Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (25 page)

In the summer of 1829, the city’s most reputable pharmacists gathered together at the Shakespeare Tavern. The purpose: to establish a College of Pharmacy modeled after the one in Philadelphia. The reason: to create a better educated class of pharmacists than presently existed in the city. For much of the nineteenth century, pharmacy occupied a fluid status midway between trade and profession. No special training was required to become a druggist and no restrictive legislation existed to regulate the compounding and selling of drugs. The Pharmacopoeia and Dispensatory were merely tools that the pharmacist could choose to use—or not. Pharmacy was seen as an entrepreneurial field in which an ambitious young man—of any class, ethnicity, and, it would seem, race—could readily make a name for himself.
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Many aspects of the current state of pharmacy disturbed the college’s
founders. One was the vast numbers of nostrums, or quack drugs, that flooded the market. Another was the poor quality of legitimate drugs, a number of which were imported from abroad. In the mid-1840s, members of the college conducted a vigorous campaign against the “Blue Pill” brought from England and containing so little mercury as to render it useless. Additionally, despite the availability of the Pharmacopoeia and Dispensatory, drug formularies varied widely, and too many pharmacists remained ignorant of advances in pharmaceutical chemistry. Most troubling of all was the high incidence of deaths due to accidental drug poisoning. The college’s founders were convinced that the study and practice of pharmacy should and could be modernized. They set up a course of study for aspiring students who, after graduation, would be eligible to become members of the college, which now served as a professional association for New York’s pharmacists.
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To be admitted to the college as a student, Philip needed to fulfill a two-year apprenticeship and take one full course of study. Once accepted, he followed a two-year curriculum consisting of three subjects. Philip was fortunate because his two professors were men of great distinction newly appointed to the college. Laurence Reid from the University of Edinburgh taught chemistry; he served on the college’s Committee of Inspection and helped expose the fraudulent “Blue Pill.” Benjamin McCready was professor of both pharmacy and materia medica. Whereas pharmacy dealt with the preparation and dispensing of drugs, materia medica covered much the same terrain as the U.S. Dispensatory, listing all the names of plants and describing their origins, parts, and properties.
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Students typically found the course dry and didactic, but with all his prior reading of the Dispensatory, Philip probably thought it quite easy.

The requirements for graduation were straightforward: students needed to show proof of an additional two years of apprenticeship (four in all) and satisfactory performance in all courses. In addition, they were required to present an “original thesis on some article of the Materia Medica, or a chemical analysis of some substance conducted by himself,” and take an oral examination administered by the professors. A two-thirds vote by the trustees present was necessary to pass.
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Out of
an entering class of twenty-eight, Philip was one of four graduating students.

Philip Augustus White

I wondered about the college’s racial politics and hoped I would come across some mention of Philip in its archives. The problem was that I couldn’t find any records, and historians of American pharmacy told me they had probably long since disappeared. I refused to give up, however, and when I was informed that the Wisconsin Historical Society held the most comprehensive pharmacy archives in the nation, I decided to take a trip to Madison. My stubbornness paid off. The college’s papers were indeed there, and Philip’s name was indeed listed for both admission and graduation. There was no reference to Philip’s race. It appeared that the trustees were as progressive in matters of race as they were in their profession. I attributed such racial tolerance to pharmacy’s entrepreneurial nature, its emphasis on ambition and industriousness
over social background, and its internationalism. Several trustees were of European parentage or had themselves immigrated to the United States; if American born, they had traveled abroad to train in French and German schools and may well have assimilated Europeans’ more tolerant racial attitudes.

But when I went back over the trustees’ minutes pertaining to graduation, I found myself reading between the lines. Who was Secretary John Meakim referring to when he wrote in the March 14, 1844, minutes that “the secretary presented the name of an additional candidate for the diploma,” and then listed the four students? Was the addition Philip or one of the other young men? And was there any particular reason why the members’ meeting for conferring the degrees was postponed from March 21 to March 28 for lack of a quorum? Finally, should any particular significance be attached to the fact that Meakim did not leave enough space to write the names of all four candidates on one line, but had to make an insertion above it?
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I can only speculate. Meakim’s note might have been totally innocent, or it could have referred to any one of the other candidates. Yet it’s also possible that the trustees had not fully thought through the implications of Philip’s admission. The college’s graduation rates were low because there were no real incentives—financial or professional—to obtain a pharmacy diploma. Unaware of Philip’s decided character, the trustees may have assumed that he would be one of the many students who would drop out, and were caught up short when he fulfilled all the requirements. Maybe, after considerable deliberation, they concluded that their only ethical choice was to grant him the degree. If so, they were determined to handle the consequences more carefully. By May of that year, two of Philip’s fellow graduates were accepted as members of the college; it would take my great-grandfather thirty years.

By 1847, Philip had opened his own drugstore and placed a simple advertisement in the very first issue of Frederick Douglass’s
North Star
, right below that of James McCune Smith: “Philip A. White, Druggist, corner of Frankfort and Gold Street.”
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That was the very same spot where his father had kept his grocery for one brief year in the 1830s. The landlord might have remembered the White family and been happy to
rent to Thomas’s son, viewing the serious, hard-working young man as a model tenant. Philip kept that corner location until his death in 1891.

I don’t think that Philip counted on financial aid from others. Some five years later at an interracial antislavery convention, James McCune Smith angrily charged white abolitionists with having consistently failed to help blacks in need. He cited “the case of a smart young man who had been an apprentice in his drug store, and he got his diploma in colleges. He asked $500 from John Rankin to assist him. It was refused.”
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John Rankin was the same man who had joined forces with the Tappan brothers at the Chatham Street Chapel when their activism touched off the 1834 riots. That young man might well have been Philip White.

In the February 11, 1848, issue of the
North Star
, Bostonian William C. Nell recorded his impressions of a visit to New York, noting with great pride that he had “visited the Apothecary’s Hall of Dr. James McCune Smith, in West Broadway, as also the establishment of Mr. Philip White in Frankfort Street, both of whom are practical men and conduct their business, preparing medicines, etc., etc., etc. with as much readiness and skill as any other disciple of Galen and Hippocrates. … [They] are proving their capacity, as I believe, to their pecuniary benefit, and at the same time thus elevating the character of those with whom they are identified by complexion.” Some four years later, writing to
Frederick Douglass’ Paper
(the successor to the
North Star
) under the pen name Ethiop, Brooklyn schoolteacher William J. Wilson reiterated much the same sentiments: “Quite a combination of enterprising blacks are beginning to appear. They begin to take their places in every pursuit about town and country; and as their thoughts and sympathies partake of their varied and independent occupations, they naturally form an active and efficient business class.” Ethiop then added one new word. “I call it,” he pronounced, “an
ARISTOCRACY
.”
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As he built up his pharmaceutical practice, Philip joined other
enterprising blacks to help form this black aristocracy. In many respects, their origins, methods, and values were similar to those of early Knickerbockers. Despite stark differences in race, educational level, and socioeconomic status, both groups constituted what George Foster, the city’s greatest observer of the day, termed a “shopkeeping aristocracy.”
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This new aristocracy was by and large better educated, more professional, and more entrepreneurial than that of William Hamilton’s generation. I was astonished by the number of men of science it contained, drawn perhaps to pharmacy and medicine not only because of the money that could be made but also because of the skills demanded, the prestige accrued, and most importantly the power to heal. Besides Smith, Peter Guignon, and Philip, there were also two doctors, Peter’s new brother-in-law, Peter Williams Ray, and the youngest DeGrasse son, John, both determined to defy the unwritten rules through which the medical profession policed its borders.

Beyond science, the elite included other professions: teachers like Charles Reason, Ransom Wake, and John Peterson; ministers like Charles Ray and Alexander Crummell; businessmen like engraver Patrick Reason, Peter Vogelsang, manager of steamers on the Albany line, jewelry dealer Edward Clarke, pickle maker Henry Scott, and restaurateur Thomas van Rensselaer. But the elite was broad enough to encompass tradesmen who, Maritcha wrote in her memoir, held jobs as “carpenters, undertakers, printers, shoemakers, tinsmiths, crockery and china ware dealers.” To make ends meet, women often worked outside the home. Maritcha’s mother was a hairdresser before her marriage. After she was widowed, Grandmother Marshall converted the basement of her home into a bakery, and later decided “to work abroad to support herself and family.” “She always said her employers were of the ‘quality,’” Maritcha continued. “Five days a week she toiled outside of her home, Saturdays she reserved for domestic duties; on Sunday, she kept the ‘sabbath’; this meant a scrupulous avoidance of all but the most necessary secular labor.”
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Although wealthier than the earlier generation, this new black aristocracy obviously never made as much money or achieved similar status in trade or profession as their white counterparts. Moses Beach’s
1855 compilation of New York’s wealthiest citizens listed Peter Lorillard Jr. as worth $2 million. Reliable accounts of black wealth are harder to come by. Like the Knickerbockers, the black aristocracy understood that, just as much as personal income, investment in real estate was a path to wealth. Boyd’s Tax Book for 1856 and 1857 valued Philip White’s real estate at $9,300, Henry Scott’s at $9,125, James McCune Smith’s at $7,734, and Charles Ray’s at $3,000. A report from the late 1850s claimed that the total value of the real estate on which the thousand most prominent black citizens paid taxes was $1.4 million, while the total of their deposits in savings banks was estimated at $1.12 million. Added together, the amount was barely more than that of Peter Lorillard alone.
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Many of course had much less, and all remained conscious of the fragility of their financial status. Peter and Cornelia Guignon, we may remember, were unable to repay Albro Lyons’s loan.

This new elite was determined to prove to whites that they were just as capable of succeeding in what New York valued the most—entrepreneurship. So, to a greater extent than William Hamilton’s generation, but much like their Knickerbocker counterparts, they preached a Protestant gospel of hard work, asserting that business was
the
path to success, and that trade and profit were
the
most efficacious means of garnering respect and, in due course, political and civil equality.

Wealth, however, was not the most important criterion for admission to the elite. Its members still cherished the traditional values of “character” and “respectability.” Character meant not only cultivating what James Fields had called “decision,” but also promoting piety, temperance, moral development. Respectability was the outward manifestation of character, conduct marked by sobriety, modesty, industriousness. And, despite what historians like to say, skin color had little to do with respectability. True, Philip was so light-skinned he could pass for white, but Crummell, Garnet, and Wilson were very dark, and Smith was somewhere in the middle.

Elite men bonded in all-male venues such as the African Society for Mutual Relief as well as Freemasonry and Odd Fellowship, which Philip had just joined. They further cemented these bonds through matrimonial ties, marrying within their class. Many unions resulted from connections
made at the African Free School; Peter and Albro married the Marshall daughters, sisters of their former classmate Edward. George Downing and Peter Vogelsang were also married to sisters, Downing to Serena DeGrasse and Vogelsang to Theodocia (named after Aaron Burr’s daughter). Their families worshiped at particular churches and formed their own social circles.