Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (12 page)

It was a proud day, never to be forgotten by young lads, who, like Henry Garnet, first felt themselves impelled along that grand procession of liberty, which through perils oft, and dangers oft, through the gloom of midnight, dark and seemingly hopeless, dark and seemingly rayless, but now, through God’s blessing, opening up to the joyful light of day, is still “
marching on.
”
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It was not only black youths who felt restless. Let’s return to Hamilton’s speech and follow it beyond his lavish praise of the Manumission Society. As Hamilton reached the end, his rhetoric turned fiery and he threw all caution to the winds. His voice dripping with sarcasm, he attacked the hypocrisy of the founding fathers, and Thomas Jefferson in particular, whom the nation had paused to commemorate that very day:

I know that I ought to speak with caution; but an ambidexter philosopher, who can reason contrarywise, first tells you “that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed with the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” next proves that one class of men are not equal to another, which by the bye, does not agree with axioms in geometry, that deny that things can be equal, and at the same time unequal to one another.

On the spot Hamilton resolved the question that had stumped Peter Williams some twenty years earlier: How can blacks become Americans? His ready answer was education. “White men,” he angrily intoned, “say you are not capable of the study of what may be called abstruse literature, and that you are deficient in moral character.” But, he asserted, “I feel, I know, that these assertions are as false as hell.”
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On the surface, the African Free Schools’ white trustees seemed to be in full agreement with the black community over the importance of education. As one trustee proclaimed:

If we were asked, What is the first and most important requisite in paving the way for the abolition of slavery? we should answer,
education.
What is the second? and the third?—our answer would still be as before—
education.
It is the philosopher’s stone, which will turn the baser metals into gold.

Even after the abolition of slavery, however, education remained necessary, since physical freedom without mental freedom would be incomplete: “The laws of the land might declare, that they should no longer be slaves, but it [is] only by the cultivation of the mind, that they [can] become truly emancipated and free.”
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In their educational efforts, white trustees, black leaders, and on
occasion black women worked cooperatively. They joined forces to inform families about the African Free Schools, enroll children, and keep up student attendance. A group of black men that included Peter Williams, William Hamilton, and Thomas Sipkins embraced the Manumission Society’s plan to divide black neighborhoods into districts and send agents into homes to encourage parents to send their children to school. When black men and women came together to establish the African Dorcas Association, they invited whites on the advisory board and asked Charles Andrews to write its constitution. Known as a “fragment society,” the association collected clothes, hats, and shoes to distribute to poor children who otherwise would be unable to attend school. Although men were the first officers of the association, black women soon took control. Isaiah DeGrasse’s mother, Maria, was an active member as was Peter Williams’s sister, Mary.
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Despite such collaboration, however, neither the black community nor the white trustees ever really agreed on what the students’ education should consist of. As it turned out, each held widely divergent views, and eventually found themselves at odds with one another. What lay at the heart of their differences was the “proper” place of free blacks in the nation. Were black men destined to remain common laborers or would they be allowed into the liberal professions? Were black women forever to remain domestic servants, or could they be mistresses of their own homes, or teachers if they so chose?

The school trustees often resorted to lofty sentiments about the education of African youth. Yet they were mostly interested in maintaining law and order among New York’s black population, in instilling habits of mind and behavior that would prevent any outbreak of social disorder. Simply put, they wanted to keep black youngsters off the streets and prevent them from becoming like “those idle ones who are suffered to grow up uncultivated, unpolished, and heathenish in our streets; and who, for the want of care and instruction, are daily plunging in scenes of sloth, idleness, dissipation and crime.” The trustees’ concern over proper behavior extended even into black homes. While Peter Williams’s agents visited the homes of prospective students to recruit them for school, the trustees went to satisfy themselves that black parents
were maintaining proper family values that would make their children obedient charges. Worried over parents’ ability to do so, they printed a handbook of school regulations instructing them on how to raise their children. Their advice included regular attendance at church, reading of the scriptures, enforcing discipline at home, teaching cleanliness, warning against dishonesty, and prohibiting bad language.
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Black leaders were not at all opposed to family values, good habits, and strict discipline. They too believed that self-regulation and proper behavior in public were of paramount importance. Peter Williams, we may remember, had ended his 1808 oration by encouraging black New Yorkers to maintain “a steady and upright deportment and strict obedience and respect to the laws of the land.” But there were two issues on which they would not compromise: a decent education that would give their children opportunities not available to the older generation, and the right of free blacks to control their own destiny.

It would be unfair to attribute the trustees’ actions to racism alone. Their attitudes were typical of white philanthropists who founded and supervised the city’s charitable institutions. Convinced that the lower classes—Africans, but also immigrant Irish and Germans, Catholics, and even the native born—had little sense of morality and selfdiscipline, they firmly believed that such impoverished groups needed to be governed by their betters. They devised an education that would limit social mobility and maintain the existing social structure just as it was.

There’s theory and then there’s practice. There’s a plan of action and then there’s what actually happened. Whether intended or not, the education that many African Free School students received ended up encouraging them to rise above their impoverished origins and in turn become community leaders.

Charles Andrews was principal of the Mulberry Street School for many years. His tenure was marked by controversy. British by birth, he arrived at the school in 1809 and remained until his dismissal in 1832. Andrews seems to have been deeply committed to the education of black youth.
When school attendance dropped precipitously in 1827, he made a presentation to the trustees to express his dismay. “Every one present felt grieved,” the trustees reported, “that one so devoted to the cause of
African
education should meet with so much to discourage him in his career of usefulness.”
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It was Andrews’s discouragement that resulted in the trustees’ plan to create neighborhood districts and send agents to visit black families. It’s quite possible that Peter and his friends were among their recruits.

In his 1865 comments about his school experiences, James McCune Smith remembered Andrews as a teacher who went out of his way to help his students. He was, Smith asserted,

of versatile talents; himself not deeply learned, but thorough so far as he went, a good disciplinarian, and in true sympathy with his scholars in their desire to advance. One special habit of his was to find out the bent of his boys, and then, by encouragement, instruction, and if need were, employing at his own expense additional teachers to develope [
sic
] such talent as far as possible.

In spelling, penmanship, grammar, geography, and astronomy, he rightly boasted that his boys were equal, if not superior, to any like number of scholars in the city, and freely challenged competition at his Annual Examinations. In Natural Philosophy and Navigation, which were then new studies in a free school, he carried on classes as far as he was able, and then hired more competent teachers at his own expense. …

Without being, in the modern sense, an abolitionist, Mr. Andrews held that his pupils had as much capacity to acquire knowledge as any other children, they were the object of his constant labors, and it was thought by some, that he even regarded his black boys as a little smarter than whites. He taught his boys and girls to look upward; to believe themselves capable of accomplishing as much as any others could, and to regard the higher walks of life as within their reach.

And yet, in stark contrast to Smith, Alexander Crummell recalled with considerable bitterness that during his years at the school their classmate Thomas Sidney had been the object “of marked dislike of an unprincipled school master.”
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Much of the controversy surrounding Andrews grew from accusations of violence in his use of physical punishment to discipline his charges. In the 1820s, whipping students was still an accepted practice, especially for infractions like truancy. In Smith’s view, Andrews was simply a “good disciplinarian,” willing now and again to resort to physical punishment. In an open letter to
Frederick Douglass’ Paper
written in the early 1850s, Smith remembered with some amusement the whipping of student Philip Bell that, he claimed, had ended in laughter. Bell had decided to “play hookey.” Fully expecting a whipping when he returned to school, he protected himself with an extra pair of pantaloons and a layer of paper. But “the paper betrayed an unusual sound to Charley Andrew’s quick ear” and Bell’s ruse was quickly discovered. The whipping proceeded until the boy’s pleas of “dear Mr. Andrews! my dear Mr. Andrews! brought down the house; even Charley Andrews could cut no more, neither can I.”
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Smith’s teasing language here suggests that he believed the whipping to have been justified, even harmless, certainly not malicious or racially motivated.

But my great-great-granduncle, Albro Lyons, gave his grandson, Harry Albro Williamson, a dramatically different account of Andrews’s physical disciplining that pits white against black in an ugly racist scenario. According to Lyons, the main reason for Andrews’s dismissal was his whipping of a young student named Sanders. A black man had come to the school asking to see Andrews, and Sanders had called out to him saying there was a gentleman at the door looking for him. Angered by Sanders’s reference to a black man as a gentleman, Andrews apparently gave the student a severe beating. When black parents found out what had happened, an uproar ensued and Andrews was forced to resign.
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Did either event happen the way Smith and Lyons remembered? If so, what were Andrews’s true feelings and motivations? The one fact that seems certain is that black-white relations all too often circle back to the question of violence, whether real, imagined, suspected, or intimated.

As embodiments of black New Yorkers’ quest for learning, the very buildings that housed the schools were revered monuments. Students commemorated their schoolhouses in drawings preserved in the African Free School papers at the New-York Historical Society. John Burns has left us a simple sketch of the William Street School. Then there’s Patrick Reason’s drawing, technically far superior. A classmate and good friend of Peter’s, and later mentor to Philip White, Patrick developed a career as a well-known engraver. His sketch of the Mulberry Street School depicts an imposing brick federal style building, two stories high, and surrounded by a fence. This was the place where Peter and his friends studied under the careful guidance of Charles Andrews, played together, and formed friendships that would last a lifetime.

School days did not always begin auspiciously. Threats of white violence lurked at every street corner as students were insulted, and even beaten or stoned. Parents often felt it necessary to accompany their children to and from school. But some, like Peter’s friend George Downing, were fearless. “He was no ‘mamby pamby,’ no ‘soft crabbed boy,’” activist T. McCants Stewart wrote in an article on Downing specially prepared for the
New York Freeman
in 1885. “Single handed and alone, he often fought his way through gangs of insulting white children, and leading other colored boys he sometimes drove the white fellows from the street.”
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If Peter was still living in Bayard Street, where the
Brooklyn Eagle
obituary claimed he was born, his home would have been close to the Mulberry Street School. I imagine him walking into the school building surrounded by his schoolmates, laughing and joking. It was probably evident even then that Peter did not have the intellectual stature of his friends. But I like to think that he was popular because of the depth of his character. “He never was a boy,” wrote Crummell; “not that he was grave; for neither was he at any period of his life staid or serious in his demeanor. On the contrary he was always cheerful, yea, even hilarious in character. But withal he was always manly.” Peter’s manliness, Crummell went on, “was marked by the moral qualities of boldness, bravery and generosity, exceeding, I think, most of the companions of
his school days.” To illustrate Peter’s courage, Crummell recalled that a schoolmate “was suddenly taken with a fit in the rear of the old school house. All the boys were frightened and stood off appalled. As soon as Guignon saw the poor fellow he rushed to his rescue; took him under his arms, dragged him, alone up a high flight of stairs and attended him until his recovery.”
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