Between Slavery and Freedom (16 page)

Back on land, African-American men took whatever work they could find. What they often got, if they were employed at all, was work that was unpleasant, strenuous, and poorly paid. An especially unpalatable form of employment in the days before flush toilets was removing the contents of privies. Because they carted sewage through the streets at night, people referred to them euphemistically as “night soil men.” The complaints of white householders in New York and elsewhere centered on two aspects of the “trade”—the tendency of “night soil men” to wheel their stinking carts past their homes (the carts had to go
somewhere
) and their habit of calling out as they went along to advertise their services.

Black men also did much of the heavy lifting in urban communities. They worked as porters and stevedores. They cleaned streets and dug graves and privies. They groomed horses and blacked boots. They toiled at anything and everything, and some turned to crime when they could find no other way to make money. For every free man who established a business or entered a skilled trade, a hundred more were common laborers. If they were fortunate, they were hired by the week or the month. Many, though, were day laborers. They would turn up before dawn to wherever they heard someone was hiring workers, though all too often employers passed them over in favor of whites. They could only hope that they would be luckier the next day.

In common with black men, most free black women found themselves relegated to low-paying and onerous “day work.” In their case that meant domestic work, and that entailed juggling family responsibilities with the demands of one's employers. An added burden came from prevailing notions of female propriety. “Ladies” seldom ventured outside their homes, unless in the company of male relatives. “Women” were in a different category. A woman hurrying through the streets on her way to and from work frequently received insults from white men who assumed that any unaccompanied woman, especially a black woman, was a prostitute.

In truth, selling sex was something that some women, regardless of race, resorted to. Every town had its red light district, where women and girls bartered sex for money in dingy alleyways and in upscale bordellos. A few
grew rich as madams. Generally, though, violence, disease, and harassment by the officers of the law were the lot of those who plied the sex trade.

At the other end of the spectrum was the woman of color who lived with a white man in a long-term relationship. In and around New Orleans,
plaçage
was a recognized social institution. A white man would select a young mixed-race
placeé
or “companion” at one of the city's famed “quadroon balls” and offer to provide for her and any children their relationship produced. The arrangement might endure lifelong or terminate when he married or tired of her.

New Orleans was notorious for the extent of “race mixing” that went on there, but it was common in other Southern communities as well. Free women of color might be coerced into sexual relationships that had little to do with mutual attraction and everything to do with money and power. Others chose freely to live with well-to-do white men. The mother of the enterprising Clamorgans of St. Louis parlayed her youth, her beauty, and her wit into cash. Although Apoline Clamorgan was legally free, her white father had left her very little to live on. As she saw it, she had two options—she could accept an offer of marriage from a free man of color and most likely end up as a household drudge for a white family, or she could take a white lover. Apoline chose cohabitation and comfort over marriage and poverty. She entered into a series of liaisons and her children inherited from her the money to start their own business.

There were notable success stories among free people of color in the antebellum era, but how well African-American women and men in any particular community fared
depended on a host of factors, most of which were beyond their control. When the economy was robust, they shared (although not equally) with whites in the general prosperity. When it took a downturn, they suffered disproportionately. Since they were invariably the last hired, they were the first fired. A family's income obviously determined where and how well that family lived. Residential segregation existed in most urban areas in the antebellum era, but what separated people was less often race than money. “Middling” and affluent people of color lived alongside whites of the same social and economic status, and their interactions might be friendly or hostile, depending on circumstances. The urban poor, regardless of race, rented badly maintained homes in narrow alleys and courts where the sun rarely shone. Overcrowding and inadequate sanitation led to disease. It took time for local boards of health to accept that epidemics spread not because of race or ethnicity—they blamed Irish immigrants as well as free blacks—but because of deplorable living conditions. Malnourished, inadequately clothed, and lacking access to basic health care, the poor were more prone
to illness, and when they contracted cholera, influenza, yellow fever, or any of a host of other ailments, they infected their less impoverished neighbors.

Joseph Willson had grown up in a wealthy mixed-race home in Augusta, Georgia. In the mid-1830s he moved to the North, trained as a printer, and distinguished himself as a writer. One of his goals was to enlighten white people about their black neighbors. It irked him that whites were “accustomed to regard the people of color as one consolidated mass.” As he explained, some free people lived “in ease, comfort and the enjoyment of all the social blessings,” some “in the lowest depths of human degradation,” and a great many “in the intermediate stages.” The free black population Willson described was complex and multilayered. Most of its members had hope for the future, and they expressed that hope not only within their own families but in the rich communal life they worked so hard to foster. If they were people “in between” in so many senses, they devoted a tremendous amount of energy to making that marginal space between slavery and full freedom as intellectually and spiritually satisfying as they could. Willson knew, though, that they could not afford to be complacent. Too many white people in both the North and the South did indeed see them as “one consolidated mass” and insisted that the nation would be better off without them.
1

One of the fiercest battles free black people had to fight in the 1820s and beyond was over their right to remain in the United States. Their fears about the American Colonization Society proved well-founded. The conviction grew among whites that free blacks did not truly belong in the United States, and they began urging their state legislatures to appropriate funds to promote African colonization. They also called on lawmakers to restrict the rights of free blacks in order to reinforce to them the message that they had no future in America.

African Americans in the Upper South were as zealous in trying to thwart the Liberia scheme as those in the North were. In Baltimore, for example, people of color routinely followed white ACS agents around town, anxious to make sure that they did not find any recruits, and even coaxing would-be emigrants off ships in the harbor. The ACS did enlist some enterprising individuals, like John Jenkins Roberts, a Virginia-born merchant whose education and business contacts enabled him to do well in Liberia and eventually become its first president. However, while some free blacks did agree to go to Liberia, most wanted nothing to do with the ACS.

Not everyone who rejected the Liberia scheme opposed voluntary emigration. In the mid-1820s, Haitian president Jean-Pierre Boyer made lavish promises to induce American free blacks to settle in his country. Throughout the North, the Upper South, and the Midwest, free people
enthusiastically endorsed the idea of moving to a nation that had come into being as the result of a successful slave uprising. Perhaps as many as ten thousand left for Haiti between 1824 and 1826. They left with high hopes, only to be bitterly disappointed when they discovered that they were pawns in a high stakes game of international diplomacy. Boyer reasoned that if he took in an unwanted segment of the American population he could persuade the United States government to recognize Haitian independence. Although some of the African-American emigrants stayed in Haiti and prospered, most found that they were as poor there as they had been in the United States and they soon returned home.

Despite the failure of the Haitian scheme, individually and collectively black people continued to leave the United States in search of brighter prospects elsewhere. An unknown number went to Canada. Some were runaways who knew that the Canadian authorities usually refused to hand over people whose only offense was seeking freedom. There were also groups of refugees who concluded that even though they were legally free they could not remain in the United States. In 1829, in response to growing violence from the city's white street gangs, hundreds of free people in Cincinnati moved to Canada where they organized their own farming community with the encouragement of the Governor-General. Although they endured many hardships, their initial settlement grew and more settlements followed, attracting black émigrés not only from Ohio but from all over the United States. Other people of color who crossed over into Canada headed for urban areas like Toronto.

After Britain abolished slavery throughout its empire in 1833, some African Americans set sail for Jamaica, or Trinidad, or British Guiana (today's Guyana). In all three colonies planters were crying out for labor and assuring settlers that in a year or two they could become independent landholders. As was the case with the Haitian scheme, most of the emigrants were disappointed, but a few did well. Back in the United States, black leaders hesitated to condemn resettlement programs in principle, insisting that free people had the right to go wherever they wished. What they denounced was the growing racism that was making emigration not so much a choice as a necessity.

Racial tensions had never been far below the surface, but during the 1820s and 1830s harassment and sporadic acts of violence exploded into full-blown race riots in the North and the Midwest. There was no shortage of white-on-black violence in the South. In the aftermath of Nat Turner's slave rebellion in Virginia in 1831, whites vented their fury on free blacks, who, they insisted, must have conspired with the rebels. In Raleigh,
North Carolina the authorities put every free black man in jail, a violation of their rights that probably saved their lives. Across the Upper South, scores of innocent free blacks suffered at the hands of white vigilantes, though what happened outside the South in the 1820s and 1830s was even worse. A verbal altercation or an unsubstantiated rumor about “unacceptable” behavior on the part of a black person or a group of people was usually all it took to inflame the mob. In 1824, rioters destroyed black homes in Providence, Rhode Island on the pretext that there was prostitution going on in the area. In 1826, white rowdies attacked black dwellings on the northern slope of Boston's Beacon Hill. The 1829 Cincinnati riot was at least in part a response to job competition and the sense that black people were prospering at the expense of whites. Although many other places experienced episodes of violence, the epicenter was Philadelphia, which endured four bloody and destructive riots in fifteen years.

A major source of contention was access to public spaces. Black Southerners understood that only too well. Whites were far less likely to molest a slave going about his master's business with the appropriate pass than they were a group of free blacks gathering for any purpose, however innocent. In cities like Baltimore and Washington, D.C., free people seldom assembled in large groups, even if they had the permission of the authorities to hold a parade or march in the funeral procession of a respected community leader. People in the Lower South exercised even more caution. African Americans outside the South were bolder. They persisted in claiming the same rights as whites. They had occasions, some of them solemn and others festive, that they wanted to mark by taking to the streets, but the sight of such public displays of community strength often provoked an angry reaction from whites.

The violence of the urban mob was one aspect of white hostility free people had to confront. The passage of discriminatory laws was another. The legal restrictions African Americans faced in their everyday lives were both expensive and demeaning. In 1821, the District of Columbia required that all free blacks register annually and post a bond to ensure their “good behavior.” Free people in North Carolina were supposed to wear a shoulder patch with the word “Free” on it. Throughout the Upper South, free blacks were forbidden to trade in certain commodities, their interactions with slaves were closely regulated, and the list of occupations off-limits to them grew steadily. Not everyone complied. People neglected to register. They pursued trades officially closed to them, traveled where they were not supposed to, and associated with enslaved friends and family members. However, they always had to worry that the authorities would crack down.

Further south the situation was worse. In 1822, whites in South Carolina panicked when they learned what free black carpenter Denmark Vesey had planned—nothing less than the freeing of all the slaves in and around Charleston, and (so it was rumored) the slaughter of every one of Charleston's white inhabitants. Vesey seemed an unlikely rebel. It never occurred to white Charlestonians that Vesey was free only because he had bought himself with his winnings from a lottery. Almost all of his family members remained enslaved. The authorities executed Vesey and the slaves he had plotted with, but they worried that the free community of color contained many more Veseys just waiting for an opportunity to subvert the slave system. Henceforth, they decreed, no free person of color who left South Carolina could ever return. As an additional safeguard, every free black male over the age of fifteen had to have a white guardian.