Part 36 (1/2)
New York had thrice New Orleans' number of colored barbers, and twice as many butchers; but her twelve carpenters and no masons were contrasted with 355 and 278 in these two trades at New Orleans, and her cigar makers, tailors, painters, coopers, blacksmiths and general mechanics were not in much better proportion. One-third of all New York's colored men, indeed, were unskilled laborers and another quarter were domestic servants, not to mention the many cooks, coachmen and other semi-domestic employees, whereas at New Orleans the unskilled were but a tenth part of the whole and no male domestics were listed. This showing, which on the whole is highly favorable to New Orleans, is partly attributable to the more than fourfold excess of mulattoes over the blacks in its free population, in contrast with a reversed proportion at New York; for the men of mixed blood filled all the places above the rank of artisan at New Orleans, and heavily preponderated in virtually all the cla.s.ses but that of unskilled laborers. New York's poor showing as regards colored craftsmen, however, was mainly due to the greater discrimination which its white people applied against all who had a strain of negro blood.
This antipathy and its consequent industrial repression was palpably more severe at the North in general than in the South. De Tocqueville remarked that ”the prejudice which repels the negroes seems to increase in proportion as they are emanc.i.p.ated.” f.a.n.n.y Kemble, in her more vehement style, wrote of the negroes in the North: ”They are not slaves indeed, but they are pariahs, debarred from every fellows.h.i.+p save with their own despised race, scorned by the lowest white ruffian in your streets, not tolerated even by the foreign menials in your kitchen. They are free certainly, but they are also degraded, rejected, the offsc.u.m and the offscouring of the very dregs of your society.... All hands are extended to thrust them out, all fingers point at their dusky skin, all tongues, the most vulgar as well as the self-styled most refined, have learned to turn the very name of their race into an insult and a reproach.”[51] Marshall Hall expressed himself as ”utterly at a loss to imagine the source of that prejudice which subsists against him [the negro] in the Northern states, a prejudice unknown in the South, where the domestic relations between the African and the European are so much more intimate.”[52] Olmsted recorded a conversation which he had with a free colored barber on a Red River steamboat who had been at school for a year at West Troy, New York: ”He said that colored people could a.s.sociate with whites much more easily and comfortably at the South than at the North; this was one reason he preferred to live at the South. He was kept at a greater distance from white people, and more insulted on account of his color, at the North than in Louisiana.”[53] And at Richmond Olmsted learned of a negro who after buying his freedom had gone to Philadelphia to join his brother, but had promptly returned. When questioned by his former owner this man said: ”Oh, I don't like dat Philadelphy, ma.s.sa; an't no chance for colored folks dere.
Spec' if I'd been a runaway de wite folks dere take care o' me; but I couldn't git anythin' to do, so I jis borrow ten dollar of my broder an'
c.u.m back to old Virginny.”[54] In Ohio, John Randolph's freedmen were prevented by the populace from colonizing the tract which his executors had bought for them in Mercer County and had to be scattered elsewhere in the state;[55] in Connecticut the citizens of New Haven resolved in a public meeting in 1831 that a projected college for negroes in that place would not be tolerated, and shortly afterward the townsmen of Canterbury broke up the school which Prudence Crandall attempted to establish there for colored girls. The legislatures of various Northern states, furthermore, excluded free immigrants as well as discriminating sharply against those who were already inhabitants. Wherever the negroes cl.u.s.tered numerously, from Boston to Philadelphia and Cincinnati, they were not only brow-beaten and excluded from the trades but were occasionally the victims of brutal outrage whether from mobs or individual persecutors.[56]
[Footnote 51: Frances Anne Kemble, _Journal_ (London, 1863), p. 7.]
[Footnote 52: Marshall Hall, _The Two-fold Slavery of the United States_ (London, 1854), p. 17.]
[Footnote 53: _Seaboard Slave States_, p. 636.]
[Footnote 54: _Ibid_., p. 104.]
[Footnote 55: F.U. Quillin, _The Color Line in Ohio_ (Ann Arbor, Mich.), p.
20; _Plantation and Frontier_, II, 143.]
[Footnote 56: J.P. Gordy, _Political History of the United States_ (New York, 1902), II, 404, 405; John Daniels, _In Freedom's Birthplace_ (Boston, 1914), pp. 25-29; E.R. Turner, _The Negro in Pennsylvania_ (Was.h.i.+ngton, 1911), pp. 143-168, 195-204, containing many details; F.U. Quillin, _The Color Line in Ohio_, pp. 11-87; C.G. Woodson, ”The Negroes of Cincinnati Prior to the Civil War,” in the _Journal of Negro History_, I, 1-22; N.D.
Harris, _Negro Slavery in Illinois_ (Chicago, 1906), pp. 226-240.]
In the South, on the other hand, the laws were still more severe but the practice of the white people was much more kindly. Racial antipathy was there mitigated by the sympathetic tie of slavery which promoted an att.i.tude of amiable patronage even toward the freedmen and their descendants.[57] The tone of the memorials in which many Southern townsmen pet.i.tioned for legal exemptions to permit specified free negroes to remain in their communities[58] found no echo from the corresponding type of commonplace unromantic citizens of the North. A few Southern pet.i.tions were of a contrasting tenor, it is true, one for example presented to the city council of Atlanta in 1859: ”We feel aggrieved as Southern citizens that your honorable body tolerates a negro dentist (Roderick Badger) in our midst; and in justice to ourselves and the community it ought to be abated.
We, the residents of Atlanta, appeal to you for justice.”[59] But it may readily be guessed that these pet.i.tioners were more moved by the interest of rival dentists than by their concern as Southern citizens. Southern protests of another cla.s.s, to be discussed below, against the toleration of colored freedmen in general, were prompted by considerations of public security, not by personal dislike.
[Footnote 57: Cf. N.S. Shaler, _The Neighbor_ (Boston, 1904), pp. 166, 186-191.]
[Footnote 58: _E. g_., J.H. Russell, _The Free Negro in Virginia_, pp.
152-155.]
[Footnote 59: J.H. Martin, _Atlanta and its Builders_ ([Atlanta,] 1902), I, 145.]
Although the free colored numbers varied greatly from state to state, their distribution on the two sides of Mason and Dixon's line maintained a remarkable equality throughout the antebellum period. The chief concentration was in the border states of either section. At the one extreme they were kept few by the chill of the climate; at the other by stringency of the law and by the high prices of slave labor which restrained the practice of manumission. Wherever they dwelt, they lived somewhat precariously upon the sufferance of the whites, and in a more or less palpable danger of losing their liberty.
Not only were escaped slaves liable to recapture anywhere within the United States, but those who were legally free might be seized on fraudulent claims and enslaved in circ.u.mvention of the law, or they might be kidnapped outright. One of those taken by fraud described his experience and predicament as follows in a letter from ”Boonvill Missouria” to the governor of Georgia: ”Mr. Coob Dear Sir I have Embrast this oppertuniny of Riting a few Lines to you to inform you that I am sold as a Slave for 14 hundard dolars By the man that came to you Last may and told you a Pack of lies to get you to Sine the warrant that he Brought that warrant was a forged as I have heard them say when I was Coming on to this Countrey and Sir I thought that I would write and see if I could get you to do any thing for me in the way of Getting me my freedom Back a Gain if I had some Papers from the Clarkes office in the City of Milledgeville and a little Good addvice in a Letter from you or any kind friend that I could get my freedom a Gain and my name can Be found on the Books of the Clarkes office Mr Bozal Stulers was Clarke when I was thear last and Sir a most any man can City that I Charles Covey is lawfuley a free man ... But at the same time I do not want you to say any thing about this to any one that may acquaint my Preseant mastear of these things as he would quickly sell me and there fore I do not want this known and the men that came after me Carried me to Mempears tenessee and after whiping me untill my Back was Raw from my rump to the Back of my neck sent me to this Place and sold me Pleas to ancer this as soon as you Can and Sir as soon as I can Get my time Back I will pay you all charges if you will Except of it yours in beast Charles Covey Borned and Raized in the City of Milledgeville and a Blacksmith by trade and James Rethearfurd in the City of Macon is my Laller [lawyer?] and can tell you all about these things.”[60]
[Footnote 60: Letter of Charles Covey to Howell Cobb, Nov. 30, 1853. MS. in the possession of Mrs. A.S. Erwin, Athens, Ga., for the use of which I am indebted to Professor R.P. Brooks of the University of Georgia. For another instance in which Cobb's aid was asked see the American Historical a.s.sociation _Report_ for 1911, II, 331-334.]
In a few cases claims of owners.h.i.+p were resurrected after a long lapse.
That of Alexander Pierre, a New Orleans negro who had always pa.s.sed as free-born, was the consequence of an affray in which he had worsted another black. In revenge the defeated combatant made the fact known that Pierre was the son of a blind girl who because of her lack of market value had been left by her master many years before to s.h.i.+ft for herself when he had sold his other slaves and gone to France. Thereupon George Heno, the heir of the departed and now deceased proprietor, laid claim to the whole Pierre group, comprising the blind mother, Alexander himself, his sister, and that sister's two children. Whether Heno's proceedings at law to procure possession succeeded or failed is not told in the available record.[61] In a kindred case not long afterward, however, the cause of liberty triumphed.
About 1807 Simon Porche of Point Coupee Parish had permitted his slave Eulalie to marry his wife's illegitimate mulatto half-brother; and thereafter she and her children and grand-children dwelt in virtual freedom. After Porche's death his widow, failing in an attempt to get official sanction for the manumission of Eulalie and her offspring and desiring the effort to be renewed in case of her own death, made a nominal sale of them to a relative under pledge of emanc.i.p.ation. When this man proved recreant and sold the group, now numbering seventeen souls, and the purchasers undertook possession, the case was litigated as a suit for freedom. Decision was rendered for the plaintiff, after appeal to the state supreme court, on the ground of prescriptive right. This outcome was in strict accord with the law of Louisiana providing that ”If a master shall suffer a slave to enjoy his liberty for ten years during his residence in this state, or for twenty years while out of it, he shall lose all right of action to recover possession of the said slave, unless said slave shall be a runaway or fugitive.”[62]
[Footnote 61: New Orleans _Daily Delta_, May 25, 1849.]
[Footnote 62: E.P. Puckett, ”The Free Negro in Louisiana” (MS.), citing the New Orleans _True Delta_, Dec. 16, 1854.]
Kidnappings without pretense of legal claim were done so furtively that they seldom attained record unless the victims had recourse to the courts; and this was made rare by the helplessness of childhood in some cases and in others by the fear of lashes. Indeed when complexion gave presumption of slave status, as it did, and custody gave color of owners.h.i.+p, the prospect of redress through the law was faint unless the services of some white friend could be enlisted. Two cases made conspicuous by the publication of elaborate narratives were those of Peter Still and Solomon Northrup. The former, kidnapped in childhood near Philadelphia, served as a slave some forty years in Kentucky and northern Alabama, until with his own savings he bought his freedom and returned to his boyhood home. The problem which he then faced of liberating his wife and three children was taken off his hands for a time by Seth Concklin, a freelance white abolitionist who volunteered to abduct them. This daring emanc.i.p.ator duly went to Alabama in 1851, embarked the four negroes on a skiff and carried them down the Tennessee and up the Ohio and the Wabash until weariness at the oars drove the company to take the road for further travel. They were now captured and the slaves were escorted by their master back to the plantation; but Concklin dropped off the steamboat by night only to be drowned in the Ohio by the weight of his fetters. Adopting a safer plan, Peter now procured endors.e.m.e.nts from leading abolitionists and made a soliciting tour of New York and New England by which he raised funds enough to buy his family's freedom. At the conclusion of the narrative of their lives Peter and his wife were domestics in a New Jersey boardinghouse, one of their two sons was a blacksmith's apprentice in a neighboring town, the other had employment in a Pennsylvania village, and the daughter was at school in Philadelphia.[63]
[Footnote 63: Kate E.R. Pickard, _The Kidnapped and the Ransomed, being the personal recollections of Peter Still and his wife Vina after forty years of slavery_ (Syracuse, 1856). The dialogue in which the book abounds is, of course, fict.i.tious, but the outlines of the narrative and the doc.u.ments quoted are presumably authentic.]
Solomon Northrup had been a raftsman and farmer about Lake Champlain until in 1841 when on the ground of his talent with the fiddle two strangers offered him employment in a circus which they said was then at Was.h.i.+ngton.