Part 37 (1/2)
[Footnote 80: _Minutes and Proceedings of the First Annual Convention of the People of Colour, held in Philadelphia from the sixth to the eleventh of June_, 1831 (Philadelphia, 1831).]
These discriminations, along with the many private rebuffs and oppressions which they met, greatly complicated the problem of social adjustment which colored freemen everywhere encountered. It is not to be wondered that some of them developed criminal tendencies in reaction and revolt, particularly when white agitators made it their business to stimulate discontent.
Convictions for crimes, however, were in greatest proportionate excess among the free negroes of the North. In 1850, for example, the colored inmates in the Southern penitentiaries, including slaves, bore a ratio to the free colored population but half as high as did the corresponding prisoners in the North to the similar population there. These ratios were about six and eleven times those prevalent among the Southern and Northern whites respectively.[81] This nevertheless does not prove an excess of actual depravity or criminal disposition in any of the premises, for the discriminative character of the laws and the prejudice of constables, magistrates and jurors were strong contributing factors. Many a free negro was doubtless arrested and convicted in virtually every commonwealth under circ.u.mstances in which white men went free. The more severe industrial discrimination at the North, which drove large numbers to an alternative of dest.i.tution or crime, was furthermore contributive to the special excess of negro criminality there.
[Footnote 81: The number of convicts for every 10,000 of the respective populations was about 2.2 for the whites and 13.0 for the free colored (with slave convicts included) at the South, and 2.5 for the whites and 28.7 for the free colored at the North. _Compendium of the Seventh Census_, p. 166. See also _Southern Literary Messenger_, IX, 340-352; _DeBow's Review_, XIV, 593-595; David Christy, _Cotton Is King_ (Cincinnati, 1855), p. 153; E.R. Turner, _The Negro in Pennsylvania_, pp. 155-158.]
In some instances the violence of mobs was added to the might of the law.
Such was the case at Was.h.i.+ngton in 1835 when following on the heels of a man's arrest for the crime of possessing incendiary publications and his trial within the jail as a precaution to keep him from the mob's clutches, a new report was spread that Beverly Snow, the free mulatto proprietor of a saloon and restaurant between Brown's and Gadsby's hotels, had spoken in slurring terms of the wives and daughters of white mechanics as a cla.s.s.
”In a very short time he had more customers than both Brown and Gadsby--but the landlord was not to be found although diligent search was made all through the house. Next morning the house was visited by an increased number of guests, but Snow was still absent.” The mob then began to search the houses of his a.s.sociates for him. In that of James Hutton, another free mulatto, some abolition papers were found. The mob hustled Hutton to a magistrate, returned and wrecked Snow's establishment, and then held an organized meeting at the Center Market where an executive committee was appointed with a view to further activity. Meanwhile the city council held session, the mayor issued a proclamation, and the militia was ordered out.
Mobs gathered that night, nevertheless, but dispersed after burning a negro hut and breaking the windows of a negro church.[82] Such outrages appear to have been rare in the distinctively Southern communities where the racial subordination was more complete and the antipathy correspondingly fainter.
[Footnote 82: Was.h.i.+ngton _Globe_, about August 14, reprinted in the _North Carolina Standard_, Aug. 27, 1835.]
Since the whites everywhere held the whip hand and nowhere greatly refrained from the use of their power, the lot of the colored freeman was one hardly to be borne without the aid of habit and philosophy. They submitted to the regime because it was mostly taken as a matter of course, because resistance would surely bring harsher repression, and because there were solaces to be found. The well-to-do quadroons and mulattoes had reason in their prosperity to cherish their own pride of place and carry themselves with a quiet conservative dignity. The less prosperous blacks, together with such of their mulatto confreres as were similarly inert, had the satisfaction at least of not being slaves; and those in the South commonly shared the humorous lightheartedness which is characteristic of both African and Southern negroes. The possession of sincere friends among the whites here and there also helped them to feel that their lives lay in fairly pleasant places; and in their lodges they had a refuge peculiarly their own.
The benevolent secret societies of the negroes, with their special stress upon burial ceremonies, may have had a dim African origin, but they were doubtless influenced strongly by the Masonic and other orders among the whites. Nothing but mere glimpses may be had of the history of these inst.i.tutions, for lowliness as well as secrecy screened their careers.
There may well have been very many lodges among illiterate and moneyless slaves without leaving any tangible record whatever. Those in which the colored freemen mainly figured were a little more affluent, formal and conspicuous. Such organizations were a recourse at the same time for mutual aid and for the enhancement of social prestige. The founding of one of them at Charleston in 1790, the Brown Fellows.h.i.+p Society, with members.h.i.+p confined to mulattoes and quadroons, appears to have prompted the free blacks to found one of their own in emulation.[83] Among the proceedings of the former was the expulsion of George Logan in 1817 with a consequent cancelling of his claims and those of his heirs to the rights and benefits of the inst.i.tution, on the ground that he had conspired to cause a free black to be sold as a slave.[84] At Baltimore in 1835 there were thirty-five or forty of these lodges, with members.h.i.+ps ranging from thirty-five to one hundred and fifty each.[85]
[Footnote 83: T.D. Jervey, _Robert Y. Hayne and His Times_ (New York, 1909), p. 6.]
[Footnote 84: _Ibid_., pp. 68, 69.]
[Footnote 85: _Niles' Register_, XLIX, 72.]
The tone and purpose of the lodges may be gathered in part from the const.i.tution and by-laws of one of them, the Union Band Society of New Orleans, founded in 1860. Its motto was ”Love, Union, Peace”; its officers were president, vice-president, secretary, treasurer, marshal, mother, and six male and twelve female stewards, and its dues fifty cents per month.
Members joining the lodge were pledged to obey its laws, to be humble to its officers, to keep its secrets, to live in love and union with fellow members, ”to go about once in a while and see one another in love,” and to wear the society's regalia on occasion. Any member in three months' arrears of dues was to be expelled unless upon his plea of illness or poverty a subscription could be raised in meeting to meet his deficit. It was the duty of all to report illnesses in the members.h.i.+p, and the function of the official mother to delegate members for the nursing. The secretary was to see to the was.h.i.+ng of the sick member's clothes and pay for the work from the lodge's funds, as well as the doctor's fees. The marshal was to have charge of funerals, with power to commandeer the services of such members as might be required. He might fee the officiating minister to the extent of not more than $2.50, and draw pay for himself on a similar schedule.
Negotiations with any other lodge were provided for in case of the death of a member who had fellows.h.i.+p also in the other for the custody of the corpse and the sharing of expense; and a provision was included that when a lodge was given the body of an outsider for burial it would furnish coffin, hea.r.s.e, tomb, minister and marshal at a price of fifty dollars all told.[86] The mortuary stress in the by-laws, however, need not signify that the lodge was more funereal than festive. A negro burial was as sociable as an Irish wake.
[Footnote 86: _The By-laws and Const.i.tution of the Union Band Society of Orleans, organised July 22, 1860: Love, Union, Peace_ (Caption).]
Doubtless to some extent in their lodges, and certainly to a great degree in their daily affairs, the lives of the free colored and the slaves intermingled. Colored freemen, except in the highest of their social strata, took free or slave wives almost indifferently. Some indeed appear to have preferred the unfree, either because in such case the husband would not be responsible for the support of the family or because he might engage the protection of his wife's master in time of need.[87] On the other hand the free colored women were somewhat numerously the prost.i.tutes, or in more favored cases the concubines, of white men. At New Orleans and thereabouts particularly, concubinage, along with the well known ”quadroon b.a.l.l.s,” was a systematized practice.[88] When this had persisted for enough generations to produce children of less than octoroon infusion, some of these doubtless cut their social ties, changed their residence, and made successful though clandestine entrance into white society. The fairness of the complexions of some of those who to this day take the seats a.s.signed to colored pa.s.sengers in the street cars of New Orleans is an evidence, however, that ”crossing the line” has not in all such b.r.e.a.s.t.s been a mastering ambition.
[Footnote 87: J.H. Russell, _The Free Negro in Virginia_, pp. 130-133.]
[Footnote 88: Albert Phelps, _Louisiana_ (Boston, 1905), pp. 212, 213.]
The Southern whites were of several minds regarding the free colored element in their midst. Whereas laboring men were more or less jealously disposed on the ground of their compet.i.tion, the interest and inclination of citizens in the upper ranks was commonly to look with favor upon those whose labor they might use to advantage. On public grounds, however, these men shared the general apprehension that in case tumult were plotted, the freedom of movement possessed by these people might if their services were enlisted by the slaves make the efforts of the whole more formidable. One of the Charleston pamphleteers sought to discriminate between the mulattoes and the blacks in the premises, censuring the indolence and viciousness of the latter while praising the former for their thrift and sobriety and contending that in case of revolt they would be more likely to prove allies of the whites.[89] This distinction, however, met no general adoption. The general discussion at the South in the premises did not concern the virtues and vices of the colored freemen on their own score so much as the influence exerted by them upon the slaves. It is notable in this connection that the Northern dislike of negro newcomers from the South on the ground of their prevalent ignorance, thriftlessness and instability[90] was more than matched by the Southern dread of free negroes from the North. A citizen of New Orleans wrote characteristically as early as 1819:[91]
”It is a melancholy but incontrovertible fact that in the cities of Philadelphia, New York and Boston, where the blacks are put on an equality with the whites, ... they are chiefly noted for their aversion to labor and p.r.o.neness to villainy. Men of this cla.s.s are peculiarly dangerous in a community like ours; they are in general remarkable for the boldness of their manners, and some of them possess talents to execute the most wicked and deep laid plots.”
[Footnote 89: [Edwin C. Holland], _A Refutation of the Calumnies circulated against the Southern and Western States respecting the inst.i.tution and existence of Slavery among them_. By a South Carolinian (Charleston, 1822), pp. 84, 85.]
[Footnote 90: E.R. Turner, _The Negro in Pennsylvania_, p. 158.]
[Footnote 91: Letter to the editor in the _Louisiana Gazette_, Aug. 12, 1819.]
CHAPTER XXII