Never Been a Time
Page 2
The Irish had come to this country expecting “a sort of Halfway stage to Heaven,” according to Thomas Grattan, the Irish-born British consul in Boston in the period. Instead, they found a nightmarish existence in crowded and disease-ridden slums, slaving from dawn to dusk in the most menial sort of labor, when they could find work at all. An Irish immigrant who found a life of “shame and poverty” in the United States wrote home that he had recently heard a black man say, “My master is a great tyrant, he treats me as badly as if I was a common Irishman.”7
Like the blacks they encountered in the slums, the Irish who were pouring into Philadelphia were poor and badly educated, came mostly from rural areas, and had little or no training or skills in the new industries that were coming to dominate the American economy. Irish immigrants discovered bitterly that they had to compete with blacks for low-paying jobs, and they were enraged that some employers seemed to prefer blacks and that some blacks appeared to be rising above them—in a few cases, well above them—in society. Blacks became the scapegoats for the failure of the Irish immigrants to achieve anything remotely resembling the American dream.
The three-day riot in 1834 in Philadelphia mentioned above was similar in a striking number of ways to later race riots in American cities, including the racial massacres of the World War I period in East St. Louis and other cities. Most of the rioters were young men and boys, many of them still in their teens. They were mainly from lower social classes. A newspaper referred to them as “the most brutish and lowest caste of society,” although also among those arrested were two house painters, a cabinet maker, a carpenter, and several other artisans.
Rioters, as well as many whites who did not take part, justified the riots as a defensible vigilante response to an increase in black crime. However, many white participants in the riot were recognized thieves, hoodlums, and ex-convicts. The Philadelphia Inquirer remarked, “There was little doubt that a large portion of the offenders were actuated solely from motives of plunder, as the pockets of some of the most active were found on examination filled with silver spoons and other valuables stolen from the blacks.”
There was a large group of onlookers, generally older and of a higher social class than the actual rioters, whose presence contributed to the mayhem. One observer of the Philadelphia riot said that it appeared that the “large body of spectators” who did nothing to stop the violence gave the rioters “more than common confidence in themselves.” It seemed as if the spectators “countenanced their operations and in one or two instances coincided with their conduct by clapping”—their approval encouraging the rioters to beat blacks savagely with clubs and bricks and demolish their homes and churches.
Initially the rioters seemed to focus mainly on young black men and places where they assembled, but as the riot progressed, according to one eyewitness, “The mob exhibited more than fiendish brutality, beating and mutilating some of the old, confiding and unoffending blacks, with a savageness surpassing anything we could have believed men capable of.”
And there was yet another crucial similarity to the attacks on blacks by mobs of whites that would follow in decades to come: Although sixty white rioters were arrested, only ten actually appeared in court and none of them was fined, jailed, or otherwise punished.8
In 1835, a mob of whites burned down an entire row of houses in a black neighborhood, and hundreds of black women and children fled Philadelphia, fearing a racial massacre was soon to come. Three years later, a riot erupted at the dedication of Pennsylvania Hall, a large abolitionist meeting place. The hall was burned to the ground. The next night, a mob burned down the Shelter for Colored Orphans. Antiblack riots continued into the next decade. In 1842, more than one thousand African Americans marched in Philadelphia to support the temperance and abolition movements, often allied in those days. They were met downtown by a mob of whites—mostly Irish—attacked, and beaten. The mob burned down a black meeting hall and church and looted homes until finally the militia was able to stop it by bringing in artillery.
In this and other riots in Philadelphia and elsewhere, the frequent attacks on churches, homes, and well-dressed blacks in particular seems to suggest that the rioters were in part motivated by resentment against the rise of a black middle class in a city with so many poor whites. But there seems to be no question that black crime was among the precipitating factors. The riots, Du Bois wrote, “received their chief moral support from the increasing crime of Negroes; A Cuban slave brained his master with a hatchet; two other murders by Negroes followed, and gambling, drunkenness and debauchery were widespread wherever Negroes settled.”9
Du Bois, who had been commissioned by the University of Pennsylvania in 1896 to study what was generally referred to as “the Negro problem,” lived in Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward, the predominantly black area he studied. The young sociologist, who ventured forth every day from the one-room, second-floor apartment he shared with his wife into a rough but vital African American neighborhood, did not—could not—deny that crime in the city’s black slums was a real problem. It was one that neither his polite if threadbare upbringing in the Massachusetts Berkshires nor his education at Fisk, Harvard, and the University of Berlin did much to prepare him for. Although he noted that arrest and prison records could be misleading because blacks traditionally had been arrested “for less cause and given longer sentences than whites,” Du Bois still argued in The Philadelphia Negro that “the problem of Negro crime in Philadelphia from 1830 to 1850 arose from the fact that less than one-fourteenth of the population was responsible for nearly a third of the serious crimes committed.”
He wrote that there were unquestionably special causes for the prevalence of crime among African Americans. The black man “had lately been freed from serfdom, he was the object of stinging oppression and ridicule, and paths of advancement open to many were closed to him. Consequently, the class of the shiftless, aimless, idle, discouraged and disappointed was proportionately larger.” At the root of the Negro problem, Du Bois said, was racial discrimination. “How long can a city teach its black children that the road to success is to have a white face?” he asked.
“Such discrimination is morally wrong, politically dangerous, industrially wasteful and socially silly. It is the duty of the whites to stop it, and do so primarily for their own sakes … [T]he cost of crime and pauperism, the growth of slums, and the pernicious influence of idleness and lewdness, cost the public far more than would the hurt to the feelings of a carpenter to work beside a black man, or a shop girl to start beside a darker mate.”10
Attacks on blacks in Pennsylvania and other states of the Northeast proceeded on the legal front as well. New Jersey and Connecticut had already disenfranchised blacks by 1837 when a state constitutional convention in Pennsylvania, where free blacks had been able to vote for nearly fifty years, inserted the word “white” in the qualifications for the right to vote. Du Bois wrote:
A curious comment on human nature is this change of public opinion in Philadelphia between 1790 and 1837. No one thing explains it—it arose from a combination of circumstances. If, as in 1790, the new freedmen had been given peace and quiet and abundant work to develop sensible and aspiring leaders, the end would have been different; but a mass of poverty-stricken, ignorant fugitives and ill-trained freedmen had rushed to the city, swarmed in the vile slums which the rapidly growing city furnished, and met in social and economic competition equally ignorant but more vigorous foreigners. These foreigners outbid them at work, beat them on the streets, and were enabled to do this by the prejudice which Negro crime and the anti-slavery sentiment had aroused in the city.”11
Most of the black newcomers were just emerging—or escaping—from slavery. They were so poor they often arrived with little more than the clothes on their backs. They were forcibly uneducated—slaves were beaten for trying to learn to read and write—and untrained for any employment except farm labor. Prejudice blocked them from most jobs and from advancement when they found
jobs. And often they had been brutalized from childhood, learning in the cruelest and most painful ways to be dubious and fearful when white men began talking about right and wrong, law and justice. Like the Irish, they had come to the cities of the American North in pursuit of a dream, and had been forced into deep poverty in the young nation’s growing slums. Some of them became criminals. But in nineteenth-century Philadelphia and other Northern cities, as in twentieth-century East St. Louis, Washington, Chicago, and Tulsa, when whites attacked blacks on downtown streets and rampaged through black neighborhoods, burning and looting and killing, the victims were almost entirely ordinary, law-abiding men and women and children, not criminals. If whites were driven to riot by the crimes of blacks, they attacked the wrong people, as lynch mobs and race rioters so often do.
The rapid growth of urban slums in America as the century progressed would have horrified Thomas Jefferson, who had envisioned America as a nation of independent farmers and feared the coming of the industrial age and the replication of the urban slums of Europe. “The mobs of great cities,” he wrote, “add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body.” Well more than a century later, black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier would contemplate the effects on African Americans of the nation’s urban slums—places like New York and Detroit and Chicago that had proved so alluring to his race for so many years—and call them “the cities of destruction.”12
In the 1820s and 1830s, European immigrants in the urban slums, as well as small farmers from states like Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, felt left out of the new industrial capitalist economy. They flocked to support Democrat Andrew Jackson, a slave owner and white supremacist from Tennessee whose election to the presidency in 1828 and again in 1832 added legitimacy and political clout to the already-powerful forces that were fighting to maintain slavery. At the same time, Democrats took political power in many cities. Supporters of Jackson railed at the hypocrisy of the wealthy abolitionists, mainly gathered in the Whig party, for campaigning to free the slaves while ignoring the poor white men and women who, in many cases, worked like slaves for the companies these very abolitionists owned. “The abolitionists of the north have mistaken the color of American Slaves,” said Theophilus Fisk, a Boston labor leader. “All the real slaves in the United States have pale faces… I will venture to affirm that there are more slaves in [mill towns] Lowell and Nashua alone than can be found South of the Potomac.”13
In the Jacksonian period, antiblack riots struck throughout the North, in large cities and small. Some of the worst were in New York City. In July of 1834, America’s largest city suffered the worst of several brutal anti-abolitionist and antiblack riots of the era. The riot was apparently triggered by sensationalist newspaper reports of widespread miscegenation and intermarriage between whites and blacks. A mob invaded black neighborhoods, beating the residents and destroying hundreds of homes. This time, the rioters were in the main nativists, not Irish immigrants. Indeed, several hundred Irish Catholics signed up as citizen volunteers to help control the rioters.
Riots were not confined to the Eastern cities. Cincinnati, across the Ohio River from the slave state of Kentucky, was notable for its abolitionists and by 1829 had a black population of about two thousand. In that year, a mob of whites rioted for three days, killing and seriously injuring free blacks and escaped slaves and destroying their property. About twelve hundred Cincinnati blacks fled into Canada. There were further riots in Cincinnati in the 1830s and another terrible one in 1841, when immigrant Irish dock workers marched against black dock workers and fired on them with a cannon.14
Farther west, blacks had begun moving into Illinois decades before the Civil War, rowing and even swimming across the Mississippi and Ohio rivers from nearby slave states. In the 1820s, in the southern part of the state, tiny Brooklyn, Illinois—located just north of a small Mississippi River settlement that in the 1860s became East St. Louis—was settled by free blacks and escaped slaves and became one of the oldest black-founded communities in the United States. But much of the white population of southern Illinois supported slavery, and many in the predominantly rural region of mines and small hardscrabble farms were adamant and sometimes brutal in their resistance to abolition.
Alton, Illinois, on the east bank of the Mississippi a few miles north of Brooklyn, was the headquarters of antislavery crusader Elijah Lovejoy, a Presbyterian minister whose home was an important stop on the Underground Railroad for escaping slaves. In the 1830s, he published the newspaper the Observer, an increasingly passionate advocate of immediate emancipation of the country’s slaves. Enraged separatists smashed his press and dumped it in the river. He ordered a new press and resumed publishing his calls for freedom. On July 21, 1836, white mobs from southern Illinois attacked the printing plant and murdered Lovejoy. The black citizens of Brooklyn honored him by informally referring to their hometown as “Lovejoy.”15
Elijah Lovejoy became the first important martyr of abolition. And in New York, influential publisher Horace Greeley declared that Lovejoy’s death had convinced him “that Slavery and Freedom could not coexist on the same soil,” and he intensified his attacks on slavery. As if the two sides were armies marching in step toward one another, every time the forces of abolition became bolder and less equivocating in their call for an end to slavery, the anti-abolitionists grew more fervent in their resistance.16
The first half of the nineteenth century—a cataclysmic era of the rapid and uncontrolled growth of cities, of a shift to an industrial economy, of growing wealth and growing poverty—was an exceptionally violent time in America. In addition to riots inspired by the dual issues of race and slavery and those inspired by prejudice against Irish Catholics, there were anti-German riots, anti-Protestant riots, riots of tenants against landlords and of workers against bosses, anti-dissection riots, riots between political parties, riots over theatrical performances, riots over the licensing of whiskey, brothel riots, and, of course, riots over taxes, the very sort of riot enshrined in the myth of the young country’s war of independence. The United States was born in riot and rebellion, and remained true to its birthright.
In 1838, a young Illinois legislator named Abraham Lincoln contemplated his fractious nation and bemoaned “the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country” and the “worse than savage mobs” that across the nation seemed to be replacing the rule of law. He said, “Accounts of outrages committed by mobs form the every-day news of the times. They have pervaded the country, from New England to Louisiana; they are neither peculiar to the eternal snows of the former, nor the burning suns of the latter; they are not the creature of climate, neither are they confined to the slave-holding, or the non-slave-holding States. Alike, they spring up among the pleasure hunting masters of southern slaves, and the order loving citizens of the land of steady habits. Whatever, then, their cause may be, it is common to the whole country.”
Lincoln warned, “Whenever the vicious portion of population shall be permitted to gather in bands of hundreds and thousands, and burn churches, ravage and rob provision-stores, throw printing presses into rivers, shoot editors, and hang and burn obnoxious persons at pleasure, and with impunity; depend on it, this Government cannot last.”17
In the 1850s, the violence in word and deed focused increasingly on the battle over slavery. Congress created a new and significantly more draconian Fugitive Slave Law, imposing heavy penalties on anyone who helped a runaway slave and giving black men in so-called free states who could not prove they were freedmen very little legal recourse against any white man who claimed to own them. The Dred Scott decision, which ruled that African Americans could not be citizens, further weakened the position of blacks in America. Slave catchers mounted intensive hunts in Northern states, seizing blacks who had lived free for many years. Abolitionists fought back, in some cases rescuing captives and setting them free again. The nation’s racial gulf widened ever further, and war seemed inevitable.
In some parts of the North, the beginning of the war deepened anti-black attitudes. Democratic leaders in New York and other Northern cities had preached to their working-class followers that the federal government was marching white men off to die in a war to free the black men who would replace them in the factories of the North. As if to confirm the charge, blacks—who were excluded from virtually all labor unions—were used as strikebreakers in many Northern cities, leading to attacks by white workers in Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, Boston, Camden, New Jersey, and other cities, including New York.18
On January 1, 1863, Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation, freeing slaves in rebel states “thenceforward and forever.” Two months later, a federal draft was instituted. The anger of poor young white men subject to induction was further stirred by the knowledge that any man wealthy enough to fork over $300 could opt out of the draft. Antidraft riots struck Detroit and other Northern and midwestern cities. By far the worst was in New York.