WHEN AMERICA S BLACK COMMUNITY DEBATED THE SSUE OF

WHEN AMERICA’S BLACK COMMUNITY DEBATED THE ISSUE OF

INTEGRATION VERSUS SEPARATION

A literature so diffuse obviously varies widely in style,purpose, and competence. Some books are works of enduring valuefrom a literary as well as a “protest” perspective. Theautobiographies of Frederick Douglass, Henry Bibb, and SolomonNorthup fuse imaginative style with keenness of insight. Theyare penetrating and self-critical, superior autobiography by anystandards. The quality of mind and spirit of their authors isapparent.... The majority of slave narratives, like mostautobiographies, are more parochial and weaker in literaryquality. Many are confused.... The very shortcomings of theirbooks as literature in part testify to their authenticity ashistorical sources. The style of their books is a product oftheir schooling. A number of slave narratives are of suchdoubtful validity that they may be shelved at the start. Whenthe authenticity of a “memoir,” THE NARRATIVE OF JAMES WILLIAMS(1838), dictated by one black man to the Quaker poet JohnGreenleaf Whittier, was questioned, Williams was nowhere to befound. The book was withdrawn from publication. James Williamsseems to have been a free Negro who culled stories from neighborsand invented others for a little ready cash. The antislaverypress is full of warnings against such bogus fugitives. Twoother books, THE SLAVE: OR THE MEMOIRS OF ARCHIE MOORE (1836) and THEAUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A FEMALE SLAVE (1856), were works of antislavery

http://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/ActiveIndex.pdf

Osofsky, Gilbert, comp. _Puttin’ on Ole Massa; The Slave Narratives of Henry Bibb, William Wells Brown, and Solomon Northup_. NY: Harper & Row, 1969, pages 10-12

2 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith

HENRY AND MARY BIBB MARY ANN SHADD CARY

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fiction. The first was written by the American historian RichardHildreth; the second was composed by Mattie Griffith, the whitedaughter of a Kentucky slaveholder. Such potential hoaxes ledto careful investigation of the stories fugitives wrote forpublication. Narrators were subjected to detailed questioningby committees of knowledgeable people; letters were written toformer masters and neighbors for corroboration. A tale soseemingly improbable as the life of Henry Bibb led to anextensive correspondence with white Southerners, all of whomverified Bibb’s account — the improbable was the real. SolomonNorthup’s fantastic experiences were verified by a basketful oflegal documents. Because few slaves were literate enough towrite their names, much less their autobiographies, and werethus forced to rely on amanuenses, usually abolitionists,scholars have rightly wondered where the slave’s experiencebegan and that of the antislavery recorder left off. Some havemaintained that the typical slave narrative is so doctored thatall are suspect as sources. Ulrich B. Phillips, for example,believed that such narratives “were issued with so muchabolitionist editing that as a class their authenticity isdoubtful.”1

By this point Boston had acceded to the desires of some of its black parents, and separated out an entirely black school, the Smith School on Belknap Street, so that within the sheltering walls of a segregate institution (equality not yet being enough of a real or potential possibility as to be so much as contemplated) the black pupils would not need daily to manage the trauma being caused by the abuse they were encountering from white pupils.

May: Milldred Jackson, the mulatto slave of the child Harriet White, daughter of David White, Esq. of Shelby County, Kentucky, had a child by a local white man, not her owner, James Bibb. Henry Bibb would have his mother’s owner Harriet as a playmate — until it came time to contract the very light mulatto boy out for labor in order to pay for the little all-white girl’s education.

1. Osofsky, Gilbert, comp. PUTTIN’ ON OLE MASSA; THE SLAVE NARRATIVES OF HENRY BIBB, WILLIAM WELLS BROWN, AND SOLOMON NORTHUP. NY: Harper & Row, 1969

1812

1815

http://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/thumbnails/T/HDT.pdf

http://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/explanation.pdf


“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 3


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Mary E. Miles was born in Rhode Island, to free parents of color, of moderate means.2 It is presumed that she attended public schools in Rhode Island and did some teaching before she entered the Massachusetts State Normal School of which the Reverend Samuel Joseph May was the principal.

October 9, Thursday: Mary Ann Shadd was born to Abraham Shadd and Harriett Shadd in Wilmington, Delaware. She would be the oldest of thirteen children. Although Delaware was a slave state, this Shadd family was descended from Hans Schad, a wounded Hessian Revolutionary War mercenary. During this soldier’s recuperation he had resided in the home of a free black woman, Elizabeth Jackson, and had fallen in love with her daughter. The couple had produced two sons, one who could pass as white and who retained the original spelling of the family name, and one who could not pass as white but who was nevertheless a free American, who went by the name Shadd.

Daniel-Francois-Esprit Auber’s opera comique La neige, ou Le nouvel Eginhard to words of Scribe and Delavigne was performed for the initial time, in Theatre Feydeau, Paris.

1820

2. It is not known that this Miles family was related to the John Miles who was of Concord, Massachusetts in 1637, as no connection to Rhode Island appears within the first three generations. They are more likely to have acquired this name by way of a white servant of John Hill named Alice Miles who, on March 10, 1661/1662, court records indicate, having been found guilty of “fornication with a Negro,” had been sentenced to be whipped “till her backe be bloody.”

1823

MARY BIBB






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Robert Purvis met the abolitionists Friend Benjamin Lundy and William Lloyd Garrison.

Annual black conventions began in Philadelphia. In the convention of this year, Robert Purvis joined in an appeal to establish a manual labor school for blacks.

The free mulatto Shadd family moved from Delaware to West Chester outside of Philadelphia. Mary Ann Shadd would attend a Quaker school there, run by Miss Phoebe Darlington. Her father Abraham Shadd would be active in abolitionist groups and other political organizations that discussed black immigration to Canada, Africa, and the West Indies. He would function as an agent of subscriptions for Garrison’s newspaper, The Liberator. He and his family would begin to socialize with the more affluent blacks of the area. The Shadd home in West Chester would function as a stop on the Underground Railroad.

In this year the shipbuilders of Chatham in Canada West (where Mary Ann Shadd eventually would teach) were launching their first commercial vessel, the Sans Pareil.

1830




Not considered a white man.



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Nathan Johnson attended the 4th National Convention for the Improvement of Free People of Color in Philadelphia with black merchant Richard Johnson, evidently not related to him but also from New Bedford, and was named one of four honorary members. Abraham Shadd was elected president of the Convention. At the age of 10, his mulatto daughter Mary Ann Shadd began attending the Quaker Boarding School run by Miss Phoebe Darlington in West Chester, Pennsylvania. She would take a six-year course.

1833

Costumes of Philadelphia Quakers






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August 28, Wednesday: Subsequent to the passage of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act by Parliament, British captains who had been being caught continuing in these international business activities had been being fined £100 for every slave found on board their vessel. However, this 1807 law had by no means been effective in halting British participation in the international slave trade — because, when slavers were in danger of being overtaken by the British navy, their captains could sometimes reduce the fines by having the cargo of blacks shoved off the other side of the vessel, to be dragged under the waves by their chains.

Some involved in the anti-trade campaign found themselves therefore arguing that to end this cruel practice the entire traffic in humans must be outlawed, and in 1823 a new Anti-Slavery Society had been formed. Members had included Friend Thomas Clarkson, Henry Peter Brougham, William Wilberforce, and Thomas Fowell Buxton. On this day Parliament passed the Slavery Abolition Act. This act manumitted all slaves anywhere in the British Empire (such as, for instance, in our neighbor to the north, Canada) under the age of

six years with the British government itself to pay full compensation to the deprived slavemasters. All slaves in the West Indies already above the age of six were by this act to be bound as apprentices for a term of 5 to 7 years (this would be reduced to 2 years), to be followed by their manumission. Said liberation was scheduled to begin on August 1, 1834 with the last batch of slaves to receive their manumission papers by August 1, 1838. As a condition of their cooperation the white “owners” of these 700,000 black and red workers

THE MIDDLE PASSAGE






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were to receive some £20,000,000 sterling in compensation. (For instance, the Bishop of Exeter alone, with 665 slaves to manumit, would receive £12,700 in compensation out of the government’s tax revenues.)

Christmas: Henry Bibb had grown into a light-colored young slave who could, in the dusk, even pass for a white man. He had been courting a slave on a plantation about four miles away near Bedford KY. Evidently this slavemaster William Gatewood’s idea of a Christmas present for himself was jus primae noctis:

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal:

4th day 25th of 12th M 1833 / Rode to Smithfield to Attend Moy

ABOLITIONISM

SLAVERY

Malinda’s master was very much in favor of the match, but entirely uponselfish principles. When I went to ask his permission to marry Malinda,his answer was in the affirmative with one condition, which I considerto be too vulgar to be written in this book.






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[Monthly] Meeting - It was very small & very poor - But I will try to hope the next may be better. —This evening our friend John Wilbur called a little while at the Institutiion, but left to go to Moses Browns to lodge. —






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Early in the year: Henry Bibb was sold by his owner, Albert G. Sibley, an exhorter in the local Methodist Episcopal Church, to Al’s brother, a Sunday School class-leader in that church, for $850, and then by that brother for the same price to William Gatewood, another member of that congregation. In consequence Henry and the girl he was courting, Malinda, Gatewood’s slave, would be able to cohabit more conveniently in the married relationship (the sacred institution of marriage itself being of course very off limits for mere slaves

1834






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such as them).3

3. For some reason, despite this great boon Henry Bibb was not going to be grateful to these white men. Being allowed to cohabit in the creation of a baby slave was only going to make him want to set himself and his family free!






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December 25, Saturday: On pretext of looking for contract labor at a slaughterhouse near the Ohio River, Henry Bibb left home with about $2.50 in his pocket, taking with him a set of clothing that no one had seen him wearing. He was not able to tell his wife Malinda that he had decided to flee slavery. He got transportation across the river and landed in Madison, Indiana. There he boarded a riverboat in the dusk, bound for Cincinnati, keeping carefully away from the light so that no one would observe that he was not completely white.4 When he would land in Cincinnati, he would start trekking across the frozen ground of Ohio, his shoes worn quite through, until he got beyond the Black Swamp and to a settlement of escaped slaves near Perrysburgh, Ohio.

1837

4. Henry Bibb was very light in complexion. At one point, later, while he was traveling on a canal boat on a ticket which entitled him to food in the course of the journey, he would mistakenly be invited to table with the white passengers. When he seated himself, however, there would be consternation and he would be expelled, the explanation being proffered “I did not know that you was a colored man, when I asked you.”






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In London, publication of Alexander Walker’s INTERMARRIAGE: OR THE MODE IN WHICH, AND THE CAUSES WHY, BEAUTY, HEALTH, AND INTELLECT RESULT FROM CERTAIN UNIONS, AND DEFORMITY, DISEASE AND INSANITY FROM OTHERS; ... EACH PARENT BESTOWS ON CHILDREN IN CONFORMITY WITH CERTAIN NATURAL LAWS. (Since a copy of this would be found in the library of Bronson Alcott at the point of his death, it is rather likely that Henry Thoreau had had access to it. It would be interesting to find out what this volume had to offer about cases of racial mixture, as in the case of the mulatto young lady Mary Ann Shadd who in this year was graduating from the Quaker Boarding School in West Chester near Philadelphia and going on to become herself a teacher of children.)

1838

FEMINISM






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May 1, Tuesday: By this point Henry Bibb had been working odd jobs long enough to have acquired a presentable costume. He had also saved $15, but not in the sort of currency which could be used in the South. He therefore took a steamboat to Detroit, Michigan and used the money to purchase dry goods, and a set of false whiskers. He would then hike across Ohio with his dry goods, peddling them, with his destination being Cincinnati.






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June: Henry Bibb took a steamboat at night across the Ohio to a place six miles from Bedford, Kentucky, where his mother Milldred Jackson and his wife Malinda were enslaved. Rapping on a window at night attired in the false whiskers he had purchased in Detroit, he passed to his wife enough money for her and their daughter’s steamboat tickets. He then went back to Cincinnati to wait for them to arrive, but while waiting was betrayed for $300 by bounty hunters pretending to be local abolitionists. He was taken as far as Louisville,

Kentucky but his guard, armed with Bowie knife and pistols, needed to take a dump in a stable, and while his guard’s pants were down around his ankles Bibb made a dash for it and made his way back to Bedford. There he found that, knowing that he had escaped from this guard, a very close watch was being kept over his wife and child. Nothing else being possible at this point, he slipped back into Cincinnati.






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The mulatto Robert Purvis became the president of the Vigilance Committee of Philadelphia. He would serve in that capacity during the organization’s six-year existence, until 1844 (the activities of this group would later be carried forward by the General Vigilance Committee from 1852 to 1857, a group of which he would also be the only chairman). The group would often meet at his house at 9th and Lombard Streets to plan ways to assist runaway slaves. This home had a secret room behind a trap door, and who knows what that was for?

The mulatto Mary Ann Shadd completed her education and began teaching nearby, outside Philadelphia. She would later also hold teaching positions in Delaware, and in Trenton, New Jersey, until 1848.

1839

UNDERGROUND RAILROAD






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July: Henry Bibb was ready to try again to retrieve his wife and daughter from slavery. He took the steamboat across the river from Cincinnati into Kentucky and made his way to the place where his mother was enslaved. There, however, he made the mistake of placing trust in one of his mother’s slave friends, and was betrayed when this slave was offered $5 by the slavemaster. This time not only he, but also his wife and child, would be sold South in chains as incorrigibles.

A Portuguese negrero, the Magadalena, master Morillo, out of Sao Tome with a cargo of an unknown number of enslaved Africans on its second of two known Middle Passage voyages, arrived in Cuban waters.A slaver flying the Portuguese flag, the Florinda de Africa, master unknown, out of Benguela with a cargo of 324 enslaved Africans on its second of two known Middle Passages, arrived at the port of Paranagua, Brazil.A slaver flying the Portuguese flag, the Fortuna, master Barbosa, out of an unknown area of Africa with a cargo of 350 enslaved Africans on one of its five known Middle Passage voyages, arrived at a port of Cuba.A slaver flying the Portuguese flag, the Dois D’Abril, master unknown, out of the Congo River with a cargo

A ship manifest of black Americans being “sold south”




Explanation: A "negrero" is a ship that transports slave cargo.

This manifest is for a coffle of 26 black American slaves being shipped coastally from the port of Baltimore, Maryland to the port of Savannah, Georgia by Austin Woolfolk, Sr. on October 6, 1821.



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of 339 enslaved Africans on one of its three known such Passages, arrived at the port of Ilha Grande, Brazil.A slaver flying the Spanish flag (as shown below), the Caridad Cubana, master S. Fabrequez, out of Bissau with a cargo of 174 enslaved Africans on its one and only known Middle Passage, arrived at the port of Havana, Cuba.

In this general timeframe the negreros Dolphin (or Constitução), Hound, and Mary Cushing (or Sete de Avril), would be discovered to be protected in their activities by American as well as by Spanish flags and papers (HOUSE DOCUMENT, 26th Congress, 2d session V, No. 115, pages 28, 51-5, 109-10, 136, 234-8; HOUSE REPORTS, 27th Congress, 3d session, III, No. 283, pages 709-15).

INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE




Explanation: A "negrero" is a ship that transports slave cargo.



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THE MIDDLE PASSAGE




A painting....:In “Barco Negrero” in 1976, Manuel Mendive used the X-ray vision of an artist to depict the contents of the interior decks of a slaver vessel.



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THE MIDDLE PASSAGE




This was engraved in 1858.



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Fall: The family of Henry Bibb had been sold “at a depreciated price because I was a runaway” to Madison Garrison, a slavetrader headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky, and taken on the steamboat Water Witch from Louisville toward New Orleans. The trip would be slow, and they would be held over for three weeks in Vicksburg, Ohio while the slavetrader negotiated the sale of some of the other slaves in his coffle. It took six weeks to make the trip all the way down the river, and when they reached New Orleans he was sold for $1,200, and his wife and child were sold for $1,000 together, to Francis E. Whitfield, a Baptist deacon and the owner of a plantation some 50 miles up the Red River at Claiborn. Malinda arrived there pregnant, but would soon lose the baby she was carrying. Then Henry would be caught attending a prayer meeting and informed that on the following day he would be tied down between four stakes and lashed. In the night before the punishment he stole a long Bowie knife and fled into the Red River swamps, managing to stay out of sight for more than

a week before being tracked down with bloodhounds. He would receive 50 lashes, and then, much worse, some eight to ten blows with a paddle. An iron collar would be riveted on his neck with prongs extending above his head, and atop this a small bell which he could not reach. At night he would be chained to a log or placed in stocks. He would soon manage somehow to escape again, with an old Virginia slave missing two toes on one foot, and they would manage to steal a gun, ammo, a Bowie knife, a blanket, a joint of meat, and some bread, and head for Little Rock, Arkansas. They would be trackable, however, by the distinctive footprint of the other

James Bowie






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slave, and by their taking a white hat from a drunken man, and again recaptured.

December: Noting the apparatus riveted around his neck, of an iron collar with prongs extending above his head and atop this a small bell which he could not reach, a band of “blacklegs” passing by, Thomas Wilson & Co., bought Henry Bibb at a reduced price for speculation. These white men, gamblers, figured they could represent him as a nonproblematic case and pass him off on some unwary purchaser at full value. He was not granted an opportunity to say good-bye to his wife Malinda or his daughter, who at the time would have been five or six years old. These venturesome fellows would not, however, be able to retail him as planned, for his obvious intelligence was such as to make potential purchasers frightened that he was able to read and write. Eventually, unable to dispose of their purchase for a profit while vending him as a single male slave, they went back and attempted to purchase also his wife and daughter, so that the three could be vended as a more-valuable family unit less likely to be troublesome. The owner would not sell the wife and daughter. At that point Bibb struck a deal with his speculative owners, that he would play dumb and cooperate in their sale of him, if in return they would share his sale price with him. He then arranged to be purchased by an unsuspecting half-Indian at a horse race in the Indian Territory of Oklahoma. The purchase price was $900 which the purchaser counted out in

1840






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gold and silver, and true to their word the blacklegs slipped Henry his share of the windfall. This person had a plantation, and slaves, despite the fact that the only crops he raised were for local consumption: “he was the most reasonable, and humane slaveholder that I ever belonged to.... All things considered, if I must be a slave, I had by far, rather be a slave to an Indian, than to a white man, from the experience I have had with both.” He seemed to be a Presbyterian. This kind master would, however, sicken and die, and then during the funeral celebrations, Bibb would seize the opportunity to again steal himself away.

During this month in which Henry was again stealing himself away, a negrero flying the Portuguese flag, the Conceicao do Maria, master J.P. Costa, on the Middle Passage out of Angola, was arriving at the port of Rio De Janeiro and at the port of Pernambuco, Brazil carrying an unknown number, probably quite a few, of new recruits to slave status.

THE MIDDLE PASSAGE




A "negrero" is a ship that transports slave cargo.



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Spring: The collar and prongs and bell apparatus had been removed from Henry Bibb and he had been purchased for $900 by a half-Indian plantation owner, who had turned out to be by far “the most reasonable, and humane slaveholder that I ever belonged to.... All things considered, if I must be a slave, I had by far, rather be a slave to an Indian, than to a white man, from the experience I have had with both.” This kind master, however, sickened and died, and during the funeral celebrations Bibb seized the opportunity to again steal himself away. He made his way cross-country to Jefferson City, and then by various steamboats by way of St. Louis to Portsmouth, Ohio. One way in which he was able to travel was that he obtained an empty trunk and carried it on board a steamboat behind some white passengers. Everyone presumed he was someone’s slave carrying their luggage, and ignored him. Then, once the boat was underway, he befriended some Irish deck passengers, buying them drinks and persuading one of them who was going to purchase a ticket for himself, to take some money and purchase a ticket for him also.5 What a risky way to avoid being interrogated!

1841

5. In that era it was common to pay after one was aboard, as receipts proving that the transportation had been paid for were collected at the gangway while debarking.






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Winter: After so many escape attempts Henry Bibb wound up in Detroit, Michigan, as free as a slave fugitive from justice could be in America. He had been attacked by wolves, and attacked by human wolves — he had survived.






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January: Henry Bibb obtained two or three weeks of schooling, the only formal schooling he ever received, from W.C. Monroe while in Detroit MI (presumably this would not be the William Monroe who had made pencils in Concord in the 1830s).

1842






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May: In Adrian, Michigan, Henry Bibb began to speak against slavery.

1844






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Summer: Henry Bibb was traveling through Ohio with Samuel Brooks and Amos Dresser, lecturing against slavery.

He had become utterly prejudiced against it.

Fall: Henry Bibb lectured against slavery alongside S.B. Treadwell in Michigan.






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In this year citizens again petitioned Boston’s authorities to end the racial segregation of its public schools. By a vote of 24 to 2 the School Committee dismissed this concern.

Spring, Summer, and Fall: During this entire lecture season, Spring-Summer-Fall, Henry Bibb was traveling around lecturing against slavery in Michigan. The antislavery society pledged itself to helping him redeem his wife and child from their southern enslavement.

At some point between March and June, Waldo Emerson entered the following material in his journal:

1845

SMITH SCHOOL

What argument, what eloquence can avail against the power of that one word niggers? The man of the world annihilates the whole combined force of all the antislavery societies of the world by pronouncing it.






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April 22, Tuesday: The Signal, an antislavery gazette of Michigan, coordinated the collection of moneys for the manumission of Henry Bibb’s wife and child “if the objects be living.” Interestingly, the arrangements made were that rather than allowing Bibb himself to collect the funds and coordinate the effort, friends of liberty in each area were to “appoint a collector” –a white man it goes without saying– “then transmit them to us.” Pay careful attention to this fact: even the white abolitionists of America, since they were white, would not trust an abolitionist of color, even to act in his own professed interest.

Wendell Phillips provided one of the obligatory prefaces-by-a-white-man without which white men would of course have been quite unable to peruse Frederick Douglass’s new book.6

6. Even if you haven’t noticed, this is just the way it is: white men, then as now, need to be told what to think by other white men. (Those who are impressed by THE BELL CURVE can probably see this, if they choose, as clear evidence of racial superiority.)






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Summer: The Michigan abolitionists sent two white men down South, a Methodist minister and a cabinet maker, to locate and negotiate for Henry Bibb’s wife and child.

They seem never to have reported back — perhaps with adequate reason.

Frederick Douglass’s NARRATIVE

Yet it is sad to think, that these very throbbing hearts which welcome your story, andform your best safeguard in telling it, are all beating contrary to the “statute in suchcase made and provided.” Go on, my dear friend, till you, and those who, like you, havebeen saved, so as by fire, from the dark prisonhouse, shall stereotype these free, illegalpulses into statutes; and New England, cutting loose from a blood-stained Union, shallglory in being the house of refuge for the oppressed, — till we no longer merely “hidethe outcast,” or make a merit of standing idly by while he is hunted in our midst; but,consecrating anew the soil of the Pilgrims as an asylum for the oppressed, proclaim ourwelcome to the slave so loudly, that the tones shall reach every hut in the Carolinas,and make the broken-hearted bondman leap up at the thought of old Massachusetts.






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Winter: The two white men the Michigan abolitionists had sent down South to locate and negotiate for his wife and child never having reported back, a disconsolate Henry Bibb took matters into his own hands and went back down into the danger zone, to Madison IN, to find out what he could himself on the slave grapevine about the fate of his wife and child. Malinda’s mother and friends advised that he try to forget her — because the word they had received was that Deacon Francis E. Whitfield of Claiborn on the Red River had long ago sold her to another white man for use as a mistress.

Bibb then hired a white man to go across the river and bring across his mother for a chaperoned visit, so that he and she could discuss the situation directly:

I have long thought from what has fallen under my own observation whilea slave, that the strongest reason why southerners stick with suchtenacity to their “peculiar institution,” is because licentious whitemen could not carry out their wicked purposes among the defencelesscolored population as they now do, without being exposed and punished bylaw, if slavery were abolished. Female virtue could not be trampled underfoot with impunity, and marriage among the people of color kept in utterobscurity.

And my mother thought it was no use for me to run any more risks,or to grieve myself any more about her.






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The Reverend Leonard Withington, having for 8 years been off the board of the Dummer Academy (established by bequest of acting governor William Dummer in 1761, this Newbury institution has come to prefer to be referred to as The Governor’s Academy), returned for another term. During most of his tenure this time, which would end in 1850, he would be serving as President.

Boston’s citizens again petitioned those in authority over them to bring to an end the racial segregation of their public schools. William Cooper Nell signed a petition, signed also by William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Francis Jackson (1789-1861), and Williams, asking the city of Boston to grant equal school rights to children of color. The School Board responded to this concern, to the effect that the racial discrimination which they saw fit to practice was a racial discrimination which was ordained of God and a racial discrimination which was “founded deep in the physical, mental, and moral nature of the two races.” What the protesting blacks needed was not indignation against their betters but cultivation of “a respect for themselves.” The committee voted 55 to 12 to continue the existing segregation of school facilities. Looking for someone more appropriate to the teaching of the black children at Boston’s Smith School than the white man Abner Forbes, who was known to have been beating them,7 Horace Mann, Sr. first offered Forbes’s position to the Reverend Samuel Joseph May and then to Ambrose Wellington.8 The inheritor of this post would need to be a white male it goes without saying, but would need to disbelieve in corporal punishment, and would need to be able to accept and honor the intellectual capabilities of black children. So, here’s an interesting question, don’t you suppose? Why did not Superintendent Mann consider offering that post to Henry Thoreau of Concord?

1846

7. It will help us be more considerate of master Forbes, if we bear in mind that among white men he was being considered a disgrace, because he was teaching students of color. We have the following from the autobiography of William J. Brown, a Rhode Islander of color: “[I]t was considered such a disgrace for white men to teach colored schools that they would be greatly offended if the colored children bowed or spoke to them on the street. Mr. Anthony, who was at one time teaching the colored school [in Providence], became very angry because Zebedee Howland met him on the street, spoke to him, raised his hat and bowed. He took no notice of his dark complexioned scholar, but the next Monday morning took poor Zebedee and the whole school to task, saying, ‘When you meet me on the street, don’t look towards me, or speak to me; if you do, I will flog you the first chance I get.’”8. Horace Mann, Sr., a stuffed shirt advocate of citizen indoctrination who is given a lot of credit in stuffed shirt histories of education, had just, in his 10th annual report to the Massachusetts Board of Education, suggested hiring mostly females as teachers — since God had implanted in the maternal breast a “powerful, all-mastering instinct of love” that would make it possible for male superiors to induce them to work cheap and, nevertheless, do the right thing. Well, that’s not exactly what he said — it’s merely what he was understood to mean by those who knew how to read the code in use at the time. He might equally well have pointed out that women have smaller heads and smaller brains, had his audience been a different audience, and conveyed precisely the same message.




http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Governor%27s_Academy








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Summer: Having finally been able to accept the fact that the institution of human enslavement had utterly destroyed his relationship with his wife and child, and all prospect of family reunion, Henry Bibb was spending the summer traveling through Michigan lecturing against slavery.

Fall/Winter: Henry Bibb would spend the fall and winter of this year in New England, lecturing against slavery:

And there I found a kind reception wherever I traveled among the






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friends of freedom.

Presumably it was during this period that Bibb ventured into Rhode Island and met William J. Brown:

Henry Bibb, from Tennessee [Kentucky, actually], came in. He hadtaken an excursion from home and had never seen fit to go backagain [well, actually, he had gone back, but then escapedagain]. He saw the Free Soil ticket spread out, which gentlemenof that party left for distribution. Mr. Bibb was nearly white,and knew well what slavery was. Taking up a Liberty ticket hesaid, “I hope the colored people will sustain this ticket.”Several of our people being present and knowing that that ticketwas nothing more than Democratic bait to draw off the coloredvoters, came down with vengeance on the tickets, much to thegreat surprise of Bibb.

May: Henry Bibb met Miss Mary E. Miles of Boston,9 a friend of freedom, and found a kind reception, and, evidently with her being aware that he had been married before, proposed marriage.

1847

9. We know of a Richard Miles who lived at 63 Southac Street, which was a colored neighborhood.

FREE SOIL PARTY

LIBERTY PARTY




This is from William J. Brown’s late-life autobiography, in which he recounted undated memories of various events which had been of significance to him.



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September 2, Thursday: Henry Bibb embarked on the canal packet Erie at Toledo, Ohio, bound for Cincinnati.10

10. And here we have an illustration of just how light-complexioned one might be in America, and still encounter race prejudice.The price of Henry Bibb’s ticket had entitled him to food in the course of the journey and at one point a white gentleman had invited him to table. When he had seated himself, however, there was consternation, and he was expelled, the reason given being “I did not know that you was a colored man, when I asked you.” A portion of Bibb’s fare was refunded in consequence of this denial of the paid-for food.






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Boston’s citizens again petitioned Boston’s authorities to end the racial segregation of its public schools. At Boston’s Abiel Smith School, enrollment had dropped from a peak of about 100, by this point in the boycott, to 66. The Boston school board responded to this concern by voting 59 to 16 to continue its practice of racial segregation.

From Waldo Emerson’s journal during this year of protest, a remark that we today might consider –on account of our recently raised sensitivities?– to veer dangerously toward a reliance upon Wubya’s waterboarding:

Emerson was having his portrait painted as an oil on panel, in the outskirts of Edinburgh, by a Scottish engraver

1848

It is better to hold the negro race an inch under waterthan an inch over.






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and artist, an admirer of his writings, whom he had met at a dinner party:

David Scott (1806-1849) was depicting, of course, one of Emerson’s usual gestures, the clenching of a hand into a fist. Emerson would describe Scott as “a sort of Bronson Alcott with easel and brushes, a sincere great man, grave, silent, contemplative, and plain.” Emerson’s son Edward regarded this likeness, like the panel upon which it was painted, as “wooden.” He would explain, however, that the symbolic rainbow in the background was appropriate: “my father stood for Hope.”

Completion of the serialization of William Makepeace Thackeray’s VANITY FAIR, a tale of two middle-class London families which had begun in the previous year, and this novel’s issuance as a book.

“This I set as a positive truth. A woman with fair opportunities,and without a positive hump, may marry whom she likes.”






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In the novel, the above is a truism only within the white race. The origins of Miss Swartz are an issue in regard to whether George Osborne will marry her. She is obviously of partly African ancestry and there a revelling in stereotypes: “I daresay she wore a nose ring when she went to court,” is George’s initial remark and, when he finally dismisses her from consideration, he goes “I’m not going to marry a Hottentot Venus.” Thackeray’s design for the character (an ugly design) depends on this, since he uses Miss Swartz to underscore the venality of old Mr. Osborne. Nothing more clearly brings home this venality, per Thackeray, than Osborne’s willingness to have his son marry a “mahogany charmer” in order to obtain her fortune. Apparently no imagined partner would be more preposterous or grotesque for Thackeray and his readers than this “dark object of the conspiracy” (as the narrator phrases it). This reveals how deeply this reading audience was steeped in its racism and fully explains why so many Victorians of mixed ancestry attempted to “pass.”

In Virginia, Henry Brown’s wife Nancy and their children were sold and were to be transported to North Carolina. Brown had been able to earn some spending money by exceeding his weekly production quota of chewing twists at the tobacco factory in Richmond, Virginia at which he was a slave, and so had been reimbursing Nancy’s master for the time she had been spending caring for their family. As Nancy began the coffle walk south shackled to other adult slaves, with their not fewer than three children loaded in a wagon, Brown walked hand-in-hand with her for the first few miles. Then he watched as his wife and children disappeared from his view — why, it was almost enough to make a man lose his faith in America. Perhaps he will feel better if he takes the Sage of Concord’s advice and goes and holds his head an inch under water. Perhaps, if he holds his head under water long enough, he will be able to glimpse Emerson’s rainbow of hope!The antislavery people were having trouble persuading the American BIBLE-believers. At least rhetorically, the proslavery people were likely to win each and every such argument based on scripture. For instance, in this year Jefferson Davis made a speech to Congress in which he declared that:

If slavery be a sin, it is not yours. It does not rest on youraction for its origin, on your consent for its existence. It isa common law right to property in the service of man; its originwas Divine decree.

In amplification of this attitude, Davis would write:

[Slavery] was established by decree of Almighty God ... it issanctioned in the Bible, in both Testaments, from Genesis toRevelation ... it has existed in all ages, has been found amongthe people of the highest civilization, and in nations of thehighest proficiency in the arts.... Let the gentleman go toRevelation to learn the decree of God — let him go to theBible.... I said that slavery was sanctioned in the Bible,authorized, regulated, and recognized from Genesis toRevelation.... Slavery existed then in the earliest ages, andamong the chosen people of God; and in Revelation we are toldthat it shall exist till the end of time shall come. You findit in the Old and New Testaments — in the prophecies, psalms,and the epistles of Paul; you find it recognized, sanctionedeverywhere (Dunbar Rowland’s JEFFERSON DAVIS, Volume 1, pages 286and 316-17).

This was the year in which Illinois more or less (a little less) abolished slavery within its borders, the year in which, with about 74,000 slaves on Martinique alone, France abolished slavery in all its West Indies colonies, and Samuel Langhorn Clemens was merely a child on a Southern farm — so in this context I will arbitrarily incorporate one of his later reminisces:

In my school-boy days I had no aversion to slavery. I was notaware that there was anything wrong about it. No one arraignedit in my hearing; the local papers said nothing against it; the






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local pulpit taught us that God approved it, that it was a holything, and the doubter need only look in the Bible if he wishedto settle his mind — and then the texts were read aloud to usto make the matter sure; if the slaves themselves had an aversionto slavery, they were wise and said nothing.

June: Henry Bibb and Miss Mary E. Miles of Boston were wed:

Not in slaveholding style, which is a mere farce, without the sanctionof law or gospel; but in accordance with the laws of God and our country.






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Elizabeth Smith Miller, a white woman needless to say, appeared on the streets of Seneca Falls, New York, in “turkish trousers,” soon to be known as “bloomers.”

George Washington Briggs, a white man needless to say, printed up an American edition of Jane Austen’s PRIDE AND PREJUDICE.

Learn how the hoity-toity live! Be aware of the anguish and torment

and uncertainty of their social striving!

At very much the other end of the accepted local social scale, Henry Bibb presented his NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF HENRY BIBB, AN AMERICAN SLAVE, WRITTEN BY HIMSELF.

[T]he only weapon of self defence I could use successfully,was that of deception.

We know that Bibb wrote the narrative himself because we have the testimony of the editor Lucius C. Matlack –a white man needless to say– that he not only personally witnessed some of this self-writing but also then preserved the evidences of it in order to remove any possibility of doubt:

[T]he writer of this introduction is well acquainted with hishandwriting and style. The entire manuscript I have examined andprepared for the press. Many of the closing pages of it werewritten by Mr. Henry Bibb in my office. And the whole ispreserved for inspection now. An examination of it will showthat no alteration of sentiment, language, or style wasnecessary to make it what it now is, in the hands of the reader.The work of preparation for the press was that of orthographyand punctuation merely, an arrangement or the chapters, and atable of contents — little more than falls to the lot ofpublishers generally.

1849






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Also, in Wilmington, Delaware, Mary Ann Shadd put out a 12-page pamphlet, “Hints to the Colored People of the North.” This focused on antislavery reform and building a collective consciousness for blacks. Writing to the free Black community of the northern states, Shadd targeted the economic fragility of the antebellum Black proto-bourgeoisie: “We forget that we are, as a people, deficient in the ‘needful’ to support such things.” What was important was a collective liberation: “what profits a display of ourselves? Is it to be seen by one another? How does that better our condition?” Frederick Douglass’s North Star would take note of this pamphlet’s identification of “black imitation of the conspicuous consumption of whites” as a problem. Martin Robison Delany would characterize its author as “a very intelligent young lady, peculiarly eccentric.” Following this pamphlet, Shadd wrote to Douglass’s North Star about the corrupt influence of the black church over the freed blacks and insisted that the way to improve the condition of free blacks was to reject materialism “without waiting for the whites of the country.” She invited blacks to be “producers instead of mere consumers.”

In this year in which Harriet Tubman was escaping from slavery in Maryland, the Maryland Supreme Court, in response to a suit by Benjamin Roberts to have his daughter admitted to a white school, was establishing the doctrine known as “separate but equal” — and Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw, who it goes without saying was a white man, was announcing the unanimous decision of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts in the case of Roberts v. Boston, that the city had the unimpeachable power to racially segregate its schools if it chose to do so.

“It is simply crazy that there should ever have come into being a world with such a sin in it, in which a man is set apart because of his color — the superficial fact about a human being. Who could want such a world? For an American fighting for his love of country, that the last hope of earth should from its beginning have swallowed slavery, is an irony so withering, a justice so intimate in its rebuke of pride, as to measure only with God.”

— Stanley Cavell, MUST WE MEAN WHAT WE SAY? 1976, page 141






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In this year, also, a British naval commander –who it goes without saying was a white man– was confessing that their 19th-Century war upon the international slave trade had been quite as utterly ineffectual as today’s “War on Drugs,” with a slippage rate of some 95 captives out of every 100 being successfully spirited past their blockading ships and retailed into their destination markets:

During 26 years, 103,000 slaves have been emancipated [in thecourse of our naval anti-slavery patrolling activities] whilein the same period, 1,795,000 slaves were actually landed in theAmericas.

At about the age of 15, the right hand of Anthony Burns was mangled in machinery (machinery which as a matter of course was entirely unshielded) while working for, it goes without saying, a white man who had hired him from his master. Nearly an inch of bone would be left permanently sticking out from his right wrist. (In addition, his face in adult life would be scarred by a burn, which is presumably why in the image we have of him his pleasant countenance is turned to one side.)

THE TRAFFIC IN MAN-BODY






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September: Enrollment at Boston’s black school having at this point declined to 53 due to parental boycott, the school board determined to procure a black teacher to see whether he might inspire the pupils or at least mollify their parents. Thomas Paul, Jr., a black graduate of Dartmouth, was hired as the new master for the Abiel Smith School on Belknap Street. On Paul’s first day as master, however, black parents surrounded the still-segregated facility in an attempt to persuade the remaining black children not to enter. The school board’s official account of this boycott differs somewhat, in that it refers to the black parents assembled as “a collection of rude boys.” After the Boston police were summoned to restore law’norder, only 23 black children were registered for the term. That evening there was a meeting of the black boycotters at the Belknap Street Baptist Church, while black non-boycotters were out on the sidewalk pelting the walls of the church with stones. Very clearly, on this tactical question of how to go about the process of betterment, the black community of Boston was deeply divided. So that the children of boycotting parents would not remain uneducated, a temporary private school was set up.

May 1, Tuesday: Henry Bibb’s NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF HENRY BIBB, AN AMERICAN SLAVE, WRITTEN BY HIMSELF11 was presented to the American public. We know that despite the fact that the escapee confessedly had resorted on occasion to deception,

[T]he only weapon of self defence I could use successfully,was that of deception.

he had himself written out the narrative as advertised, with some editing, because we have the testimony of the editor, Lucius C. Matlack, that he not only personally witnessed some of this self-writing but also then had preserved the evidences of it:

[T]he writer of this introduction is well acquainted with hishandwriting and style. The entire manuscript I have examined andprepared for the press. Many of the closing pages of it werewritten by Mr. Henry Bibb in my office. And the whole ispreserved for inspection now. An examination of it will show

11. Henry Bibb. NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF HENRY BIBB, AN AMERICAN SLAVE, WRITTEN BY HIMSELF. New-York, 1849






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that no alteration of sentiment, language, or style wasnecessary to make it what it now is, in the hands of the reader.The work of preparation for the press was that of orthographyand punctuation merely, an arrangement or the chapters, and atable of contents — little more than falls to the lot ofpublishers generally.

According to the Congressional Globe for the 1st session of the 31st Congress, Senator Jacob W. Miller of New Jersey responded to charges by his southern colleagues, that New Jersey had become a harbor for their fugitive slaves, by commenting that:

The difficulty in New Jersey has been, not about surrenderingfugitive slaves to their legal masters, but rather how to getrid of those worthless slaves which you suffer to escape intoour territory, and to remain there to the annoyance of ourpeople.

1850






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(Decoding this, “our people” means “white people.”)

Lewis Henry Morgan opinioned that “it is time to fix some limits to the reproduction of this black race among us.”12

Upon the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law William Cooper Nell formed a Committee of Vigilance. He increased his participation in the Underground Railroad.

Henry Youle Hind’s TWO LECTURES, ON AGRICULTURAL CHEMISTRY (Toronto, Canada). This would quickly be overshadowed as a textbook by the publications of John William Dawson.

Upon passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, Henry Bibb fled with his 2d wife, Mary Miles Bibb, to Canada.

There, they would work to establish a Refugees’ Home Colony for other Black American immigrants, such as the ones being forwarded by the minuscule Ms. Tubman and her Equalizer. The Bibbs would publish a newspaper, The Voice of the Fugitive, in the columns of which they would render the following ecologically unsound and problematic advice to fellow escaping slaves:

Bring along your axes with which to make low at your feet thetall forest on this, the Queen’s free soil, which awaits your

12. We will also find him arguing for the abolition of slavery on the grounds that once this social institution is abolished, the support system of the negro in the paternalistic benevolence of the slavemaster will be disintegrated — and the freed slaves would have to die away.






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coming.






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April: Waldo Emerson commented to his journal about Daniel Webster’s support for the Fugitive Slave Bill:

April: Enrollment at Boston’s segregated black Smith School stood at 25. By decision of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, each local public-school system would be allowed to decide for itself, whether to be racially segregated or integrated.

Thomas Chandler Haliburton’s THE ENGLISH IN AMERICA, and his RULE AND MISRULE IN ENGLISH AMERICA.

Despite what seems a total lack of preparatory coursework in chemistry, Henry Youle Hind joined Trinity College’s medical faculty as Professor of Chemistry.

A North American Convention was held at the St. Lawrence Hall in Toronto, with anti-slavery leaders from across the U.S. and Canada West in attendance, to discuss emigration and other issues. An Anti-Slavery Society of Canada, interracial, was founded in Toronto (subsequently, branches would be formed in other areas of Ontario as well). Upon passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, Henry Bibb had fled with his 2d wife, Mary Miles Bibb, to near Windsor, Ontario (a town then called “Sandwich” in what was then termed “Canada West”) were creating a Refugees’ Home Colony for escaped slaves, while they were publishing a newspaper, The Voice of

1851

I think there was never an event half so painful occurred in Boston as the letter with 800 signatures to Webster.






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the Fugitive.

Harriet Tubman moved to St. Catharines, Canada West. This would become the center for her anti-slavery activities for the following seven years.

Mary Ann Shadd at this point had been teaching in New-York, and she attended a meeting with her father in Toronto to discuss black immigration to Canada. She and her brother Isaac Shadd decided to emigrate with Henry Bibb, disregarding the fact that the Bibbs were the diametric opposite of determined “integrationists” like herself — they were determined “separatists.”

Christian Olbey has pointed out in “Unfolded Hands: Class Suicide and the Insurgent Intellectual Praxis of Mary Ann Shadd” (Canadian Review of American Studies — Issue 30:2, 2000) that Canada’s profession of hospitality toward fleeing US blacks was more a phenomenon of self-congratulation than of any real hospitality. Although during the early decades of the 19th Century, Canada did advertise itself as welcoming fugitives from US slavery (in fact, Lieutenant Governor Sir John Colborne responded to a prospective group of fugitives seeking refuge from the imposition of the draconian “black codes” in Cincinnati in this manner: “Tell the Republicans on your side of the line that we do not know men by their color.... If you come to us, you will be entitled to all of the privileges of the rest of his majesty’s subjects”), this had more to do with the perceived need of white Canadians to construct for themselves a national identity than with “any lasting concern for the plight of human beings trapped under the threat of enslavement, or any actual desire to receive a substantial fugitive emigration. As the threat enacted in the Fugitive Slave Law made Black life in the northern states much more dangerous, the growing numbers and increasing visibility of fugitives began to






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strain the self-congratulatory ‘hospitality’ of Canadians, and foregrounded the antagonism between the ideal of Black freedom and the reality of Black presence.” At this point, in a letter printed in the Toronto Colonist newspaper, a fear was expressed that the blacks were “coming rather too fast for the good of the Province. People may talk about the horrors of slavery as much as they choose; but fugitive slaves are by no means a desirable class of immigrants for Canada, especially when they come in large numbers.”

Mary Ann Shadd was, therefore, in moving to Canada, positioning herself between a whole bunch of Canadian whites who were not exactly eager for her presence and a few influential Canadian blacks to whom her politics were anathema. There was going to be trouble, big trouble.

However, that was the future and this was the present. In this year the shipbuilding location known as Chatham,






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where these events would transpire, was incorporating as a village.

May: The Massachusetts legislature voted down a school desegregation bill despite the fact that due to parental boycott, at this point enrollment at Boston’s public all-black Smith School stood at 37.

Fall: In Syracuse NY, a group of public-spirited citizens took Jerry McHenry, subject to the new Federal Slave Law, out of the courthouse, and carried him off to safety in Canada.

By this point Mary Ann Shadd had settled as a teacher in Windsor, Canada West (Ontario). Since there were no adequate accommodations for a school, she wrote to the American Missionary Association of which her father was a member, for assistance. She obtained the recommendations of several prominent men in New-York, and a letter from a local missionary. After several months of waiting, she would receive funds to open a new integrated school in the sparsely populated settlement. She would have 23 children in day school and a night school for adults. She would be the only teacher of color, of the 263 teachers supported by the American Missionary Association. She could not publicize the fact that she had received grant money from the American Missionary Association for this racially integrated school, amounting to half her salary as its teacher, since if she had done so this would have made the parents of the children reluctant to pay the other half. When Mary Miles Bibb, the wife of Henry Bibb, would open a rival school that was racially segregated, Henry Bibb would reveal this unacknowledged partial financing as a scandal in his paper Voice of the Fugitive, and would pretend that the financing had been total rather than only in half, thus conveying a false message that the teacher had been cheating the parents. When the American Missionary Association would learn of the controversy, it would simply cancel all support.

Mary Miles Bibb set up a racially segregated school for black children in Sandwich, Canada West (Ontario). She taught for no pay. The school nevertheless floundered.






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After her first attempt at a racially segregated school for black children in Sandwich, Canada West (Ontario) floundered, Mary Miles Bibb began another racially segregated school for black children in Windsor, Canada West (Ontario), or, perhaps, merely took over a previously existing school.

Professor Henry Youle Hind became the first editor of the Canadian Institute’s Canadian Journal: a Repertory of Industry, Science and Art (Toronto), the initial scientific periodical in Canada, a position he would fill until 1855.

The fundamental and profound idea, that the quantity of energy in the universe available for useful work was a quantity which was perpetually being depleted without renewal, with a consequent inevitable increase of randomness construed as disorder, a quantity which would eventually decrease to zero as the universe became flat and static, burst upon our intellectual world as the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Once this was conceived of, degeneration began to seem utterly inevitable. From this point in our intellectual trajectory forward none of our thoughts about the end and purpose of life would be the same as before — except of course for our thoughts about racial purity and the inexorable advance of race mixture (amalgamation), which would in a strange manner be subtly reinforced by this idea of the general amalgamation and degeneration of the universe!

Mary Ann Shadd, a product of this detested racial amalgamation and constantly on the lookout for someplace in this woebegone universe where she might find acceptance and a home, in this year published a pamphlet entitled “A Plea for Emigration or Notes on Canada West in Its Moral, Social, and Political Aspect: Suggestions Respecting Mexico, W. Indies and Vancouver’s Island / For the Information of Colored Emigrants.” She extolled the virtues of Canada in her pamphlet and urged free American blacks, under threat from the new Fugitive Slave Law, to venture north. She cited the common language, culture, and religion as the primary reasons for American blacks to consider Canada first. Her agenda was that perhaps Canada could become the place where American blacks could successfully integrate, amalgamate, merge into the general cultural context, and then no longer live lives in which they were reduced to being objects for “special attention.”

The document subverted pro-slavery allegations that the British would expropriate and exploit the labour of emigrating blacks even more severely than the slave owner. “The master tells [the slave],” explains Lewis Clarke in his slave narrative, that “if he goes to Canada the British will put him in a mine under ground, with both eyes put out, for life.” Better let the Colonizationists send you back to Africa where you belong. Shadd responded that “Tropical Africa, the land of promise of the colonizationists [teemed] with the breath of pestilence, a burning sun and fearful maladies.” Africa was death. When Shadd does broach the topic of racism, under the sub-heading “Churches—Schools,” she offers an explicit indictment of Black, rather than White, racism. She observes that Black racism toward Whites is encouraged by the fugitive leadership’s insistence on segregated institutions (churches, schools, and segregated communities such as Josiah Henson’s Dawn settlement), contending that “their influence on colored people is fatal.” It would be a fatal mistake for Blacks to respond to the wickedness of white racism by imitating it. Shadd launched her public attack not only on segregated institutions in general but, in particular, on the lucrative little pyramid of local power at the apex of which sat prominent abolitionists Henry Bibb and Mary Bibb, ostensibly servants of the needs of the rapidly growing fugitive community. Shadd pointed out that the Bibbs’s insistence upon segregated institutions had less to do with the collective welfare of the fugitive population than with their own standing as unchallengeable spokespersons for and leaders of the fugitive community:

1852






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[T]here are those who pretend to have been enlightened, and tohave at heart the common good, whose influence and operationshe will find designedly counteracting his conscientious efforts,the more effectively appealing to a common origin and kindredsufferings, secretly striking behind and bringing his characteras a missionary, and his operations, into discredit in the eyesof a sympathizing Christian community.

Shadd first chose to settle in Windsor, Canada West (present-day southern Ontario), on the advice of Henry Bibb and Mary Bibb. The relationship between Shadd and the Bibbs thus appears to have begun on a promising note — but the honeymoon turned out to be short-lived, as a bitter feud would begin over the vital issue of integrated versus segregated schools.

Due to the boycott of race segregation of the public schools, the enrollment at Boston’s all-black Smith School stood at 54.

Remembering the Sabbath day and keeping it holy, for many pious Bostonians in Henry Thoreau’s day, amounted in practice to listening to the Reverend Theodore Parker preach a sermon at his downtown megachurch. Parker’s key text was Luke 21:33, which declaimed that Heaven and earth shall pass away but not My Words, because this provided him with a doctrine of religious progress. All we Anglo-Saxons have to do is wait in the flock of a megachurch leader like the Reverend Parker, and over the course of time all that is accidental and peripheral and, to use Parker’s own term of art, transient, will reveal itself as Transitory by its very changeableness, and therefore as part of Error. What is left is absolute, true religion. Therefore our Anglo-Saxon agenda must be to purge “the negro in us” and become really white. Parker worked so much crowd-pleasing stuff into his “28th Congregational Society” that by 1852 he was able to begin to hold the worship services of this society in the new Boston Music Hall, which boasted 1,500 comfortable seats of a Sunday






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morning. In other words, God-loving Parker was the Robert Schuller of his century, on the eastern seaboard instead of the western, near Faneuil Hall rather than near Disneyland.

But wait, wait! –Wasn’t this Anglo-Saxon Reverend Parker one of the forefront anti-slavery fighters of his day? Wouldn’t he become a member of the Secret “Six” devoted to ending human slavery? Wasn’t he risking the charge of treason to rectify this shame? Doesn’t that mean that he just couldn’t be a racist? Get a clue, he wanted to end slavery not because he was not a racist, but because he was a racist. Just as he wanted to purge “the negro in us,” he wanted to purge our society of its black Americans. They had no business being here and were to have no place here. Hear him: “An Anglo-Saxon with common sense does not like this Africanization of America.” Getting rid of the possibility of our enslaving them was merely an advance step to purging the negro from our society entirely!

Mary Ann Shadd teamed up with the Reverend Samuel Ringgold Ward, a preacher for the Anti-Slavery Society, and several others to publish a newspaper, The Provincial Freeman. Frederick Douglass was also an editor of this gazette. The motto of the gazette was, “Self-Reliance is the True Road to Independence.” This paper was competition for Bibb’s Voice of the Fugitive. Contributors to The Provincial Freeman included not only Douglass but also Harriet Beecher Stowe and William Still. Mary Ann and Still would maintain an enduring friendship that continued throughout her life. In this year Mary Ann met Thomas F. Cary or Carey, a Toronto barber.

Due to the general boycott against race segregation of the public school system, enrollment at Boston’s Smith School for nonwhite children, on Belknap Street on the back side of Beacon Hill, stood at 51. A pupil who appeared to be white but who was of mixed black, red, and white ancestry, Edward Pindall, was ordered to attend there, so his parents filed a formal complaint with the city.

1853

An Anglo-Saxon with common sense does not like thisAfricanization of America.

horrified at slavery






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Mary Ann Shadd took over editing The Provincial Freeman. The first black female editor and publisher in North America, she announced in an article that she had “broken the editorial ice.” Shadd’s newspaper would bear the slogan “Self Reliance is the True Road to Independence,” and would excoriate all such begging and compromising approaches as had been being practiced by the Bibb family.

1854

FEMINISM






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Thomas Chandler Haliburton’s NATURE AND HUMAN NATURE.

Mary Ann Shadd began to dissociate herself from the Escape-to-Canada movement because, she had found white racism to be as present in Canada as in the United States, to the extent that slave catchers were unfortunately often able to seize escaped blacks in Canada and spirit them across the border to their former masters in the US.

At this point Benjamin Drew, a Boston abolitionist acting in cooperation with officers of the Canadian Anti-Slavery Society, was visiting various towns of Upper Canada, interviewing scores of refugees from the slave states and copying their words soon after they were spoken. For reasons of safety, he protected the identity of his informants through the use of fictitious names. There were only about 30,000 black persons at that time in Upper Canada and most of these were adults who had once been US slaves. John P. Jewett, the prominent

1855






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abolitionist-minded publisher of Boston who had unexpectedly reaped a fortune from printing UNCLE TOM’S CABIN in 1852, vouched for the integrity and intelligence of Drew. The testimony tends to stress well-known gross abuses, but some of the ex-slaves offer fresh insights into the working of the plantation system. You can consult these testimonies in Benjamin Drew (ed.), THE REFUGEE: NARRATIVES OF FUGITIVE SLAVES IN CANADA RELATED BY THEMSELVES (Boston, 1856), pages 260-270, 276-280, 301-305, 314-320.

Shipping interests of Rochester, New York and Toronto, Canada formed the International Steamboat Company to run former Canadian Line steamers Maple Leaf and Highlander between Hamilton, Kingston, Toronto, and Rochester.

The racially integrated village of Chatham in Canada West was in this year re-incorporating as a town.






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March 7, Wednesday: Anthony Burns, back from his 2nd enslavement at a ransom price of $1,325.00, was feted at the Tremont Temple and handed manumission papers. The former slave, free at last, would attend the School of Divinity at Oberlin College and become a minister of the gospel, pastor at the Zion Baptist Church of St. Catherine’s, Canada West.

During that spring, however, in Boston, due to the parental boycott of racially segregated school facilities, enrollment at Boston’s all-black Smith School was standing at but 28. In the petition drive to desegregate Boston’s system, William C. Nell would obtain 311 signatures and Lewis Hayden would obtain 87. A bill prohibiting all distinction of color and religion would be passed by the Massachusetts House of Representatives, at that time under the control of Know-Nothings. Then that bill would be passed by the Massachusetts Senate, also at that time under the control of these people.13

March 7. P. M. — To Red-Ice Pond. A raw east wind and rather cloudy. Methinks the buds of the earlywillows, the willows of the railroad bank, show more of the silvery down than ten days ago. Did I not see crowsflying northeasterly yesterday toward night? The redness in the ice appears mostly to have evaporated, so that,

13. In Massachusetts at least, this party was not only nativist and anti-immigrant but also anti-aristocratic and anti-slavery. Nothing in this blazing amazing world is so strange and strained as politics! An explanation for this phenomenon might be that the Catholic Irish, who had to compete with free blacks for the roughest and dirtiest of laboring jobs, were violently pro-slavery and, since the Know-Nothings were violently anti-Catholic and anti-Irish and the Catholic Irish were reaching what were seen as dangerous proportions, actually in Boston by that point the majority of the citizenry, then, on the principle “an enemy of my enemy is my friend,” the Know-Nothings were making common cause with the free black minority. One Know-Nothing representative is recorded as having stated that he resented the idea that some black children had to travel a long way to Black Smith, passing other schools on the way, when the “dirtiest Irish” could step directly from their teeming tenements into the nearest and most convenient public school. The Boston Pilot, a Catholic paper, suggested that this integration of the public schools was intended “as an insult” to Boston’s Catholics, who were of course all white. Boston Catholics were at this time so anti-black that they didn’t even bother to establish a segregated section in their cathedral for blacks. When a temperance speaker who had spoken against slavery in Ireland, where it was unpopular, came to speak of temperance in the Catholic churches of America, for the most pragmatic of reasons he needed to cease saying anything at all about this topic of slavery.

ANTI-CATHOLICISM




https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nativism_(politics)



Whenever and wherever you see this little pencil icon in the pages of this Kouroo Contexture, it is marking an extract from the journal of Henry David Thoreau. OK?



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melted, it does not color the water in a bottle. Saw, about a hemlock stump on the hillside north of the largestAndromeda Pond, very abundant droppings of some kind of mice, on that common green moss (forming a firmbed about an inch high, like little pines, surmounted by a fine red stem with a green point, in all three quartersof an inch high), which they had fed on to a great extent, evidently when it was covered with snow, shearing itoff level. Their droppings could be collected by the hand probably, [550307a.jpg (2597 bytes)] a light brownabove, green next the earth. There were apparently many of their holes in the earth about the stump. They musthave fed very extensively on this moss the past winter [Vide Mar. 14th.]. It is now difficult getting on and offWalden. At Brister's Spring there are beautiful dense green beds of moss, which apparently has just risen abovethe surface of the water, tender and compact. I see many tadpoles of medium or full size in deep warm ditchesin Hubbard's meadow. They may probably be seen as soon as the ditches are open, thus earlier than frogs. Athis bridge over the brook it must have been a trout I saw glance, — rather dark, as big as my finger. To-day, asalso three or four days ago, I saw a clear drop of maple sap on a broken red maple twig, which tasted very sweet.The Pyrola secunda is a perfect evergreen. It has lost none of its color or freshness, with its thin ovate finelyserrate leaves, revealed now the snow is gone. It is more or less branched. Picked up a very handsome whitepine cone some six and a half inches long by two and three eighths near base and two near apex, perfectlyblossomed. It is a very rich and wholesome brown color, of various shades as you turn it in your hand, — a lightashy or gray brown, somewhat like unpainted wood. as you look down on it, or as if the lighter brown werecovered with a gray lichen, seeing only those parts of the scales always exposed, — with a few darker streaksor marks ([DRAWING]) and a drop of pitch at the point of each scale. Within, the scales are a dark brown above(i. e. as it hangs) and a light brown beneath, very distinctly being marked beneath by the same darker[550307b.jpg (3940 bytes)] brown, down the centre and near the apex somewhat anchorwise. We were walkingalong the sunny hillside on the south of Fair Haven Pond (on the 4th), which the choppers had just laid bare,when, in a sheltered and warmer place, we heard a rustling amid the dry leaves on the hillside and saw a stripedsquirrel eying us from its resting-place on the bare ground. It sat still till we were within a rod, then suddenlydived into its hole, which was at its feet, and disappeared. The first pleasant days of spring come out like a






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squirrel and go in again






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April 28, Saturday: At what would be known as the Battle of Poncha Pass, white vigilantes and soldiers killed 40 native Americans.The governor of the Washington Territory, Isaac Stevens, was concluding the Yakima War with a treaty binding the native Americans to relinquish their territories and live on a reservation. Although the headman Kamiakin and a group of Yakima refused to sign, twelve days later Stevens would be announcing that their lands were open to white settlement.

The Know-Nothing governor of Massachusetts signed the school desegregation bill into law. After eleven years of the most intense black boycott, under black leadership Boston’s public schools had become again integrated.

Henry Thoreau was on the Concord River near Ball’s Hill (Gleason D9):

A second cold but fair day. Landed at Ball’s Hill to look for birds under the shelter of the hill in thesun. There were a great many myrtle-birds [Yellow-rumped Warbler Dendroica coronata] there, –they havebeen quite common for a week,– also yellow redpolls, and some song sparrows, tree sparrows, field sparrows,and one F. hyemalis. In a cold and windy day like this you can find more birds than in a serene one, becausethey are collected under the wooded hillsides in the sun. The myrtle-birds flitted before… in great numbers, yetquite tame, uttering commonly only a chip, but sometimes a short trill or che che, che che, che che. Do I hearthe tull-lull in the afternoon? It is a bird of many colors, –slate, yellow, black and white,– singularly spotted.

September: Boston’s public schools opened their doors to all pupils without distinction of race or creed. William C. Nell said he saw a boy walk by black Smith School and wave good-bye and shout “Good-bye forever, colored school! Tomorrow we are like other Boston boys!” Describing the 1st day of integration, the Boston Transcript said some of the schools looked like huckleberry puddings. Boston would be not only the 1st major US city to desegregate its schools prior to our civil war, it would be the only one. None of these “huckleberry pudding” schools for New-York, or for Philadelphia, for example!

At the same time, a separate high school for girls was opened.

SMITH SCHOOL






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December 17, Monday: The victory celebration for the Boston school desegregation campaign. After eleven years of struggle William C. Nell was honored. In his speech Nell stated that it had been the women who had kept the flame alive. He also stated “the little leaven leavens the whole lump, and this is the way the world is to be redeemed.”

SMITH SCHOOL






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Thomas Chandler Haliburton retired from law and relocated from Nova Scotia to England. He remarried, with Sarah Harriet Owen Williams. They would reside in Isleworth.

Dr. Martin Robison Delany resettled in Canada and continued in medical practice.

Mary Ann Shadd got married with Thomas F. Cary or Carey, the Toronto barber she had met in 1853. This man already had three children, by a previous marriage. There would be two children of this new union, Sarah and Linton. After the marriage, Mary Ann Shadd Cary would continue to live in Chatham, approximately 180 miles from Toronto.

1856






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Hinton Rowan Helper’s polemical compilation of census data THE IMPENDING CRISIS OF THE SOUTH: HOW TO MEET IT was published in Baltimore, expanding upon what we now have come to regard as a pleasant

conceit –the idea that oppression actually is unprofitable to the oppressor– and proclaiming also the pleasant conceit that Waldo Emerson, who had originally espoused this idea in the 1844 “EMANCIPATION IN THE

1857






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BRITISH WEST INDIES”, was America’s “most practical and profound metaphysician.” Hoo boy!

This Emerson-admirer was an egregious case of what you would term an Antislavery Racist. –Which is to say, he was a Southern white man, from North Carolina, who owned no slaves, whose fixation was that he was being victimized. It wasn’t the blacks who were being harmed by slavery, it was real decent folks, white folks like him who were being harmed by slavery. All these darkies, who belonged to other people, were impacting his life! He hated the nigger who was doing him wrong, he hated the slavemaster who was doing him wrong. What he needed most urgently was a lily-white, pure America of which he could be proud, where he could stand tall. Slavery was a tainted and archaic social system that was standing in the way of white people’s cultural and material progress. Blacks were a tainted and inferior group who had no business being over here, in our brave New World, in the first place.14

14. Hinton Rowan Helper. THE IMPENDING CRISIS OF THE SOUTH: HOW TO MEET IT. Baltimore, Maryland, 1857This interesting book has been republished in Cambridge MA in 1968. For more on this guy and his not-all-that-novel

conceit that the victims were victimizing him and needed to be trumped, see Bailey, Hugh C. HINTON ROWAN HELPER: ABOLITIONIST-RACIST (University AL: 1965).






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“History, among its many ironies, often places enemiesin life into various positions of posthumousconjunction.” — Stephen Jay Gould

This antislavery racism, which did not want slaves to exist because it did not want blacks to exist, is to be compared and contrasted with the proslavery racism of the Irishman John Mitchel, who, as long as blacks did exist, needed for them to exist as slaves. In this year Mitchel gave up trying to become a farmer and created the Southern Citizen.

According to Noel Ignatiev’s HOW THE IRISH BECAME WHITE,“To be acknowledged as white, it was not enough for theIrish to have a competitive advantage over Afro-Americans in the labor market; in order for them toavoid the taint of blackness it was necessary that noNegro be allowed to work in occupations where Irish wereto be found.”

According to the jokes that were going the rounds inthose days among non-Irish white racists (the bulk ofthe population, actually), the Irish were “Negroesturned inside out” while the American free blacks were“smoked Irish.”

It has been well said, that inside the charmed Caucasianchalk circle it is the sum of what you are not –notIndian, not Negro, not a Jew, not Irish, etc.– that makeyou what you are. And, that’s as true now as it was then.




http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noel_Ignatiev







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A crisis would break out in the discussions of this attitude about how to achieve progress, in December 1859 during the uproar over the John Brown raid on Harpers Ferry by abolitionists.

Speaking of progress, in this year in England, Herbert Spencer’s article “Progress: its Law and Cause” began to apply his one big idea, a principle that he had derived from K.E. von Baer, that the biological development of an organism proceeds from a homogenous state to a heterogeneous state, to the solar system, to animal species, to human society, to industry, to art, to language, to science, and to the kitchen sink. This infatuation eventually led to his friend Thomas Henry Huxley commenting about him that Spencer’s idea of a tragedy was “a deduction killed by a fact.”

Mary Ann Shadd Cary gave birth to a daughter, Sarah. In this period her gazette The Provincial Freeman was becoming encumbered in debt.

In this year George Fitzhugh’s CANNIBALS ALL! OR, SLAVES WITHOUT MASTERS

was printed in Richmond VA by the firm of A. Morris. This author would oppose secession until civil war began, arguing that a slaveholding Confederacy could not survive until the advanced capitalist countries had likewise abandoned capitalist competition and its bourgeois individualism. After the loss of the war both Helper and Fitzhugh would becoming more and more negrophobic, more and more idiosyncratic, and sink into obscurity.

The black barber Thomas F. Cary moved from Toronto to Chatham, Canada.

1858






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May 8-10: In Chatham, in the district now known as Ontario but then known as Canada West, where there was a large population of former American slaves, John Brown announced to a secret “convention” of Negroes and whites

he had organized, at the home of Mary Ann Shadd Cady’s brother Issac Shadd, that he intended to establish a stronghold in the Maryland and Virginia mountains for the shelter of escaping slaves. This was referred to as the Subterranean Pass Way scheme. A provisional constitution was adopted for the new government of the United States of America. The Reverend William Charles Munroe of Detroit, Dr. Martin Robison Delany, and several other influential black leaders were among those who voted their approval of this “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the people of the United States,” the charter formal of the fugitive society to be created in the remote fastnesses of the Alleghenies. (Delany would in 1868 allege that he had known nothing of the plan for the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, but others who had also been present at these meetings would mock such claims of ignorance.) Then it was decided that the flag for this new society would be the original flag used during the American Revolution, Captain Brown was voted to be commander in chief of this scheme, John Henry Kagi became his secretary of war, George B. Gill became his secretary of the treasury, and Richard Realf became his secretary of state. They had trouble finding a black leader willing to assume the dicey role of President of this new society, so it was decided to replace the function of a president, temporarily, with a 15-person council headed by Commander-in-Chief Brown.

In Chatham, Canada, Mary Ann Shadd Cary opened a school with her sister-in-law Amelia Freeman Shadd. Her father Abraham Shadd became the first black to win elective office in what is now Ontario.

The American Medical Association announced its opposition to abortion. The birth rate continued its downward spiral as reliable condoms became available. (By the late 1900s American women would be raising an average of only two or three children — cutting in half the family size typical of the early 1900s.)

1859






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Thomas F. Cary died. Mary Ann Shadd Cary continued to work in Chatham in Canada West as a teacher, supporting her daughter Sarah. After her husband’s death she gave birth to a son, Linton. Her gazette The Provincial Freeman had to be closed due to lack of funds.

1860

FEMINISM






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In Boston, Mary Ann Shadd Cary published A VOICE FROM HARPER’S FERRY: A NARRATIVE OF EVENTS AT HARPER’S FERRY; WITH INCIDENTS PRIOR AND SUBSEQUENT TO ITS CAPTURE BY CAPTAIN BROWN AND HIS MEN, BY OSBORN P. ANDERSON.

There is evidence that she began a “fancy goods” store in Boston in about this period, a store that would be in existence at least until 1871.

To destroy an invasion route between South and North, the bridge at Harpers Ferry was blown up and burned:

1861






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August 15, Saturday: Mary Ann Shadd Cary was commissioned as a Recruiting Army Officer to enlist Colored Volunteers in the Union Army. Governor Levi P. Morton of Indiana himself presented her with the certificate. She would actively assist in recruiting a regiment of soldiers of color to provide labor for the Union armies.

The now-famous sketch of the attack on Fort Wagner in Charleston Harbor appeared in Harper’s Weekly: A Journal of Civilization of New-York – the final battle scene in the film “Glory.” In the sketch Colonel Robert Gould Shaw resembles the actor Matthew Broderick.15 The report had been written by the correspondent who was portrayed in the movie when Shaw handed off his letters for his father and for Massachusetts Governor Andrew before the attack of July 18th.

(In the famous illustration above, it does not at all seem to be made clear that the lads in gray uniforms were blasting holes in the lads in blue uniforms, by the employment of specially-provided-for-that-moment double-

1863

15. One of the problems we have in reasoning out these materials is that Frederick Douglass has been consistently rendered, in treatments of his early life, as if he were already the elder statesman he eventually would become. For instance, in the film GLORY, the character presented as Douglass was modeled upon a photograph taken of Douglass during his 60s — but in fact at the time of the assault of the 54th upon Fort Wagner, Douglass was 45 years of age. (Another interesting detail about the film is that the black character who quotes Emerson, supposedly a boyhood chum of Colonel Shaw, was entirely and utterly a Hollywood invention intended to make it appear that the white officer was able to rise above the common racist animosities of his generation.)






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barreled shotguns.)

“The Fifty-fourth did well and nobly, only the fall of Colonel Shaw prevented them from entering the fort.... They moved up as gallantly as any troops could, and with their enthusiasm they deserved a better fate.”16

16. There was good reason to dispose of these soldiers, as they had become troublesome. They had recently refused to solder for less of a monthly reward than the $13 that was being disbursed to white soldiers, and the result had been that their pay had been raised to $10. By an obvious accounting trick the $10 they were to received was being presented to them as the equivalent of the $13 that white soldiers were receiving — but it would be only a matter of time before they would recognize that they were still unequal.






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Chatham in Canada West had 4,600 residents and was about a third black, some of these blacks being escaped American slaves.

1864






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Mary Ann Shadd Cary returned to the US to recruit black soldiers for the Union army.

At this point it was made illegal for the first time, for American infantry units to make use of drummer-boys under the age of 16. —What, did someone get embarrassed? —Like, is war not for children?

Drummer Taylorof 78th Regiment






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Henry Youle Hind’s A PRELIMINARY REPORT ON THE GEOLOGY OF NEW BRUNSWICK, TOGETHER WITH A SPECIAL REPORT ON THE DISTRIBUTION OF THE “QUEBEC GROUP” IN THE PROVINCE (Fredericton, 1865).

Mary Ann Shadd Cary obtained a Canadian passport. The passport described her as 5'6" tall with a slight figure and a pug nose, with black hair and mulatto complexion (a white missionary once described her as of light complexion). The passport gave her age as 35 (actually, in this year she was 42).

In this year hundreds of Northern white women were going to the South to teach at Freedman Schools.

1865

FEMINISM






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After the war James Mason went with his family into self-exile in Canada.






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Mary Ann Shadd Cary relocated to Detroit, Michigan, where she obtained work as a teacher.

Lucy Stone, Henry Blackwell, Clarina Nichols, and others traveled to Kansas to agitate for women’s suffrage. After months of campaigning, the suffragists were defeated on the fall ballot.

At the American Equal Rights Association annual meeting, opinions divided sharply on supporting the enfranchisement of black men before women.

1867

FEMINISM






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Friend Ann Preston was allowed to begin to send her students of Female (later Woman’s) Medical College of Pennsylvania, despite the fact that they were females, to teaching clinics at “Old Blockley,” the Philadelphia General Hospital.

1868






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Despite the fact that she was obviously not a white woman, the Board of Education of Detroit issued a teacher’s certificate to Mary Ann Shadd Cary. She purchased a house in Detroit.






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Chatham in Canada West’s main drag, King Street from William past Third, which ran above a trunk sewer, had been paved with cobblestones brought from Pelee Island. In this year these cobblestones were replaced by a wood and asphalt “Nicholson” pavement. (Chatham was an early experimenter with this sort of road surfacing.)

Mary Ann Shadd Cary, a former teacher of Chatham’s children, became the 1st woman to enroll in Howard University Law School and the 1st African-American woman to enroll in law school (her brother Abraham Shadd, 20 years younger, also enrolled). She therefore removed from Detroit to Washington DC with a daughter Elizabeth (perhaps this Elizabeth was an adopted daughter, one of Mr. Cary’s children by his previous marriage). She worked during the day as a teacher at the Lincoln Mission School and attended evening classes. She was elected by Samuel Watson and other Detroit leaders to represent Michigan at the convention of the Colored National Labor Union in Washington DC. She would teach in that city for 15 years, in public schools and at Howard College. She would for seventeen years serve as the principal of three large schools there. From 1881 to 1885 she would live in a brick row house at 1421 W Street NW, which still stands although it is not

1869






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now open to the public.






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Elizabeth Cabot Cary Agassiz made muslin curtains for the first classroom of the “Harvard Annex” school for young ladies17 which opened with 27 pupils at 10 Garden Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (That school would become known as the Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women, with Elizabeth Agassiz as its president, and would in 1894 be accepted by the legislature as Radcliffe College, sister to Harvard College.)

In this year, at a Howard College-sponsored ceremony, the mulatto woman Mary Ann Shadd Cary presented her paper “The Origins and Necessity of Corporations.”

1870

17. This info is from an official Radcliffe history source, and was presented in the Radcliffe Yard to me in the company of several young women of color — we wondered, should the above not rather have been more accurately phrased as “for young white ladies”? In what year, specifically, we wondered, had Radcliffe College transformed itself into categorically being, actually being, “for young ladies”?






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John Mercer Langston, who had made himself the 1st black lawyer in the United States, left Oberlin, Ohio for Virginia. He would make himself the 1st black American admitted to practice law before the US Supreme Court.

President U.S. Grant extended the grounds of the White House south and a great round pool was built on the south lawn.

Mary Ann Shadd Cary’s brother Abraham Shadd graduated from the law school of Howard College and moved to Mississippi, where he was admitted to the bar. He was also admitted to practice in Arkansas.

In this year Ms. Cary and 63 other women were unsuccessful in an attempt to register to vote at the local

1871






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polling place in Washington DC.

The 1st African American woman, Charlotte Ray, graduated from the law school of Howard College.

A woman’s suffrage proposal before the legislature of the Dakota Territory failed by a single vote.

Mary Ann Shadd Cary’s sister Amelia Shadd and her husband moved to Washington DC.

1872

1873

FEMINISM






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Mary Ann Shadd Cary prepared testimony to present before the House Judiciary Committee in support of women’s suffrage. She submitted her MS of a book outlining her contribution to the abolitionist movement to a New-York publisher and the package was rejected with a letter addressed to “M.A. S. Cary, Esq.”

In Minor v. Happersett, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the XVth Amendment did not grant women a right to vote.

A referendum gave Michigan’s male voters the chance to enfranchise women, and they voted against women’s suffrage.

1874

FEMINISM






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Mary Miles Bibb died.

Howard College reopened after having been closed for a period due to lack of funds.

Mary Ann Shadd Cary attended two meetings of the National Women’s Suffrage Association and was appointed to a seven-person business committee.

1877






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Mary Ann Shadd Cary formed the Colored Women’s Progressive Franchise Association. In this year, also, she completed her law studies at Howard College (although she would not receive her graduation papers until a later year).

1880






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Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s COMMON SENSE ABOUT WOMEN, made up primarily of pieces he had placed in the Woman’s Journal.

Harriet Hanson Robinson’s MASSACHUSETTS IN THE WOMAN SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT. She publicly affiliated with Susan B. Anthony’s National Woman’s Suffrage Association.

Mary Ann Shadd Cary also became an active member of the National Woman’s Suffrage Association.

1881

COMMON SENSE ... WOMEN

MASS. WOMAN SUFFRAGE

FEMINISM




http://books.google.com/books?id=XIxJAAAAIAAJ&dq=Thomas+Wentworth+Higginson%E2%80%99s+Common+Sense+about+Women&source=gbs_navlinks_s

http://books.google.com/books?id=lKz04suar_MC&dq=Harriet+Hanson+Robinson%E2%80%99s+Massachusetts+in+the+Woman+Suffrage+Movement&source=gbs_navlinks_s



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June: Mary Ann Shadd Cary received her LLB from Howard Law School (she was one of four women to graduate from the law school).

1883






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Mary Ann Shadd Cary was one of two representatives of color at the annual congress of the Association for the Advancement of Women in New-York (Frances Ellen Watkins Harper also attended).

Rhode Island made itself the 1st eastern state to vote on a woman’s suffrage referendum — but voted down this amendment to the state Constitution. Elizabeth Buffum Chase, in bed recovering from surgery, pointedly inquired of a friend:

“Well, what shall we do next?”

The United States Supreme Court struck down the law that had enfranchised women in the Washington Territory. Meanwhile, the United States Congress denied the right to vote to the women of Utah. Meanwhile, however, the women of Kansas won the right to vote, but only in municipal elections.

1887

FEMINISM






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Mary Ann Shadd Cary’s son Linton Cary died.

June 5: Mary Ann Shadd Cary died of stomach cancer in Washington DC.

Henry Bibb. NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF HENRY BIBB, AN AMERICAN SLAVE, WRITTEN BY HIMSELF. New-York, 1849

Osofsky, Gilbert, comp. PUTTIN’ ON OLE MASSA; THE SLAVE NARRATIVES OF HENRY BIBB, WILLIAM WELLS BROWN, AND SOLOMON NORTHUP. NY: Harper & Row, 1969

Bearden, Jim, and Linda Jean Butler. Shadd: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF MARY SHADD CARY. Toronto: NC, 1977.

Clarke, Lewis, and Milton Clarke. NARRATIVES OF THE SUFFERINGS OF LEWIS AND MILTON CLARKE, SONS OF A SOLDIER OF THE REVOLUTION, DURING A CAPTIVITY OF MORE THAN TWENTY YEARS AMONG THE SLAVEHOLDERS OF KENTUCKY, ONE OF THE SO-CALLED CHRISTIAN STATES OF NORTH AMERICA, DICTATED BY THEMSELVES. 1846. In I WAS BORN A SLAVE: AN ANTHOLOGY OF CLASSIC SLAVE NARRATIVES, 1770-1849. Ed. Yuval Taylor. Vol. 1. Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1999. 601-72.

Mary Ann Shadd. HINTS TO THE COLOURED PEOPLE OF THE NORTH. Wilmington, Delaware, 1849.

Mary Ann Shadd. A PLEA FOR EMIGRATION OR, NOTES OF Canada WEST. Detroit, Michigan, 1852.

Mary Ann Shadd, ed. Provincial Freeman. 1853-1858.

Mary Ann Shadd. Editorial. Provincial Freeman 6 March 1854.

Silverman, Jason. UNWELCOME GUESTS: Canada WEST’S RESPONSE TO AMERICAN FUGITIVE SLAVES, 1800-1865. NY: Associated Faculty, 1977.

Rhodes, Jane. MARY ANN SHADD CARY: THE BLACK PRESS AND PROTEST IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1998.

Breaking the ice [videorecording]: The Mary Ann Shadd story. Dir. Sylvia Sweeney. First Run/Icarus Films, 1997.

1892

1893






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COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others,such as extensive quotations and reproductions ofimages, this “read-only” computer file contains a greatdeal of special work product of Austin Meredith,copyright 2013. Access to these interim materials willeventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup someof the costs of preparation. My hypercontext buttoninvention which, instead of creating a hypertext leapthrough hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems—allows for an utter alteration of the context withinwhich one is experiencing a specific content alreadybeing viewed, is claimed as proprietary to AustinMeredith — and therefore freely available for use byall. Limited permission to copy such files, or anymaterial from such files, must be obtained in advancein writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo”Project, 20 Miles Avenue, Providence RI 02906. Pleasecontact the project at <[email protected]>.

Prepared: July 1, 2013

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over untiltomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.”

– Remark by character “Garin Stevens”in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST




mailto:[email protected]

Well, tomorrow is such and such a date and so it began on that date in like 8000BC? Why 8000BC, because it was the beginning of the current interglacial -- or what?

Bearing in mind that this is America, "where everything belongs," the primary intent of such a notice is to prevent some person or corporate entity from misappropriating the materials and sequestering them as property for censorship or for profit.



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ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by ahuman. Such is not the case. Instead, upon someone’s request wehave pulled it out of the hat of a pirate that has grown out ofthe shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (depicted above). Whatthese chronological lists are: they are research reportscompiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of data moduleswhich we term the Kouroo Contexture. This is data mining.To respond to such a request for information, we merely push abutton.






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Commonly, the first output of the program has obviousdeficiencies and so we need to go back into the data modulesstored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, andthen we need to punch that button again and do a recompile ofthe chronology — but there is nothing here that remotelyresembles the ordinary “writerly” process which you know andlove. As the contents of this originating contexture improve,and as the programming improves, and as funding becomesavailable (to date no funding whatever has been needed in thecreation of this facility, the entire operation being run outof pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweakingand recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation ofa generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward andupward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge.Place your requests with <[email protected]>.Arrgh.




mailto:[email protected]



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H-NET BOOK REVIEW

PUBLISHED BY [email protected] (JULY, 1999)

Jane Rhodes. MARY ANN SHADD CARY: THE BLACK PRESS AND PROTEST IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998

Reviewed for H-SHEAR by Shirley J. Yee<[email protected]>, Department of Women Studies,University of Washington

The Life and Times of Mary Ann Shadd CaryUntil recently, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Black teacher, politicalactivist, journalist, and lawyer, has been one of the leaststudied Black activists of the nineteenth century. Jane Rhodes’new book on the life of one of the most vocal and controversialBlack women abolitionists is a much needed comprehensivebiography that builds upon and expands Jim Bearden’s and LindaJean Butler’s SHADD, published in the late 1970s. Thesignificance of Rhodes’ book is that in addition to chroniclingShadd Cary’s life, it provides an important window into Blackactivist politics in the United States and Canada during thisperiod, the uneven development of the Black press, thecomplicated internal struggles with Black abolitionistleadership circles, the evolution of race relations in Canada,and Shadd Cary’s own personal struggles as an educated Blackwoman to carve out a place for herself and her voice in the male-dominated world of Black abolitionist and emigrationistdiscourse.In the Fall of 1851, just before her twenty-eighth birthday,Mary Ann Shadd joined the steady stream of Blacks escaped andfreed slaves as well as free-born Blacks who left the UnitedStates for Canada during the 1850s. Having abolished slavery in1833, Canada, as part of the British empire, provided a legalrefuge for escaped slaves. Trained as a teacher, Shadd set outas a teacher of fugitive slaves. Her passion for politicalwriting, however, quickly manifested, as evidenced by thepublication of her pro-Canadian pamphlet, NOTES ON CANADA WEST in1852.Rhodes begins the study by examining Shadd Cary’s early life asa free-born Black woman growing up in Wilmington, Delaware andWest Chester, Pennsylvania. This section of the book does morethan simply fill in the blacks of Shadd Cary’s childhood.Rather, it lays the foundation for a more complete understandingof the forces that helped shape the life of this complex andcontroversial woman. Shadd Cary’s family clearly provided herwith both material and emotional resources as well as with anactivist legacy. Born the eldest of thirteen children to AbrahamDoras Shadd, a prosperous boot manufacturer, and Harriet ParnellShadd, Mary Ann Shadd grew up in relative economic comfort. Herfather’s regular participation in local antislavery politics






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injected Shadd and her siblings with a strong dose ofabolitionist fervor. Abraham Shadd was a well-respected memberof the Black abolitionist leadership and brought his childreninto frequent contact with many prominent abolitionists, Blackand white.The larger community into which Shadd Cary grew up also shapedher political views. As Rhodes aptly points out, Shadd Caryencountered multiple layers of racism and sexism in thenonslaveholding northern states in general and the northern freeBlack community in particular. Within free Black urban society,which had internalized racial hierarchies based upon skin color,Shadd, as a light-skinned and economically privileged Black, waspart of the northern free Black elite who owned property andengaged in skilled trades. At the same time, however, Shadd andher family, like other free Blacks, lived in between slavery andfreedom, residing within states that sanctioned racial violence,discrimination, and segregation. For example, despite theShadds’ wealth, obtaining a formal education proved especiallydifficult in Delaware, where Blacks were often excluded fromschools. In Pennsylvania, despite a growing anti-Blacksentiment, her parents apparently paid for a private educationin Quaker schools, which were known for their antislaverypolitics. It is likely that Shadd’s exposure to institutionalracism influenced her later rejection of “complexionaldistinctions” of any kind when she opened her school in Canada(p. 18). As a Black female, Shadd often felt the sting of sexism,which limited her choices in life, such as the pursuit of highereducation, economic independence within marriage, and entranceinto male-dominated professions. Like many unmarried, educatedyoung women of her generation, Shadd pursued teaching, one ofthe few legitimate occupations open to women.Rhodes’s study is thoroughly researched. The author minesavailable written sources that enable her to weave together acohesive narrative of Shadd Cary’s life and the world aroundher. In addition to conducting painstaking research into thestate census reports, Rhodes makes careful use of THE BLACKABOLITIONIST PAPERS, a collection of writing by Black men and womenin connection to the antislavery movement. These papers haveprovided historians of nineteenth century African-Americanhistory with a wealth of primary source material from Blacknewspapers, pamphlets, and public and private correspondence.Rhodes employs her expertise in U.S. journalism to analyze thecontent of Shadd Cary’s newspaper, The Provincial Freeman, aswell as other Black newspapers that served as a forum for Blackpolitical views. From this analysis, readers learn a great dealabout the genealogy of the Black press in the United States andCanada, the underlying, sometimes subtle, sometimes overt,political agendas, and, ultimately, the impact of Blacknewspapers on the reading public of the time. As Rhodesillustrates, these publication reflect the complex politicaldynamics that permeated the Black abolitionist community oversuch issues as emigration, Black nationalism, and strategies andtactics for combatting slavery in the United States. Suchdebates, as evidenced in the feud between Shadd Cary and HenryBibb, ex-slave and editor of the Voice of the Fugitive,






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sometimes degenerated into personal attacks.Throughout the book, Rhodes depicts both the public and privateaspects of Shadd Cary’s life. The line between public andprivate often blurred, for she lived a rather unconventionalprivate life for a woman of her generation and upbringing. Hermarriage to Thomas F. Cary, a businessman and activist fromToronto, was, perhaps, the clearest marker of her defiance ofgender conventions. She lived apart from Cary for much of theirfour-year marriage in order to operate and raise funds for hernewspaper. The arrangement seemed to work, for she apparentlymaintained a happy relationship with her husband, who visitedas often as he could. Yet, at his death at age thirty-five, whenshe was pregnant with their second child, Shadd Cary, like manywidows, was left in a compromised financial position.The author argues effectively that despite Shadd Cary’s efforts,she could not escape the gender conventions that characterizednineteenth century life. Although much is known about her well-publicized confrontations with prominent Black abolitionistmen, less is known about her ongoing struggle to establishherself as a journalist, a profession dominated by men. Rhodesuncovers this dimension of Shadd Cary’s professional life, whichunderscores her continual struggles at the margins of Blackleadership circles. For years, she hid the fact that she was thetrue editor of the Freeman. Samuel Ringgold Ward, a prominentNew York minister and editor of the Impartial Citizen, agreedto serve as the “editor.”A final important contribution of this book is its narrative ofShadd Cary’s experiences after she returned to the United Statesin the 1860s. Previous studies of Shadd Cary provided only acryptic view of this portion of her life. Rhodes constructs afuller narrative of Shadd Cary’s life between the 1860s and herdeath in 1893, including her efforts to earn a law degree, thecontinuation of her teaching, and her participation in thetemperance and woman suffrage movements.Rhodes’s study of the life and times of Mary Ann Shadd Cary isa valuable contribution to the historical scholarship in theU.S. and Canadian history in general and Black history andwomen’s history in particular.

Copyright (c) 1999 by H-Net, all rights reserved. Thiswork may be copied for non-profit educational use ifproper credit is given to the author and the list. Forother permission, please contact [email protected].

Response to Shirley Yee, by Jane RhodesI am delighted to receive such a resounding endorsement for mybook from Shirley Yee, author of the influential text, BLACK WOMENABOLITIONISTS. I was initially drawn to this project because itaddressed my dual interests in black women’s history and theblack press. I found that although Shadd Cary was oftendiscussed as an important historical figure in other studies,such as Dr. Yee’s, there had been no rigorous treatment of herlife. Shadd Cary was inducted into the National Women’s Hall ofFame in Seneca Falls last summer, yet she is hardly a householdname, even among historians. So, this is clearly a piece of






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reclamation history. My goal in writing this book, as Dr. Yeenotes, was not only to produce a biography of an under-recognized pioneer, but also to discuss the lives of thenineteenth-century free black elite. Despite the dramatic growthof African American history in the last decade, we still knowfar too little about the tremendous variety of circumstances andissues that marked the free black experience. It is my hope thatthrough Shadd Cary’s life, readers will gain some new, andperhaps more critical, insights into the antebellum blackconventions, the painful conflicts over colonization andemigration, the internal debates between free born blacks andformer slaves, and between black and white abolitionists. Thelatter half of her life sheds light on the difficulties blackAmericans faced in seeking redress for the horrors of theslavery era, and their quest to establish some measures ofpersonal, economic, and political stability. Shadd Cary’soutspoken nature and often fractious personality motivated herto uncover the “underside” of the movements in which she wasinvolved. She told of white abolitionist racism and paternalism,black abolitionist opportunism and complacency, and rampantsexism that sought to keep women activists in the background.These qualities made her a good journalist and a keen thinker,but not an organizational leader who could compromise whennecessary. Thus, she was often silenced or ignored. I alsowanted to complicate our understanding of the lives of blackwomen in the nineteenth century. Shadd Cary was particularlycritical of the gender dynamics in the black communities whereshe lived. She assailed the double standards that existed formale and female behavior, and was daring in her defiance of blackmale authority. She was an adventurer, often traveling on herown in the U. S. and Canada, and she spent most of her life asa single woman or widow. Mary Ann Shadd Cary was certainlyunusual, but she was not unique. Black women then (and now) hadto negotiate a tricky terrain where they responded to theexigencies of their families and communities, followed their ownlife path, and at the same time endured multiple forms ofoppression and violence. Gradually, we are learning about thevast range of choices and strategies they employed for survival.This book, then, is a small tribute to all sisters in thestruggle--a legacy I hope Shadd Cary would have approved.

From: Dr. Jeffrey L. McNairn <[email protected]> Just to make a minor point of clarification regarding ShirleyJ. Yee’s review of the biography of Mary Ann Shadd Cary: Thestatement that ‘Having abolished slavery in 1833, Canada, aspart of the British empire, provided a legal refuge for escapedslaves’ might mislead those less familiar with Canadian historythan Professor Yee.First, there was no such thing as ‘Canada’ in 1833. Mary AnnShadd emigrated to the British colony of Upper Canada (now theprovince of Ontario). Second, while British legislation couldapply to Upper Canada under certain circumstances, the legalissue of slavery had already been settled by local legislation.Thus legal developments in Upper Canada before Shadd’s arrival,not membership in the British empire, was crucial.






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Upper Canada, created in 1791 to cope with the influx of refugeesfrom the American Revolution, was home to several hundredslaves, many of them brought there by their loyalist ownersfleeing the new republics. Upper Canada’s first parliament,under pressure from Governor Simcoe, passed an act to graduallyabolish slavery in the colony: No more slaves could be broughtinto Upper Canada. Those already in the colony prior to the Actwere to remain slaves for the rest of their lives. The childrenof female slaves already in Upper Canada would be free uponreading their 25th birthday. Reflecting pressure from slaveowners and some members of the elective Assembly, what were seenas existing property rights were protected but legal slavery wasdoomed to steadily decline and eventual disappearance in thecolony.This Upper Canadian statute did not explicitly deal with thequestion of the rights of fugitive slaves who had escaped toUpper Canada but as a result of the legal opinion of the colony’sChief Justice in 1818 no one seen as a slave in anotherjurisdiction could be returned there simply because he/she hadsought freedom in Upper Canada. Whatever their status in theU.S. or elsewhere, in Upper Canada they were free long beforethe abolition of slavery throughout the British empire in 1833.Of course, none of this alters the substance of the review, butI did want to use the occasion to call for more work like JaneRhodes’ Mary Ann Shadd Cary that offers a trans-boundary and/orcomparative perspective on the important themes andpersonalities of the early American republic. Much light on bothCanadian and American history might be shed by pursuing ourtopics across the international boundary between the U.S. andthe colonies of British North American. I suspect we would besurprised at how relatively unimportant that boundary turns outto have been.






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