Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (32 page)

The slaveholder came. … He disregards all obligations, all ties; he drags him [Preston] from our gates. Would that this was the last of the infamy. But our Reverend and
MOST
CHRISTIAN
adviser, if called upon to “put asunder” those that “God hath joined together”—to screw on the thumb screw—yes, he would feel it to be his “christian duty to obey.” Aye, he even takes his place to entwine with the rope which shall bind him and keep him from fleeing to some christian gate.

As if that were not bad enough, Downing continued, St. Philip’s vestry “passed a vote of thanks to said Reverend and approved of his entire course.” He then proceeded to list the names of the vestrymen one by one, starting with Philip. Only one, Downing claimed, opposed the resolution, and that was his father.

Unable to let the matter rest, some two years later Downing returned to Morris’s admonition, charging in yet another letter that “a white one of his vestrymen, with a sanctimonious grin, exclaims Amen! to the Reverend’s exclamations.”
³³
Although Downing called out St. Philip’s vestrymen in the plural, I think his animus was specifically directed against Philip. Downing placed his name first on the list and his reference to one of the white vestrymen could only have been a play on words: white as in skin color, racial composition, weak character, and last name.

This incident explains the
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
’s later comment. I’ve thought it over many times, and reached the inevitable conclusion: Philip was indifferent to the plight of the slave. My initial reaction was one of utter dismay. I wanted my great-grandfather to be a dedicated race man, a hero of the antislavery cause just like Downing and Smith. But one can’t choose one’s ancestors, can one? So rather than condemn, excuse, or apologize for Philip’s behavior, I’ve simply tried to understand it. It’s not easy. Philip was devoted to his mother, Elizabeth; coming from Jamaica, she must have had ties to slavery, either as a slave herself or the child of a slave mother. Nevertheless, Philip’s personal history was different from that of men like Smith and Garnet who had had direct experiences with slavery. And it was different from those whose fathers were white but remained distant if not unknown. Philip was nurtured by his white father for the first ten years of his life. Perhaps Thomas White impressed upon the boy lessons he would never forget:
that character, not race, was the measure of the man; that the privileges of citizenship were his due; that he should not have to fight for them, and certainly not fight on behalf of others.

In that sense it’s fair to say that Philip took little interest in his race. Yes, his commitment to black education indicated that to some degree he did care, yet he wanted to educate young men to believe in themselves just as he did. And no, he did not agree with statements like the one author Frances Harper would make a few years later: “Identified with a people over whom weary ages of degradation had passed,” she wrote, “whatever concerns them, as a race, concerns me.”
³⁴
Philip did not identify with those degraded by slavery, and their concerns were not his.

In the 1850s, Philip’s goal was to help St. Philip’s obtain a secure place within the American Episcopal Church. This quest created a wide cast of characters that pitted not only black parishioners against white churchmen, but also parishioner against parishioner, and churchman against churchman. Yet it also gave rise to unexpected alliances, most especially with white churchmen. Most tellingly, however, it revealed the utter whimsy of scientific racism, exposing how the character and behavior of white men (and white men of the cloth at that) were often a lot more suspect than the Negro’s.

In his letters to
Frederick Douglass’ Paper
, Downing charged Philip White with being all too willing to follow the lead of St. Philip’s white pastor, Reverend Morris.

Peter Williams’s death in 1840 had left an aching void at St. Philip’s. Quite naturally, the church wanted another black minister to lead it, but finding one proved to be a difficult task. Bishop Hobart had taken six long years to ordain Williams, and later Bishop Onderdonk had denied Isaiah DeGrasse, Alexander Crummell, and Charles Reason the requisite training for the ministry. By the mid-1840s, DeGrasse was dead, and Reason was a teacher. Only Crummell had persevered; he was finally ordained by Bishop Alfred Lee of Delaware in 1844. Crummell
had not yet left for England and Africa and was an obvious candidate for the position at St. Philip’s. But his prickly personality stood in the way. Although James McCune Smith, a member of the vestry at the time, lobbied on Crummell’s behalf, others were wary. He was not appointed.

With no black candidates in the ministry, St. Philip’s turned first to Alexander Frazer and then after his death to William Morris. Ordained by Onderdonk, Morris had been assistant minister of Trinity Church before becoming rector of Trinity School. In 1849, the vestry appointed him officiating minister, a position he held for ten years.

Morris was his pastor, but was that reason enough for Philip to heed his call to obey the laws of the land? Like many committed Christians then and now, my great-grandfather must have concluded that there was no place for politics in the church. He undoubtedly remembered how Onderdonk had chastised Peter Williams for his abolitionist activity and forced him to resign his position in the American Anti-Slavery Society.

Philip had a quite specific reason for wanting to ban politics from St. Philip’s: admission to the Diocesan Convention. St. Philip’s parishioners were unshakeable in their conviction that acceptance was essential to their religious identity: it would establish their church as a legitimate black parish within a larger white religious order. The Episcopal Church conceived of itself as a national institution structured around the concept of denominational unity. Individual parishes made up the local level; these were then grouped by region to form dioceses, each one headed by a bishop and administered by a convention. Diocesan conventions met annually, and General Conventions comprising all the dioceses triennially. Conventions were not mere bureaucratic meetings but were considered integral components of church structure, a demonstration of its unity. Not to be admitted to the convention meant not to be part of the diocese, not to be in union with the Episcopal denomination.

St. Philip’s had a difficult road ahead. The church knew it could count on John Jay II. He came from a distinguished family of Episcopalians and antislavery activists and had taken up Crummell’s cause
against Onderdonk in the 1830s, airing his denomination’s racism publicly in pamphlets and newspaper articles. A majority of white Episcopalians, however, agreed with scientific racists who declared that whites were the superior race, the standard bearers of civilization, while blacks were inferior, forever mired in barbarism. Preeminent among them was George Templeton Strong, a prominent member of New York’s elite, lawyer, trustee of Columbia College, vestryman at Trinity Church. Although antislavery, Strong was equally anti-black; he qualified as a “niggerologist” since he used the N-word in his diary like a tic.

There were more men like Strong than Jay in New York’s Episcopal Diocese, and they were prepared to fight St. Philip’s admission to the Diocesan Convention. They rested their case on the claim that Hobart had only acceded to “the admission of a colored person as a candidate for Holy Orders … upon the distinct understanding, that in the event of his being admitted to Orders, he should not ‘be entitled to a seat in the Convention, nor should the congregation of which he may have the charge, be represented therein.’”
³⁵

Strong operated according to the rule of whimsy. He adhered to a double racial standard according to which blacks were by nature brutes and could not be civilized, but excuses could readily be found for bad white behavior. In 1844, Bishop Onderdonk, a middle-aged, balding, graying, bespectacled, thin-lipped man of the cloth, was brought before an ecclesiastical court and charged with “immorality and impurity.” His sins were twofold: excessive drinking and gross indecency toward women. For several years he had been the subject of idle gossip, openly referred to as the “touching bishop” because social drinking led him to touch those with whom he was conversing. But court records suggest more egregious behavior. In one testimony, a witness confirmed that during a thirty-minute carriage ride, Onderdonk had rested his hand on her bosom while talking with a passenger in the front seat! Although tempted to leap from the carriage, she remained silent for fear of being
heard by those sitting in front. The court voted to suspend Onderdonk indefinitely, in effect prohibiting him from further fulfilling any church functions.
³⁶

Writing in his diary, Strong dismissed the charges against Onderdonk as “this most pitiful attack on the Bishop’s character … [by] amateurs in stink and stercoration.” And, he continued with breathtaking misogyny, “all I dread is that some silly slips of sickly virginity, whom the Bishop may have shaken hands with, looked at, or (shocking to relate) actually
kissed
(the ungentlemanly old ruffian!) will be brought forward, with some imperfect recollections, distilled by vanity … self-importance and their own impure suggestions, to swear to—heaven knows what—of an attempted rape and a heroic resistance.”
³⁷

The reaction of St. Philip’s vestry made it strange bedfellows of the very racist Strong. Adhering to conventions of respectability as closely as they did, they would never have countenanced such behavior from one of their own. But, rather than take advantage of his plight, the vestry wrote Onderdonk a letter of sympathy, hand delivered by Peter Ray and James McCune Smith. Reading back through the minutes, Philip could find the following:

We feel especially humiliated in your humiliation, because we have reason to believe, that during the course of your ministry, we have been blessed with an unusually large share of your sympathy, support and attention. … Be assured that our confidence in you remains unshaken; our love, respect, and veneration unaltered; and we shall greatly rejoice when the time shall come for us again to listen to your counsel and admonitions, and the word preached by you.

To make their position official, the vestry followed up with a resolution stating “that Bishop Onderdonk should not resign the Episcopacy of the Diocese under the present circumstances.” Even the usually independent minded Smith voted in favor. Onderdonk’s letter of response was effusive in its gratitude.
³⁸

What was St. Philip’s trying to accomplish? George Strong provided one answer. In his diary he made clear that what was at stake in
Onderdonk’s trial was the future direction of the Episcopal Church, which in the 1840s was riven by a deep division between High and Low Churchmen. During his episcopacy, Hobart had managed to preserve a delicate balance between evangelical truth and apostolic order. But, dedicated to High Church ideals, Onderdonk went to extremes, obsessing to the point of fussiness over every detail of what he considered proper Episcopal ritual. Onderdonk’s high-handed pronouncements infuriated Low Churchmen, and they used his sexual escapades to get rid of him. As one who favored Onderdonk’s policies, Strong lamented his downfall and was consoled only by “the very general feeling of sympathy for the Bishop that seems to exist even in quarters where one would least expect it.”
³⁹
One of these unexpected quarters was the High Church St. Philip’s. Religion trumped morality, and it placed both a racist ideologue and his victims in the same camp.

St. Philip’s vestry minutes provided a second answer. In a canny political move, the vestry took swift advantage of Onderdonk’s predicament and newfound benevolence toward them to appeal to him for help. They appointed a committee composed of Smith and Henry Scott “to wait on Bishop Onderdonk and state that the vestry is anxious to have the parish represented in the next Diocesan Convention; and to enquire what are the necessary steps for that purpose.”
⁴⁰

Neither the meeting with Onderdonk nor admission to the 1846 Diocesan Convention happened. I can’t imagine the sickened reactions of Philip and his fellow parishioners as they read the language of the convention’s rejection, which could have been lifted straight from a Van Evrie’s textbook.

When society is unfortunately divided into classes—when some are intelligent, refined, and elevated, in tone and character, and others are ignorant, coarse and debased, however unjustly, and when such prejudices exist between them, as to prevent social intercourse on equal terms, it would seem inexpedient
to encounter such prejudices, unnecessarily, and to endeavor to compel the one class to associate on equal terms in the consultations on the affairs of the Diocese, with those whom they would not admit to their tables, or into their family circles—nay, whom they would not admit into their pews, during public worship. … We deeply sympathize with the colored race in our country, we feel acutely their wrongs—and not the least among them, their social degradation. But this cannot prevent our seeing the fact, that they
are
socially degraded, and are not regarded as proper associates for the class of persons who attend our Convention.
⁴¹

Given such open contempt, it’s a wonder that the men of St. Philip’s did not give up. They didn’t, but their efforts in the late 1840s seemed at best dispirited.

Ironically, it was the arrival of William Morris that gave them new impetus. In the fall of 1852, Morris, Philip, and Peter Ray were chosen to represent St. Philip’s at the Diocesan Convention. By now, Philip had displaced his former mentor, James McCune Smith, as both vestryman and convention delegate. He must have felt honored by his church’s trust in selecting him to succeed Smith. The three members of the 1852 delegation—one white man and two blacks—decided on a plan of action: avoid racial politics and simply argue that as a parish in good standing St. Philip’s was entitled to admission to the convention.