Between Slavery and Freedom

by Julie Winch

  In his short but eventful life David Walker promoted the twin causes of antislavery and racial equality in various ways. He is best known today for authoring the Appeal, but he was also the Boston agent for the nation’s first black-owned and edited newspaper. The first issue of Freedom’s Journal rolled off of the presses in New York City on March 16, 1827. Freedom’s Journal printed a wide range of items, from denunciations of slavery and racial injustice to historical accounts of Africa, letters and opinion pieces, marriage and death notices, poetry, and advertisements. Many more people read Freedom’s Journal than actually subscribed to it. Well-thumbed copies were handed around in churches and self-improvement societies, and among friends and workmates, few of whom paid a cent to keep the newspaper in business. Lack of revenue was one reason for its demise. Another was its editor’s change of heart. In 1829, John Brown Russwurm shocked readers by announcing that he planned to emigrate. The college-educated Russwurm had accepted the American Colonization Society’s invitation to edit a newspaper in Liberia. Shortly before his departure, he wrote confidently to a friend that “the day . . . is not far distant, when all our people . . . will be as anxious to locate themselves there [Liberia], as foreigners now are of emigrating to America.”3 He could not have been more mistaken, but in the short term his defection doomed Freedom’s Journal.

  White abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator filled the void for several years. Garrison’s black friends helped fund the newspaper, and Garrison published many articles by and about free people, as well as launching blistering attacks on the slave system in the South. Still, the Liberator was no substitute for a newspaper owned and edited by African Americans. Answering that need, in the 1830s and 1840s, African Americans launched numerous newspapers and magazines, including the Colored American, Frederick Douglass’s North Star, and Philadelphia’s National Reformer. By 1850, an African-American reader in the North or the Midwest with cash to spare, or a membership in one of the black literary societies, could read at least a couple of black newspapers and find out what was going on beyond the confines of his or her own community. But subscribing to a paper like the North Star in New York City or Chicago was one thing. Subscribing in Charleston or Savannah was quite another. Postmasters routinely pulled “incendiary” publications out of the mailbags and told the local authorities who the intended recipients were.

  The sentiment grew among whites in the South that black literacy was dangerous. They feared that if free blacks became educated they would disseminate abolitionist literature, forge passes for their enslaved friends, and teach them to read and write. Although a number of states in the slave South passed laws expressly forbidding the education of free people, African Americans found ways around those laws. In Missouri, for instance, preacher John Berry Meacham reportedly held classes on a boat on the Mississippi, where he and his students were under federal rather than state jurisdiction. Charleston, South Carolina had a number of black schools, some of which flourished in secret, while others operated more openly. At least in the case of the Brown Fellowship Society, which sponsored the education of its members’ children, the fact that many of those members had ties of blood to prominent white families, and some were slave owners themselves, earned the organization’s endeavors grudging acceptance from the authorities. Elsewhere in major urban centers like Baltimore, New Orleans, and Washington, D.C., African-American schools did function, even if they had to do so without public funding and their trustees had to be constantly on their guard against suspicions that they were in any way threatening slavery.

  In the North as well as the South, black education became more closely linked to the campaign for abolition and black rights in the minds of many whites, and that could have a chilling effect, as the fate of several educational initiatives made abundantly clear. In 1831, an interracial group of reformers chose New Haven, Connecticut as the site of the nation’s first African-American college. The horrified townspeople organized a protest meeting and handed the plan a crushing defeat. In 1833, in Canterbury, Connecticut, white teacher Prudence Crandall agreed to admit the daughter of a prosperous African-American farmer to her private school. Almost immediately, white parents withdrew their daughters. Crandall responded by announcing that henceforth she would operate her school exclusively for “young ladies and little misses of color.” Word spread, and affluent black parents in a number of Northern cities enrolled their daughters in Crandall’s school.4 The white inhabitants of Canterbury promptly embarked on a campaign of harassment that culminated in Crandall’s arrest. Two years later, Noyes Academy, in Canaan, New Hampshire opened its doors to black as well as white students. The experiment ended abruptly when local whites chased out the black students and tore down the school building.

  Black parents in the North and Midwest petitioned repeatedly for access to public education for their children. They pointed out that their tax dollars helped to pay for the schooling of white children. If the local boards of education listened, what they typically provided for black children were segregated schools housed in rundown buildings. Almost all of the teachers the boards of education hired to teach in black schools were white. Some were truly dedicated to improving the lives of their students, while others regarded assignment to a black school as a demotion and took out their frustrations on their pupils. As for the curriculum, it was usually much more limited than in white schools because the authorities assumed that black children were incapable of mastering anything beyond the fundamentals and they had no need of advanced education anyway because it would render them unfit for the menial occupations they would fill.

  Some communities did integrate their schools, and black parents moved or sent their children to live with friends in those communities. Cleveland admitted students to its public schools without regard to race, and that attracted some out-of-state families. Thanks to pressure from black parents, school integration came to one town after another in Massachusetts, but the battle in Boston was a protracted one. In 1849, printer Benjamin Roberts sued the Boston School Board on behalf of his young daughter. Sarah Roberts’s attorneys pointed out that Sarah had to pass a number of “whites only” schools each day on her way to the “colored” school. The Roberts case went down to defeat, although in 1855 political maneuvering led to the desegregation of public schools throughout the state, including Boston.

  Black parents wanted good schools for their children and they themselves valued learning. Evening and Sunday classes for adults attracted many who had never had the chance of an education in their earlier years. Social and intellectual life in the African-American community flourished, even if it did so beyond the notice of most whites. Where they had the numbers and the means to do so, free people organized literary and debating groups. They had to do so separately from whites because even though many libraries and lyceums boasted that they were “free to all,” in reality “all” did not include blacks. In an added irony, black men’s societies excluded women, so African-American women formed their own literary groups. Members met regularly to read, to write, and to give one another encouragement. One activity blended into another. The women sewed or knitted garments for the “charity box” while one of their members read aloud to them. They discussed how best to help their community. They collected money to aid runaway slaves and they sponsored abolitionist fundraisers. For both the men and the women who flocked to literary societies, antislavery and campaigning for civil rights went hand-in-hand with the desire for education.

  It is impossible to overemphasize the bitter reality of slavery in the lives of the overwhelming majority of free black people. Many had been slaves or had kinfolk who were enslaved. Even the freeborn understood that the existence of slavery made them vulnerable to kidnapping. Destroying slavery and securing full citizenship were the twin goals of free black activists. For some, the means to achieving those goals lay in organizing all sorts of initiatives, from antislavery societies to national and state-wide civil rights movements, from seizing t
he power of the press to petitioning, agitating, and endeavoring to shame the state and federal governments into acting justly to everyone, regardless of race. For others the tactic of choice was direct action when slave catchers or city constables seized an alleged runaway or a white mob seemed intent on driving black people out of their homes. In organizing or in using force, free people collaborated with white sympathizers when they could and acted on their own when they had to.

  African Americans were almost always prepared to work with white abolitionists. The older organizations like the Pennsylvania Abolition Society and the New York Manumission Society did not admit blacks to membership. However, that “first wave” of white abolitionists did their best to improve the situation of people of color by sponsoring schools, helping people find work, and trying to rescue victims of kidnapping. Admittedly, they dispensed a good deal of patronizing advice, but most black people who interacted with them accepted that the white men in these organizations were well-intentioned.

  Black activists in the North welcomed the rise of “radical” abolitionism among whites in the 1830s. They admired the fervor of William Lloyd Garrison and the members of his circle. They applauded the calls for immediate emancipation. They accepted invitations to join the American Anti-Slavery Society, and a number held office in the organization and in its state and local affiliates. After a few years, though, some black abolitionists became disenchanted when they realized that they were not necessarily equal participants.

  The ties between blacks and whites in organized antislavery were complex. The older “whites only” societies often had a greater appreciation of the need to look beyond emancipation to the new social and economic patterns that would have to develop if black people were to be free in more than name only. Many white foes of slavery who joined the new antislavery societies found it easier to focus on ending Southern bondage than on working toward racial equality. Sarah Forten, the daughter of wealthy sailmaker James Forten, wrote of encountering “professed friends” within the ranks of the white abolitionists to whom prejudice “clings like a dark mantle.” One man even confessed to her that he could remember the time “when in walking with a Colored brother, the darker the night, the better Abolitionist was I.”5 Although sometimes disappointed in their white allies, Forten and countless other people of color refused to abandon the abolitionist cause. Destroying slavery lay at the heart of their struggle to force the nation to live up to its founding principles of freedom and equality for all. They would simply have to convince white reformers that eradicating slavery was not good enough. If black people were stranded on the margins of American society, somewhere between abject slavery and full citizenship, then abolition would be a failure, or at best a partial victory.

  While many members of the emerging free black middle class in the North and Midwest joined antislavery societies, people of color at all levels of society did whatever they could to weaken and ultimately destroy the institution of slavery. They contributed money to the Vigilance Committees that coordinated aid to fugitive slaves. Sometimes they helped not with cash but with a hint to an anxious-looking black stranger about a place to hide, the chance of a job or a hot meal. People in slaveholding states reached out when they could. If they recognized the wisdom of not openly affiliating with an antislavery society, they still found innumerable ways to assist fugitives.

  Whether they lived in the South, the North or the Midwest, free people of color followed as intently as their white neighbors did the events that were unfolding on the nation’s borders in the three decades after 1820. It was hardly surprising if those events held a special significance for them, because what was at issue was the fundamental question of black freedom.

  That question arose in 1821, when Mexico declared its independence from Spain. Eager to attract settlers to the underpopulated state of Coahuila (which included Texas), the Mexican government invited in people from the United States. Many of those who took advantage of the offer of cheap land were white slaveholders. Although Mexico renounced slavery in 1829, the national government was willing to compromise on abolition and other issues with the American settlers in Texas. Compromise was not good enough for the Texans. Tensions escalated until 1835, when Mexico’s head of state announced that he would tolerate no more defiance from the Texans and they responded by rejecting Mexican authority over them.

  In the war that followed, the Texans emerged victorious. Texas became the Lone Star Republic, and it did so with the aid of free black men, like William Goyens, who was Texas leader Sam Houston’s interpreter with the Indian peoples of East Texas, and dozens of others who fought for independence or helped the cause with money and supplies. Their loyalty garnered little reward. Even before the formal break with Mexico, the General Council of the Republic of Texas prohibited the entry of any more free blacks into Texas under penalty of enslavement. Once they had defeated the Mexican forces, Texas lawmakers permitted only those people of color who had resided in the region since preindependence days to stay. Eventually they informed even those individuals that they must pay five hundred dollars each and get permission from the courts to remain in Texas.

  The United States finally annexed Texas in 1845. Statehood brought a further weakening of black rights. Free blacks could not vote or hold office. They could not testify in court, and they were subject to harsher penalties than whites if convicted of the same offense. Should a slave owner decide to free a slave, he or she could only do so beyond the boundaries of the state, and the ex-slave could not return to Texas, although Texas law did give a free person the option to re-enslave him- or herself. Not surprisingly, Texas failed to attract many free black settlers.

  Texas annexation led to war with Mexico from 1845–1848, which resulted in the United States gaining a vast amount of new territory in the West, where thousands of blacks had already settled. Free blacks had been trickling into California long before the war. Under Mexican rule, a few people of mixed African, Spanish, and Indian descent in California had enjoyed influence unmatched by anything men and women with any discernible trace of African ancestry could aspire to in the United States. Andreas Pico was a general who fought against the Americans, and his brother, Pio, was the governor of California at the time of the Mexican surrender. However, people of color were also instrumental in wresting control of California from Mexico. William Leidesdorff, a man of African and Danish parentage, arrived in California in 1841. Originally from St. Croix, he made Yerba Buena, today’s San Francisco, his base of operations. Leidesdorff was a rancher, a land speculator, a ship-owner and a very successful merchant. Although he took Mexican citizenship, he sided with the Americans. Had he lived longer—he died in 1848—his wealth and political astuteness would have made him a force to reckon with when California achieved statehood.

  Leidesdorff died just before the Gold Rush. The stream of Americans, black and white, making for California became a raging torrent once word spread of the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill. The population soared, and soon California was on the verge of statehood. The constitutional convention of 1849 drafted a document that banned slavery, in large measure because white prospectors had no desire to compete with huge gangs of slaves panning for gold to enrich their masters.

  The war with Mexico and the acquisition by the United States of millions of additional square miles of territory led to the same intense debate that had followed the Louisiana Purchase. Politicians and the white public in general had very different notions about whether or not to permit slavery in the new territories. For the supporters of slavery it was a question of fundamental rights—their rights to take their slaves wherever they chose. For the white abolitionist minority it was about the gross injustice of one human being exploiting another. For many whites who opposed the spread of slavery, though, it came down to their determination to keep the West for white people. As Pennsylvania’s David Wilmot declared when he tried to push through Congress a piece of legislation that would have prohibited slavery in all the
lands the United States had gained from Mexico, he was “plead[ing] the cause of the rights of white freemen.” The West was “a rich inheritance” for “the sons of toil, of my own race and own color.”6 Black slaves did not belong in the West, and neither did black “freemen.” The truth was that many whites were prepared to argue that black “freemen” had no right to live anywhere in the United States. For the nation’s free men and women of color, who had hoped to complete what their parents had begun, the era of “manifest destiny” brought both hope and frustration. They could hope for a better future for themselves and their children, but they could not help feeling a growing sense of frustration. By the 1840s, it seemed that freedom and the rights of American citizenship were only for white people.

  American Foot Soldiers. On the eve of the British surrender at Yorktown in 1781, a French officer painted this picture of black men and white men serving together in the Continental Army. Some of the black soldiers were already free, while others hoped to win their freedom by enlisting. (Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection, John Hay Library, Brown University)