Reckoning with Race. Gene Dattel
of white children were enrolled in school.
The absolute numbers of black people residing in a Northern city or state in the antebellum years are critical to understanding racial separation and animosity. They reinforce the distinction made by the white North in opposing slavery but despising the presence of blacks. Blacks constituted a mere 2 percent of the North’s antebellum population, and 94 percent of them were not allowed to vote, even with such minuscule numbers. That proportion was preferred even in Boston, the hotbed of abolition and twentieth-century liberal politics. In 1930 the black population in the entire state of Massachusetts was 1.3 percent out of a total of four million. By contrast, as David Cohn has noted, the cotton-dominated Bolivar County, in the Mississippi Delta, alone had the same number of blacks—fifty-two thousand. A hospitable North would have drained the South’s labor force after the Civil War.
Connecticut provides a vivid portrait of Northern disdain for free blacks. Slavery was hardly an economic bonanza in Connecticut and was simply not profitable enough to expand. In 1784 the state ended race-based slavery via legislation for gradual emancipation, by which all slaves born after 1784 would be freed at age twenty-five; females were to be freed at age twenty-one. In 1775 the state had had more than 5,100 black slaves, about 3 percent of the population. In 1800, in a population of 451,520, only 8,627 (1.9 percent) were black.
Supposedly, slavery in New England was benign. Still, an article in the Connecticut Journal in 1774 exhibited widespread notions of black inferiority. The writer categorized “the Negroes of Africa” as animals to be ruled by white descendants of the biblical Adam.
God formed [blacks] . . . in common with horses, oxen, dogs, &c. for the white people alone to be used by them either for pleasure or to labour with other beasts in the culture of tobacco, indigo, rice, and sugar. [This was before the advent of cotton production.]
Connecticut has left an extraordinary record of white attitudes toward free blacks in the antebellum North. In 1800 the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences conducted a survey of more than one hundred Connecticut towns. The major sponsors were Timothy Dwight, the president of Yale College, and Noah Webster. The survey consisted of thirty-two “articles,” of which Number 26 dealt with race. Specifically, it wanted to know if a black person born enslaved was different than one born free:
Free blacks; their number, vices and modes of life, their industry and success in acquiring property; whether those born free are more ingenious and virtuous, than those who were emancipated after arriving to adult years.
The inquiry embodied the optimistic viewpoint that blacks had been degraded by slavery and, once freed, would undergo a transition to “proper” morality and productive citizenship. In Connecticut a brief period between gradual emancipation and the first decades of the nineteenth century evidenced white idealism and a hope that the effects of slavery could be whitewashed from black character. A thorough apprenticeship, similar to Benjamin Franklin’s proposal for “improvement,” with white tutelage and charity, was envisioned. The goal was the acceptance of white Christian norms. If this transition could not work in Connecticut, what would be the fate of blacks in the rest of America?
The Connecticut town responses were devastating, with a damaging assessment of blacks as lazy and immoral. No distinction was drawn between the character of emancipated blacks and that of freeborn blacks. In all, blacks were recognized in early-nineteenth-century Connecticut as an intractable problem.
Timothy Dwight, the well-educated Congregationalist minister, wrote the report from New Haven in 1811. In one of his own sermons in 1810, Dwight was highly critical of New Haven blacks:
[T]hese people . . . are, generally, neither able, nor inclined to make their freedom a blessing unto themselves. When they first became free, they are turned out into the world, in circumstances, fitted to make them nuisances to society. They have not property; nor any skill to acquire it. Nor have they . . . generally any industry. . . . They have no economy; and waste, of course, much of what they earn. They have little knowledge either of morals or religion. They are therefore victims to sloth, prodigality, poverty, ignorance, and vice.
In the report of the Connecticut towns survey, Dwight expanded on the destructive behavioral characteristics of blacks.
Their vices . . . are usually intended by the phrase “low vice.” Uneducated to principals of morality, or to habits of industry . . . they labor only to gratify gross and vulgar appetites. Accordingly, many of them are thieves, liars, profane drunkards, Sabbath-breakers, quarrelsome idle. . . . Their ruling passion seems very generally to be . . . fashionable.
The conservative scholar Thomas Sowell has blamed white Southerners for such destructive traits in blacks. The characteristics—“aversion to work,” “neglect of education,” “drunkenness,” “improvidence,” “proneness to violence,” love “of fine clothes and good living . . . more than . . . a bank account,” and “low standards of ability, ambition, and morals”—sound very much like those of early-nineteenth-century Connecticut; yet the erudite Sowell finds that Southern blacks, whom he calls “black rednecks,” inherited these habits from white Southern rednecks. There were no white Southern rednecks in Connecticut in 1800 to influence blacks.
In his report, Dwight then describes the white tutelage that will be necessary to bring blacks properly into white society. Two racially separate schools were set up for black children, one of which was funded by charity. For Dwight, education was the only “rational hope of a reformation” for blacks.
But the idea of a black transition to freedom was essentially abandoned by Connecticut. By 1818 the state constitution had disfranchised its tiny black population. By 1820 Connecticut joined the American Colonization Society (ACS), which sought to encourage blacks to leave America for Africa. Short of deportation, this was the ultimate form of exclusion. Few recall that Harriet Beecher Stowe gave a nod to colonization when she sent the heroes and heroines of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as missionaries to Liberia. The powerful New Haven Congregationalist minister Leonard Bacon in 1823 referred to free blacks as “aliens and outcasts” who should “seek a home on the . . . shores of Africa.” White tutelage had vanished; assimilation was impossible. “You cannot bleach him,” wrote Bacon using the color metaphor, “into the enjoyment of freedom.”
Connecticut never evolved toward racial tolerance. With a tiny black population, in 1857 the state reaffirmed its disfranchisement of blacks when 76 percent of whites voted against allowing the vote to its 1.9 percent black population. Again, after the Civil War Connecticut voted against ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment to enfranchise blacks.
At the root of this support for colonization and disfranchisement, as elsewhere in the North, was a fear of black migration from the South and an endorsement of separatism. Further evidence may be seen in the Reverend Simeon S. Jocelyn’s 1831 proposal that “a Collegiate school [for teaching] a manual labor system” for blacks be established in New Haven. In the years before the Civil War most Northern blacks lived in poverty, typically working as domestic servants or manual laborers. Successful black barbers were an exception.
Jocelyn’s school was designed to help blacks “cultivate habits of industry.” The clergyman had impeccable credentials as a friend of blacks: he had helped found the anti-slavery society in New Haven, was pastor of New Haven’s Temple Church, which had a black congregation, and was actively involved in charities for blacks. Nevertheless, his was a voice in the wilderness. Despite the town’s anti-slavery trappings, its citizens had voted heavily against black suffrage in 1857. In a hastily convened town council meeting, the “air ran hot and foul” as New Haven condemned Reverend Jocelyn’s proposed school on racial grounds. A resolution passed by the mayor, aldermen, and the Common Council was clear:
Yale College, the institutions for the education of females, and the other schools [in New Haven] . . . are important . . . and the establishment of a College in the same place to educate the Colored population is incompatible with their prosperity, if not the existence of the present institutions of learning, and will be destructive of the best interests of the city. . . . We will resist the establishment of the proposed College in this place by every lawful means.
The proposal died, and thousands of free blacks