Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (21 page)

So what differentiated the two orders in this early period of their existence? It was a question of emphasis. Odd Fellowship stressed mutual relief, envisioning itself as a vast society that endeavored to extend aid far beyond its own membership. Grounding their identity in their original trade as builders, Freemasons saw themselves as skilled artisans, and referred to their activities as the Craft. To a greater extent than Odd Fellows, they emphasized the importance of individual labor, which, when accompanied by a strong work ethic, would eventually lead to greater opportunities in education, entrepreneurship, and property ownership.
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What did black women think? They were not pleased.

In 1853, the anonymous “Charlotte K—” penned several letters to
Frederick Douglass’ Paper
, a national newspaper published out of Rochester with a broader subscription base than the earlier New York papers.
In them, she agonizingly relived the havoc Peter Ogden’s actions had caused in the black community. Before he brought the Odd Fellows to New York, there had been

two Literary Societies in active operation, giving public lectures, debates, etc., to which we women folks were admitted. I can assure you those were pleasant times! Our beaux gallanted us to and from the meetings (at one of which I became acquainted with my first husband); and our social circle, especially at tea parties on Sunday evenings, felt the impulse and the culture which flowed from the eloquent and earnest discussions.

But Odd Fellowship ended women’s participation in community cultural life and, Charlotte K lamented, destroyed her “domestic happiness” as well. Her husband

was out every night; on Monday he went to the Philomathean Lodge; on Tuesday to the Hamilton; Wednesday, the Hannibal; Thursday, the Council; Friday, to a Committee meeting on the regalia, or the constitution; Saturday night he had to sit with a sick brother; and Sunday nights, instead of pleasant tea drinkings, he sought male society to discuss “the Order” in some segar or drug shop in the fifth ward. I cannot tell you how much I suffered from this continual neglect, this cruel slight.

The sad irony, she concluded, was that the Odd Fellows actually violated their own principles. They neglected and impoverished their own families by catering to the needs of members and spending too much money on the lodges’ balls, suppers, and costly regalia.
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A testy George Downing shot back. The literary societies, he suggested, were already dead. If not quite yet, “it would have been an act of mercy to relieve the Philomathean Society in its dying struggles.” Neither should Odd Fellowship be held responsible for all the social extravagance of those years; in truth it had held noble aspirations. Interestingly
enough, however, at no point in his letter did Downing defend his erstwhile lodge.

In this same letter, Downing suggested that the Philomathean Society’s only hope for survival was “the Ladies’ Literary Society [which] came to save it, but was carried down. … It had been but at best a ghostly existence.” The phrase “ghostly existence” aptly describes New York’s black female societies of the period, for their traces have all but vanished from the archives. If information about the African Dorcas Society of the late 1820s has been preserved, this is undoubtedly because of its male leadership in its early days. Yet we still know so little about the black women who eventually took it over—Isaiah DeGrasse’s mother, Maria, Peter Williams’s sister Mary,
Colored American
editor Charles Ray’s wife, Henrietta, and her good friend Hester Lane.
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And what do we know of the women who founded the Ladies’ Literary Society in 1834? Precious little. We need to thank Samuel Cornish for naming Henrietta Ray “one of its brightest stars” in an elaborate eulogy he published at her death. An intimate friend, Cornish chose to emphasize Henrietta’s religious character, in particular her forbearance in the face of suffering, but said little about the society.
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I wondered what Charles Ray thought of his wife’s activities. How much support did he give her? I found no information. Ray, I knew, was struggling over the question of women’s participation in male-dominated political organizations. In 1840, he agreed with those in Garrison’s American Anti-Slavery Society who believed that women—white and black—should have the right to be officeholders, and had actually put forth the name of his late wife’s associate Hester Lane, only to have her rejected. But a mere year later he vociferously (and successfully) opposed the proposal that women be allowed into the Troy Convention as observers, insisting that a man could “do more work abroad without a wife than with her.”
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Maybe he was relieved that Henrietta had confined herself to more modest, feminine endeavors.

Perhaps in continued homage of Henrietta, Cornish reported extensively on the Ladies’ Literary Society’s third anniversary celebration held a few months after her death. There were readings, addresses, recitation of poems, music. I recognized the names of some of the participants because of their relation to prominent men in the community:
Maria DeGrasse, Miss Crummell, John Peterson’s daughter Rebecca. But other names meant nothing to me: Eliza Richards, Fanny Tompkins, Sarah Ennalls. Cornish chose to reprint only one address titled “On the Improvement of the Mind.” Its sentiments replicated those of black male leaders in their emphasis on black self-improvement and achievement.

It is now a momentous time, a time that calls us to exert all our powers, and among the many of them, the mind is the greatest, and great care should be taken to improve it with diligence. … Neglect will plunge us into deeper degradation, and keep us groveling in the dust, while our enemies will rejoice and say, we do not believe they (colored people) have any minds; if they have, they are unsusceptible of improvement. … Awake and slumber no more—arise, put on your armor, ye daughters of America, and stand forth in the field of improvement.
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Other than the Ladies’ Literary Society, few black female organizations seem to have existed in New York at this time, and most of them—the Daughters of Wesley, the Female Branch of Zion, the Female Mite Society, the Daughters of Israel—were church related. Their absence from the historical record is especially puzzling given black women’s vibrant presence in community affairs in cities like Boston, Philadelphia, Salem, and Rochester. I was faced with a question. Had New York’s black women not been activists? Or had they been, but all trace of their endeavors simply disappeared from the archives?
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In the late 1870s, Alexander Crummell offered his version of the matter in a testimonial he wrote on behalf of Maria Stewart, a Boston activist and writer who had so antagonized that city’s black community with charges of do-nothingism in the early 1830s that she was practically run out of town, whereupon she moved to New York. Crummell remembered returning from Oneida Institute with Garnet and Sidney and being surprised on meeting Stewart to find “a young woman of my own people full of literary aspiration and ambitious authorship. In those days,” he continued, “the desire for learning was almost exclusively confined
to colored young men. There were a few young women in New York who thought of higher things, and it was a surprise to find another added to their number.”
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Crummell’s comment reeks of condescension; it suggests that New York’s black women lacked intellectual ambition, thought only of lower things, and were responsible for their own inaction. But these women were constrained. For one, many cities in the Northeast had active interracial female antislavery societies that were key in launching the public careers of women like Susan Paul in Boston or Henrietta Forten and Sarah Mapps Douglass in Philadelphia; perhaps because of the city’s strong ties to the South, such societies did not take hold in New York. For another, to a much greater extent than its counterparts elsewhere, New York’s black leadership devoted much of its energy to two causes—the restitution of black male suffrage and entrepreneur-ship—that relegated women to the sidelines.

In the late 1830s, black porter Peter Paul Simons tried to come to the rescue of the womenfolk in his community. In a speech delivered before the Daughters of Wesley, he decried the damage done to black women by those who looked down on their intellectual abilities. “Those females who considers there grudgement less,” he affirmed in bizarre prose, “ought to be outcasts of all popular societies; for there influence might excite the same opinion, of self-incapability in many a promising damsel, and I sincerely contend, that where a female feels the inferiority, she is but a dead member to the intellectual and cultivated society of mankind.” Gender issues soon gave way to a debate about class. When Simons asked the
Colored American
editors Samuel Cornish and Philip Bell to publish his speech in their paper, they refused, calling it “worthless trash” that could not be understood “any more than if it had been Greek.” Simons counterattacked, accusing the elite of, well, elitism since he was not of “Glasgow College or of DeGrasse’s lineage,” and challenging the very notion of intellectual elevation.

Here are the two sides of the debate. The elite maintained that
literacy, education, knowledge, were
the
keys to success in America and hence virtues to which all black Americans should aspire. Not to do so indicated indifference to self-improvement, to the betterment of the community, and to proving the race’s intellectual capacities to white Americans. And so yes, they looked down their noses at men like Simons. For Simons, however, the inverse was true. The elite’s virtues were more like vices. Their emphasis on intellectual elevation was a sign of submissiveness to white society, an impediment to black progress, the cause of invidious “classes of distinction” within the community, and a hindrance to “our people from acting collectively for themselves.”
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It’s undeniable that the elite’s very language of “uplift” and “elevation” connoted inequality and hierarchy: a privileged class, convinced of the rightness of its own values, stooping down to raise the masses to their level. In fact, some could argue that the elite was doing nothing other than replicating the paternalistic agenda of white benefactors like the African Free Schools trustees, elevating the lower orders while simultaneously maintaining the social status quo. To these charges members of the elite responded that, first, uplift extended to
their
own continued self-improvement as well, and second, their efforts in the community proved that they had not, and would never, turn their backs on those less fortunate than they. To them, intellectual elevation was an expression of racial solidarity.

Simons was correct when he charged that the elite held education to be the key to black advancement. It was here that New York’s black women found their calling, teaching in the city’s schools for colored children right alongside black men.

The schools were not doing well. In 1833, the Manumission Society had ceded control of the African Free Schools to the newly established Public School Society (the predecessor of the Board of Education), arguing that this transfer would result in “a more efficient and regular supervision of them, … a greater economy of expenditure, more uniformity in the system of instruction and probably a more general
interest in the welfare and melioration of the children.” A couple of years into the experiment, however, the society acknowledged that the schools were neither efficacious nor useful. None of the rationales had borne fruit. Despite the controversy over Charles Andrews, black parents remained loyal to the Manumission Society, convinced that it had always had the best interests of their children at heart. They were outraged when the Public School Society demoted all the schools except one to the level of primary schools and decided to discontinue the use of spelling books. They were equally furious when they discovered that black teachers were paid less than their white counterparts, and even more so when several were dismissed.

But the Public School Society did do some good. It acceded to the black community’s request to change their schools’ name from “African” to “Colored,” in keeping with black New Yorkers’ shift in identity.
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And it hired an ever increasing number of black teachers. The records kept by the society consist mainly of lists—of schools, of teachers, of pay. Names of male teachers such as John Peterson and Charles Reason are familiar because we know about their other community activities. But the same can’t be said of women teachers. Here’s a list from 1838:

Public school no. 1: Caroline Roe, teacher; Elizabeth Roe, assistant

Public school no. 2: Eliza Richards and Sarah Ennalls, teachers, Maria Stewart, assistant

Primary school no. 3: Maria DeGrasse, teacher

Primary school no. 4: Fanny Tompkins, teacher

Primary school no. 5: Rebecca Peterson, teacher.
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Many of the names overlap with those of participants in the Ladies’ Literary Society celebration. That suggested to me that in their own way these women
were
community leaders; but in contrast to their male counterparts, and with the exception of the notorious Maria Stewart, their lives were indeed unobtrusive.

By 1837, only one out of four black children attended school. This state of affairs was not acceptable to New York’s black leaders. Although they knew the community had few financial resources, their commitment
to education as the path to black achievement never wavered. Relying on their own human resources, they set about creating a private school system that ranged from tutoring in specialized subjects to evening schools to academies that offered a comprehensive curriculum.