Dear heart, what a terrible life I am led!A dog has a better, that's sheltered and fed.Night and day 'tis the same;My pain is deir game:Me wish to de Lord me was dead!Whate'er's to be done,Poor black must run.Mungo here, Mungo dere,Mungo everywhere:Above and below,Sirrah, come; sirrah, go;Do so, and do so,Oh! oh!Me wish to de Lord me was dead!
Dear heart, what a terrible life I am led!A dog has a better, that's sheltered and fed.
Night and day 'tis the same;My pain is deir game:
Me wish to de Lord me was dead!
Whate'er's to be done,Poor black must run.Mungo here, Mungo dere,Mungo everywhere:Above and below,Sirrah, come; sirrah, go;Do so, and do so,
Oh! oh!
Me wish to de Lord me was dead!
The depreciation of the race that Mungo started continued, and when in 1781Robinson Crusoewas given as a pantomime at Drury Lane, Friday was represented as a Negro. The exact origins of Negro minstrelsy are not altogether clear; there have been many claimants, and it is interesting to note in passing that there was an "African Company" playing in New York in the early twenties, though this was probably nothing more than a small group of amateurs. Whatever may have been the beginning, it was Thomas D. Rice who brought the form to genuine popularity. In Louisville in the summer of 1828, looking from one of the back windows of a theater, he was attracted by an old and decrepit slave who did odd jobs about a livery stable. The slave's master was named Crow and he called himself Jim Crow. His right shoulder was drawn up high and his left leg was stiff at the knee, but he took his deformity lightly, singing as he worked. He had one favorite tune to which he had fitted words of his own, and at the end of each verse he made a ludicrous step which in time came to be known as "rocking the heel." His refrain consisted of the words:
Wheel about, turn about,Do jis so,An' ebery time I wheel aboutI jump Jim Crow.
Wheel about, turn about,Do jis so,An' ebery time I wheel aboutI jump Jim Crow.
Rice, who was a clever and versatile performer, caught the air, made up like the Negro, and in the course of the next season introduced Jim Crow and his step to the stage, and so successful was he in his performance that on his first night in the part he was encored twenty times.152Rice had many imitators among the white comedians of the country, some of whom indeed claimed priority in opening up the new field, and along with their burlesque these men actually touched upon the possibilities of plaintive Negro melodies, which they of course capitalized. In New York late in 1842 four men—"Dan" Emmett, Frank Brower, "Billy" Whitlock, and "Dick" Pelham—practiced together with fiddle and banjo, "bones" and tambourine, and thus was born the first company, the "Virginia Minstrels," which made its formal debut in New York February 17, 1843. Its members produced in connection with their work all sorts of popular songs, one of Emmett's being "Dixie," which, introduced by Mrs. John Wood in a burlesque in New Orleans at the outbreak of the Civil War, leaped into popularity and became the war-song of the Confederacy. Companies multipled apace. "Christy's Minstrels" claimed priority to the company already mentioned, but did not actually enter upon its New York career until 1846. "Bryant's Minstrels" and Buckley's "New Orleans Serenaders" were only two others of the most popular aggregations featuring and burlesquing the Negro. In a social history of the Negro in America, however, it is important to observe in passing that already, even in burlesque, the Negro element was beginning to enthrall the popular mind. About the same time as minstrelsy also developed the habit of belittling the race by making the name of some prominent and worthy Negro a term of contempt; thus "cuffy" (corrupted from Paul Cuffe) now came into widespread use.
This was not all. It was now that the sinister crime of lynching raised its head in defiance of all law. At first used as a form of punishment for outlaws and gamblers, it soon came to be applied especially to Negroes. One was burned alive near Greenville, S.C., in 1825; in May, 1835, two were burned near Mobile for the murder of two children; and for the years between 1823 and 1860 not less than fifty-six cases of the lynching of Negroes have been ascertained, though no one will ever know how many lost their lives without leaving any record. Certainly more men were executed illegally than legally; thus of forty-six recorded murders by Negroes of owners or overseers between 1850 and 1860 twenty resulted in legal execution and twenty-six in lynching. Violent crimes against white women were not relatively any more numerous than now; but those that occurred or were attempted received swift punishment; thus of seventeen cases of rape in the ten years last mentioned Negroes were legally executed in five and lynched in twelve.153
Extraordinary attention was attracted by the burning in St. Louis in 1835 of a man named McIntosh, who had killed an officer who was trying to arrest him.154This event came in the midst of a period of great agitation, and it was for denouncing this lynching that Elijah P. Lovejoy had his printing-office destroyed in St. Louis and was forced to remove to Alton, Ill., where his press was three times destroyed and where he finally met death at the hands of a mob while trying to protect his property November 7, 1837. Judge Lawless defended the lynching and even William Ellery Channing took a compromising view. Abraham Lincoln, however, then a very young man, in an address on "The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions" at Springfield, January 27, 1837, said: "Accounts of outrages committed by mobs form the everyday 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 creatures of climate, neither are they confined to the slaveholding or the nonslaveholding states.... Turn to that horror-striking scene at St. Louis. A single victim only was sacrificed there. This story is very short, and is perhaps the most highly tragic of anything that has ever been witnessed in real life. A mulatto man by the name of McIntosh was seized in the street, dragged to the suburbs of the city, chained to a tree, and actually burned to death; and all within a single hour from the time he had been a free man attending to his own business and at peace with the world.... Such are the effects of mob law, and such are the scenes becoming more and more frequent in this land so lately famed for love of law and order, and the stories of which have even now grown too familiar to attract anything more than an idle remark."
All the while flagrant crimes were committed against Negro women and girls, and free men in the border states were constantly being dragged into slavery by kidnapers. Two typical cases will serve for illustration. George Jones, a respectable man of New York, was in 1836 arrested on Broadway on the pretext that he had committed assault and battery. He refused to go with his captors, for he knew that he had done nothing to warrant such a charge; but he finally yielded on the assurance of his employer that everything possible would be done for him. He was placed in the Bridewell and a few minutes afterwards taken before a magistrate, to whose satisfaction he was proved to be a slave. Thus, in less than two hours after his arrest he was hurried away by the kidnapers, whose word had been accepted as sufficient evidence, and he had not been permitted to secure a single friendly witness. Solomon Northrup, who afterwards wrote an account of his experiences, was a free man who lived in Saratoga and made his living by working about the hotels, where in the evenings he often played the violin at parties. One day two men, supposedly managers of a traveling circus company, met him and offered him good pay if he would go with them as a violinist to Washington. He consented, and some mornings afterwards awoke to find himself in a slave pen in the capital. How he got there was ever a mystery to him, but evidently he had been drugged. He was taken South and sold to a hard master, with whom he remained twelve years before he was able to effect his release.155In the South any free Negro who entertained a runaway might himself become a slave; thus in South Carolina in 1827 a free woman with her three children suffered this penalty because she gave succor to two homeless and fugitive children six and nine years old.
Day by day, moreover, from the capital of the nation went on the internal slave-trade. "When by one means and another a dealer had gathered twenty or more likely young Negro men and girls, he would bring them forth from their cells; would huddle the women and young children into a cart or wagon; would handcuff the men in pairs, the right hand of one to the left hand of another; make the handcuffs fast to a long chain which passed between each pair of slaves, and would start his procession southward."156It is not strange that several of the unfortunate people committed suicide. One distracted mother, about to be separated from her loved ones, dumbfounded the nation by hurling herself from the window of a prison in the capital on the Sabbath day and dying in the street below.
Meanwhile even in the free states the disabilities of the Negro continued. In general he was denied the elective franchise, the right of petition, the right to enter public conveyances or places of amusement, and he was driven into a status of contempt by being shut out from the army and the militia. He had to face all sorts of impediments in getting education or in pursuing honest industry; he had nothing whatever to do with the administration of justice; and generally he was subject to insult and outrage.
One might have supposed that on all this proscription and denial of the ordinary rights of human beings the Christian Church would have taken a positive stand. Unfortunately, as so often happens, it was on the side of property and vested interest rather than on that of the oppressed. We have already seen that Southern divines held slaves and countenanced the system; and by 1840 James G. Birney had abundant material for his indictment, "The American Churches the Bulwarks of American Slavery." He showed among other things that while in 1780 the Methodist Episcopal Church had opposed slavery and in 1784 had given a slaveholder one month to repent or withdraw from its conferences, by 1836 it had so drifted away from its original position as to disclaim "any right, wish, or intention to interfere in the civil and political relation between master and slave, as it existed in the slaveholding states of the union." Meanwhile in the churches of the North there was the most insulting discrimination; in the Baptist Church in Hartford the pews for Negroes were boarded up in front, and in Stonington, Conn., the floor was cut out of a Negro's pew by order of the church authorities. In Boston, in a church that did not welcome and that made little provision for Negroes, a consecrated deacon invited into his own pew some Negro people, whereupon he lost the right to hold a pew in his church. He decided that there should be some place where there might be more freedom of thought and genuine Christianity, he brought others into the plan, and the effort that he put forth resulted in what has since become the Tremont Temple Baptist Church.
Into all this proscription, burlesque, and crime, and denial of the fundamental principles of Christianity, suddenly came the program of the Abolitionists; and it spoke with tongues of fire, and had all the vigor and force of a crusade.
The great difference between the early abolition societies which resulted in the American Convention and the later anti-slavery movement of which Garrison was the representative figure was the difference between a humanitarian impulse tempered by expediency and one that had all the power of a direct challenge. Before 1831 "in the South the societies were more numerous, the members no less earnest, and the hatred of slavery no less bitter,... yet the conciliation and persuasion so noticeable in the earlier period in twenty years accomplished practically nothing either in legislation or in the education of public sentiment; while gradual changes in economic conditions at the South caused the question to grow more difficult."157Moreover, "the evidence of open-mindedness can not stand against the many instances of absolute refusal to permit argument against slavery. In the Colonial Congress, in the Confederation, in the Constitutional Convention, in the state ratifying conventions, in the early Congresses, there were many vehement denunciations of anything which seemed to have an anti-slavery tendency, and wholesale suspicion of the North at all times when the subject was opened."158One can not forget the effort of James G. Birney, or that Benjamin Lundy's work was most largely done in what we should now call the South, or that between 1815 and 1828 at least four journals which avowed the extinction of slavery as one, if not the chief one, of their objects were published in the Southern states.159Only gradual emancipation, however, found any real support in the South; and, as compared with the work of Garrison, even that of Lundy appears in the distance with something of the mildness of "sweetness and light." Even before the rise of Garrison, Robert James Turnbull of South Carolina, under the name of "Brutus," wrote a virulent attack on anti-slavery; and Representative Drayton of the same state, speaking in Congress in 1828, said, "Much as we love our country, we would rather see our cities in flames, our plains drenched in blood—rather endure all the calamities of civil war, than parley for an instant upon the right of any power, than our own to interfere with the regulation of our slaves."160More and more this was to be the real sentiment of the South, and in the face of this kind of eloquence and passion mere academic discussion was powerless.
TheLiberatorwas begun January 1, 1831. The next year Garrison was the leading spirit in the formation of the New England Anti-Slavery Society; and in December, 1833, in Philadelphia, the American Anti-Slavery Society was organized. In large measure these organizations were an outgrowth of the great liberal and humanitarian spirit that by 1830 had become manifest in both Europe and America. Hugo and Mazzini, Byron and Macaulay had all now appeared upon the scene, and romanticism was regnant. James Montgomery and William Faber wrote their hymns, and Reginald Heber went as a missionary bishop to India. Forty years afterwards the French Revolution was bearing fruit. France herself had a new revolution in 1830, and in this same year the kingdom of Belgium was born. In England there was the remarkable reign of William IV, which within the short space of seven years summed up in legislation reforms that had been agitated for decades. In 1832 came the great Reform Bill, in 1833 the abolition of slavery in English dominions, and in 1834 a revision of factory legislation and the poor law. Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Barrett Browning began to be heard, and in 1834 came to America George Thompson, a powerful and refined speaker who had had much to do with the English agitation against slavery. The young republic of the United States, lusty and self-confident, was seething with new thought. In New England the humanitarian movement that so largely began with the Unitarianism of Channing "ran through its later phase in transcendentalism, and spent its last strength in the anti-slavery agitation and the enthusiasms of the Civil War."161The movement was contemporary with the preaching of many novel gospels in religion, in sociology, in science, education, and medicine. New sects were formed, like the Universalists, the Spiritualists, the Second Adventists, the Mormons, and the Shakers, some of which believed in trances and miracles, others in the quick coming of Christ, and still others in the reorganization of society; and the pseudo-sciences, like mesmerism and phrenology, had numerous followers. The ferment has long since subsided, and much that was then seething has since gone off in vapor; but when all that was spurious has been rejected, we find that the general impulse was but a new baptism of the old Puritan spirit. Transcendentalism appealed to the private consciousness as the sole standard of truth and right. With kindred movements it served to quicken the ethical sense of a nation that was fast becoming materialistic and to nerve it for the conflict that sooner or later had to come.
In his salutatory editorial Garrison said with reference to his position: "In Park Street Church, on the Fourth of July, 1829, in an address on slavery, I unreflectingly assented to the popular but pernicious doctrine of gradual abolition. I seize this opportunity to make a full and unequivocal recantation, and thus publicly to ask pardon of my God, of my country, and of my brethren, the poor slaves, for having uttered a sentiment so full of timidity, injustice, and absurdity.... I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire, to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present! I am in earnest. I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—AND I WILL BE HEARD." With something of the egotism that comes of courage in a holy cause, he said: "On this question my influence, humble as it is, is felt at this moment to a considerable extent, and shall be felt in coming years—not perniciously, but beneficially—not as a curse, but as a blessing; and POSTERITY WILL BEAR TESTIMONY THAT I WAS RIGHT."
All the while, in speaking to the Negro people themselves, Garrison endeavored to beckon them to the highest possible ground of personal and racial self-respect. Especially did he advise them to seek the virtues of education and coöperation. Said he to them:162"Support each other.... When I say 'support each other,' I mean, sell to each other, and buy of each other, in preference to the whites. This is a duty: the whites do not trade with you; why should you give them your patronage? If one of your number opens a little shop, do not pass it by to give your money to a white shopkeeper. If any has a trade, employ him as often as possible. If any is a good teacher, send your children to him, and be proud that he is one of your color.... Maintain your rights, in all cases, and at whatever expense.... Wherever you are allowed to vote, see that your names are put on the lists of voters, and go to the polls. If you are not strong enough to choose a man of your own color, give your votes to those who are friendly to your cause; but, if possible, elect intelligent and respectable colored men. I do not despair of seeing the time when our State and National Assemblies will contain a fair proportion of colored representatives—especially if the proposed college at New Haven goes into successful operation. Will you despair now so many champions are coming to your help, and the trump of jubilee is sounding long and loud; when is heard a voice from the East, a voice from the West, a voice from the North, a voice from the South, crying,Liberty and Equality now, Liberty and Equality forever! Will you despair, seeing Truth, and Justice, and Mercy, and God, and Christ, and the Holy Ghost, are on your side? Oh, no—never, never despair of the complete attainment of your rights!"
To second such sentiments rose a remarkable group of men and women, among them Elijah P. Lovejoy, Wendell Phillips, Theodore Parker, John Greenleaf Whittier, Lydia Maria Child, Samuel J. May, William Jay, Charles Sumner, Henry Ward Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and John Brown. Phillips, the "Plumed Knight" of the cause, closed his law office because he was not willing to swear that he would support the Constitution; he relinquished the franchise because he did not wish to have any responsibility for a government that countenanced slavery; and he lost sympathy with the Christian Church because of its compromising attitude. Garrison himself termed the Constitution "a covenant with death and an agreement with hell." Lydia Maria Child in 1833 published anAppeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans, and wrote or edited numerous other books for the cause, while the anti-slavery poems of Whittier are now a part of the main stream of American literature. The Abolitionists repelled many conservative men by their refusal to countenance any laws that recognized slavery; but they gained force when Congress denied them the right of petition and when President Jackson refused them the use of the mails.
There could be no question as to the directness of their attack. They held up the slaveholder to scorn. They gave thousands of examples of the inhumanity of the system of slavery, publishing scores and even hundreds of tracts and pamphlets. They called the attention of America to the slave who for running away was for five days buried in the ground up to his chin with his arms tied behind him; to women who were whipped because they did not breed fast enough or would not yield to the lust of planters or overseers; to men who were tied to be whipped and then left bleeding, or who were branded with hot irons, or forced to wear iron yokes and clogs and bells; to the Presbyterian preacher in Georgia who tortured a slave until he died; to a woman in New Jersey who was "bound to a log, and scored with a knife, in a shocking manner, across her back, and the gashes stuffed with salt, after which she was tied to a post in a cellar, where, after suffering three days, death kindly terminated her misery"; and finally to the fact that even when slaves were dead they were not left in peace, as the South Carolina Medical College in Charleston advertised that the bodies were used for dissection.163In the face of such an indictment the South appeared more injured and innocent than ever, and said that evils had been greatly exaggerated. Perhaps in some instances they were; but the South and everybody also knew that no pen could nearly do justice to some of the things that were possible under the iniquitous and abominable system of American slavery.
The Abolitionists, however, did not stop with a mere attack on slavery. Not satisfied with the mere enumeration of examples of Negro achievement, they made even higher claims in behalf of the people now oppressed. Said Alexander H. Everett:164"We are sometimes told that all these efforts will be unavailing—that the African is a degraded member of the human family—that a man with a dark skin and curled hair is necessarily, as such, incapable of improvement and civilization, and condemned by the vice of his physical conformation to vegetate forever in a state of hopeless barbarism. I reject with contempt and indignation this miserable heresy. In replying to it the friends of truth and humanity have not hitherto done justice to the argument. In order to prove that the blacks were capable of intellectual efforts, they have painfully collected a few specimens of what some of them have done in this way, even in the degraded condition which they occupy at present in Christendom. This is not the way to treat the subject. Go back to an earlier period in the history of our race. See what the blacks were and what they did three thousand years ago, in the period of their greatness and glory, when they occupied the forefront in the march of civilization—when they constituted in fact the whole civilized world of their time. Trace this very civilization, of which we are so proud, to its origin, and see where you will find it. We received it from our European ancestors: they had it from the Greeks and Romans, and the Jews. But, sir, where did the Greeks and the Romans and the Jews get it? They derived it from Ethiopia and Egypt—in one word, from Africa.165... The ruins of the Egyptian temples laugh to scorn the architectural monuments of any other part of the world. They will be what they are now, the delight and admiration of travelers from all quarters, when the grass is growing on the sites of St. Peter's and St. Paul's, the present pride of Rome and London.... It seems, therefore, that for this very civilization of which we are so proud, and which is the only ground of our present claim of superiority, we are indebted to the ancestors of these very blacks, whom we are pleased to consider as naturally incapable of civilization."
In adherence to their convictions the Abolitionists were now to give a demonstration of faith in humanity such as has never been surpassed except by Jesus Christ himself. They believed in the Negro even before the Negro had learned to believe in himself. Acting on their doctrine of equal rights, they traveled with their Negro friends, "sat upon the same platforms with them, ate with them, and one enthusiastic abolitionist white couple adopted a Negro child."166
Garrison appealed to posterity. He has most certainly been justified by time. Compared with his high stand for the right, the opportunism of such a man as Clay shrivels into nothingness. Within recent years a distinguished American scholar,167writing of the principles for which he and his co-workers stood, has said: "The race question transcends any academic inquiry as to what ought to have been done in 1866. It affects the North as well as the South; it touches the daily life of all of our citizens, individually, politically, humanly. It molds the child's conception of democracy. It tests the faith of the adult. It is by no means an American problem only. What is going on in our states, North and South, is only a local phase of a world-problem.... Now, Whittier's opinions upon that world-problem are unmistakable. He believed, quite literally, that all men are brothers; that oppression of one man or one race degrades the whole human family; and that there should be the fullest equality of opportunity. That a mere difference in color should close the door of civil, industrial, and political hope upon any individual was a hateful thing to the Quaker poet. The whole body of his verse is a protest against the assertion of race pride, against the emphasis upon racial differences. To Whittier there was no such thing as a 'white man's civilization.' The only distinction was between civilization and barbarism. He had faith in education, in equality before the law, in freedom of opportunity, and in the ultimate triumph of brotherhood.
'They are rising,—All are rising,The black and white together.'
'They are rising,—
All are rising,
The black and white together.'
This faith is at once too sentimental and too dogmatic to suit those persons who have exalted economic efficiency into a fetish and who have talked loudly at times—though rather less loudly since the Russo-Japanese War—about the white man's task of governing the backward races.But whatever progress has been made by the American Negro since the Civil War, in self-respect, in moral and intellectual development, and—for that matter—in economic efficiency, has been due to fidelity to those principles which Whittier and other like-minded men and women long ago enunciated.168The immense tasks which still remain, alike for 'higher' as for 'lower' races, can be worked out by following Whittier's program, if they can be worked out at all."
Even before the Abolitionists became aggressive a test law had been passed, the discussion of which did much to prepare for their coming. Immediately after the Denmark Vesey insurrection the South Carolina legislature voted that the moment that a vessel entered a port in the state with a free Negro or person of color on board he should be seized, even if he was the cook, the steward, or a mariner, or if he was a citizen of another state or country.169The sheriff was to board the vessel, take the Negro to jail and detain him there until the vessel was actually ready to leave. The master of the ship was then to pay for the detention of the Negro and take him away, or pay a fine of $1,000 and see the Negro sold as a slave. Within a short time after this enactment was passed, as many as forty-one vessels were deprived of one or more hands, from one British trading vessel almost the entire crew being taken. The captains appealed to the judge of the United States District Court, who with alacrity turned the matter over to the state courts. Now followed much legal proceeding, with an appeal to higher authorities, in the course of which both Canning and Adams were forced to consider the question, and it was generally recognized that the act violated both the treaty with Great Britain and the power of Congress to regulate trade. To all of this South Carolina replied that as a sovereign state she had the right to interdict the entry of foreigners, that in fact she had been a sovereign state at the time of her entrance into the Union and that she never had surrendered the right to exclude free Negroes. Finally she asserted that if a dissolution of the Union must be the alternative she was quite prepared to abide by the result. Unusual excitement arose soon afterwards when four free Negroes on a British ship were seized by the sheriff and dragged from the deck. The captain had to go to heavy expense to have these men released, and on reaching Liverpool he appealed to the Board of Trade. The British minister now sent a more vigorous protest, Adams referred the same to Wirt, the Attorney General, and Wirt was forced to declare South Carolina's act unconstitutional and void. His opinion with a copy of the British protest Adams sent to the Governor of the state, who immediately transmitted the same to the legislature. Each branch of the legislature passed resolutions which the other would not accept, but neither voted to repeal the law. In fact, it remained technically in force until the Civil War. In 1844 Massachusetts sent Samuel Hoar as a commissioner to Charleston to make a test case of a Negro who had been deprived of his rights. Hoar cited Article II, Section 2, of the National Constitution ("The citizens of each state shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several states"), intending ultimately to bring a case before the United States Supreme Court. When he appeared, however, the South Carolina legislature voted that "this agent comes here not as a citizen of the United States, but as an emissary of a foreign Government hostile to our domestic institutions and with the sole purpose of subverting our internal police." Hoar was at length notified that his life was in danger and he was forced to leave the state. Meanwhile Southern sentiment against the American Colonization Society had crystallized, and the excitement raised by David Walker'sAppealwas exceeded only by that occasioned by Nat Turner's insurrection.
When, then, the Abolitionists began their campaign the country was already ripe for a struggle, and in the North as well as the South there was plenty of sentiment unfavorable to the Negro. In July, 1831, when an attempt was made to start a manual training school for Negro youth in New Haven, the citizens at a public meeting declared that "the founding of colleges for educating colored people is an unwarrantable and dangerous interference with the internal concerns of other states, and ought to be discouraged"; and they ultimately forced the project to be abandoned. At Canterbury in the same state Prudence Crandall, a young Quaker woman twenty-nine years of age, was brought face to face with the problem when she admitted a Negro girl, Sarah Harris, to her school.170When she was boycotted she announced that she would receive Negro girls only if no others would attend, and she advertised accordingly in the Liberator. She was subjected to various indignities and efforts were made to arrest her pupils as vagrants. As she was still undaunted, her opponents, on May 24, 1833, procured a special act of the legislature forbidding, under severe penalties, the instruction of any Negro from outside the state without the consent of the town authorities. Under this act Miss Crandall was arrested and imprisoned, being confined to a cell which had just been vacated by a murderer. The Abolitionists came to her defense, but she was convicted, and though the higher courts quashed the proceedings on technicalities, the village shopkeepers refused to sell her food, manure was thrown into her well, her house was pelted with rotten eggs and at last demolished, and even the meeting-house in the town was closed to her. The attempt to continue the school was then abandoned. In 1834 an academy was built by subscription in Canaan, N.H.; it was granted a charter by the legislature, and the proprietors determined to admit all applicants having "suitable moral and intellectual recommendations, without other distinctions." The town-meeting "viewed with abhorrence" the attempt to establish the school, but when it was opened twenty-eight white and fourteen Negro scholars attended. The town-meeting then ordered that the academy be forcibly removed and appointed a committee to execute the mandate. Accordingly on August 10 three hundred men with two hundred oxen assembled, took the edifice from its place, dragged it for some distance and left it a ruin. From 1834 to 1836, in fact, throughout the country, from east to west, swept a wave of violence. Not less than twenty-five attempts were made to break up anti-slavery meetings. In New York in October, 1833, there was a riot in Clinton Hall, and from July 7 to 11 of the next year a succession of riots led to the sacking of the house of Lewis Tappan and the destruction of other houses and churches. When George Thompson arrived from England in September, 1834, his meetings were constantly disturbed, and Garrison himself was mobbed in Boston in 1835, being dragged through the streets with a rope around his body.
In general the Abolitionists were charged by the South with promoting both insurrection and the amalgamation of the races. There was no clear proof of these charges; nevertheless, May said, "If we do not emancipate our slaves by our own moral energy, they will emancipate themselves and that by a process too horrible to contemplate";171and Channing said, "Allowing that amalgamation is to be anticipated, then, I maintain, we have no right to resist it. Then it is not unnatural."172While the South grew hysterical at the thought, it was, as Hart remarks, a fair inquiry, which the Abolitionists did not hesitate to put—Who was responsible for the only amalgamation that had so far taken place? After a few years there was a cleavage among the Abolitionists. Some of the more practical men, like Birney, Gerrit Smith, and the Tappans, who believed in fighting through governmental machinery, in 1838 broke away from the others and prepared to take a part in Federal politics. This was the beginning of the Liberty party, which nominated Birney for the presidency in 1840 and again in 1844. In 1848 it became merged in the Free Soil party and ultimately in the Republican party.
With the forties came division in the Church—a sort of prelude to the great events that were to thunder through the country within the next two decades. Could the Church really countenance slavery? Could a bishop hold a slave? These were to become burning questions. In 1844-5 the Baptists of the North and East refused to approve the sending out of missionaries who owned slaves, and the Southern Baptist Convention resulted. In 1844, when James O. Andrew came into the possession of slaves by his marriage to a widow who had these as a legacy from her former husband, the Northern Methodists refused to grant that one of their bishops might hold a slave, and the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, was formally organized in Louisville the following year. The Presbyterians and the Episcopalians, more aristocratic in tone, did not divide.
The great events of the annexation of Texas, with the Mexican War that resulted, the Compromise of 1850, with the Fugitive Slave Law, the Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854, and the Dred Scott decision of 1857 were all regarded in the North as successive steps in the campaign of slavery, though now in the perspective they appear as vain efforts to beat back a resistless tide. In the Mexican War it was freely urged by the Mexicans that, should the American line break, their host would soon find itself among the rich cities of the South, where perhaps it could not only exact money, but free two million slaves as well, call to its assistance the Indians, and even draw aid from the Abolitionists in the North.173Nothing of all this was to be. Out of the academic shades of Harvard, however, at last came a tongue of flame. In "The Present Crisis" James Russell Lowell produced lines whose tremendous beat was like a stern call of the whole country to duty:
Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side;Some great cause, God's new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight,Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right,And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness and that light.Then to side with Truth is noble when we share her wretched crust,Ere her cause bring fame and profit and 'tis prosperous to be just;Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside,Doubting in his abject spirit, till his Lord is crucified,And the multitude make virtue of the faith they had denied.New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth;They must upward still and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth;Lo, before us gleam her camp-fires! we ourselves must Pilgrims be,Launch ourMayflower, and steer boldly through the desperate winter sea,Nor attempt the Future's portal with the Past's blood-rusted key.
Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side;Some great cause, God's new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight,Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right,And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness and that light.
Then to side with Truth is noble when we share her wretched crust,Ere her cause bring fame and profit and 'tis prosperous to be just;Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside,Doubting in his abject spirit, till his Lord is crucified,And the multitude make virtue of the faith they had denied.
New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth;They must upward still and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth;Lo, before us gleam her camp-fires! we ourselves must Pilgrims be,Launch ourMayflower, and steer boldly through the desperate winter sea,Nor attempt the Future's portal with the Past's blood-rusted key.
As "The Present Crisis" came after the Mexican War, so after the new Fugitive Slave Law appearedUncle Tom's Cabin(1852). "When despairing Hungarian fugitives make their way, against all the search-warrants and authorities of their lawful governments, to America, press and political cabinet ring with applause and welcome. When despairing African fugitives do the same thing—it is—whatisit?" asked Harriet Beecher Stowe; and in her remarkable book she proceeded to show the injustice of the national position.Uncle Tom's Cabinhas frequently been termed a piece of propaganda that gave an overdrawn picture of Southern conditions. The author, however, had abundant proof for her incidents, and she was quite aware of the fact that the problem of the Negro, North as well as South, transcended the question of slavery. Said St. Clair to Ophelia: "If we emancipate, are you willing to educate? How many families of your town would take in a Negro man or woman, teach them, bear with them, and seek to make them Christians? How many merchants would take Adolph, if I wanted to make him a clerk; or mechanics, if I wanted to teach him a trade? If I wanted to put Jane and Rosa to school, how many schools are there in the Northern states that would take them in?... We are in a bad position. We are the moreobviousoppressors of the Negro; but the unchristian prejudice of the North is an oppressor almost equally severe."
Meanwhile the thrilling work of the Underground Railroad was answered by a practical reopening of the slave-trade. From 1820 to 1840, as the result of the repressive measure of 1819, the traffic had declined; between 1850 and 1860, however, it was greatly revived, and Southern conventions resolved that all laws, state or Federal, prohibiting the slave-trade, should be repealed. The traffic became more and more open and defiant until, as Stephen A. Douglas computed, as many as 15,000 slaves were brought into the country in 1859. It was not until the Lincoln government in 1862 hanged the first trader who ever suffered the extreme penalty of the law, and made with Great Britain a treaty embodying the principle of international right of search, that the trade was effectually checked. By the end of the war it was entirely suppressed, though as late as 1866 a squadron of ships patrolled the slave coast.
The Kansas-Nebraska Bill, repealing the Missouri Compromise and providing for "squatter sovereignty" in the territories in question, outraged the North and led immediately to the forming of the Republican party. It was not long before public sentiment began to make itself felt, and the first demonstration took place in Boston. Anthony Burns was a slave who escaped from Virginia and made his way to Boston, where he was at work in the winter of 1853-4. He was discovered by a United States marshal who presented a writ for his arrest just at the time of the repeal of the Missouri Compromise in May, 1854. Public feeling became greatly aroused. Wendell Phillips and Theodore Parker delivered strong addresses at a meeting in Faneuil Hall while an unsuccessful attempt to rescue Burns from the Court House was made under the leadership of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who with others of the attacking party was wounded. It was finally decided in court that Burns must be returned to his master. The law was obeyed; but Boston had been made very angry, and generally her feeling had counted for something in the history of the country. The people draped their houses in mourning, hissed the procession that took Burns to his ship and at the wharf a riot was averted only by a minister's call to prayer. This incident did more to crystallize Northern sentiment against slavery than any other except the exploit of John Brown, and this was the last time that a fugitive slave was taken out of Boston. Burns himself was afterwards bought by popular subscription, and ultimately became a Baptist minister in Canada.
In 1834 Dr. Emerson, an army officer stationed in Missouri, removed to Illinois, taking with him his slave, Dred Scott. Two years later, again accompanied by Scott, he went to Minnesota. In Illinois slavery was prohibited by state law and Minnesota was a free territory. In 1838 Emerson returned with Scott to Missouri. After a while the slave raised the important question: Had not his residence outside of a slave state made him a free man? Beaten by his master in 1848, with the aid of anti-slavery lawyers Scott brought a suit against him for assault and battery, the circuit court of St. Louis rendering a decision in his favor. Emerson appealed and in 1852 the Supreme Court of the state reversed the decision of the lower court. Not long after this Emerson sold Scott to a citizen of New York named Sandford. Scott now brought suit against Sandford, on the ground that they were citizens of different states. The case finally reached the Supreme Court of the United States, which in 1857 handed down the decision that Scott was not a citizen of Missouri and had no standing in the Federal courts, that a slave was only a piece of property, and that a master might take his property with impunity to any place within the jurisdiction of the United States. The ownership of Scott and his family soon passed to a Massachusetts family by whom they were liberated; but the important decision that the case had called forth aroused the most intense excitement throughout the country, and somehow out of it all people remembered more than anything else the amazing declaration of Chief Justice Taney that "the Negroes were so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect." The extra-legal character and the general fallacy of his position were exposed by Justice Curtis in a masterly dissenting opinion.
No one incident of the period showed more clearly the tension under which the country was laboring than the assault on Charles Sumner by Preston S. Brooks, a congressional representative from South Carolina. As a result of this regrettable occurrence splendid canes with such inscriptions as "Hit him again" and "Use knock-down arguments" were sent to Brooks from different parts of the South and he was triumphantly reëlected by his constituency, while on the other hand resolutions denouncing him were passed all over the North, in Canada, and even in Europe. More than ever the South was thrown on the defensive, and in impassioned speeches Robert Toombs now glorified his state and his section. Speaking at Emory College in 1853 he had already made an extended apology for slavery;174speaking in the Georgia legislature on the eve of secession he contended that the South had been driven to bay by the Abolitionists and must now "expand or perish." A writer in theSouthern Literary Messenger,175in an article "The Black Race in North America," made the astonishing statement that "the slavery of the black race on this continent is the price America has paid for her liberty, civil and religious, and, humanly speaking, these blessings would have been unattainable without their aid." Benjamin M. Palmer, a distinguished minister of New Orleans, in a widely quoted sermon in 1860 spoke of the peculiar trust that had been given to the South—to be the guardians of the slaves, the conservers of the world's industry, and the defenders of the cause of religion.176"The blooms upon Southern fields gathered by black hands have fed the spindles and looms of Manchester and Birmingham not less than of Lawrence and Lowell. Strike now a blow at this system of labor and the world itself totters at the stroke. Shall we permit that blow to fall? Do we not owe it to civilized man to stand in the breach and stay the uplifted arm?... This trust we will discharge in the face of the worst possible peril. Though war be the aggregation of all evils, yet, should the madness of the hour appeal to the arbitration of the sword, we will not shrink even from the baptism of fire.... The position of the South is at this moment sublime. If she has grace given her to know her hour, she will save herself, the country, and the world."
All of this was very earnest and very eloquent, but also very mistaken, and the general fallacy of the South's position was shown by no less a man than he who afterwards became vice-president of the Confederacy. Speaking in the Georgia legislature in opposition to the motion for secession, Stephens said that the South had no reason to feel aggrieved, for all along she had received more than her share of the nation's privileges, and had almost always won in the main that which was demanded. She had had sixty years of presidents to the North's twenty-four; two-thirds of the clerkships and other appointments although the white population in the section was only one-third that of the country; fourteen attorneys general to the North's five; and eighteen Supreme Court judges to the North's eleven, although four-fifths of the business of the court originated in the free states. "This," said Stephens in an astonishing declaration, "we have required so as to guard against any interpretation of the Constitution unfavorable to us."
Still another voice from the South, in a slightly different key, attacked the tendencies in the section.The Impending Crisis(1857), by Hinton Rowan Helper, of North Carolina, was surpassed in sensational interest by no other book of the period exceptUncle Tom's Cabin. The author did not place himself upon the broadest principles of humanity and statesmanship; he had no concern for the Negro, and the great planters of the South were to him simply the "whelps" and "curs" of slavery. He spoke merely as the voice of the non-slaveholding white men in the South. He set forth such unpleasant truths as that the personal and real property, including slaves, of Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Missouri, Arkansas, Florida, and Texas, taken all together, was less than the real and personal estate in the single state of New York; that representation in Southern legislatures was unfair; that in Congress a Southern planter was twice as powerful as a Northern man; that slavery was to blame for the migration from the South to the West; and that in short the system was in every way harmful to the man of limited means. All of this was decidedly unpleasant to the ears of the property owners of the South; Helper's book was proscribed, and the author himself found it more advisable to live in New York than in his native state.The Impending Crisiswas eagerly read, however, and it succeeded as a book because it attempted to attack with some degree of honesty a great economic problem.
The time for speeches and books, however, was over, and the time for action had come. For years the slave had chanted, "I've been listenin' all the night long"; and his prayer had reached the throne. On October 16, 1859, John Brown made his raid on Harper's Ferry and took his place with the immortals. In the long and bitter contest on American slavery the Abolitionists had won.
Footnote 151:(return)See "Two Lectures on the Natural History of the Caucasian and Negro Races. By Josiah C. Nott, M.D., Mobile, 1844."
Footnote 152:(return)See Laurence Hutton: "The Negro on the Stage," inHarper's Magazine, 79:137 (June, 1889), referring to article by Edmon S. Conner inNew York Times, June 5, 1881.
Footnote 153:(return)See Hart:Slavery and Abolition, 11 and 117, citing Cutler:Lynch Law, 98-100 and 126-128.
Footnote 154:(return)Cutler:Lynch Law, 109, citing Niles'sRegister, June 4, 1836.
Footnote 155:(return)McDougall: Fugitive Slaves, 36-37.
Footnote 156:(return)McMaster, V, 219-220.
Footnote 157:(return)Adams:The Neglected Period of Anti-Slavery, 1808-1831, 250-251.
Footnote 158:(return)Ibid., 110.
Footnote 159:(return)William Birney:James G. Birney and His Times, 85-86.
Footnote 160:(return)Register of Debates,4,975, cited by Adams, 112-3.
Footnote 161:(return)Henry A. Beers:Initial Studies in American Letters, 95-98 passim.
Footnote 162:(return)"An Address delivered before the Free People of Color in Philadelphia, New York, and other cities, during the month of June, 1831, by Wm. Lloyd Garrison. Boston, 1831," pp. 14-18.
Footnote 163:(return)See "American Slavery as it is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses. By Theodore Dwight Weld. Published by the American Anti-Slavery Society, New York, 1839"; but the account of the New Jersey woman is from "A Portraiture of Domestic Slavery in the United States, by Jesse Torrey, Ballston Spa, Penn., 1917," p. 67.
Footnote 164:(return)See "The Anti-Slavery Picknick: a collection of Speeches, Poems, Dialogues, and Songs, intended for use in schools and anti-slavery meetings. By John A. Collins, Boston, 1842," 10-12.
Footnote 165:(return)It is worthy of note that this argument, which was long thought to be fallacious, is more and more coming to be substantiated by the researches of scholars, and that not only as affecting Northern but also Negro Africa. Note Lady Lugard (Flora L. Shaw):A Tropical Dependency, London, 1906, pp. 16-18.
Footnote 166:(return)Hart:Slavery and Abolition, 245-6.
Footnote 167:(return)Bliss Perry: "Whittier for To-Day,"Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 100, 851-859 (December, 1907).
Footnote 168:(return)The italics are our own.
Footnote 169:(return)Note McMaster, V, 200-204.
Footnote 170:(return)Note especially "Connecticut's Canterbury Tale; its Heroine, Prudence Crandall, and its Moral for To-Day, by John C. Kimball," Hartford (1886).
Footnote 171:(return)Hart, 221, citingLiberator, V, 59.
Footnote 172:(return)Hart, 216, citing Channing,Works, V. 57.
Footnote 173:(return)Justin H. Smith:The War with Mexico, I, 107.
Footnote 174:(return)See "An Oration delivered before the Few and Phi Gamma Societies of Emory College: Slavery in the United States; its consistency with republican institutions, and its effects upon the slave and society. Augusta, Ga., 1853."
Footnote 175:(return)November, 1855.
Footnote 176:(return)"The Rights of the South defended in the Pulpits, by B.M. Palmer, D.D., and W.T. Leacock, D.D., Mobile, 1860."
So far in our study we have seen the Negro as the object of interest on the part of the American people. Some were disposed to give him a helping hand, some to keep him in bondage, and some thought that it might be possible to dispose of any problem by sending him out of the country. In all this period of agitation and ferment, aside from the efforts of friends in his behalf, just what was the Negro doing to work out his own salvation? If for the time being we can look primarily at constructive effort rather than disabilities, just what do we find that on his own account he was doing to rise to the full stature of manhood?
Naturally in the answer to such a question we shall have to be concerned with those people who had already attained unto nominal freedom. We shall indeed find many examples of industrious slaves who, working in agreement with their owners, managed sometimes to purchase themselves and even to secure ownership of their families. Such cases, while considerable in the aggregate, were after all exceptional, and for the ordinary slave on the plantation the outlook was hopeless enough. In 1860 the free persons formed just one-ninth of the total Negro population in the country, there being 487,970 of them to 3,953,760 slaves. It is a commonplace to remark the progress that the race has made since emancipation. A study of the facts, however, will show that with all their disadvantages less than half a million people had before 1860 not only made such progress as amasses a surprising total, but that they had already entered every large field of endeavor in which the race is engaged to-day.
When in course of time the status of the Negro in the American body politic became a live issue, the possibility and the danger of animperium in imperiowere perceived; and Rev. James W.C. Pennington, undoubtedly a leader, said in his lectures in London and Glasgow: "The colored population of the United States have no destiny separate from that of the nation in which they form an integral part. Our destiny is bound up with that of America. Her ship is ours; her pilot is ours; her storms are ours; her calms are ours. If she breaks upon any rock, we break with her. If we, born in America, can not live upon the same soil upon terms of equality with the descendants of Scotchmen, Englishmen, Irishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, Hungarians, Greeks, and Poles, then the fundamental theory of America fails and falls to the ground."178While everybody was practically agreed upon this fundamental matter of the relation of the race to the Federal Government, more and more there developed two lines of thought, equally honest, as to the means by which the race itself was to attain unto the highest things that American civilization had to offer. The leader of one school of thought was Richard Allen, founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. When this man and his friends found that in white churches they were not treated with courtesy, they said, We shall have our own church; we shall have our own bishop; we shall build up our own enterprises in any line whatsoever; and even to-day the church that Allen founded remains as the greatest single effort of the race in organization. The foremost representative of the opposing line of thought was undoubtedly Frederick Douglass, who in a speech in Rochester in 1848 said: "I am well aware of the anti-Christian prejudices which have excluded many colored persons from white churches, and the consequent necessity for erecting their own places of worship. This evil I would charge upon its originators, and not the colored people. But such a necessity does not now exist to the extent of former years. There are societies where color is not regarded as a test of membership, and such places I deem more appropriate for colored persons than exclusive or isolated organizations." There is much more difference between these two positions than can be accounted for by the mere lapse of forty years between the height of the work of Allen and that of Douglass. Allen certainly did not sanction segregation under the law, and no man worked harder than he to relieve his people from proscription. Douglass moreover, who did not formally approve of organizations that represented any such distinction as that of race, again and again presided over gatherings of Negro men. In the last analysis, however, it was Allen who was foremost in laying the basis of distinctively Negro enterprise, and Douglass who felt that the real solution of any difficulty was for the race to lose itself as quickly as possible in the general body politic.
We have seen that the Church was from the first the race's foremost form of social organization, and that sometimes in very close touch with it developed the early lodges of such a body as the Masons. By 1800 emancipation was well under way; then began emigration from the South to the central West; emigration brought into being the Underground Railroad; and finally all forces worked together for the development of Negro business, the press, conventions, and other forms of activity. It was natural that states so close to the border as Pennsylvania and Ohio should be important in this early development.
The Church continued the growth that it had begun several decades before. The A.M.E. denomination advanced rapidly from 7 churches and 400 members in 1816 to 286 churches and 73,000 members by the close of the Civil War. Naturally such a distinctively Negro organization could make little progress in the South before the war, but there were small congregations in Charleston and New Orleans, and William Paul Quinn blazed a path in the West, going from Pittsburgh to St. Louis.
In 1847 the Prince Hall Lodge of the Masons in Massachusetts, the First Independent African Grand Lodge in Pennsylvania, and the Hiram Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania formed a National Grand Lodge, and from one or another of these all other Grand Lodges among Negroes have descended. In 1842 the members of the Philomathean Institute of New York and of the Philadelphia Library Company and Debating Society applied for admission to the International Order of Odd Fellows. They were refused on account of their race. Thereupon Peter Ogden, a Negro, who had already joined the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows of England, secured a charter for the first Negro American lodge, Philomathean, No. 646, of New York, which was set up March 1, 1843. It was followed within the next two years by lodges in New York, Philadelphia, Albany, and Poughkeepsie. The Knights of Pythias were not organized until 1864 in Washington; but the Grand Order of Galilean Fishermen started on its career in Baltimore in 1856.
The benefit societies developed apace. At first they were small and confined to a group of persons well known to each other, thus being genuinely fraternal. Simple in form, they imposed an initiation fee of hardly less than $2.50 or more than $5.00, a monthly fee of about 50 cents, and gave sick dues ranging from $1.50 to $5.00 a month, with guarantee of payment of one's funeral expenses and subsequent help to the widow. By 1838 there were in Philadelphia alone 100 such groups with 7,448 members. As bringing together spirits supposedly congenial, these organizations largely took the place of clubs, and the meetings were relished accordingly. Some drifted into secret societies, and after the Civil War some that had not cultivated the idea of insurance were forced to add this feature to their work.
In the sphere of civil rights the Negroes, in spite of circumstances, were making progress, and that by their own efforts as well as those of their friends the Abolitionists. Their papers helped decidedly. TheJournal of Freedom(commonly known asFreedom's Journal), begun March 30, 1827, ran for three years. It had numerous successors, but no one of outstanding strength before theNorth Star(later known asFrederick Douglass' Paper) began publication in 1847, continuing until the Civil War. Largely through the effort of Paul Cuffe for the franchise, New Bedford, Mass., was generally prominent in all that made for racial prosperity. Here even by 1850 the Negro voters held the balance of power and accordingly exerted a potent influence on Election day.179Under date March 6, 1840, there was brought up for repeal so much of the Massachusetts Statutes as forbade intermarriage between white persons and Negroes, mulattoes, or Indians, as "contrary to the principles of Christianity and republicanism." The committee said that it did not recommend a repeal in the expectation that the number of connections, legal or illegal, between the races would be thereupon increased; but its object rather was that wherever such connections were found the usual civil liabilities and obligations should not fail to attach to the contracting parties. The enactment was repealed. In the same state, by January, 1843, an act forbidding discrimination on railroads was passed. This grew out of separate petitions or remonstrances from Francis Jackson and Joseph Nunn, each man being supported by friends, and the petitioners based their request "not on the supposition that the colored man is not as well treated as his white fellow-citizen, but on the broad principle that the constitution allows no distinction in public privileges among the different classes of citizens in this commonwealth."180In New York City an interesting case arose over the question of public conveyances. When about 1852 horse-cars began to supersede omnibuses on the streets, the Negro was excluded from the use of them, and he continued to be excluded until 1855, when a decision of Judge Rockwell gave him the right to enter them. The decision was ignored and the Negro continued to be excluded as before. One Sunday in May, however, Rev. James W.C. Pennington, after service, reminded his hearers of Judge Rockwell's decision, urged them to stand up for their rights, and especially to inform any friends who might visit the city during the coming anniversary week that Negroes were no longer excluded from the street cars. He himself then boarded a car on Sixth Avenue, refused to leave when requested to do so, and was forcibly ejected. He brought suit against the company and won his case; and thus the Negro made further advance toward full citizenship in New York.181
Thus was the Negro developing in religious organization, in his benefit societies, and toward his rights as a citizen. When we look at the economic life upon which so much depended, we find that rather amazing progress had been made. Doors were so often closed to the Negro, competing white artisans were so often openly hostile, and he himself labored under so many disadvantages generally that it has often been thought that his economic advance before 1860 was negligible; but nothing could be farther from the truth. It must not be forgotten that for decades the South had depended upon Negro men for whatever was to be done in all ordinary trades; some brick-masons, carpenters, and shoemakers had served a long apprenticeship and were thoroughly accomplished; and when some of the more enterprising of these men removed to the North or West they took their training with them. Very few persons became paupers. Certainly many were destitute, especially those who had most recently made their way from slavery; and in general the colored people cared for their own poor. In 1852, of 3500 Negroes in Cincinnati, 200 were holders of property who paid taxes on their real estate.182In 1855 the Negro per capita ownership of property compared most favorably with that of the white people. Altogether the Negroes owned $800,000 worth of property in the city and $5,000,000 worth in the state. In the city there were among other workers three bank tellers, a landscape artist who had visited Rome to complete his education, and nine daguerreotypists, one of whom was the best in the entire West.183Of 1696 Negroes at work in Philadelphia in 1856, some of the more important occupations numbered workers as follows: tailors, dressmakers, and shirtmakers, 615; barbers, 248; shoemakers, 66; brickmakers, 53; carpenters, 49; milliners, 45; tanners, 24; cake-bakers, pastry-cooks, or confectioners, 22; blacksmiths, 22. There were also 15 musicians or music-teachers, 6 physicians, and 16 school-teachers.184The foremost and the most wealthy man of business of the race in the country about 1850 was Stephen Smith, of the firm of Smith and Whipper, of Columbia, Pa.185He and his partner were lumber merchants. Smith was a man of wide interests. He invested his capital judiciously, engaging in real estate and spending much of his time in Philadelphia, where he owned more than fifty brick houses, while Whipper, a relative, attended to the business of the firm. Together these men gave employment to a large number of persons. Of similar quality was Samuel T. Wilcox, of Cincinnati, the owner of a large grocery business who also engaged in real estate. Henry Boyd, of Cincinnati, was the proprietor of a bedstead manufactory that filled numerous orders from the South and West and that sometimes employed as many as twenty-five men, half of whom were white. Sometimes through an humble occupation a Negro rose to competence; thus one of the eighteen hucksters in Cincinnati became the owner of $20,000 worth of property. Here and there several caterers and tailors became known as having the best places in their line of business in their respective towns. John Julius, of Pittsburgh, was the proprietor of a brilliant place known as Concert Hall. When President-elect William Henry Harrison in 1840 visited the city it was here that his chief reception was held. Cordovell became widely known as the name of the leading tailor and originator of fashions in New Orleans. After several years of success in business this merchant removed to France, where he enjoyed the fortune that he had accumulated.