Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (15 page)

Bigger, dirtier, and busier than ever, Gotham remained as vulnerable to disease as it had during the yellow fever epidemics. It was a perfect breeding ground for cholera, which infected human populations through contact with contaminated water. Much of the downtown area near the Hudson and East Rivers was still marshy lowland. Garbage and manure still piled up in the streets. Privies and sewers still overflowed. Animals still roamed the neighborhoods. Nuisance laws still went ignored. The poor still crowded in unventilated apartments and cellars.

Indifferent to racial distinctions, cholera attacked whites and blacks alike as it raced throughout the city. New York’s population was slowly segregating itself according to class, race, and ethnicity, but no strict boundaries as yet existed. White elite families like those of Philip Hone and Peter Lorillard lived to the west in the Third and Fifth Wards—the length of Broadway, along Greenwich Street, and around St. John’s Park. Others moved northward to streets like Bond, Bleecker, and Great Jones in the Fifteenth Ward. In contrast, some merchants chose to remain close to their manufactures; Jacob Lorillard still resided near his tannery on the Lower East Side. White working-class families, whose homes and shops were similarly close to one another, could be found in Greenwich Village as well as to the east around Corlear’s Hook and the Bowery.
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Black New Yorkers were sprinkled throughout the city. A number resided to the west in the Fifth Ward as well as in the Eighth, lodged between the elite neighborhoods of the Fifth and Fifteenth Wards. But their greatest concentration remained in the Five Points, which by now had become home to many Irish immigrants. The Marshalls still lived
on Centre Street, and the Crummells had moved just a short distance away to Leonard Street, right next to the Garnets and close to Peter Williams Jr. James McCune Smith resided on Walker Street. Within short walking distance of these homes were two black institutions, the African Society for Mutual Relief on Baxter Street and St. Philip’s Church on Centre Street.

A New York doctor listed the neighborhoods most devastated by cholera: “The locations most severely affected were on the borders of the rivers, where the ground is low and marshy, as Roosevelt, Cherry, and Water-street; at the foot of Reed-street, Duane-street and vicinity; the neighbourhood of the Five Points; the house in Broad-street, with an old common sewer under it, in which ten fatal cases occurred; Laurens-street, Corlaer’s Hook, Yorkville, Harlem, Bellevue, and Greenwich Village.” Not only was the city’s black population threatened but so were white working-class households in Greenwich Village, and even elite whites needed to be on guard. Jacob Lorillard must have worried about the proximity of his home and business to the Roosevelt, Cherry, and Water Street area, just as his brother Peter might have been concerned that the disease could spread one block from Reade Street to Chamber Street. Yet the doctor also noted that the epidemic didn’t attack all areas within these neighborhoods equally; rather it targeted those households most affected by poverty and its attendant evils—overcrowding, poor ventilation, and even poorer sanitation.
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Public health officials ordered a quarantine of the city, increased street cleaning, and set about disinfecting outdoor areas with quicklime. Contaminated items were burned, leaving heavy acrid smoke in the air. Those stricken with the disease experienced diarrhea, spasmodic vomiting, and painful cramps that led to dehydration and cyanosis (turning blue from lack of oxygen). Remedies were few and ineffective. Some doctors prescribed calomel, laudanum, or bleeding, or a combination of all three. Others suggested more radical treatments such as tobacco smoke enemas, electric shocks, injecting saline solutions into the veins, plugging the rectum with beeswax or oilcloth to stem the diarrhea. The best remedy, available only to wealthy families like the Hones, was to leave the city altogether. From their country places, they waited, in Philip Hone’s words, “until the destroying angel has sheathed his sword
and our citizens have returned to their homes.” By the end of August, the epidemic finally ran its course, killing 3,513 people out of a total population of approximately 212,600.
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To most New Yorkers, the Five Points area had become virtually synonymous with the most extreme forms of destitution. Even so, the Marshalls and their friends were spared from the cholera epidemic. Spared in body, but not in the white imagination since many New Yorkers still blamed blacks for outbreaks of epidemics. Racists held them responsible for the virulence with which cholera ravaged the city. It was blacks’ “moral deformity and gross stupidity,” their filthy habits and ignorance of proper hygiene that had made the disease so difficult to control. Reformers and public health officials were somewhat more sophisticated in their thinking. They were slowly coming to the conclusion that personal behavior was perhaps not the direct cause of the epidemic. Rather, they speculated that social conditions—namely the poverty that plagued neighborhoods like the Five Points—led to demoralization, which in turn gave rise to poor habits, which in turn opened the door to disease. Predictably, however, the city’s response was not to work to improve public health policy and thereby eradicate poverty and its attendant ills. Instead, it encouraged the private construction of housing in open spaces equipped with water, plumbing, and gas lighting—that is, housing for the rich.
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Other awful calamities were visited upon New York’s black population, events that came not from the anonymous hand of disease but from acts of human hatred. One was a calamity unimaginable to Hone: seizure of escaped slaves by slave catchers, or “black-birders,” as they were called. With the end of slavery in the state, New York had become a destination for fleeing slaves. In his retrospective sketch of Henry Highland Garnet’s life from 1865, James McCune Smith noted that although slave hunts were not frequent, escaped slaves still lived in “constant apprehension and jeopardy [that] at any moment they might be forced to fly.”
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This fear became a reality for the Garnet family one summer evening
in 1829. Years earlier, George Garnet had devised a ruse to bring his wife and children out of slavery in Maryland by asking his master’s permission to attend a funeral, then hiding them in a covered wagon and heading north. Reaching New York, the family rented rooms in a building right next to the Crummells on Leonard Street. At the time of the attempted seizure, Henry had left school and shipped out to sea as a cabin boy to help with his family’s finances. But young Alexander Crummell was an eyewitness to the event. Years later, in his
Eulogium
commemorating Henry’s life, Crummell recalled: “I saw the occurrence with my own eyes, playing, after sunset before my father’s door. One evening in the month of July or August, a white man, a kinsman of the late Colonel Spencer, the old master, walked up to Mr. Garnet’s hired rooms, on the second floor of the dwelling.” Immediately recognizing
the danger he was in, George Garnet calmly proceeded into the side bedroom and went straight to the window. As he continued his account, Crummell underscored how desperation can make the impossible possible.

Henry Highland Garnet, abolitionist and editor (Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library)

Between the two houses was an alley at least four feet wide; the only way of escape was to leap from the side window of the bed-room into my father’s yard. How Mr. Garnet made this fearful leap, how he escaped breaking both neck and legs, is a mystery to me to this day; but he made the leap and escaped. In my father’s yard was a large ill-tempered dog, the terror of the neighborhood. The dog, by a wondrous providence, remained quiet in his early evening slumbers. After jumping several fences Mr. Garnet escaped through Orange Street, and the slave-hunter’s game was thus effectually spoiled.

The family was safe, but the blackbirder made sure to destroy everything they owned. They were forced to start over from scratch.

The story doesn’t end there; it continues after young Henry returned from his sea voyage. His Mulberry Street School friends tried to console him, but according to James McCune Smith:

The news fell like a clap of thunder upon the young seafarer; the first shock over, he was roused almost to madness. With the little money he had he purchased a large clasp-knife, openly carried it in his hand and sturdily marched up Broadway, waiting and hoping for the assault of the men-hunters. … This raid upon his peaceful family made a powerful impression on Henry. It seared his soul with an undying hatred of slavery, and touched his lips with that anti-slavery fervor and eloquence which has never gone out.
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Garnet did not use his clasp-knife. But he was later one of the first black abolitionists to use force—both verbal and physical—in his fight against prejudice and slavery.

Racism was not just a southern import. It was also a homegrown product that erupted with astonishing venom in the race riot of 1834. At the start, the riot pitted an unruly white mob against the city’s white abolitionist leaders; by the end, it was black New Yorkers who bore the brunt of the violence.

Unlike his lengthy descriptions of the other calamities of the decade, Philip Hone devoted far less space to the riot in his diary. His comments appear to blame both sides, as he heaped equal scorn on “fanatical” abolitionists and a “diabolical” mob. Without a functioning press at the time, there’s virtually no public commentary from the black community. Nor have individual accounts surfaced as yet in the archives. So it’s to white newspaper reports and personal anecdotes compiled by “fanatical” white abolitionists that we owe most of our accounts of the riot.
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From the early 1830s on, white mob violence in northern cities rose in direct proportion to the spread of radical abolitionist activity. In New York wealthy merchants like Arthur Tappan and his brother Lewis, John Rankin, and Joshua Leavitt were the vanguard of abolitionism. In 1833, the Tappan brothers established the New York Anti-Slavery Society, followed by the American Anti-Slavery Society, of which William Lloyd Garrison in Boston soon emerged as the undisputed leader. Fueled by religious evangelical fervor, members adopted a program far more radical than that of the earlier Manumission Society. They were fervent anti-colonizationists, favored immediate over gradual emancipation, and promoted black educational efforts as well as black male suffrage. Their methods were equally radical. Interracial collaboration was the bedrock of the movement. Blacks joined the societies, attending meetings alongside their white counterparts. Leaders made effective use of mass mobilization, submitting thousands of petitions to Congress, and employing the U.S. mail to disseminate antislavery newspapers and pamphlets as well as medals, emblems, and kerchiefs.
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The Tappan brothers were the instigators of New York’s antislavery activity. In the early 1830s, they took over a church building, the Chatham Street Chapel, and turned it into an abolitionist meeting
place. It was this free mixing of whites and blacks, this congregation of people who looked like “the keys of a piano forte,” that so infuriated working-class white New Yorkers. In the summer of 1834, a mob marched on the chapel and stormed it twice.

The first attack occurred on July 4, when white and black abolitionists gathered together for an Emancipation Day celebration. Peter Williams had helped the Tappans organize the event, and the Marshall, Crummell, and DeGrasse families might well have been in the audience. There’s a considerable irony here, because Williams had agreed with his white abolitionist friends that an indoor ceremony would be far more dignified—and thus more acceptable to the city’s white population—than a rowdier street parade like the one James McCune Smith had so enjoyed in 1827. The second attack came a few days later when white and black church choirs, including St. Philip’s, found themselves competing for the right to rehearse in the chapel. Both times, whites hurled racial epithets at blacks and threw prayer books and benches at them.
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The activities in the Chatham Street Chapel brought to the surface the deepest anxieties of New York’s white working class, namely fears of racial equality and race mixing, or “amalgamation.” They were determined to prevent anything of the kind from happening and to break the backbone of the black community. Bent on destruction, the mob refused to disperse. They first turned against white abolitionists, attacking Lewis Tappan’s home and his brother’s store, and threatening Joshua Leavitt’s residence. Any place that was rumored to have condoned interracial activity—especially sexual—was also threatened. Rioters launched an assault against the Spring Street Church, where they believed an interracial marriage had been performed, and targeted cellars on Nassau Street and Peck Slip known to be inhabited by interracial couples.