Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (18 page)

Let’s return to the black pastor and the three candidates for orders whom Bishop Onderdonk had treated with such contempt. Despite their humiliation, they managed to surmount adversity. Peter Williams bowed to Onderdonk’s demands in order to keep St. Philip’s in good standing with the diocese. But he maintained his affiliation with the Anti-Slavery Society, continued to work on behalf of black education, and retained his political interests; it was said that had he lived he planned to vote the antislavery ticket. In time, Isaiah DeGrasse was ordained deacon, then left to serve as a missionary in Jamaica. After many difficulties, Crummell was finally accepted into the ministry and became the most eminent black Episcopal theologian of the nineteenth century. If Reason was forced to abandon his plans to enter the clergy, it was perhaps for the best. He went on to become a prominent black educator in New York City, a teacher to both Philip White and Maritcha Lyons.

James McCune Smith was not with his former classmates because he was pursuing his education across the Atlantic in Great Britain. He was ambitious. While still attending the Mulberry Street School, he was apprenticed to a blacksmith, and after class he could be found “at a forge with the bellows handle in one hand and a Latin grammar in the other.”
³⁰
Smith had aspirations to become a doctor, but there were obstacles to overcome: U.S. medical schools proved to be just as inhospitable to young black men as were seminaries. Medicine was still struggling to establish itself as a respectable profession. All too often, the public confused regular doctors with the “irregulars,” and derided them as humbugs. So physicians policed their profession with care, determined not to admit anyone who might smell of quackery. Evidently, that automatically included blacks. Smith was rejected by the Geneva College medical school (although the college would later admit Isaiah
DeGrasse) and then by Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. Peter Williams eventually prevailed on a group of white abolitionists to help send the young man to the University of Glasgow in Scotland.

I’m not sure what made Smith so determined to become a doctor. Maybe it was the terrible ravages of the cholera epidemic of 1832 on New York’s black community. When he left on a steamship for Europe in mid-August of that year, Smith must have been haunted by images of the sick and dying. Yet in a matter of days he was forced to face the disease once again when one of the sailors on board the ship came down with symptoms of cholera. Writing about his experiences for the
Colored American
, Smith recalled how he watched helplessly as the other sailors dosed the sick man with brandy and pepper and rubbed his limbs.
³¹
Fortunately, the sailor recovered. Ever persistent, cholera would be waiting for Smith upon his arrival a month later in Glasgow, where it was still raging although with less intensity than the year before. The epidemic, which had caused so much death and destruction on both sides of the Atlantic, must have hardened Smith’s resolve to alleviate suffering whenever and wherever he could.

Smith stayed in Glasgow for five years, obtaining his B.A., M.A., and M.D. degrees, and graduating first in his class. In his early years of study he followed a general curriculum that reflected the influence of Scottish Enlightenment thought: Latin, moral philosophy, natural history, and the like. These courses affirmed principles that Charles Andrews had already taught him—the importance of inductive reasoning, of literature and the arts, of moral sensibility. But they also introduced Smith to new forms of knowledge, notably statistics. Medical courses included anatomy, chemistry, materia medica, midwifery, surgery, and botany. Smith was given practical training as well. In anatomy classes, he dissected cadavers. At Lock Hospital, he learned about treatments for venereal disease. During his yearlong infirmary clerkship at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary, he might well have worked with Robert Perry, who was studying the difference between typhus and typhoid fever.
³²

In Britain, Smith found the atmosphere of freedom, the lack of “spirit of caste,” intoxicating. As he recalled in his
Colored American
articles, he was embraced by the Glasgow Emancipation Society, spent
time in the company of eminent men of science, worshiped alongside white parishioners in the Anglican Church, enjoyed London’s cultural scene. In a word, he became a cosmopolitan. Yet he felt like an exile and was happy to return to his native city. The black community welcomed him home in a series of elaborate celebrations, proudly referring to him as our “public property.”
³³

CIRCA 1840

BY THE LATE 1830S
, Peter and most of the other Mulberry Street School graduates had regrouped in the city. For them, it was an invigorating period of maturation and emergence into adulthood. On any given night, passersby could observe the young men streaming into Philomathean Hall at 161 Duane Street. The physical structure of the hall has disappeared from historical memory, yet the significance the place held for black New Yorkers remains alive in the archives. The building was a mecca of civic activism for black youth and “old heads” alike, beckoning them to take part in the community’s many flourishing institutions. Fortunately for us, the
Colored American
extensively covered the many meetings held there, since the newspaper’s various editors—Philip Bell, another Mulberry Street School graduate, James McCune Smith, Samuel Cornish, Charles Ray, a recent newcomer from Massachusetts—overlapped with the organizations’ leadership.
¹

Peter was newly wed. “Rebecca was married to Peter Guignon in 1840,” Williamson noted tersely in his genealogical records; “she was his first wife.” It’s clear that Peter married up.
²
Rebecca’s parents, Joseph and Elizabeth Marshall, were freeholders; they owned a home on Centre Street and several lots of land north of the city. I’m guessing that Peter
lived alone with his mother, probably as tenants in a multifamily dwelling. By the time of his marriage, it’s possible that she was no longer alive. I know nothing about my great-great-grandparents’ marriage. How did they meet? It’s possible that Rebecca’s brother Edward, a classmate of Peter’s, introduced them during one of the many activities that brought together the African Free School girls and boys, perhaps at the school fairs that Charles Andrews had instituted. Was theirs a love match? Did Joseph and Elizabeth Marshall approve or disapprove of the relationship?

Maritcha’s memoir explained at least one gap. Without mentioning any names, she referred to her mother, Mary Joseph, and Rebecca as “two daughters who both joined St. Philip’s and in that communion they were married by the beloved rector.” In an interesting aside, she added that in “those days things moved leisurely; the rector died before he had given any marriage certificates. There were no public records and the brides of 1840 could do no better than the renowned Cornelia—point to their children and say ‘these are my evidences’ of marriage.”
³
Peter Williams’s sloppy record keeping and sudden death—these were the mundane facts that explain the lack of the most basic documentation about Rebecca and Peter’s marriage.

My hopes were briefly raised when I came across an 1890 newspaper clipping in Williamson’s papers describing Mary Joseph and Albro Lyons’s fiftieth wedding anniversary celebration, which was attended among others by the now elderly Philip White and his wife, Elizabeth Guignon White. Glancing back to the golden couple’s beginnings, the article noted: “In 1840 the young couple … were married in the old frame church on Centre street, a picture of which now hangs upon the wall of their Brooklyn parlor. A portrait of the bridegroom’s best man, a celebrated physician of that day, Dr. James McCune Smith who … has long since been dead was given a conspicuous place.”
⁴
But Rebecca and Peter’s wedding held the same year was not remembered, maybe not even talked about at this celebration.

Despite being newly married, Peter was deeply immersed in community work in the years surrounding 1840. Wherever he had been and whatever he had been doing in the early and mid-1830s, he was now ready to join his former schoolmates, who were slowly trickling back
into the city to further the cause of institution building. Peter never exercised sustained leadership, but fulfilled more of a supporting role, leaving leadership to his friends of more forceful character, in particular James McCune Smith. Yet he was involved.

An editorial in the September 9, 1837, issue of the
Colored American
welcomed James McCune Smith back home from Europe, praising him as a sterling example of individual black achievement. “As it is,” the writer asserted, “all things are becoming new. The people who long sat in darkness, now have the Heavenly light, and intend to give ocular demonstration of the fact, in patronizing Dr. Smith.”
⁵
Although there were others, Smith was already emerging as an undisputed leader of New York’s black community. He could be found everywhere, and his voice could be heard at all times, proposing, arguing, counterattacking.

After paying homage to Smith’s accomplishments, the
Colored American
editorial proceeded to consider what black New Yorkers could achieve as a group. “We can, and we intend,” the editorial insisted, “(so far as we think it good policy to have separate institutions) to support our moral, literary, and domestic establishments.” In other words, we must set about founding and nurturing our own community organizations—whether newspapers, literary societies, political associations, and the like.

Although a seemingly simple promise, the editorial was loaded with ambiguities. Who were the “we”? What was meant by “all things becoming new”? Why insist on “separate institutions”? What made “good policy”?

The “we” were the “old heads” of the community—tradesmen like Boston Crummell and Thomas Downing, and educators like John Peterson and Ransom Wake. But they were now joined by Mulberry Street School graduates, James McCune Smith, Peter and his two new brothers-in-law, and others. Following the conventions of the period, the organizations were closed to women. They were venues where New York’s black men met to discuss how best to gain and exercise what they
called their “manhood rights”: the right to vote and serve in the military; the duty to agitate for these rights; economic opportunity; protection of family and community; improved education of the young. Women were relegated to the background, sometimes invited to attend, rarely to speak, and never permitted to become officers. They struggled to create organizations of their own.

In creating separate institutions, men of the black elite decisively rejected the paternalistic benevolence of white philanthropists like the Mulberry Street School trustees who demanded gratitude, obedience, and worst of all humility as a reward for their largesse. Separate institutions, elite men affirmed, would encourage black New Yorkers to become autonomous and self-reliant, to control their own agenda and course of action. “We,” these black men insisted, are quite capable of fighting slavery, eradicating racial discrimination, obtaining an education, and achieving citizenship without the intervention of whites, however well intentioned.

The wording of the
Colored American
editorial—“so far as we think it good policy”—suggested choice, implying that community leaders could decide whether they wanted separate institutions or not. This was not always the case, however. With so few material resources, autonomy was often a mere abstraction, and black institutions were frequently obliged to accept funds from white philanthropists, the Lorillards, the Tappans, and others. The phrase also intimated that black leaders were not so sure separate institutions made good policy. From a pragmatic point of view, they could argue that since theirs was an impoverished community they could ill afford to sever ties with white benefactors. But they might also caution that if they could not always count on help from whites, or if help came with too many strings attached, separate institutions were, insofar as possible, good policy. But then again, it might not be: separation might reinforce the idea that a deep, fixed, and unbridgeable gulf existed between the two races.

Finally, the
Colored American
editorial boldly proclaimed that “all things are becoming new.” What were these things, and were they truly new? At pains to distinguish itself from the “old heads” and to establish the legitimacy of its leadership, the younger generation of Mulberry Street School graduates was perhaps overstating its case. But just
as the years leading up to emancipation in 1827 had been crucial for debates about black identity, so were the years surrounding 1840 when black New Yorkers reexamined and crystallized their ideas about what it meant to be black Americans.

New York blacks gave themselves a new name. Asserting the Americanness of their people, they eschewed the term “African” in favor of “colored American.” Only a few among them, Boston Crummell for example, could claim Africa as a birthplace. For most, the African past was several generations removed and their African identity increasingly attenuated. To sort out their allegiances, they turned to the doctrine of Ethiopianism, a cyclical view of African history that derived its name from Psalm 68, line 31: “Princes shall come out of Egypt, and Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God.” According to this theory, the continent’s early history had been one of great kingdoms and civilizations, yet its present was one of degradation caused by European invasion, African enslavement, and the deleterious effects of the slave trade—depopulation, internal conflict—and yes, heathenism. In time, however, economic development and the civilizing influence of Christianity would restore Africa to its former greatness. So for the present black New Yorkers identified with the country of their birth, while recognizing—always with pride—their special heritage.