Never Been a Time (3 page)

Attacks on blacks in Pennsylvania and other states of the Northeast proceeded on the legal front as well. New Jersey and Connecticut had already disenfranchised blacks by 1837 when a state constitutional convention in Pennsylvania, where free blacks had been able to vote for nearly fifty years, inserted the word “white” in the qualifications for the right to vote. Du Bois wrote:

A curious comment on human nature is this change of public opinion in Philadelphia between 1790 and 1837. No one thing explains it—it arose from a combination of circumstances. If, as in 1790, the new freedmen had been given peace and quiet and abundant work to develop sensible and aspiring leaders, the end would have been different; but a mass of poverty-stricken, ignorant fugitives and ill-trained freedmen had rushed to the city, swarmed in the vile slums which the rapidly growing city furnished, and met in social and economic competition equally ignorant but more vigorous foreigners. These foreigners outbid them at work, beat them on the streets, and were enabled to do this by the prejudice which Negro crime and the anti-slavery sentiment had aroused in the city.”
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Most of the black newcomers were just emerging—or escaping—from slavery. They were so poor they often arrived with little more than the clothes on their backs. They were forcibly uneducated—slaves were beaten for trying to learn to read and write—and untrained for any employment except farm labor. Prejudice blocked them from most jobs and from advancement when they found jobs. And often they had been brutalized from childhood, learning in the cruelest and most painful ways to be dubious and fearful when white men began talking about right and wrong, law and justice. Like the Irish, they had come to the cities of the American North in pursuit of a dream, and had been forced into deep poverty in the young nation's growing slums. Some of them became criminals. But in nineteenth-century Philadelphia and other Northern cities, as in twentieth-century East St. Louis, Washington, Chicago, and Tulsa, when whites attacked blacks on downtown streets and rampaged through black neighborhoods, burning and looting and killing, the victims were almost entirely ordinary, law-abiding men and women and children, not criminals. If whites were driven to riot by the crimes of blacks, they attacked the wrong people, as lynch mobs and race rioters so often do.

 

The rapid growth of urban slums in America as the century progressed would have horrified Thomas Jefferson, who had envisioned America as a nation of independent farmers and feared the coming of the industrial age and the replication of the urban slums of Europe. “The mobs of great cities,” he wrote, “add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body.” Well more than a century later, black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier would contemplate the effects on African Americans of the nation's urban slums—places like New York and Detroit and Chicago that had proved so alluring to his race for so many years—and call them “the cities of destruction.”
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In the 1820s and 1830s, European immigrants in the urban slums, as well as small farmers from states like Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, felt left out of the new industrial capitalist economy. They flocked to support Democrat Andrew Jackson, a slave owner and white supremacist from Tennessee whose election to the presidency in 1828 and again in 1832 added legitimacy and political clout to the already-powerful forces that were fighting to maintain
slavery. At the same time, Democrats took political power in many cities. Supporters of Jackson railed at the hypocrisy of the wealthy abolitionists, mainly gathered in the Whig party, for campaigning to free the slaves while ignoring the poor white men and women who, in many cases, worked like slaves for the companies these very abolitionists owned. “The abolitionists of the north have mistaken the color of American Slaves,” said Theophilus Fisk, a Boston labor leader. “All the real slaves in the United States have pale faces… I will venture to affirm that there are more slaves in [mill towns] Lowell and Nashua alone than can be found South of the Potomac.”
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In the Jacksonian period, antiblack riots struck throughout the North, in large cities and small. Some of the worst were in New York City. In July of 1834, America's largest city suffered the worst of several brutal anti-abolitionist and antiblack riots of the era. The riot was apparently triggered by sensationalist newspaper reports of widespread miscegenation and intermarriage between whites and blacks. A mob invaded black neighborhoods, beating the residents and destroying hundreds of homes. This time, the rioters were in the main nativists, not Irish immigrants. Indeed, several hundred Irish Catholics signed up as citizen volunteers to help control the rioters.

Riots were not confined to the Eastern cities. Cincinnati, across the Ohio River from the slave state of Kentucky, was notable for its abolitionists and by 1829 had a black population of about two thousand. In that year, a mob of whites rioted for three days, killing and seriously injuring free blacks and escaped slaves and destroying their property. About twelve hundred Cincinnati blacks fled into Canada. There were further riots in Cincinnati in the 1830s and another terrible one in 1841, when immigrant Irish dock workers marched against black dock workers and fired on them with a cannon.
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Farther west, blacks had begun moving into Illinois decades before the Civil War, rowing and even swimming across the Mississippi and Ohio rivers from nearby slave states. In the 1820s, in the southern part of the state, tiny Brooklyn, Illinois—located just north of a small Mississippi River settlement that in the 1860s became East St. Louis—was settled by free blacks and escaped slaves and became one of the oldest black-founded communities in the United States. But much of the white population of southern Illinois supported slavery, and many in the predominantly rural region of mines and small hardscrabble farms were adamant and sometimes brutal in their resistance to abolition.

Alton, Illinois, on the east bank of the Mississippi a few miles north of Brooklyn, was the headquarters of antislavery crusader Elijah Lovejoy, a Presbyterian minister whose home was an important stop on the Underground Railroad for escaping slaves. In the 1830s, he published the newspaper the
Observer
, an increasingly passionate advocate of immediate emancipation of the country's slaves. Enraged separatists smashed his press and dumped it in the river. He ordered a new press and resumed publishing his calls for freedom. On July 21, 1836, white mobs from southern Illinois attacked the printing plant and murdered Lovejoy. The black citizens of Brooklyn honored him by informally referring to their hometown as “Lovejoy.”
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Elijah Lovejoy became the first important martyr of abolition. And in New York, influential publisher Horace Greeley declared that Lovejoy's death had convinced him “that Slavery and Freedom could not coexist on the same soil,” and he intensified his attacks on slavery. As if the two sides were armies marching in step toward one another, every time the forces of abolition became bolder and less equivocating in their call for an end to slavery, the anti-abolitionists grew more fervent in their resistance.
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The first half of the nineteenth century—a cataclysmic era of the rapid and uncontrolled growth of cities, of a shift to an industrial economy, of growing wealth and growing poverty—was an exceptionally violent time in America. In addition to riots inspired by the dual issues of race and slavery and those inspired by prejudice against Irish Catholics, there were anti-German riots, anti-Protestant riots, riots of tenants against landlords and of workers against bosses, anti-dissection riots, riots between political parties, riots over theatrical performances, riots over the licensing of whiskey, brothel riots, and, of course, riots over taxes, the very sort of riot enshrined in the myth of the young country's war of independence. The United States was born in riot and rebellion, and remained true to its birthright.

In 1838, a young Illinois legislator named Abraham Lincoln contemplated his fractious nation and bemoaned “the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country” and the “worse than savage mobs” that across the nation seemed to be replacing the rule of law. He said, “Accounts of outrages committed by mobs form the every-day news of the times. They have pervaded the country, from New England to Louisiana; they are neither peculiar to the eternal snows of the former, nor the burning suns of the latter; they are not the creature of climate, neither are they confined to the slave-holding, or
the non-slave-holding States. Alike, they spring up among the pleasure hunting masters of southern slaves, and the order loving citizens of the land of steady habits. Whatever, then, their cause may be, it is common to the whole country.”

Lincoln warned, “Whenever the vicious portion of population shall be permitted to gather in bands of hundreds and thousands, and burn churches, ravage and rob provision-stores, throw printing presses into rivers, shoot editors, and hang and burn obnoxious persons at pleasure, and with impunity; depend on it, this Government cannot last.”
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In the 1850s, the violence in word and deed focused increasingly on the battle over slavery. Congress created a new and significantly more draconian Fugitive Slave Law, imposing heavy penalties on anyone who helped a runaway slave and giving black men in so-called free states who could not prove they were freedmen very little legal recourse against any white man who claimed to own them. The
Dred Scott
decision, which ruled that African Americans could not be citizens, further weakened the position of blacks in America. Slave catchers mounted intensive hunts in Northern states, seizing blacks who had lived free for many years. Abolitionists fought back, in some cases rescuing captives and setting them free again. The nation's racial gulf widened ever further, and war seemed inevitable.

By the time Lincoln was sworn in as president of the United States, in March of 1861, six states had already seceded from the Union over the question of slavery. A month later, the Civil War began. Major Democratic politicians in New York and Philadelphia, both of which had close commercial ties to the South, put forth serious if ultimately fruitless proposals that those cities also secede and at least be neutral, if not pro-Confederate.

In some parts of the North, the beginning of the war deepened anti-black attitudes. Democratic leaders in New York and other Northern cities had preached to their working-class followers that the federal government was marching white men off to die in a war to free the black men who would replace them in the factories of the North. As if to confirm the charge, blacks—who were excluded from virtually all labor unions—were used as strikebreakers in many Northern cities, leading to attacks by white workers in Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, Boston, Camden, New Jersey, and other cities, including New York.
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On January 1, 1863, Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation,
freeing slaves in rebel states “thenceforward and forever.” Two months later, a federal draft was instituted. The anger of poor young white men subject to induction was further stirred by the knowledge that any man wealthy enough to fork over $300 could opt out of the draft. Antidraft riots struck Detroit and other Northern and midwestern cities. By far the worst was in New York.

In mid-July of 1863, in the depths of the war and not long after blacks with police protection were brought in as strikebreakers in a longshoreman's strike, a riot swept across New York that far exceeded in destruction and brutality anything that had happened in Philadelphia or other cities. The riot occurred at a seeming low point in the war for the North, in a city that had already contributed fifty thousand men to the Union cause and that (unlike Philadelphia) had not voted for Lincoln in the November election. By then, the Irish had become New York City's largest immigrant group. They numbered more than two hundred thousand, about one fourth of the population. But they were still competing with blacks for jobs and were considered by many whites to be merely “blacks turned inside out,” or even inferior to blacks because of their supposed lack of industriousness and dissolute living.
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The New York Draft Riots began on July 13, 1863, with the torching of a draft office on Forty-sixth Street, and quickly spread to other parts of the city and into outlying areas. Mobs of poor whites numbering well into the thousands, many of them Irish, rioted for four days, attacking the mansions of the rich as well as the hovels of poor blacks, assaulting blacks on the streets, burning down a black church, killing more than one hundred men, women, and children, and forcing thousands of blacks to flee the city. Not for the last time in an American city, blacks were chased or hurled into the adjoining rivers and hanged from lamp poles above the city streets. And white public officials repeatedly refused to respond with adequate force as rioters sacked, looted, and burned a city and murdered its citizens. In the most notorious attack, five hundred armed rioters stormed and torched the Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue. Despite cries of “murder the damned monkeys,” the 233 children were rescued before the building, a symbol of white charity toward blacks, burned to the ground.
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The New York riot of 1863 shared crucial foreshadowing elements with other major American race riots, from Philadelphia in 1834 to East St. Louis in 1917: bitter competition between blacks and whites for scarce jobs; use of blacks as strikebreakers; deep mistrust of government, politicians, and
law-enforcement officials; a high crime rate; sensationalist newspaper reports of black rape and other heinous crimes; bitterness over what many poor white people saw as unfair advantages given to blacks; and murderous resentment of any small sign that blacks had risen from the lowest rung of the social and economic ladder.

A little less than two years later, Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox to end the Civil War. By then more than six hundred thousand Americans, white and black, had been killed. Just under four million American slaves were free. But the fight for black freedom—and the Northward migration by blacks—had just begun, along with violent white resistance to black hopes and aspirations, resistance that often led to lynching, riot, and racial massacre.