Between Slavery and Freedom Page 10
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.
Within a matter of days free blacks in major cities in the North and the Upper South began responding to what they were reading and hearing about the ACS. Community leaders in Georgetown, Virginia, were the first to react. They denounced African emigration, but they argued for a settlement in the Missouri Territory. Meanwhile, in Philadelphia disagreement surfaced between the rank and file and those accustomed to speak for them. Paul Cuffe’s longtime confidante James Forten was deeply involved in the wrangling. Forten did not want to leave America. A Revolutionary War veteran, he saw his future as linked to that of the republic he had helped create. He was prospering as a sailmaker and real estate speculator. He did concede, however, that there were some free blacks who were not faring well in America, or who simply wanted to try their luck elsewhere. At least initially, Forten and some of those closest to him, including Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, shared Cuffe’s opinion that the American Colonization Society was a humanitarian undertaking and the white men behind it were dedicated to black freedom. When Finley visited Philadelphia, Forten and other black leaders met with him and endorsed his plan, at least as he outlined it.
Many other black people in Philadelphia disagreed. They insisted that African colonization was an insidious plot hatched by whites who supported slavery while at the same time fearing and despising free blacks. Before long, more statements from the ACS leadership convinced James Forten and other prominent people of color not just in Philadelphia but in communities from Boston to Baltimore that the organization was not committed to ending slavery or to giving free people a choice about going to Africa. Then Paul Cuffe, the one man who might have been able to push the enterprise in the direction that free people of color would have found acceptable, fell ill and died. The dream of a large-scale voluntary exodus, coupled with the freeing of every slave in America, died with him.
The ACS forged ahead regardless. With the endorsement of powerful politicians in Washington, it mounted an expedition to West Africa to pick a site for a colony. What resulted was the founding of Liberia. The colony proved to be anything but a land of milk and honey for those who volunteered to go there, and disease and disputes threatened the whole venture. Although word soon filtered back to the United States about the dire situation in Liberia, the ACS kept up its recruiting efforts. A war of words broke out between the advocates of colonization, the vast majority of them white, and its opponents, almost all of them free blacks. James Forten was particularly vocal, especially when ACS officers tried to pressure him to lead the exodus now that Paul Cuffe was dead. Some people of color did agree to go to Liberia, although never in the numbers the ACS hoped. In many instances they were slaves whose masters freed them only on condition that they emigrate. Of the freeborn, most who left
did so because they were pessimistic about their prospects in America. However, the overwhelming majority of free people steadfastly refused to abandon their homeland for an uncertain future in Africa.
The debate over emigration and colonization was just one aspect of the complex nature of black freedom in the generation after independence. Hundreds of thousands of people had struggled out of slavery, only to find that liberty seldom meant for them what it did for whites. However they saw themselves, most whites saw them differently. Freedom had given them hope for the future. It had also brought them disappointment and disillusionment. In the generation that followed, the struggle to make freedom truly meaningful continued. Black people endeavored in many different ways to claim what they considered their birthright as Americans. They sought prosperity and education, a peaceful existence, and the chance to live where they chose and as they chose. They also sought to liberate the growing number of black Americans who did not even share with them in “half-freedom.” They were “free”—after a fashion—but as long as so many other black people were unfree, their own freedom was less than complete.
CHAPTER FOUR
“We Will Have Our Rights”
Redefining Black Freedom, 1820–1850
The men and women of the first generation after independence fought with courage and persistence to make black freedom a reality. They won some remarkable victories, even as they weathered crises in their personal lives and in the lives of their communities. Many were poor. Many had loved ones who were still enslaved, and they themselves were often at risk of losing their liberty. However, they spoke up and they organized. Their message to white Americans was that black people could make good use of their freedom.
Their sons and daughters built on what their parents had achieved. They struggled to maintain and expand their communities. They demanded equal access to education for themselves and their children. They let white Americans know that they expected nothing less than equality. They had much to contend with, though. In the thirty years from 1820 to 1850 there was a rise in racial violence and the passage of discriminatory laws in state after state. The American Colonization Society remained active and drew support from whites of all social classes. The nation extended its boundaries significantly in the course of these three decades, and with the acquisition of more territory came the question of what rights, if any, free blacks could enjoy as they tried to move into America’s borderlands in search of the same opportunities that white pioneers were seeking.
In spite of all the laws designed to keep them subordinate to whites, and in spite of the hostility they encountered, some free blacks achieved the “American Dream” of economic self-sufficiency. By the 1820s, the Lower South was home to black plantation owners like William Ellison and Anna Jai Kingsley. In a number of instances these planters were the heirs of rich white men, and some of them benefited from the labor of slaves. They were not the only black slave owners in the South. When they had the means to do so, free people purchased their friends and family members out of bondage with the obvious intention of freeing them. However, the likes of Ellison and Kingsley owned slaves for the same reason that whites did—because they wanted their labor.
Table 4.1 Free Black Population by State and Territory, 1790, 1820, and 1850
1790
1820
1850
Alabama
——
571
2,265
Arkansas
——
59
608
California
——
——
962
Connecticut
2,801
7,844
7,693
Delaware
3,899
12,958
18,073
District of Columbia
——
4,048
10,059
Florida
——
——
932
Georgia
398
1,763
2,931
Illinois
——
457
5,436
Indiana
——
1,230
11,262
Iowa
——
——
333
Kentucky
114
2,759
10,011
Louisiana
——
10,476
17,462
Maine
538
929
1,356
Maryland
8,043
39,730
74,723
Massachusetts
5,463
6,740
9,064
Michigan
——
174
2,583
Minnesota (territory)
——
——
39
Mississippi
——
458
930
Missouri
——
347
2,618
New Hampshire
630
786
520
New Jersey
2,762
12,460
23,810
New Mexico (territory)
——
——
22
New York
4,654
29,279
49,069
North Carolina
4,975
14,612
27,463
Ohio
——
4,723
25,279
Oregon (territory)
——
——
207
Pennsylvania
6,537
30,202
53,626
Rhode Island
3,469
3,554
3,670
South Carolina
1,801
6,826
8,960
Tennessee
361
2,727
6,422
Texas
——
——
397
Utah (territory)
——
——
24
Vermont
255
903
718
Virginia
12,766
36,889
54,333
Wisconsin
——
——
635
Total
59,466
233,504
434,495
Source: Federal Population Schedules for the Years 1790, 1820, and 1850
Besides the wealthy “free colored” planters of the Lower South, there were thousands of black men and women in other parts of the country who had toiled, struggled, and parlayed their way into the land-owning classes by the 1820s. But for every independent and successful African-American farmer there were countless more for whom land ownership was an impossible dream, who had neither the capital nor the credit to buy land. Some became tenant farmers. Others squatted on vacant land, as many whites did, in the hope that the rightful owners would never find out. The majority of free black rural dwellers belonged to the ranks of landless laborers. The fortunate ones earned a living wage. The less fortunate labored for little more than food and shelter.
Opportunities were few and far between for free people who left the land and tried to make a living at something other than farming. In freedom, people searched for gainful employment wherever they could find it. They were not afraid of hard work. That was all most of them had known. However, few had exited slavery with much in the way of resources. If they had skilled trades they could not be sure that whites who had employed them when they had been someone�
��s “property” would hire them once they were free.
Whites in different parts of the country had different ideas about what free black people should and should not be able to do for a living. In the cities of the North and Upper South, white working men complained vociferously about job competition, and whites of all classes conspired to prevent African Americans from becoming financially independent. In New York City in the 1820s, residents began a campaign against black chimney sweeps. They had not complained when the sweeps had been slaves, but once they were free their calls of “Sweep O, Sweep O” as they paraded through the streets allegedly disturbed the peace. White New Yorkers demanded that all sweeps get licenses, and they tried to make sure that no licenses went to black men. Carters and draymen also needed licenses, and whites wanted to ensure that those licenses went only to whites. This pattern of exclusion occurred in many other cities besides New York.