as
sociable as an Irish wake.
[Footnote 86: _The By-laws and Constitution of the Union Band Society of
Orleans, organised July 22, 1860: Love, Union, Peace_ (Caption).]
Doubtless to some extent in their lodges, and certainly to a great degree
in their daily affairs, the lives of the free colored and the slaves
intermingled. Colored freemen, except in the highest of their social
strata, took free or slave wives almost indifferently. Some indeed appear
to have preferred the unfree, either because in such case the husband would
not be responsible for the support of the family or because he might engage
the protection of his wife's master in time of need.[87] On the other hand
the free colored women were somewhat numerously the prostitutes, or in more
favored cases the concubines, of white men. At New Orleans and thereabouts
particularly, concubinage, along with the well known "quadroon balls," was
a systematized practice.[88] When this had persisted for enough generations
to produce children of less than octoroon infusion, some of these doubtless
cut their social ties, changed their residence, and made successful though
clandestine entrance into white society. The fairness of the complexions of
some of those who to this day take the seats assigned to colored passengers
in the street cars of New Orleans is an evidence, however, that "crossing
the line" has not in all such breasts been a mastering ambition.
[Footnote 87: J.H. Russell, _The Free Negro in Virginia_, pp. 130-133.]
[Footnote 88: Albert Phelps, _Louisiana_ (Boston, 1905), pp. 212, 213.]
The Southern whites were of several minds regarding the free colored
element in their midst. Whereas laboring men were more or less jealously
disposed on the ground of their competition, the interest and inclination
of citizens in the upper ranks was commonly to look with favor upon those
whose labor they might use to advantage. On public grounds, however, these
men shared the general apprehension that in case tumult were plotted, the
freedom of movement possessed by these people might if their services were
enlisted by the slaves make the efforts of the whole more formidable. One
of the Charleston pamphleteers sought to discriminate between the mulattoes
and the blacks in the premises, censuring the indolence and viciousness
of the latter while praising the former for their thrift and sobriety and
contending that in case of revolt they would be more likely to prove allies
of the whites.[89] This distinction, however, met no general adoption. The
general discussion at the South in the premises did not concern the
virtues and vices of the colored freemen on their own score so much as the
influence exerted by them upon the slaves. It is notable in this connection
that the Northern dislike of negro newcomers from the South on the ground
of their prevalent ignorance, thriftlessness and instability[90] was more
than matched by the Southern dread of free negroes from the North. A
citizen of New Orleans wrote characteristically as early as 1819:[91]
"It is a melancholy but incontrovertible fact that in the cities of
Philadelphia, New York and Boston, where the blacks are put on an equality
with the whites, ... they are chiefly noted for their aversion to labor
and proneness to villainy. Men of this class are peculiarly dangerous in
a community like ours; they are in general remarkable for the boldness of
their manners, and some of them possess talents to execute the most wicked
and deep laid plots."
[Footnote 89: [Edwin C. Holland], _A Refutation of the Calumnies circulated
against the Southern and Western States respecting the institution and
existence of Slavery among them_. By a South Carolinian (Charleston, 1822),
pp. 84, 85.]
[Footnote 90: E.R. Turner, _The Negro in Pennsylvania_, p. 158.]
[Footnote 91: Letter to the editor in the _Louisiana Gazette_, Aug. 12,
1819.]