Part 6 (2/2)
Furthermore, the fortunate few, const.i.tuting the stewards of these vessels, could by placing contracts for supplies and using business methods realize handsome incomes. Many Negroes thus enriched purchased real estate and went into business in towns along the Ohio.
The other force, the rise of the Negro mechanic, was made possible by overcoming much of the prejudice which had at first been encountered. A great change in this respect had taken place in Cincinnati by 1840.[32]
Many Negroes who had been forced to work as menial laborers then had the opportunity to show their usefulness to their families and to the community. Negro mechanics were then getting as much skilled labor as they could do. It was not uncommon for white artisans to solicit employment of colored men because they had the reputation of being better paymasters than master workmen of the favored race. White mechanics not only worked with the blacks but often a.s.sociated with them, patronized the same barber shop, and went to the same places of amus.e.m.e.nt.[33]
Out of this group came some very useful Negroes, among whom may be mentioned Robert Harlan, the horseman; A.V. Thompson, the tailor; J.
Presley and Thomas Ball, contractors, and Samuel T. Wilc.o.x, the merchant, who was worth $60,000 in 1859.[34] There were among them two other successful Negroes, Henry Boyd and Robert Gordon. Boyd was a Kentucky freedman who helped to overcome the prejudice in Cincinnati against Negro mechanics by inventing and exploiting a corded bed, the demand for which was extensive throughout the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. He had a creditable manufacturing business in which he employed twenty-five men.[35]
Robert Gordon was a much more interesting man. He was born a slave in Richmond, Virginia. He ingratiated himself into the favor of his master who placed him in charge of a large coal yard with the privilege of selling the slake for his own benefit. In the course of time, he acc.u.mulated in this position thousands of dollars with which he finally purchased himself and moved away to free soil. After observing the situation in several of the northern centers, he finally decided to settle in Cincinnati, where he arrived with $15,000. Knowing the coal business, he well established himself there after some discouragement and opposition. He acc.u.mulated much wealth which he invested in United States bonds during the Civil War and in real estate on Walnut Hills when the bonds were later redeemed.[36]
The ultimately favorable att.i.tude of the people of Detroit toward immigrating Negroes had been reflected by the position the people of that section had taken from the time of the earliest settlements. Generally speaking, Detroit adhered to this position.[37] In this congenial community prospered many a Negro family. There were the Williams' most of whom confined themselves to their trade of bricklaying and ama.s.sed considerable wealth. Then there were the Cooks, descending from Lomax B.
Cook, a broker of no little business ability. Will Marion Cook, the musician, belongs to this family. The De Baptistes, too, were among the first to succeed in this new home, as they prospered materially from their experience and knowledge previously acquired in Fredericksburg, Virginia, as contractors. From this group came Richard De Baptiste, who in his day was the most useful Negro Baptist preacher in the Northwest.[38] The Pelhams were no less successful in establis.h.i.+ng themselves in the economic world. Having an excellent reputation in the community, they easily secured the cooperation of the influential white people in the city. Out of this family came Robert A. Pelham, for years editor of a weekly in Detroit, and from 1901 to the present time an employee of the Federal Government in Was.h.i.+ngton.
The children of the Richards, another old family, were in no sense inferior to the descendants of the others. The most prominent and the most useful to emerge from this group was the daughter, Fannie M. Richards. She was born in Fredericksburg, Virginia, October 1, 1841. Having left that State with her parents when she was quite young, she did not see so much of the antebellum conditions obtaining there. Desiring to have better training than what was then given to persons of color in Detroit, she went to Toronto where she studied English, history, drawing and needlework. In later years she attended the Teachers' Training School in Detroit. She became a public-school teacher there in 1863 and after fifty years of creditable service in this work she was retired on a pension in 1913.[39]
The Negroes in the North had not only shown their ability to rise in the economic world when properly encouraged but had begun to exhibit power of all kinds. There were Negro inventors, a few lawyers, a number of physicians and dentists, many teachers, a score of intelligent preachers, some scholars of note, and even successful blacks in the finer arts. Some of these, with Frederick Dougla.s.s as the most influential, were also doing creditable work in journalism with about thirty newspapers which had developed among the Negroes as weapons of defense.[40]
This progress of the Negroes in the North was much more marked after the middle of the nineteenth century. The migration of Negroes to northern communities was at first checked by the reaction in those places during the thirties and forties. Thus relieved of the large influx which once const.i.tuted a menace, those communities gave the Negroes already on hand better economic opportunities. It was fortunate too that prior to the check in the infiltration of the blacks they had come into certain districts in sufficiently large numbers to become a more potential factor.[41] They were strong enough in some cases to make common cause against foes and could by cooperation solve many problems with which the blacks in dispersed condition could not think of grappling.
Their endeavors along these lines proceeded in many cases from well-organized efforts like those culminating in the numerous national conventions which began meeting first in Philadelphia in 1830 and after some years of deliberation in this city extended to others in the North.[42] These bodies aimed not only to promote education, religion and morals, but, taking up the work which the Quakers began, they put forth efforts to secure to the free blacks opportunities to be trained in the mechanic arts to equip themselves for partic.i.p.ation in the industries then springing up throughout the North. This movement, however, did not succeed in the proportion to the efforts put forth because of the increasing power of the trades unions.
After the middle of the nineteenth century too the Negroes found conditions a little more favorable to their progress than the generation before. The aggressive South had by that time so shaped the policy of the nation as not only to force the free States to cease aiding the escape of fugitives but to undertake to impress the northerner into the service of a.s.sisting in their recapture as provided in the Fugitive Slave Law. This repressive measure set a larger number of the people thinking of the Negro as a national problem rather than a local one. The att.i.tude of the North was then reflected in the personal liberty laws as an answer to this measure and in the increasing sympathy for the Negroes. During this decade, therefore, more was done in the North to secure to the Negroes better treatment and to give them opportunities for improvement.
[Footnote 1: _Cincinnati Morning Herald_, July 17, 1846.]
[Footnote 2: Woodson, _The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861_, p.
242.]
[Footnote 3: Turner, _The Negro in Pennsylvania_, p. 143; _Correspondence of Dr. Benjamin Bush_, x.x.xIX, p. 41.]
[Footnote 4: DuBois, _The Philadelphia Negro_, pp. 26-27.]
[Footnote 5: _The Journal of Negro History_, I, p. 5; and _Proceedings of the American Convention of Abolition Societies_.]
[Footnote 6: DuBois and Dill, _The Negro American Artisan_, p. 36.]
[Footnote 7: Jay, _An Inquiry_, pp. 34, 108, 109, 114.]
[Footnote 8: _The Journal of Negro History_, I, pp. 20-22.]
[Footnote 9: Delany, _Condition of the Colored People_, p. 106.]
[Footnote 10: _The Liberator_, July 9, 1835.]
[Footnote 11: Hammond, _Gerrit Smith_, pp. 26-27.]
[Footnote 12: Frothingham, _Gerrit Smith_, p. 73.]
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