American Negro Slavery Part 35

[Footnote 17: "Letter from a Gentleman of Natchez to a Lady of Cincinnati,"

in the _Georgia Courier_ (Augusta), May 22, 1828. For a similar instance in colonial Maryland see the present work, p. 31.]

Most of the negroes who procured freedom remained in the United States, though all of those who gained it by flight and many of those manumitted had to shift their location at the time of changing their status. At least one of the fugitives, however, made known his preference for his native district in a manner which cost him his liberty. After two years in Ohio and Canada he returned to the old plantation in Georgia, where he was welcomed with a command to take up the hoe. Rejecting this implement, he proposed to buy himself if a thousand dollars would suffice. When his master, declining to negotiate, ordered him into custody he stabbed one of the negroes who seized him. At the end of the episode the returned wanderer lay in jail; but where his money was, or whether in truth he had any, is not recorded.[18] Among some of those manumitted and sent out of their original states as by law required, disappointment and homesickness were distressingly keen. A group of them who had been carried to New York in 1852 under the will of a Mr. Cresswell of Louisiana, found themselves in such misery there that they begged the executor to carry them back, saying he might keep them as slaves or sell them--that they had been happy before but were wretched now.[19]

[Footnote 18: Ca.s.sville, Ga., _Standard_, May 31, 1858, reprinted in the _Federal Union_ (Milledgeville, Ga.), June 8, 1858.]

[Footnote 19: _DeBow's Review_, XIV, 90.]

The slaves manumitted for meritorious service and those who bought themselves formed together an element of substantial worth in the Southern free colored population. Testamentary endors.e.m.e.nt like that which Abel P. Upshur gave on freeing his man David Rich--"I recommend him in the strongest manner to the respect, esteem and confidence of any community in which he may live"[20]--are sufficiently eloquent in the premises. Those who bought themselves were similarly endorsed in many instances, and the very fact of their self purchase was usually a voucher of thrift and sobriety. Many of those freed on either of these grounds were of mixed blood; and to them were added the mulatto and quadroon children set free by their white fathers, with particular frequency in Louisiana, who by virtue oftentimes of gifts in lands, goods and moneys were in the propertied cla.s.s from the time of their manumission. The recruits joining the free colored population through all of these channels tended, together with their descendants, to be industrious, well-mannered and respected members of society.

[Footnote 20: William C. Nell, _The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution_ (Boston, 1855), pp. 215, 216. For a similar item see Garland's _Randolph_, p. 151.]

Each locality was likely to have some outstanding figure among these. In Georgia the most notable was Austin Dabney, who as a mulatto youth served in the Revolutionary army and attached himself ever afterward to the white family who saved his life when he had been wounded in battle. The Georgia legislature by special act gave him a farm; he was welcomed in the tavern circle of chatting lawyers whenever his favorite Judge Dooly held court at his home village; and once when the formality of drawing his pension carried him to Savannah the governor of the state, seeing him pa.s.s, dragged him from his horse and quartered him as a guest in his house.[21] John Eady of the South Carolina lowlands by a like service in the War for Independence earned a somewhat similar recognition which he retained throughout a very long life.[22]

[Footnote 21: George R. Giltner, _Sketches of Some of the First Settlers of Upper Georgia_ (New York, 1855), pp. 212-215.]

[Footnote 22: Diary of Thomas P. Porcher. MS. in private possession.]

Others were esteemed rather for piety and benevolence than for heroic services. "Such," wrote Bishop Capers of the Southern Methodist Church, "were my old friends Castile Selby and John Bouquet of Charleston, Will Campbell and Harry Myrick of Wilmington, York Cohen of Savannah, and others I might name. These I might call remarkable for their goodness. But I use the word in a broader sense for Henry Evans, who was confessedly the father of the Methodist church, white and black, in Fayetteville, and the best preacher of his time in that quarter." Evans, a free-born full-blooded black, as Capers went on to relate, had been a shoemaker and licensed preacher in Virginia, but while journeying toward Charleston in search of better employment he had been so struck by the lack of religion and morality among the negroes in Fayetteville that he determined upon their conversion as his true mission in life. When the town authorities dispersed his meetings he shifted his rude pulpit into the woods outside their jurisdiction and invited surveillance by the whites to prove his lack of offence. The palpable improvement in the morals of his followers led erelong to his being invited to preach within the town again, where the white people began to be numerous among his hearers. A regular congregation comprising members of both races was organized and a church building erected. But the white attendance grew so large as to threaten the crowding out of the blacks. To provide room for these the side walls of the church were torn off and sheds built on either flank; and these were the conditions when Capers himself succeeded the aged negro in its pulpit in 1810 and found him on his own score an inspiration. Toward the ruling race, Capers records, Evans was unfailingly deferential, "never speaking to a white but with his hat under his arm; never allowing himself to be seated in their houses.... 'The whites are kind to me and come to hear me preach,'

he would say, 'but I belong to my own sort and must not spoil them.' And yet Henry Evans was a Boanerges; and in his duty feared not the face of man." [23]

[Footnote 23: W.W. Wightman, _Life of William Capers_ (Nashville, 1858), pp. 124-129.]

In the line of intellectual attainment and the like the princ.i.p.al figures lived in the eighteenth century. One of them was described in a contemporary news item which suggests that some journalists then were akin to their successors of more modern times. "There is a Mr. St. George, a Creole, son to the French governor of St. Domingo, now at Paris, who realizes all the accomplishments attributed by Boyle and others to the Admirable Creighton of the Scotch. He is so superior at the sword that there is an edict of the Parliament of Paris to make his engagement in any duel actual death. He is the first dancer (even before the Irish Singsby) in the world. He plays upon seven instruments of music, beyond any other individual. He speaks twenty-six languages, and maintains public thesises in each. He walks round the various circles of science like the master of each; and strange to be mentioned to white men, this Mr. St. George is a mulatto, the son of an African mother."[24] Less happy was the career of Francis Williams of Jamaica, a plaything of the human G.o.ds. Born of negro parents who had earned special privilege in the island, he was used by the Duke of Montague in a test of negro mental capacity and given an education in an English grammar school and at Cambridge University. Upon his return to Jamaica his patron sought his appointment as a member of the governor's council but without success; and he then became a schoolmaster and a poet on occasion in the island capital. Williams described himself with some pertinence as "a white man acting under a black skin." His contempt for his fellow negroes and particularly for the mulattoes made him lonely, eccentric, haughty and morose. A Latin panegyric which is alone available among his writings is rather a language exercise than a poem.[25] On the continent Benjamin Banneker was an almanac maker and somewhat of an astronomer, and Phyllis Wheatley of Boston a writer of verses. Both were doubtless more noted for their sable color than for their positive qualities. The wonder of them lay in their ambition and enterprise, not in their eminence among scientific and literary craftsmen at large.[26] Such careers as these had no equivalent in the nineteenth century until its closing decades when Booker T. Washington, Paul Laurence Dunbar and W.E.B.

DuBois set new paces in their several courses of endeavor.

[Footnote 24: News item dated Philadelphia, Mch. 28, in the _Georgia State Gazette and Independent Register_ (Augusta), May 19, 1787.]

[Footnote 25: Edward Long, _History of Jamaica_ (London, 1774), II, 447-485; T.H. MacDermott, "Francis Williams," in the _Journal of Negro History_, II, 147-159. The Latin poem is printed in both of these accounts.]

[Footnote 26: John W. Cromwell, _The Negro in American History_ (Washington, 1914), pp. 77-97.]

Of a more normal but less conspicuous type was Jehu Jones, the colored proprietor of one of Charleston's most popular hotels who lived in the same manner as his white patrons, acc.u.mulated property to the value of some forty thousand dollars, and maintained a reputation for high business talent and integrity.[27] At New Orleans men of such a sort were quite numerous. Prominent among them by reason of his wealth and philanthropy was Thomy Lafon, a merchant and money lender who systematically acc.u.mulated houses and lots during a lifetime extending both before and after the Civil War and whose possessions when he died at the age of eighty-two were appraised at nearly half a million dollars.[28] Prosperity and good repute, however, did not always go hand in hand. The keeper of the one good tavern in the Louisiana village of Bayou Sara in 1831 was a colored woman of whom Anne Royall wrote: "This _n.i.g.g.e.r_ or mulatto was rich, owned the tavern and several slaves, to whom she was a great tyrant. She owned other valuable property and a great deal of money, as report said; and doubtless it is true. She was very insolent, and, I think, drank. It seems one Tague [an Irishman], smitten with her charms and her property, made love to her and it was returned, and they live together as man and wife. She was the ugliest wench I ever saw, and, if possible, he was uglier, so they were well matched."[29] One might ascribe the tone of this description to the tartness of Mrs. Royall's pen were it not that she recorded just afterward that a body-servant of General Ripley who was placed at her command in St.

Francisville was "certainly the most accomplished servant I ever saw."[30]

[Footnote 27: W.C. Nell, _Colored Patriots_, pp. 244, 245.]

[Footnote 28: New Orleans _Picayune_, Dec. 23, 1893. His many charitable bequests are scheduled in the _Picayune_ of a week later.]

[Footnote 29: Anne Royall, _Southern Tour_ (Washington, 1831), pp. 87-89.]

[Footnote 30: _Ibid_., p. 91.]

The property of colored freemen oftentimes included slaves. Such instances were quite numerous in pre-revolutionary San Domingo; and some in the British West Indies achieved notoriety through the exposure of cruelties.[31] On the continent a negro planter in St. Paul's Parish, South Carolina, was reported before the close of the eighteenth century to have two hundred slaves as well as a white wife and son-in-law, and the returns of the first federal census appear to corroborate it.[32] In Louisiana colored planters on a considerable scale became fairly numerous. Among them were Cyprien Ricard who bought at a sheriff's sale in 1851 an estate in Iberville Parish along with its ninety-one slaves for nearly a quarter of a million dollars; Marie Metoyer of Natchitoches Parish had fifty-eight slaves and more than two thousand acres of land when she died in 1840; Charles Roques of the same parish died in 1854 leaving forty-seven slaves and a thousand acres; and Martin Donato of St. Landry dying in 1848 bequeathed liberty to his slave wife and her seven children and left them eighty-nine slaves and 4,500 arpents of land as well as notes and mortgages to a value of $46,000.[33] In rural Virginia and Maryland also there were free colored slaveholders in considerable numbers.[34]

[Footnote 31: Reverend Charles Peters, _Two Sermons Preached at Dominica, with an appendix containing minutes of evidence of three trials_ (London, 1802), pp. 36-49.]

[Footnote 32: LaRochefoucauld-Liancourt, _Travels in the United States_ (London, 1799), p. 602, giving the negro's name as Pindaim. The census returns of 1790 give no such name, but they list James Pendarvis in a group comprising a white man, a free colored person and 123 slaves, and also a Mrs. Persons, free colored, with 136 slaves. She may have been Pindaim's (or Pendarvis') mulatto daughter, while the white man listed in the Pendarvis item was perhaps her husband or an overseer. _Heads of Families at the First Census of the United States: South Carolina_ (Washington, 1908), pp. 35, 37.]

[Footnote 33: For these and other data I am indebted to Professor E.P.

Puckett of Central College, Fayette, Mo., who has permitted me to use his monograph, "_Free Negroes in Louisiana_," in ma.n.u.script. The arpent was the standard unit of area in the Creole parishes of Louisiana, the acre in the parishes of Anglo-American settlement.]

[Footnote 34: Calvin D. Wilson, "Black Masters," in the _North American Review_, CLx.x.xI, 685-698, and "Negroes who owned Slaves," in the _Popular Science Monthly_, Lx.x.xI, 483-494; John H. Russell, "Colored Freemen as Slave Owners in Virginia," in the _Journal of Negro History_, I, 233-242.]

Slaveholdings by colored townsmen were likewise fairly frequent. Among the 360 colored taxpayers in Charleston in 1860, for example, 130, including nine persons described as of Indian descent, were listed as possessing 390 slaves.[35] The abundance of such holdings at New Orleans is evidenced by the multiplicity of applications from colored proprietors for authority to manumit slaves, with exemption from the legal requirement that the new freedmen must leave the state.[36] A striking example of such pet.i.tions was that presented in 1832 by Marie Louise Bitaud, free woman of color, which recited that in the preceding year she had bought her daughter and grandchild at a cost of $700; that a lawyer had now told her that in view of her lack of free relatives to inherit her property, in case of death intestate her slaves would revert to the state; that she had become alarmed at this prospect; and she accordingly begged permission to manumit them without their having to leave Louisiana. The magistrates gave their consent on condition that the pet.i.tioner furnish a bond of $500 to insure the support and education of the grandson until his coming of age. This was duly done and the formalities completed.[37]

[Footnote 35: _List of the Taxpayers of Charleston for 1860_(Charleston, 1861), part 2.]

[Footnote 36: Many of these are filed in the record books of manumissions in the archive rooms of the New Orleans city hall. Some were denied on the ground that proof was lacking that the slaves concerned were natives of the state or that they would be self-supporting in freedom; others were granted.]

[Footnote 37: For the use of this MS. pet.i.tion with its accompanying certificates I am indebted to Mr. J.F. Schindler of New York.]

Evidence of slaveholdings by colored freemen occurs also in the bills of sale filed in various public archives. One of these records that a citizen of Charleston sold in 1828 a man slave to the latter's free colored sister at a price of one dollar, "provided he is kindly treated and is never sold, he being an unfortunate individual and requiring much attention." In the same city a free colored man bought a slave sailmaker for $200.[38] At Savannah in 1818 Richard Richardson sold a slave woman and child for $800 to Alex Hunter, guardian of the colored freeman Louis Mirault, in trust for him; and in 1833 Anthony Ordingsell, free colored, having obtained through his guardian an order of court, sold a slave woman to the highest bidder for $385.[39]

[Footnote 38: MSS. in the files of slave sales in the South Carolina archives at Columbia.]

[Footnote 39: MSS. among the county archives at Savannah, Ga.]

It is clear that aside from the practice of holding slave relatives as a means of giving them virtual freedom, an appreciable number of colored proprietors owned slaves purely as a productive investment. It was doubtless a group of these who sent a joint communication to a New Orleans newspaper when secession and war were impending: "The free colored population (native) of Louisiana ... own slaves, and they are dearly attached to their native land, ... and they are ready to shed their blood for her defence. They have no sympathy for abolitionism; no love for the North, but they have plenty for Louisiana.... They will fight for her in 1861 as they fought in 1814-'15.... If they have made no demonstration it is because they have no right to meddle with politics, but not because they are not well disposed. All they ask is to have a chance, and they will be worthy sons of Louisiana."[40] Oral testimony gathered by the present writer from old residents in various quarters of the South supports the suggestion of this letter that many of the well-to-do colored freemen tended to prize their distinctive position so strongly as to deplore any prospect of a general emanc.i.p.ation for fear it would submerge them in the great black ma.s.s.

[Footnote 40: Letter to the editor, signed "A large number of them," in the New Orleans _Daily Delta_, Dec. 28, 1860. Men of this element had indeed rendered service under Jackson in the defence of the city against Pakenham, as Louisianians well knew.]

The types discussed thus far were exceptional. The main body of the free negroes were those who whether in person or through their mothers had been liberated purely from sentiment and possessed no particular qualifications for self-directed careers. The former slaves of Richard Randolph who were colonized in accordance with his will as petty landed proprietors near Farmville, Virginia, proved commonly thriftless for half a century afterward;[41] and Olmsted observed of the Virginia free negroes in general that their poverty was not due to the lack of industrial opportunity.[42]

Many of those in the country were tenants. George Washington found one of them unprofitable as such;[43] and Robert Carter in 1792 rented farms to several in spite of his overseer's remonstrance that they had no adequate outfit of tools and teams, and against his neighbors' protests.[44] Not a few indeed were mere squatters on waste lands. A Georgia overseer reported in 1840 that several such families had made clearings in the woods of the plantation under his charge, and proposed that rent be required of them;[45] and travellers occasionally came upon negro cabins in fields which had been abandoned by their proprietors.[46] The typical rural family appears to have tilled a few acres on its own account, and to have been willing to lend a hand to the whites for wages when they needed service.

It was this readiness which made their presence in many cases welcome in a neighborhood. A memorial signed by thirty-eight citizens of Ess.e.x County, Virginia, in 1842 in behalf of a freedman might be paralleled from the records of many another community: "We would be glad if he could be permitted to remain with us and have his freedom, as he is a well disposed person and a very useful man in many respects. He is a good carpenter, a good cooper, a coa.r.s.e shoemaker, a good hand at almost everything that is useful to us farmers."[47] Among the free negroes on the seaboard there was a special proclivity toward the water pursuits of boating, oystering and the like.[48] In general they found a niche in industrial society much on a level with the slaves but as free as might be from the pressure of systematic compet.i.tion.

[Footnote 41: F.N. Watkins, "The Randolph Emanc.i.p.ated Slaves," in _DeBow's Review_, XXIV, 285-290.]

[Footnote 42: _Seaboard Slave States_, p. 126.]

[Footnote 43: S.M. Hamilton ed., _Letters to Washington_, IV, 239.]

[Footnote 44: Carter MSS. in the Virginia Historical Society.]

[Footnote 45: _Plantation and Frontier_, II, 155.]

[Footnote 46: _E. g_., F. c.u.mming, _Tour to the West_, reprinted in Thwaites ed., _Early Western Travels_, IV, 336.]

[Footnote 47: J.H. Russell, _The Free Negro in Virginia_, p. 153.]

[Footnote 48: _Ibid_., p. 150.]

Urban freemen had on the average a somewhat higher level of attainment than their rural fellows, for among them was commonly a larger proportion of mulattoes and quadroons and of those who had demonstrated their capacity for self direction by having bought their own freedom. Recruits of some skill in the crafts, furthermore, came in from the country, because of the advantages which town industry, in sharp contrast with that of the plantations, gave to free labor. A characteristic state of affairs is shown by the official register of free persons of color in Richmond County, Georgia, wherein lay the city of Augusta, for the year 1819[49]. Of the fifty-three men listed, including a planter and a steamboat pilot, only seven were cla.s.sed as common laborers, while all the rest had specific trades or employments. The prosperity of the group must have been but moderate, nevertheless, for virtually all its women were listed as workers at washing, sewing, cooking, spinning, weaving or market vending; and although an African church in the town had an aged s.e.xton, its minister must have drawn most of his livelihood from some week-day trade, for no designation of a preacher appears in the list. At Charleston, likewise, according to the city census of 1848, only 19 free colored men in a total of 239 listed in manual occupations were uncla.s.sified laborers, while the great majority were engaged in the shop and building trades. The women again were very numerous in sewing and washing employments, and an appreciable number of them were domestic servants outright.[50]

[Footnote 49: _Augusta Chronicle_, Mch. 13, 1819, reprinted in _Plantation and Frontier_, II, 143-147.]

[Footnote 50: Dawson and DeSaussure, _Census of Charleston for 1848_, summarized in the table given on p. 403 of the present work.]

In the compendium of the United States census of 1850 there are printed in parallel columns the statistics of occupations among the free colored males above fifteen years of age in the cities of New York and New Orleans. In the Northern metropolis there were 3337 enumerated, and in the Southern 1792. The former had 4 colored lawyers and 3 colored druggists while the latter had none of either; and the colored preachers and doctors were 21 to 1 and 9 to 4 in New York's favor. But New Orleans had 4 colored capitalists, 2 planters, 11 overseers, 9 brokers and 2 collectors, with none of any of these at New York; and 64 merchants, 5 jewelers and 61 clerks to New York's 3, 3 and 7 respectively, and 12 colored teachers to 8.