Brown Fellowship Society

By: Douglas R. Egerton

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

Brown Fellowship Society

Founded by James Mitchell and four other “free brown men” on 1 November 1790, the Brown Fellowship Society of Charleston was the ultimate expression of South Carolina's racial exceptionalism. In that year, only 1.7 percent of the state's nonwhite population was free—compared with 30.5 percent in Delaware—and most of that number were mulattoes. Over the course of the eighteenth century a three-caste system of racial stratification emerged in Charleston that was more typical of the Caribbean than of other parts of the Old South outside New Orleans, Louisiana. When several mulattoes were denied funerary rights in the grounds of Saint Philip's Protestant Episcopal Church, the Reverend Thomas Frost, the white pastor of the congregation, encouraged several mixed-race members of his flock to create an exclusive mulatto fraternal organization.

By its charter, the society was open to no more than fifty men; each had to pay a prohibitive initiation fee of fifty dollars besides monthly dues. The general fund supported aged members who were too ill to work, and the group also assisted widows and orphans of its members. Upon their death, associates were guaranteed an impressive funeral and interment in the society's private cemetery on Boundary Street. But social advancement and economic security for the colored elite, not philanthropy for the state's enslaved majority, were the goals of the organization. Despite its motto of “Charity and Benevolence,” the society existed for the purpose of drawing biologically constructed lines of demarcation between the wealthy browns (as they styled themselves) and Charleston's sizable black community, whether bond or free. Slaves, even if mixed race, were denied membership, as were free blacks who could not prove a partial white ancestry.

The immediate success of the society indicated a growing awareness among the Lowcountry's free mulatto population that they were a socially distinct group with a unique position in the city. Although they were denied access to South Carolina's white institutions and cultural life, the free Creoles were neither slaves nor Africans at a time when the state continued to import thousands of African bondpeople every year. Many enjoyed the open patronage of their white fathers, but they occupied a tenuous position in the early national South. Even their chosen term of identification, browns, was designed to remind the city's political elite that they were a group apart from the black majority.

Although black fraternal organizations in Philadelphia routinely purchased slaves for the purposes of manumitting them, no evidence indicates that the Brown Fellowship Society ever did so. Extant records do not reveal the percentage of members who owned slaves, but many of its leading members owned bondpeople. (In Charleston, fully 85 percent of nonwhites who owned slaves were mulattoes.) William Penceel owned fifteen slaves, whom he employed as apprentices in his plate business, and Samuel Holman, a former slave trader who had amassed his fortune in Rio Pongo, West Africa, owned a large plantation at Saint James Santee where he kept forty slaves. Several members even married into the Lowcountry's planter aristocracy. James Pendarvis, the son of planter Joseph Pendarvis and Parthena, Joseph's black mistress, married a poor but respectable white woman, and both of their daughters married prosperous white planters. By the time of his death, Pendarvis owned 150 bondpeople.

The determination of wealthy mulattoes to identify with their fathers' caste was evidenced in other ways as well. On occasion, the free brown aristocracy even fought to protect Charleston's social structure. Conscious of the fact that their mixed ancestry made them suspect in the eyes of many proslavery theorists, who believed that African blood was both dissimilar and inferior to Euro-American blood, Carolina mulattoes sought to prove their worth in times of crisis. During the War of 1812, at a time when Chesapeake slaves fled toward the British invaders, Charleston mulattoes helped man the defense of the city. Five years later, in 1817, the Brown Fellowship Society publicly expelled a member who was implicated in a slave conspiracy, and in 1822 Penceel was instrumental in revealing the Denmark Vesey conspiracy. The cost of white protection, one society member admitted, was that the colored elite “had to be in accord with [whites] and stand for what they stood for.” As recompense for their service against Britain, Mayor Robert Y. Hayne commended the organization's purpose and declared its members exempt from the ordinance requiring the attendance of a white man at any meeting of more than six people of color.

In the hope of democratizing the organization, Thomas Smalls, a free black, applied for membership but was rejected because his hair was not straight enough. In retaliation, Smalls organized a rival fraternal society, the Society for Free Blacks of Dark Complexion, which was later renamed the Brotherly Society. To better make his point, Smalls purchased a lot next to the Brown's cemetery for his group's burial grounds and announced that his graveyard was available only to those of “pure African descent.”

Because of this competition, and because the post–Civil War black codes of 1866 briefly tended to erase old distinctions between blacks and browns, the Brown Fellowship Society attempted to change its image of exclusiveness by admitting women. Finally, in 1892, in celebration of its centennial, the society eliminated the word “brown” from its name by becoming the Century Fellowship Society. During World War II, white Charlestonians passed an ordinance that banned private organizations from maintaining graveyards within the city's boundaries. Although the Brown Fellowship Society was no longer the influential organization it had once been, the elimination of the group's original reason for existence essentially marked its termination.

See also Cemeteries and Burials; Denmark Vesey Conspiracy; Fraternal Organizations and Mutual Aid Societies; Louisiana; Marriage, Mixed; Race, Theories of; Skin Color; South Carolina, Colony and State to 1828; Vesey, Denmark; and War of 1812.

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