African Americans during Antebellum

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African Americans during Antebellum

• Ms. Thomas
• October 24-28, 2003

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Documenting Freedom

• This certificate indicates that the
  forty-two-year-old mulatto Harriet Bolling was
  freed by James Bolling in 1842. Freeborn blacks
  could stay in Virginia, but emancipated African
  Americans were generally required to leave the
  state. This certificate states that the court
  allowed Bolling "to remain in this Commonwealth
  and reside in Petersburg."

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An African American Seaman

• In the event of capture or impressment, sailors
  needed to have documents on file to verify that
  they were citizens of the United States. For this
  reason the government provided seamen's
  protection certificates for those who served at
  sea, including thousands of African American
  seamen. This certificate is for twenty-year-old
  Samuel Fox who is described as having a "light
  African complexion, black woolly hair and brown
  eyes."

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African-American Institutions

• During antebellum, the black institutions in the
  urban areas of the North and in the South became
  stronger, more numerous and more varied. This
  was because of the growing black populations, the
  exertions of African American elite, and the
  persistence of racial exclusion and segregation.
  

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Continued
schools
theater

• Black institutions included schools, mutual aid
  organizations, benevolent and fraternal
  societies, self-improvement and temperance
  associations, literary groups newspapers and
  journalism and theaters, and the church.

literature
newspaper
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African Americans at Work
                            

• In 1819 Negroes were listed in thirty different
  occupations, including 11 as carpenters, 10 as
  tailors, 22 as seamstresses, six as shoemakers,
  and one as the owner of a hotel. By 1849 there
  were fifty different types of work listed-
  including 50 carpenters, 43 tailors, 9
  shoemakers, and 21 butchers.

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Continued

• The most common black enterprises were small
  cookshops and groceries, which usually doubled as
  saloons and gambling houses where free Negroes,
  slaves, and occasionally whites gathered.

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Wilmington's Free African American Population
1800-1860

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Wages

• In spite of their skill and efforts, free black
  workers still faced many problems in a
  slave-holding society. For example, Charleston's
  City Council attempted to fix the wages of free
  blacks at 1 per day or 12½ an hour. In
  addition, many whites were hostile to the high
  skill levels of free blacks. While many whites
  avoided "black jobs," there was increasing
  competition for jobs by the late antebellum and
  this increased the hostility of many whites
  against African-Americans.

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Education

• Education was racially segregated b/w 1820-1860.
• Some public schools such as those in Cleveland,
  Ohio, during the 1850s were racially integrated.
  When 20 or more African-American children
  appeared in a school district white parents
  demanded that they be sent to separate schools.
• Whites felt that Black children lacked mental
  capacity and lowered the quality of education.
  They also feared that opening schools to black
  children would encourage more black people to
  live in the school district.

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Continued

• Until 1848, Ohio and other states of the Old
  Northwest simply excluded black kids from public
  schools and allocated tax revenues to support
  separate facilities.
• Inadequate public funding resulted in poor
  education or none at all for most black children.
  
  
• Black schools were overcrowded and white teachers
  who taught there received lower pay than those
  who taught in white schools,, and black teachers
  received even less.

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Continued

• Prince Hall established the African School in
  1812.
  
• The African Free Schools begun in New York City
  in 1787 by the New York Society for Promoting the
  Manumission of Slaves.
  
• By the 1830s, most northern African Americans
  favored racially integrated public education and
  during the 1840s Frederick Douglass became a
  leading advocate for this policy.

Frederick Douglass
Prince Hall
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Continued

• The black elite had more success gaining
  admission to northern colleges during the
  antebellum period than most African-American
  children had in gaining an adequate primary
  education.
• African American colleges
• Ashmum Institute in Oxford, Penn, founded in 1854
  to prepare blk missionaries to go to Africa.
  Renamed Lincoln University, was the first black
  institution of higher learning in the US.
• Wilberfoce University, founded in 1855 near
  Columbus, Ohio, by the AME church

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Earlier Northern Colleges

• Bowdoin in Maine, Dartmouth in New Hampshire,
  Harvard and Mount Pleasant in Massachusetts,
  Oneida Institute in New York, and Western Reserve
  in Ohio.

• Oberlin College in Ohio was the most famous
  biracial institution of higher learning during
  the era. By 1860 many northern colleges, law
  schools, medical schools, and seminaries admitted
  black applicants, although not on an equal basis
  with white applicants.

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Religion

• Black church buildings were community centers
  which housed schools and were meeting places for
  a variety of organizations.
  
• Antislavery societies often met in churches, and
  the church harbored fugitive slaves.
  
• They also began schools and various voluntary
  associations.

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Continued
Jupiter Hammon

• Churches spoke against slavery, racial
  oppression, and what they considered weaknesses
  among African Americans.
  
• Many followed Jupiter Hammon in admonishing their
  congregations that preparing ones soul for
  heaven was more important that gaining equal
  rights on earth.

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Continued

• By 1846 The independent African Methodist
  Episcopal (AME) Church had 2986 congregations in
  the US and Canada with 17, 375 members.
  
• 1848 Frederick Douglass maintained that the AME
  Mother Bethel Church in Penn, was the largest
  church in the Union with b/w 2-3 thousand
  worshippers each Sunday.
• Most black Baptist, Presbyterian,
  Congregationalist, Episcopal, and Roman Catholic
  congregations remained affiliated with white
  denominations although they were rarely
  represented in regional and national church
  councils.

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Continued

• William Jay, a white abolitionist convinced the
  New York Episcopalians to admit black
  representatives because they excluded black
  ministers from its annual conventions.

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Voluntary Associations

• Mutual aid societies became attractive to black
  women. Example in 1830 black women in PA had
  27 such organizations compared with 16 for blakc
  men. By 1855 PA ha 108 black mutual aid
  societies, enrolling 9,762 members, with a
  combined annual income of 29, 600.

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Benevolent Societies

• Organized originally in 1828 in NYC by black
  women, these societies distributed used clothing
  to the poor especially poor school children.
  
• 1830s- Black women began NYCs Association for
  the Beneit of Colored Prphans, which operated an
  orphanage that had helped 524 children by 1851

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Fraternities

• Prince Hall Masons created new lodges in the
  cities of the Northeast and the Chesapeake.
  
• Black Odd Fellows lodges also became common from
  the 1840s.

Prince Hall noted as the Father of Black Masonary
in the US
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• The manifestations of the reform spirit that
  swept the North and much of the upper south
  during antebellum was the self-improvement,
  library, literary, and temperance organizations.
• This was closely linked to evangelical
  Protestantism, and was maintaining that the moral
  regeneration of individuals was essential to
  perfecting society.
• Black temperance societies were even more
  widespread than literary and benevolent
  organizations. These were members of the middle
  class who sought to stop the abuse of alcoholic
  beverages by those lower on the social ladder.

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Early Black Literary Societies, 1828-1834
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(No Transcript)
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What did the Temperance Society do?

• Organized lecture series and handed out
  literature that portrayed the negative physical,
  economic, and moral consequences of liquor.

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African Americans in the Arts and Science Field
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Best Known Artists

• Robert S. Duncanson was born in Cincinnati and
  worked in Europe between 1843-1854, painted
  landscapes and portraits.

Portrait by Duncanson
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Robert Douglass and

• A painter who studied in England before
  establishing himself in Philadelphia. Patrick
  Reason, an engraver, created portraits of
  abolitionist during the 1830s and etched
  illustrations of the sufferings of slaves.

Portrait by Reason
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Edmonia Lewis

• Lewis the daughter of a black man and a Chippewa
  woman, was admitted to Oberlin college in Ohio
  with abolitionist help and studied sculpture in
  Rome. Her works emphasized African- American
  themes, came into wide demand after the Civil war.

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Black Musicians

• The best known professional black singer of the
  period was Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, who was
  born a slave in Mississippi and raised by Quakers
  in Philadelphia. She in known as the Black Swan.
  She is renown for her vocal range.

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The End.

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