Seventh Snippet from >Fundmentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education >>>>> Living Lives of Accomplishment in the Face of Injustice

This snippet from my new book, Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education, is from Chapter Seven, African American History.  The section given as the snippet here is entitled, "Living Lives of Accomplishment in the Face of Injustice."


The section given comes after a section describing the slave trade and slavery and before another on the Civil War and Reconstruction.  I particularly like this section for the astounding accomplishments that are described for both slaves and free blacks, who typically studied under self-education scenarios and succeeded at the highest levels prevailing in their fields, often recording achievements far beyond those of white members of their communities who started life with far more advantages.


After you read this snippet, scroll on down to the next article (actually posted earlier) for the fullest explanation that I have given to date with regard to my motivation for writing Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education.


And then, as you scroll on down through my blog, you'll find the six other snippets posted thus far, posted amidst other articles that I trust will be of keen interest, as well.


Here is the snippet from Chapter Seven:




Although the life of the slave was laborious and the working hours long, there was some time left over for recreation, amusement, and personal accomplishment. Many slaves became superb hunters and fishers, planted masterful gardens, and played tunes on homemade instruments that would prove to be the progenitors of the blues and jazz genres that are at the soul of American music. Some resourceful slaves cultivated reputations for good behavior that won them off-plantation passes from lenient masters; given access to a wider circle of associations, some slaves learned how to read and write. This knowledge might also come from a comparatively compassionate member of the master’s family, either with or without the master’s permission.


Free blacks also often reached out to their fellow African Americans by providing instruction in reading, writing, and subjects for which those skills served as gateway. African Americans of free status occasionally founded schools, as did those among the white population who opposed slavery and sought to elevate the educational and cultural level of slaves and former slaves. A free black by the name of Elias Neua, who had been born in France, operated a school for African Americans by 1704. Records indicate that a couple of slaves whose given names were Harry and Andrew (surnames unknown) ran a school for basic reading and writing instruction in South Carolina during the early 18th century. For a period beginning in 1751, missionary and teacher Joseph Ottolenghi taught slaves in Georgia at the behest of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts.


The Quaker Anthony Benezet ran an evening school for African Americans out of his home during 1750-1760; a group of Quakers also came together in 1774 to run a school for African Americans in Philadelphia. And in 1787, the New York Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves established the New York African Free School, generally credited as the first full-curriculum school for African Americans. Most African Americans eventually became Christians, although some, especially at first, incorporated animistic beliefs into their new faith. They also very notably drew upon African music to enliven standard Christian hymns and to create spirituals unique to African American people. From the African American Christian tradition came much of the impetus for blues and jazz motifs that in turn shaped all music that is American in origin.


For a mostly enslaved people, contributions in many fields were mighty:




In 1721, a Massachusetts slave named Oneissimus taught the famous religious leader Cotton Mather how to inject a patient with a small amount of the small pox virus to create a vaccine effect. A South Carolina slave named Caesar developed antidotes to rattlesnake venom. Also in South Carolina, the slave Wilcie Elfe gained medical knowledge from an owner-doctor, opened a successful pharmaceutical practice in Charleston, patented effective medicines, and sold his curatives throughout the state. Similarly, the slave James Derham studied under owner Dr. Robert Dove, from whom he purchased his freedom and then set up his own medical practice. During the 18th century, former slave David K. McDonough gained fame for his skill as a vision and hearing specialist, displayed at his own Eye and Ear Infirmary in New York.


According to the census of 1860, there were 488,070 free blacks in a total African American population of 4,441,770 (with the slave population, therefore, at 3,953,700 [having grown from 697,897 since 1790]). Hence, free blacks constituted about 11% of the total African American population in the United States just prior to the Civil War. Over half of these free African Americans lived in the South.


Freedom had come in a variety of ways. Some white masters freed offspring that resulted from intercourse with black slaves, thus hoping to avoid social censure. Once in a great while, a slave was so enterprising as to secure off-plantation wage labor, in addition to her or his toil as human chattel, and make enough money to purchase freedom from masters implicitly more lenient and empathetic than most. As the abolitionist movement gained momentum, some southerners felt the tweak of conscience that could give a slave her or his freedom, as reward for faithful service, or just because it seemed the right thing to do. Other slaves were freed by the terms of wills. Some survived the mad dash for freedom, moving across fields and through woods just ahead of sniffing dogs and scurrying agents of the master, against the intent of the fugitive property provisions of the United States Constitution and statutory law.


Some free African Americans themselves owned slaves. Some of these were carpenters, shoemakers, and tailors who bought slaves and made them apprentices. The 1830 census recorded 753 slaveholding African Americans. The 1850 census recorded that 19% of black tailors in Charleston, South Carolina, owned slaves. Slaves worked for free blacks as maids or day laborers and, in a few cases, they worked the fields picking cotton or harvesting, much as they did for white slave owners. William Johnson, a freed slave living in Natchez, Mississippi, became a multi-business entrepreneur, running barbershops, purchasing and renting out property, and superintending a money-lending business; hiring managers to run businesses selling toys, wallpaper, coal, and sand; renting carts and other vehicles; offering a service watering down the streets of the hot southern city of Natchez; and accumulating 350 acres of land on which he put fifteen slaves to work chopping down timber and farming the fields. New Orleans merchant Cecee McCarty trained slaves as salespeople who peddled imported dry goods across the state of Louisiana; in time, she amassed a fortune.


But black slave owners were a tiny portion of the free African American population. Most free African Americans worked as laborers or skilled crafts people; some entered the professions or started businesses.


Paul Cuffe (1759-1817) operated a thriving shipbuilding business in Connecticut, gained great wealth, and trained other African Americans to start businesses of their own. James Forten (1766-1842) also made a fortune in the maritime industry, inventing a device to handle sails more efficiently and launching a company that employed a total of 40 employees, including on his payroll both African American and white workers. At mid-19th century, William Whipper of Pennsylvania began his entrepreneurial career as a clothes cleaner, became an expert in steam scouring, and prospered so greatly as to pour investments into multiple successful business ventures. Tax records from the mid-19th century indicate that there were 21 African American entrepreneurs in New York City making over $100,000 per year, thus earning what for that era was a huge amount of money.


African Americans of the pre-Civil War era made huge contributions with their scientific inventions. Benjamin Banneker (1731-1806) compiled The Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia Almanac and Ephemeris, published annually from 1791 to 1802; he also served on the commission that planned the construction of a new capital at Washington, D. C., in 1789, then from 1790 was among those commissioned to survey the site for the future capital. Henry Blair received a patent for a unique seed planter in 1834. Norbert Rillieux (1806-1894) received a patent in 1846 for a vacuum evaporator that produced white sugar crystals from sugarcane juice and proved also to have utility in the production of soap, gelatin, and glue. Lewis Temple (1800-1854) invented a harpoon that revolutionized the whaling industry, given the enhanced effectiveness of his invention for hunting the huge oceangoing mammals whose bodies were used for the production of many commercially lucrative goods; Temple, though, never gained much from the commerce induced by his invention: he never was able to gain a patent and died penniless in the very city of Bedford, Massachusetts, whose economy had boomed on the strength of his invention.


The entrepreneurial success and inventiveness of African Americans in the early 19th century was not rewarded with citizenship, which was obviously denied to slaves but also withheld from free blacks. Free blacks in Maryland and North Carolina had to have special licenses to sell corn, wheat, or tobacco. In most states of both the North and the South, free blacks could not vote, hold public office, or testify in courts against whites. African Americans could not carry weapons in this era of commonplace white gun-wielding. Failure to pay off debts or remit tax payments resulted in fine or imprisonment for free blacks of the North; in the South, such a debtor or tax offender could be sold into slavery as means to collect the sums owed.


African American artisans, entrepreneurs, inventors, journalists, and professionals formed a small but energetic black middle class that grew restive with the conditions of American life, at the same time that their success provided powerful arguments against the racist pronouncements and assumptions that pervaded white-dominated society. African Americans were in large measure responsible for establishing the economy and physical infrastructure of the United States. They designed and constructed churches, mansions, public buildings, and private plantations.


John Hemings is famous for his role in producing articles and fixtures for the Monticello, the plantation of Thomas Jefferson in Virginia. Hemings was a slave at Monticello, but he was no field hand. He was a joiner by trade and a genius who created numerous exquisite pieces of furniture in the woodworking shop that he ran on Jefferson’s plantation. Following Jefferson’s sketches, Hemings turned out chairs, tables, benches, fine railings, arches, and window shutters.


African Americans in the growing urban centers of the North generally faced prospects of inadequate public education facilities, inferior housing, and lack of legal protections that white citizens held as a matter of birth. And they faced numerous challenges beyond the strictly legal: A white mob attacked a community of predominately African American residents in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1829; similar incidents occurred in a number of northern cities where newly arrived black immigrants competed with workers for jobs. During the decade after the riot in Cincinnati, most southern and some northern states limited or banned the immigration of free blacks.


In this context of the sheer cruelty perpetuated against slaves and the vexing legal injustices inflicted against free blacks, an inexorable momentum built for the abolition of slavery and the establishment of full citizenship rights for all African Americans.