Copyright ©2011, ©2006 by Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved. Prentice Hall...

Copyright ©2011, ©2006 by Pearson Education, Inc.All rights reserved.

Prentice Hall African-American History, Second EditionDarlene Clark Hine • William C. Hine • Stanley Harrold

African-American HistorySECOND EDITION

PRENTICE HALL

Chapter

Free Black People in Antebellum America1820–1861

7



Title page



Our Voices and our degradation are ever arrayed against us, but our virtues are passed by unnoticed. And what is still more lamentable, our white friends to whom we conceded all the principles of humanity and religion, from these very causes seem to have fallen into the current of popular feeling and are imperceptibly floating on the stream – actually living in the practice of prejudice, while they abjure it in theory, and feel it not in their hearts.



Chapter Focus Questions

What are the contradictions described in this excerpt?

What challenges did free black people face as they built communities in the

decades before the Civil War?



What are the contradictions



Freedom



Demographics of Freedom (cont'd)

How many free African Americans were there and where did they live?



MAP 7–1



Demographics of Freedom

• In 1820 there were 233,504 free African Americans living in the United States.

• Of the free African Americans, 99,281 lived in the North, 114,070 in the upper South, and just 20,153 in the Deep South.

• Free people of color accounted for 2.4 percent of the American population and 3 percent of the southern population.



Demographics of Freedom (cont'd)

• By 1860 the free African-American population had reached 488,070. Of these, 226,152 lived in the North, 224,963 in the upper South, and 36,955 in the Deep South.



FIGURE 7–1



FIGURE 7–2



The Jacksonian Era

• Market Revolution - The transformation of the North into a modern industrial society.

• An economy based on subsistence farming, goods produced by skilled artisans, and local markets grew into one marked by commercial farming, factory production, and national markets.



Artist’s depiction of the Erie Canal.



The Jacksonian Era (cont'd)

• By the 1820s the northern states were teeming with reform

• The market revolution also helped create mass political parties.

• Suffrage - The right to vote.




• President John Quincy Adams (1825), along with his secretary of state, Henry Clay, hoped to promote industrialization through a national program of federal government aid.

• Democratic Party - Political party led by Martin Van Buren.

• Supported slaveholders




• The Whig Party was a national organization that fought the Democrats for power from 1834 to 1852.

• Opposed expansion, immmigration• Peaceful tones regarding race but few defended

the rights of African Americans



Limits of Freedom



The North (cont'd)

What was the Fugitive Slave Law and why was it a threat to all free African

Americans?



Fugitive Slave Laws

• 1793

• Escaped slaves in the north had to be returned

• Endangered the freedom of northern African Americans who were taken as well



Black Laws (cont'd)

What types of laws did states enact against African Americans and how did it

impact their lives?



Black Laws

• White Americans considered self-reliance, intellectual curiosity, the capacity for self-government, military valor, and an energetic work ethic as inherently “Anglo-Saxon” characteristics. They also believed that other racial groups

lacked these characteristics They considered black people inferior



Black Laws (cont'd)

• White Americans considered self-reliance, intellectual curiosity, the capacity for self-government, military valor, and an energetic work ethic as inherently “Anglo-Saxon” characteristics. Northern states tried to keep more African

Americans from moving into this territory, due to fear of job competition among other things.



Black Laws (cont'd)

• Between 1804 and 1849, Ohio’s black laws required several things from African Americans entering the state.

• Legal evidence that they were free

• $500 bond to pay for their support

• Could not sit on juries



Certificates of Freedom



Black Laws (cont'd)

• In 1813 the Illinois Territory threatened that African Americans who tried to settle within its borders would be repeatedly whipped until they left.

• Indiana citizens ratified a state constitution in 1851 that explicitly banned all African Americans from the state.



Table 7-1



Disfranchisement (cont'd)

Why did most white oppose giving free African American men the right to vote?



Disfranchisement

• Disfranchisement means depriving a person the legal right to vote.

• This was common for black voters during this period.

• During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the dominant elite in the northeastern states had used property qualifications to prevent both poor black and poor white men from voting.




• Franchise - The right to vote. People on both sides of the universal white

male suffrage debate argued it would be dangerous to extend the same privilege to black men.

New Jersey stopped allowing black men to vote in 1807 and in 1844 adopted a white only suffrage provision in its state constitution.




• Franchise - The right to vote. At the other extreme, Maine, New Hampshire,

Vermont, and Massachusetts—none of which had a significant African-American minority—made no effort to deprive black men of the vote



FREDERICK DOUGLASS



Segregation

• Northern hotels, taverns, and resorts turned black people away unless they were the servants of white guests.

• African Americans were either banned from public lecture halls, art exhibits, and religious revivals or could attend only at certain times.

• African Americans faced special difficulty trying to use public transportation.



Segregation (cont'd)

• Jim Crow: Term associated with segregated public spaces and amenities.

• Segregation: The practice of separating people on the basis of race.




• All African Americans, regardless of their wealth or social standing, were treated this way.

• All black people, regardless of their class, were also frequently insulted in public by white adults and children.

• In this atmosphere, African Americans learned to distrust white people.




What steps did northern whites take to enforce racial segregation?




• African Americans moving to northern cities, therefore, were not surprised to find segregated black neighborhoods.

• Because African Americans representing all social and economic classes lived in these segregated neighborhoods, the quality of housing in them varied.

• “Nigger Hill” – Boston• “Little Africa” – Cincinnati• Ghettos were terrible (disease, crime, ect)



Black Communities in the Urban North



The Black Family

• Urban neighborhoods, with their more concentrated black populations, nurtured black community life.

• As they became free, northern African Americans left their masters and established their own households. By the 1820s the average black family in northern cities had two parents and between two and four children.



The Black Family (cont'd)

• Both financial need and African-American culture encouraged black northerners to take in boarders and create extended families.

Why were black families headed by single women increasingly common in

this period?



Table 7-2



The Struggle for Employment

• The rising tide of immigration from Europe hurt northern African Americans economically.

• Before 1820 black craftsmen had been in demand but, given the choice, white people preferred to employ other white people, and black people suffered.



The Struggle for Employment (cont'd)

• For the rest of the antebellum period, most northern black men performed menial day labor, although a few worked as coachmen, teamsters, waiters, barbers, carpenters, masons, and plasterers.



The Struggle for Employment

• By 1847 in Philadelphia, for example, 80 percent of employed black men did unskilled labor.

Why were African Americans increasingly concentrated in unskilled

jobs after 1820?



Barbering was one



STEPHEN SMITH AND WILLIAM WHIPPER



The Northern Black Elite

• A northern Black elite emerged during the first six decades of the nineteenth century.

• Although few African Americans achieved financial security during the antebellum decades, black people could become rich in many ways.



The Northern Black Elite (cont'd)

• Although less so than among African Americans in the South, complexion influenced social standing among African Americans in the North, especially in cities like Cincinnati that were close to the South.



Entrepreneurs

• Entrepreneurs became prevalent among the black elite during this time.

• Perhaps most successful was Stephen Smith, who owned a lumber and coal business in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and speculated in real estate.



Black Professionals

• The northern black elite also included physicians and lawyers.

• Smith, the first African American to earn a medical degree, graduated from the University of Glasgow in Scotland in 1837 and practiced in New York City until his death in 1874.



Artists and Musicians

• Although they rarely achieved great wealth and fame, black artists and musicians were also part of the northern African-American elite.



Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield



Edmonia Lewis.



Lewis’s Hagar



Lewis’s bust of American



Lewis’s Forever Free



HARRIET E. WILSON



Black Authors

• In some respects, the antebellum era was a golden age of African-American literature. Frederick Douglass Martin R. Delany George M. Horton James W. Whitfield Harriet E. Wilson



Black Authors (cont'd)

What was the relationship between the black elite and the rest of the African-

American community?



African-American Institutions



Black Churches

• The black institutions that had appeared during the revolutionary era became stronger, more numerous, and more varied.

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



Black Churches (cont'd)

• Black churches were often also community centers and schools for children.

• By 1846 the independent African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church had 296 congregations in the United States and Canada with 17,375 members.

• Most other congregations remained affiliated with white denominations.



This stained-glass window



An 1844 lithograph



Bishops of the AME Church



A contemporary photograph



Schools (cont'd)

Why did most black children receive an inadequate education in the antebellum

period?



Black Churches (cont'd)

What role did churches play in the black community?



Schools

• Very segregated during this time.

• Black schools were underfunded.

• Inadequate public funding resulted in poor education or none at all for most black children across the North.

• Some black leaders defended segregated schools as better for black children than integrated ones.



African Free Schools



Voluntary Associations

• The African-American mutual aid, benevolent, self-improvement, and fraternal organizations that originated during the late eighteenth century grew during the antebellum decades.

• African Dorcas Association: Distributed clothes to needy African American children.



Voluntary Associations (cont'd)

How did black voluntary associations reflect the values and concerns of the

black elite?



Free African Americans in the south



The Upper South

• The free black people of the upper South had much in common with their northern counterparts.

• But significant differences, which resulted from the South’s agricultural economy and slavery, set free people of color in the upper South apart from those in the North.



The Upper South (cont'd)

• Freedom A more important difference was the impact

of slavery on the lives of free African Americans in the upper South.

Unlike black northerners, free black people in the upper South lived alongside slaves.

Many still had family ties to slavery. Free black people of the upper South were

also more at risk of being enslaved than were black northerners.



The Upper South (cont'd)

• Freedom Free black people had to carry free papers,

which they had to renew periodically.



Work

• Free black people in the upper South also experienced difficulties in earning a living.

• Free persons of color in rural areas were generally tenant farmers—renting land from landlords to farm.

• More factory jobs available due to less competition from immigrants

• Fewer factories than in the north



Work (cont'd)

• As in the North, the most successful African Americans were barbers, butchers, tailors, caterers, merchants, and those teamsters and hack drivers who owned their own horses and vehicles.



Early Black Literary Societies



Community Life

• These circumstances made it more difficult for free black people in the upper South to maintain community institutions.

What was the impact of slavery on the lives of the African Americans living

the upper South?



Mother Mary Elizabeth Clovis Lange



The Deep South

• A three-caste system similar to that in Latin America developed in the Deep South during the antebellum period. White People Free Black People Slaves



The Deep South (cont'd)

• Some cities developed in the deep South that had a mostly black population, however many of the people there lived in rural areas

What was the relationship between free blacks and the white slaveholding class

in the Deep South?



Trans-Mississippi West

• Free black people were rare in this area.

• African Americans who lived in California in 1860 constituted “75 percent of the free black population of the West.”

• Laws often prevented blacks from settling in these territories and states.



Trans-Mississippi West (cont’d)

Why were there so few African Americans in the West?



Timeline A



Timeline B

Copyright ©2011, ©2006 by Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved. Prentice Hall...

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