Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (16 page)

Above all, the mob vented its rage against blacks, targeting the Five Points area and working with uncanny precision. Even though they lived on Leonard and Centre Streets, the Marshalls, Crummells, De-Grasses, and Garnets appear to have escaped direct attack. Yet they must have felt helplessly vulnerable as they watched the horrendous events unfold before their eyes. According to Lewis Tappan, “a dozen
or more [houses] in Orange, Mulberry, Elm and Centre streets, occupied by colored people, were more or less injured, the roofs torn from several, and the furniture they contained was either burned or broken to pieces.” Black businesses, notably a barbershop on Orange Street as well as porterhouses on Leonard and Anthony Streets, were also assaulted. Fearing the worst for Thomas Downing’s oyster house, an anonymous writer penned a note to the mayor stating that “he had been inform’d that an attack will be made on his [Downing’s] house and requests the authority to interfere if it should be necessary.” Finally, the mob turned its fury against black institutions. Rioters pelted the African Baptist church on Orange Street with rocks and inflicted damage on the African Society for Mutual Relief Hall as well as a nearby schoolhouse.
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Located on Centre Street, St. Philip’s stood in the heart of the Five Points. For its minister and parishioners, the riot was disastrous. As the violence unfolded, Benjamin Onderdonk, bishop of New York’s Episcopal Diocese, pleaded with the mayor for help, citing his “knowledge of the respectable and uniformly decent and orderly character of the congregation of that Church.”
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It was yet another indignity for this young parish that had confronted hardship after hardship. First, New York’s black Episcopalians had had to badger Trinity into letting them establish a separate church; then they were forced to beg for a space of their own until George Lorillard gave them the sixty-year lease on the Collect Street lots and Trinity parishioners raised funds for the church building; even so, they still depended on Trinity for an annual stipend of $330.

St. Philip’s was home to its parishioners in the fullest sense of the word, as both physical and spiritual abode. Like worshipers from all denominations, they revered the physical structure of their church as sacred space in which the here-and-now of historical time and material place represented God, the divine, and the eternal. When St. Philip’s first structure, made of wood, burned down in 1819 shortly after being erected, they immediately set about rebuilding it, this time in brick. Now they had to watch as what they had so painstakingly built up over years was destroyed in minutes. Rioters entered the sanctuary, smashed the stained-glass windows with the Eucharistic candlesticks, broke the altar table into pieces and ripped up its hangings, tore the carpets, demolished
the organ, and dragged the hand-carved walnut pews into the street and set fire to them.
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In a final vindictive gesture the mob turned on Peter Williams’s home. Their assault had repercussions well beyond physical destruction. Williams’s personal journey of striving against the odds paralleled that of his church. After receiving permission to establish St. Philip’s, Williams had to battle the Episcopal Diocese to become the church’s pastor. Since he was already a lay reader, ordination into the priesthood seemed the next logical step. But the diocese could not countenance admitting a black man into the ministry and rejected his application. In 1820, the newly appointed Bishop John Henry Hobart finally ordained Williams deacon, and in 1826, priest. Although he had begged for protection for St. Philip’s Church, in the aftermath of the riot Bishop Benjamin Onderdonk condemned what he saw as Williams’s pernicious radical abolitionist activity and demanded that he resign as an officer of the American Anti-Slavery Society. Williams complied, noting that upon ordination he had promised “reverently to obey my Bishop, to follow with a glad mind his godly admonitions, and to submit myself to his godly judgment.” Williams, however, maintained his membership in the society. Some in the black community sympathized with him; others judged him harshly. “Brother Williams was a timid man,” Crummell wrote years later; “he had felt all his lifetime the extreme pressure of Episcopal power and had exaggerated opinions concerning it. He became intimidated—nay frightened.”
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Against this backdrop of racial prejudice and violence, I wondered how Peter Guignon and his schoolmates from the Mulberry Street School fared as they entered maturity.

Unfortunately, I know nothing about my great-great-grandfather’s life during the early and mid-1830s. His name does not appear in the city directories until the 1840s. If he was in the city, it’s likely that he did not have steady work. Or it’s possible that, as his obituary suggested, these were the years he spent in California.

But what about the other boys? They were determined to achieve. On the whole, they did better than previous generations, but still their fortunes were mixed. Some went into trade while others tried to further their education. Some remained in the city; a number left but eventually returned or at least maintained close ties to Gotham, thus establishing a pattern of dispersal and return that continued throughout the century.

There were those who struggled. Much like his future brother-in-law, Albro Lyons seemed to be floundering, first going into the cigar-making business and then opening up an ice cream parlor. George Allen, whom James McCune Smith had referred to as a “prodigy of calculation,” became a sailor and was lost at sea.
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Others were more fortunate, helped by the patronage of the more prosperous within the black community and, occasionally, by white benefactors. George Downing followed in his father’s footsteps, first working in Thomas’s oyster house and then opening his own catering business. In his 1885 character portrait of George Downing, T. McCants Stewart described him as heir to much more than Thomas Downing’s catering skills: “He inherited his father’s aggressive temperament and manly character. He was reared under Christian influences and taught benevolence; but he was also trained to stand up for his own rights and those of the weak and to repel all invasions with force, if necessary.” Like his father, George was constantly on the go: “To him there is no such word as ‘rest.’ His idea of heaven is ceaseless progressive activity. He could not be quiet if he would; and I am sure that with his views of the needs of the race, he would not be in repose if he could. … How could he have done otherwise than fill up his life with thought and work and noble deeds.”
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In his 1819 valedictorian address at the Mulberry Street School, student James Fields had complained about his future prospects. “Shall I be a mechanic?” he asked rhetorically. “No one will employ me; the white boys won’t work with me.” Yet Patrick Reason caught the eye of a British-born engraver, Stephen Henry Gimber, who had immigrated
to the United States around 1829, settling in New York before moving to Philadelphia in 1842. Sympathetic to the abolitionist cause, Gimber did a mezzotint engraving commemorating West Indian emancipation in 1834. It was perhaps these sympathies that led him to train Patrick, who was already showing extraordinary talent. In 1833, Gimber brought the young man into his shop for a four-year apprenticeship, “to learn the art, trade and mystery of an engraver,” paying his mother three dollars a week for her son’s labor. It was during this period that Patrick did a portrait of Peter Williams for St. Philip’s. He also designed a stipple engraving of a kneeling female slave with chains hanging from her wrists accompanied by the inscription “Am I Not a Woman and a Sister?” the counterpart of the famous Wedgwood seal of a kneeling male slave produced in Britain in the late 1780s. By 1838, Patrick was doing well enough to advertise himself in the
Colored American
as a “Portrait and Landscape Engraver, Draughtsman and Lithographer.”
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George Thomas Downing, businessman and civil rights leader, circa 1880s, by an anonymous artist (Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library)

Studio portrait of Patrick Reason, circa 1890s, photograph by Pifer and Becker (Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library)

There were those in the black community, however, who resisted the idea that all their boys were good for was trade, and held out hope that they would receive a classical education. Community leaders established the Canal Street High School and hired instructors to teach Latin, Greek, and other classical subjects. Alexander Crummell, Henry Highland Garnet, George Downing, and Thomas Sidney were all enrolled. “This school only whet our youthful appetite for larger facilities of training and culture,” Crummell later recalled. To satisfy them, “our parents looked one way and another; but not a ray of hope was discoverable on the intellectual horizon of the country.”

Hope soon came from outside the city in the form of the Noyes Academy in Canaan, New Hampshire. A group of white abolitionists had decided to open a school for the express purpose of preparing black youth “for admission into any of the Colleges and Universities of the United States [or] to commence the study of the learned professions,” and hired a teacher from the Andover Theological Institution to instruct
them. In 1835, three of the Mulberry Street School boys, Henry Highland Garnet, Alexander Crummell, and Thomas Sidney, set off for the school. Once again, Crummell’s
Eulogium
offers an intimate eyewitness account: “The sight of three black youths, in gentlemanly garb, traveling through New England was,
in those days, a most unusual sight;
started not only surprise, but brought out universal sneers and ridicule. We met a most cordial reception at Canaan from two score white students, and began, with the highest hopes, our studies.”

But matters did not remain cordial for long once the good citizens of New Hampshire determined quite literally to break up the school: “Fourteen black boys with books in their hands set the entire Granite State crazy! On the 4th of July, with wonderful taste and felicity, the farmers, from a wide region around, assembled at Canaan and resolved to remove the academy as a public nuisance! On the 10th of August they gathered together from the neighboring towns, seized the building, and with ninety yoke of oxen carried it off into a swamp about half a mile from its site. They were two days in accomplishing their miserable work.”

Remembering perhaps how blackbirders had almost captured his family some years earlier, Garnet refused to be cowed.

Under Garnet, as our leader, the boys in our boardinghouse were moulding bullets, expecting an attack upon our dwelling. About eleven o’clock at night the tramp of horses was heard approaching and as one rapid rider passed the house and fired at it, Garnet quickly replied by a discharge from a double-barrelled shotgun which blazed away through the window. At once the hills, for many a mile around, reverberated with the sound. Lights were seen in scores of houses on every side, and the towns and villages far and near were in a state of great excitement. But that musket shot by Garnet doubtless saved our lives. The cowardly ruffians dared not to attack us. Notice, however, was sent to us to quit the State within a fortnight. When we left Canaan the mob assembled on the outskirts of the village and fired a field piece, charged with powder, at our wagon.
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Undaunted, Garnet, Crummell, and Sidney persevered. With help from Peter Williams, they were admitted to the interracial Oneida Institute in Troy, New York. Under the presidency of Rev. Beriah Green, the school curriculum combined manual labor—work on its farms and in its shops—and academic study, offering advanced courses in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and the Old and New Testaments. James McCune Smith, who must have later heard about his friends’ experiences, inserted an account—both poignant and witty—into his 1865 sketch of Garnet’s life. It was at Oneida, he wrote, that the “young seekers after knowledge” found a measure of peace, “not only in a region comparatively free from caste-hate, but under the repose, the intellectual calm, of one of the ablest thinkers of the century.” Even petty incidents of racial prejudice could not dampen the young men’s spirits. When a proslavery student threw a pumpkin at Garnet during a colloquy, Garnet watched it smash to the floor and impishly commented: “My good friends, do not be alarmed, it is only a soft pumpkin; some gentleman has thrown away his head, and lo! his brains are dashed out!”
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