History of Black Americans

The Free Black Community in the Antebellum North

Northern free blacks for the most part were considered “not slaves, but … pariahs, debarred from every fellowship save with their own despised race, scorned by the lowest white ruffian.” “They are free, certainly,” a contemporary noted, “but they are also degraded, the target of the offscum and the off-scouring of the very dregs of society.” Given this situation, it was inevitable that free blacks in the North would establish their own community.

Each city in the antebellum North with a sizable black population developed a separate black community and a separate subculture, both of which were active and viable.

THE BLACK CHURCH IN THE NORTH

“As among our people generally,” wrote Martin R. Delany to Frederick Douglass in 1849, “the church is the Alpha and Omega of all things.” Except in a few cities of the North, such as Cleveland, where blacks worshipped in integrated communities, the black church became the focal point and gathering place for a city’s blacks, and the subculture’s leadership came predominantly from the clergy.

The independent black church arose primarily as a response to the discrimination blacks faced in white churches (see volume 1). Even when Negroes were permitted to attend the same churches as whites, they were usually seated either in separate pews in the back of the church or upstairs in a gallery especially set aside for colored persons; they also usually received communion after whites. The movement for an independent black church began in Philadelphia’s St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church, when white officials attempted to segregate black members in a separate gallery. On April 17, 1787, Richard Allen and Absalom Jones organized the Free African Society, from which two black congregations emerged. Jones took the lead in establishing St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church of Philadelphia, which was associated with the white Protestant Episcopal denominations. St. Thomas’ Church was accepted on the condition that its members would not take part in the general church government. Not until 1864 did the black church receive recognition on the basis of equality, but its congregation, made up of cultured and wealthy blacks, was always small. In 1795, it numbered only 427, and by 1860, it had declined to 105.

Richard Allen and his followers organized the Bethel Church in Philadelphia, which began with weekly gatherings in Allen’s blacksmith shop. In 1794, with the aid of a few whites, they were able to build a church. It was dedicated by the white Methodist bishop and later became known as the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church. (“Bethel,” from the Hebrew beth’El, means “house of God.”) In 1816, Allen and fifteen other delegates organized the African Methodist Episcopal church with Allen as bishop. By 1820, the church had 4,000 members in Philadelphia alone. The AME Church continued to grow, and by 1846 it had 296 churches in fourteen states and Canada, with 17,375 lay members presided over by 3 bishops, 48 deacons, and 62 elders. Members of the AME church were at various times called “Allenites,” and their churches the “Bethel Churches,” after the name given the first church in Philadelphia. When Bishop Allen died in 1831, he was succeeded by his assistant, the Reverend Morris Brown.

On August 11, 1820, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church was founded as an autonomous all-black church in New York, and the following year, Peter Varick was elected as its bishop. In 1839, the church had a membership in the city of between twelve hundred and two thousand, and ten years later, the National Anti-Slavery Standard noted that Zion was considered to be “the largest and wealthiest church of the coloured people in this city—perhaps in the country.” Although on a national basis, the AME church considerably outstripped Zion in membership and churches, the latter remained the largest of the individual congregations in New York’s black community. In 1848, Frederick Douglass reported that AME Bethel Church in Philadelphia was the “largest church in this Union, and from two to three thousand worship there every Sabbath,” but he also observed that Zion Church in New York City “exerts considerable influence over the next largest colored denomination of the country.” Slight differences in church government and probable rivalry for leadership prevented the unification of these groups.

African Baptist churches were established in Petersburg, Richmond, and Williamsburg, Virginia, in other Southern cities, and in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. Although organized as separate organizations in the North, the black Baptist churches remained affiliated with the white Baptists. In 1836, the Providence Baptist Association of Ohio became the first independent Afro-American Baptist conference in the country. Although local and state conferences organized the Western Colored Baptist Convention in 1853, no national organization was formed until the 1890s.

By 1837, Philadelphia had four Baptist churches with seven hundred members. New York’s Abyssinian Baptist Church, organized in 1809, struggled for several years without any steady pastor. It also suffered many financial difficulties, and, on one occasion, the building in which the congregation worshipped was sold at auction. But the church continued to progress, and by 1850, it could support a membership of 450 communicants, with Reverend Sampson White as pastor.

Zion Baptist Church was an offshoot of the Abyssinian Baptist congregation. Formed in 1832 with only sixteen members, mostly female, its pulpit was occupied by various preachers, both white and black. A permanent pastor was finally obtained in 1843, and three years later, Zion was able to boast a membership of 446.

The only black Baptist church in New England, the Free Will Baptist Church, was formed in Providence, and it became the largest of the Negro religious groups. Providence also had an African Methodist Episcopal Zion church, established in 1837, and an African Methodist Episcopal church, launched a year later. The fourth and smallest of the black churches in Providence was Christ Church, with Alexander Crummell, a recent arrival from New York, as pastor.

Although the independent black churches no longer had to deal with the problems caused by the prejudice of the white churches and clergy, this was not true of those that remained within the larger white denominations. They still had to fight to abolish the “nigger heaven” in the upper church galleries where the black members were seated. Black ministers still had to struggle for equal treatment. Although he was a member of the presbytery of New York, the Reverend Samuel E. Cornish never attended a general assembly of that body, despite the rule that every member in turn was to be a delegate. In a stinging indictment of his fellow Presbyterians, Cornish wrote that for ten or fifteen years, he and his fellow black Presbyterian, Reverend Theodore S. Wright, “have been passed by, and neglected by the brethren. Never exchanged pulpits with, never appointed to any ecclesiastical delegation, nor to fill any vacancy. No, nor never invited to a pulpit neither in the city nor out of the city; so far as the country is connected with our Presbytery.” He continued:

The brethren, when they take a journey either for health or business, will sooner close their churches, than to admit a colored brother to their pulpits. And they have so taught their people, that if a colored minister happens to be present, whatever his piety and talents, when their pulpit is unoccupied, they will rather dismiss without preaching and go to their homes than to invite him to officiate or receive the word of life from his lips.

The black churches became centers of social intercourse in a manner foreign to white churches. They spawned beneficial societies, black schools, and a number of other agencies that sought to promote the welfare of the black masses. No other institution disseminated news or information among blacks as quickly as the church. Since blacks were not generally served by labor unions or occupational benevolent associations, the church took on much of this type of activity. The only formal employment aid center established for blacks in antebellum Boston was founded by a black minister.

Black ministers could usually relate to the needs and concerns of the laboring members of their congregations, since they themselves were personally familiar with many of the problems of poverty and discrimination that affected the lives of all blacks, especially the poorer ones. So many members of Leonard A. Grimes’ church in Boston were fugitives from slavery that the church was commonly called the “fugitive church.”

The black church served as a community service center, an educational center, and an assembly hall for protest meetings. Shiloh in New York City could accommodate sixteen hundred people in its building at Prince and Marion streets and was considered “eminently suited as a meeting hall” in a city where blacks could not ordinarily hire such halls. The church was also a social welfare agency, seeking to maintain the viability and integrity of the black family unit by encouraging parents to bring up their children under a strict moral regimen and to impress upon them the necessity of keeping their young in school.

Believing that “knowledge is power,” the black church developed its own schools. Nineteen black Philadelphia churches offered Sabbath school education taught by blacks, and in 1856, 1,882 blacks attended these schools. Conducted on Sundays, these schools mainly emphasized the memorizing of the Scriptures. However, the libraries established on the church grounds offered poor children of the black community one of their few contacts with a variety of reading materials. The Sabbath schools were either free or low in cost, but they had the disadvantage of being staffed by church members whose emphasis was on religion rather than on education.

The church also furnished a cultural center for the black community. Musical concerts and dramatic productions were held on its premises, which served as both practice center and concert hall for musical performances. The buildings were the meeting centers for all sorts of religious and secular societies. They signified the emergence of economic cooperation in the black community. W.E.B. Du Bois has pointed out that “it was the Negro’s desire to purchase his own house of worship that began a pooling of their meager economic resources.”

The role of the black minister, like that of the church, was of necessity diverse. “The preacher’s function,” Carter G. Woodson noted, “was not limited to pulpit reading and soul saving. He was a walking encyclopedia, the friend of the unfortunate, the social welfare organizer, and the interpreter of the signs of the times.” Some ministers were better known for their organizational work than for their work in their churches.

Among their other activities, black ministers were involved in education, and many taught evening classes for adults. Samuel E. Cornish served as a traveling agent for the African Free Schools of New York to encourage attendance. Other ministers who also served in this capacity were Benjamin Paul, William Miller, and Peter Williams, Jr. When the African Dorcas Association was organized to provide clothing for the children attending the schools of the New York Manumission Society, the ministers of the African churches comprised the committee.

Black ministers were an important force in the development of Philadelphia’s Institute for Colored Youth, one of the nation’s outstanding black schools. Begun by a group of Quakers as a farm school in 1842, the institute moved to the city ten years later at the urging of Philadelphia’s black ministers, led by William T. Catto. Among the subjects to be taught at the institute’s new facilities were philosophy, physiology, Latin and Greek, classical literature, and advanced mathematics, including trigonometry. On the advice of the black ministers, Haitian-born Charles L. Reason, a professor of mathematics at New York Central College, was hired and placed in charge of implementing this new curriculum. When Reason resigned his post in 1855, the black ministers helped select black teacher Ebenezer Don Carlos Bassett to succeed him. A graduate with high honors from Birmingham Academy and Connecticut Normal School, Bassett had taught in the public grammar schools of New Haven and taken graduate courses at Yale University.

Once admitted to the Institute for Colored Youth, students were issued books and library privileges without charge. The institute’s reading room and library contained over two thousand volumes. All six teachers were black, three of them graduates of the institute. Sarah Mapps Douglass, from a prominent Negro Quaker family in Philadelphia and for many years a teacher, was in charge of the Preparatory Department of the Institute for Colored Youth, and lectured in physiology and hygiene.

Although black ministers paid tribute to the Quaker gift of education, they openly resented the paternalistic view of many Quakers that Negroes were child-like and had to be looked after and told what to do. Such condescending treatment of blacks in Quaker-financed schools, they believed, did little to aid in the development of black pride.

Some black ministers found that their congregations were either too small or too poor to provide them with a salary or to support them in their old age. But in general, they were supported by the black community. In this respect, black ministers were more independent of white society than other blacks. They could speak out on controversial subjects like slavery and civil rights with some immunity from a white backlash. In this respect, too, black ministers in Northern cities were more fortunate than those in the South, where their activities were curbed by the white society. But even the Northern black minister had to be cautious, for the power of that white society could make itself felt in riots in which black churches were often the first targets.

The church was thus the most important institution in the Northern black community. It was a place of worship, a social and cultural center, a political meeting place, a hiding place for fugitives, a training ground for potential community leaders, and one of the few places where blacks could express their true feelings. “It has been in the church,” wrote black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, “that the Negro has found a meaning for his existence and it was the church that enlisted his deepest loyalties.”

BLACK MUTUAL AID AND BENEVOLENT SOCIETIES

Despite their widespread poverty, blacks could not expect help from the mushrooming array of evangelical Christian or immigrant-aid societies, since most of these served only either white denominations or the nationalities that financed them. Black beneficial associations arose to help meet this problem. Although their privileges and benefits were limited to members and their immediate families, the aid societies performed invaluable roles in caring for those blacks who were sick, homeless, and destitute.

The first society with a goal of mutual aid was the Free African Society of Philadelphia, founded in 1787 and out of which grew Bethel, the original AME church. The society taxed its members a shilling a month in order to make funds available to the needy, “provided this necessity is not brought on them by their imprudence.” The society also pledged itself to provide school or apprenticeships for the children of deceased members.

The first organization among Philadelphia blacks exclusively devoted to mutual aid was established in 1795. Other mutual aid organizations followed rapidly, and by 1815, there were eighty such organizations with 7,448 members. The growth continued, and by 1855, Philadelphia’s blacks had 108 mutual benefit societies with 9,762 members, an annual income of $29,600, and permanent investments totaling $28,365. Participating members paid dues ranging from $3 to $5 a year, collected weekly or monthly.

The societies apparently worked efficiently. Edward Needles’ study of blacks undertaken for the Pennsylvania Abolition Society revealed that the number of blacks receiving aid in the almshouses had decreased between 1837 and 1847 because of the work of these benevolent associations.

The New York African Society was formed in 1817 “to raise a fund to be appropriated exclusively to the support of such of its members as shall by reason of sickness and infirmity be incapable of attending their usual vocation of employment and also towards the relief of the widows and orphans of deceased members.” The society grew rapidly. In 1852, its yearly income from rents and properties amounted to $2,000, while its membership dues for that year totaled $197.25.

The African Clarkson Association, incorporated in 1829, was another mutual aid society formed in New York. It was founded as a “charitable society of African descent to afford mutual means of education to the members thereof and relief to their families in case of sickness and death.” Members had to be between the ages of twenty-one and forty and pay dues of twenty-five cents per month. Sick benefit payments of $2 per week were provided for three months to members with one year’s standing. Widows were granted $20 per year in addition to a $15 burial allowance.

The Abyssinian Benevolent Daughters of Estes Association in New York City was patterned closely after the men’s mutual aid societies. Those between the ages of sixteen and fifty were eligible for membership, but the society excluded “any person addicted to insobriety or having a plurality of husbands.” Dues were seventy-five cents quarterly. Included in the benefits to the members was a $2 weekly sick benefit payment for six months, “provided the sickness is not the result of immoral conduct.” Benefits were also provided in case of the incapacity of members’ husbands, but specifically barred was any allowance in case of pregnancy.

When the city of Boston refused in a number of instances to care for those Negroes who were too poor or too sickly to take care of themselves, a group of forty-two blacks came together in 1796 and formed the African Humane Society. Although poor, they paid a twenty-five cent membership fee and contributed what they could to help the sick, pay the funeral expenses of those Negroes whose families could not afford it, and provide aid for widows and children who could not otherwise care for themselves. In their constitution, the members made it clear that they were only a benevolent organization, and that “behaving ourselves … we take no one into the society who shall commit any injustice or outrage against the laws of their country.”

Other Boston benevolent associations exercised a different form of selectivity in deciding who should be members. While the African Society of Boston set its initiation fee at twenty-five cents and required another twenty-five cents in monthly dues, the dues had to be paid for one full year before any benefits were provided to the member. This financial requirement probably made membership in the society difficult for all but the economically stable.

Although most benevolent associations confined themselves to meeting the need for which they had been organized, some also engaged in social and ceremonial activities. Members of the African Society of Salem, Massachusetts, often appeared with musical instruments at weddings and funerals and paraded on the anniversaries of the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies. Karl Bernhard, a foreign visitor to New York, described the formal dress parade of the Wilberforce Philanthropic Society of New York, organized in 1812, when “during a quarter of an hour scarcely any but black faces were to be seen on Broadway.” The imminent passage of the New York State law abolishing slavery was the occasion for this “great procession of well-dressed Negroes on October 26, 1826 parading through the streets two by two preceded by music and a flag.” Bernhard noted, too, that one member “solemnly bore a large sky blue box containing the fund raised by weekly subscription for the purpose of assisting sick and unfortunate blacks while alongside stood the treasurer of the society carrying a large golden key. … The rest of the officers wore ribands of several colours and badges like the officers of free Masons, while Marshals with large staves walked outside of the procession.”

African Dorcas Associations were formed in many cities and towns by black women. Like their biblical namesake who gave clothing to the poor, the groups provided hats, shoes, and coats to needy blacks, especially school children. The Harrisburg (Pennsylvania) Dorcas Society stipulated that none of its food, clothing, or fuel was to go “to drunkards, kidnappers, betrayers or base idle persons.” The African Dorcas Association in New York City was formed by women connected with the African Free School (assisted by black ministers) for the purpose of “providing and making garments for the destitute,” especially children who could not attend school for lack of clothing. In 1829, the group reported that it had clothed forty-nine boys and twenty-five girls during the year and had distributed a total of 232 garments, including shoes and hats.

An important benevolent enterprise of the period was the Colored Orphans Asylum in New York City. In 1833, two black women made plans for establishing a home for black children. The public was urged to contribute funds, and $2,000 was collected. In 1836, a board of twenty-two lady managers was elected, with an advisory committee of five men. A constitution was adopted, and the organization was launched under the title of the “Association for the Benefit of Colored Orphans.” The society’s object was “to provide and maintain a place of Refuge for colored orphans, where they shall be boarded, clothed, and suitably educated until of an age to be bound out or apprenticed.” While full orphans would receive preference, half-orphans would also be admitted.

After unsuccessfully trying to induce property owners to lease an empty dwelling, a small building was acquired on Twelfth Street, near Sixth Avenue, for the sum of $9,000. The association progressed so rapidly that by 1843, it was financially strong enough to move into new headquarters on Fifth Avenue. Indeed, so effective was the work of the Colored Orphans Asylum that it attracted both municipal and state support. By February 1851, the asylum had received 524 children. Most of them at the time of their admittance were young—half under eight years of age. They remained at the institution until the age of twelve, when they were apprenticed in the country. Half-orphans’ parents paid a small amount for board and could receive custody of their children at the age of twelve, provided they could prove their ability to take care of them.

The Society for the Relief of Worthy Aged, Indigent Colored Persons in New York City, more popularly known as the Colored Home, was another organization formed by the black community to ameliorate the conditions of needy blacks. Incorporated by the state legislature in 1845, the society made arrangements with the commissioner of the alms house to receive at a very low rate all aged black paupers in the city, reserving the right to reject such applicants as the resident physician should pronounce medically unfit for the Colored Home. By 1852, the twelfth year of its operation, the Colored Home was accommodating upwards of two hundred persons at its building on Sixty-fifth Street, between Avenue A and First Avenue.

The Colored Seamen’s Home in New York City represented another type of black benevolent enterprise. In 1837, the American Seamen’s Friend Society, a Protestant missionary organization, established a home for sailors in the city. Two years later, the society approached William P. Powell, a former black seaman active in New York’s black community, with the proposal that he start a home for black seamen, some two thousand of whom sailed regularly from the port of New York City. The need was desperate. If conditions were horrible for white seamen, they were doubly so for black sailors. For paltry wages—$10 a month for long voyages for ordinary seamen—they experienced extreme personal danger and the “unbearable brutality of master and mate.” Many were “despoiled of their clothing by shipmates, and sometimes by the officers” while at sea. Destitute and homeless, many black sailors were denied admission into the alms house or the Sailors Snug House. Most were at the mercy of rum-selling boardinghouses, where they could quickly be robbed of their wages.

With the financial assistance of the American Seamen’s Friend Society, Powell launched the Colored Seamen’s Home in mid-1839 at 70 John Street. While most boarders paid for their stay, no “destitute black sailors” were turned away, and all received board and clothing. To accommodate an increasing number of seamen, a three-story brick building was acquired at 230 Pearl Street in 1849. In that year, Powell reported that the annual average number of boarders was 400, and that since its founding, about 4,175 had been cared for. While the American Seamen’s Friend Society was the principal source of outside financial support for the Colored Seamen’s Home, Powell provided additional funds out of his own pocket, and on the tenth anniversary of its founding, it was reported that “in a pecuniary point of view, it [the home] had been to him a source of considerable loss.”

For black seamen, boardinghouses were more than residences. They performed the function of fraternal organizations and social clubs as well. For those without families, boardinghouses provided companionship and mutual support. They were sometimes small communities offering recreation, social contact, and even protection for their residents. After a visit in February 1848, Frederick Douglass praised Powell’s Colored Seamen’s Home as “an Oasis in the desert, when compared with many houses where seamen usually congregate.” The banner of temperance floated conspicuously throughout the establishment, and an excellent library and other reading room facilities were available. At meal times and on every other occasion, Powell led discussions of the issues confronting blacks. Douglass himself had escaped from slavery with the aid of a black seaman who was his height and who had lent him his sailor’s suit and a sailor’s “protection,” and he was very much impressed with the discussions held at Powell’s home concerning slavery and the need for conducting a continuous struggle against it.

During the Civil War the Colored Seamen’s Home became the headquarters of the American Seamen’s Protective Association, a pioneer union of Negro workers and the first seamen’s organization in the United States. Even before the Civil War, black workers tried to unite for protection and alleviation of their conditions. But such societies as the New York African Society for Mutual Relief, founded in 1808; the Coachmen’s Benevolent Society and the Humane Mechanics, organized in Philadelphia in the 1820s; and the Stewards’ and Cooks’ Marine Benevolent Society, established in New York in the 1830s, resembled fraternal lodges more than trade unions, emphasizing “the need to relieve the distressed, and soften the forms of poverty, by timely aid to the afflicted.”

Another type of organization among black workers before the Civil War was the American League of Colored Laborers, organized in New York City in July 1850, with Samuel Ringgold Ward as president and Frederick Douglass as vice-president. Its main object was to promote unity among mechanics, foster training in agriculture, industrial arts, and commerce, and to assist member mechanics in setting up in business for themselves. Clearly the league was interested in industrial education rather than trade union activity; moreover, its orientation was toward the self-employed artisan.

BLACK FRATERNAL SOCIETIES

Among the most important organizations in the black community were secret societies, such as the Masons and Odd Fellows. Both movements resulted from the discrimination practiced by whites. Freemasonry among blacks developed after the Revolutionary War, when Prince Hall, a Methodist minister who had served with the colonial army in the American Revolution, and fourteen other Boston blacks received a charter from the Grand Lodge of England, after American Masons had denied the group a charter. Organized as African Lodge No. 459 with Hall as master, and later renamed the Prince Hall Lodge, the African Lodge grew in size and influence, and its program of education and community service was notable. Weekly sick dues were provided for members unable to work, and loans were made to members and their families.

By 1797, the movement had spread to Philadelphia and Rhode Island, by 1812 to New York, and by 1825 to Washington and Maryland. In those states, too, the lodge’s programs complemented those of the mutual aid societies and the black church. In 1832, another Grand Lodge of black Masons was established by a dissident group in Philadelphia known as the Hiram Grand Lodge of the State of Pennsylvania. In 1847, the Prince Hall Lodge of Massachusetts joined with the two Pennsylvania lodges to form the National Grand Lodge of Colored Masons. Although they were united among themselves, the black Free Masons still did not achieve legitimacy in the eyes of white Free Masons.

The Odd Fellows movement had a similar history. In 1842, blacks in New York and Philadelphia were denied admission to the international order because of race. The Grand Lodge of New York made it plain that only “free white males of good moral character” were eligible, causing the Ram’s Horn, a black paper, to comment that “strange as it seems the very persons who had been prating of obligations to their fellow men and of sympathy and suffering, who had inscribed on their banners that beautiful triad—‘Friendship, Love and Truth’—now felt their dignity in danger and most incourteously refused their request.” The black groups sent Peter Ogden, a New York black, to England to make application to the parent body. Ogden was initiated as a member of the Victorian Lodge in Liverpool, achieved high honors in the society, and returned to the United States with authority to establish a branch in New York. In 1843, the Philomethan Lodge of the Odd Fellows, the first lodge of which blacks could become members, was chartered. Within five years, twenty-four lodges had been established with a combined membership of almost two thousand.

The fraternal groups presented large musical festivals and dances several times during the year. Especially famous was the “Soiree Musicale” sponsored by the Odd Fellows of Boston during the 1840s. Organization members marched in full regalia to the hall, already crowded with party goers. Entertainment for the evening included vocal and instrumental presentations, followed by dancing.

In September 1856 a convention of the Colored Odd Fellows of New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, and Washington, D.C., was held in New York City. The procession of the black Odd Fellows moved up Fifth Avenue, Seventeenth Street, Fourth Avenue, Bowery, Chatham, and Nassau streets, and back up to the Broadway Tabernacle where the chair was taken by the Grand Master, David B. Bornsen of Philadelphia. In the evening, a grand promenade concert was held at the Crystal Palace, which was brilliantly illuminated for the occasion. The New York Tribune commented:

Upon the whole, this demonstration showed that our colored people North, who are so frequently represented as lazy, poor, and miserable, are rather thrifty, brotherly, respectable, and independent. … It was a turnout creditable to itself and to our city, and pleasant to look upon.

Delegates representing Colored Free Masons from five states convened at the Columbus (Ohio) AME church in June 1857, heard speeches, passed resolutions, and treated the citizens to a parade complete with brass band in full regalia.

These conferences and local meetings were important to blacks who were excluded from white cultural institutions. They provided socialization and programs for economic advancement and mutual relief and gave their members a feeling of prestige. All blacks experienced a sense of pride in the public demonstrations.

BLACK SELF-IMPROVEMENT SOCIETIES

Barred in nearly all Northern cities from using libraries, attending lectures, or participating in debates with whites outside of the ranks of abolitionists, blacks formed their own self-improvement societies. In the late 1820s and early 1830s, literary clubs, debating groups, and library companies sprang up in every urban community of the North with a sizable black population. Boston had its Debating Club, in which eighteen or twenty members met once every two weeks for the extemporaneous discussion of current subjects. Philadelphia had its Library for Colored People, with over one thousand volumes and at which young black men spent two and three evenings a week debating moral and literary questions. Pittsburgh had its Theban Literary Society, Albany its Union Society for the Improvement of the Colored People in Morals, Education and Mechanic Arts, and Troy, New York, its Mental and Moral Improvement Association. In 1831, the Female Literary Association was formed in Philadelphia and was followed a year later by the Afric-American Female Intelligence Society in Boston. The latter was both a literary and mutual aid organization. Maria W. Stewart, the first black woman lecturer and one of the first women of any color to speak in public, delivered an address before the Afric-American Female Intelligence Society in 1832, the same year it was founded.

One of the most celebrated of these societies was the Phoenix Literary Society of New York City. Founded in 1833, it included Christopher Rush, Thomas L. Jennings, Theodore S. Wright, and Peter Vogelsang, and the white Arthur Tappan. The board was composed of both whites and blacks, but it was Tappan, the wealthy philanthropist and abolitionist, who remained the society’s chief financial backer. Its aim was indeed ambitious, since it sought to accomplish the following objectives:

To visit every family in the ward, and make a register of every colored person in it—their name, sex, age, occupation, if they read, write, and cipher—to invite them, old and young, and of both sexes, to become members of this society, and to make quarterly payments according to their ability—to get the children out to infant, Sabbath, and week schools, and induce the adults also to attend school and church on the Sabbath—to encourage the women to form Dorcas societies to help clothe poor children of color if they will attend school, the clothes to be loaned, and to be taken away from them if they neglect their schools; and impress on their parents the importance of having the children punctual and regular in their attendance at school—to establish mental feasts, and also lyceums for speaking and for lectures on the sciences, and to form moral societies—to seek out young men of talent, and good moral character, that they may be assisted to obtain a liberal education—to report to the board all mechanics who are skillful and capable of conducting their trades and with respectable farmers for lads of good moral character—giving a preference to those who have learned to read, write and cipher—and in every way to endeavor to promote the happiness of the people of color, by encouraging them to improve their minds, and to abstain from every vicious and demoralizing practice.

The Phoenix Society normally held its gatherings at New York City’s famous Broadway Tabernacle. There literary presentations were often given by its members, but the society did not limit itself to literary exercises. It established the School for Colored People, which met three times a week also at the Broadway Tabernacle. Tuition was $3 per quarter, and instruction was offered in reading, writing and geography. The school operated for two years and then suffered a sharp decline. By 1839, the Phoenix Society itself had passed out of existence.

The literary society that outlived all the others and exerted the greatest influence in the New York black community was the Philomathean Literary Society. Founded in 1829 for the purpose of “devoting itself to the improvement of literature and useful knowledge,” it met regularly on Tuesday evenings in its own hall on Duane Street. At its gatherings, debates and recitations were presented, along with select readings on moral and scientific subjects.

Membership was limited to those with a “good moral character and the desire to improve the mind,” and its roster of members included such distinguished black leaders as Dr. James McCune Smith, the physician and civil rights activist, and Philip Bell, owner of the Colored American, who was also active in the New York African Society for Mutual Relief. Members of the society read original essays and poetry, held debates, and attended lectures on scientific and literary subjects. The 1841 program, for example, included lectures on “Music—Its Practical Influence in Society,” “Geography,” “The Philosophy of Phrenology,” “Duty of Young Men,” “Touissaint L’Ouverture,” and “Patriots of the American Revolution.” Of the fourteen men scheduled for lectures in 1841, almost half were black, including Reverend Samuel E. Cornish, whose lecture was “The Incipient Measures to a Right Understanding of the Laws that Govern Mind and Matter,” Dr. James McCune Smith on “Circulation of the Blood,” and Alexander Crummell on “Oratory—Interspersed with Recitations.” At the time, the Philomatheans owned a library of over eight-hundred books and still expanding.

“Among no people in proportion to their means and advantages is the pursuit of knowledge more honored than among the colored inhabitants of Philadelphia,” wrote “A Southerner” in 1841. On March 20, 1828, William Whipper, a prominent Philadelphia black, gathered a group of his people together for the purpose of the “Improvement of Colored People in the Neighborhood of Philadelphia.” Whipper noted the limited educational opportunities for blacks in the city and felt “bound to open an institution to which they may repair and qualify themselves for future usefulness.” A “Reading Room” was established at the African Methodist church on Lombard Street, and weekly meetings afforded members the opportunity to discuss ideas gained from the reading of books.

Founded in 1833, the Philadelphia Library Company of Colored Persons emulated the white library company that had been started by Benjamin Franklin. By 1841, it had a hundred members and six hundred books. There was a fee of one dollar to join and monthly dues of twenty-five cents. The Rush Library and Debating Society (1836), the Demosthenian Institute (1837), and the Moral Reform Society (1837) followed. In 1837, there were five lyceums and debating clubs in Philadelphia maintained by black men and women, with a combined membership of 260. Philadelphia also had the only self-improvement society made up of members of both sexes—the Gilbert Lyceum, founded in 1841, with Jacob C. White as president and Grace Douglass as treasurer. But Philadelphia’s black women, not satisfied with the single opportunity, also formed four of their own self-improvement societies. The first was the Female Literary Society of Philadelphia, followed in the 1830s by the Minerva Literary Society and the Edgeworth Society. The last of the antebellum women’s societies was the Sarah M. Douglass Literary Circle formed in September 1859, named in honor of the teacher of Philadelphia’s black young women.

The most noted of the antebellum Philadelphia black literary societies was the Banneker Institute, named after the black scientist Benjamin Banneker. Founded in 1854, it was composed primarily of young black men. The institute had a library of 450 books by 1860, by which time its lectures and discussions were well known in the city. The schedule of speakers and topics for 1855 and 1856 included Sarah M. Douglass, on “Anatomy,” Isaiah C. Wears and Miss A. M. Shadd, on “Canada,” Robert Campbell, on “Chemistry of the Atmosphere,” Reverend Jeremiah Asher, on “Does the Bible Sanction Slavery?” and Professor Pliny E. Chase, on “Mental Physiology.” In 1859, lectures were given on such diverse subjects as music, mathematics, and Napoleon III.

The Debating Society of the Banneker Institute met in the evening in the building of the Institute for Colored Youth to discuss both scholarly matters and events of the day. On February 2, 1859, the debate was on the question “Has Slavery Been Beneficial to the African Race?” Another subject debated at the institute was “Has Africa Any Claims Upon Us as a People?” Fortunately, John C. White, Jr., the Banneker Institute’s secretary, kept careful minutes of its meetings and debates for many years, and these and other records have been preserved by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

In 1858, an effort was made to include the Banneker Institute in the white debating societies’ city-wide organization. A petition was submitted to the National Literary Congress asking that the Banneker Institute be considered for membership. Congress delegates visited the meetings of the black group “in order to ascertain if it were a bona fide Literary Society.” These men reported back to the Congress that the organization was purely of literary character and recommended that it “admit the Banneker Institute as a member of the Literary Congress.” In the end, however, the proposal was rejected because of the color of the institute’s members.

Throughout its existence, the Banneker Institute gave its black members opportunities to debate and discuss the current issues of the day and to read on a wide variety of subjects. It provided a practical training ground for young black men. The discussions were not solely academic. The members of the institute regularly sent memorials to the Pennsylvania legislature calling for repeal of laws discriminating against blacks.

Most of the antebellum black literary societies, like all of the fraternal and many of the mutual aid societies, were for men only. Yet in many of the social groups in the black community, men and women worked together. Significantly, too, the black-sponsored Adelphic Union Library Association of Boston, when it broadened its program to include lectures on various topics of educational and current interest, invited women to speak before them. Indeed, the association opened its meetings to all, regardless of color or sex.

Unlike groups like the Brown Fellows of Charleston, most of the Northern urban black societies did not represent an economic or social elite. There was certainly a disproportionate number of small businessmen, professionals, and skilled workers among the membership, but unskilled black workers were not totally excluded. (They would have been discouraged, however, by the practice of the Boston Adelphic Union Library Association of charging fifty cents for each lecture or seventy-five cents for the seasonal series.) There was no evidence of color distinction in any of the Northern societies.

The existence of black self-improvement societies appeared to some to be, in itself, an effective refutation of the charge of Negro inferiority. A black New Yorker put it strongly (if somewhat naively) in the Colored American of March 11, 1837:

Mr. Editor—It is certainly gratifying to know that there is in existence, in this city, a number of associations, male and female, devoted to the mental and literary improvement of our people. Their establishment has been procured by the spirited efforts of individuals, who have deeply at heart, whatever concerns the interest of the oppressed; and for years have been diffusing among us their benign influences. I care not how many societies, whose objects are moral and mental improvement are raised up. They will do good among us. They will tend to clear us from the charge of indolence, or indifference, to our own welfare which has been heaped upon us. These societies will be productive of the happiest, and most beneficial results, and will not fail to win the approbation of the wise and good of every community. If academic privileges are withheld, they prove a readiness in us to avail ourselves of every means of improvement which lies within our reach. They show, too, that we are not a people given to revelry and licentiousness as we have been basely misrepresented, but that the leisure hours of many are devoted to thought and literary advancement.

Both the benevolent and literary societies reflected a deepening concern on the part of the black community, or at least of some in the community, for the mental and moral uplift of the people. But the major uplift organization in the black community was devoted to destroying the influence of “demon rum.” Black leaders were deeply committed to the temperance cause as a solution to the major problems of poor Negroes, including child neglect. They insisted that poverty was in part due to intemperance and that no progress could be made toward solving the situation of those living in squalor until they swore to refrain from drinking.

BLACK TEMPERANCE SOCIETIES

Although some of the mutual aid and other improvement bodies frequently sponsored temperance, blacks were urged to sustain the cause of temperance by the “formation of societies for its promotion.” The response was immediate, and local temperance societies sprang up in cities all over the North, at whose meetings blacks took the “cold water pledge.” In 1837, there were four black temperance organizations in Philadelphia, and the number appears to have grown to about ten in 1842. During the 1840s, nearly one-fourth of Cincinnati’s entire black population belonged to temperance societies. Pressure within the community prohibited blacks from openly selling alcoholic beverages. In 1834, William Whipper operated a “Free Labor and Temperance Grocery” in Philadelphia, and when he married Harriet L. L. Smith in Columbia, Pennsylvania, in 1836, the wedding omitted both wine and the products of slave labor. Lemonade was the standard drink at social gatherings among the black upper class in Philadelphia. James Forten, one of Philadelphia’s leading black businessmen, refused to hire any worker who was not a teetotaler to work at his sail-manufacturing establishment.

The Temperance Society of the People of Color of New Haven, founded in 1829, was the pioneer local black organization, and the Connecticut State Temperance Society of Colored People, organized in 1836, was the first such statewide organization. Others followed, including the Grand Lodge of the Order of Colored Sons of Temperance, formed on January 1, 1850, at Cincinnati.

The various black temperance groups maintained a steady stream of circulars, lectures, and newspaper articles to curb habitual drinking, which they claimed would “destroy us and all we hold dear.” But the black temperance crusade was long on planning and passing resolutions and short on performance. Little action was taken to attract lower-class blacks, laborers, sailors, and other unskilled workers who required the most aid, and the societies were mainly made up of those most committed to the middle-class values that temperance represented. Although temperance meetings were held regularly, the participants were inactive between programs. Prejudice also plagued the temperance movement. In 1850, the national division of the Temperance Society excluded blacks from membership. In general, white temperance societies did not provide the blacks with much-needed cooperation. Yet despite shortcomings, the temperance movement among black Americans was at least as effective as that among whites.

We lack data as to the precise number of societies formed by blacks in the North during the antebellum period. One student has estimated that at least fifty were launched between 1800 and 1860 in New York City alone, and we know that in Philadelphia, there were several hundred societies during these same years. Many, to be sure, were weak and short-lived, such as the American League of Colored Laborers, organized in New York City in July 1850 with Samuel Ringgold Ward as president and Frederick Douglass as vice-president. Its main objectives, as we have seen, were to promote unity among mechanics, foster training in agriculture, industrial arts, and commerce, and assist members in establishing businesses for themselves. But it seems to have gone out of existence directly after it was organized. Other societies, however, flourished and grew into significant organizations. Mutual aid and self-improvement societies, Masonic Lodges, Odd Fellows, and temperance movements, founded and controlled by blacks, provided a sanctuary where no one was insulted because of complexion. The church, the lodge, and the society provided for common social needs and brought people together for praying, singing, dancing, talking, and learning in an environment free of the repressions and persecutions of the dominant white society.

THE BLACK PRESS: FREEDOM’S JOURNAL AND RIGHTS FOR ALL

“We wish to plead our cause. Too long have others spoken for us.” These words are from Freedom’s Journal, the first black newspaper in the United States. The launching of Freedom’s Journal resulted from a variety of circumstances. The New York City press regularly featured continuous tirades against blacks, and by 1827, leaders of the black community had decided that the only effective answer lay in the launching of a black newspaper. Early that year, at a meeting in the home of Boston Crummell, they put up the funds for a black-owned paper and selected two young blacks to launch and continue the journal. Reverend Samuel E. Cornish was chosen senior editor and John Browne Russwurm, recently graduated from Bowdoin College, junior editor.

Samuel E. Cornish was born free in about 1795 in Delaware and was raised in Philadelphia and New York City. After graduating from a Free African School, he studied for the Presbyterian ministry. In 1819, he was judged by the presbytery of Philadelphia to have received “a respectable literary education” and to be “of good moral character,” and he was licensed as a probationary minister. He was later ordained by the New York Presbytery, and in 1824 he became the first pastor of the First Colored Presbyterian Church of New York City, serving in that capacity until 1818.

Russwurm, it will be recalled, had planned to move to Haiti or attend medical school in Boston after his graduation from Bowdoin College. Instead, he moved to New York City, and his presence there as well as the availability of Cornish must have been a major factor in the move to launch Freedom’s Journal.

Describing themselves as editors and proprietors, Cornish and Russwurm issued and distributed a prospectus announcing the forthcoming publication of a paper to be called Freedom’s Journal. Appealing for subscribers, they wrote:

Daily slandered, we think that there ought to be some channel of communication between us and the public through which a single voice may be heard, in defense of five hundred thousand free people of colour. For often has injustice been heaped upon us when our only defense was an appeal to the Almighty; but we believe that the time has now arrived, when the calumnies of our enemies should be refuted by forcible arguments.

The census of 1830 listed only 319,599 free Negroes in the United States. But Freedom’s Journal always referred to 500,000. Undoubtedly the editors, like other blacks of the period, were aware that many escaped slaves hid from the census takers.

Upon receiving the prospectus, blacks in several communities began drumming up support. Toward the end of February 1827, several leading blacks in Boston met and passed resolutions that “there is reason to believe that great good work will result to the People of Colour by the publication of ‘FREEDOM’S JOURNAL.’ ” They urged that Boston’s black citizens give it their utmost support and patronage in order to secure its success.

The first issue of Freedom’s Journal, appearing on March 16, 1827, had sixteen pages, including an editorial page with the heading “To Our Patrons.” It opened with the historic words quoted at the opening of this section: “We wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others spoken for us.” It stressed the “interesting fact” that “no publication as yet” had been devoted “exclusively” to the “improvement” of the hundreds of thousands of free people of color in the United States and that, therefore, this “large body of our citizens have no public channel” through which to voice their grievances. Freedom’s Journal proposed to fill this vacuum, though, at the same time, the editors “would not be unmindful of our brethren who are still in the iron fetters of bondage.” The opening editorial also took a stand in favor of civil rights in general and the ballot in particular. “The civil rights of a people being of the greatest value,” it stressed, “it shall ever be our duty to vindicate our brethren, when oppressed; and to lay the case before the public. We shall also urge upon our brethren … the expediency of using their elective franchise; and of making an independent use of the same. We wish them not to become tools of party.”

The editors pledged to print “everything that relates to Africa” and to devote space to “News from Hayti.” They guaranteed that “we shall never insert any news whatever of a doubtful nature concerning that island,” whose citizens had “erected the standard of liberty,” and were determined to maintain their independence “in the face of the universe.” Finally, the editors declared that it was their

earnest wish to make our Journal a medium of intercourse between our brethren in the different states of this great confederacy; that through its columns an expression of our sentiments, on many interesting subjects which concern us, may be offered to the public: that plans which apparently are beneficial may be candidly discussed and properly weighed: if worthy, receive our cordial approbation; if not, our marked disapprobation.

Besides the prospectus, the opening editorial, and the testimonial of good-wishers, the first issue contained the first installment of the “Memoirs” of Paul Cuffe, the black sea captain, ship owner, and philanthropist; a report on the “Unconstitutional seizure and imprisonment of free men of color in the South”; articles on the “Common Schools of New York,” “The Church and the Auction Block,” “Chinese Fashions,” “The Egg Trade,” and “On Choosing a Wife by Proxy”; an antislavery article reprinted from the New York Christian Advocate; a poem about the capture and enslavement of an African chief; “A True Story,” an essay on “The Effect of Sight upon a Person Born Blind”; and entertainment and variety departments. Also included in the paper were notices of marriages, deaths, and court trials. Commercial advertisements were printed on the last page. The paper was to be published every Friday at 5 Varick Street in Manhattan and would sell for three dollars a year. Already, readers were informed, Freedom’s Journal had authorized agents in Portland, Maine; Boston and Salem, Massachusetts; Providence, Rhode Island; New London, Connecticut; Philadelphia and Columbia, Pennsylvania; Albany, New York; Newark, Princeton, and New Brunswick, New Jersey; Baltimore; and Washington, D.C.

As part of a campaign against wholesale detractors of black people, Freedom’s Journal ran a series of articles designed to educate both blacks and whites to some of the notable accomplishments of blacks in various parts of the world. Five articles appeared on the history of Haiti, highlighting the virtues of the black-run government after the island’s successful revolution against French control and the establishment of the first black republic in 1804. At about the same time, the paper carried a three-installment piece on Touissaint L’Ouverture, the brilliant black general who had led the black revolution and ruled the island until he was tricked into departing for France, where he died in prison. Other articles dealt with Antony Williams Arno, an African philosophy teacher in Europe, Olaudah Equiano, an African who wrote an autobiography of his life in Africa and America, Richard Allen, Benjamin Banneker, James Derham, black doctor, Paul Cuffe, shipowner and pioneer African colonizationist, and quite often, the female poet, Phillis Wheatley. “Anything relating to Phillis Wheatley, who by her writings has reflected honour upon our name and character, and demonstrated to an unbelieving world that genius dwells not alone in ‘skins of whitish hue,’ ” it declared in its January 23, 1828, issue, “will not surely be deemed uninteresting by the readers of Freedom’s Journal.” Writing in the issue of November 2, 1827, from Boston, Samuel E. Cornish commented: “To our shame I write it, ‘our Poetess’ lies buried in the Northern-Burying-Ground, without a stone to mark the spot, where repose African genius and worth.” He urged a nationwide drive by blacks to erect a monument in her honor—“let us evince to the world that we are not insensible to the fame and renown which her writings have conferred upon us—that we are proud of them.”

The paper published poems by Phillis Wheatley and other blacks, including those by George M. Horton, the slave-poet of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Emphasizing the “black is beautiful” theme, it carried the following poem by a black in its issue of June 8, 1827:

In the issue of August 10, 1827, a black woman, who signed herself “Matilda,” spoke out in favor of “women’s rights” in general and, in particular, for the rights of Negro women who, she pointed out, did not possess “the advantages with those of our sex, whose skins are not coloured like our own, but we can improve what little we have, and make our one talent produce two-fold.” The editors welcomed “Matilda’s” criticism that they did not pay enough attention to this question, and she wrote several articles for the paper on the role that young black women should play in the freedom struggle.

Every measure designed to limit the freedom of free blacks was reported in Freedom’s Journal and editorially condemned. In its November 16, 1827, issue, the paper carried the text of the new ordinance adopted in Washington, D.C., requiring blacks to furnish “satisfactory evidence of their title to freedom” or face imprisonment “as an absconding slave.” The editorial comment went:

We cannot see by what rules of equity, the free man of colour, in the pursuit of his lawful business, should be incarcerated in prison, called upon to prove his freedom, and in case of refusal, sold as an absconding slave. In common with other citizens, we have rights which are dear to us: and we shall never sit patiently, and see them trampled upon, without raising our feeble voice, and entering our protest against the unconstitutionality of all laws which tend towards curtailing them in the least degree.

The exclusion of blacks from the skilled trades by employers and white workers and the need for them to settle for work as common laborers came under frequent attack. “Such is the present state of things,” declared Freedom’s Journal, “that whatever qualifications our sons may possess, if we offer them to a respectable mechanic, we are met with the unreasonable reply, that my apprentices are not willing to work with coloured boys.” The black paper firmly insisted that this pattern could be changed if employers would stop allowing hiring policy to be determined by their white journeymen and apprentices and would themselves take a firm stand against racial exclusion: “Let good men discountenance the evil.” But the Journal failed to note that it was employers who often were responsible for the evil.

To the oft-repeated charge that the “jails and penitentiaries are crowded with coloured convicts,” Freedom’s Journal replied:

The coloured man’s offence, three times out of four, grows out of the circumstances of his condition, while the white man’s, most generally, is premeditated and vicious. Therefore, if more of our people, in proportion, have unhappily become the tenants of jails and penitentiaries, it does not prove them more subject to crime, or their characters more debased. … The white man possesses all the advantages, to education and competency, while the coloured man has scarcely any.

Freedom’s Journal did not neglect the evils of slavery. In its fourth number (April 27, 1827), it struck a significant note, observing: “It is no use to wait until the negroes are fit to be freemen. Nothing but freedom will fit a man to be free. No other condition will draw forth the energies of his mind.” It made its position clear in editorials like the following: “We abominate slavery, and all its advocates. We consider it as the most iniquitous system ever set in operation; which must sooner or later meet its due reward.” When the editor of the New York Evening Post praised slavery both in the West Indies and in the Southern United States, Freedom’s Journal lashed out:

For this absurd attempt, we can make but one apology; that is, of old age. The many years he the editor has been permitted to enjoy the goodness of Providence, perhaps, have impaired his mind, and left it without much of its former fruitfulness, without sufficient vigour to guide its decisions. This is the most charitable view we can take of such an effort. … The only rewards we can promise him, are the patronage of the South, and what is still more important the eulogies of the Enquirer.

Although it fulfilled the role as a paper of protest, Freedom’s Journal devoted most of its pages to serving the developing black urban community. As Frederick Cooper points out: “It gave extensive coverage to the activities of black mutual relief, literary, temperance and fraternal societies, announcing their meetings, encouraging people to attend, and reporting what happened.”

Cornish had originally accepted editorial responsibility for six months. When his term came to an end with the issue of September 14, 1827, he was succeeded by the junior editor, John Browne Russwurm. Immediately there was a noticeable decline in the quality and amount of editorial material. More serious was the fact that the Bowdoin graduate did an about-face on colonization to Africa.

From the outset, Freedom’s Journal had waged a campaign against the American Colonization Society, and this had brought down upon it the bitter opposition of champions of colonization. Reverend Dr. Samuel Miller of Princeton, New Jersey, a fervent colonizationist, denounced the black weekly as “exerting an unfavourable influence upon the coloured population of New Jersey, and unworthy of the support of the wise and good among them.” Then, late in January 1829, evidently under severe financial pressure, Russwurm wrote to James Gurley, secretary of the American Colonization Society, that he stood ready to take a staff position in Liberia. In February he announced his support of the “return to Africa movement” and started to feature articles in favor of colonization and the Colonization Society.

To the dismay of many blacks, Russwurm came out in the issue of March 7, 1829, in defense of a law recently passed in Ohio requiring free blacks to leave the state if they could not post a $500 bond guaranteeing good behavior. Russwurm put the reason succinctly: “Our rightful place is in Africa.” In the issue of March 28, 1829, he announced that he was severing his connection with Freedom’s Journal, and, convinced that blacks would never achieve “the rights and privileges of citizens” in the United States, he was leaving for Liberia.

Russwurm was well rewarded by the American Colonization Society for his advocacy. Awarded a master’s degree by Bowdoin, he was sent to Liberia as superintendent of schools in 1831, became editor of the Liberia Herald, and five years later was made governor of the Maryland colony of Cape Palmas.

Russwurm was forced to resign his editorship after he had endorsed the American Colonization Society. Cornish resumed his former role and tried to undo the damage caused by Russwurm’s defection. In May 1829, backed by a group of black stockholders, including the influential Thomas Jennings and Peter Williams, Cornish issued the first number of Rights of All and pledged that “this Paper will more especially be devoted to the rights and interests of the colored population.” Although the paper continued to stress the same issues as Freedom’s Journal had under Cornish’s original editorship, it dealt especially with the new crisis facing free blacks in Ohio: enforced migration as a result of the state law and the riots by white laborers in Cincinnati designed to force blacks to leave more quickly. Under the heading, “Barbarism in Ohio,” Cornish labeled the $500 bond act “unparalleled for illegality and barbarism in the history of the world.” As for Cincinnati, he recommended “all the outlaws of foreign countries to go there, and as an inducement we are authorized to inform them that the mob rules there four evenings out of five. … ‘Hail Columbia, happy land.’ ”

Cornish kept the paper alive for a number of issues, but financial problems forced him to suspend publication. By the fourth number, his income was only $36 with which to meet expenses of over $200. Many of the former subscribers to Freedom’s Journal, disgusted with the issues under Russwurm’s editorship, were evidently unwilling to subscribe to its successor at the $2 annual subscription price.

Thus came to an end the first journalistic venture of black Americans, the “first to be owned, operated, published and edited by and for black people.” Until its last period, Freedom’s Journal, as Boston blacks declared at a meeting in its support, was “a powerful auxiliary” in the struggle of black Americans for freedom and equality—not in Africa but in the United States.

THE BLACK PRESS: OTHER BLACK PAPERS

After the demise of Rights of All there was a lapse of only a few years before another black newspaper appeared. During 1831 and 1832, John G. Stewart edited a paper in Albany, New York, entitled the African Sentinel and Journal of Liberty, but it quickly passed from the scene. In the mid-1830s, Philip A. Bell of New York began publishing the Struggler, but it, too, lasted only a few issues. In January 1837, the Weekly Advocate, edited by Reverend Samuel Cornish, came into existence in New York City, and in March of that same year, it was renamed the Colored American. As the editor explained: “ We are Americans … colored Americans, brethren—and let it be our aim to make the title Colored American as honorable and as much respected before the world as white Americans or any others.”

While it paid attention to slavery, the Colored American made it clear from the outset that it believed that racism in the North was the main problem that should be attacked and that it was a mistake to focus attention exclusively on slavery in the South. Hence, although the paper devoted much space to the struggle against slavery, it concentrated on Northern racial prejudice, which brought daily humiliation to free black people, deprived them of schooling, apprenticeships, jobs, and the vote, and segregated them in every aspect of society from the church to the lyceum. Fight back, Cornish editorialized: “Brethren, be careful never to go into the prescribed Negro pews. Stand in the aisles, and rather worship God upon your feet, than become a party to your own degradation. You must shame your oppressors, and wear down prejudice, to this holy policy.”

From the beginning, the Colored American encountered severe financial difficulties. Cornish served virtually without salary, and Philip A. Bell, the proprietor, obtained no income to offset his investment. “The Editor has not received one cent, nor asked for any pecuniary consideration as yet; and the Proprietor— worse still—is in debt,” Cornish informed the readers in mid-June 1837. Efforts to improve the paper’s financial condition were fruitless. Cornish left it in May 1839, and between November 1839 and March 1840, it suspended publication. Charles B. Ray, who was to become editor when the Colored American reappeared, kept the paper alive until March 13, 1841, when it was forced to suspend permanently.

In August 1838, David Ruggles, secretary of the New York Vigilance Committee, published the Mirror of Liberty in New York, first as a quarterly and then as a monthly magazine devoted to the welfare of the free Negro. Its publication came to an end in September 1841.

In April 1838 Benjamin Roberts began publishing the Anti-Slavery Herald in Boston, with the hope of making it the voice of the city’s black community, in spite of William Lloyd Garrison’s insistence that his Liberator fulfilled that purpose. Determined to have the Herald printed and edited solely by Negroes, Roberts had to purchase and set up his own printing press and then teach his employees how to run it. This proved costly, and the paper appeared only sporadically from April to October when Roberts announced he would have to stop publication until the first of the year. But Boston’s only pre-Civil War Negro newspaper never appeared again.

The 1840s brought a substantial increase in the number of black publications. In Albany, New York, in 1842, Stephen Myers edited the Elevator, The National Watchman, with which William G. Allen was associated, was circulated from Troy, New York, beginning in the latter part of 1842 and lasting until 1847. The Clarion was published by the Reverend Henry Highland Garnet in Troy, but it was short-lived. The People’s Press was edited in New York City by Thomas Hamilton during 1843. In the same year, Martin Robinson Delany edited the Mystery in Pittsburgh. The Ram’s Horn, edited in New York City by William Hodges, was published in January 1847 and expired eighteen months later. In 1853, William H. Day provided Ohio blacks with their first newspaper, the Aliened American. It was soon discontinued because of economic difficulties. Day tried again in 1855 with the People’s Exposition, but it too soon failed. Still another short-lived black paper was the Pacific Appeal, published in San Francisco and edited by Mifflin W. Gibbs and J. H. Townsend.

That these papers lacked stability is hardly surprising. Their circulation was usually small, with their subscription lists confined for the most part to the city in which the journal was published. Black papers faced great difficulties: there were few Negro merchants and professional men who bought advertising; the Negro people were too poor to make substantial contributions to requests for funds; and not many white people were interested in black journals. Constantly needing financial assistance, nearly all of the journals expired after a valiant battle to exist.

The following announcement in the Ram’s Horn of November 1, 1847, marked the beginning of a new era in black journalism:

FREDERICK DOUGLASS AND HIS PAPER PROSPECTS FOR AN ANTI-SLAVERY PAPER TO BE ENTITLED—THE NORTHSTAR.

Frederick Douglass proposed to publish in Rochester, New York, a weekly anti-slavery paper with the above title. The object of The North Star will be to attack slavery in all its forms and aspects; advocate Universal Emancipation; exact the standard of public morality; promote the moral and intellectual improvement of the colored people; and to hasten the day of freedom to our three million enslaved fellow-countrymen.

The paper will be printed on a double medium sheet, at $2.00 per annum, paid in advance, and $2.50 if payment be delayed over six months.

Frederick Douglass was born in February 1817, somewhere in Tuckahoo, Talbot County, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, the son of an unknown white father and Harriet Bailey, a slave. As a child he suffered much from both a lack of nourishing food and the cold, and he grew to detest slavery. He saw slaves brutally whipped; worked from sunrise to sunset six days a week; was fed insufficient amounts of pork or fish and low-quality meal; and was sheltered in dirty, crowded, uncomfortable quarters in which the clay floors were their only beds.

Douglass’ mother was hired out to a farmer twelve miles away, and to see her son, she would walk the distance after a day of labor in the field and then return to the farm to begin another day of labor at dawn. These visits ceased during Douglass’ seventh year, when she died. He was not even allowed to attend her funeral.

A major turning point in Douglass’ life occurred in 1825 when his mistress, Mrs. Thomas Auld, at his request, began teaching him to read. In a short time, he had mastered the alphabet and was learning to spell words of three and four letters.

At this point, Mrs. Auld informed her husband of her efforts to teach Douglass to read and of her pupil’s mental agility. Astounded at his wife’s naiveté, Auld ordered her to discontinue the instruction, explaining in Douglass’ presence that education would spoil even the best of “niggers” by making them unmanageable, discontented, and determined to run away. The lessons ceased, but Douglass was impressed by Auld’s assertion that education and freedom were somehow related. He resolved to learn to read and write, despite his master’s stern opposition and without Mrs. Auld’s aid—indeed, over her objections. To accomplish this purpose, he made the streets of Baltimore, where he now worked as a slave, his school and used his white playmates as teachers. Out of his pocket would come the leaves of books he had raked “from the mud and filth of the gutter,” a copy of his Webster’s spelling book, and a slice of bread to pay for his lessons.

By the time he was twelve or thirteen, Douglass had learned to read and had turned his attention to writing. While working in the Baltimore shipyards, he watched the carpenters label the prepared pieces of timber with letters indicating the part of the ship for which they were designed, and he practiced drawing these letters in his spare time. Then using the fences as his copybooks and blackboards and chalk as his pen and ink, he learned to write.

A second major turning point in Douglass’ life as a slave occurred when he fought back against the cruel “slave-breaker,” Edward Covey. “The battle with Mr. Covey,” he wrote in his autobiography published in 1845, “was the turning-point in my career as a slave. It … revived within me a sense of my own manhood. … It was a glorious resurrection, from the tomb of slavery to the heaven of freedom. My long-crushed spirit rose, cowardice departed, bold defiance took its place. … I now resolved that, however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact.”

From the summer of 1836 to the summer of 1838, Douglass worked in the Baltimore shipyards, first as an apprentice, then as a skilled caulker. In the evenings, after a day’s work in the shipyards, Douglass extended his education. He met free blacks who were well versed in literature, geography, and arithmetic, and he sought to learn from them. As a slave, he was not able to join any of the forty benevolent institutions established by the free blacks of Baltimore, but he was permitted, by special dispensation, to become a member of the East Baltimore Improvement Society. There he took a prominent part in debates and there, too, he met Anna Murray, who afterward became his wife. Anna was one of twelve children of slave parents and the first of their five children born in freedom, escaping by one month the fate of her older brothers and sisters born in slavery.

On Monday, September 3, 1838, Douglass bade farewell to slavery. From a black seaman friend who was his height, he borrowed a sailor’s suit and a sailor’s “protection,” a paper listing the physical features of its owner who, as a free American sailor, could move about the country. (The suit was later returned to its owner by mail.) In the late afternoon of September 3, Douglass arrived in Philadelphia and then went on to New York City, where he was joined by Anna Murray. On September 15, twelve days after his escape, they were married by the Reverend James W. C. Pennington, who had fled from a Maryland master ten years earlier. Two days later, they were on their way to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where Douglass believed that his skill as a caulker would secure him a livelihood. However, white racism prevented him from working at his trade, and for three years Douglass led a hand-to-mouth existence as a day laborer. In 1841, following the discovery that he possessed a talent for the public platform, he became an abolitionist lecturer. He had changed his name from Bailey to Douglass soon after his arrival in New Bedford, the name Douglasshaving been suggested to him by a black with whom he stayed for a while and who was an admirer of the Douglass in Sir Walter Scott’s Lady of the Lake.

While he was on an antislavery tour of England in 1846, a group of British antislavery women, led by Ellen and Anna Richardson of Newcastle, raised $711.96 to purchase his emancipation from his master in Maryland, so that on his return to the United States, Douglass was legally free. A group of British antislavery women also raised $2,175 to enable Douglass to purchase a printing press and establish his own paper. Julia Griffiths, the daughter of a close friend of William Wilberforce, the British abolitionist, organized the campaign for Douglass’ paper and furnished him with a “valuable collection of books, pamphlets, tracts and pictures” to use as editor.

The first issue of the North Star came off the press on December 3, 1847, its masthead proclaiming the slogan: “Right is of No Sex—Truth is of No Color— God is the Father of us All, and we are all Brethren.” The editors were Frederick Douglass and Martin R. Delany, who had just resigned the editorship of the Pittsburgh Mystery. William C. Nell, like Douglass a self-taught Negro, was listed as publisher.

The weekly paper, edited by a former slave who had never gone to school, became the best-known, most influential, and longest-lasting black paper of the antebellum and Civil War era. The paper changed its name to Frederick Douglass’ Paper in 1851 and in 1859 to Douglass’ Monthly. It remained in existence from December 1847 to May 1863, when Douglass suspended publication to help raise black troops for the Union Army.

Had it not been for Julia Griffiths, Douglass’ paper would not have been able to maintain its unbroken existence for almost sixteen years. There were many occasions when it was on the verge of suspending publication and surely would have done so without her aid. For example, when she learned in the spring of 1848 that the North Star was in financial trouble, she wound up her affairs in England and came to Rochester with her sister to help put the journal back on its feet. “She came to my relief,” Douglass wrote later, “when my paper had nearly absorbed my means, and I was heavily in debt, and when I had mortgaged my house to raise money to meet current expenses; and in a single year, by her energetic and effective management, enabled me to extend the circulation of my paper from 2,000 to 4,000 copies.” In a single year, too, she paid off a debt of between seven hundred and eight hundred dollars.

With the assistance of the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, of which she was secretary, Griffiths organized fairs, published gift books, and conducted numerous other activities on behalf of Douglass’ paper. When paying tribute to those who had enabled him to continue as an editor, Douglass noted that “we are indebted to none more than to the ever active and zealous friend of the slave, Miss Julia Griffiths.”

In format and typography, Douglass’ paper was typical of nearly all of the other black papers published before the Civil War. It consisted of four pages of seven columns each. The first page usually featured the full text of speeches or sermons. Foreign reports also rated a front-page position, as did reports of local, statewide, and national antislavery meetings or black conventions. The second page was filled with editorial matter, which sometimes poured over onto the next page. The third page contained reports of meetings, notices of activities to come, and letters to the editor. The fourth was generally devoted to clips from other sources, poetry, installments of novels running serially, book reviews or “literary notices,” announcements of antislavery tracts, advertisements of pills, “all sorts of horse medicines,” and ointments.

In the first number of the North Star, Douglass pledged: “Giving no quarter to slavery at the South, it will hold no truce with oppressors at the North. While it shall boldly advocate emancipation for our enslaved brethren, it will omit no opportunity to gain for the nominally free complete enfranchisement.” Douglass continually stressed in his editorials that the free Negro and the slave were chained together and must rise and fall together. “To strengthen prejudice against the free,” he argued, “is to rivet the fetter more firmly on the slave population. Only show that the free colored man is low, worthless, and degraded, and a warrant for enslaving him is readily acknowledged.” The free black, he maintained, must not resign himself to a position of inferiority in American society. Both for his own sake and for the sake of his brothers in chains, he must allow no feeling of fright or disillusionment to stand in the way of his self-improvement. The strongest argument for emancipation was a Negro proving by endeavor and achievement that he was as good as the white man. The white man and the Negro were equals, and the white man was superior only when he outstripped the Negro in improving himself; the Negro was inferior only when he proved himself incapable of accomplishing what his white brother had accomplished. It must no longer be white lawyer and black wood sawyer, white editor and black street cleaner, white intelligent and black ignorant, “but we must take our stand side by side with our fellow countrymen, in all the trades, arts, professions, and callings of the day.”

The longest-lasting black paper founded in the antebellum era was the Christian Recorder, the official organ of the African Methodist Episcopal church. It began publication in Philadelphia in 1854 and continued until 1901. Like other black journals, the Christian Recorder was a weekly. The Anglo-African Magazine, a monthly published in New York City by Thomas Hamilton, appeared in January 1859. Its ambitious and varied aims were listed in its prospectus:

To present a clear and concise statement of the condition, the past history, and the coming prospects of the Colored population of the United States, free and enslaved.

To afford scope for the rapidly rising talent of Colored men in their special and general literature.

To examine the population movements of the Colored people.

To present a reliable statement of their religious condition, of their moral, and economic statistics.

To present a statement of their educational conditions and movements.

Of their legal conditions and status in the several States.

To examine into the basis on which rest their claims for citizenship of the several States, and of the United States.

To present an elaborate account of the various books, pamphlets, and newspapers written or edited by Colored men.

To present the biographies of noteworthy Colored men throughout the world.

In addition to the information on these subjects there was a special reason, according to the prospectus, why blacks should support the new magazine:

On the condition and prospects of free Colored men, by common consent, rest, in a great degree, the condition and prospects of enslaved Colored men. Hence, besides the intrinsic interest which attaches itself to a magazine of such scope and information, the end of all who wish to advance the great cause of Immediate Emancipation is earnestly solicited for its support.

For twenty-five cents a copy or one dollar a year, the reader of the Anglo-African Magazine was introduced to the views of some of the leading black intellectuals of the era—Dr. James McCune Smith, Frances Ellen Watkins, Martin R. Delany, William C. Nell, J.W.C. Pennington, Edward Blyden, Thomas Holly, Daniel A. Payne, George T. Downing, George B. Vashon, John B. Vashon, John Mercer Langston, J. Sella Martin, Amos Garry Beman, Charles L. Reason, and Frederick Douglass. The breadth of the articles is apparent in some of the titles: “The Attraction of Planets” by Martin R. Delany; “The German Invasion” by James McCune Smith; “The Educational Wants of the Free Colored People” by M. H. Freeman; and “A Review of Slavery and the Slave Trade” by J.W.C. Pennington.

The magazine ceased publication with the issue of April 1860. It was succeeded by the Anglo-African, a weekly newspaper, edited by Robert Hamilton, whose brother had published the magazine. It survived for five years until 1865.

“Circumstances make it absolutely necessary that we should have a press of our own,” declared the State Convention of Colored Freemen of Pennsylvania in 1841. “It is just as absurd to imagine that we can become intelligent and enterprising by others speaking and writing for us, as that we can become fat by their eating and drinking for us.” A black press did come into existence in the North during the antebellum period. In his Condition, Elevation, Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered, published in 1852, Martin R. Delany listed “twenty odd newspapers” published by blacks in the previous twenty years. Others have added to the list so that over thirty black papers are known to have come into existence before the Civil War. While copies of most of them have not been found and many existed only briefly, it seems clear that the black press did voice the concerns of black people in the North and contributed substantially to the creation of a viable black community. There may be some question as to whether Samuel E. Cornish or Frederick Douglass was the outstanding Negro journalist of the pre-Civil War period, but there is no doubt that both rank high in the history of American journalism.

History of Black Americans -- : From the Emergence of the Cotton Kingdom to the Eve of the Compromise of 1850

MLA

"The Free Black Community in the Antebellum North." History of Black Americans : From the Emergence of the Cotton Kingdom to the Eve of the Compromise of 1850. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993. The African American Experience. Greenwood Publishing Group. 23 Jun 2015. <http://testaae.greenwood.com/doc.aspx?fileID=GR7966&chapterID=GR7966-1260&path=books/greenwood>

Chicago Manual of Style

"The Free Black Community in the Antebellum North." In History of Black Americans : From the Emergence of the Cotton Kingdom to the Eve of the Compromise of 1850, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993. The African American Experience. Greenwood Publishing Group. http://testaae.greenwood.com/doc.aspx?fileID=GR7966&chapterID=GR7966-1260&path=books/greenwood. (accessed June 23, 2015).