Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (43 page)

Peter and Cornelia didn’t relocate to any of these areas, however, but moved instead to Williamsburgh, where they shared a home with Cornelia’s brother, Peter Williams Ray. Peter Guignon’s association with the Rays can only be called serendipitous. Through his marriage to Cornelia, my great-great-grandfather not only started a new family and acquired a new set of relatives, but also began a new profession. Peter Williams Ray had followed in James McCune Smith’s footsteps, becoming a doctor and setting up a medical practice. Another brother, Samuel, had opened a drugstore nearby, but left it vacant when he decided to emigrate to Liberia. The Ray family evidently thought well enough of their new relative to allow this untrained, almost fifty-year-old man to take over the drugstore and set himself up as a pharmacist. (It’s possible that they did have a few reservations, since Cornelia is listed as co-owner in all the city directories.) Living together, working collaboratively, and sharing common interests, the two Peters must have forged close bonds, in ways, as events soon revealed, that they could scarcely have imagined.

In the late 1850s, Peter Williams Ray had already distinguished himself. Just about the same age as Philip White, he too had apprenticed in James McCune Smith’s pharmacy. In a sign of how much times had changed since the 1830s, Ray was admitted to a U.S. medical school. He matriculated first at Bowdoin College Medical School, probably around the same time as John DeGrasse, then transferred to Castleton Medical College in Vermont, where he received his degree in 1850. During his three years of training, Ray took courses in anatomy, physiology, chemistry, materia medica, surgery, obstetrics, and pathology. When he opened his medical practice, he specialized in obstetrics, perhaps because Castleton’s training in this field was especially good. “In surgery and obstetrics,” its catalogue boasted, “the means of instruction are ample, in the instruments, apparatus and appliances … which are necessary to aid the teaching of these branches of medicine.”
⁴

Settling in Williamsburgh, Ray prospered. He married Cordelia Scottron, the sister of one of Brooklyn’s most prominent young black men. An ambitious businessman brimming with new ideas, Samuel
Scottron had made his fortune by obtaining a patent for an adjustable mirror for barbers, in which two mirrors were placed opposite each other to allow a barber to view both sides of a customer’s head at the same time. He also manufactured looking glasses, mantel mirrors, wood moldings, extension cornices, and imitation onyx used by lamp and candle makers. Eager to help other blacks succeed in business, Scottron was an active participant in the Committee for Improving the Industrial Condition of Negroes in New York.
⁵

Ray was not to be outdone by this brother-in-law. In late 1861, the
Liberator
printed a short article pointing to the presence of “many men of wealth, intelligence and refinement” in the black community, much as the
North Star
had done in the 1840s and
Frederick Douglass’ Paper
in the 1850s. In listing African American members of the medical profession, the article placed Ray’s name right after that of James McCune Smith.
⁶
Following Smith’s lead, Ray not only established a thriving medical practice but also became politically active, attending state and national conventions where he commanded a great deal of respect.

Ray’s political activism replicated the earlier efforts of Smith and other Mulberry Street School graduates, namely the struggle for the restitution of black male suffrage in New York state. In the mid-1850s, Ray attended a state convention in Troy held expressly to devise a strategy to repeal the state’s property qualification for voters. The convention proceeded to form a permanent lobbying organization, the New York State Suffrage Association; Ray helped write its constitution and was appointed to its board of managers. Increasingly aware of the importance of grassroots activism, Ray and his colleagues refined the organizational efforts of the earlier voting rights movement. They created a tiered system in which the state society broke down into county associations, which in turn were made up of city clubs. Ray was instrumental in the formation of the Colored Political Association of the City of Brooklyn and Kings County as well as the Young Men’s Elective Franchise Club of Williamsburgh. In their statement of purpose, the organizations’ founders emphasized their status, as
native-born
Americans, as property owners, and their deep investment in civil society. “Many of our petitioners,” they declared, “have resided during
their entire lives in, and are Freeholders of this State,—their families are permanently located within its boundaries, their social relations are established within its limits, and their entire pecuniary interests are inseparable from its welfare.”
⁷

In 1860, Peter W. Ray, Peter Guignon, and their colleagues in the Kings County and Williamsburgh associations joined forces with Manhattan counterparts—Philip, James McCune Smith, Charles Reason, Henry Highland Garnet, and others—to lobby for the repeal of property qualifications for New York state voters. Like Philip, Peter Guignon made his drugstore available as a pickup point for amendment ballots. Despite the fact that only 1,250 black votes were at issue, Brooklyn’s white Democrats mounted fierce resistance. Their arguments were predictable. Giving northern blacks the vote would risk antagonizing the South and harm economic relations between the two sectors; it would degrade the status of white workingmen to that of blacks, and result in the triumph of black labor over white. Just to make sure that white voters understood what was at stake, the
Brooklyn City News
issued a final warning reminding them that they were being asked to decide “whether ten or fifteen thousand sooty Negroes shall be raised to a political level with yourselves in this State. You are asked to deposit your vote in the ballot box, cheek by jowl with a large ‘buck nigger.’” Brooklynites voted down the amendment 23,400 to 5,535.
⁸

Beyond political causes and maybe even beyond familial ties, the two Peters were bound together in Freemasonry brotherhood. Decades earlier, the two men had joined Odd Fellows and Masonic lodges in New York along with other Mulberry Street School graduates. Now settled in Brooklyn, they affiliated with the new Stone Square Lodge no. 6 under the jurisdiction of the United Grand Lodge of New York, which combined all of the state’s African American lodges. The ardent Masons Patrick Reason and John Peterson were also members.

One of the chief principles of Freemasonry is secrecy. Nevertheless, Peter Guignon’s grandnephew Harry Albro Williamson compiled vast quantities of notes, minutes, and commentary on the organization that he left in his collection. There I discovered that at the Grand Lodge’s annual meeting in 1862, Peter put forth his lodge’s request that a committee be appointed to investigate “the origin of masonry among
colored and white men in the United States.” Although his suggestion was adopted enthusiastically, I haven’t been able to find any such document. It was Williamson himself who finally put together a history some seventy years later, although he never managed to publish it. His account repeats many other writings on Freemasonry: its ancientness and universality; its mission as an agent of civilization; its alignment with traditional Christian doctrine; its ethic of equality, brotherly love, and mutual helpfulness. In particular, Williamson emphasized black Freemasons’ belief in the ideal of equality, which he interpreted in two ways: the equality of black men obligated to help one another in time of need, and the equality of men of all races bound together in universal brotherhood. Moving beyond the concept of equality, Williamson then proceeded to suggest the possibility of black superiority. White lodges, he argued, had violated the principle of universality by keeping blacks out of their orders. They had become corrupt, and hence it was left to black lodges to uphold the purity of original Freemasonry.
⁹

When Peter and Cornelia joined the Ray family in Williamsburgh, the neighborhood, like Brooklyn proper, was a mix of homes, factories, and commercial establishments lining the East River, major thoroughfares, and even some side streets. In the late 1850s, approximately 30 percent of Brooklyn’s blacks lived in Williamsburgh. Like Fort Greene, it was a mostly white neighborhood with black homes clustered in one particular area, bordered by Grand Street to the north, Eighth Street (renamed Marcy Avenue) to the east, and South Sixth to the south.
¹⁰
The Ray/Guignon residence was initially at 15 Stagg Street, but the two families later moved to 282 South Fourth Street, while the drugstore stood at the corner of South Second and Eleventh Street (renamed Hooper). They were close to James McCune Smith, who fled New York in 1864 after the draft riots and established his residence at 162 South Third Street, where he died a year later. When Peter Williams Ray moved to Brooklyn proper in the late 1860s, Peter Guignon relocated just a few doors away to 383 South Fourth Street, where he acquired a new neighbor, his
father-in-law Peter Ray, who now lived at 117 South Second Street. The 1870 census suggests that Peter Guignon was doing well financially: in addition to Cornelia, his household included one female servant and two clerks; his home was valued at five thousand dollars and personal income at three thousand dollars.

From a study of insurance maps, it’s evident that these streets were typical of Williamsburgh in this period: the Ray/Guignon households occupied one of the neighborhood’s many frame dwellings, which were only occasionally interspersed with brick structures. Peter’s drugstore, where his brother-in-law had an adjoining office, occupied the ground floor of a spacious four-story brick building.

Williamsburgh’s black families lived within a stone’s throw of one another. I don’t think such close proximity had existed since the early days when the Marshall, DeGrasse, and Crummell families lived on Centre Street, with many of their friends nearby in the Five Points district. Settling in a new town and a new neighborhood, these families were desperate to escape the landscape of Lower Manhattan, where just about every street held unwanted reminders of the violence perpetrated against their people. Especially after the draft riots, they were determined never again to live far apart from one another, unable to protect each other in times of trouble, and dependent on the whims of strangers. They created a new community made up of old friends from the same social circle. Living close to one another, they could visit freely back and forth. Their children could walk in safety to Colored School no. 3 at the corner of Union and Keap Streets. And even though the Rays, Guignons, Hamiltons, and Smiths still crossed the East River to Manhattan on Sundays to attend St. Philip’s, other families worshiped locally at Zion A.M.E. Church, which had begun in an old white Methodist Chapel on Metropolitan Avenue, St. James Episcopal near Union Street, or Third Baptist on Stagg.
¹¹

Yet Williamsburgh’s black residents also forged ties with white neighbors. In his 1933 autobiography, James Weldon Johnson recalled a childhood visit in 1884 to his granduncle and aunt, William and Sarah Curtis, who lived on South Second Street. “My playmates,” he reminisced, “were for the greater part the white boys and girls who lived on our side of the street and those across. The only colored playmates I had
were a girl named Edith Mathews, who lived just around the corner, and two brothers by the name of Jackson, who lived on the same street four or five blocks away.”
¹²

Insurance maps of the period suggest another fact: that many of the area’s shop owners and businessmen were Germans, sporting names like Knaup, Schnaderbeck, Dengel, Strubel, and Huschle, who had chosen Williamsburgh as a place to live. As in Manhattan, blacks’ relations with Germans were less acrimonious than with the Irish. Their merchant class worked hard to put themselves on a sound economic footing, become homeowners, and provide for their families. They were churchgoers, family oriented, and respectable, striving to become American in much the same way as the black elite. It was said that Peter Williams Ray counted many Germans among his patients. And in his writings on Freemasonry, Williamson noted that in 1867 one of the German American lodges of the
Verein deutsch-americanischer Freimaurer
, working under the jurisdiction of the Grand Lodge of Hamburg, put the principle of universal brotherhood into action and invited Ray into their lodge.
¹³

White-black interactions such as these have given rise to the myth that nineteenth-century Brooklyn was kinder to blacks than was Manhattan, that it was a safe haven of sorts. History doesn’t bear this out. Racial discrimination and racial violence flourished in Brooklyn as well, coming from expected and unexpected quarters.

Knowing my interest in the Lorillard family, several historian friends suggested that I look into an attack on the Lorillards’ Brooklyn tobacco factory in the summer of 1862. I decided to investigate. Since there were no black newspapers in Brooklyn at this time, I started with the
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
, whose masthead proudly proclaimed that “this paper has the largest circulation of any evening paper published in the United States.” I found what I was looking for in the August 5 issue. The article’s headlines occupied six lines and ran as follows:

The Irrepressible Conflict in Brooklyn.
SERIOUS RIOT BETWEEN WHITE MEN
AND NEGROES
The Former Attack a Tobacco Factory
in which the Negroes are Employed
ATTEMPT TO BURN THE FACTORY DOWN
INTENSE EXCITEMENT
The Arraignment of the Parties—They
are Held to Bail
¹⁴

All the elements that precipitated the New York draft riots some eleven months later were already at work in Brooklyn in the summer of 1862: white workers’ antagonism toward blacks who held decent jobs they didn’t deserve as well as toward the elites willing to employ these undeserving blacks.