Reckoning with Race. Gene Dattel
and politician Seargent S. Prentiss expressed a commonly held belief: “That slavery is a great evil, there can be no doubt—and it is an unfortunate circumstance that it was ever introduced into this or any other country. At present, however, it is a necessary evil, and I do not think admits of a remedy.” Just five years later the quotable Prentiss offered a diametrically opposed view in his recommendation to the Mississippi state legislature:
Resolved, that the people of the state of Mississippi look upon the institution of domestic slavery . . . not as a curse, but as a blessing, as the legitimate condition of the African race, as authorized both by the laws of God and the dictates of reason and humanity. . . . We will allow no present change, or hope of future alteration in this manner.
From a “great” and “necessary” evil to a “blessing” in five years to justify an economic force.
The white North, without the ability to cultivate cotton, had no such economic imperative for slavery, but it nonetheless had to grapple with the existence of a small free-black population in its midst. While Americans have often conflated anti-slavery attitudes with pro-black sentiments, in fact, white Northerners were anti-slavery and also predominantly anti-black. In every Northern state the pattern of responses to free blacks was similar. There was no thought of creating a biracial society based on freedom and equality. White Northerners wanted blacks shipped overseas to Africa, the Caribbean, or Central America via colonization societies or sent to segregated regions within America or placed in designated all-black states or forced into physically separate communities, the forerunners of the modern urban racial ghettos. Above all, after emancipation they wanted blacks contained in the South.
White America’s hypocrisy and its true racial attitudes were fully on display in the North. There, racial animosity was rife, and an all-consuming fear of black migration was well entrenched. Northern bigotry played a vital role in curtailing the physical and economic mobility of blacks. Trapped in the South, they were needed as cotton-field laborers, first as slaves, then as free blacks, for with emancipation the economic imperatives of cotton did not go away. The consequence was a separate community of free blacks, first induced by white Northerners, then adopted by the white South after Emancipation, then reinforced by blacks during the long period of compulsory exclusion. Historians generally ignore the North’s racial containment policy designed to keep blacks in the South. The policy worked, for on the eve of World War I 90 percent of all blacks in America lived in the South. Only another economic force—a labor shortage in the North—toppled the containment policy.
Black American identity was put to the test early in the North, where slavery was being eliminated by gradual emancipation. The living and social conditions of the small number of free blacks in the antebellum North is well worth reviewing, beginning in the New England and Middle Atlantic states.
Separatism asserted itself early on. As a twenty-six-year-old, Richard Allen, a former slave turned gifted Methodist orator, preached to a small number of blacks in 1786 at St. George’s Church in Philadelphia. The young leader was allowed to perform his service at 5 a.m., before the white service. At a later date, either 1787 or 1792, Allen and his fellow black worshipers were told to vacate the white section of St. George’s Church. Allen’s black colleague, the Reverend Absalom Jones, in a prayer position on his knees, was pulled up by a white trustee. “You must get up; you must not kneel here,” the trustee said. The black congregants had been assigned instead to a newly built, racially segregated balcony. Thus provoked, blacks left the church, never to return. “An increase in the black communicants,” as W. E. B. Du Bois later wrote, had alarmed the white church and prompted racial segregation. Allen and others would found a racially separate religious entity, the African American Church (Bethel), and a mutual aid society, the Free African Society of Philadelphia. The white North would not be a promised land for free blacks.
In a pattern that would be repeated throughout American history, an increase, or anticipated increase, in the number of blacks in a particular community invariably provoked a policy of forced separation. Historians rationalize the establishment of separate black institutions by Allen and others as evidence of black resilience and ingenuity, but in doing so they ignore the devastating long-term consequences of racial segregation.
Philadelphia, like other Northern cities before the Civil War, offers a glimpse of the “squalid” conditions of most free blacks in the North. In 1862 the English visitor Edward Dicey provided this account of the city:
Everywhere and at all seasons the colored people form a separate community. . . . As a rule, the blacks you meet in the Free States are shabbily, if not squalidly, dressed; and as far as I could learn, the instances of black men having made money by trade in the North are few in number. . . . In every Northern city, the poorest, the most thriftless, and perhaps the most troublesome part of the population are free negroes.
“There is . . . [no] city,” wrote Frederick Douglass, the black abolitionist and orator, “in which prejudice against color is more rampant than in Philadelphia.” Such was the reality in the “City of Brotherly Love.”
By the time Philadelphia’s most famous citizen, Benjamin Franklin, was a delegate to the Constitutional Convention in 1787, he had become an abolitionist. Earlier he had owned slaves for thirty years; in 1770 he had lobbied the English government for approval of the state of Georgia’s slave codes; in 1779 he had contacted the French police to help recapture Abbe, a female slave owned by John Jay, another of his compatriots living in France. (Jay was a founding member of New York’s abolition society when he still owned slaves.) The French police found Abbe and imprisoned her until she “repented her ingratitude.” Franklin had also asked the French government to allow his relative, John Williams Jr., to keep a slave in France after the French had abolished slavery.
More important for our purposes, Franklin’s ideas for the “improvement” of free blacks were harsh. In the fall of 1789 he issued a formal plan for a committee of Abolition Society members to oversee emancipated blacks. Because he feared a mass of free slaves unleashed on American society, he also recommended that a branch of our “national police . . . supervise emancipated slaves.” A “committee of inspection” would “superintend the morals, general conduct, and ordinary situation of Free Negroes.” A “committee of education” was formed to “superintend the children of Free Blacks,” who would be taught “moral and religious principles.” A “committee of employ” would find “constant employment for those Free Negroes who are able to work, as the want of this would occasion poverty, idleness, and many vicious habits.” The jobs contemplated would “require little skill.” Apprehensive white abolitionists like Franklin wanted comprehensive white regulation of the lives of blacks after emancipation.
Examples of white Northern racial animosity abound, often with a modern resonance. In the 1790s, residents of New Haven, Connecticut, and Salem, Massachusetts, argued that the movement of blacks to white neighborhoods precipitated a 20 to 50 percent decline in property values. Citizens of South Boston bragged in 1847 that “not a single colored family” resided in the neighborhood. Abolitionist Boston had its segregated “Nigger Hill” when only 1.3 percent of the population was black. Groping for a positive interpretation of this situation, black historians cite examples of Boston blacks and whites living “adjacent to one another.” But, in fact, Boston greeted blacks with residential segregation; separate and inferior schools; separate churches, lecture halls, and places of entertainment; and, according to the historian James Horton, “condescension in polite circles.” Blacks “held the worst jobs at the lowest pay.” Even the Irish, according to Frederick Douglass, were able to push blacks out of their normal occupations. The two decades before the Civil War were a time of economic crisis for Boston’s blacks. As the white population doubled from 84,400 to 177,800, the black population held stagnant at 2,261 (1.3 percent).
Historians heap praise on the Massachusetts legislature for banning racial segregation in schools in 1855. The act affected all of fifty children. (When time came for real integration via busing in the 1960s, Boston’s resistance, led by Louise Day Hicks, was legendary.) In 1860 only thirty thousand black children out of an American black school population of eighty-six thousand in the free North