Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (10 page)

Dominance in commerce, manufacturing, land monopoly, and city affairs put men like the Lorillards in a social and economic class far above that of most other New Yorkers. Nevertheless, geographic segregation between rich and poor, white and black, was difficult to maintain. In the city’s early years, merchants’ and tradesmen’s residential and work places often occupied the same premises, and employees lived with them or close by. Neighborhoods were not separated into residential and industrial areas, nor were they segregated according to class, race, or ethnicity. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, New York’s elite families began moving their homes away from the downtown commercial area to more pleasant surroundings, first to Bowling Green, then west to Greenwich Street and St. Johns Park, and up Broadway past Trinity Church. For their part, black New Yorkers lived in homes around Collect Street in the Sixth Ward. From there, they extended toward the East River in the Fourth Ward, and west to the Hudson River in the Fifth Ward. Yet, although blacks were concentrated in certain areas, they still lived among or close to white households. The Fifth Ward, for example, was home both to whites of varying social classes and to blacks. Moreover, even when white merchants and tradesmen moved to residential neighborhoods, they remained within short walking distance of commercial centers and their mixed populations.
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Some, like the Lorillards, decided not to move. In 1760, Pierre had located both his home and tobacco shop business on the High Road to Boston near the Commons. When his son Peter took over the business late in the century, he too kept shop and home together at what had become Chatham Street. He remained there well into the 1830s before moving to Chamber Street. In the 1790s, Jacob apprenticed at a tannery on the corner of Pearl and Cross Streets, which he later bought. He subsequently established his store on Ferry Street and lived right next door. Like Peter, it was many years before he moved west to Hudson Street. By staying put, the Lorillards remained in close physical proximity to blacks. Cliff, Cross, and Little Water Streets, where many black families lived, were close to Jacob’s home and tannery; Collect Street was a short distance from Peter’s home on Chatham Street.
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Such proximity to the poor meant that not even the wealthiest could entirely escape the consequences of poverty. Neither was disease ever far from their doorstep. During the summer months when yellow fever was most likely to strike, those who could fled town. Those who remained stared the epidemic directly in the face and sometimes took sick themselves. In 1799 Elizabeth Bleecker, who lived with her parents on Lower Broadway, wrote in her diary about how “a black man came up our alley and laid himself down on the ground” to die. Merchant Grant Thorburn reported visiting the home of a journeyman friend near the East River, and watching over the death of both his friend and an old colored woman who had refused to leave the house.
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Yet physical proximity also led on occasion to greater familiarity between blacks and whites, and to more fruitful contacts. Trade was an area of such interactions, and tobacco manufacturing offers some telling examples. In the 1790s, Peter Williams Sr., the father of St. Philip’s first pastor, entered the tobacco business. He had been the slave of tobacconist James Aymar, a British sympathizer who returned to England after the revolutionary war. After receiving his freedom, Williams opened a tobacco shop on Liberty Street in Lower Manhattan. Looking back at this early period, a mid-nineteenth-century commentator observed that “the old Negro was then striving to sustain a rival opposition in the tobacco line, with the famous house of Lorillards.” While this claim might have been something of an exaggeration, it’s likely that Williams was sufficiently important in the business to come into contact with white counterparts like Peter and George Lorillard.
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Even more significant, the Lorillard brothers hired blacks to work in their own factory. This decision had a direct impact on my family. When I went back to Crummell’s obituary of my great-great-grandfather, I decided to investigate the background of his second wife, Cornelia Ray. The obituary told me that her father was one “P. A. Ray.” I found out that his full name was Peter Ray and, armed with that information, I went hunting for his obituary. To my astonishment, I discovered that he had had a long and honorable association with the Lorillards. Born in 1800, Ray became an errand boy in the Lorillard tobacco company at age eleven. It’s quite possible that Peter Williams Sr. recommended the youngster to the Lorillard brothers. By the mid-1820s, Ray
had become the foreman of the Lorillard factory on Wooster Street and lived on the premises. At his death in 1882 he was a general superintendent of their Jersey City factory.
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The Lorillards never hesitated to hire or promote Ray according to his abilities.

Beyond helping individuals, the Lorillards extended their benevolence throughout the city to institutions of all kinds. Cutthroat competitors as they were, they also fashioned themselves generous philanthropists and wanted to be remembered as such. The first to die in 1838, Jacob was eulogized by whites and blacks alike. Trinity’s Reverend Berrian offered lavish praise of Jacob’s good works: “The sagacity, foresight, and diligence with which he managed his affairs, and the fair and honorable means by which he acquired his riches, would have been less worthy of admiration, had they not also been accompanied by liberal views and benevolent designs. His wealth, his influence, and talents were all directed in an eminent degree to the good of men and the glory of God.” Black New Yorkers offered similar testimonials. In the newspaper of the period, the
Colored American
, they published a moving tribute proclaiming that “the death of Mr. Lorillard will be most sensibly felt by the poor, and by the benevolent institutions generally, in the city of New York. On all occasions of charity, in which we were concerned, we called on Mr. Lorillard, and never failed to obtain his aid and his counsel.”
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Did black New Yorkers see a contradiction in the Lorillards’ behavior? Were they aware that the brothers had profited from the destruction of the Negroes Burial Ground? Did they take note that the money the Lorillards gave their institutions came from slave labor, which maintained blacks in perpetual bondage, and shady practices that consigned the poor to lasting misery? If so, they never mentioned it. Perhaps they found nothing unusual about city merchants making lots of money by honest and not-so-honest means, and then giving a little of it away to good causes. But one thing that black New Yorkers did come to debate was the double-edged nature of white benevolence. They knew that charity was never simply a gift but carried expectations in return, expectations under which they would increasingly chafe.

CIRCA 1828

THE WHITE PHILANTHROPISTS
who founded the Mulberry Street School placed it in the heart of the Five Points, an area that encompassed an intersection of three streets—Orange, Cross, and Anthony—as well as several adjacent streets—Centre, Pearl, Leonard, Mulberry, and others. It was home to many black families and institutions.

I haven’t come across any contemporaneous accounts of the Five Points written by its black inhabitants. Instead, it’s Charles Dickens who penned the most memorable portrayal of the area after his tour of the United States in the early 1840s:

Poverty, wretchedness, and vice are rife enough where we go now. This is the place, these narrow ways, diverging to the right and left, and reeking everywhere with dirt and filth. … Debauchery has made the very houses prematurely old. See how the rotten beams are tumbling down, and how the patched and broken windows seem to scowl dimly, like eyes that have been hurt in drunken frays. … Here, too, are lanes and alleys, paved with mud knee deep; underground chambers, where they dance and game, … hideous tenements which take their name from robbery and murder; all that is loathsome, drooping, and decayed is here.
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Five Points 1827, Intersection of Cross, Anthony, and Orange Streets, from
Valentine’s Manual
, 1885 (New-York Historical Society)

Such was the perspective of an outside observer. But certainly those who lived there would never have thought to portray their streets or homes in such contemptuous and abject language. To the black denizens of the Five Points, the families of Centre Street, of William Hamilton, Henry Sipkins, Thomas Downing, Peter Williams, and others, held the same status as did the Knickerbockers in their community. Some had Knickerbocker surnames and undoubtedly shared a common ancestor with their white counterparts; it was rumored that William Hamilton was a natural-born son of Alexander. At the end of the nineteenth century, many descendants would refer to themselves as black Knickerbockers.

What qualities did these men and women possess that made them part of an emerging elite class?

Just as savvy as white New Yorkers in understanding the value of real estate, they aspired to property ownership and, whenever possible, bought lots on which to build homes, even if it was limited to the made ground of Centre Street.

They had steady employment primarily in skilled trades. Boston Crummell was an oysterman as was Thomas Downing, who also owned a restaurant. George DeGrasse ran a provisioning business while William Hamilton worked as a carpenter and Henry Sipkins as a porter. Peter Williams and Samuel Cornish entered the ministry. According to Maritcha’s memoir, my great-great-great-grandfather Joseph Marshall had steady work as a house painter until he died in 1828, probably as a result of painter’s colic, brought on by lead poisoning. Once widowed, Elizabeth Marshall opened a bakery in the cellar of her home and was able to make ends meet. When she was too old to live alone, she sold her property and moved in with her daughter and son-in-law, Mary Joseph and Albro Lyons.
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These jobs were never very remunerative, of course, and this early black elite could not count on wealth as a criterion for membership. If they did promote acquisition, it was not merely of money, but also of those qualities that natural historians like Linnaeus claimed African-descended people could never possess. The elite needed to be proactive: members proclaimed to the world at large that they could accomplish just as much as whites; they admonished blacks to be self-reliant in bettering their own circumstances and those of their community. Like their white counterparts, they preached a Protestant gospel of hard work. They promised that education and dedication to work would eventually lead to success, respect, and, in due course, political and civil equality. They encouraged the cultivation of character, the development of the inner values of morality, piety, temperance, and intellectuality. In turn, character would lead to respectability, outward conduct marked by sobriety, modesty, industriousness, economy.

As undisputed leaders of the black community, members of this early elite founded and nurtured a number of institutions. First and foremost were the churches. In the late eighteenth century, Peter Williams Sr. helped found the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. Some twenty years later, his son, Peter Williams Jr., spearheaded the effort to establish St. Philip’s, and Samuel Cornish formed the First Colored Presbyterian Church. Although these black men affiliated with different religious denominations, they were all welcome to join the New
York African Society for Mutual Relief, founded by William Hamilton and others in 1808. Only recently unearthed, the society’s records offer compelling testimony of the founders’ racial pride and aspirations to autonomy. According to the certificate of incorporation, members promised to raise funds among themselves to care for those who were sick or infirm and could no longer work, as well as help widows and orphans of deceased members. They reiterated these promises in hymns composed especially for anniversary celebrations: “Bound by strong friendship’s closest ties / In social union, we / Mutual relief and aid to give / Each other do agree.” By 1820 they had accumulated sufficient funds to buy a building at 42 Orange (later Baxter) Street, in the heart of the Five Points, for eighteen hundred dollars.
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When it came to the education of New York’s black youth, however, independence from white benevolence was simply not possible.

Rereading Alexander Crummell’s obituary of Peter Guignon, I was struck by how the opening paragraph so lovingly commemorated not only my great-great-grandfather but also many of their former classmates from “the old Mulberry Street School for colored children.” Referring to them as “celebrated students,” Crummell diligently listed their names and noted that Peter remained “the friend and intimate companion of every one of these eminent boys not only in their boyhood, but afterwards in their manhood and maturity.”