Between Slavery and Freedom (17 page)

Throughout the South, free people resorted to all sorts of subterfuges to protect themselves and their families from discriminatory laws. James Thomas recalled how his mother had navigated around the Tennessee law that said that all newly emancipated slaves must leave the state. Sally Thomas ran a laundry in Nashville and she managed to save enough money to buy her son, although she herself was still a slave. She did not want the authorities to take James away from her once they learned he was free, so she enlisted the aid of a sympathetic white neighbor who assumed ownership of the boy in a fictitious “sale.” Years later, when James Thomas was a successful businessman, the neighbor “freed” him and endorsed his petition to the courts to be allowed to remain in Tennessee.

Even if a state did not act to control the free black community, a locality within that state might do so. For example, in St. Louis any free black person not born in Missouri needed a license to live in the city, and that could cost as much as one thousand dollars. The St. Louis court records reveal the intricate webs of friendship that developed as people assisted one another to get their licenses. In the early 1830s, Harriet Thompson, a Pennsylvania native, wed barber Henry Clamorgan. He was exempt from the residency law because he was a Missouri native, but Harriet was not, and the couple recruited several people to post cash bonds with the court on her behalf. Likewise, Henry helped Harriet's sister Mary to obtain a license later when she married his best friend, Samuel Mordecai.

Robert Jerome Wilkinson, another member of the Clamorgans' circle, learned what happened to those who refused to obey the law. Citing the “equal protection” clause of the U.S. Constitution, Wilkinson argued that if whites did not need a license, he should not need one. He was promptly arrested. After several weeks of incarceration he abandoned the fight, paid
for his license, and settled down in St. Louis. He was lucky. The authorities could have expelled him, or even bound him out to pay his fine. In many parts of the South the courts routinely bound out black lawbreakers, some of whom ended up in slavery when unscrupulous employers sold them.

Wholesale kidnapping without the cover of the law was also a constant danger. Just as the Underground Railroad spirited slaves to freedom, so another, less well-known “railroad” conveyed free people into bondage in the South. Every year organized gangs and “freelancers” seized unsuspecting individuals and hustled them away. Sometimes black Northerners went to the South looking for work and were ensnared. That was the plight of New Yorker Solomon Northup, who endured twelve years of enslavement in Louisiana. It was the fate of scores of Northern black sailors whose vessels called at ports in the Lower South. The local laws stipulated that African-American sailors had to stay in jail while their vessels were in port. Once they were in jail, a dishonest captain or jailer might be tempted to sell them as slaves. Kidnappers would even seize white people and claim they were “bright mulattoes.” If an individual was reputed to be black, that made his or her evidence inadmissible against whites in most Southern courts.

The erosion of black people's fundamental rights continued inexorably, but so, too, did the efforts of African Americans to challenge the discrimination they faced. They attacked segregation, especially on public transportation, which was a class issue as well as a racial one. Poor blacks did not travel much. If they had to go across town they walked, and if they needed to go further afield they could only afford the cheapest accommodations—precisely the ones white-owned shipping lines and railroad and streetcar companies earmarked for them anyway. Affluent people felt the sting of unequal treatment more intensely, so they campaigned against it. They refused to give up first-class seats and steamboat berths they had paid for. They pointed out that black servants could travel with white employers, but black fare-paying passengers were forced into the “colored car” or refused passage.

What stirred up even deeper resentment than segregation was the denial of rights by the state and federal governments. If black Southerners were more reluctant to speak up for fear of retribution than were Northerners, they were no less eager to secure their rights. The right on which free people focused most intently was the right to vote. This right, they contended, was the key to all others, and yet almost every new state that entered the Union after 1820 barred them from voting, while many of the older states disfranchised them. By 1850, only 6 percent of the nation's free black men lived in states where they could vote on the same basis as whites.

When African Americans had leverage they used it. In an era before the secret ballot, those who employed whites, rented homes to them, or patronized their businesses could “advise” them about whom to vote for and hint at repercussions if they did not heed that advice. Of course, few black people could wield that kind of power, and indirect influence was no real substitute for the right to vote. Understandably, African Americans grew angry as they watched white immigrants become naturalized and qualify to vote while they could not.

The nation's free people of color mulled over how to respond most effectively to the racial oppression they were experiencing—oppression that seemed to grow in intensity with each passing year. Black leaders from across the Northern and Midwestern states began holding meetings to review the situation of the entire black community, free and enslaved, and try to devise strategies for improving it.

What prompted the calling of the first black national convention in 1830 was the plight of Cincinnati's African-American community in the wake of the previous year's rioting. The consequent flight of hundreds of black people to Canada constituted a humanitarian crisis that people of color elsewhere could not ignore. Organizers dispatched invitations to different communities, and several dozen men gathered at Philadelphia's Mother Bethel Church. They pledged to do whatever they could for the Cincinnati refugees and then they turned to what black people across the nation needed, namely an end to slavery and racial inequality. There was so much to discuss that they agreed to meet again the following year. The pattern of annual meetings continued through the early 1830s until the delegates began fighting among themselves over goals and tactics and the national convention movement weakened and died. In the 1840s, though, community leaders decided that they must sink their differences and revive the movement. White hostility was growing and they needed to present a united front. Disagreements and personality clashes occasionally disrupted the proceedings, but through the 1840s and beyond the black national conventions were scenes of dynamic and energetic debate. Black people in individual states also organized their own conventions to discuss regional and local matters.

Beyond the national and state conventions, other meetings took place. The African Methodist Episcopal (AME) and the AME Zion denominations held regular assemblies of ministers and prominent laymen, and matters of church policy spilled over into discussions about civil rights. Beginning in the early 1830s, black men met with white men in the annual conventions of national and state antislavery organizations. For years women were excluded, so they held their own conventions. Just as the AME and AMEZ
meetings were not limited to matters of religion, so the women's antislavery conventions were not limited to abolition. Black and white women started to focus on their status as women and link the ending of racial oppression to the ending of gender discrimination.

The black men and women of the post-Independence era had seized on the power of the written word, and their sons and daughters built on the foundation they had laid. They wrote antislavery verse and personal memoirs, attacks on unjust laws, and treatises on everything from Christian theology to the role of African Americans in the Revolutionary War. By far the most inflammatory publication by a black writer, at least as far as the defenders of slavery were concerned, however, was David Walker's
Appeal to the Colo
u
red
Citizens
. When it appeared in 1829 it provoked outrage among slave holders while inspiring people of color by its boldness. Walker was from North Carolina, the son of a free woman and a slave. His
Appeal
, written long after he had relocated to Boston, demonstrated his voracious appetite for reading and his ability to construct devastatingly effective arguments. Why, he thundered, should black people endure the slave owner's lash one moment longer? And why should any free person be satisfied with the “very
dregs
” of liberty,
when they deserved nothing less than full citizenship?
2
When copies of his
Appeal
surfaced in the South, lawmakers demanded that the authorities in Boston silence Walker. Boston's mayor responded that Walker had not broken any Massachusetts law. In little over a year, however, Walker
was
silenced. Although rumors circulated that he had been poisoned, recent scholarship has uncovered the true cause of his death, tuberculosis. Perhaps Walker spoke out because he knew he did not have long to live under any circumstances. If his enemies did not kill him, the disease he was suffering from surely would.

In his short but eventful life David Walker promoted the twin causes of antislavery and racial equality in various ways. He is best known today for authoring the
Appeal
, but he was also the Boston agent for the nation's first black-owned and edited newspaper. The first issue of
Freedom's Journal
rolled off of the presses in New York City on March 16, 1827.
Freedom's Journal
printed a wide range of items, from denunciations of slavery and racial injustice to historical accounts of Africa, letters and opinion pieces, marriage and death notices, poetry, and advertisements. Many more people read
Freedom's Journal
than actually subscribed to it. Well-thumbed copies were handed around in churches and self-improvement societies, and among friends and workmates, few of whom paid a cent to keep the newspaper in business. Lack of revenue was one reason for its demise. Another was its editor's change of heart. In 1829, John Brown Russwurm shocked readers by announcing that he planned to emigrate. The college-educated Russwurm
had accepted the American Colonization Society's invitation to edit a newspaper in Liberia. Shortly before his departure, he wrote confidently to a friend that “the day . . . is not far distant, when all our people . . . will be as anxious to locate themselves there [Liberia], as foreigners now are of emigrating to America.”
3
He could not have been more mistaken, but in the short term his defection doomed
Freedom's Journal
.

White abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison's
Liberator
filled the void for several years. Garrison's black friends helped fund the newspaper, and Garrison published many articles by and about free people, as well as launching blistering attacks on the slave system in the South. Still, the
L
iberato
r
was no substitute for a newspaper owned and edited by African Americans. Answering that need, in the 1830s and 1840s, African Americans launched numerous newspapers and magazines, including the
Colored A
merican
, Frederick Douglass's
North Star
, and Philadelphia's
National Reformer
. By 1850, an African-American reader in the North or the Midwest with cash to spare, or a membership in one of the black literary societies, could read at least a couple of black newspapers and find out what was going on beyond the confines of his or her own community. But subscribing to a paper like the
North Star
in New York City or Chicago was one thing. Subscribing in Charleston or Savannah was quite another. Postmasters routinely pulled “incendiary” publications out of the mailbags and told the local authorities who the intended recipients were.

The sentiment grew among whites in the South that black literacy was dangerous. They feared that if free blacks became educated they would disseminate abolitionist literature, forge passes for their enslaved friends, and teach them to read and write. Although a number of states in the slave South passed laws expressly forbidding the education of free people, African Americans found ways around those laws. In Missouri, for instance, preacher John Berry Meacham reportedly held classes on a boat on the Mississippi, where he and his students were under federal rather than state jurisdiction. Charleston, South Carolina had a number of black schools, some of which flourished in secret, while others operated more openly. At least in the case of the Brown Fellowship Society, which sponsored the education of its members' children, the fact that many of those members had ties of blood to prominent white families, and some were slave owners themselves, earned the organization's endeavors grudging acceptance from the authorities. Elsewhere in major urban centers like Baltimore, New Orleans, and Washington, D.C., African-American schools did function, even if they had to do so without public funding and their trustees had to be constantly on their guard against suspicions that they were in any way threatening slavery.

In the North as well as the South, black education became more closely linked to the campaign for abolition and black rights in the minds of many whites, and that could have a chilling effect, as the fate of several educational initiatives made abundantly clear. In 1831, an interracial group of reformers chose New Haven, Connecticut as the site of the nation's first African-American college. The horrified townspeople organized a protest meeting and handed the plan a crushing defeat. In 1833, in Canterbury, Connecticut, white teacher Prudence Crandall agreed to admit the daughter of a prosperous African-American farmer to her private school. Almost immediately, white parents withdrew their daughters. Crandall responded by announcing that henceforth she would operate her school exclusively for “young ladies and little misses of color.” Word spread, and affluent black parents in a number of Northern cities enrolled their daughters in Crandall's school.
4
The white inhabitants of Canterbury promptly embarked on a campaign of harassment that culminated in Crandall's arrest. Two years later, Noyes Academy, in Canaan, New Hampshire opened its doors to black as well as white students. The experiment ended abruptly when local whites chased out the black students and tore down the school building.