Living Lives of Accomplishment in the
Face of Injustice
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 play 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 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 face
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.
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