Negroland

by Margo Jefferson

  Anthony Johnson was born in Angola and brought to Virginia in 1621; he began plantation life as an indentured servant before slavery was firmly established. Mary, another Negro servant, became his wife. They produced four children and completed their term of service; Johnson bought 250 acres of land in 1640. (The same year, a black indentured servant who’d fled was caught and sentenced to “serve his said master…for the time of his natural life.”) Anthony and Mary increased their 250 acres to 550, and acquired cattle and indentured servants. In 1654, one of those servants, the Negro John Casor, accused Johnson of wanting to enslave him and left, going to work for a white landowner willing to treat him as an indentured servant. Johnson took the white landowner to court, won his case on appeal, and took Casor back into servitude for life, thus becoming one of the first legal slaveholders in the colonies.

  Genevieve Belly Ricard of Louisiana belonged to a small band of gens de couleur libres who bought and sold large quantities of land, sugar, rice, cotton, livestock, machinery, and slaves. When her husband, Cyprian Ricard, died, she inherited his thriving plantation; thereafter, the widow Ricard, as she was known, successfully managed (with the help but not the supervision of her son), about a thousand acres and close to a hundred slaves, valued at $200,000 on the eve of the Civil War.

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  More modestly, Negroland citizens are ministers, teachers, and skilled artisans. They own property that they rent out; they own inns and modest hotels; they are barbers, carpenters, mechanics, tailors, jewelers, bakers, and dressmakers. The majority are of mixed racial ancestry because that ancestry gives them more access to well-placed white patrons and relatives.

  What did it mean to be a privileged free Negro? It meant you were free to earn money; free to marry legally and (sometimes) showily; free to educate your legally free children and pass property on to them; free to travel, to buy a summer home; free to form reading societies, debating societies, mutual aid societies; free, if you were a female, to cultivate “the lighter accomplishments…to show much taste and skill in painting, instrumental music, singing and the various departments of ornamental needlework &c.”; free to hire a maid and a nanny; free to have your own version of the Social Register.

  Free in the North to agitate against slavery and for voting rights while excluding Negroes with fewer accomplishments from your social circles.

  Free in the South to lobby for your fluctuating rights while deeming it wise to ignore the claims of poorer, darker free Negroes.

  Free to labor for privilege in the hopes that your children would be entitled to it.

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  “You have seen how a man was made a slave; now you shall see how a slave was made a man,” wrote Frederick Douglass in his autobiography. Let us see how slaves, male and female, become social arbiters and leaders. One Negro elite to declare itself in print and begin publishing its stories in the early nineteenth century was comprised of escaped slaves like Douglass, like William Wells Brown, like Ellen and William Craft.

  Even the first author to formally define “the elite of our people” had, in his quiet way, escaped slavery. In 1841 Joseph Willson, dentist, of Philadelphia, published Sketches of the Higher Classes of Colored Society. He used the pseudonym “A Southerner.” He was born Joseph Keating in Augusta, Georgia, first son of a wealthy middle-aged slaveholder, John Willson Jr., unmarried, and a teenage slave, Betsy Keating, unmarried and freed by Willson before she bore the first of their five children. The couple had a pedigree of sorts: for many years, Betsy’s slave aunt had served John’s slaveholding uncle. His will declared her, their daughter, and her siblings free, “on account of her care and attention to my domestic concerns.” Ah, the clinical euphemisms of the law.

  Joseph was just five when his father died in 1822. The will provided the Negro family with shares in the Augusta bank Willson had helped found, as well as the protection of a trustworthy executor and a rent-free house in the country, with “suitable household and Kitchen furniture and an adequate number of male and female Servants to wait upon them.” Were all those servants slaves? Had Betsy known any of them in her youth?

  She had begun her life as a slave wench; she became an astute and planful matron. The Keatings lived in discreet comfort for eleven years. As formal education for Negroes was forbidden in Georgia, she sent her sons out of state for schooling and had her daughters tutored at home. Each year the state looked with increasing disfavor on free persons of color and found new ways to limit their actions and opportunities. In 1833, when Joseph was sixteen, Georgia marshaled its resources to pass laws that (1) fined any person who allowed a slave or free Negro access to a printing press or any other labor requiring a knowledge of reading and writing; (2) forbade any person to teach a slave or free Negro to read or write; and (3) allowed a free Negro convicted of “living an idle life” (which could mean walking down the street at a leisurely pace) to be sold into slavery. The family relocated to Philadelphia, long known for its community of achieving Negroes.

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  Betsy Keating was wise in the ways of social discretion. In Philadelphia she became Mrs. Elizabeth Willson, widow. She bought a three-story house in a largely white neighborhood—she knew how to live quietly among white people—then joined the prestigious St. Thomas’s African Episcopal Church and set about introducing her family to Negro society. They were attractive, and they formed solid ties in that small, watchful world. Joseph found a mentor in another Southern Negro émigré, Frederick Augustus Hinton, who was a fervent abolitionist as well as a barber and perfumer to the city’s white elite. Hinton arranged for Joseph to learn that once-forbidden printer’s trade—not in Philadelphia, where custom encouraged white printers to deny Negroes training, but in Boston, under the fervent white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. When Joseph returned to Philadelphia, he opened a printing business and married a young lady from Georgia of like background. Elizabeth Harnett was the daughter of a Scottish slaveholder and a free woman of color.

  What a relief it must have been for this young couple to talk together openly about their parents and their histories!

  Willson’s book sets the tone for another 150 years of prose on the subject. The very idea of “Higher Classes” of colored society will “undoubtedly excite the mirth of a prejudiced community on its annunciation,” he declares; nevertheless, “it is perfectly correct and proper.” He aims to “remove” the unfounded and widespread prejudice of the white reader. He also aims to correct the tonal abuse of English writers like Frederick Marryat, Harriet Martineau, and Frances Trollope, who had skewered American customs and manners to great acclaim. By so doing he demonstrates that he is perfectly capable of passing literary and ethical judgments on the white world. And though he does intend to address certain behavioral “abuses” of colored society, he assures his people that they will “discover none but the best of feelings throughout has had any influence in guiding the pen of their humble servant, The Author.”

  He is clearly on the defensive, as generations of future chroniclers will be. “The prejudiced world has for a long time been in error in judging of what may be termed the home condition, or social intercourse, of the higher classes of colored society by the specimens who in the everyday walks of life are presented to their view as ‘the hewers of wood and the drawers of water.’ This rash mode of judgment—the forming of an opinion of the beauty of the landscape by the heavy shading in the fore-ground of the picture—has been the source of many groundless and unjust aspersions against their general character, and one which common justice requires should be removed.”

  To establish his intellectual acumen, Willson lists the usual criteria for defining elites—wealth, education, occupation, birth, family connections—then qualifies them. The higher class, according to him, is “that portion of colored society whose incomes, from their pursuits or otherwise (immoralities or criminalities of course excepted), enables them to maintain the position of house-holders and their families in relative ease and comfort.” F
urther, their incomes allow them, and their instincts encourage them, to pursue education, acquire culture, and embrace moral causes from temperance to abolitionism. He is determined to avoid boasts, grandiosity. He is determined to set high standards, to question (if a touch rhetorically) the worth of any distinction not founded chiefly on virtue. He respects upward mobility that displays itself as self-improvement. He deplores the petty social feuds and rivalries that hinder the work of racial advancement.

  Is it any surprise that he writes formal, rather eighteenth-century prose, quoting Shakespeare, Alexander Pope, and Thomas Gray, or that he savors highly constructed metaphors and diction?

  The machinery of the watch will not fulfill its intent, unless the impulse of the spring be applied; and, though things inanimate are not to be compared with the human soul, yet, neither can a man be expected to rise to eminence in a given department, where, as is the case with men of color, there is not only an absence of all encouragement—all impulse—all definite motive to cheer him onward—but from the exercise of the legitimate functions of which, even were he fitted therefor, he would be absolutely excluded!

  There are no reports on his speaking voice, but surely all evidence of a Southern accent had been eradicated. I’m moved by his choice of image: the tension between a perfectly constructed mechanism and a human soul striving to function perfectly, because of course the human can never attain that kind of perfection, any more than a Negro in antebellum America could be accorded perfect respect or equality.

  Why did he choose the pseudonym “A Southerner”? His authorship was well known to the colored elite he wrote of. Still, it offered an appearance of discretion he must have hoped would calm their fear that any public criticism might inflame Anglo-Saxon prejudice. At moments he seems to imply that only “A Southerner” knows just how fragile Negro rights are, even in the North. Pennsylvania Negroes would do well, he counsels, to pursue their interests “in the manner of suitors; and show themselves very humble in the exercise of even that prerogative.”

  He may have hoped his moniker would encourage Northern white readers to think themselves liberal compared to Southern slaveholders, and give more credence to his observations. In fact, after receiving a small number of respectable reviews in both white and Negro newspapers, the book disappeared. White reviewers amiably condescended. One, an abolitionist, “glanced” at the work to find that “its outward appearance seems creditable,” and that the author, “himself a colored man,” showed some writing ability. Another lauded Willson for correcting his people’s “errors,” but failed to notice that he was far more eager to correct white people. Negro reviewers took pains to show their insider knowledge: one recorded the “disapprobation” of certain members of the higher classes; another commended the author’s “moral courage,” given the subject’s delicacy. Already we were keeping close count of our achievements: written in “rather good style” (a touch of fraternal competition here?), Willson’s book, noted the reviewer, “adds to the number of our authors.”

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  Almost twenty years later—two years before the Civil War—author Cyprian Clamorgan publishes The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis. He offers a much showier, more worldly view. The times have changed and, in keeping with his florid, luxuriant name, he savors certain tonal liberties.

  Clamorgan opens by making clear that he is a man on intimate terms with all kinds of important people, from “Fred. Douglass and his able compatriots” to eighteenth-century voyageurgrandees like his grandfather, who was among the First White Families of St. Louis. In their travels, Clamorgan explains, such men, while trading in land, fur, and slaves, sometimes “obtained wives” with the blood of Africa in their veins, and from this commingling came the colored aristocracy of the city: “those who move in a certain circle; who, by means of wealth, education, or natural ability, form a peculiar class—the elite of the colored race.” His grandfather obtained and owned a series of such wives, owning all and marrying none; his grandmother was the third of five who bore the grandee’s children. The colored Clamorgans inherited property from this grandee, who, they claimed, had been awarded about a half million acres by the king of Spain in 1796.

  Cyprian belongs to what he jauntily calls the “tonsorial profession.” Starting out as a barber in one of the city’s fine hotels, he then entered business with his brothers, who owned a “Depot of Elegant French and English Parfumeries, Toilet and Fancy Articles, Combs, Brushes, Razors &c.” Many colored aristocrats are “knights of the razor”—could it be, he posits, that they are the only men in the community who truly enjoy free speech? After all, “they take the white man by the nose without giving offense and without causing an effusion of blood.” He likes his little jests.

  Cyprian flaunts his birth and skin color as well as his people’s looks, money, property, and fine taste; he considers himself more arbiter than chronicler. Joseph Willson would have shuddered to name a gentleman’s income, speak of a lady’s amours, or salute those “separated from the white race by a line of division so faint that it can be traced only by the keen eye of prejudice.” But we have left the East for a city where brash Western manners meet Southern extravagance; where blood is hot; where fortunes and reputations are made and squandered every day.

  So the book is arranged like a tour of the great houses, part boosterism, part scandal sheet.

  “If the reader will accompany me down Seventh street to the vicinity of Rutgers, I will show him a large mansion, which, with the yard and out-buildings, occupies half a block of ground. Entering this mansion, I will introduce him to its mistress.” That would have been Mrs. Pelagie Rutgers, a former slave who purchased her freedom for three dollars and is now worth half a million: “Mrs. Rutgers is an illiterate woman, but lives in good style; she has in her house a piano which cost two thousand dollars but her wealthy daughter, the sole heiress to her large estate, is not able to play upon it.” Dashing Samuel Mordecai made his fortune in gambling, “and is good for one hundred thousand dollars when flush”; his daughter was sent to England for her schooling, and he talks of settling in Paris, where “he would be received into the first circles.”

  William Johnson opened a barbershop, set money aside, bought a city block for $1,000 when real estate values were low, then sold it for $100,000: “Not so bad a speculation for a colored man!” Cyprian commends ladies for their intelligence but dwells far more on the particulars of their skin tone, hair grade, and social graces or lapses.

  London Berry “is a good man, his only fault being too great a fondness for cards.” Recently, though, his wife committed the faux pas of attending a ball given by the “second class of colored people” and has been banned from the better parties ever since. Cyprian’s judicious counsel: “They are both no doubt sorry for their conduct and will be again received next winter and their indiscretion forgiven.”

  The “rather dilapidated” Mrs. Pelagie Foreman, he notes with spiteful satisfaction, was once a fascinating but saucy “lump of yellow flesh” who earned a cowhiding she probably deserved from her white lover; her indiscretions have made her a social outcast, but (this he notes with approval) she remains a shrewd property owner who “can command the cool sum of one hundred thousand dollars.”

  Other cities, North and South, have their variously flavored antebellum elites: among the most established are in Boston, New York, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Lexington, Fayetteville, Natchez, Cincinnati, and Cleveland. Sociologically, they range from petit bourgeois to lower upper class and middle upper class. Their ancestries, as they are always proud to boast, extend into the highest ranks of white society. Strains of Indian and African royalty are also welcome.

  Cyprian Clamorgan ends his Colored Aristocracy with a promise to write a second book about the “second” class of colored St. Louisians—those who give balls the aristocrats are expected not to attend, and whose exploits “will startle many of our white friends.” But it is 1858. He had begun his book by invoking Harriet Beecher Stowe,
Solomon Northrup, and Frederick Douglass; he had declared Missouri’s Emancipation Party “the result of the unwearied and combined action of the wealthy free colored men of St. Louis, who know that the abolition of slavery in Missouri would remove a stigma from their race, and elevate them in the scale of society.” His second book never appeared. It was the Civil War that elevated the wealthy, the poor, the free, and the enslaved colored men, women, and children.

  * * *

  * What had once been the Douglass High School in Baltimore, Maryland, became Coppin State University in 1926.

  1861–1865: In the South male slaves build Confederate forts, make Confederate artillery, maintain Confederate railroads, serve their masters in Confederate army camps. Women slaves work the fields that produce food for the Confederate army, cook and clean for Confederate mistresses who now run farms and plantations in the absence of their men, care for the children of those Confederate mistresses, care for their own children, cook and clean, and nurse soldiers in Confederate hospitals. As the war goes on, slaves begin to desert their owners, flee Confederate fields and towns for Union army camps, where—as contraband rather than slave property—the men build forts, repair railroads, haul supplies and equipment, and serve as scouts and spies for Union troops, while the women cook and clean in the camps, nurse soldiers, serve as scouts and spies for Union troops, and take care of the children they have brought along.

  Free Negroes struggle to defeat or evade new laws that constrict their liberties. A small mulatto upper class swears loyalty to the Southern cause and volunteers to fight for it. (Nearly all such offers are refused: equality of sword and musket is not an appealing notion to the Confederate army.) Negroes who own land and slaves are expected to use both to provide food and labor for the Confederate troops. Others, less conspicuous, lie low, even do what they can to aid the cause of freedom: prepare themselves to be leaders when the war ends and slavery is past and gone, when they have a Negro community and constituency to lead.