The African Americans

by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

  37 William O’Brien, “Did the Jennison Case Outlaw Slavery in Massachusetts?” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 17 (April 1960): 223–41; Egerton, Death or Liberty, 106–07; Zilversmit, “Quok Walker, Mumbet,” 617–18.

  38 O’Brien, “Did the Jennison Case Outlaw Slavery in Massachusetts?,” 223–25; Edgar J. Bellefontaine, “Chief Justice William Cushing: Stalwart Federalist and Reluctant Abolitionist, The Massachusetts Years, 1772–1789,” Supreme Judicial Court Historical Society Annual Report, (1993) 20–23, quoted 24; Egerton, Death or Liberty, 107–08, 173; Blanck, “Seventeen Eighty-Three,” 44–45; 1830 U.S. Census.

  39 For instance, the slave owner in Tony v. Clapp dropped his suit after seeing the end of the Jennison appeals. Zilversmit, “Quok Walker, Mumbet,” 624; Egerton, Death or Liberty, 107–09.

  40 Gates, Life Upon These Shores, 36–37; Leon Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 3–10; Rhoda Freeman, “The Free Negro in New York City in the Era Before the Civil War” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1966), 64–67, 319–26; Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967), 230–46.

  41 Philippe R. Girard, The Slaves Who Defeated Napoleon: Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian War of Independence, 1801–1804 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2011), 117–21, 183, 225–26.

  42 Jed Handelsman Shugerman, “The Louisiana Purchase and South Carolina’s Reopening of the Slave Trade in 1803,” Journal of the Early Republic, 22 (Summer 2002): 263, 270, 282.

  43 Douglas R. Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 & 1802 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 17, 19–22.

  44 Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion, 17–24.

  45 Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion, 25–29, 31, 34, 38, 43, 46–47; Matthew J. Clavin, Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War: The Promise and Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 16.

  46 Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion, 46–47, 50–53, 58–59, 69–71.

  47 Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion, 77–78.

  48 Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion, 92–94, 108–09, 110–12.

  49 Tim Matthewson, “Jefferson and Haiti,” Journal of Southern History 61 (May 1995): 217–18, 225.

  50 Wendell Phillips had also given his address in 1860 at the Cooper Union in New York to cheers and hisses. New York Times, February 1, 1860; Wendell Phillips, “Toussaint l’Ouverture,” in Selections from the Works of Wendell Phillips, ed. A. D. Hall (Boston: H. M. Caldwell Co., 1902), 154 quoted, 121–58; Clavin, Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War, 1–2.

  51 Carl A. Brasseaux and Glenn R. Conrad, eds., The Road to Louisiana: The Saint-Domingue Refugees, 1792–1809 (Lafayette, LA: Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1992), 25.

  52 Daniel Rasmussen, American Uprising: The Untold Story of America’s Largest Slave Revolt (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), 23, 89; Shugerman, “The Louisiana Purchase and South Carolina’s Reopening of the Slave Trade,” 282.

  53 Rasmussen, American Uprising, 105–06, 117, 128–39, 140, 147–48; Junius P. Rodriguez, “Always ‘En Garde’: The Effects of Slave Insurrection upon the Louisiana Mentality, 1811–1815,” Louisiana History 33 (Autumn 1992): 400–01.

  54 Clavin, Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War, 3–4, 16.

  55 Quoted in Robert Pierce Forbes, The Missouri Compromise and Its Aftermath: Slavery and the Meaning of America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 39–40, 145.

  4

  HALF SLAVE, HALF FREE 1797–1858

  FOR FORMER SLAVES AND THEIR CHILDREN FREED AFTER THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, THE FIRST YEARS OF THE NEW CENTURY OFFERED UNPRECEDENTED OPPORTUNITY. Free black people were able to create new worlds for themselves, North and South, rural and urban. We often think of these years in crude dichotomies: the North free, the South enslaved. The reality proved far more complicated, with surprising pockets of freedom in the South and tragic levels of oppression in the North. In each section of the country, including the Midwest, which saw an even more complex mix of slavery and freedom, a surprisingly large range of responses to the challenges of carving out a life as an African American unfolded.

  In the end, the accomplishments of these years—intellectual, political, organizational—played a crucial role in forcing the issue of slavery to the forefront of national politics, creating the momentum that many years later would lead to emancipation. But progress was by no means linear, and many of the era’s most fundamental conflicts have never been fully resolved.

  The late 18th century saw the beginnings of a democratic ethos that became, for all races and classes, clearly manifest in popular religion. The Second Great Awakening, inauspiciously begun in rural Connecticut, caused “the wilderness to blossom as the rose,” as one observer remarked, and “the desert to put on the appearance of the garden of the Lord.” Good works and faith, not predestination and faith, now became the hallmarks of American Protestantism. Throughout the eastern states a new evangelicalism arose, an inherently democratic movement that spawned Methodism in the mid-Atlantic region, liberalized orthodox Protestantism in New England, and even encouraged the growth of liberal Quakerism and Unitarianism—the latter group actually sending missionaries from Massachusetts to Connecticut and India. It fueled a reform movement that in one form or another would embrace the North and Midwest and even penetrate into urban areas of the South.1

  Free black communities emerged from the 18th century with vigor and a sense of possibility. In Boston, Providence, Newport, New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, free black people formed schools, Masonic lodges, and self-improvement societies; founded churches; owned homes; and started businesses. Prior to the 1820s, the color line—as W. E. B. Du Bois would famously call it—was a gray area, still permeable and contradictory, rather than the sharp, razorlike edge that it would soon become, wounding those who attempted to cross it. Churches did not yet possess “negro pews”; parades and festivals included African Americans; black military service, while slow to be authorized during the Revolution, had become gratefully appreciated, honored, and respected. By the early 1820s, black community leaders had created a stunning number of institutions; as one historian has written, “by any measure extraordinary, and the painstaking work of ordinary people [made it] all the more so.”2 Before long, successful black communities would begin emerging in Cincinnati and Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Buffalo and Rochester, smaller towns in New England and Ohio—and later in Chicago. For African Americans, some of the most important events of the early republic transpired in Philadelphia.

  As a vital commercial center—the nation’s first vessel to China, for instance, left from the port of Philadelphia—the city drew immigrants from throughout the Atlantic world. The neighborhoods of Southark and Moyamensing became home to African and Caribbean immigrants arriving from New Jersey, the Chesapeake region, and later, from Virginia. When Toussaint’s revolution began in the 1790s, almost 900 Saint-Domingue refugees had settled in the city. By 1800, it had the country’s largest urban black population, topping 2,000. Philadelphia, Frederick Douglass would later declare, “holds the destiny of our people.”3

  It also became home to the founder of one of the most important African American religions: Richard Allen—one of the most influential blacks to emerge out of the new republic. Born a slave owned by Benjamin Chew, patriarch of a Philadelphia Quaker family, Allen and his family were sold in about 1768 to Stokely Sturgis, a small farmer in Delaware, a region that possessed about 11,000 slaves. Allen’s life was transformed at age 17 by his conversion to the Methodist faith after hearing a preacher in the Delaware woods in 1777. He described the experience as “a shaking of dungeons and a falling of chains.”4 Sturgis, his master, a struggling planter, was similarly affected, although he hadn’t been when he purchased Alle
n and promptly sold off his parents and younger siblings. Characteristic of this unique era, both Sturgis and Allen became caught up in the turbulence and promise of the Age of Revolutions, as well as in the progressive principles of the Methodist faith. In September 1779, Sturgis attended a service by Freeborn Garrettson, himself a former slave owner and one of the most successful early itinerant ministers, experienced a conversion, and concluded that he could no longer own a slave.5

  In January 1780, Allen signed an agreement with his master so that he could pay Sturgis $2,000 (an incredibly high figure for the period) over the next five years to earn his freedom. For the next several years, Allen worked tirelessly, hauling salt, laying brick, and chopping wood to buy himself out of slavery. He labored so hard that in August 1783, the year that the new United States formally secured its independence from Great Britain, he paid Sturgis the last installment of his debt—far ahead of schedule. As was the case with Mum Bett and other slaves who gained their freedom, Allen disposed of his slave name—Negro Richard—and chose Allen as a last name, perhaps to honor a Pennsylvania jurist named William Allen who had lived near Allen’s first owner, Benjamin Chew.

  With his newfound freedom, Allen began traveling and attending many camp meetings and revivals. He then set out to become a minister and spent years as an itinerant preacher, crisscrossing Delaware and Maryland before settling in Philadelphia. Antislavery leaders in Philadelphia spread word of Allen’s reputation as a minister and in 1785, the great Methodist evangelist Francis Asbury asked Allen, whom he had known since at least 1779, to travel with him in the South—an idea that understandably repelled the young black Methodist. Although he refused to go, the two bonded in friendship and Allen bought Asbury a horse so that he could continue his travels. When Allen eventually opened his own church in the 1790s, Asbury conducted the opening service. It was rare for two men of different races at this time to share such a deep and public friendship.

  In 1786, Allen was called back to Philadelphia to preach to blacks in St. George’s Church; he would remain in the city for the rest of his life. He supported himself by establishing a chimney-sweeping business and, ironically, took on young indentured servants, one white and one a mixed-race Indian. But he put his soul into building a congregation of blacks for St. George’s—he began with about 5 black parishioners, but within a year he had gathered together about 42 new African American congregants. He soon began thinking about establishing a separate church just for black parishioners, an idea that white elders of the church denounced. Nevertheless, Allen worked tirelessly to recruit more black members, holding meetings in and out of the church, on street corners, anywhere to gain new adherents. The church grew so much, in fact, that the new funds his labors brought in helped toward construction of a new wing for St. George’s.

  As so often would happen over the course of the 19th century, black success attracted white resentment and opposition. Church elders tried to restrict Allen’s labors and modify his enthusiastic style. Resentment may have been fueled in part by Allen’s role in founding the Free African Society, a self-help community uplift group that brought together two of the city’s most important black religious leaders, Allen and Absalom Jones (1746–1818). The two worked with surprising success to raise money for a black church and Allen recalled that, in about 1791, they gathered the incredible amount of $390 in one day.

  But the defining moment came sometime later in 1792 or 1793 when church elders reversed long-standing policy and attempted to exile black congregants to “negro pews.” In an especially humiliating incident, white trustees of the church approached a kneeling Absalom Jones and ordered him to the gallery. When he declined to move, two whites picked up the kneeling man to remove him from the front of the church, thus sparking a mass walkout of the church’s entire black membership—led by Richard Allen. Possibly Allen and Jones had planned the confrontation, knowing of the growing white resentment in the church and, like Rosa Parks in the 20th century, had more deliberation in their actions than we have recognized.6

  Whatever the case, Jones would go on to become the nation’s first black Episcopal priest and found St. Thomas’s African Episcopal Church, and Allen would work with the great Philadelphia scientist and philanthropist Benjamin Rush to found the Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Allen and 11 other black Methodists met at his home in 1794 and agreed to purchase a former blacksmith shop and move it to a lot Allen had bought at Sixth and Lombard Streets. When the church opened on April 9, 1799, Bishop Asbury ordained Allen as a deacon. By 1803, Allen reported that his congregation had grown to 457 members, and two years later his converted blacksmith shop had been transformed into a respectable brick structure.

  His African Methodist Episcopal Church became the first independent black denomination in the United States. It quickly developed into one of the most important black institutions in the nation, with a publishing house and an astonishingly long-running newspaper and journal, establishing congregations throughout the country, especially in the South after the Civil War. Allen’s church also ran a school, ministered to its members’ secular as well as religious needs, and became a haven for runaway slaves.7

  Richard Allen and Bishops of the A.M.E Church. Lithograph. Published in Boston by J. H. Daniels, circa 1876. Library of Congress. Clockwise from top: Morris Brown, William Paul Quinn, Daniel A. Payne, Jabez P. Campbell, Thomas M. D. Ward, John M. Brown, James A. Shorter, Alexander W. Wayman, Willis Nazrey, and Edward Waters. Additionally, there are scenes depicting Wilberforce University; the Payne Institute in Cokesbury, Abbeville County, South Carolina; the Bible; early days of African Methodism; missionaries in Haiti; and the A.M.E. Church Book Depository in Philadelphia.

  WHILE PHILADELPHIA TOOK THE LEAD IN THE HISTORY OF BLACK RELIGION, THE CITY BY NO MEANS WAS ALONE IN THE PROCESS OF BLACK COMMUNITY FORMATION. Although Boston possessed a tiny black population, about 761 in 1790, it too exerted leadership and enormous influence.8 On March 6, 1775, a former slave and leather dresser named Prince Hall and 14 other black Bostonians became Freemasons, inducted into the fraternity by British soldiers stationed in the city to keep watch on the Patriots. In all likelihood, Hall and his companions approached the soldiers because they could find no white American Masons to support their bid to join the fraternity.

  Freemasonry had a long and distinguished history in the city, first appearing in June 1739 when a “vast concourse” of people turned out to view a parade of brothers marking the feast day of St. John the Baptist, their patron. Adorned in their iconic aprons and accompanied by a band, they marched through the city and visited the governor’s home. In Boston Harbor, a vessel adorned with flags and a Masonic apron fired off its guns every hour in celebration.9 Hall wisely saw Freemasonry as the most effective avenue for African Americans to gain acceptance and respectability. He could also use Enlightenment ideology of fraternal equality that lay at the core of Freemasonry to attack the institution of slavery, which he knew so intimately.

  Little is known about Hall’s early years, a mystery made frustratingly complicated by the appearance in surviving city records of several men named Prince Hall, and no documentation exists for his life prior to his emancipation in 1770. While Boston and regional newspapers covered him and the activities of his lodge, we have no idea what he looked like, so typical of early African American history.10 Hall probably married a Flora Gibbs of Gloucester in 1770 and had one son named Primus Hall, although this may have been the result of an earlier slave marriage that was, of course, unrecognized by law. The son, born in 1756, served in the Revolutionary War, and his father had made drumheads for the Patriots. An enterprising worker, Hall put together a career as a leather dresser and a huckster, or peddler of various goods. His diligence certainly paid off, and by 1800 Hall became one of the few black Bostonians to own real estate.

  His hard work, success, and Masonic activities made him a community leader. In 1777, for example, he joined a number of other black petitioners to insist that
the Massachusetts legislature abolish slavery. He worked to build a separate black lodge in the city, but found the local white Freemasons hostile and unwelcoming. Through much of its history, white Masons attacked Prince Hall’s lodge as illegitimate. In 1787, after years of struggle, Hall received a charter from the Grand Lodge in London, which officially established Lodge No. 459. He then led the way toward establishing black lodges across the North and became recognized by his peers as the country’s most important black Masonic leader. In 1797, for instance, the black Philadelphians Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, and James Forten looked to Hall for assistance in getting them recognized as fellow Freemasons.11

  Also in 1797, Hall delivered a startling address that laid the foundation for the black abolitionist movement. In June, before an audience of Masonic brothers—possibly mixed race, but we do not know for sure—he condemned the slavery that dragged “our friends and brethren … from their native country” and kept them under “the iron hand of tyranny and oppression.” As a former slave separated from his own family, he knew all too well the pain of “weeping eyes and aching hearts.” He mourned those brought to “a strange land and strange people, whose tender mercies are cruel; and there to bear the iron yoke of slavery & cruelty till death as a friend shall relieve them.” He also censured the racism that already infected Boston and pointed to Saint-Domingue as a reminder that “God can and will change their conditions, and their hearts too; and let Boston and the world know, that He hath no respect of persons, and that the bulwark of envy, pride, scorn and contempt, which is so visible to be seen in some and felt, shall fall, to rise no more.” He predicted (or threatened) that the day would come—as in Saint-Domingue at the very minute he spoke—that whites would pay for their unwillingness to let the enslaved go free. For one who so earnestly sought acceptance and respectability from whites for himself and his brethren, Hall’s astounding address proved remarkably daring.12