Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (33 page)

We can better understand Morris’s seemingly contradictory actions—obey the proslavery laws of the land but fight for equal rights for a black parish—if we view his motives as inspired by purely religious beliefs in which racial thinking played no part. Morris could then simultaneously claim that true Christians (whatever their race) should not meddle in politics, and that exemplary Episcopalians (whatever their race) should be in union with their diocese. This was a position Philip wholeheartedly endorsed. So St. Philip’s delegation must have cringed when John Jay II stood up during the 1852 convention deliberations and proposed a resolution repudiating admission based on “caste.” The outcome was inevitable: the resolution failed and St. Philip’s was denied admission.

Success finally came at the convention of 1853, and Philip was there to savor it. Jay kept silent on the issue of racial discrimination. Apparently exhausted by this drawn-out struggle, the convention bypassed debate. Nineteen parishes were presented, St. Philip’s the very last. It was admitted by a vote of 215 to 46.
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With quiet satisfaction, St. Philip’s vestry minutes merely noted that: “Peter Ray for the Delegates to the Convention reported the application of St. Philip’s Church for admission to the seventieth Diocesan Convention was successful and the church is now in full union with the rest of the Diocese.” With considerable venom, Strong wrote in his diary: “Another Revolution. John Jay’s annual motion carried at last, and the nigger delegation admitted to the Diocesan Convention.”
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I wondered what James McCune Smith thought of his former apprentice. Was he exasperated by Philip’s refusal to embrace the antislavery cause? Dismayed that Philip had replaced him on the vestry despite his many years of service? Upset that he had not been part of the very first delegation seated at the Diocesan Convention? A brief letter Smith wrote to John Jay would seem to bear that out. In it, Smith complained that the vestry secretary (Philip) was not giving out any information about the upcoming convention. Yet as soon as he heard of St. Philip’s admission, Smith fired off a letter to
Frederick Douglass’ Paper
highly complimentary of the delegation: “The delegates from St. Philip’s are Peter Ray, senior warden, superintendent of Lorillard’s immense tobacco factory, Philip A. White, chemist and apothecary, and Henry Scott, merchant—all worthy, intelligent and respectable men.”
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By 1858, Philip and Smith were attending the Diocesan Convention together as delegates. If there had been grudges, neither man appeared interested in holding on to them. They were well aware of the importance of collaborative work in the black community.

Philip and his fellow vestrymen expressed their gratitude to Morris in several ways: verbal thanks and a renewal of his contract for another five years. Over the next several months, it became clear that this white minister
was a changed man. “Our excellent pastor of St. Philip’s,” James McCune Smith commented approvingly, “actually preaches against the Nebraska Bill.”
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Did Morris have a change of heart and now believe that religion and politics could in fact mix? Or was he trying to get right with as many of the church’s parishioners as possible?

As Philip and the rest of the congregation were soon to find out, Morris was having problems of his own—termed of a “domestic nature”—even while espousing St. Philip’s cause at the Diocesan Convention. In 1856, he informed the vestry that he could no longer continue his ministerial duties because of his impending trial by the Ecclesiastical Court.
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Once again a white man of the cloth was being charged with the kind of sexual behavior with which scientific racists demonized blacks. The details of the court records are lurid; they make Onderdonk’s trial pale by comparison.

It appears that sometime around 1853 Morris tired of his wife and sought to get his marriage annulled. Frustrated in his plan, he turned abusive. He allegedly referred to her as a “drunken whore,” accused her of having an affair, and claimed that their son was not his child. Turning violent, on one occasion he supposedly grabbed her and dragged her across the floor; on another he pressed her against the sideboard until she was blue in the face. Mrs. Morris eventually went on the offensive, hiring lawyers and accusing her husband of the very same crimes. Her charges were a lot more specific. A witness testified that Morris had had an affair with one Jane Hayden and had seen him “kissing her, holding her on his lap and spitting into her mouth,” and also taking candy out of her mouth and eating it. They had been observed together in bed. They were known to have traveled to Europe as a couple. Another witness maintained that Morris had also committed adultery with one Ann Spread. She had gone into his bedroom and closed the door, later appearing downstairs with “her dress crushed and her face flushed.”

Morris’s defenders had a lot more clout than George Templeton Strong. The clergy all lined up behind their colleague to give positive character testimony. Morris, they asserted, was “very cheerful, exceedingly benevolent; extravagantly so; and his conduct as far as I ever saw irreproachable.” Even better, he was a “man of purity and integrity of character upright in his principles. Ingenious and unsuspicious in his
manner, liberal and generous in his disposition.” The verdict was minimally damaging. On a split vote Morris was found guilty of depreciation of his wife’s character and impropriety with Ann Spread. There was no ecclesiastical censure.
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I won’t even try to explain the dissonance between Morris’s personal and religious behavior, or why St. Philip’s kept him on rather than fire him. Surely, if one of their own had engaged in such disreputable behavior, he would have been ousted immediately. I can only surmise that they remained grateful for the way he had fought for them and were determined to stick by him.

In 1858, it appeared that harmony might at last reign at St. Philip’s. The vestry still hoped to hire a black minister, but when their efforts failed, the congregation sent a petition requesting that Morris be given yet another five-year contract. I couldn’t find Philip’s or Peter’s name on the list. But for the first time, women were signatories: they included Peter’s wife, Cornelia, his daughter Elizabeth, and his former sister-in-law Mary Joseph Marshall. Women, it seemed, were beginning to make their presence felt. Morris declined the invitation, and thereafter slipped into obscurity.
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“I am a plain Dutch negro, with only one head, without horns or tail: I am well known in the Flats, and Harsimus and Bergen, and way up to Hell Gate, and am a lineal descendant from one of the folly fellows whom Washington Irving alludes to in his sketch book, as shining and laughing on our side of Buttermilk Channel.”
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I imagine Philip coming home after a long day of work, picking up his copy of
Frederick Douglass’ Paper
, which he subscribed to, and reading those lines in a column signed by “Communipaw” with a broad smile on his face. The article in question was part of a literary exchange carried out in the paper between 1852 and 1855 among three men writing under the pen names of Communipaw, Ethiop, and Cosmopolite. Their identities were not a mystery, but an open secret among the paper’s readership. Ethiop was the Brooklyn schoolteacher William J. Wilson, Cosmopolite was Philip
Bell, and Communipaw was none other than James McCune Smith. The pen names were not chosen at random. To the contrary, each established its creator’s particular perspective on race.

Under their ironic and playful tone, these three men were conducting a serious debate about the place of blacks in the city, the nation, and the cosmos to figure out what it meant to be “African” or “colored.”
Frederick Douglass’ Paper
provided an ideal forum for refuting the niggerologists and devising their own definitions and interpretations of race.

Wilson initiated the debate. In naming himself Ethiop, he drew attention to his undiluted black blood and proudly identified himself with Africa. “I am not ashamed to own,” he wrote early in January 1852, “that through my veins flow, freely flow, dark Afric’s proudest blood.” Throughout his columns, Ethiop suggested that certain essential traits—suffering, patience, endurance, submission to the law, Christian turning of the other cheek—inhered in “dark Afric’s blood”; put together, they created Negro nationality. In statements like these, Ethiop was simply repeating Smith’s earlier contention about the special destiny of the Negro race. He claimed, for example, that only a black would be able to revitalize modern American religion: “Who will be the Luther of this age and country? Under all circumstances, he evidently must come from the Africo-American side.”
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There was a downside to Ethiop’s theory, however. His definition of Negro character differed little from those of white liberals, like Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose concept of “romantic racialism” offered a less malignant, but nonetheless racist, view of blacks than scientific racism. According to this softer version, blacks were permanently fixed in a childlike state; like Stowe’s Uncle Tom, they were naive, docile, willing to be guided, spiritual, and all forgiving. Equally troubling was that this line of reasoning—defining race through a series of essential-ist traits—came dangerously close to that of the niggerologists. Positive racial traits were simply substituted for negative ones, and racial categories defining black and white remained firmly in place.

In contrast, Philip Bell chose the pen name Cosmopolite, drawing from the worldly sensibility of eighteenth-century British culture. Perhaps
remembering Charles Andrews’s early schooling, Bell fashioned himself into a citizen of the world who, even as a black man in America, was free to partake of cosmopolitan high culture. It was Cosmopolite who related with delight his participation in the city’s high-cultural events: a lecture on the life and character of Toussaint L’Ouverture at the Mercantile Library; a performance of Donizetti’s
La Favorita
at the Academy of Music; concerts at the Broadway Tabernacle; browsing through Bailliere’s bookstore that specialized in scientific books; visits to Goupil’s gallery, a Parisian institution that had expanded its art empire to world capitals, to view the popular religious artist Ary Sheffer’s painting of the Temptation.

To Bell, his ability to enjoy these events was proof positive that “color-phobia” was fast disappearing in the city. In fact, he went further, arguing that cosmopolitanism transcended race and led to color blindness. From that, he drew two conclusions. The first was that cosmopolitan experience made its participants forget about racism, uniting them into a single, universal “race” of common humanity. “Thus,” he argued, “art knows no distinction of color, science recognizes no prejudice.”
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The second was that “education and wealth” were the weapons through which blacks would make their way into a world of cosmopolites and conquer racism.

In the 1840s, James McCune Smith had trumpeted theories similar to Ethiop’s concept of the special destiny of the Negro race and Cosmopolite’s notion of raceless universality. But by now he had moved well beyond both positions, turning to New York’s favorite literary son to forge a more sophisticated and modern view of race. Since Washington Irving’s writings appeared with some regularity in
Frederick Douglass’ Paper
, readers like Philip needed no literary gloss to explain what Smith was up to.

According to Irving’s fictional historian, Diedrich Knickerbocker, author of
Diedrich Knickerbocker’s History of New-York
, the first Dutch settlers to come to North America landed at a village named Communipaw, now Jersey City. They lived in perfect harmony with both Native Americans and “Dutch Negroes,” whom Knickerbocker credited with “being infinitely more adventurous and knowing than their masters,”
until a group of Dutchmen decided to sail “in quest of a new seat of empire” and settled on the island of Manna-hatta.
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If you accepted Knickerbocker’s version of history, Communipaw was the original Dutch settlement antedating Manhattan, a small harmonious interracial community rather than a seat of empire.

Smith never re-created the community of Communipaw in his writings. Instead, his “village” was Lower Manhattan. In ten sketches titled “Heads of the Colored People,” Smith drew a series of portraits of its black inhabitants in which he conveyed deep sympathy for common folk and intimate knowledge of city streets. His first subject was a poor crippled black news vendor. On Sundays, the man could be found on West Broadway, between Anthony and Leonard Streets; on weekdays he stationed himself at the corner of Broadway and Duane Street. Born in Virginia, like so many unskilled black men of the period he had been a sailor; but his days at sea ended when his legs were frozen in a shipwreck and had to be amputated. He resorted to selling newspapers but barely made ends meet.
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Confined to a narrow existence, this poor commoner lived a life seemingly at the other extreme from Cosmopolite’s. Yet his experiences as a sailor and news vendor suggested that, like the original inhabitants of Communipaw, he too was connected to a global world.

By reinventing himself as Communipaw, Smith gave himself a new ancestry. Placing himself in the lineage of the village’s original inhabitants, he presented himself as a composite of different races and ethnicities, as a man of peace rather than a conqueror. In contrast to Ethiop (and the niggerologists), Communipaw scoffed at the idea of racial purity, insisting that single races no longer existed and hence all racial categories were false. Addressing Ethiop directly, and riffing on Shakespeare, he argued that racial mixing was a historical inevitability: “‘Black spirits and white, / Mingle, mingle mingle’; and however dear to you may be your ebon hue, your great-grandchildren will be ‘many a whitey brown.’ … It is quite too late in the day to get up an association for the propagation of the pure African, or Irish, or any other breed.”
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