Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (26 page)

Looking back on her childhood, Maritcha explained how the elite’s social life depended on “a main general distinction—persons attending the same church usually confined their intimate intercourse with members of that congregation.” For most, that church was St. Philip’s. Peter Guignon and Philip White worshiped there, as did many of the Mulberry Street School graduates—James McCune Smith, Alexander Crummell, Isaiah DeGrasse, Albro Lyons, George Downing, the Reason brothers, to name but a few. It was at St. Philip’s that Peter married Rebecca (and Albro married Mary Joseph) in 1840. And it was there that after the tragic death of his son in 1865 “the natural ardor of the man,” according to Crummell’s obituary, “quickened into a religious zeal,” making Peter one of its most valued members. It was at St. Philip’s that Philip White became a communicant in 1844. He remained, in Maritcha’s words, “an assiduous and devoted son of the church until his decease. For more than forty years, his time, thoughts, energies and resources were at the service of his spiritual mother. No event occurred without having the stamp of his individuality.”
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The city’s second largest black congregation, St. Philip’s was located in the middle of Centre Street. An 1840 report on colored churches noted that it was well placed for just about all black New Yorkers. The building itself was not the original one. The first structure, made of wood, burned to the ground shortly after being completed, and was replaced by a solid brick building. Badly damaged during the 1834 riot, by 1840 it was fully restored. The renovated church in the Federal style was approximately three thousand square feet, its exterior plain, without a steeple or cross. The sanctuary could hold up to 2,000 people even
though the congregation numbered only 350 members. The interior still lacked “all the modern improvements,” yet, the report insisted, it was “exceedingly neat and comfortable” and “characterized by simplicity, good taste and economy.”
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Many motives attracted the black elite to the Episcopal faith. Some were religious: the beauty of High Church rituals, the purity of its doctrines, the sense of belonging to an ancient and universal tradition that reached back to the first apostles. Others were more secular. St. Philip’s mother church, Trinity, was the place of worship for members of the white elite, George Lorillard and Philip Hone among them. Many of St. Philip’s early congregants had close ties to Trinity. In guarded language, Maritcha observed that the “quality” families at Trinity “employed exclusively colored servants. To these they were not merely masters and mistresses in the conventional sense, but guardians and censors of manners if not morals. In more than one case even a closer connection obtained.”
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Blacks who had such relationships might well have chosen to remain with the denomination of white family members. They might have hoped that continued religious association with the city’s governing elite might garner them political or social advantages.

In contrast to the Anglican Communion, the Episcopal Church was a fairly democratic institution. Laity voted with clergy on matters of importance. Parishioners were not taxed. Moreover, St. Philip’s itself was a big tent. If it was home to the black elite, it was also home to the black poor, welcoming the families of unskilled workers—laborers, porters, washers, bootcleaners, sailors, cartmen. Each individual, each family contributed according to their own abilities. Bricklayers and painters rebuilt the church. Cleaners and laundresses took responsibility for the condition of the carpets and the clergy’s vestments.

Still, it was the elite that governed St. Philip’s through election to the vestry. In 1840, “old heads” like Thomas Downing, Peter Ray, and Ransom Wake were vestrymen. But the younger generation was not far behind. James McCune Smith was elected to the vestry in 1843 and Philip White in 1850. Using the skills they had acquired in business, vestrymen oversaw church finances—buying and selling property, improving the church building, maintaining the cemetery, renting out pews, supporting the sick, needy, and destitute. They did so well that,
as Maritcha proudly declared, they “demonstrate[d] the governing capacity of a so-called under race; it show[ed] successful government of the people, by and for the people.”
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Maritcha’s memoir offers a rare and fascinating glimpse into the social lives of the black elite. It tells of the pleasures they enjoyed despite the harsh conditions under which they labored. And it emphasizes the special role of elite women in defining the boundaries, norms, and behavior of their class. “Among the friends of our family,” Maritcha wrote, “were two circles founded on personal preference; these were led respectively by Mrs. Clorice Esteve Reason [Charles Reason’s wife] and Mrs. Elizabeth West Bowers. The former gathered about her the studious and conservative and kept open house for all visitors of note; the latter was surrounded by the mirth of loving folks, young and old. In this coterie, not to have a good time was impossible. … To Mrs. Reason belonged the honor of being able to ‘hold a salon’; her strain of French blood made her a queen of entertainers and covered her with a taste in social functions that was irreproachable.”

Many pages later, Maritcha added a third woman, her mother, to her list: “Mother was the life of a minor group of young single and married folks who found in her a social woman whose company was as agreeable as when she was a maiden; with her it was possible to have a good time without ‘fuss and feathers.’ Her guests were frequent, they danced played or sung, played games or sewed for charity and all alike found many an opportunity to pass many delightful hours with her in the home where courtesy, sociability and friendliness reigned supreme.” It was permissible, Maritcha observed, for families to move from one circle to another: “No hard and fast lines were drawn, however, the same persons could be met, now in one circle, now in the other.” But outsiders were not welcome.
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Maybe one of Mary Joseph Lyons’s guests brought a friendship album on one of her visits. Like the salon, friendship albums were the
special province of elite women through which they created other, more diffuse social circles. The private possessions of a single person, these albums were nevertheless quasi-public documents, circulating from friend to friend, home to home, neighborhood to neighborhood, and even city to city. They functioned as yet another meeting place for members of the elite to display and promote the values they so cherished: respectability, character, modesty, literary knowledge. Owned exclusively by women, men were occasional contributors. Similar to scrapbooks, the albums were made up of various items—poems, essays, letters, water-colors—which dealt with the female themes of friendship, marriage, motherhood, domesticity, piety.

The few albums that have survived were kept by Philadelphia women in the late 1830s and early 1840s, a fact that once again underscores the greater absence of New York women from the archives. Black New Yorkers do appear in the albums, but only as contributors, not owners. One album belonged to Martina Dickerson and contains several poems submitted by Rebecca Peterson. Peter Williams Jr.’s daughter, Amy Matilda Cassey, who had moved from New York to Philadelphia after her marriage to the prominent merchant Joseph Cassey in 1828, owned a second album; its pages are graced by entries from four Mulberry Street School graduates, James McCune Smith, Isaiah DeGrasse, and the two Reason brothers.
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The very term friendship album connotes intimacy. If that’s true, these albums offer intimacy at a distance, once again refusing to shed light on the private, inner lives of nineteenth-century black New Yorkers. Whether contributed by women or men, the majority of the pieces were not original but copied from works of favorite writers. They tell us less about the personal emotions of the contributors and more about what they valued: literary knowledge of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors, the aesthetic sensibility their works reflected, and the moral values they embodied. Study Rebecca Peterson’s entries, for example. Whether original or not, her poem to Martina Dickerson on friendship is highly stylized, revealing little of her true feelings for her friend. The copied poem “On My Lady’s Writing” by Anna Barbauld is a commentary on proper feminine values. The poetic speaker praises the
lady’s penmanship, connecting its evenness to both her subject’s inner self—her steady temper and strong judgment—and her outer appearance of neat dress and graceful manners.
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The Reason brothers copied male authors. Charles excerpted lines from Wordsworth’s “Excursion” as well as from the lesser known Scottish poet Robert Pollock’s “The Course of Time,” which asserted that “true happiness had no localities; no tones provincial; no peculiar garb”; it resides instead wherever charity and sympathy are to be found. Patrick’s entry consisted of a paragraph from Washington Irving’s short story “The Wife.” In it, he deftly married originality to copying by reproducing Irving’s words in artistically fanciful characters. Yet his choice of story was itself impersonal, unless taken as a cautionary tale. It’s about a wealthy man’s fear of confessing to his young wife that he has lost all his money, and her loving acceptance when he finally does. This was not the Casseys’ fate, but perhaps Patrick was preparing Amy Matilda for that eventuality.

James McCune Smith and Isaiah DeGrasse submitted original pieces, but neither entry betrayed any personal feelings. Smith wrote a poem about Scotland’s river Clyde and its environs as a place of freedom. In a short essay, DeGrasse argued that far from being a religion of gloominess and despondency, Christianity was “nought but affability, cheerfulness, benevolence” visiting “alike palaces of grandeur and cottages of poverty.” His most intimate comment, if that’s what it can be called, came in his concluding paragraph: “Such is religion, and, Mrs. Cassey, may all its golden pleasures, and choicest blessings ever hover around, and breathe her hallowed influences within your delightful and hospitable dwelling.”
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Respectability invited simple pleasures, but extravagance was frowned upon. In one of his “Ethiop” columns in
Frederick Douglass’ Paper
, William J. Wilson described with a strange mixture of pride and repulsion the cultural excesses of the black community’s entertainment district, Church Street, “alias (black) Broadway”:

St Charles, St. Dennis, and Eldorado [hotels] are here. Talk not of your Astor, and your Irving House. In one respect, they are but the mere shadows; the substance is here. Pleasure here is neither mockery, nor is she mocked. Enter one of these resorts, and behold, for yourself, my dear sir. Rosewood and marble tables, spring sofas, and wilton covers, are scattered around in confused order; fashionable books, periodicals, and papers of the day, theatre bills and opera cards, are strewed about like autumn leaves. Easy chairs that yield to your touch, ere you are fairly seated in them; Billiard-tables, Pianos, Sporting-Rings, and Debating-Galleries; in fine, all the requisites for fancy gentlemen are here. Wealth may be found at your Astor, and your Irving, but easy negligence, careless abandonment and refined freedom may be studied here. … If you would know the height of fashion, you can as well learn it there, as in upper tendom. Patent leather boots and claret coats, tight pants and pointed collars, French wrappers, and Scotch shawls, diamond rings and studded breast-pins, gold watches and California chains, all are exhibited here, from finer forms, and with more taste, than above Bleecker Street. Better Wines and Claret, better Champaign, and Havannas are to be had here too. No smuggling in of second quality; all are good judges. Most of the whites of your Astor, Irving, Howard and like resorts, are fresh from the country. Money they have, but good judges of these luxuries, never.

Ethiop judged black Broadway and its “fancy gentlemen” superior in taste and refinement to white Broadway and the “upper tendom” (the elite of the elite) living above Bleecker Street. But he also looked askance at the confusion and carelessness that such high living engendered.

An appetite for luxury too easily resulted in the frittering away of energies needed for more serious endeavors. “Oh, sir,” Ethiop lamented, “if the inclination of these young men could be changed, if the congregated motive power could be made available, what might not be done in a very short space of time, for the improvement of our people! Here
are the requisites for a mighty people. Here are bone and muscle and intellect; and above all, life and vivacity; great power of endurance, notwithstanding this pernicious hot-house and pot-house culture.”
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Just as damaging was the possibility that white observers might deem such manifestations of black leisure proof of the racial stereotypes they held. In 1852, southern visitor William Bobo published a damning account of the goings-on of Church Street. “Suppose we go in,” he suggested, beckoning his readers into the St. Charles hotel. “Passing through a long dark passage we enter a drinking saloon. Here seated around a large table, sit a party of negroes, playing cards and drinking rum after the most approved style. The barkeeper is the proprietor. The others are gentlemen ‘ob town,’ who spend their leisure hours and dollars at the St. Charles Exchange. Some of these gents are moneyed men, and board at this hotel … probably with their ‘wife,’ upon the European manner of living.” Black New Yorkers, Bobo suggested, were totally devoid of respectability. To counter men like him, the black elite counseled a course of action similar to that of an 1837 resolution demanding that “it behooves us to place the most careful watch over our own demeanor, living down, by consistent and virtuous conduct, every charge which may be brought against us.”
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