Urbanization

By: Gregory D. Smithers

Source:

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

Urbanization

In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, European powers began the process of colonizing the new world of the Americas. Combining technological and financial capacity with scientific curiosity, European powers sailed across the Atlantic Ocean, searching for riches and establishing settlements in the Caribbean, South America, and North America. The earliest European settlers set the tenor for later settlement as they strove to establish pockets of civilization in what they saw as an untamed wilderness. Spanish colonizers, the historian Jane Landers argues, were guided by an “urban model.” She asserts that the Spanish believed that urban living facilitated “religious conversion, but, beyond that, Spaniards attached a special value to living a vida politica, believing that people of reason distinguished themselves from nomadic ‘barbarians’ by living in stable urban communities.” The English held similar views. They spoke matter-of-factly about the importance of establishing dwellings and habitations on lands that they argued constituted a terra nullius, a land not under the sovereignty of any nation or people. Native Americans, the English contended, had failed to establish permanent dwellings or cultivate the soil, both of which the English saw as key indicators of civilization and the possession of land. The establishment of an “urban spirit” in British North America was thus bound up in ideas about civil society and government, Christianity, and a common appreciation of the dictum “Be fruitful and multiply.”

That credo gave rise to an overwhelming demand for labor. Indian slaves, indentured servants, and ultimately African slaves filled the demand, making people of African descent a permanent fixture in urban centers. African slaves were reported to exist in urban New England, the Middle Atlantic, and the Chesapeake as early as the 1620s and in some cases even earlier. The historian Ira Berlin claims that in the Chesapeake many slaves were Atlantic Creoles, often mixed-race people, who acquired knowledge of European social, economic, and political practices through their dealings on the west coast of Africa. For the Atlantic Creoles who found themselves in the New World, this knowledge made their transition from Africa to the Americas slightly more manageable. Initially, Atlantic Creoles played important roles in the cities and towns of North America, which—unlike rural areas, where slavery was identified by self-sufficiency and gang labor—were defined by their constant state of social and economic flux. The historian Richard Wade argues that “the rural setting promoted stability seldom found in towns.” This was particularly true, he believes, between 1835 and 1845, as cotton became king in the rural South and the demand for slaves in the metropolis declined.

New York

In the Middle Atlantic, New York was colonized by the Dutch and then ruled by the English after 1664, producing what ultimately became a slave society. Slavery came to New York, known as New Amsterdam before English control, with the Dutch West India Company in 1626. The company purchased sixteen slaves from pirates and thereafter attempted to attract European settlers with promises of land and black slaves. The colony's original slaves formed the basis of a free black community. According to one historian, by 1660 thirty blacks had attained their freedom on Manhattan Island. They attempted to forge communities based on the principles of “personal freedom, landownership, religion, and local institutions.”

The Dutch viewed slavery in pragmatic terms, seeing it as essential to the colony's economy. Rapid economic growth after the 1640s made slavery's importance seem more pressing, a perception reflected in the increase in slave prices. While not employed on large plantations during this early period, New Amsterdam slaves worked in a variety of occupations, from domestics to farm hands and stevedores. Slaves also needed to be physically fit. In 1660 Governor Stuyvesant made clear the need for such qualities in New Amsterdam's slaves: “They aut to be stout and strong fellows, fit for immediate employment on this fortress and other works; also, if required, in war against the wild barbarians, either to pursue them when retreating, or else to carry some of the soldiers' luggage.”

“Black and White Beaux,” This lithograph by A. Ducote of a free black couple in New York City appeared in Fanny Trollope's famous book Domestic Manners of the Americans, 1832.

New-York Historical Society.

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African and African American slaves enjoyed a greater degree of legal freedom during Dutch rule than in the English period of colonial rule. They successfully sued for lost wages; could own land, livestock, and other property; and could legally marry. Some even owned slaves, usually kin. Under Dutch rule slaves were afforded the opportunity of acquiring “half-freedom”: in return for the payment of an annual tribute and seasonal labor, slaves were essentially free to use their time as they saw fit. New York slaves were confronted, however, with restrictive laws. For example, in 1638 Governor William Kieft prohibited “Adulterous intercourse with Heathens [and] Blacks.” Moreover, race, specifically blackness, quickly became prima facie evidence of slave status in New Amsterdam.

By the time the English took control of New Amsterdam in 1664, the free black community had spread outside Manhattan to Brooklyn and the New Jersey hinterland. Under English rule, New York's free blacks occupied an increasingly tenuous position as the English oversaw an aggressive expansion of slavery. Between 1703 and 1746 the black population increased from 11.5 percent of the total population to 14.8 percent. In New York City 41 percent of households owned slaves. New York's standing as the most important slave city in North America was maintained until the mid-eighteenth century, when its preeminence was surpassed by Charleston, South Carolina, and ultimately New Orleans. Slaves in New York City continued to work in various occupations but were generally confined to unskilled labor. Many, for instance, worked on manors or “gentleman's farms,” while others entered the “Meal Market,” which after 1711 institutionalized the hiring of slaves by artisans, giving all whites in New York a stake in slavery. Slave women, however, tended to be more prominent in the city, a function of their employment as domestics.

Under English rule New York became a slave society. Slaves became a larger portion of the state's population and were increasingly important to its economy. In 1665 slavery was recognized as a legal institution. This ushered in a raft of laws that policed the movement of blacks, such as curfews on Africans and Indians in 1684, the punishment of black thieves by branding with the letter T, New Jersey laws that mandated the castration of black men guilty of raping white women, and a 1706 New York law that denied emancipation to blacks, Indians, and mulattoes on the ground of Christian conversion.

In the face of these restrictions African Americans continued to strive to create their own cultural identity. Blacks incorporated African beliefs into their Christian practices, and they drew on European and African culture to develop a distinctive song and dance culture, which whites feared would fuel slave rebellion. The 1712 conspiracy, for example, drew on African belief systems, calling on beliefs in magic for protection. Similar slave conspiracies were detected in New York in 1721, 1734, and 1741, all of which gave rise to calls for tighter slave laws. These laws, which continued to be promulgated into the nineteenth century, restricted the social and economic activities of New York's blacks. Laws policing African Americans came as New York's black population declined as a percentage of its total population. Moreover, gradual emancipation changed the nature of the black population in urban New York during the first three decades of the nineteenth century. In 1800 slaves constituted one-half of New York's black population, but by 1820 this percentage had declined to less than one-twentieth.

The black Episcopalian minister Peter Williams Jr. argued in the early 1830s that racial prejudice was more intense in New York City than in rural areas. Mounting restrictions on black enfranchisement supported Williams's opinion. Blacks were originally required to present certificates of freedom and later to meet onerous property qualifications before they could vote. In 1826 a constitutional amendment abolished the property qualification for whites, but it remained for free blacks. These restrictions were particularly demanding for free blacks, given the social and legal restrictions on their economic activity. By the 1840s New York's city directories recorded fewer than ten African Americans, listing their occupations as carters, draymen, and the like.

Despite the enforced marginality of blacks in New York, African Americans formed their own institutions, including churches and benevolent and literary societies, designed to foster self-improvement. John Teasman, the vice president of the New York African Society for Mutual Relief, advised African Americans in an 1811 speech to “be animated my brethren to improve your genius. … For this purpose establish institutions, let them be well attended and well supported.” Thus black New Yorkers were not passive victims of white racism but drew on their own resources and inner strength to build their own communities.

New England Cities: Boston

In New England the harsh climate and poor-quality soil meant that plantation slavery never took root. Nevertheless, it remained a society with slaves until the Revolutionary era. Because slaves never became a central feature of New England's economy and cultural life, Africans and African Americans stayed on the periphery of white society. Historians estimate that as many as three-quarters of New England's slaves were African born, most arriving by way of the Caribbean. Hugh Hall, for example, sold eighty Barbados slaves in Boston in 1729, two-thirds possessing African names. New England's slaves came from the Gold Coast of Africa but also the Bights of Benin and Biafra, and from Senegambia, Sierre Leone, the Grain and Windward Coasts, and Central Africa. African slaves adapted their cultural traditions to life in New England. Most had to live, work, eat, and sometimes sleep alongside their masters in an environment that remained mostly white. This facilitated the acculturation of Africans and African Americans to European sociocultural norms.

Between 1690 and 1740 American cities experienced rapid growth, fueled by the expansion of the commercial economy. Boston was at the forefront of this growth. As its economy grew, so did its slave population. In 1742 the black population of Massachusetts was 1,500, the bulk of this clustering around Boston. By 1754 one-half of the 2,700 adult blacks in Massachusetts lived in Boston. These figures are indicative of Boston's importance as a slave port. In fact, Boston not only became the chief port for New England slaves in the eighteenth century but also was the greatest slave-trading area in North America. The historian Lorenzo Greene contends that New Englanders became part of the “triangle trade,” linking New England with Africa and the West Indies in an exchange of slaves and other commodities—sugar, rum, molasses—that fueled economic growth. Indeed, slave merchants embodied the ideals of gentility in early colonial America. As Greene states, “The slave trade was as honorable a vocation as lumbering or fishing. … [Slave merchants] were regarded by their fellows as worthy of emulation.”

Black New Englanders tended to cluster around urban centers like Boston. Most slaves lived and worked in the homes and gardens of white urban families. As a result, many blacks were cut off from fellow slaves, retarding the development of African American culture in New England. New England slaves worked a variety of occupations, from laboring on small family farms, in shipyards or on fishing and trading ships, and in homes, as domestics. In essence, the slave population worked in most facets of the New England economy, and as a consequence slaves' skills were highly diversified.

New England's slaves constituted a small proportion of the region's population, making its impact on social and cultural formation less evident than the impact of slaves in the Carolinas. Because many slaves worked alongside the white family members who owned them, New England slavery had a distinctive “familial” flavor. Slave children were often taken from their natural parents and raised, at the master's discretion, in white households, hastening the slave's assimilation. This was the experience, for example, of the African American poet Phillis Wheatley, who acquired the manners of upper-class Boston. However, tensions did exist within the New England family. The historian William Piersen observes, “The artificial laws of paternalistic ownership could never successfully be reconciled to the innate laws of the human spirit.”

Boston blacks understood the contradictions between the ideals of the paternalistic household and the oppressiveness of human bondage. During the latter decades of the eighteenth century, the free black population of Boston protested such discrepancies by forming its own churches and benevolent societies, institutions vital to protesting the injustices of slavery. One group of Boston blacks, in petitioning for freedom from slavery, stated:

"How many of that number have there been and now are in this Province, who have had every day of their lives embittered with this intolerable reflection that, let their behavior be what it will, neither they, nor their children to all generations, shall ever be able to do, or to possess and enjoy anything, no not even life itself, but in a Manner as the beasts that perish."

(Piersen, p. 60)

Northern free blacks protested slavery's injustices and struggled against restrictions on their own social mobility. Massachusetts, with its dense population of blacks in Boston, was the only New England colony to pass a law in the early 1700s prohibiting marriages and illicit sex between blacks and whites. Although intermarriage was rare, the Boston merchant Samuel Dexter noted in 1795 that when interracial marriage did occur, it was “oftener between black men and white women than on the contrary.” In this sense, the Boston law was an attempt by white patriarchal authorities to protect the virtue of white womanhood.

The Revolutionary era brought not only emancipation for New England blacks but also a hardening of laws policing free blacks. In 1788 Massachusetts passed a law that stated, “No person being an African or Negro, other than a subject of the Emperor of Morocco (to be evidenced by a certificate from the Secretary of the State of which he shall be a citizen) shall tarry within this Commonwealth, for a longer time than two months.” Such laws highlighted the racially exclusive society white New Englanders hoped to create after the Revolution. In fact, laws restricting the movement and activities of free blacks throughout New England continued during the first three decades of the nineteenth century despite the fact that the free black population was declining as a total percentage of the population. For example, by midcentury free blacks in Providence, Rhode Island, made up one-half of the percentage of the total population they had reached in 1800. The decline was due primarily to the natural population increase and immigration among Europeans into northern cities.

Life for free blacks became more and more circumscribed between 1800 and 1830. Free blacks were restricted from engaging in entrepreneurial activities and competing with whites for employment in skilled professions. The marginal economic position of free blacks in urban New England therefore became entrenched during the first three decades of the nineteenth century. It became a socially accepted practice to limit black employment opportunities. Black women, for example, were employed as domestics in the urban homes of white Bostonians, as in other urban centers throughout the United States. The mercantile activities of Boston's black entrepreneurs were confined to huckstering and peddling. Moreover, because Boston was the most segregated city in the United States, black entrepreneurs relied almost solely on a black clientele for their livelihood.

Philadelphia

Not unlike blacks in New York and New England, Philadelphia's black population displayed a willingness to fight the oppression of racism and slavery. Renowned for their political activism and staunch abolitionism during the nineteenth century, blacks in Philadelphia forged a free black community “in an atmosphere of growing Negrophobia in the early nineteenth century.” Gary Nash argues that Philadelphia's free blacks “pursued their goal of a dignified and secure existence.” The genesis of Philadelphia's black population, both free and slave, dates to 1684, when 150 slaves were introduced to Philadelphia's population of one thousand white settlers. Unlike New York, Philadelphia never had a large demand for slave labor. Only during the Seven Years' War, which precipitated a dearth of white indentured labor, did the demand for African slaves spike dramatically. The peak year for slave imports was 1762, with five hundred slaves being imported directly from Gambia. As a rule, Philadelphia's slave men were employed along the wharves or in the shops of artisans, while slave women worked in kitchens and tended to white children.

Owing to the small population of blacks in seventeenth-century Philadelphia, blacks usually came into intimate contact with whites, toiling alongside their masters in homes, shops, and factories, absorbing the folkways of European culture. The acculturation of Philadelphia's African and African American slaves took place not only in the workplace but also in the public square, churches, and taverns. Blacks in Philadelphia, however, did not enjoy complete equality with their white counterparts. Contemporary travelers were struck by the absence of skilled blacks in Philadelphia, which was not true in southern cities such as Charleston and New Orleans. In 1823 the Pennsylvania Abolition Society noted that the city's blacks filled “‘the most laborious and least profitable’ occupations.” Similarly, laws were passed as early as the 1720s mandating harsh penalties for amalgamation and the cohabitation of whites with blacks; even the much vaunted “Quaker humanitarianism was never founded on a deep sense of the ‘likeness among all persons.’” According to Nash, “From their earliest experiences in England in the mid-seventeenth century, Quakers held themselves at arms length from the rest of the world.”

Philadelphia's free blacks were not prepared to let their marginal status go unchallenged. During the Revolutionary era, black Philadelphians drew on the lofty principles that buttressed the American war effort against Britain to stake their claim to equality in American society. At the forefront of these efforts was the Free African Society of Philadelphia, founded in 1787 with the purpose of “forging a visionary collective consciousness upon which to build a viable future.” As blacks became increasingly segregated in social, political, and economic life, the Free African Society led a movement for an independent black church, which ultimately formed the backbone of the city's black community and its political and social organizing.

As an indication of the intellectual vibrancy of the city's black population, however, the erection of a church did not quash debates about religious affiliation, with Absalom Jones heading the Saint Thomas Protestant Episcopal Church of Philadelphia while Richard Allen founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Although Jones and Allen disagreed over their religious affiliations, they, like other black Philadelphians, were united in their opposition to slavery during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Many agreed with the black abolitionist and businessman James Forten when he wrote, “Though our faces are black, yet we are men, and … are as anxious to enjoy the birth-right of the human race” as much as any other man. Such rhetoric intensified during the antebellum period. The African American abolitionist Robert Purvis, for example, declared in 1837, “We are Pennsylvanians, and we hope to see the day when Pennsylvania will have reason to be proud of us, as we believe she has now none to be ashamed!”

Chesapeake Cities: Richmond and Baltimore

In the South the use of Africans as slaves was by no means inevitable during the early seventeenth century. Like other frontier societies throughout history, the Chesapeake colonists struggled initially to survive and ultimately to find an exportable cash crop that would foster the colony's economic viability. Tobacco became that crop, but by 1680 the number of Africans in Virginia amounted to little more than two thousand. However, as indentured servitude declined as a major form of labor in the region, black slavery grew in importance. Between 1700 and 1710 nearly eight thousand slaves arrived in the colony. Although bondpeople in the seventeenth century were primarily seasoned slaves from the Caribbean, by the early eighteenth century the demand for labor meant that almost 90 percent of the slave population was from Africa. In contrast to New York and New England, the majority of Virginia's slaves labored on plantations. As the number of African-born slaves increased, laws governing slavery tightened. The historian Ira Berlin describes the stimulus for these laws:

"Men and women with filed teeth, plaited hair, and ritual scarification … were everywhere to be seen. Their music—particularly their drums—filled the air with sounds that frightened the European and European-American settlers, and their pots, pipes, and other material effects left a distinctive mark on the landscape."

(Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, p. 111) Confronted with a seemingly alien population of bonded laborers, Chesapeake lawmakers passed laws that tightened the regulation of slaves and slavery. On rural plantations and in the Chesapeake's emerging urban centers, laws and black codes policed black peoples' social mobility, preventing them from owning firearms, trading, or fornicating with white people.

Slavery throughout the South was primarily rural, but urban centers emerged in the eighteenth century as marketing hubs. Richmond, Virginia, remained a relatively insignificant town before the 1780s. Granted legal status as a town in 1724, it became the state capital in 1772. As Richmond grew in importance, its population began to swell, although it was relatively transient in nature. By 1782 Richmond had one thousand residents, approximately one-half of which was enslaved. By 1790 the city's black population comprised 250 free blacks and 1,400 slaves; this growing black population escalated the anxieties of whites determined to subordinate blacks.

Urban centers, writes the historical anthropologist Anne Elizabeth Yentsch, are sites that create intricate patterns. In her study of urban Annapolis, Yentsch argues that African and European cultural systems shared roughly the same urban spaces, meshing in a process that gave new meaning to old cultural forms. Yentsch's analysis can be applied to Richmond as well as to Charleston, South Carolina. In Richmond blacks and working-class whites labored and caroused alongside each other. Authorities in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries worried that this carousing (street dancing, prostitution, and displays of public drunkenness on the Sabbath) made Richmond a site of utter chaos. Despite these fears, Richmond provided an urban context that was critical to the assimilation of blacks as Americans. Although slaves and free blacks worked and socialized with Richmond's working-class whites, there is no evidence to suggest that whites considered blacks their equal. In fact, the hiring of slaves in Richmond gave all whites a stake in slavery, placing work at the core of most black peoples' urban experience.

Just as blacks were economically and socially restricted in their activities in the North during the early nineteenth century, blacks in the Chesapeake were similarly marginalized. Liquor laws barred blacks from buying, selling, and consuming alcohol. In Maryland numerous acts were passed during the first three decades of the nineteenth century that prohibited blacks from selling agricultural produce, and in 1827 the Maryland legislature received requests from Baltimore residents requesting that blacks not be allowed to operate hacks, carts, or drays. Burdensome as these restrictions were, some free blacks in the Upper South did attain wealth and status. These blacks were usually the free mixed-race offspring of wealthy planters. Many wealthy free blacks acquired their riches through knowledge of a trade. In this sense, they were anomalies in a social context that strove to limit the number of skilled African Americans in society.

Charleston, South Carolina

If slavery was not inevitable from the beginning of the Chesapeake's history, the same cannot be said of South Carolina. Settlers and slaves arrived in the Carolinas from the Caribbean after the 1670s. During its early years, South Carolina was a cesspool of disease and misery. The historian Peter Wood notes that malaria and yellow fever were rampant in Charleston, particularly among blacks. Indeed, Africans were confronted with sickness and disease before they stepped off the slave ships that brought them to Charleston. Dr. Alexander Garden, Charleston's port physician, wrote the following:

"There are few ships that come here from Africa but have had many of their cargoes thrown overboard; some one-fourth, some one-third, some lost half; and I have seen some that have lost two-thirds of their slaves. I have often gone to visit those Vessels on their first Arrival, in order to make a Report of their State of Health to the Governor and Council, but I have never yet been on board one that did not smell most offensive and noisome, what for Filth, putrid Air, putrid Dysantries (which is their most common Disorder) it is a wonder any escape with Life."

(Morgan, p. 441)

The loss of black laborers to disease was significant, for the nascent colony relied on their labor, employing them as “cow boys” and ultimately to perfect the region's cultivation of rice. The demand for slave labor was so high that Charleston's slave merchants sold slaves more quickly, and in larger groups, than did slave dealers in any other city in the South.

Rice cultivation transformed South Carolina's landscape, culture, and economy. Slaves from West Africa, especially female slaves, adapted African rice-growing techniques to South Carolina. Bringing with them specialized knowledge of growing and irrigation methods, they helped make rice a viable cash crop. Charleston became an important trade and distribution center by the mideighteenth century for the Carolina rice economy. For African and African American slaves, urban development meant not only finding a degree of anonymity and social flexibility in a major city but also the opportunity to acquire skills and hire out their labors. The historian Philip Morgan notes the following:

"Charleston supported by far the most specialized craft concerns in the Lowcountry. Most South Carolina shipyards were located either in or near the city, and almost all were large employers of slave labor. In 1747, shipwright John Daniel employed eight slaves as ship carpenters, as did one of his successors, Alexander Russell, a quarter-century later."

(p. 229) Skilled slaves posed particular problems to Charleston's leaders. One Charleston owner sold his skilled slave because he was “obliged to hire him out, and the fellow having the handling of so much money, has of late been several times in liquor.”

As in Richmond, authorities focused on drunken carousing among blacks, and the poorer class of whites, as a major source of social instability. “Disorderly houses” attracted urban whites and blacks and were magnets for blacks from the nearby countryside. However, black urban culture offered more than interracial drunkenness. Blacks developed churches and conducted dances, which by the Revolutionary era were known as “Ethiopian balls” and caught the attention (and participation) of whites from all social backgrounds. In the eighteenth century Charleston also gave birth to a small free black community—a class-conscious, intermediate group wedged between the slave and white societies. Often of mixed racial parentage, they either were granted freedom by their former masters or purchased their own freedom. Many possessed skills, owned slaves, and attained great wealth. As the South Carolina editor Edwin C. Holland stated in 1822, the free mulattoes were hard-working and industrious and “their temper and disposition of their feelings [demonstrate that they] abhor the idea of association with blacks in any enterprise that may have for its object the revolution of their condition.” Charleston's “free people of color,” like their contemporaries in New Orleans, maintained their relatively privileged social status because they did not threaten to undermine a society based on slave labor.

However, authorities in Charleston, as in other cities, worried about the influence of free urban blacks on the slave populations in the countryside. In the early nineteenth century Charleston's free blacks risked flogging if they were found guilty of “whooping or hallooing … or … making a clamorous noise, or … singing aloud any indecent song.” Similarly, Charleston authorities vigorously policed a curfew aimed at the African American population. The fear of slave rebellion, which gained intensity in the 1820s and 1830s with Denmark Vesey's conspiracy and the publication of David Walker's Appeal (1829), gave rise to legislation that prohibited blacks from entering South Carolina and attempted to retard the growth of the free black population by making manumission possible only through legislative act. Thus, with the unfolding of the nineteenth century and growing antislavery agitation, white South Carolinians became increasingly suspicious of free blacks.

New Orleans

In New Orleans the French introduced African slaves in the early eighteenth century. Settlement under the French failed to reach great heights, Louisiana remaining a burdensome and expensive outpost of the French empire into the 1730s and beyond. Nevertheless, Louisiana became a colonized space renowned for its racial fluidity. As the historian Gwendolyn Hall has noted, the rapid increase in Africans in the 1720s brought blacks and Indians into close contact, forging bonds that bound them against the oppressiveness of European settlers. The fear of racial union and sexual amalgamation, which French officials expressed most clearly from the 1730s, continued under British rule. By the early nineteenth century, New Orleans, the South's largest and most cosmopolitan city, was described as “a world in miniature.” The city's massive growth could be credited to its role as a transportation hub, being the site where sugar, cotton, grain, and other products of the slave South were handled and placed on ships.

New Orleans exemplified the way in which slave discipline in the cities was the role of “official agencies,” a stark contrast to the rural South, where discipline was a private concern. Many of the slaves in New Orleans were able to hire their labor out to city employers. “Living out,” as the practice was called, precipitated anxiety among the city's whites, who feared that the boundaries between slavery and freedom were being blurred. To prevent this, laws such as the 1808 Police Code controlled where slaves could work, the type of labor they could be employed to do, and the wages they were paid. In 1817 New Orleans officials instituted an ordinance that required slaves to live on the premises of their master. Despite efforts to police slave mobility within New Orleans, however, virtually every area of the city was occupied by some blacks.

Visitors to New Orleans, as to other urban areas of the South, noted the privileged status of city slaves. The historian Richard Wade reasons that the proximity of urban slaves “to the whites assured them of minimum living standards, and life in the yard had at least a surface of gentility.” However, for the free blacks of New Orleans, every aspect of their existence came under constant scrutiny. The New Orleans Daily Picayune called the city's free blacks “a plague and pest in the community,” and city officials feared that the presence of free blacks in the city made the lines between slavery and freedom indistinct. This fear, embodied in white anxiety about racial amalgamation, was noted in a Louisiana law of 1830, which required that free blacks leave the state within thirty days. Thus, despite the appearance of racial fluidity, New Orleans was plagued by anxieties about racial blending as much as other urban centers in the South. Although New Orleans appeared to offer social, political, and economic opportunities for determined slaves and free blacks, African American mobility was becoming increasingly circumscribed by the mid-1840s. An English traveler visiting New Orleans during that period summed up this situation well when he wrote that the “negro and colored population are here, as everywhere else throughout the United States, the proscribed class.” By the antebellum period, this statement was as true for New Orleans as it was for other urban areas, North and South, throughout the United States.

Antebellum Urbanization

During the nineteenth century a network of cities emerged to define the American landscape from the Atlantic to the Pacific coasts. Fueled by western expansion, population growth, a burgeoning market economy, and technological advances, a country that was overwhelmingly rural (95 percent of the population) when the U.S. Constitution came into effect in 1789 assumed an increasingly urban character by the end of the nineteenth century. In the Northeast the urban population in 1830 was 785,000, while the rural population of the region was 4,758,000. By 1900 the urban population of the northeast had grown to 13,911,000 compared with a rural population of 7,136,000. Growth was also evident in the urban South, where the population increased from 301,000 in 1830 to 4,421,000; the rural population went from 5,407,000 to 20,103,000. With the rise of American cities came the development of distinctive forms of urban culture and modes of living. African Americans participated in these developments, experiencing both the opportunities offered in U.S. cities and the indignities of an increasingly racist society.

Urban North

During the antebellum period in American history (roughly the 1830s to the 1860s), northern blacks fought to share in the opportunities the urban North offered, but more often than not they fell victim to its racist pitfalls. According to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, the black population of the Northeast rose from 146,000 in 1850 to 385,000 by 1900. In comparison, the white population—both native and foreign born—went from 8,467,000 in 1850 to 20,638,000 by 1900. As the Northeast grew, the racism suffered by African Americans increased. As the historian Leon Litwack explains, African Americans in New York and Pennsylvania, as in other parts of the North in the nineteenth century, “faced a long period of political disfranchisement, economic discrimination, and social ostracism.” Litwack argues, for example, that black economic opportunities in the North were limited during the antebellum era:

"In New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, the men worked largely as laborers, mariners, servants, waiters, barbers, coachmen, bootblacks, porters, second-hand clothing dealers, and hod carriers, while women worked as washerwomen, dressmakers, seamstresses, and cooks. Only a few Negroes managed to obtain the financial and educational prerequisites for entrance into business or the professions. As late as 1855, some 87 per cent of the gainfully employed Negroes of New York City worked in menial or unskilled jobs, and this appears to represent their economic condition in other northern cities."

(p. 155)

In the 1850s the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass remarked on the lack of economic opportunity for northern blacks, asserting that African Americans “were shut from all lucrative employments and compelled to be merely barbers, waiters, workmen and the like at wages so low that they could lay up little or nothing.” Douglass was by no means alone in this assessment of the limited nature of black economic opportunities in the North. A black Philadelphian exclaimed in the early nineteenth century that “in no enterprises” engaged in by African Americans was talent required and that “the mass are improvident, and seek the lowest avocations, and most menial stations.” As a consequence, the black middle class in most northern cities was small. The historian Gilbert Osofsky notes that in New York City, a small black middle class worked mainly as clerks. He concludes that 90 percent of African American workers in New York City were employed in menial occupations as servants, porters, waiters, laundresses, and dressmakers.

The lack of economic opportunities for African Americans in northern cities was replicated in the political, social, and cultural pursuits of antebellum blacks. These restrictions—an increasingly explicit part of the North's racist culture and codified in state laws—built on the racial thinking of an earlier generation of northern white elites who, in introducing gradual emancipation during the Revolutionary era, promulgated a swathe of laws that prescribed life for northern blacks.

During the early nineteenth century, northern legislators passed laws that enacted bans on interracial marriage; instituted segregation on trains, steamboats, and stagecoaches; established residential segregation (laying the foundation for the ghettoization that defined northern black life in the twentieth century), and prohibited integrated educational facilities. Examples of these restrictions, and their consequences for black cultural and community development, have been ably analyzed by historians, who note, for example, that Boston authorities in 1800 endeavored to act on legal bans on interracial marriage by deporting from the state of Massachusetts “240 Negroes, most of them natives of Rhode Island, New York, Philadelphia, and the West Indies.”

Residential segregation reinforced a sense of “social ostracism” for northern blacks and compounded the impact of economic marginalization. Throughout the urban North, blacks were generally forced to live in clearly defined areas. In Boston, African Americans congregated around “Nigger Hill” and the wharves, known as “New Guinea.” Blacks in New York City mixed with poor whites in the Five Points area, the black section being known as “Stagg Town” or “Nigger Plantation.” In Philadelphia the residential options for black people were generally restricted to the “gloomy cellars and squalid houses located along narrow courts and alleys.” The combination of residential segregation and economic marginalization had a deleterious impact on the political influence of African Americans. As Osofsky argues of New York City,

"Only a very small number of New York City negroes could meet the qualification of a $250 freehold for voting established by the state constitution of 1821. In 1865, for example, 44 Negroes in a population of 9,943 owned enough property to vote. ‘The Black man goes to the wall,’ was the New York Tribune's summary of the economic status of negro New Yorkers in the nineteenth century."

(Osofsky, p. 7)

African Americans did not suffer the racism of the North passively. Patrick Rael tells how black northerners responded to northern racism by organizing public celebrations and displays of civility and by critiquing and protesting the social, political, and economic forces that marginalized them. Celebrations marking the emancipation of slaves in the British West Indies were prominent events on the calendars of antebellum black northerners. These events attracted large and vociferous crowds. Rael notes that in 1843 a group of black Bostonians celebrating West Indian Emancipation Day “was so large that ‘multitudes’ were unable to enter the church where it ended.” To avoid giving white onlookers the impression that such gatherings were disorderly mobs, celebrations of this nature were often accompanied by dinner parties, where public celebrations were controlled through ticket sales and “dining plans” that reinforced social distinctions through prearranged seating.

Such events fostered a sense of community among northern blacks. Indeed, a sense of community was also cultivated with the organization of black churches, political organizations, and benevolent societies. Churches and benevolent societies were the foundation of black institutional life in the urban North. In Boston the African Society was founded in 1796 to tend to the needs of black Bostonians. Similarly, the African Baptist Church was founded in Boston in 1805 by the Reverend Thomas Paul, and in New York the African Methodist Episcopal Zion denomination was founded in 1796 under the leadership of James Varick, William Miller, June Scott, and Abraham Thompson. These institutions formed the backbone of efforts to establish schools for African Americans, like the African Free School in New York City, founded in 1787.

Far from being revolutionary in intentions or pan-African in focus (as their names might suggest), the institutions, founded and run by African Americans born and raised in the United States, were quintessentially American. In fact, some black leaders objected to the use of “African” in the titles of many of their institutions and removed it. For example, in the 1830s the African Baptist Church of Boston changed its name to the First Independent Church of the People of Color, “for the very good reason that the name African is ill applied to a church composed of American citizens.” Most significant, black institutions reflected a longing to be part of American society but at the same time highlighted the degree to which black Americans had been marginalized from mainstream society and institutions by white racism. According to Rael, “The freedom struggle often requires engagement with the culture of the oppressors, despite the liabilities inevitable in that engagement.” The history of black leadership and institutional life in the antebellum North highlights this point. Rael further argues that as “the experience of antebellum black activists attests, it is not so easy for historical actors to determine when they are operating with the cultural baggage of their oppressors; it is even more difficult to determine which elements of oppressor culture ought to be jettisoned.”

Black leaders of the North were by no means in complete agreement on their course of political action. Although they all detested slavery, many African Americans in the Negro convention movement were divided over such issues as colonization during the first half of the nineteenth century. In 1817 members of the Philadelphia convention denounced colonization proposals as efforts to “banish or exile” them. What they wanted was to be able “to participate in the blessings of America.” Thus, through such venues as the National Negro Convention, northern blacks not only protested their segregation in northern cities but also argued for the abolition of slavery. A black Bostonian summed up the position of northern blacks on the eve of Civil War in 1860:

"Some persons think that because we have the right to vote, and enjoy the privilege of being squeezed up in an omnibus, and stared out of a seat in a horse-car, that there is less prejudice here than there is farther South … it is five times as hard to get a house in a good location in Boston as in Philadelphia, and it is ten times as difficult for a colored mechanic to get work here as it is in Charleston."

(Litwack, p. 110)

Urban South

If the small black population in the urban North increasingly protested segregation and slavery from the margins of northern society, an even smaller urban black population in the South was forced to tread a fine line between freedom and the fear of being thrust back into slavery. Data from the U.S. Bureau of the Census indicate that the total white population of the South—both native and foreign born—increased from 8,467,000 to 20,638,000 between 1850 and 1900. In comparison, the African American population grew from 234,000 in 1850 to 7,990,000 by 1900. (The accuracy of these estimates must be treated with caution. For example, the same census document suggests that the black population grew from 234,000 in 1850 to 4,421,000 by 1870.) In the antebellum South much of the population, black and white, lived in rural areas, making the small populations of free blacks in urban areas highly visible.

An example of this visibility, and the caution free blacks had to observe in their daily lives, could be seen in the small free black population of Charleston, South Carolina. Many of these free urban blacks were of mixed-race origin, often the product of unions between white men and black women. The free black population of the urban South was thus light skinned, and they were often highly skilled. Color and skill set these African Americans apart, marking them both as anomalies in the broader context of southern slavery and as people “whites had to watch.” The historians Michael Johnson and James Roark, in their study of William Ellison, a free African American “of mixed white and black ancestry,” provide an example of a freed slave who through his skills as a cotton gin mechanic was able to acquire wealth, slaves, and raise a family in South Carolina.

Ellison, like other free blacks in Charleston, knew the importance of demonstrating to whites his good character and ability to make an honest living. Free blacks understood that in the Slave South, having the same skin color as slaves debased them, despite the admixture of white blood. For free blacks this magnified the importance of projecting to whites the sense that they were of good character and, like Ellison, not about to flaunt their economic success in decadent displays of material attainment. Like African Americans in other southern cities, Charleston's free blacks had a precarious existence. Their social and economic freedom was predicated on the willingness of whites to countenance their existence. As Johnson and Roark succinctly note, “Whites had most of the people and all of the guns” and hence the power to determine the fate of free African Americans.

For free African Americans in southern cities, principally in the Lower South, theirs and their family's freedom was safeguarded through economic success. Owning slaves, even if they were only relatives, suggested to whites that free blacks supported the dominant socioeconomic system of the South. Ellison, for example, owned thirty-one slaves in 1831. Ellison also used his skills as a cotton gin maker and repairman to endear himself to local whites, maintaining their patronage through demonstrations of deference, tact, and circumspection. While it helped that whites in the cities and towns of the Lower South preferred to deal with light-skinned blacks like Ellison, his skills were vital to maintaining his freedom in an urban milieu. One of Ellison's white contemporaries, for example, noted that he was considered “as good as a white man, but not quite.”

In the cities of the Lower South, free blacks enjoyed greater economic opportunity than elsewhere in the United States. This was particularly true for light-skinned blacks, who were far more common in the Lower South than in the Upper South. Although free blacks in the Lower and Upper South did not have equal access to all types of work, occupational opportunities for skilled slaves and free blacks, especially in the Lower South, were greater than those experienced by African Americans throughout the North. Indeed, the historian Leonard Curry argues that employment discrimination against free blacks was far more pervasive in northern cities. As Curry notes, free blacks in the cities of the Lower South were far more likely to be skilled workers and to secure apprenticeships. Possessing a lighter skin in the Lower South not only was an advantage for free African Americans determined to acquire economic security but also enabled them to place social distance between themselves and the slave population, something that contributed to the ever-increasing mixed-race population throughout the South. In New Orleans “quadroon balls,” attended by wealthy white southern gentlemen and attractive light-skinned African American women dressed in the finest couture, provided a venue for interracial mixing. One historian has stated that events of this nature were “a source of pleasure and profit for the quadroons who attended,” but they surely also are an indication of the limited social and economic opportunities available to free blacks in the South, particularly women.

The hard work of free urban blacks to cultivate their character, attain economic success, and remain deferential to southern whites counted for little as sectional conflict escalated in the 1850s. During the Civil War the South's free blacks lost much of the economic and social freedom they had attained, giving rise to a sense among Charleston's free black community that things would never be as they had once been. Many endeavored to flee the South, and many others found themselves slaves once more, abandoned by their white trustees who had succumbed to wartime pressures and refused to pay the annual slave badge fee that designated the free status of former slaves. Thus, free blacks in the South's antebellum cities were an anomaly in the broader social context of southern slavery, and like northern blacks their socioeconomic status was always tenuous and constantly scrutinized by whites.

The Civil War (1861–1865) and Reconstruction (1865–1877) brought a reorganization of America's social landscape. Slavery was abolished, and former slaves took to the road in search of opportunity and freedom. In the South both blacks and whites were confronted with poverty, but blacks also contended with legal and extralegal oppression in the form of black codes and the violence of the Ku Klux Klan. Many former slaves moved to urban areas in the South searching for economic opportunities. Most, however, found themselves engaged in drudgery, with women working as washerwomen and men as unskilled laborers. Moreover, blacks in southern cities were residentially segregated and exposed to the malevolent forces of Jim Crow laws by the 1890s. As the historian Alecia Long contends in her study of prostitution in New Orleans, segregation by the 1890s “was a popular solution to a range of social problems … including the spread of disease, race relations, and prostitution.” Life for most blacks in southern cities was difficult despite the abolition of slavery because “most black urbanites remained trapped in personal service and unskilled labor,” unable to find the mobility that emancipation promised in the urban South.

Many African Americans decided to flee the South's racial oppression. The most famous example of this is the Exoduster movement of 1879. Determined that they be treated as human beings, 16,250 African Americans left the South for Kansas in 1870, a number that had increased to 43,110 a decade later. The historian Nell Painter writes of the Exodusters:

"The Kansas Fever Exodus—the most remarkable migration in the United States after the Civil War—took some six thousand Blacks from Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas to Kansas in the space of a few months. … Pushed by fears of damnation and pulled by belief in the Kansas Fever idea, thousands left Mississippi and Louisiana between March and May 1879, and Texas in the latter part of the year."

Determined to escape the “young hell” of Mississippi for the “promised land” of Kansas, freed blacks established their own communities in Kansas or settled in urban areas in search of a better life. So strong was the drive of the Exodusters that they were prepared to risk starvation. Demonstrating their “implacable determination,” one Exoduster exclaimed, “What, go back! Oh, no, I'd sooner starve here!”

Not all African Americans went to Kansas and points farther west after the Civil War. Some headed for the Northeast. New York City's black population grew to 60,666 by 1900, concentrated primarily in Manhattan. Blacks migrated from the South at an average rate of 41,378 people each decade from 1870 to 1890. However, the decade before 1900 saw the migration rate more than double, with roughly 107,800 southern African Americans moving north and west. The black population of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Illinois more than doubled between 1890 and 1910, and the number of African Americans in New York State nearly tripled. The gender ratio of New York City's black population also changed. A Howard University professor, Kelly Miller, points out that owing to economic opportunities for black women in American cities, there were 810 black men for every thousand black women in American cities in 1890. By 1910 the figure was 850 to every thousand women.

The migration of southern blacks into northern cities did not please all African Americans. Well-established black New Yorkers, eager to preserve their social and economic status, labeled these migrants as “vagrants,” a “hoodlum element,” “riff-raff,” and “lazy.” Such labels, however, said as much about generational differences as they did about class tensions in urban black communities. Just as the Exodusters sought a better life in Kansas, so, too, did blacks migrating to the Northeast in search of the promise that emancipation held out to them. As the historian Gilbert Osofsky argues, by the 1870s and 1880s a generation of African Americans had come of age for whom the Civil War, “Hell, and slavery were but childhood tales.” This new generation of black New Yorkers attacked institutional racism and lobbied for their civil rights.

The struggle of northern blacks continued into the twentieth century. However, in the late nineteenth century, white racism remained a central part of northern society. Following the publication in 1863 of the satirical pamphlet Miscegenation by the New York World journalists David Goodman Croly and George Wakeman, northerners grew increasingly anxious about the specter of a flood of southern blacks migrating north and mixing with white women. Portrayals of the allegedly horrendous consequences of interracial sex were presented to northerners in popular culture, “teaching whites that blacks are physically and socially inferior” and should be treated accordingly. If in the South new forms of racially restrictive laws were codified to limit the socioeconomic mobility of urban blacks, in the North the racial logic of antebellum restrictions continued and was applied to the new historical challenges that black migration had unleashed in the wake of emancipation.

See also Abolitionism; African Americans and the West; African Diaspora; African Methodist Episcopal Church; Africanisms; Allen, Richard; American Revolution; Artisans; Black Abolitionists; Black Church; Black Codes and Slave Codes, Colonial; Black Family; Black Politics; Black Separatism; Black Uplift; Caribbean; Childhood; Civil Rights; Civil War; Class; Colonization; Confederate Policy toward African Americans and Slaves; Constitution, U.S.; Dance; David Walker's Appeal; Demographics; Denmark Vesey Conspiracy; Discrimination; Dreams; Economic Life; Education; Emancipation; Entrepreneurs; Episcopalians (Anglicans) and African Americans; Europe; Exoduster Movement; ; Folklore; Forten, James; Fraternal Organizations and Mutual Aid Societies; Free African Americans before the Civil War (North); Free African Americans before the Civil War (South); Free African Americans to 1828; Free African Society; Freedmen; Gradual Emancipation; Health and Medicine; Identity; Immigrants; Indentured Servitude; Integration; Jim Crow Car Laws; Jones, Absalom; Laws and Legislation; Literacy in the Colonial Period; Literature; Marriage, Mixed; Mulattoes; Music; National Conventions of Colored Men; Native Americans and African Americans; New York African Society for Mutual Relief; New York City; New York Conspiracy of 1741; New York Slave Revolt of 1712; Occupations; Political Participation; Petitions; Political Participation; Poverty; Race, Theories of; Racism; Reconstruction; Religion; Riots and Rebellions; Segregation; Seven Years' War; Sexuality; Skin Color; Slave Insurrections and Rebellions; Slave Trade; Slavery; Slavery: Lower South; Slavery: Mid-Atlantic; Slavery: Northeast; Slavery: Upper South; Society of Friends (Quakers) and African Americans; Vesey, Denmark; Voting Rights; Walker, David; West Indies; Wheatley, Phillis; Williams, Peter, Jr.; Women; and Work.

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