Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (14 page)

The school trustees expended considerable effort to introduce students to the geography of Africa and countries of the diaspora. They established a Cabinet of Minerals and Natural Curiosities, and sent out an appeal to “captains of vessels and other gentlemen traveling in our own, or in foreign countries” to add to their collection of “minerals, shells, reptiles, curious works of art, etc.” The editors of
Freedom’s Journal
further specified that they hoped to hear from “gentlemen trading to Africa, or who may have an African production.” Students also studied Haitian geography through a pamphlet written in a question-and-answer format that provided factual information, covering the location of the island, its towns, rivers, products, and more.
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Chapters in geography books were another matter. Written from a British perspective,
Travels at Home
depicted African and Asian countries as backward and primitive. Africa, the book maintained, was a place of utter wretchedness: its nations were run by despotic governments that engaged in perpetual warfare and encouraged slavery; its people were ignorant and morally degenerate. The young students knew that such depictions of their motherland were distorted and incomplete. They had listened carefully to the lessons imparted by their elders: yes, they were now Americans and should see themselves as such; but no, although Africa was now troubled, they should remember that it had once been great and would one day recover its glory. They needed to remember their African heritage and take pride in it.

In contrast, the young men must have enjoyed sections of the first
volume of
Travels at Home
, which took them on a virtual grand tour of Europe much like the real journeys that the great Romantic poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth went on as part of their worldly education. The opening chapters introduced them to England, extravagantly praising it as a nation where freedom reigned supreme while marginalizing its participation in the slave trade and slave system. One of the results of English liberty was to make “Englishmen better manufacturers and merchants, better cultivators of the ground, and better philosophers and scholars.” The school trustees surely did not anticipate that such statements might later provide the motivation for James McCune Smith and Alexander Crummell to set their sights on university training in Britain when they found the doors of American institutions of higher education closed to them because of their race.
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Andrews’s list of books did not include volumes on government or law. But as they read through
The Literary and Scientific Class Book
, three students in particular would have been drawn to its few political chapters: Henry Highland Garnet, recently escaped from slavery; George Downing, who later became a political activist firmly committed to racial integration; and Thomas Sidney, who until his early death in 1840 led the campaign for black male suffrage in New York state. They would have agreed with the book’s chapter that praised republicanism as the best form of government and the U.S. constitution as giving “a new dignity and a higher duty to
law
,” while remaining fully aware of its failure to protect all members of society. But they must have greeted with a great deal of skepticism, if not outright laughter, the book’s tortured argument that the
unequal
distribution of property was in fact beneficial because otherwise everybody would be equally poor (not rich) and no industries would exist to lift people out of their wretched condition.
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William Hamilton’s call to study “abstruse literature” did not extend to girls. Like most men of his time, Hamilton believed that the goal of female education was to develop the feminine virtues of modesty and gentility. To the extent that women were to improve their own minds, it
was to help form the manners of their menfolk. The girls who attended the African Free Schools initially occupied the old William Street building. But in the summer of 1828, the Mulberry Street School opened a female department catering to families living uptown. Maybe this is when Peter’s classmate Edward Marshall introduced him to his sister Rebecca, leading to a courtship that eventually culminated in marriage. As in the boys’ department, Rebecca’s teachers were white; one, Julia Andrews, was Charles’s daughter. The girls’ education was basic—the three Rs and geography. And in lieu of navigation and astronomy, Rebecca and her friends were taught sewing and knitting.
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The schools’ trustees and teachers also devised educational activities outside the classroom for their young charges. Some were pleasurable, others less so.

One activity that was both instructional and fun was the tradition of school fairs, instituted by Andrews, in which students displayed artifacts they had made during the year. Boys exhibited carts, wheelbarrows, tables, chairs, hammers, crowbars, carpenter’s tools, and the like, while girls showed off their sewing, dresses, hats, shirts, pillows, and curtains. It was perhaps at one of these fairs that Peter got to know Rebecca better and began to dream of marriage. Prizes for the best handiwork were handed out in the form of tickets redeemable for money or “those creature comforts which schoolboys and girls so well know how to estimate.”
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More burdensome and vexing were those public events—one could almost call them exhibitions—in which the efforts of school trustees and teachers to control their students’ thinking were barely disguised. It’s here that we can best sense the latent violence between white benefactors and black recipients—violence that Andrews’s alleged whipping of Sanders brought out in the open for all to see.

At these events students were required to speak in front of audiences composed of well-intentioned whites. School trustees insisted that their compositions were “genuine, unaided productions,” but in his
history of the school Andrews acknowledged that the majority were written by either a teacher or a trustee. Certainly the repetition of the same ideas and phrases over and over again, echoing Smith’s earlier address to Lafayette, makes it difficult to accept that the students wrote the speeches by themselves. Their content made explicit the terms of the benevolent contract. Students thanked their white benefactors for condescending to help black youth acquire an education. Then turning to the audience they begged them to sympathize with their plight as “poor little descendants of Africa” and give generously to the school. In return, they promised unconditional gratitude and full obedience to the school’s principles.

The young students were on display. White audience members opined that they were witness to “the interesting spectacle of the sable children of Africa, evincing an endowment of intellect.” Assessing the students’ learning and scrutinizing their behavior, they reached their own conclusions. In a letter to his daughter, John Pintard complained that the black youngsters reciting a chapter of Hebrews from memory had no understanding of what they were saying.
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In contrast, others commended the students for their orderliness and the seriousness with which they undertook their studies. Whether they were praising or critiquing, however, whites talked about the students as if they were curiosities on exhibit.

The trustees maintained that they wanted their charges to “become men of distinction.” Yet they insisted on controlling the students’ thought processes and, as time went on, increasingly emphasized vocational over intellectual training. They established an employment service to place students in trades through a system of indenture; boys were trained in crafts and mechanical arts, girls were taught needlework. Perhaps the exhibition of such items at the school fairs was designed to orient students toward this kind of work. In any event, the trustees noted with satisfaction that some of the boys had entered trades where they worked as “Sail Makers, Shoe Makers, Tin Workers, Tailors, Carpenters, Blacksmiths, etc.” They suggested that others could find jobs as waiters, coachmen, barbers, servants, and laborers, while still others could go to sea as stewards, cooks, or sailors. George Allen,
that young prodigy in navigation and astronomy, became a sailor. With his strong navigational skills, he saved the ship he was on when both the captain and the mate died; but on the very next voyage the entire crew was lost.
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Had he been a white boy from a good family, would he have entered the business side of shipping, prospered, and lived to a ripe old age?

In encouraging black youth to stick to manual labor, the trustees were in part responding to the realities of the marketplace. White employers in New York City did not want to employ blacks, and white employees did not want to work next to them. But the trustees were also revealing their prejudices against black achievement, following the adage of to each his proper place. “There is no disgrace incurred,” they maintained, “in the pursuit of any calling, however humble. It is the duty of every one to do all the good in his sphere in which Providence has placed him.”
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Where did Charles Andrews stand in this debate? It’s undeniable that he taught James McCune Smith and maybe other students as well “to look upward; to believe themselves capable of accomplishing as much as any others could, and to regard the higher walks of life within their reach.” Yet Andrews also promoted trades and crafts in the school fairs and made the navigation class an important part of the curriculum. Most egregiously, he endorsed the conservative American Colonization Society’s plan to send free blacks to Liberia. In all these instances, was Andrews merely being realistic about the degree of racism that permeated the American work force? Or was he revealing something about the nature of his own racial prejudices?

In 1832 Andrews was summarily dismissed from his job, raising still other questions. Was it his colonization views, his frequent absences from the school, or his alleged caning of Sanders that brought about his firing? The reasons remain unclear, but what is clear is that “the leading colored men” of the city played an important role. According to Smith:

This was a sore trial for the “old scholars,” whose attachment to their teacher was firm and ardent; it led to something of a struggle, in which the old heads of the people ultimately triumphed.
The principal leaders in this movement were Henry Sipkins, an uncle to Thos. S. Sydney, William Hamilton, and that distinguished son of Virginia, Thomas Downing.
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James McCune Smith might not have liked the decision of the “old heads” in forcing Andrews’s dismissal. But it taught him an important lesson: that black men were not going to remain humble, grateful, and obedient to the wishes of their white benefactors when they believed their community had been wronged. Smith must have known even then that one day he would be called upon to replace these old heads and that he needed to be ready. And he must have recognized that despite all its failings, and perhaps somewhat paradoxically, the Mulberry Street School had well prepared him and his classmates to confront the future. The curriculum gave them academic knowledge not readily available to most public school students. The Lancasterian system prepared student monitors to be leaders; even though it might have been a cost-saving device for the school, it taught them how to assert authority and command respect.

The Mulberry Street School also gave its young students something that was less tangible and harder to define. It taught them to love book reading. And book reading developed their imaginations. I’m convinced that the books Charles Andrews made available to them lifted them, however briefly, out of their neighborhoods, their community, their city, and invited them to explore a vaster world. I think of this world as cosmopolitan. In their books, students discovered the many different cultures that existed in all corners of the globe. Without a doubt, the authors presented these from a western perspective, emphasizing that cultures were not all equal but that some (white, Christian, Anglo-Saxon) were superior to others. But book reading offered the students other gifts. It gave them the capacity to be amazed. It allowed free rein to their imaginations. It invited them to experience different kinds of aesthetic pleasures. It opened them up to beauty. It convinced them that they too could be citizens of the world.

CIRCA 1834

IN HIS DIARY ENTRY OF
December 17, 1835, eminent Knickerbocker and former New York mayor Philip Hone described with anguish “the most awful calamity which has ever visited these United States.” He was referring to the Great Fire of 1835, which destroyed nineteen blocks and 674 buildings in Lower Manhattan, costing more than $15 million and resulting in enormous economic repercussions. Yet, if Hone could have forecast the future, he might have reserved the distinction of “most awful” for the Panic of 1837 in which bust followed boom. Freed from federal restrictions, banks issued notes in excess of what they owned. Money was abundant and cheap, credit easy to obtain, and banks eager to lend. Inflation set in. The final blow came when the price of southern cotton suddenly dropped, an unpleasant reminder of the city’s overdependence on the southern slave economy. Gotham fell into a deep depression.
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Terrible as these events were for Knickerbocker merchants, neither the Great Fire of 1835 nor the Panic of 1837 were the most awful calamities ever visited upon black New Yorkers. Epidemics and racial violence trumped both.

After the yellow fever outbreaks of the 1820s, it was only a matter of time before another epidemic struck the city. This time it came in the form of Asiatic cholera. In his diary, Hone tracked its progress from the major cities of Europe across the Atlantic to Quebec, where it then spread to Montreal on a cargo ship filled with infected Irish immigrants. He watched helplessly as “this awful messenger of death” invaded New York in the summer of 1832.
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