by Julie Winch
Portrait of Elizabeth Freeman (Mumbet). In 1781, Elizabeth Freeman and her lawyer, Theodore Sedgwick, won her freedom and helped end slavery in Massachusetts by arguing that the Massachusetts constitution’s guarantee of freedom and equality applied to everyone in the state. Sedgwick’s daughter-in-law, Susan Ridley Sedgwick, painted this portrait of Freeman thirty years after her landmark case. (Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society)
Benjamin Banneker’s Almanac. Self-taught mathematician and astronomer Benjamin Banneker (1731–1806), the author of a series of well-received almanacs, publicly challenged Thomas Jefferson in print, asking how the framer of the Declaration of Independence could defend slavery and condemn black people as intellectually inferior to whites. (The Library Company of Philadelphia)
Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Philadelphia. Founded by Methodist preacher Richard Allen in 1794, Bethel eventually became the “mother church” of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) denomination and a vibrant hub of black community life. (The Library Company of Philadelphia)
Paul Cuffe. New England–born shipowner Paul Cuffe (1759–1817) played a crucial role in promoting the emigration of American free blacks to Africa. He hoped it would give them greater economic opportunities and lead to the abolition of slavery. (Courtesy of the New Bedford Whaling Museum)
Black Sawyers Working in Front of the Bank of Pennsylvania, Philada. The working people in this lively Philadelphia street scene painted around 1811 by German-born artist John Lewis Krimmel were most likely free. However, even though the men were skilled craftsmen, they may not have been able to find steady employment. The nursemaid probably lived in her employers’ home rather than with her own family. (Rogers Fund, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: ART RESOURCE)
Kidnapping. As this illustration from Joseph Torrey’s A Portraiture of Domestic Slavery (Philadelphia, 1817) shows, even in the supposedly free states black people were in danger of being kidnapped and sold into slavery. (The Library Company of Philadelphia)
Black and White Beaux. This refined and elegantly-dressed young couple out for a stroll in New York City belonged to the black middle class that was emerging in a number of communities by 1830. (From Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans [1832], The Library Company of Philadelphia)
James Forten. Born to free black parents in Philadelphia, James Forten (1766–1842) served on an American privateer during the Revolutionary War while still in his mid-teens and then carved out a career for himself as a successful sail-maker and real estate speculator. He was an outspoken critic of slavery and racial inequality. (Leon Gardiner Collection, Historical Society of Pennsylvania)
David Walker’s Appeal. David Walker’s 1829 pamphlet urged free blacks to insist on equality with whites and told the nation’s slaves to demand their freedom. The Appeal outraged the defenders of the racial status quo, and when Walker died in 1830 of tuberculosis it was rumored that he had in fact been murdered. (The Library Company of Philadelphia)
Francis Johnson. Francis Johnson (1792–1844) toured extensively in North America and Europe with his band, which was made up entirely of African-American musicians, and composed music for many white upper-class social events. This portrait is by Robert Douglass Jr., a black painter from Philadelphia who struggled to make his own career in the arts. (Ferdinand J. Dreer Collection, Historical Society of Pennsylvania)
Caution!! Colored People. The passage of a harsh new Fugitive Slave Law in 1850 made free blacks feel vulnerable. They could be arrested as runaways, denied the chance to prove that they were in fact free, and shipped off to the South. (Photographs and Print Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)
CHAPTER FIVE
“No Rights which the White Man was Bound to Respect”
Black Freedom and Black Citizenship, 1850–1861
The message the new generation of African-American leaders wanted to convey to the entire free black community was that if they hoped to see every slave in the nation liberated and every free person treated as a citizen they must unite. It was one thing to call upon people to rally around the core issue of ending racial oppression. It was quite another, however, to reach a consensus about how best to proceed, or indeed who should speak for the nation’s free black population. By 1850, that population stood at almost 435,000. Free people of color lived in every state of the Union and in every territory. They dwelled on small farms and in great cities. Some were wealthy, while many were desperately poor. Several hundred were slaveholders, while a great many more were ex-slaves. Although most were legally free, a considerable number—we will never know the precise figure—were passing as free. Geography and socioeconomic status divided the free community, and so too did gender. Black women struggled with the “double bond” of race and gender; when they spoke out, some black men were supportive but others dismissed their concerns. Although unity was difficult to achieve across lines of region and class, education and gender, the overwhelming majority of free people were agreed on one central point: things could not remain as they were.
Table 5.1 Free Black Population in Selected U.S. Cities, 1790, 1820, and 1850
1790
1820
1850
Baltimore
323
10,326
25,442
Boston
761
1,687
1,999
Charleston, SC
775
1,475
3,441
Chicago
——
——
323
Cincinnati
——
433
3,237
Louisville, KY
1
93
1,538
Nashville, TN
——
189
511
New Orleans
862
6,237
9,905
New York
1,036
10,368
13,815
Philadelphia
1,805
10,710
17,142
Providence, RI
417
975
1,499
Richmond, VA
265
1,235
2,369
St. Louis
37
196
1,470
Washington, D.C.
——
1,696
8,158
Sources: Federal Population Schedules for the Years 1790, 1820, and 1850; Kimberly S. Hanger, Bounded Lives, Bounded Places: Free Black Society in Colonial New Orleans, 1769–1803 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 22 (1791 census for Spanish-held New Orleans); www.usgennet.org/usa/mo/county/stlouis/census.htm (accessed May 2, 2013) (1791 census for Spanish-held St. Louis)
The new decade began ominously for the nation’s free people of color. Negotiators in Congress patched together the Compromise of 1850 to try to damp down the fires of sectional discord. California entered the Union as a free state, a move that seemed promising to African Americans who wanted to settle there. The Compromise organized New Mexico and Utah into territories. It resolved a boundary dispute between Texas and New Mexico, and it banned the slave trade in the District of Columbia. Foreign visitors to the nation’s capital had been openly critical of the fact that auctioneers were selling off slaves to the highest bidder just blocks away from where congressmen were holding forth on the subject of American liberty. The slave trade ended in the District, although slavery did not, but by far the most controversial provision of the Compromise was the passage of a new Fugitive Slave Law.
Slaveholders had been complaining for decades that the 1793 law was not tough enough. They wanted a law that had “teeth.” In 1850 they got it. The new Fugitive Slave Law was broad in its scope and truly terrible in its impact. It made every
African American vulnerable to arrest and enslavement. Slave owners or their agents had the power of the federal government behind them. Armed with vague descriptions of the individuals they were hunting, they roamed black neighborhoods in the North and Midwest. The people they seized as fugitives were judged to be so unless they could prove otherwise—but they could not prove otherwise because the law did not allow them to bring forward witnesses to attest to their free status. The fact that the federally-appointed commissioners responsible for determining whether the black man or woman standing before them was a slave or a free person received ten dollars if they ruled in favor of the slave catcher and only five if they found that it was a case of mistaken identity obviously weighed in the decision-making process.
In Boston and elsewhere, black and white antislavery radicals stormed courthouses, harassed slave catchers, and did whatever they could to wrest alleged runaways from the clutches of their captors. If they had to use violence, some were prepared to do so. In at least one instance—in Christiana, Pennsylvania, in 1851—a slave owner paid with his life for attempting to take back his human property. As Frederick Douglass proclaimed, “The only way to make the Fugitive Slave Law a dead letter is to make half a dozen or more dead kidnappers.”1 Black people began to arm themselves and some of them fortified their homes.
The federal government repeatedly intervened to uphold the law. The “rendition” of Anthony Burns in Boston in 1854 took so much manpower and generated so much expense that, humanitarian considerations apart, critics of the slave law insisted that it would have been cheaper if the authorities had simply paid Burns’ master for his freedom. Nine “free” states either revamped their personal liberty laws or wrote new ones. Those states might not give black people many rights in their everyday lives, but they were concerned about the implications of the federal law. Tensions escalated as the defenders of slavery demanded that the Supreme Court strike down the state laws.
The 1852 publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin stiffened the resolve of the antislavery forces and brought them new recruits. Some African-American readers were dismayed that Stowe’s novel ended with George and Eliza Harris leaving for Liberia. They argued that Stowe should have had this brave young couple stay and fight the slave system, but they appreciated the response Uncle Tom’s Cabin generated. It brought home to many of Stowe’s white readers the evils of slavery and the pernicious nature of the Fugitive Slave Law. However, sympathy for the poor, oppressed slaves in the South did not necessarily change the way whites in the “free” states viewed people of color in general. The body of laws in place in all sections of the nation reinforced to free black people their marginal status, and where the law was silent, majority sentiment often ruled the day. If race riots were less prevalent in the 1850s, racial violence was as commonplace as it had ever been. The mob actions of earlier decades had given way to smaller-scale but no less virulent assaults on black people and black-owned property. An unstable economy only made things worse as whites took out their fears and frustrations on their black neighbors.
Facing an uncertain future, some light-skinned free people tried to redefine themselves in racial terms. Charleston’s James Hanscome was one individual who succeeded. Hanscome was the wealthy slave-owning son of a white planter and a free woman of color. Under South Carolina law, the child of a Native-American woman and a white man was considered white, so Hanscome declared that his late mother had been an Indian. He also insisted that he had never paid the discriminatory tax that South Carolina imposed on all free people of color, and hence he never had been “colored.” He even produced as a witness the official responsible for collecting the tax. Both men lied. Hanscome had paid the tax. Whether his white ally perjured himself out of friendship or because Hanscome had bribed him is open to question, but no one checked, and Hanscome slipped quietly across the racial boundary. What he achieved was hardly unusual. A newspaper in Charleston around the same time that James Hanscome “passed” lamented that “[e]very day” free people stretched the truth and “gained the privileges of white men.”2
Suspicion of free people increased in many quarters. Even if only a small number of them were able to do what Hanscome had done, many whites saw free blacks as constituting a dangerous and restless element in society. Southern states made vigorous efforts to cut off the flow of recruits into the free community. Manumission became virtually impossible in most slave states after 1850. Courts that had once been fairly liberal in their interpretation of what counted as a “meritorious act” on the part of a slave now adopted a much harsher attitude. And when the laws of a particular state required that newly-emancipated slaves leave immediately or face reenslavement, judges were less likely than they had been to grant waivers. Masters and mistresses who did want to liberate a slave often found that they could not do so. If an owner defied the law rather than trying to maneuver around it, that did not help the slave, who would find him- or herself back in slavery by order of the state. Local authorities in the South began conducting sweeps of particular neighborhoods, taking into custody black people who had been living as free, with or without the connivance of their owners.
Under the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that some free people chose to leave the United States. A new Haitian emigration scheme induced hundreds of men and women to try their luck in the island nation. People of color reevaluated emigration to Liberia. In the 1820s and 1830s, the free community had been intensely critical of the American Colonization Society and had condemned as foolish and misguided anyone who even considered going to Liberia. However, in 1847 Liberia had become an independent republic and it had a black man, Virginia-born merchant John Jenkins Roberts, as its president. That made it much more appealing.
Black men and women left America to seek better opportunities elsewhere. Some, like abolitionist lecturer Sarah Parker Remond and gifted young scholar Jesse Ewing Glasgow, sought in Britain the college education they could not get in the United States. France attracted a number of mixed-raced émigrés from Louisiana. Some people ventured much further afield. African-American mariners and whalers jumped ship in faraway locations like Hawai’i, while black prospectors joined whites in seeking their fortunes in the gold diggings in Australia.
Opportunity motivated some people, but sheer panic drove others into exile. Reports that slave catchers had arrived in town prompted escaped slaves to head for the Canadian border in droves. In many cases those individuals and their families had been living as free for years, and their neighbors were stunned when they packed up and disappeared overnight. An unknown number who were legally free fled north as well, fearful that the slave catchers might seize them and ship them off to the South. Whatever prompted free blacks to leave America, black leaders in the 1850s were far less critical of voluntary emigration than those of an earlier generation had been. As Martin R. Delany saw it, black people should turn their backs on a nation that was obviously rejecting them. “We love our country, dearly love her, but she . . . despises us, and bids us begone.” He recommended that they move to any country willing to “receive [them] as her adopted children.”3
Although thousands of free blacks left the United States in the 1850s, the overwhelming majority stayed. Plenty of white people hoped that they would go as well because, in their opinion, the nation would be better off without them. Pressure mounted in various parts of the South for a black exodus. Virginia, Maryland, Missouri, and Kentucky earmarked public funds to advance the African colonization scheme. In 1853, the Tennessee legislature announced that henceforth every slave who gained his or her freedom must leave for Liberia. On at least two occasions, South Carolina lawmakers advocated rounding up free people and reducing them to slavery. Some free blacks panicked and fled the state. Others laid low, hoping the storm would soon blow over.
Arkansas lawmakers told free blacks outright that they must leave or lose their liberty. Admittedly, Arkansas’s free population was not a large one—it numbered just 608 in 1850
—but most free people heeded the warning and left. Virginia twice debated expulsion in the 1850s. North Carolina considered it, as did Maryland. There were rumors of similar moves afoot in Missouri, although ultimately they came to nothing. James Thomas recalled how the authorities in St. Louis had ordered all the free people in the city, some 1,500 individuals, to appear in court and answer questions about who they were, where they lived, and how they supported themselves. The situation in the free states was different in one major respect. Since slavery was dead, black people could not be reduced to chattel once more. They could, however, be made to feel that they counted for very little in other respects.
With prospects so gloomy in the North and the South, some free blacks hoped they might do better in the West. Many hundreds joined the surge of white Forty-Niners into California during the Gold Rush. In common with the majority of the white prospectors, most African Americans stayed even after they realized they were never going to strike it rich in the goldfields. California entered the Union as a free state, and that attracted more black settlers, but being a free state did not qualify California as a haven of peaceful coexistence. Some slave owners defied the law, brought their slaves to California, and tried to keep them. California’s fugitive slave law helped them do so because it allowed people who did not reside permanently in the state to own slaves. Slaveholders simply lied about where they lived, and if their slaves ran away they hunted them down and reclaimed them, with the approval of the local courts.