Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (17 page)

Garnet’s courage and perseverance during this period are all the more astonishing given the severe physical disability under which he labored. Shortly after returning from sea, Garnet had contracted a swelling in his right leg. Crippled and in constant excruciating pain, he was eventually forced to have the leg amputated. Travel to Canaan and to Troy had been hard enough for Crummell and Sidney, but it was almost unbearable for the sickly Garnet. “I can never forget his sufferings,” Crummell wrote with barely suppressed anger in his
Eulogium
, “sufferings from pain, sufferings from cold and exposure, sufferings from thirst and hunger, sufferings from taunt and insult at every village and town, and ofttimes at every farm-house, as we rode, mounted upon the top of the coach.” Yet Garnet’s illness, Crummell insisted, led to a greater perfection of both body and mind: “After the amputation of his leg, he developed into a new life of vigor and mightiness. Tall and majestic in stature, over six feet in height, with a large head, its front both broad and expansive, his chest deep and strong, his limbs straight and perfectly moulded, his very presence impressed one with the idea of might and manliness.” Mental prowess complemented physical manliness. Endowed from boyhood “with a wonderful memory, with a most vivid
imagination, with strong native powers of thought, and great originality of mind,” Garnet refused to let his illness overwhelm the workings of his mind, using it instead to hone his analytical and imaginative abilities.
²¹

Between 1836 and 1843, three of the Mulberry Street School graduates—Isaiah DeGrasse, Alexander Crummell, and Charles Reason—sought admission to New York’s General Theological Seminary, the nation’s principal Episcopal institute for candidates to the priesthood established by Bishop Hobart in the late 1820s. The same members of Trinity Church who, like George Lorillard, had been so instrumental in the founding of St. Philip’s were generous contributors and active fundraisers. There appeared to be a happy convergence of interest between the Mulberry Street School graduates and St. Philip’s. The church saw the need to cultivate a black ministry beyond the single person of Peter Williams, and the three young men born and bred in the church wanted to dedicate their lives to serving the Episcopal denomination. Yet their path would not be an easy one.

Opposition came in the form of Bishop Onderdonk. Born in New York City, Onderdonk studied under Bishop Hobart and served as assistant minister at Trinity before assuming the bishopric of New York following his mentor’s death in 1830. According to writer James Feni-more Cooper, even Onderdonk’s friends admitted that he was “a little Dutch,” by which they meant stubborn, plodding, nitpicky, and pretty much devoid of charm. But he was ambitious and determined to increase the number of Episcopal churches, clergy, and congregants throughout the state. Perhaps Onderdonk feared that the growth of black parishes might prove too controversial and interfere with his plans. In any event, he was convinced that Peter Williams had caused enough trouble and decided to prevent future ordinations by denying the requisite theological training to black candidates to the ministry.
²²

The first to bear the full brunt of Onderdonk’s ire was Isaiah De-Grasse.
While his former classmates were attending Noyes Academy and Oneida Institute, DeGrasse had matriculated at Geneva College in 1832, leaving in 1835 without having obtained a degree. With the full support of Peter Williams, Isaiah decided to enter the ministry and in 1836 applied to the General Theological Seminary. Maybe both men thought that Isaiah’s light skin and miniscule portion of African ancestry would shield him from racist objections, but evidently they had not counted on their bishop. The ensuing conflict involved three antagonists—Isaiah, Onderdonk, and John Jay II. Young Jay was the grandson of the eminent John Jay, first chief justice of the United States, former governor of New York, and a founder of the Manumission Society who, as governor, had enacted the bill for the gradual elimination of slavery. His father, Judge William Jay, was also an ardent abolitionist and what we would call today an activist judge. John Jay II was determined to follow in his forebears’ footsteps, and became a fervent ally of black New Yorkers and in particular of St. Philip’s parishioners.
²³

We need to thank John Jay II for leaving us a full account of the ugly events that ensued. In 1843, Jay published a pamphlet,
Caste and Slavery in the American Church
, in which he gleefully aired dirty Episcopal laundry in public. Jay’s information came directly from Isaiah DeGrasse, who painstakingly detailed all that happened in a diary now lost to us. I marvel at Jay’s compositional strategy: he filled the main body of his text with his own interpretation of actions and motivations, while placing excerpts from Isaiah’s diary in footnotes. But I guess it’s better to be relegated to footnotes than altogether erased.

I focused on the footnotes. Isaiah passed the seminary’s entrance exam and was accepted as a student. Onderdonk, however, strenuously objected to the young man’s admission. “He seems,” Isaiah wrote in his October 11 diary entry, “to apprehend difficulty from my joining the Commons, and thinks that the South, from whence they receive much support, will object to my entering.” Yet, Isaiah insisted that “thus far I have met with no difficulty from the students, but have been kindly treated.” Sensing trouble ahead, Isaiah decided it would be “judicious” to leave the seminary’s dormitory. He then went on to detail his future course of action:

As far as in me lies I will in my trouble let all my actions be consistent with my christian profession, and, instead of giving loose to mortified feelings, will acquiesce in all things, but this acquiescence shall not in the least degree partake of the dogged submissiveness which is the characteristic of an inferior.

My course shall be independent, and then, if a cruel prejudice will drive me from the holy threshold of the school of piety, I, the weaker, must submit and yield to the superior power. Into thy hands ever, O God, I commit my cause.

Isaiah’s fears were well grounded, for the very next day he wrote:

At 9 am, I called on our spiritual father again, and sought advice in relation to my present embarrassing circumstance. He gave me plainly to understand that it would be advisable, in his opinion, for me not to apply for a regular admission into the Seminary, although I had taken a room, and even settled, yet to vacate the room and silently withdraw myself from the Seminary. He further said that I might recite with the classes and avail myself of the privileges of the institution, but not consider myself in the light of a regular member. Never, never will I do so!

According to Isaiah, Onderdonk had given in not so much to southern sentiment but to his fear of it, arguing

that the Seminary receives much support and many students from the South, and consequently if they admit coloured men to equal privileges with the whites in the Institution, the South will refuse to aid it and use their influence to keep all from the Seminary south of the Potomac. As head of the Seminary, and knowing the feelings and prejudices of the South, he could not hazard my fuller admission at such expense.

From the extreme excitability of public feeling on this delicate subject, and from my known and intimate connection with the people of colour, there would be a high probability not only of bringing the Institution into disrepute, but of exciting opposing sentiment among the students, and thus causing many to abandon the School of the Prophets.

Without hesitation, Isaiah rejected Onderdonk’s compromise solution, scornfully noting that “being a ‘hanger-on’ in the Seminary, is something so utterly repugnant to my feelings as a man, that I cannot consent to adopt it.”
²⁴

In his quiet leave taking, Isaiah chose to emulate the example set by Peter Williams when Onderdonk demanded that he resign from his position in the Anti-Slavery Society after the 1834 riots. Not so Alexander Crummell, the next to apply for admission in 1839. Onderdonk rejected him with a “violence and grossness” that reduced the young man to tears. Going on the offensive, Crummell openly attacked Onderdonk by publishing their exchange of letters in the
Colored American
, the successor to
Freedom’s Journal.
Reading through them, it appears that Crummell had in fact been admitted for orders until Onderdonk intervened to object, providing two somewhat contradictory reasons: the first a seemingly altruistic one, claiming “that great prudence was necessary in order to avoid the doing of serious injury to colored persons,” the second more defensive, insisting “that the subject [Crummell] should not be allowed to agitate our ecclesiastical body.” To Onderdonk’s explicit request that he follow Williams’s and DeGrasse’s course of action, Crummell responded that he could not submit to the “unreasonableness” of the racial distinction that had dictated their behavior. Appeals to the seminary’s board of trustees led nowhere, and after much back and forth Crummell finally withdrew his candidacy. According to John Jay II, this was but another instance of Episcopal actions taken “from dread of popular prejudice, and from fear the southern patronage of the Seminary might be withdrawn.”
²⁵

Onderdonk’s contemptuous attitude toward Crummell appears to have left a lasting wound. In
The Souls of Black Folk
, Du Bois noted that
after his experience at Noyes Academy, Crummell had struggled with the temptation of hate. “It did not wholly fade away,” Du Bois wrote, “but diffused itself and lingered thick at the edges.” In his interactions with Onderdonk, according to Du Bois, Crummell faced the temptation of despair: “Like some grave shadow he flitted by those halls, pleading, arguing, half angrily demanding admittance, until there came the final
No;
until men hustled the disturber away, marked him as foolish, unreasonable, and injudicious, a vain rebel against God’s law.”
²⁶
These became the character traits Crummell was known by for the rest of his life: unreasonable, injudicious, vain.

Charles Reason’s case was somewhat different from DeGrasse’s and Crummell’s. By 1843, St. Philip’s vestry had taken responsibility for pushing for the ordination of black priests. Initially, they gave full support to Reason’s application. Unsurprisingly, Onderdonk objected. More surprisingly, when Reason threatened to confront the bishop, the vestry hastily put together a subcommittee—which included James McCune Smith—to go and warn Onderdonk of Reason’s impending visit. It’s hard to tell what their motivations were. They were undoubtedly exhausted by all the melodrama occasioned by the two hotheads, Alexander Crummell and John Jay II. Pragmatic men, they might have realized how useless and maybe even counterproductive such belligerence was. And it’s quite possible that they were anticipating bigger battles ahead and adjusted their tactics accordingly. In any event, the matter came to a close when the vestry discovered that Reason had been lax in his private studies and he subsequently withdrew his candidacy.
²⁷

Crummell had rightly complained that Onderdonk and the seminary’s trustees had treated him not as “a man, made in the image of God … but as a colored man, not as a candidate, but as a colored candidate.”
²⁸
So why did these proud black New Yorkers remain affiliated with a denomination that was so inhospitable, if not downright hostile to them? It’s not easy to understand such devotion.

First, they were pragmatists. If they left the Episcopal Church, would any other white denomination be less racist than the one to which they were affiliated by birth? Or, given their community’s lack of
resources, would any new black denomination they established be able to sustain itself over time? They decided to stick with what they had.

Second, above and beyond denominational politics, St. Philip’s was a spiritual refuge. The DeGrasse, Crummell, and Reason families, joined later by members of my own—Albro and Mary Joseph Lyons, Peter and Rebecca Guignon, Philip White—cared so intensely about St. Philip’s not despite, but
because
, it was part of the Episcopal denomination. As they arrived for Sunday services, they crossed the threshold into a sacred space deeply rooted in Anglican tradition. This simple act held tremendous significance: it placed New York’s black Episcopalians within an ancient, cosmopolitan history and offered them a set of collective memories to place alongside their more recent history of enslavement, degradation, and Americanization.

In the church of her childhood, Maritcha Lyons recalled in her memoir, “doctrines were zealously taught and guarded; forms and ceremonies were rigidly adhered to,” a direct reference to St. Philip’s unabashed commitment to High Church values. Under Bishops Hobart and Onderdonk, New York’s Episcopal congregations had revived the old traditions and rituals discarded by the liberal wing of the Anglican Communion, and endorsed Hobart’s ideal of “evangelical truth and apostolic order.” Grounded in a deep sense of history, they aspired to return to a pre-Constantinian model of a pure, ancient, and universal Church, insisting that their bishops led back in an unbroken chain of succession to the early Christian church and hence to the Apostles themselves. In religious doctrine, they embraced the tenets of religious evangelicalism that placed faith in the redemptive power and atoning grace of Christ; but, unlike evangelicals, they insisted that only the church and its ministry could grant salvation to believers.

The High Church “forms and ceremonies” Maritcha referred to offered St. Philip’s parishioners a religious aesthetic that combined both pageantry and order. They took great pleasure in Sunday services that incorporated the use of incense, the ringing of bells, genuflection, the sign of the cross, and changes of vestments for the clergy, all carried out with the utmost decorum. They delighted in the revised Book of Common Prayer that now included a more elaborate language inflected with
an old-world flavor.
²⁹
For old and young alike, High Church doctrines and forms invited black Episcopalians to put aside their daily cares, forget the disordered world of Gotham, merge with ancient religious tradition, and reach closer to their God.