Transcript
The First Page
1827
In 1827, America had hundreds of newspapers. When Black Americans appeared in them, it was mostly in ads for sales and runaways, or in jokes.
So in New York, two free Black men decided to print their own.
No Black American had ever owned and run a newspaper.
Samuel E. Cornish We wish to plead our own cause.
John B. Russwurm Too long have others spoken for us.
They were free men in a Northern state. But New York made Black men own $250 in property to vote. White men needed none.
They weren't alone. Black Americans pleaded that cause from a Charleston church in 1822 to a printing press in Rochester in 1847.
Some argued in print, some in court. Some ran. A few rose up. What changed for Black Americans between 1800 and 1848, and what didn't?
Some argued in print, some in court. Some ran. A few rose up. What changed for Black Americans between 1800 and 1848, and what didn't?
Freedom by Installments
1799–1828
In the North, slavery ended slowly, one law at a time.
New York's 1799 law freed no one who was already alive. Only children born after July 4 would go free, at twenty-five, or twenty-eight for boys.
Still, the free Black population nearly tripled by 1830.
Free Black Northerners built their own institutions. In 1816 Richard Allen's church joined others to found the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the first Black denomination.
In Boston, Black families built a meeting house in 1806. Its basement soon held a school.
In 1813 Pennsylvania's senate took up a bill making Black newcomers register. Anyone caught without papers could be sold into servitude.
James Forten, a rich sailmaker and Revolutionary War veteran, answered in print.
James Forten Has the God who made the white man and the black, left any record declaring us a different species?
The bill died.
In 1816 prominent white men founded the American Colonization Society, to send free Black Americans to Africa. One founder was Francis Scott Key. Yes, that Francis Scott Key.
About three thousand Black Philadelphians packed Bethel Church to answer it. They wouldn't abandon the enslaved:
James Forten they are our brethren by the ties of consanguinity, of suffering, and of wrong.
About twelve thousand did go to Liberia before 1860. Most stayed.
On July 4, 1827, New York freed everyone it still held in lifelong slavery. Many Black New Yorkers celebrated on July 5.
Isabella, freed that summer, found out her five-year-old son had been sold illegally to Alabama. She sued, and won him back. Later she renamed herself Sojourner Truth.
What They Kept
1800–1831
In the South, enslaved people had no legal marriages and no right to testify against whites. They had no say in being sold.
Families held on anyway. Douglass's mother, hired out twelve miles away, walked to him at night after a day's work.
Frederick Douglass I do not recollect of ever seeing my mother by the light of day. She was with me in the night.
Many parents named children for relatives who'd been sold away. Neighbors raised children whose parents were gone.
Many made Christianity their own. They prayed in the woods at night, out of the patrols' hearing, and sang about Moses.
Most resistance was quiet: slow work, broken tools, days in the woods. Every runaway ad was a person who ran.
Omar ibn Said, a Muslim scholar, had studied for twenty-five years in West Africa before he was shipped to Charleston.
Omar ibn Said My name is Omar ibn Seid. My birthplace was Fut Tur, between the two rivers.
In 1831 he was still enslaved. He wrote his life story in Arabic. It opens with a chapter of the Quran: dominion belongs to God.
New Orleans, 1819. The city let enslaved people gather to dance on Sundays, in a place the mayor chose.
People called it Congo Square.
Hundreds danced in rings, sold what they had grown, and kept African music alive by making it new.
Our best description comes from the architect Benjamin Latrobe. He called the dancing savage and dull. Then he took careful notes on the drums and drew a string instrument. His evidence undercuts his claim.
Rising
1811–1831
A few chose rebellion, nearly the only antislavery action possible in the South. It almost always failed.
In 1800, a storm and two informers stopped Gabriel's planned rising near Richmond.
January 1811, the sugar country above New Orleans. Charles Deslondes, an enslaved foreman, led the largest slave revolt in U.S. history.
Two hundred or more marched toward New Orleans with cane knives and a few guns.
Militia and U.S. troops crushed them in two days and killed nearly a hundred.
Planters put the heads of the dead on poles along the river road.
Charleston, 1822. Denmark Vesey was a carpenter who had won a lottery and bought his freedom. He led classes in the African Methodist church.
A court later said he planned a midsummer rising, then flight by ship to Haiti.
Informers talked. A court hanged thirty-five men, Vesey among them, and the city tore the church down.
Historians still argue how big the plot was. The evidence came from men questioned under threat of death.
Southampton County, Virginia, August 1831. Nat Turner, an enslaved preacher who read signs from God in the sky, led a revolt.
It killed about fifty-five white people, many of them children.
Militias and mobs then killed Black people across the county, most of them uninvolved. Virginia hanged Turner in November.
Harriet Jacobs Not far from this time Nat Turner's insurrection broke out; and the news threw our town into great commotion.
In Edenton, North Carolina, patrols searched and whipped Black families.
Nearly every word we have from Turner came through Thomas Gray, a white lawyer. He interviewed Turner in jail and sold the result.
Thomas R. Gray He is a complete fanatic, or plays his part most admirably.
That is how Gray introduced Turner to his readers.
Gray asked if he saw his mistake now. Gray printed this reply:
Thomas R. Gray Was not Christ crucified.
That's Turner as Gray chose to print him.
After each scare, Southern states tightened their slave codes. They banned teaching enslaved people to read and silenced Black preachers.
Appeal
1829–1833
Boston, 1829. David Walker, born free in North Carolina, sold used clothes to sailors near the docks. He had also been Freedom's Journal's agent in Boston.
That fall he published an Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World.
David Walker America is more our country, than it is the whites—we have enriched it with our blood and tears.
He argued that enslaved people had every right to fight back.
Sailors carried it south. Officials found copies in Savannah, Charleston and New Orleans. Georgia answered with a law against teaching enslaved people to read. North Carolina followed.
Walker died in August 1830. Rumor said poison. His death record says consumption, the old word for tuberculosis.
A month later, Black delegates from several states gathered at Bethel Church in Philadelphia. Bishop Richard Allen, seventy, presided. It was the first of the Colored Conventions.
Two years later, Maria Stewart, a widow, spoke to men and women in Boston. Few American women ever had.
Maria W. Stewart Why sit ye here and die?
Maria W. Stewart Come let us plead our cause before the whites: if they save us alive, we shall live—and if they kill us, we shall but die.
In Boston, those voices met in one building.
One year later, on the same date, Stewart gave her farewell address in this building. Many listeners objected to a woman speaking. She moved to New York and taught school for decades.
The Road North
1835–1841
Free states were not safe states.
In May 1838, a Philadelphia mob burned Pennsylvania Hall, a new antislavery meeting place. Firemen hosed the buildings next door and let it burn.
That fall, Pennsylvania's new constitution gave the vote to "every white freeman." Black men who had been voting lost it.
Black Northerners protected each other. Vigilance committees hid people fleeing slavery and fought kidnappers who sold free people south.
On September 3, 1838, a ship caulker boarded a Baltimore train, dressed as a sailor. He carried a free Black sailor's papers. They described someone else.
Train, ferry, train, steamboat, train. By Tuesday morning he was in New York.
David Ruggles took him in. Anna Murray, who helped pay for his escape, came north and married him. In New Bedford he took the name Douglass.
Frederick Douglass I appear before the immense assembly this evening as a thief and a robber.
Frederick Douglass I stole this head, these limbs, this body from my master, and ran off with them.
In his 1845 Narrative, he named names but would not say how he escaped. Telling might close the road for others.
In 1839, fifty-three Africans, kidnapped into the illegal slave trade, seized the Cuban schooner Amistad. They landed in a Connecticut jail.
No one in court could translate Mende, so a Yale professor learned to count to ten in it. He counted aloud along the New York docks until a sailor answered.
Kale All we want is make us free, not send us to Havanna.
Former president John Quincy Adams took their case to the Supreme Court.
On March 9, 1841, the Court freed them, seven to one. It ruled they had never legally been slaves. It said nothing against slavery itself.
The North Star
1846–1848
Nine years after escaping slavery, Frederick Douglass put out the first issue of his own newspaper.
Frederick Douglass …the man who has suffered the wrong is the man to demand redress.
Twenty years apart, two papers made the same argument: we speak for ourselves.
In fifty years, Black Americans had built churches, schools, newspapers, conventions and a road north. Yet the share who were free barely moved: about eleven percent in 1800, about twelve in 1850.
Douglass's British supporters could buy his freedom. In St. Louis, an enslaved couple, Dred and Harriet Scott, sued for theirs. In 1850, a new federal law would help slaveholders seize people who had escaped, even in the free states.