Reckoning with Race. Gene Dattel
occupations. Life held no promise for the Negro, for he was caught in a vise designed to crush, and degrade him. . . . Great numbers of Negroes sank to the level of pariahs condemned to a bitter existence on the fringe of free society. . . . The Negroes were in a very real sense a population in quarantine, trapped in a system of racial bondage.
In 1859 the historian Thomas De Voe lamented the plight of New York’s black population. Freedom had boundaries, he observed, for blacks were “poor, squalid, dirty, half-dressed, ill-fed and –bred, some . . . strong with an inclination to be thievish.” In fact, blacks were convicted of crimes at a rate three and a half times that of whites. De Voe blamed black poverty on the severe limits imposed by whites. In 1840 the New York State Convention of Colored Citizens described their situation:
We find ourselves crippled and crushed in soul and ability. . . . We were translated into the partial enjoyment and limited possessions of freedom. . . . The prejudice against us in the community has been more potent than the dictates of Christian equality.
Examples of successful black entrepreneurs in the North are scarce. In Philadelphia, James Forten was a well-known sailmaker who in 1929 employed forty workers, black and white. Stephen Smith, a lumber merchant in Philadelphia, had revenues of $100,000 in the 1850s. Among the amazing stories of black business enterprise, a Virginia slave, Robert Gordon, earned enough money to purchase his freedom by selling a coal by-product, slack, from a coal yard. He then moved to Cincinnati, where he continued building his business and invested in real estate. These and similar stories are inspiring but isolated instances in a prosperous world that was largely closed to antebellum black Northerners.
Despite overwhelmingly anti-black attitudes, white charity on behalf of the black community is a recurring theme in American history. Inspired by humanitarian concerns, such benevolence was so often strictly paternalistic that it led black groups to seek their own destiny. Whites hoped to create an uplifting process by which blacks would be “civilized” and accept Western norms, chiefly in the areas of education, jobs, and morality. One such endeavor, the racially separate African Free Schools, was founded in 1785 by the New York Manumission Society. Its members were heavily involved in the New York City Colonization Society, which began in 1817 and was followed in 1829 by the state organization. Both organizations encouraged sending blacks to Liberia. The Manumission Society also recommended Texas for black colonization because it was a less expensive solution than Liberia and because it was closest to “those states which are overcharged with the descendants of Africa.” For white Northerners, black freedom hopefully meant a black exodus.
Yet blacks for the most part rejected colonization. The frustrated black minister Henry Highland Garnet did encourage emigration to the West Indies and Africa in 1858, when he organized the African Civilization Society. In a symbolic but futile gesture, Garnet also promoted the Free Produce movement, which advocated a boycott of slave-produced sugar and cotton.
By the 1830s white New Yorkers had determined that blacks could not be assimilated. In 1839 a group of white women set up the Colored Orphanage Asylum, a racially segregated institution located between Forty-Third and Forty-Fourth Streets along Fifth Avenue. Most of the city’s upper-class white women were involved with the colonization society to encourage black emigration to Africa. The Hopper Home, a halfway house for Irish women, was established by the Women’s Prison Association in 1854, but it excluded African American women. The Society for the Relief of Worthy, Aged, Indigent Colored Persons began in 1843 as a distinctly segregated entity. In addition, the Colored Home of the City of New York had been established to care for destitute blacks. In all, blacks, with a tiny portion of the city’s population, accounted for 20 percent of the people on relief. The Colored Home’s 1851 annual report, called “Broken Gloom,” was explicitly pessimistic. “For the person of color, no future dawns with brightening ray,” the document read, “no star gild his horizon: his doom, if he remains in this his native land, is moral, intellectual and civil inferiority.”
Along with economic degradation, blacks in New York also had to contend with violence. White and black abolitionists in New York City were attacked in July 1834. During the Civil War, anti-black sentiment in New York erupted into the most violent civil disturbance in American history to that time. The stage was set in the spring of 1863 as the war was going poorly for the North. The well-chronicled Draft Riots began on July 12. New York’s working-class whites, protesting the military draft, rampaged through the city’s streets, lynching innocent blacks, roughing up white businessmen, and burning the Colored Orphanage Asylum. At least a hundred people were killed and a thousand wounded in the melee. New York was fortunate in that six thousand Union soldiers returned from victory at Gettysburg on July 4 to help quell the insurrection that had reduced the city to chaos. This was a race riot; white people were killing black people. The label “Draft Riots” should at least be changed to Draft Race Riots.
Through laws and customs, whites in New York pushed the black population into a separate, subordinate society, unfit to enter the assimilation process. Racial segregation was observed in virtually every aspect of life except in working-class taverns. By the opening of the Civil War, housing in New York City was segregated, with 86 percent of New York’s African Americans living below Fourteenth Street; fully 75 percent of the city’s streets were exclusively white. New York City did not have to wait for a large black migration to put residential segregation in place. When Seneca Village, the only area of significant black land ownership, was taken over by the city in 1857, its residents were poorly compensated and were unable to purchase land elsewhere.
Whites were particularly concerned about amalgamation, interracial sex, and interracial marriage. Lydia Maria Child, a prominent abolitionist, made it clear that she did not wish to violate the “distinctions of society by forcing the rude illiterate [blacks] into the presence of the learned and refined [whites].”
In the mid-nineteenth century, America was bursting at its boundaries, surging across a continent. Cotton was dragging race-based slavery in its westward wake. Slave expansion in the West had its limits because slavery spread only where climate and soil permitted. Nonetheless the free states—those in the North that had abolished slavery—wanted slavery’s extension prohibited. The political stakes were high, for the new states carved from the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 were reservoirs of power. The fight over the extension of slavery to the Western territories reached a climax with the presidential election of Abraham Lincoln, who clearly opposed the spread of the peculiar institution.
In portraying westward expansion, history often omits the distinction between black slaves and free blacks. While opposing the extension of slavery, white anti-slavery Northerners were also vehemently anti-black. This attitude toward race would, after emancipation, doom blacks to bondage in cotton production in the South. It was illustrated in the misunderstood Wilmot Proviso of 1846. A little-known Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania, David Wilmot, forever secured his place in American history by introducing an amendment to a $2 million appropriations bill for the Mexican War:
Provided, that, as an express and fundamental condition of the acquisition of any territory from Mexico . . . neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said territory, except for crime . . .
Americans were an acquisitive lot. Wilmot favored the annexation of Texas, supported the Mexican War, and wanted to buy New Mexico and California. His amendment passed by nineteen votes in the House but was defeated in the Southern-dominated Senate. Although the measure was thereby blocked, it fed the growing controversy over slavery, and its underlying principle helped bring about the formation of the Republican Party in 1854. For Wilmot, the issue was slavery but also race.
When territory presents itself for annexation where slavery is already established, I stand ready to take it, if national considerations require it, as they did in the case of Texas; I will not seek to change its institutions. I make not war upon the South nor upon slavery in the South. I will not first ask the abolition of slavery. I have no squeamish sensitivity upon the subject of slavery, nor morbid sympathy for the slave. I plead the cause of the rights of white freemen. I would preserve for free white labor a fair country, a rich inheritance, where the sons of toil, of my own race and own color, can live without