Between Slavery and Freedom (13 page)

Organizing in the South posed more problems than organizing in the North because whites were suspicious of free people gathering together for any purpose, however laudable. People overcame those difficulties, though, and soon there were societies in Baltimore, New Castle, Delaware, and Washington, D.C. Further south, Charleston's community of color split along lines of racial heritage. Light-skinned men formed the Brown Fellowship Society, while darker-skinned men set up their own society.

The societies did more than help members and their families through tough times. They became the arbiters of moral behavior. No one wanted to extend benefits to someone, for instance, who drank heavily and was more likely than an abstemious member to fall ill or lose a job. The societies disciplined members for transgressions of one kind or another, told them to mend their ways, and expelled them if they ignored the warnings. In this respect the mutual benefit societies reinforced the message the churches were spreading, namely that members must live lives that were irreproachable—for their own good and the good of the community.

Free black men in many cities and towns in the North and Upper South proudly identified themselves as “African” masons. Whites on both sides of the Atlantic had enthusiastically joined the “craft” of Freemasonry in the early eighteenth century, dedicating themselves to the quest for enlightenment and perfectibility across the lines of faith. The tenets of Freemasonry said nothing about it being exclusively white, and lodges in sailor towns like London, Liverpool, and Bristol often admitted African-American mariners as brother masons.

Back in America, however, white lodges routinely rejected black candidates. In the spring of 1775, just before the Revolutionary War began, a group of fifteen free black masons in Boston decided to approach a British military “traveling lodge” to see if the members of
that
lodge would recognize them as brother masons. Prince Hall and his friends convinced the lodge's officers of their devotion to the principles of Freemasonry and received from them the necessary authorization to form their own lodge. Hall, a former slave, became the lodge's “master.” In the postwar period the black masons of Boston secured a warrant from the Grand Lodge in Britain and with it the power to charter other lodges.

Free people in other communities sought Prince Hall's help. A committee of black men in Philadelphia wrote Hall and explained that they and their friends had been assembling for some time and hoped to create a lodge, but the white lodges in Pennsylvania had rebuffed them, claiming that if
they
became masons, black men in Virginia would want the same privilege. Hall helped them establish their lodge and install their first officers in 1797, the
same year that he chartered another black lodge in Providence, Rhode Island. Soon there were other lodges in New York City, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and Alexandria, Virginia, although that was as far south as African or Prince Hall Masonry spread for many years, given the prevailing hostility in the Lower South to independent black societies of any kind.

A major goal of the masons was the pursuit of knowledge, and that fit with many other initiatives free black people were taking—through the lodges, the churches, and through a host of self-improvement associations. Reading and writing were increasing in importance among Americans in general in the post-Revolutionary era, and for free people of color basic literacy held a special significance. It was a hallmark of liberty and independence. It was also a tool they could use to try to improve their situation in life. To be sufficiently educated to read the Bible and to be able to pick up a newspaper or a handbill and make out the letters said something about one's connection to the wider world, while to be able to sign one's name was as symbolic of freedom as having a name of one's own choosing to sign. A priority for many of the newly-formed black community institutions was setting up schools for black children and organizing evening classes for adults. Whites in some localities in the North and the Upper South supported the efforts of black churches and charitable groups, donating money and books, and even volunteering to teach. However, if some white people encouraged the aspirations of their black neighbors out of a religious or humanitarian impulse, others were deathly afraid of the notion of black literacy and what it might lead to.

What it did in fact lead to was a flood of petitions and pamphlets as free people used the power of the written word to defend themselves and their communities from libel and slander and articulate their desires and goals. In doing so, they posed questions that white people did not always care to answer. In his 1791 letter to Thomas Jefferson, for example, the self-taught mathematician Benjamin Banneker asked how the author of the Declaration of Independence could speak of his love of liberty while “detaining by fraud and violence so numerous a part of my brethren, under groaning captivity and cruel oppression.”
2
Two years later, Jefferson was one of thousands of white people who fled Philadelphia when yellow fever struck. Many more stayed behind because they had nowhere else to go or because they had already contracted the deadly disease. Richard Allen and Absalom Jones mobilized the Free African Society, and eventually many other black men and women, to try to relieve the suffering of their white neighbors, at grave risk to themselves. Despite assurances to the contrary, blacks were not immune to yellow fever, and hundreds sickened and died. Once the crisis was past, white publisher Mathew Carey downplayed the dangers black people had faced—he
was convinced they were in fact immune—and he pilloried them as thieving opportunists who had exploited the epidemic for personal gain, stealing from those they had nursed and demanding excessively high wages for any services they rendered. Allen and Jones responded forcefully and eloquently in their
Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People
. Elsewhere black people refused to accept attacks upon themselves without answering back. In Boston, Prince Hall spoke out about the mistreatment of members of his community. In Baltimore, Daniel Coker laid out the arguments against slavery in his
Dialogue
Between a Virginian and an African Minister
. Philadelphia's James Forten used his own money to print his
Letters from a Man of Colour
, his personal protest against a series of discriminatory laws the Pennsylvania Senate was considering. In the 1790s and early 1800s black people came into their own as writers and orators. They also proved adept at using the political process. They submitted petitions for redress of grievances to the state and local authorities and occasionally to the U.S. Congress. Even when those bodies refused to receive their petitions, as Congress did in 1799 when dozens of men of color in Philadelphia denounced the kidnapping of free people under cover of the fugitive slave law and asked for action on the part of the federal government to begin the nationwide abolition of slavery, black people succeeded in making their voices heard.

One intriguing aspect of free black life in this period is the extent to which people incorporated aspects of an African past into their various initiatives. Absalom Jones and Richard Allen and their friends had called their society the Free African Society, and people in Newport had called theirs the Newport African Union. As the number of groups grew, they took names like the Daughters of Africa, the Angola Society, the Baltimore African Female Society, the Daughters of Abyssinia, the Sons of Ethiopia, and so on. People organized “African” schools and “African” churches, and they spoke and wrote of themselves as “Africans.” Until the movement was renamed in Prince Hall's honor after his death, black freemasonry was “African” freemasonry. How much this spoke to a shared memory of Africa on the part of those who had been born there or had parents who had been born there, how much to a feeling of pride in the greatness of Africa, and how much to a sense of separation from Americans of European ancestry is a matter of debate among scholars. In the 1830s, heated differences arose over naming practices, with some Northern black leaders urging the abandoning of “African” because that term, and others like it, perpetuated the notion among whites that black people were not truly “American.” For the women and men who experienced freedom in the 1790s and early 1800s, though, this posed no ideological or philosophical dilemma. “African” was
what whites called them and it was what they called themselves. “African” was synonymous with “black,” and they had no quarrel with that. But the issue of “African-ness” and what it implied about a sense of racial and national identity became an increasingly complex one during the 1810s. The question of whether black people should leave America once they were free had sparked the debate between Philadelphia's Free African Society and the Newport African Union in the 1780s. It resurfaced three decades later, generating a fascinating “paper trail” that helps us explore the question of how free people saw their future unfolding.

The pivotal figure was Paul Cuffe, a man whose own sense of identity was complicated by his ancestry. He was the son of a West African father and a Wampanoag mother. His father had arrived in Massachusetts as a slave, while his mother's people had been living in Massachusetts for centuries. Sometimes Cuffe described himself as an Indian, sometimes an African, and sometimes as a “mustee,” the child of black and Native American parents. By the early 1800s, though, when Cuffe had become a merchant captain and the owner of a small but impressive fleet of ocean-going vessels, most of the people he interacted with regarded him as black.

Paul Cuffe was a convert to Quakerism, a faith that attracted relatively few people of color in this period, despite the Quakers' antislavery stance. In Cuffe's case that religious affiliation was crucial because it linked him to the transatlantic world of Quaker reform. Quaker abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic wanted to see Britain's colony of Sierra Leone thrive and prove to the world that Africa had more to export than slaves. They reached out to Cuffe as a successful black businessman and a fierce opponent of slavery and they explained to him the vital role they thought the colony could play in advancing the antislavery cause.

In 1811, on his own initiative, but with the active encouragement of his fellow Quakers, Cuffe visited Sierra Leone and talked with the black loyalists who had settled there. Then he sailed to England and met the officials who would need to approve any plan he formulated to take black Americans to the colony to help develop the local economy. After that, he began contacting friends in the various free communities in the United States. At first he emphasized the profits that those with cash to invest in trade with Sierra Leone could reap. Then he talked about recruiting black craftsmen to set up all kinds of workshops in the colony and introduce some much-needed skills. Finally, he began mulling over the promoting of large-scale black emigration from the United States. American slaveholders were always saying they dared not free their slaves because they would slaughter them in their beds. Cuffe disputed that. The slaves did not want revenge, only freedom.
But if the sticking point was where the freedmen should live, perhaps creating separate settlements for them in West Africa would hasten the abolition of slavery. Cuffe talked with white Quakers and with his extensive network of well-connected, well-educated, and well-to-do free men of color. He generated a lot of interest, but once war broke out between the United States and Britain in 1812, he and his supporters were powerless to move forward.

As the war raged, Cuffe and his friends, both black and white, began speculating about setting up their own colony. The British would probably not want thousands of African Americans to settle in Sierra Leone. At most they might welcome a couple of hundred. There would have to be a separate, American-sponsored colony. And perhaps there should be another colony somewhere on America's western frontier for black people who wanted to stay in the United States but live apart from whites. No one was talking about an exodus of the entire black population at this point. Cuffe and the people with whom he was swapping ideas simply agreed that if some black people chose to form separate settlements either in America's “western wilds” or in Africa they had every right to do so. If they preferred to stay where they were, that was their right as well.

In the early weeks of 1815 the U.S. Senate ratified the peace treaty with Britain and the war ended. Cuffe refurbished his favorite ship, the aptly-named
Traveller
, and sailed to Sierra Leone, taking almost forty free black emigrants with him. Setting up an American colony was something that might happen in the future. This party of emigrants was going to the British colony. When Cuffe eventually returned to the United States he did so with mixed feelings. Although the British had not helped him as much as he had hoped, his settlers were thriving. He urged his friends to find more settlers and help him raise funds to finance their passage to Africa.

Cuffe and his associates were not the only people contemplating the merits of African emigration. Robert Finley, a white minister from New Jersey, had friends in high places, among them Speaker of the House of Representatives Henry Clay and Andrew Jackson, the hero of the Battle of New Orleans, and in Washington, D.C. in December of 1816 he convened a series of meetings at which he brought together his friends—and their friends—to discuss the future of black Americans. Significantly, he did not invite any black people to participate.

The result of the meetings in Washington was the creation of the American Colonization Society (ACS), which had as its goal promoting the emigration of free people of color from the United States to a colony somewhere in Africa. Their writings and speeches indicate that at least some of the men who founded the ACS truly hoped that they were taking the
first step to ridding America of slavery. Others were more concerned about ridding America of free black people. As for where Finley himself stood, he had assured Cuffe of his sincere belief that a separate colony would serve the best interests of the entire black community, enslaved and free. Cuffe had not read Finley's
Thoughts on the Colonization of Free Blacks
, so he did not know that Finley was deeply perturbed about the black presence in the United States. Finley dismissed out of hand the idea of a settlement in the American West. Black people must go to Africa. They did not belong in America as slaves or as citizens.