Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (36 page)

The rioters came from the outside. There was nothing random about their attack. They were looters, shamelessly helping themselves to goods—or, to twist the writer’s words, “saving property”—that they could never have bought on their own. Yet that doesn’t begin to explain their vindictiveness. In 1834, a mob had attacked the Chatham Street Chapel because of its interracial activities. Similarly, the rioters now vented their rage at whites who they believed were giving so much to undeserving blacks, at their black beneficiaries who, if equipped with education and jobs, would increasingly become economic competitors, and at an institution that portended possibilities of interracial cooperation that would leave them out in the cold. Caught off guard by their ferocity and realizing that they themselves might be targets, the asylum’s neighbors did not (could not?) come to the rescue.

According to the
Tribune
, one or two anonymous bystanders did protest. Theirs was the first act of decency I had come across. There would be others. But in each case the kind rescuers remain shadowy, unnamed, unexplained figures. How had their sense of humanity prevailed over their fear of the mob’s violence? Why them, and not others? Was it simply another instance of the rule of whimsy at work?

I wondered what happened to individual members of the black elite. Were they immune from attack or not? Did class trump race? In the July 24 issue of the
Times
I came across an account of J. W. C. Pennington’s fate, which differed little from the others I had read thus far. Pennington had returned from out of town to find that “the mob had attacked my residence; my own, with other colored families, had been expelled and I was at once set upon by a mob with stones, brickbats, etc., with the shout, “Kill the d——d black neager, etc.” He fled and wandered around the city in search of his loved ones.

But was it not possible that New York neighborhoods might have functioned like small villages, where daily face-to-face contact with relatives and friends, but also with customers, tradesmen, co-workers, landlords, tenants, and the like gave rise to acceptance, camaraderie, even social intimacy? If so, did blacks still live among strangers who hated them? Did they not have neighbors who loved them, or at least tolerated them, and looked out for them when under siege?

In his sketch of Garnet’s life, James McCune Smith offered a short account of his friend’s fate during the draft riots:

The Rev. Mr. Garnet was too prominently known to escape the attention of the July rioters; they rushed down Thirtieth Street where he resided, loudly calling him by name. By the lucky forethought of his daughter who wrenched off the door-plate with an axe, his house escaped sacking, and his own life and that of his family were preserved by the kind acts of some white neighbors.
¹⁸

The mob came from outside Garnet’s neighborhood. Known to them by reputation, he was not quite a stranger; but neither was he a
neighbor since they couldn’t locate his exact address. Yet he had neighbors—nameless, faceless—who cared enough about his family to protect them.

For William Powell and Albro Lyons, conflict was inevitable. In the early 1850s, the two men had dissolved their partnership in the Colored Sailors’ Home on Pearl Street and gone their separate ways. But ten years later, they were both back living and working in their old Fourth Ward neighborhood. They must have rued the day they returned. By the early 1860s, the area had become increasingly working-class and Irish. Merchants still maintained businesses there but had moved their households to more distant residential enclaves. Irish longshoremen patrolled the port, determined to maintain their monopoly on dock work. Both Powell and Lyons had strong ties to the black community, but their neighborhood relationships were weak. The combination was combustible.

In the summer of 1851, Powell had made a bold move, sending what he deemed a “sensible petition” to the state legislature. He began by complaining that he and his family were being denied the benefits of U.S. citizenship, which should have been theirs by right for the following two reasons. The first was that his grandmother Elizabeth Barjona had been a cook for Congress during the revolutionary war and thus had helped further the cause of American independence. The second was that his father had been a slave, one of the many who had enriched the soil of his native land with his sweat and blood. Given their country’s refusal to recognize their rights as citizens, Powell requested funds to emigrate “to the Kingdom of Great Britain, where character not color—capacity and not complexion, are the tests of merit.”
¹⁹
The petition fell on deaf ears, yet by the end of 1851 Powell and his family had found a way to move to England on their own.

Ten years later, with news of impending war, and hopes for a brighter future, Powell returned to New York, opening a new Sailors’
Home on Dover Street. In addition to providing living quarters for black sailors, the home housed a labor union he had founded, the American Seamen’s Protective Union Association, designed to improve the condition of black sailors; it soon counted approximately fifty-five members. The home served as a “shaping-up” hall where union members could be hired without having to pay bribes or special fees to land-sharks or landlords.
²⁰

Fifty-five black sailors traipsing in and out of 2 Dover Street could not have gone unnoticed for long. Irish sailors and longshoremen couldn’t have liked it much. And, when the rioters arrived, Powell’s neighbors didn’t care enough to come to his aid.

In the July 24, 1863, issue of the
Liberator
, Garrison published a letter from Powell that detailed his family’s harrowing escape from the mob. After the demolition of the Colored Orphan Asylum, Powell’s is probably the best-known account of the mob’s destruction of black property. Rioters arrived at his doorstep the very first day. Not knowing that Superintendent Kennedy was badly injured, Powell appealed to him in vain for protection. Alone and abandoned, he wrote, “myself and family were prisoners in my own house to
king mob
from which there was no way to escape but over the roofs of adjoining houses.” At some point,

the mob commenced throwing stones at the lower windows until they had succeeded in making an opening. I was determined not to leave until driven from the premises. My family, including my invalid daughter, (who is entirely helpless), took refuge on the roof of the next house. I remained till the mob broke in, and then narrowly escaped the same way. This was about 8 1/2 pm. We remained on the roof for an hour; still I hoped relief would come.

While the rioters plundered the house, Powell and his family cowered on the roof, where the rain that Strong had hoped for beat down on them mercilessly. Worried about their own safety, neighbors did not stretch out a helping hand but carried their own belongings to their roofs just in case the mob decided to “fire” Powell’s home.

Help finally came in the form of a Jewish neighbor who, Powell seemed to suggest, intuitively sympathized with his family’s plight: “The God that succored Hagar in her flight came to my relief in the person of a little deformed, despised Israelite—who, Samaritan-like, took my poor helpless daughter under his protection in his house; there I presume she is now, until friends send her to me.” With a rope this Good Samaritan had given him, Powell “took a clove-hitch around the clothes-line which was fastened to the wall by pulleys, and which led from one roof to the other over a space of about one hundred feet.” In this manner, he lowered the rest of his family down to the next roof, and then from one roof to another until he came to a friend’s house where they waited until police came and took them to the station. They remained there with seventy other bruised and beaten men, women, and children until they could be conveyed to safety.

Powell concluded his letter on a bitter note. He was a loyal Unionist eager to serve his country; for that reason, he had just received a commission in the naval service. Yet his fellow citizens had treated him like an enemy. He had abided by the American work ethic, built up a business, and accumulated some property. Yet the rioters had stripped him of all his possessions and “scattered [them] to the four winds, which ‘like the baseless fabric of a vision, leaves not a wreck behind’ except our lives.”
²¹

Although Albro Lyons had been Powell’s partner in the Pearl Street Colored Sailors’ Home, he and his family had lived in Seneca Village, a community founded in the mid-1820s when the owner of a vast tract of land between Eighty-first and Eighty-ninth Streets and Seventh and Eighth Avenues began selling plots to interested black families. The motivations for establishing Seneca Village were several. One was to create a neighborhood where black New Yorkers could live together in relative peace and security. Another, equally important goal was to encourage property ownership and thereby enlarge the class of black freeholders who could meet the $250 voting requirement.

Seneca Village is the closest approximation to what we think of as a black community: a segregated enclave of black homes and institutions. According to the 1855 census, the total number of inhabitants was 264, but due to underreporting it might have been much higher. In the early 1850s, German and Irish families began moving in. Amazingly, all three groups managed to get along, suggesting that Seneca Village might have evolved into a viable multiethnic, multiracial community. But the Democratic mayor Fernando Wood and his cronies seized Seneca Village’s land to begin construction of Central Park. By 1857, Seneca Village no longer existed.
²²

After Powell left for England, Lyons took over the Colored Sailors’ Home on Pearl Street and in the late 1850s moved it and his family to 20 Vandewater Street in the Fourth Ward. In addition, he owned an outfitting store for seamen on nearby Roosevelt Street. James Gordon Bennett’s
New York Herald
mentioned the destruction of the Lyons home in the briefest of notes: “In Vandewater street, a negro boarding house, kept by a man named Lyons, who, though black, is a strong Democrat, was pulled to pieces, and is now doubtless, being used as fire wood by many of the residents of the Fourth Ward.”
²³
Except that Lyons was not a strong Democrat.

I found a much fuller account in Maritcha’s memoir. Although her father’s home was not a center of black labor organizing, it functioned as a stop on the Underground Railroad. “Under mother’s vigilant eye,” Maritcha recalled, “refugees were kept long enough to be fed and to have disguises changed and be met by those prepared to speed them on in the journey toward the North Star.” Maritcha suggested that since the house was “semi-public,” people “could go in and out without attracting special attention.” Maybe yes, but maybe no. In a sketch of their father’s life, Charles Ray’s daughters noted that their house, also a stop on the Underground Railroad, was frequently abuzz with activity. They recalled in particular an incident in which a conductor rapped at the door, and then whistled loudly when it opened to signal fourteen fugitive men to enter, alarming even the family.
²⁴
If similar incidents occurred at the Lyons home, they would have attracted a good deal of attention, undoubtedly to their neighbors’ great displeasure.

Maritcha did not witness the destruction of her childhood home. But she must have memorized the account she heard her parents tell over and over again, and come to feel that she had been there herself.

A rabble attacked our house, breaking window panes, smashing shutters, and partially demolishing the main front door. Had not the mob’s attention been suddenly diverted, further damage would certainly have ensued. The stones thrown in were utilized as material to form a barricade for the otherwise unprotected main front doorway. …

As the evening drew on, a resolute man and a courageous woman quietly seated themselves in the exposed hall, determined to protect their property, to sell their lives as dearly as may be should the need arise. Lights having been extinguished, a lonely vigil of hours passed in mingled darkness, indignation, uncertainty, and dread. Just after midnight, a yell announced that a second mob was gathering to attempt assault. As one of the foremost of the rioters attempted to ascend the front steps, father advanced into the doorway and fired point blank into the crowd. Not knowing what might be concealed in the darkened interior, the fickle mob more disorganized than reckless, retreated out of sight hastily and no further demonstration was made that night.

At dawn, Officer Kelly from the Oak Street police station finally appeared, calling out his name so that Lyons would not shoot at him. He then sat on the steps and sobbed because he did not have enough men to protect Lyons’s home.

Undeterred, the mob came back the following day and launched a third and successful attempt against the house. A German neighbor, as nameless, faceless, and silent as all the other Good Samaritans in these accounts, took Mary Joseph in, while Albro escaped to the police station. When it was all over, Maritcha’s parents returned to a ravaged home: “Its interior was dismantled, furniture was missing or broken. From basement to attic evidences of the worst vandalism prevailed. A
fire, kindled in one of the upper rooms, was discovered in time to prevent a conflagration.” In what appears to have been a final blow, “the dismayed parents had to submit to the indignity of taking refuge in the police station house.”
²⁵
Perhaps they at least had the comfort of finding their old friends the Powells.

The destruction of these two homes occurred, I think, because both households fulfilled multiple functions—private and public—inimical to the mob. Powell and Lyons had worked hard to build their homes. To them, they were a haven in which to raise their families, a shelter for black men and women in need, and a well-deserved reward for successful entrepreneurship. That is exactly what the rioters were intent on destroying. They deliberately struck at the heart of the black household. They attacked black property and wealth, which from their point of view could only have been ill gotten and illegitimate. In his letter to Garrison, Powell estimated his personal property at $3,000. Maritcha described the Lyons home, which might well have once belonged to a tanning merchant like Jacob Lorillard, as a “large brick building”; in 1862, it was assessed at $5,500.
²⁶
In addition, the rioters were determined to destroy black enterprises and prevent black sailors from seeking “white” work on the docks. Finally, they set about eliminating black community institutions dedicated to improving the lot of black Americans.