Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (13 page)

African Free School No. 2, engraving by Patrick Reason (Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library)

After entering the classroom, each boy proceeded to his designated place. Like many other urban public schools of the period, the African Free Schools followed the Lancasterian system, created by British educator Joseph Lancaster in the late eighteenth century and quickly adopted in U.S. schools. Because Lancaster attended to all aspects
of schooling, recording them in minute detail in his
Manual of the Lancasterian System
, we have a pretty good idea of what the inside of the Mulberry Street School must have looked like. A two-story building, it would have contained one large room on each floor, the length of which would have been double the width, each one capable of accommodating up to 250 children. The teacher, Charles Andrews or any instructor working under him, sat at a desk in the front of the room, facing the students seated in rows or “forms” behind their desks, probably around twenty-five forms of approximately ten students each. The floor inclined up toward the back so that Andrews could have a full view of all his charges. The forms were organized according to the students’ ability, the least advanced in front, the more advanced in the back. The front row made up the “sand class,” composed of children learning the alphabet. Sand covered the right side of the desk; with their left arm resting on the desk, students traced letters in the sand with their right hand.

In the late 1820s, Peter and his friends would have occupied the benches in the more advanced forms toward the back of the room. But they would not necessarily have all sat together. Monitors were placed at special desks at the right end of a row and slightly elevated for better observation. These were the more capable students who, following Lancasterian principles, were called upon to teach the younger and less knowledgeable. Although proponents of the system praised it as a highly efficient method of public school teaching, it was above all a cost-saving device. We know from the school’s archives that in 1827 George Moore was a monitor and James McCune Smith monitor general for order; Charles Reason occupied the more advanced position of proctor in 1830. The monitors’ tasks included getting to school early; taking attendance; making sure all students were properly supplied with slates, copybooks, and pencils; supervising reading, writing, and arithmetic. Monitors also oversaw the “draught stations,” in which groups of students stood in front of a board hanging from a wall and covered with words or numbers. Using a pointer, the monitors would call upon students one by one to read or do arithmetic.
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A long four-page poem of the period conveys these and other details about the Lancasterian system in a more playful tone. The first lines run as follows:

Before we take a pen in hand,

We learn to write upon the sand:

And when the Alphabet we know,

We write on slates—six in a row.

An easy lesson is prepar’d,

As AB, ab—ARD, ard.

And those who spell, or read, the best,

Have some reward above the rest.

When we in spelling, well succeed

We do appointed lessons read.

The Holy Bible is the source

Of each gradationary course.

A semicircle draught of six,

Whose eyes must on the lesson fix;

With hands behind, attentive stand,

Read—till they hear a fresh command:

Our places, then, at desks we take,

(For standing long, our legs would ache).

The rest of the poem goes on to describe how a monitor might teach penmanship, arithmetic, and grammar, and concludes with a stern lesson on the importance of honesty, cleanliness, and good grooming.
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In the minds of both Andrews and the school trustees, James McCune Smith stood head and shoulders above all the other students, and they heaped reward after reward upon him. When the Marquis de Lafayette visited the school in 1824, Smith, who was only about eleven years old, was chosen to deliver a public address, which he did in the following words (undoubtedly written for him by one of the trustees).

General La Fayette,

In behalf of myself and my fellow school mates, may I be permitted to express our sincere and respectful gratitude
to you for the condescension you have manifested this day, in visiting this Institution, which is one of the noblest specimens of New-York philanthropy. Here, Sir, you behold hundreds of the poor children of Africa, sharing with those of a lighter hue, in the blessings of education; and, while it will be our pleasure to remember the great deeds you have done for America, it will be our delight also to cherish the memory of General La Fayette as a friend to African Emancipation, and as a member of this Institution.
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Dr. James McCune Smith, physician and abolitionist, from Week’s (Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library)

During the school term, Andrews repeatedly singled out Smith for his precocious intelligence. When he created a Class of Merit, “composed of such boys, as are the best behaved, and most advanced in their learning,” he placed Smith in it. When it came time to choose a chair for one of the class’s monthly meetings, he made sure that Smith would be elected. And since it was the principal’s task to appoint the monitor general for order, the highest position a boy could achieve in a Lancasterian school, it was undoubtedly Andrews who conferred this honor on the young man.

At times, Smith was given even greater responsibilities. When Andrews became ill and was frequently absent, the trustees placed Smith in charge of the entire school. In the minutes of their February 1827 meetings, they pronounced themselves highly satisfied with Smith’s management, referring to him as a “lad of promise.”
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We’re back to the vexed question of motivation. Did the school trustees truly recognize Smith’s talents and seek to develop them? Or was Smith’s de facto leadership of the school simply a money-saving device? Could they rest assured that Smith would function as their mouthpiece and carry out their orders?

Given the poor quality of early-nineteenth-century free schools, the many hundreds of children who passed through the Mulberry Street School undoubtedly left with inadequate literacy and math skills. But a small group of students who congregated around Smith pushed themselves—and were pushed by Charles Andrews—to excel. By the late 1820s, Peter and his friends surely possessed basic skills in the three Rs, and didn’t need to spend much time on penmanship, spelling, or taking dictation. In fact, by then the students chosen as monitors would have been teaching these rudimentary subjects to their younger charges. Until he became ill, Andrews would have continued to teach the senior boys. In addition to taking more advanced classes in arithmetic and reading, they would have studied specialized subjects such as science, astronomy, and navigation. Andrews’s curriculum might well have served as
a model for Peter’s future brother-in-law, Edward Marshall, and other students who later opened their own schools in the black community.

In arithmetic, drills in the elementary classes proceeded from simple addition through subtraction and multiplication to division. In the more advanced classes, the same drills were performed with compound sums. By all accounts, the mathematical genius was George Allen, who Smith described as “a little boy, perfectly black, so fragile that you might crush him between thumb and finger.” It was Allen who in a few minutes solved some “puzzling arithmetical questions” for a visitor to the school. Maybe these were the word problems often given the students that dealt with questions raised in counting houses. They were asked to calculate interest, figuring out, for example, how much a merchant owed if he borrowed X amount on the dollar for a note of Y amount.
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The Bible, as the poem suggested, was the source material for reading classes. Every morning, Andrews opened the school by reading a passage from the Scriptures. Given the deeply religious values held by black families, the boys must have paid scrupulous attention to these lessons. It was perhaps during one of these moments that several of them felt called to the ministry. In adulthood, Alexander Crummell and Isaiah DeGrasse were ordained in the Episcopal Church; Henry Highland Garnet became a Presbyterian pastor; Samuel Ringgold Ward, who like Garnet had been born into slavery in Maryland and escaped north with his family, served as a licensed minister in the Congregational Church.

In the afternoons Andrews shifted to readings from instructional texts that offered the senior boys information on a wide variety of topics. He had a broad array of books from which to choose. Donations from trustees and other benefactors had swelled the number of volumes in the school’s library to a sizable 450. If Smith’s assessment of Andrews as a teacher who endeavored to develop the interests of each of his students was correct, I’d like to think that he selected texts accordingly. He certainly encouraged students to take books out from the library and continue reading on their own.

The texts that Andrews listed by title in his history of the school were
A Father’s Legacy to His Children, The Scientific Class Book, Polite
Learning, Scientific Dialogues, Travels at Home
, and
Cook’s Travels.
Most of these were British-authored, adapted for use in American schools. Given Crummell’s comments that Peter was even in his youth “prematurely mature” and “marked by the moral qualities of boldness, bravery and generosity,” perhaps my great-great-grandfather was most taken with
A Father’s Legacy to His Children.
This pamphlet consisted of a long letter written by a father, one Russell Freeman imprisoned for debt, to his children. Anticipating his impending death, Freeman put together a set of moral guidelines for his children to live by. He counseled them to abide by the golden rule of “whatsoever things ye would that men should do unto you, do ye the same unto them”; reminded them that worldly pleasures were fleeting; and advised them to have faith in God and to follow His guidance especially in times of adversity and death.
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The other books on Andrews’s list covered topics in language arts, social studies, and natural philosophy—that is, science. James McCune Smith must have been thrilled with the Reverend Joyce’s
Scientific Dialogues.
In this multivolume work, Joyce explained in detail the fields of mechanics, hydrostatics, pneumatics, optics, magnetism, electricity, and galvanism. It was around this time that young Smith sketched a portrait of Benjamin Franklin for a school assignment, so even in these early years he might have been dreaming of becoming the nation’s black Franklin.

Charles Reason, Patrick’s younger brother, would have been drawn to literary topics. In adulthood, he became an influential black educator and sometime poet. Reading chapters on rhetoric and poetry in
A Short System of Polite Learning
, Charles would have studied prosody and read the works of Shakespeare, Young, Cowper, and Milton. But he would also have become familiar with the burgeoning tradition of African American literature through the pages of
Freedom’s Journal;
holding fast to the belief that blacks could achieve racial equality through demonstrated excellence in the literary arts, the editors Cornish and Russwurm regularly featured Afro-British writers Olaudah Equiano, Ignatius Sancho, Ottobah Cuagono, and the African American poet Phillis Wheatley.
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As Smith noted, Andrews introduced more specialized courses into the curriculum, notably astronomy and navigation, which often
overlapped with geography and geology instruction. The students who excelled in these subjects were George Allen, who Smith described as “little less than a prodigy of calculation and original thought on the abstruse problems of gravity, cohesion, and the laws of planetary motion,” and George Moore, about whom nothing is known. In poring over
Cook’s Travels
, the two Georges would have discovered how Cook’s navigational skills enabled him to travel the world, rounding both Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope. As a result of their studies, the two boys could solve problems of all kinds with the greatest of ease: measuring the distance from Washington to London or Calcutta; finding the declination of the sun at 5:30 p.m. on any given day; calculating the distance of Venus and Mars from the sun.
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