In freedom's birthplace; a study of the Boston Negroes

Front matter

:i! I I

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FREEDOM'S BIRTHPLACE

Preface

To Mr. Robert A. Woods, of the South End House, the writer desires to acknowledge his deep gratitude for constant guidance in connection with the making of the present study. Also to Mr. Albert J. Kennedy and to Mr. William I. Cole, both till recently of the staff of the above Settlement, the writer is greatly indebted, particularly for the painstaking reading and candid criticism of his manuscript preceding its final revision. The plan of casting the account mainly in the historical and the descriptive, rather than the argumentative, mould, to the extent which has been done, was suggested by Dr. Robert E. Park, now of the sociological department of Chicago University.

Any adequate roll of those among the Negro people who have assisted would be impossible to call in the space here permitted. Some, however, have contributed an especially generous quota of their time. Grateful acknowledgment for such service is due Mr. William L. Reed, Mr. Butler R. Wilson, Mr. William H. Lewis, Mr. Archibald H. Grimke, Mr. William M. Trotter, Mr. William H. Dupree, Mr. Robert M. Coursey, Mr. Joshua A. Crawford, Mr. Joseph W. Houston, and Miss Eliza Gardner, — all of Boston. Beyond this, however, the writer wishes to record that the source from which in general he has derived his measure of sympathetic understanding and of closerange information, with regard to the conditions herein vi PREFACE

describedras well as constant encouragement for the continuance and completion of his inquiries, has been found in the Negro people themselves. To them, their achievements, and their higher and broader future, this study is sincerely dedicated.

In the interest both of accuracy and also of possible subsequent attention to this same subject, the writer will welcome any corrections, amplifications, or suggestions, in connection with the present narrative. For this purpose, he may be addressed in care of the publishers.

Contents

I. Slave, Patriot, and Pioneer Freeman 1

II. A Race Delivered 30

III. Equal Rights and Public Favor 81

Introduction

The residents of the South End House, early in the development of their work, were struck by a curious anomaly in the attitude of Boston citizens toward the Negro. Very large sums of money were annually contributed to schools for appropriate and effective measures of improvement among colored people in the South, while practically no specific attention was paid to the serious problem of the steadily increasing Negro population of Boston itself. A few descendants of the Abolitionists, natural or spiritual, continued to have a care for the broad rights of the Negro, but this somewhat abstract concern seemed to make it the more difficult for them to find that there were once again new occasions bringing new duties; to realize that the issue was no longer merely one of equality but of contact.

For the sake of a more human and more timely relation, the South End House undertook in 1904 a small branch in a street inhabited almost entirely by an isolated cluster of colored families; an experiment which by gradual stages led to the establishment, on an independent basis, of the Robert Gould Shaw House, in the midst of the great Negro quarter of the city.

The present study was begun among experiences associated with that development; and has been continued by Mr. Daniels, as other work would permit, for a period of nine years. It is hoped that this presentment may help the citizens of Boston to focalize their traditional devotion to the cause of the Negro in

X INTRODUCTION

greater degree upon conditions that are immediate in time and place. It may also be of service in cities and large towns throughout the country where the most distinctive of all our American problems is coming into its urban phase.

It is, indeed, entirely possible that the issue, which for a century has run tantalizingly athwart every large motive of broad national progress, may proceed to play this same role, with unexpected variations and complications, in the life of our municipalities. As ever stronger magnets to unskilled labor, the cities of the North inevitably draw the Negroes to them. Even in the South it is anticipated that, with the development of cotton-picking machinery, an increasing proportion of Negroes will be driven from the farming regions to the towns.

It cannot be doubted that the feeling of aversion on the part of the whites in the cities is increasing. Even the incoming immigrants begin to express it. It is often pathetically urged by Negro leaders that this sentiment is imparted to the newcomers by native Americans who have stifled in themselves the sentiments inculcated by their fathers; but the actuality of the color prejudice is shown by the fact that some of the immigrants, notably the Italians, bring it with them.

The city situation may be protected from this new danger, and it may be the means of shifting the Negro problem for the country as a whole into a normal and ultimately manageable angle, if the Negroes can be considered as an unassimilated social factor analogous to the diflFerent immigrant nationalities; and the people

INTRODUCTION xi

of the city as a whole, including the colored population, be accustomed to look upon the color line, in many of its aspects, as simply a much more extreme form of the cleavage which separates the diflferent types of immigrants from the natives and from one another. It is true that this analogy is incomplete: — at the point of racial intermixture it ceases. But its practical value can be very great.

In the case of each immigrant nationality, bitter prejudice has been encountered; but such experience has only more firmly established and specialized certain forms of economic, political, and religious allegiance within the nationality group. This formation has, on the whole, eased the process of assimilation ; has brought resource more quickly to the hand of the stranger; and made it possible to bring up within the shortest possible time trained and powerful leaders who have secured for themselves, and then for their congeners, a solid and abiding foundation of influence and consideration throughout the community as a whole. This path beaten down by the footsteps of the great multitude of the new Americans is open to the Negro, and it is his only dependable way of entrance into the broad fellowship of American city life. The cities of the country, in their community relations, are, for better or worse, decisively organized on the basis of racial distinctions, and of a particular method for overcoming them. The Negro must adopt the method or rule himself out of the game.

The great secret is that of learning the power of association based on racial loyalty. The immigrants have even proved that a certain sort of segregation, amid all

3di INTRODUCTION

the conflicting currents of city life, is provisionally a blessing. They have also learned the relative futility of scattered pleas for a flat parity of opportunity, and the indomitable quality of collective power in hand. Here is the test of whether the Negro of the cities can develop the urban type of intelligence through which city dwellers maintain themselves and make advances. The present measure of his capacity for registering in thought and purpose the indications of reality is in such achievements and such failures as he is making in organization. If the Negroes of Boston could, for instance, consolidate their purchasing power, and direct it as they collectively chose, they could quickly double or treble the number of their representatives who should be holding responsible positions in industrial and mercantile establishments. Mr. Daniels's treatment will be found particularly suggestive as to whether in economic opportunity the Negroes do not, in spite of prejudice, have almost as much as they on the average and collectively merit.

That the Negroes as a type do not force conviction to the mind of the citizen as an economic asset is to-day very largely owing to the relative incapacity for loyal, continuous, result-getting team-work among themselves. Their minor leaders are destroyed by the jealousies of such as should gladly be their followers; and those who are otherwise equipped to be their major leaders see in all forms of internal organization a truculent surrender of the principle of social equality.

One would be far from forgetting that the Negro suffers under a cruel load of injustice; but the point of incidence of this infliction is not where he thinks it to be.

IN FREEDOM'S BIRTHPLACE

Chapter I

The Negro has had his part in the history of Boston almost as long as his Caucasian fellow-citizens. He came into the community in 1638, only eight years after the original settlement.

The first Negroes, apparently but a few in number, were brought to Boston by a trading- vessel, the Desire, as part of a cargo which, it is interesting to note, consisted for the rest of tobacco and cotton, the two commodities which have become the staples of the Negro's labor in America. These Negroes were brought directly from Providence in the Bahamas, where presumably they had undergone a brief seasoning, but they were in all probability native Africans, who not long before had been captured in the jungle. They were purchased by the people of Boston as slaves.^

* For the account of the first landing of Negroes in Boston, see Winthrop's New England, vol. i, p. 254 (p. 305, Savage edition). There is reason to believe that Negroes had been brought to the vicinity of Boston even before 1638. See Mass. Hist. Coll. vol. i, p. 194. One of the earliest writers on New England (Josselyn, author of Two Voyages to New England) had occasion to visit Noddle's Island in the harbor, in October, 1637. He found, in the possession of one Maverick, three Negroes, two women and one man. Neither of the women could speak English. One of them seemed to have been a person of high rank in Africa. This writer observed that "the people are well accommodated with servants, some English, others Negroes."

Thus there arose, simultaneously with the Negro's advent, a contradiction between the abstract profession of the white citizens of Boston and their concrete treatment of this race. The Puritans had founded the town in devotion to the cause of spiritual freedom. Yet they did not refrain, within a few years, from placing Negroes in a state of bondage, in which not only was the negation of spiritual freedom implicit, but which took away physical freedom as well. This contradiction was speedily to give trouble to the Puritan conscience, and was to have momentous consequences, in bringing that conscience to bear as a lever to change the Negro's lot. It was a contradiction, moreover, which in modified degree and form has survived to the present, and which still troubles the Boston community.

These first Negroes were not, however, the first slaves in Boston. Indian captives had already been held in slavery. This fact naturally suggests the query as to why Indian slavery did not preclude, or at least continue to coexist with, Negro slavery. The most immediate reason why the enslavement of Indians was not kept up was that the Indian tribes made this practice one of the grievances for their constant wars with the colonists, and in the treaties which were made stipulated its discontinuance. The more intrinsic reason, however, was that the Indian did not prove to be so good a slave as the Negro. On the one hand, the Indian's time-honored traditions had instilled in him the idea that manual toil was degrading, and his characteristic pride made him rebellious against such toil, and still more against the disgrace of being held in subjection. On the other hand, his equally characteristic sulkiness, his obstinacy in clinging to his own ways and in resisting the civilized ways of the white man, and his laziness, made him unsatisfactory in point of service. The Negro, however, though he lacked the innate pride which in itself commanded respect, was of a cheerful disposition, quick to imitate, readily teachable, and, while somewhat given to loafing and inviting his soul, was for the most part industrious. Curiously enough, it appears from the old records that the Negroes brought to Boston by the Desire had been purchased with the proceeds from the sale of fifteen Indian boys and two squaws whom the vessel had carried away on her outward voyage from her home port, near-by Salem ;^ that is, Indians were practically exchanged for Negroes, — a transaction the inference of which is obvious.

Though these two peoples were not to undergo a common experience in slavery, their destinies were nevertheless interlinked by the white man's coming to America; — destinies strangely alike, yet opposite. The Negroes were to be taken away from their immemorial home-land. The Indians were to have their immemorial home-land taken away from them. There is a suggestion of elemental sympathy in the fact that from the beginning the two races intermarried. To-day, hundreds of Negroes in Boston are imbued with an Indian strain. The Negroes may boast the unique distinction of having more aboriginal American blood flowing through their veins than any other racial group except the present-day Indians themselves. Should the "noble red man" eventually pass into ex- ^ Winthrop's New England, vol. i, p. 234 (p. 279, Savage's edition).

tinction, it will be the Negro who will transmit his heritage to the modern American composite.

There is one further aspect from which the Negro in Boston is a significant figure. His advent in that city followed by only nineteen years the first appearance of Negroes in the colonies.^ His history in Boston, going back two hundred and seventy-five years, is therefore very nearly coextensive with, and so within bounds representative of, the history of the Negro people in the United States.

For the first century and a half, roughly, from 1638 down to the Revolution, the chronicles bearing upon the subject in hand have to do chiefly with slavery and the slave-trade, and their suppression.

The first slave-ship fitted out in the colonies is believed to have sailed from Boston in 1646.^ Thereafter not a few Boston merchants engaged in the traffic. Some ships carried barrel-staves, fish, and rum to the Madeiras and the Canaries, and brought back Negroes from the Guinea coast and Madagascar, for sale chiefly in the West Indies, whence cargoes of sugar and molasses were taken home to be manufactured into rum for further trade. ^ Other ships took miscellaneous cargoes to the West Indies and bartered for slaves, which were sold in the Southern colonies.^ Direct importation of Negroes into Boston remained slight till the close of the century, and never became large. More were obtained indirectly, from the South, and from the Dutch in New York. In 1680, Governor

' The first Negroes brought into the colonies were slaves landed at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1G19. ^ U.S. Census, 1860, vol. 2, p. iv. * Reuben Gold Thwaites, The Colonies, p. 185.

Bradstreet of Massachusetts stated, "There hath been no Company of blacks or Slaves brought into the Country since the beginning of this plantation, for the space of Fifty yeares,^ only one small Vessell about two yeares since, after twenty months' voyage to Madagasca, brought hither betwixt Forty and fifty Negro's, most women and children Sold here for 10£ 15£ and 20£ apiece, which stood the merchants in neer 40£ apiece one with another. Now and then, two or three Negro's are brought hither from Barbados and other of his Majesties plantations, and sold here for about twenty pounds apiece. So that there may be within our Government about one hundred or one hundred and twenty." ^ In 1708, Governor Dudley gave four hundred as the number of slaves in Boston, adding that half of these had been born here.^ The others had been brought in since 1698.^ From that year to 1727, when, it is recorded, "the traffic in slaves appears to have been more an object than at any period before or since, "^ from twenty -five to fifty Negroes were brought in annually. Thenceforth there was a steady decline.

The lot of the slaves in Boston, however, was not severe. Most of them were house and body servants, and in fact the less forbidding term "servant" soon came into common use. The Massachusetts Body of

* Governor Bradstreet apparently used the expression "Fifty yeares" roughly, or else the Negroes brought to Boston in 1638 were not sufficient in number to be referred to as a "Company."

2 Mass. Hist. Coll., Third Series, viii, p. 337.

^ Thirty-fourth Annual Report of the Mass. Bureau of Statistics of Labor, p. 230.

■* Drake's History of Boston, p. 574.

6 Ibid.

Liberties of 1641 contained the imperative declaration that the slaves should be accorded "all the liberties and Christian usages which the law of God established in Israel doeth morally require," and the instructions from the Crown to Governor Andros in 1668 required him to have a law passed restraining brutality on the part of masters and overseers, and making wilful killing of slaves punishable by death. ^

Hardly had slavery got a foothold, moreover, before opposition to it, on humanitarian grounds, began. As early as 1701, citizens of Boston had appealed to their representatives in the colony's Legislature, "to put a period to negroes being slaves," and to encourage the bringing in of white servants.^ The same sentiment was further evidenced by persistent efforts to stop the rating of Negroes as live stock for purposes of taxation. About 1712, Judge Samuel Sewall, the leader of the anti-slavery agitation of that period, wrote a tract entitled "The Selling of Joseph," which greatly furthered the movement toward manumission. The slaves themselves entered upon a determined effort to obtain their freedom. In 1770, James, a slave of Richard Lechmere, of Cambridge, brought an action against his master for detaining him in bondage. The Negroes raised money enough to employ counsel and push the matter through to a conclusion. They won a victory, and from that time on there were many such suits and the majority of them were successful.^ A pamphlet containing an account of the famous Sommersett case,

* Thirty-fourth Annual Report of the Mass. Bureau of Statistics of Labor, p. 220.

^ Mass Hist. Coll., Second Series, viii, p. 184.

' Address of Charles Sumner, U. S. Senate, June 28, 1854.

which occurred in England in 1772, and in which the court had ruled that no one could be held in bondage in that country, was widely and effectively circulated in Massachusetts, as well as in the other Northern colonies. In 1773^ and again in 1777^ groups of slaves petitioned the Legislature to enact emancipation.

The fact that there were free Negroes — or, as they were styled to distinguish them from the slaves, "free persons of color" — in the community, helped to undermine slavery. As has been mentioned, some Negroes were bound as slaves for a term of years only. Others gained their freedom through exceptional industry or the exhibition of superior qualities. Not a few were set at liberty in return for military service. Some escaped, and, thanks in large part to a public sentiment inclined to be sympathetic, contrived to evade capture and return. Negroes already free often purchased the freedom of kinsmen still held in bondage. Practically from the beginning, moreover, a considerable proportion of slaves were manumitted by more than ordinarily kind-hearted masters. In 1708, according to the town officials' lists, there were thirtythree free Negroes in Boston, and thenceforth their number rapidly increased. The presence of this class prevented slavery from coming to be accepted either by the Negroes or the whites as a foreordained and necessary institution.

Slavery got its death-blow, however, from the rights-of-man fervor which inspired the Revolution.

1 Mass. Legislative Report on Free Negroes and Mulattoes, January 16, 1822. ^ William C. Nell, Colored Patriots of the Revolution.

Enthusiasm for the principles of equality could scarcely avoid being brought hard up against the paradox of the Negro's status. Augmented by appreciation of the service which, as will appear, the Negro rendered in the war, that enthusiasm finally assured the Negro his freedom. Though an exact date has never been set to mark the termination of slavery in Massachusetts, the approximate time of its disappearance is sufficiently certain. "How, or by what act particularly, slavery was abolished in Massachusetts, whether by the adoption of the opinion in Sommersett's case, as a declaration and modification of the common law, or by the Declaration of Independence, or by the constitution of 1780, it is not now very easy to determine, and it is rather a matter of curiosity than utility; it being agreed on all hands, that if not abolished before, it was so by the declaration of rights." ^ The declaration of rights here referred to was that drafted by John Adams and adopted by the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention of 1780, the first article of which read: "All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential and unalienable rights: among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; that of acquiring, possessing and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness." The slave-trade was formally prohibited in 1788, twenty years before similar action was taken by the Federal Government. In 1790 the first national census showed not a single slave in the state. Though

1 Statement by Chief Justice Shaw in 1836; — Commonwealth v. Aves, 18 Pickering, p. 209.

several other Northern states had by that time adopted acts of conditional emancipation, in the complete elimination of slavery Massachusetts had attained a unique distinction.

This was the first great result wrought by the disturbance which slavery had produced in the Puritan conscience. Boston, as the active center of the movement which brought slavery to an end in Massachusetts, became the birthplace of the Negro's freedom in America, in point of time. There, nearly a century and a half ago, the Negro first came into the estate of a free citizen. Some fourscore years later, Boston was to prove his freedom's birthplace in point of relation to his emancipation throughout the land.

While slavery was being stamped out in Massachusetts, the historic events which terminated in the American Revolution were taking place. It seems like something more than mere coincidence — like a natural intervolution of kindred issues, indeed — that the Negro's first attainment of freedom was contemporaneous with the colonists' victorious struggle for their own independence; and that in this struggle the Negro took a worthy and in truth a memorable part.

The momentous incident which finally drove the colonists to the extreme decision of separation from the mother country was the Boston Massacre. The central hero of that incident was a Negro, or a Negro- Indian half-breed, Crispus Attucks.^ English troops

^ Attucks was an escaped slave, who had run away from his master, a resident of Framingham, Massachusetts, in September, 1750. In an advertisement for his apprehension, which appeared in the Boston Gazette on October 2 of that year, he was described as a mulatto, over six feet in height, and well proportioned.

had been quartered in Boston since October, 1768, to repress any violent opposition to the obnoxious Taxation Act of the previous year. The presence of these troops was most offensive to the citizens and provoked ominous friction. On the evening of the 5th of March, 1770, some soldiers leaving the main guard at the head of King (now State) Street, were met by a crowd armed with cudgels. The resulting row swelled the numbers of the crowd, which soon set itself to harrying the sentinel on duty before the custom house, opposite the head of the street. Finally this sentinel, in exasperation, struck a boy with the butt of his musket. The boy ran off and set up an alarm, and in a few minutes a furious crowd, headed by Attucks, rushed upon the scene. The sentinel was joined by other soldiers, till ten were in line. At last they fired, killing Attucks and two of his companions, James Caldwell and Samuel Gray, and mortally wounding two others, Samuel Maverick and Patrick Carr. The alarm bells of the city clanged, the British drums beat to arms, and the streets were thronged with soldiers and enraged citizens.

Lieutenant-Governor Hutchinson prevented further bloodshed by placing the ten soldiers under arrest and inducing the officers to send the troops back to barracks. But next day a town meeting was held, and the citizens voted "that nothing can rationally be expected to restore the peace of the town and prevent blood and carnage but the immediate withdrawal of the troops." This action forced the removal of the troops to Castle Island in the harbor. Two days later, March 8, a public funeral was held. The four bodies were deposited together in a single grave. Over the grave was erected a stone with this inscription : —

" Long as in Freedom's cause the wise contend, Dear to your country shall your fame extend. While to the world the lettered stone shall tell. Where Caldwell, Attucks, Gray and Maverick fell."

This marked grave lies in the northeast corner of the old cemetery between the Park Street Church and the Tremont Building, close to the grave of Samuel Adams, signer of the Declaration of Independence and Governor of the commonwealth. In a prominent position on the Common, midway facing Tremont Street, stands a more conspicuous memorial, in the form of a monument, erected by the State in 1888. A figure of Liberty holds in her left hand a broken chain, in her right the flag, and at her feet crouches the American eagle. The scene of the massacre is represented on a bronze tablet, the British soldiers with smoking muskets still raised, Attucks lying dead on the ground, and the others falling back into the arms of their fellows. Above, to the left, are carved the words of Daniel Webster, — "From that moment we may date the severance of the British Empire"; and to the left, those of John Adams, — "On that night the foundation of American independence was laid." The Fifth of March was, in fact, celebrated as the chief American holiday till the Fourth of July took its place.

When the Revolution broke out, the question arose as to whether Negroes should be allowed to serve as soldiers. At that time a considerable proportion of the Negroes in Massachusetts, the majority of those in the other Northern colonies, and nearly all of those in the Southern colonies, were still slaves. The opposition to their enlistment appears to have been due mainly to recognition of the obvious inconsistency of calling upon a slave class to help in a war for independence. Because the inconsistency involved was less direct, there was less opposition to enlisting free Negroes. The element that wanted slavery abolished pressed strongly for general emancipation, urging that this was the policy dictated by national self-interest. The proposal was broached in the first Provincial Congress in 1774, but was allowed to subside. In May, 1775, the Committee of Safety passed a resolve that in their opinion "the admission of any persons, as soldiers, but only such as are freemen, will be inconsistent with the principles that are to be supported, and reflect dishonor on the Colony, and that no slaves be admitted into the army upon any consideration whatever." Washington, having assumed command of the army around Boston on July 3, 1775, on the 10th issued instructions to the recruiting officers not to allow any Negro to enlist. At a council of war on October 8, it was agreed unanimously to reject all slaves, and, by a great majority, to reject Negroes altogether, and in November, Washington issued further instructions to that effect.

Whatever may have been the nominal policy in this matter, however, the fact is that Negroes were allowed to serve in the Revolutionary army from the outset, and in increasing numbers till the war's close ; for the reason, evidently, that their military service was too badly needed to be refused. Bancroft states that, at Cambridge, "Free Negroes stood in the ranks by the side of white men." On September, 1775, the Continental Congress debated whether to order all Negro soldiers, slave and free, then in service, to be discharged, and apparently because of their number, decided against such action. In December, Washington issued general orders as follows: "As the General is informed that numbers of free Negroes are desirous of enlisting, he gives leave to the recruiting oflScers to entrain them, and promises to lay the matter before the Congress, who, he doubts not, will approve of it." Congress, in January, 1776, ordered that "the free Negroes who have served faithfully in the army at Cambridge may be reinstated therein, but no others." Though it thus appears that the relaxation applied mainly to free Negroes, yet there is no doubt that a considerable number of slaves served as soldiers, and that many slaves in fact earned their manumission thereby. From an official document dated August 24, 1778, it is known that altogether there were 755 Negroes distributed through the main army under Washington's immediate command.^ An additional number, it may be assumed, were enlisted in subsidiary corps. Besides, there were at least two fighting bodies composed entirely of Negroes. One of these was the famous Rhode Island regiment, which successfully defended Red Bank at Bunker Hill — 400 Negroes against 1500 Hessians. 2 The other was a Massachusetts company known as "The Bucks of America," and commanded by " Colonel" Middleton, a Boston Negro, who was a

' For the account of Negroes in the Revolutionary army, up to this point, the facts have been taken from the Thirty-fourth Annual Report of the Mass. Bureau of Statistics of Labor, pp. 227-28.