Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (20 page)

On what side soever we turn our eyes, in search of the principal pursuits which employ the enterprizing part of mankind, we find a great portion of them engaged in toiling up the rugged ascent of the “Hill of Science,” each bearing some mental tribute to the shrine of “Wisdom’s Temple,” placed on its lofty summit. Yet in this search of the mind’s eye, we turn in vain to find among the aspirants of wisdom a proportionate number of our own race, sharing the toils of ascension
with their more ambitious neighbors, or contributing their mite to the offering of nations. This want of energy and spirit, (too degrading to be endured by rational beings) having at length engaged the attention of a few associates, determined to erase the inglorious record of the past by an active future, they hereby solemnly engage to support.

Peter and his co-authors then proceeded to invite New York’s young men of color to join the society. The only requirements, they assured them, were the possession of good character and an agreement to donate half a dozen volumes to the library. Working collaboratively, they would fulfill the society’s goal of elevating “the colored man to the level of high moral and mental attainments” through the expansion of the library, discussion groups, and lecture series.
¹⁷

The Philomathean Society’s lectures were reason enough to leave home on any given evening for Philomathean Hall. Several years earlier, the society had launched a highly successful series shortly after James McCune Smith’s return from Scotland. Taking advantage of his presence, organizers were able to attract other lecturers who replicated the best aspects of the Mulberry Street School curriculum. Peter was undoubtedly in the audience, accompanied perhaps by former schoolmates Edward Marshall, Albro Lyons, Isaiah DeGrasse, and the Reason brothers. By and large, the lecture topics were not political or racial, but broadly literary and scientific. The goal was to enhance the audience’s knowledge of western science and culture. Representing Peter’s schoolmates were Smith, who spoke on “Organs of the Senses,” “Circulation of the Blood,” and “Phrenology,” and DeGrasse, who addressed the topic of “Evidences of Christianity.” In addition, there were speeches on such general subjects as chemistry, history, geography, and logic. Ransom Wake gave a lecture on “Oratorical Delivery” in which he argued that to be effective orators African Americans needed to study not only literary examples and rhetorical devices but delivery as well.
¹⁸

The series that Peter and his friends organized in 1841 was just as intellectually stimulating. Subjects ranged from the aesthetic—sacred music, for example—to topics more concerned with racial uplift and
political organization: the “character and capability of colored men,” “power and influence of union,” “popular reform.” In one of his presentations, Charles Reason combined the literary and the political. Placing himself in the tradition of his favorite poets Milton and Wordsworth, he argued his case in a poem titled “The Spirit Voice, Or, Liberty Call to the Disfranchised” in which he imagined that this voice

’Tis calling you, who now too long have been

Sore victims suffering under legal sin,

To vow, no more to sleep, till raised and freed

From partial bondage, to a life indeed.
¹⁹

The early black elite has been charged with race betrayal, with selling its birthright, its African heritage, for a mess of pottage—western culture. There are several possible responses to such attacks. The first is that this emerging elite was not engaged in “aping,” as black Philadelphia writer Frances Watkins Harper would later put it, but in “imitation.” Aping, in Harper’s words, was “servile or abject mimicking,” while imitation strove for the improvement of self and the larger community.
²⁰
Much like other American groups, members of the elite were merely imitating—adapting to their own purposes—the culture of the nation into which they were born, to which they insisted they belonged, and in which they claimed citizenship. And, as many intuited, imitation could readily lead to competition, to the urge to rival and outdo the originators.

The second response invites us to consider that those in the black elite read and absorbed the works of classical writers and poets, political philosophers, musicians, and artists because doing so brought them sheer aesthetic pleasure, made them delight in the beauty of phrases and images, the musicality of sound, the inspired power of finely crafted arguments, the solace of ritual. In acquiring cosmopolitan culture, elite blacks were able to think of themselves in terms that included, but went
beyond, that of “colored American.” It allowed them to imagine an ideal world—a world without borders, a global community of voluntary citizens hungry for open cultural and intellectual exchange. In this sense, cosmopolitanism became a tool for negotiating what W. E. B. Du Bois would later call the dilemma of “double consciousness,” of being simultaneously Negro and American. If black Americans were cosmopolitans, citizens of the world, they could without contradiction claim to be both African-descended
and
citizens of the United States.

Certainly, nobody could accuse James McCune Smith of aping.

Full of intellectual fervor, Smith struggled to define what he called the “destiny” of his people in three major documents: a lecture, “The Destiny of Our People,” delivered as part of the 1841 Philomathean Society lecture series that Peter and his colleagues deemed so significant they insisted on publishing it; some seven speeches on the Haitian Revolution printed in pamphlet form in 1841; and a series of articles that appeared in the
New York Daily Tribune
in 1843 titled “Freedom and Slavery for Afric-Americans,” rebutting claims that blacks were worse off in freedom than in slavery. In his political speeches, Smith based his arguments on the universal rights of citizenship. In contrast, in these essays and lectures, he asserted that God had endowed African-descended peoples with a special destiny: the redemption of their race, their nations, and perhaps the world.

Smith began by debunking commonplace myths about the innate inferiority of the African race. First addressing the question of origins, he summarily dismissed polygenesist notions of separate species to affirm the “unity of the human race.” He then proceeded to turn racist stereotypes on their head, suggesting that it was black Americans, not whites, who were upholding the democratic ideals on which the Republic was founded. As he proceeded, Smith evinced an amazing ability to manipulate different kinds of discourses, ranging from religious pathos to historical example to statistical analysis. He was in fact speaking
out of a double faith, “which holds first to the Bible, and secondly, to American institutions, which have made us free, which will free our brethren in bonds, and which will be triumphant in pulling down the strongholds of tyranny throughout our globe.”
²¹

“The Destiny of Our People” is shot through with biblical references and religious ideals. Unlike the ancient Jews who never thought of Egypt as home, Smith argued, black Americans were attached through their blood and their tears to the soil of their birthplace; hence, they should not emigrate, but should remain in the United States. Their destiny was to convert the “form” of the current American government into “substance,” to “purify” it by replacing slavery and oppression with liberty. They would do so by following the guidelines set by Christ, relying on “right” rather than “might,” and “good” rather than “evil.” And their weapon would be that of reason: “as physical force is out of the question, the effort must be purely intellectual, and in order to maintain the struggle we must qualify ourselves to reason down the prejudices which bar us from rights.”
²²

It might seem paradoxical that Smith chose the Haitian Revolution, whose bloodiness had been widely reported throughout the world, as an example of New World blacks’ use of reason to gain their rights. But by means of careful historical investigation, Smith led his readers through the different stages of the rebellion, countering conventional interpretations by arguing that on every occasion black violence had been a legitimate defensive response to assaults by whites. When white Haitians rose up in opposition to granting citizenship to the free colored population, self-defense by the latter was fully justified. It was only when whites reacted to these defensive measures “with a recklessness of purpose truly diabolical,” toward both free and enslaved blacks, that slaves “first manifested a disposition to revolt.” “Be it remembered,” Smith insisted, “that this insurrection was the legitimate fruit of slavery, against which it was a spontaneous rebellion. It was … the consequence of withholding from men their liberty.” In a final reversal of conventional thinking, Smith argued that Toussaint L’Ouverture’s leadership of the rebellion indisputably proved that
he
was the true democrat; it was this educated former slave who, through constitutional means, endeavored
to grant the rights of liberty, equality, and fraternity to every Haitian.
²³

The main problem, as Smith saw it, was one of perception. As ignorant as they were prejudiced, whites made assumptions about blacks based on misperceptions. They automatically believed the historical accounts that portrayed Haitian slaves as savages engaged in senseless acts of violence. And they readily accepted the erroneous data of the 1840 U.S. census that indicated that southern slaves were better off than free blacks in the North. In “Freedom and Slavery for Afric-Americans,” Smith responded head on. Using sophisticated statistical analysis, he proved that free blacks had greater longevity and lower mortality rates than slaves, and did not suffer from the degree of insanity claimed by the census. To the extent that blacks lived in degraded conditions, it was because racial prejudice had instilled in them the belief that they were naturally inferior, then mocked their ignorance, and caused them to abandon all educational pursuits.

“Urged by a bloodless revolution,” however, free blacks
had
established schools, literary societies, newspapers, churches, and benevolent associations, and sent a number of youths to institutions of higher education. Smith concluded by chastising white Americans for their failure to recognize black achievement, and specifically the existence of an elite class—to which he and his friends belonged—similar to their own.

Men of narrow views and limited information are apt to conceive that society and refinement are confined to the little heaven in which they are privileged to “thunder,” regarding all as outcasts—
barbaroi
—who are not embraced within their charmed environ: such men cannot perceive that there is around every intelligent “home,” all the elements of refined manners and dignified deportment. There are, thank heaven, a thousand such homes among the free blacks of the free States—homes, in which the sounds of “my wife,” “my child,” “my mother,” “my Father,” “
my Bible
,” and their thousand clustering joys, weave the sweet harmonies of content and happiness.
²⁴

The Philomathean Society did not so much die as transform itself into something else. An 1885 obituary of the recently deceased John Peterson, published in the
New York Freeman
, noted that in his youth the venerable old man had been an early member of the Philomathean Society. Then in 1843, the obituary explained, one Peter Ogden “was delegated to go to England to procure a charter to open a lodge of Odd Fellows in this city which he returned with and the first lodge of colored Odd Fellows, Philomathean 646, was opened March 1, 1843.”
²⁵
A second lodge named after William Hamilton followed soon thereafter.

Black secret societies were nothing new. By 1826, four Masonic lodges had been established in the city. Both Odd Fellowship and Freemasonry gripped the imagination of New York’s black men. Their membership rolls soon swelled and included many former Philomatheans. James McCune Smith, Thomas and George Downing, and James Fields joined the Odd Fellows, while Peter, Charles Reason, and Samuel Cornish affiliated with Freemasonry. Some—like John Peterson and Patrick Reason—belonged to both orders.
²⁶
Evidently, participation in one did not preclude the other. Like the literary societies that preceded them, these organizations were managed by men of the elite who served as masters and grand masters, but remained open to any man willing to abide by the rules of the orders. They were in effect safe places where all black men were free to assert their manhood in word, behavior, and deed.

It’s difficult to talk about either of these organizations because both are shrouded in secrecy, necessary, they maintained, to prevent imposture by hostile outsiders. Their overlapping membership suggests that they were in fact quite similar. Both grew out of conditions of U.S. racism. After being rejected by U.S. Freemasonry, Philadelphian Prince Hall traveled to England to ask the English Grand Lodge to charter the first African Lodge, which it did in 1784. Some sixty years later Peter Ogden was forced to do the same for black Odd Fellowship. Although details remain murky, both orders claimed ancient and universal origins: the Odd Fellows variously dated themselves back to the Goths
or to a fifteenth-century order established in London; the Freemasons claimed King Solomon’s temple, the Parthenon, Jacob’s well, and the Pyramids as early Masonic sites.
²⁷
Much like black Episcopalians’ immersion in the Anglican Communion, members of these secret societies were asserting their right to participate in ancient, cosmopolitan traditions broader than those of enslavement and Americanization.

Both Freemasons and Odd Fellows insisted that they were motivated by two beliefs: the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man. The first ensured that members of the orders would abide by the “eternal principles” that also guided Christianity: love and truth. The second emphasized “universal fraternity.” For blacks, this notion had special resonance. It affirmed not only the brotherhood of lodge members but even more importantly that of men of all races. These abstract principles had practical application. One was mutual relief—the obligation to provide for the sick and pay the burial costs of deceased members and their families. Another was moral self-improvement, the duty to engage in honest industry, avoid intemperance, cultivate an irreproachable character, and exhibit dignified behavior at all times.