Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (30 page)

In the early 1850s, Peter would have been part of these debates. He was among those who responded to the first test case of the Fugitive Slave Law when James Hamlet, an escaped slave living as a free man in
Williamsburgh, was captured in September 1850, remanded into slavery, and sent to Maryland to be sold.

The black community’s swift response to Hamlet’s plight was not new, but the culmination of a long tradition of rescue. In 1835, David Ruggles, a free black man originally from Connecticut, had founded the New York Vigilance Committee for the purpose of protecting fugitive slaves (as well as free blacks accused of being slaves) from being kidnapped. The committee’s task was to identify slave hunters, keep a lookout for endangered blacks, and hide them in stations on the Underground Railroad until they could get safe passage out of the city; Frederick Douglass was among those rescued. Unlike many other organizations of the period, the Vigilance Committee extended deep into the black community. In addition to its leadership, which at various times included Albro Lyons and Charles Ray, the Vigilance Committee set up an Effective Committee composed of a hundred persons whose job it was to collect dues from ten to twelve other community members. Women were active participants, serving on the Effective Committee and raising money under the auspices of the Ladies’ Literary Society.
¹²

So black New Yorkers were prepared when James Hamlet was captured. Peter and his friends circulated the following handbill:

THE FUGITIVE BILL!

THE PANTING SLAVE!

FREEMEN TO BE MADE SLAVES!

Let every colored man and woman attend the GREAT

MASS MEETING to be held in

ZION CHURCH,

Church street, corner of Leonard on TUESDAY EVENING,

OCTOBER 1, 1850, for your Liberty, your Fireside

is in danger of being invaded! Devote this night upon

the question of YOUR DUTY in the CRISIS.

Shall we resist oppression? Shall we defend our Liberties?

Shall we be FREEMEN OR SLAVES?

Fifteen hundred people turned out for the meeting to denounce slavery and raise money for Hamlet’s freedom. William Powell presided.
Several vice presidents were named: first James McCune Smith, followed by Peter, Albro Lyons, and Charles Reason. Powell, Smith, George Downing, and others delivered long, impassioned speeches. They described the horrors of escaped slaves being seized and sent back into slavery; they disputed the constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Law, claiming that it violated habeas corpus; they complained that the mayor had turned a deaf ear on their pleas for protection; they called for petitions to the state legislature; they threatened armed resistance. At the end, Charles Ray rose to announce that eight hundred dollars had been raised, enough to secure Hamlet’s freedom.
¹³
In early October, Hamlet returned to the city a free man and was greeted by several thousand supporters at City Hall Park.

Hamlet’s case underscored the very insecurity of free blacks in the North. The Zion Church meeting handbill warned that under the terms of the Fugitive Slave Law no one was safe. The law struck at the very heart of the black community. It forced many of its members to recall the condition of their birth. Smith had been born a slave of a slave mother in New York City. Garnet’s family had escaped from slavery to New York only to have their home invaded by slave hunters and themselves pursued through the streets. Like the Garnets, Samuel Ward and his parents had been runaway slaves from Maryland; in 1851, Ward became so apprehensive about his family’s safety that he moved to Canada. Since Hamlet might well have hidden his slave status from his neighbors, black New Yorkers must have wondered whether there were others like him in the vicinity. And, as the handbill suggested, the rule of whimsy was in full force; at any moment, any of them could be snatched from their homes or off the streets, charged with being a runaway slave, and sold South without having the chance of proving their free status. Federal officials, they knew, would not bother themselves much about the legal niceties of their civil status. Members of the black elite understood that everything they had worked so hard for—their businesses, property, education of their children—was now threatened.

Newspaper reports of the Zion Church meeting observed that it was attended mostly by “colored people, with a slight and visible sprinkling of white Abolitionists.” Since the early 1830s, the presence of northern white sympathizers at rallies such as these was common. The activities of the American Anti-Slavery Society brought together white abolitionists like Garrison and the Tappan brothers, and blacks from across the North. Priding themselves on interracial cooperation and impelled by intense evangelical fervor, the society’s members initially shared the same values and goals. They called for immediate emancipation, rejected colonization schemes, and strove for moral perfection.

Such intermingling was not without danger. The presence of Peter Williams and the Tappans on the same platform in 1834 had inflamed the passions of white New Yorkers and resulted in a race riot. The same scenario repeated itself, albeit on a lesser scale, in May 1850 at the anniversary meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society at the Broadway Tabernacle. The convention brought together what one New York newspaper mockingly referred to as Garrison’s “nigger minstrels”—Samuel Ward and Frederick Douglass—as well as white abolitionists like Lewis Tappan and Henry Ward Beecher, the younger brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose novel
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
would soon rock the nation. They were interrupted by one Captain Rynders, a notorious proslavery rabblerouser, and his Empire Club gang of prizefighters and sporting men, who rushed the platform, hurling obscenities and claiming that Douglass was not a human being but descended from the ourang-outang. Alerted ahead of time, the chief of police was there, but he stood by passively before eventually clearing the premises. Attendees repaired to Powell and Lyons’s Sailors’ Home to conclude the meeting.
¹⁴

If there were dangers from without, there was also dissension from within. Even though Lewis Tappan and Garrison shared the same platform at the Tabernacle meeting, they had long since gone their separate ways. Garrison was committed to the idea that human beings could free themselves from sin and achieve moral perfection. He believed God had
made women the equal of men, and wanted to give them a greater voice in the abolitionist movement. At the same time he was convinced that all institutions were corrupt because human, so he counseled antislavery activists not to place any faith in church, government, or party politics, and to regard the Constitution as a suspect, proslavery document. Against mounting calls for armed resistance, he clung to his belief in the power of moral suasion. On most of these points, the Tappans disagreed. They had little interest in women’s rights but wanted to stay focused on abolition. They embraced political activism as an effective tool in the antislavery struggle, and they backed those political parties sympathetic to their cause.
¹⁵
By 1840, a split was inevitable; many black New Yorkers abandoned Garrison to follow the Tappans into their newly created American and Foreign Anti-slavery Society.

In the mid-1840s, the white abolitionist Gerrit Smith approached James McCune Smith, Charles Ray, and a few others with a novel plan. A wealthy landowner, he proposed to set aside 120,000 acres that he owned in the Adirondacks, then carve it up into forty- to sixty-acre lots that he would give away to impoverished blacks. Gerrit Smith’s goal was to adapt the Jeffersonian ideal of the independent yeoman farmer to mid-nineteenth-century black Americans. He was undoubtedly also influenced by the recent founding of utopian societies, such as John Humphrey Noyes’s perfectionist community and George Ripley’s transcendentalist Brook Farm. Removed from the competitive harshness, racial tension, and seductive dangers of city life, Gerrit Smith argued, blacks would form a peaceful and productive self-sustaining community. Smith and Ray responded enthusiastically to Gerrit Smith’s plan, envisioning the settlement, named Timbucto after the mythical city in West Africa, as a place where blacks could live and work free of the whimsy of white racism, yet remain within the borders of the United States to continue their antislavery agitation and acquire enough property to qualify for the vote. Selecting the land-grant beneficiaries, they
relocated approximately twenty to thirty families. But this Timbucto turned out quite differently. The families were unprepared. Many who attempted to claim their land were swindled out of their lots or charged a service fee. Once settled, they were baffled by the obligations of land ownership. They knew nothing about taxes; they lacked agricultural skills; the soil was too poor for cultivation, or the harvesting of wood too expensive. By the mid-1850s, Timbucto was pretty much defunct.
¹⁶

Maybe the settlement would have thrived if it had had greater socioeconomic diversity. But, to the black elite, Timbucto represented primarily a solution to the economic plight of New York’s black underclass. There were few economic incentives for men like James McCune Smith, who despite the odds were succeeding in the city, to pull up stakes and move. In a letter to Gerrit Smith, Smith confessed that he “would gladly exchange this bustling anxious life for the repose of that majestic country,” but worried that “the country is yet too sparse to give support to a physician. Until I can make enough to secure an income of $400 per annum,” he concluded, “I must defer settling in the country.”
¹⁷
In essence, Smith and his friends were underwriting a community segregated not only by race but also by class.

Asserting their right to citizenship, in the 1840s black Americans became increasingly involved in party politics. They had few palatable choices. In New York, Peter Guignon, Thomas Downing, and other “old heads” threw their support to the Whig Party. Probably the best that could be said about the Whigs was that they were not proslavery Democrats. They were descendants of the earlier Federalists, the party of the American aristocracy, who had filled the ranks of the New York Manumission Society and the pews of Trinity Church, and in the 1830s fiercely opposed Jacksonian Democrats. Whether indentured or enslaved, many black New Yorkers had been attached to Federalist families and followed their lead in religious and political matters. Federalist
values were attractive to New York’s black entrepreneurial class: old-fashioned qualities like austerity and virtue, but also more recent liberal ideas promoting individualism, education, the chance to realize one’s potential to the fullest, and a capitalist system that embraced property ownership, active markets, and the profit motive. Moreover, Federalists trumpeted doctrines like equal rights of all (whatever that might mean) and the leveling up not down of all citizens (however that might be accomplished).
¹⁸

Peter’s former classmate Henry Highland Garnet, who was becoming increasingly radicalized, was not impressed. He created an uproar at the 1843 Buffalo National Convention of Colored Citizens where he delivered a fiery speech advocating slave resistance and warning “that there is not much hope of redemption without the shedding of blood.” Bringing almost as much passion to party politics, some six years later he openly accused Peter and other “colored Whigs” of being willing to “sell yourselves for nothing to the pro-slavery Taylor Whigs.” Garnet continued with a series of rhetorical questions to which the first answer was a resounding “no,” and the second an equally impassioned “yes”: “Is it respectful to yourselves to be found giving your political support to men who despise, and buy, and sell you? Do they not shut you out of their schools, churches,—their stages and hotels, and equal political privileges?” The stumbling blocks for Garnet were the two men who had been the Whigs’ presidential candidates, Henry Clay, the former slaveholder and colonizationist, and Zachary Taylor, a Louisiana-born general who had led U.S. troops during the Mexican-American War.

Blacks who wanted to become politically involved, Garnet advised, should throw their support to the Liberty Party, which, though “few in number, have stood by our rights in all the storms that have assailed us—and even to this day, they are arrayed around the shattered pillar of truth, while the majority have forsaken us.” Formed the same year as the American and Foreign Anti-slavery Society to encourage antislavery activists to enter party politics, the Liberty Party championed abolition and equal rights. It was dominated by men like Frederick Douglass, Samuel Ward, the Tappans, Gerrit Smith, and Beriah Green, former president of the Oneida Institute, who had welcomed young Garnet,
Crummell, and Thomas Sidney to his school after they had been driven out of Noyes Academy.
¹⁹

Just as black New Yorkers split over their support for political parties, so they differed in their political theories. As the 1850s advanced, black leaders took considerable pains to define what constituted “nationality.” First were those I’ll call the interracial constitutionalists, who sought to adapt the nation’s founding documents to the politics of the 1850s. They were made up of white and black abolitionists who split off from the Liberty Party to form the Radical Abolition Party. Their radicalism lay in their vision of an inclusive American nation; at their 1856 convention they nominated Gerrit Smith as their presidential candidate and James McCune Smith as his running mate.
²⁰
Building on arguments of earlier intellectuals and buttressed by recent historical events, they challenged the common interpretations of such terms as “man” and “equality.” “Man,” they insisted, was a universal concept, as was his thirst for liberty; Negroes were men in exactly the way the term was used in the Declaration of Independence. Both the Declaration and the Constitution were inclusive documents, and the phrases “all men are created equal” and “inalienable rights” fully applied to black Americans.