Black Chicago's First Century

1833-1900

Christopher Robert Reed

• Publisher: University of Missouri
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780826221285, 9780826215703
• eBook ISBN: 9780826264602
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: Social Sciences

In Black Chicago's First Century, Christopher Robert Reed provides the first comprehensive study of an African American population in a nineteenth-century northern city beyond the eastern seaboard. Reed's study covers the first one hundred years of African American settlement and achievements in the Windy City, encompassing a range of activities and events that span the antebellum, Civil War, Reconstruction, and post-Reconstruction periods. The author takes us from a time when black Chicago provided both workers and soldiers for the Union cause to the ensuing decades that saw the rise and development of a stratified class structure and growth in employment, politics, and culture. Just as the city was transformed in its first century of existence, so were its black inhabitants.
 

Methodologically relying on the federal pension records of Civil War soldiers at the National Archives, as well as previously neglected photographic evidence, manuscripts, contemporary newspapers, and secondary sources, Reed captures the lives of Chicago's vast army of ordinary black men and women. He places black Chicagoans within the context of northern urban history, providing a better understanding of the similarities and differences among them. We learn of the conditions African Americans faced before and after Emancipation. We learn how the black community changed and developed over time: we learn how these people endured—how they educated their children, how they worked, organized, and played. Black Chicago's First Century is a balanced and coherent work. Anyone with an interest in urban history or African American studies will find much value in this book.

PART I

HAVEN OF LIBERTY FOR FORMER CHATTEL AND CONTRABAND
1833–1865

Introduction to Part I

BETWEEN 1833 and 1865, black Chicago partially fulfilled famed bibliophile Arthur Schomburg’s preconditions for a workable history geared to meet the demands of African Americans throughout the African diasporan world. Among the indispensable elements in remaking their past in order to build a secure future, Schomburg cited the development of a group tradition, pride in race, and, importantly, a restoration of the confidence that the slave experience had extracted from so many of their minds and personalities. Even without a direct link to the successes of Du Sable, habits, traditions, and positive linkages of the past formed a nexus that constituted real history in contradiction to what the Chicago Defender had printed. The antebellum and Civil War periods bore witness to a favorable African American response to the simultaneous interaction between internal impulse and self-interest, which meant doing what they wanted, and external racial constraints, which found them responding to the more powerful will of others. Social conditions imposed or influenced by whites, then, shaped only a portion of their lives. Their desires as they perceived them allowed for a semblance of happiness. This demonstration of agency was especially true in the African American enthusiasm for worship and for recreation, which demonstrated the extent to which the racially driven dynamics of their internal world acted. In the workplace, they acceded more readily to what the outside work dictated. Black Chicagoans, indeed, were sufficiently motivated to transform themselves into subjects making history, rather than being the objects of policy decisions enacted by others. Moreover, they felt linked by a common thread of what they perceived to be racial destiny, one several generations in the future realized in the dream of the Black Metropolis.

The city’s historically recognized founder, Jean Baptiste Pointe Du Sable, personified the concept of agency or the exertion of personal power or influence. In succeeding decades, persons of African descent who followed in Du Sable’s footsteps encountered a different and variegated racial setting. Some whites refused to recognize even the possibility of African American human potential. Nonetheless, with the presence of abolitionists of all persuasions, Chicago, in relative terms in the North, stood as a haven of liberty and opportunity.

At this point, Arthur Schomburg’s blueprint seemed accurate as to the necessity of building a group tradition for racial advancement. One could imagine the African American outlook over time as they bonded into one group: experiencing passive liberation in the North during the antebellum period; embracing active liberation as combatants during the Civil War; developing “New Negro” sentiments early in the emancipation phase, which yielded to self-determination that was, at first, expectant until the 1920s, when it was finally brought into realization. Remarkably, all of these sentiments were reinforced by almost constant linear successes.

Within the mass of refugees from Southern slavery, heterogeneity counterbalanced homogeneity. Feelings, attitudes, perceptions, and dreams differed based on experience and mind-set. Some feelings and attitudes were also held in common. While there were differences among African Americans depending on their time of arrival to Chicago before the Civil War, a number of them shared the same sense of fatalism. This was also the case with some of the later migrants from the Upper South, namely from Virginia and Kentucky. They all possessed a personal set of views of the redeemable as well as dispensable features of their past lives as slaves. A significant end in this cycle of fatalistic thinking came with the break between the past, in the person of the former slave who became an abolitionist or a camp follower, or the slave man or woman who became a compensated wage worker, or who by choice assumed the status of husband, wife, father, or mother.

They exercised their freedom through unfettered movement to reach Chicago—by lake shipping, as Abram T. Hall did; by stagecoach, as was case with John and Mary Richardson Jones; or by traveling on foot, as innumerable runaways successfully showed on the Underground Railroad, the mechanism set up to help refugees escape to the north and onward sometimes to slave-free Canada. Complementing this prized mobility, the men of the Twenty-ninth Infantry left Chicago by rail to protect this newly won freedom on Civil War battlefields.

The associational activities of Chicagoans included organizing churches, initiating fraternal life, and participating in the black convention movement, even if it was of a limited nature. What they experienced was reflective of the general trend even as some aspects of life in Chicago seemed to be unique to the city.

During the wartime period, personal transformation resulted from contact in a physician’s office as men, not chattel, volunteered to be examined for military service. In houses of worship and on the streets of Chicago, men were enlisted by their fellow kinsmen to join in a cause much greater than themselves—the liberation of an entire people numbering four million. Pride also built upon personal contact with fellow African Americans who exuded success, such as that found in the personage of the professional practitioner in medicine and the prosperous citizen in business. Residence in Chicago brought the refugee face-to-face with aspiring, northern-oriented and -educated African Americans such as Dr. C. H. Hutchinson and lecturer H. Ford Douglas, along with the successful businessmen John Jones and Lewis Isbel (or Isabel). Because of the inauguration of a federal bureaucratic enlistment process, members of the black elite began providing leadership to an independent body of citizens.

Chicago, seen as an arena of economic opportunity, proved a proper choice. From laborer to domestic servant to businessperson, compensated production sustained African American life and provided hope that a better life awaited in the future, once slavery ended in the South and racial restrictions eased in the North. This accounted for the roots of African American entrepreneurial and business action. A future observer, Charles S. Johnson, found it the very character of frontier-period, wartime, and industrial-era Chicago. “Cities have personalities. . . . Similar differences between cities account for the curiously varied directions of growth which the Negro populations take. They help to explain the furious striving after commercial glory in Chicago.”¹

Hope increased, moreover, with the coming of the Civil War and the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. Despite its shortcomings, it had transcended all expectations in 1863 just with its issuance. Later, in March 1865, successful pressure by African Americans, along with that of their white allies, resulted in the repeal of the formal instrument of legalized Illinois bigotry, the Illinois Black Laws. Then, of the several momentous events affecting the status and conditions under which the African Americans in Chicago lived, the most significant was the legal end of bondage through the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865. While emancipation generated hope of a better life, it delivered a tumultuous one. The mettle of the African American would be tested repeatedly, but despite obstacles, progress was evident.

At this same time, emancipation was won on Civil War battlefields, and an attachment to the martial spirit pervaded African American thinking. Especially among soldiers, combat experience in 1864 and 1865 grew to be valued for a generation or so until memory faded against the daily vicissitudes of urban survival in the industrializing world. The Grand Army of the Republic’s John Brown Post Number 50 showed the away. Still, the emergence of the Hannibal Guard in 1872 showed that the martial spirit was still in the air. By 1897, the formation of the Eighth Regiment, Illinois National Guard, began another tradition, which rested on valor in the Spanish-American War and then was reforged in World War I.

A proliferation of institutional life, a sure sign of social change, was evidenced in the formation of churches, families, and fraternal and cultural bodies. The first church experience centered around biracialism, with white Protestants opening their doors to their Colored brethren. However, it yielded to a more powerful impulse from within African American ranks centering around a sense of black racial destiny in religious affairs. Beginning a precedent with the establishment of the first African American church in 1847, three more were formed by the advent of the Civil War. Through consolidation and independent formation, the city housed four African American Protestant churches by the end of the war. All chose black pastoral leadership and worshiped along liturgical lines that conformed to African American wishes and traditions.

Migration to Chicago and fulfillment in the longevity of settlement produced another tradition. It contained elements of courage, disregard for the unknown, curiosity about the different, and confidence in the inevitability of individual and group triumph. In focusing on migration and place, the noted sociologist Charles S. Johnson once dubbed the entirety of Illinois, and, in particular, Chicago, as the “Mecca of the Migrant Mob.”² The migrants came from far and near, sojourning over space but also over time in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Whether or not their ethnic roots were from West Africa, as remnants of the Ibo, Mandingo, Yoruba, or other societies in the earliest days of the African diaspora, these African Americans came as sojourners, arriving during slavery under French, Spanish, and American periods of hegemony. Tennessee, Kansas, Virginia, North Carolina, Mississippi, and Alabama sent their residents at a much later time.

Acknowledgment of an existing preoccupation with and sense of place rested on the presence of the “Old Settlers.” The oldest settlers, the pioneers of the antebellum period, 1833–1860, and their offspring, would refer to themselves with this sobriquet.³ They resided in the city before the Civil War, and therefore also before the Great Fire of 1871, and they interacted with whites in ways distinctive to those eras. Many were persons who had certificates of freedom. Some did not have such paperwork and were refugees, or fugitives, as they were derisively designated by the laws of the land. Yet, all African Americans commonly shared the same experience of the city with its countervailing offerings of social proscription and unbridled hope. The formation of the “Old Settlers,” the result of a mind-set requiring group status, confirmed the uniqueness of place and a corresponding sense of belonging in the “Windy City,” had Du Sablean roots into which literally each generation could tap. For Chicago, it took on a very special quality that elevated it to the ethereal. Tuttle wrote of this phenomenon: “Chicago was not only a city; it was a state of mind.”⁴

To a much lesser extent, the small number of Civil War veterans formed a part of this group. Place, time, circumstance, and being were marked by significant events and the triumph over adversity associated with them. This was particularly true of the Emancipation of 1865 and the fires of 1871 and 1874. Figuratively, for a people rooted in biblical imagery, 1865 saw the black Lazarus rise from the living death of bondage, and thus ended three decades of life that began the African American saga.

Chapter 1

Antebellum Frontier Town and “City of Refuge,” 1833–1860

The kidnaping of fugitive slaves by slave owners, assisted by some of the low whites and officers of the city, was the chief conversation among our people. That the Negroes might not become paupers the laws of the state demanded $2,000 security from each and every one who came in the city or state, but to the honor of Chicago, the law was never enforced and the setting of every sun marked the arrival of a strange Negro.

— “A Real Oldtimer on the Life of Early Colored Settlers”

Were any Negroes ever sold in Chicago? Yes, a free Negro was one day arrested [in 1842] and put up to auction to be sold to the highest bidder. [But] it would have been hazardous for any man to buy him to keep in slavery or to sell him again. . . . Mr. Ogden bought the Negro for 25 cents and again set him at liberty.

— ATTORNEY LEMUEL C. FREER

Then came the passage of the fugitive slave law [in 1850], and many of the poor colored people were so frightened at what it portended that they fled to Canada.

— MARSHA FREEMAN EDMOND

WHATEVER ELSE it was during its initial, antebellum phase—a frontier town that in 1833 could be described demographically as a place where the population was filled with “rogues of every description, white, black, brown and red—half breeds, quarter breeds and men of no breed at all,” or that, in 1853, was said to be so primitive physically that “only years ago the prairie grass was scarcely trodden down”—Chicago represented a “City of Refuge” for African Americans seeking freedom from slavery and racial subordination.¹ This circumstance of urban transformation, along with several other active factors, such as economic opportunity, humanitarianism, and demographic increase, molded African American life between 1833 and 1860. As a result of those collective influences, the first phase of sustained community life among African Americans occurred.

Continual, salutary demographic changes affected African Americans, influencing them individually, in the aggregate, in family formation, and in their residency patterns. Then, a complex, multifaceted ethos governing internal dynamics authenticated a unique side of life existing within an incipient, heterogeneous African American population. The ensuing cultural base turned healthy population growth into vital institutional development within a parallel world incubating in the heart of frontier Chicago.

Just as important, in a nation committed to white racial supremacy, pervasive societal constraints kept the lives of blacks in a state of perpetual flux as they existed in mainstream America. At no time, however, were these debilitating influences so overwhelming that they could stymie the indomitable spirit of African Americans to end their existence under racial proscription immediately and in bondage eventually.² The significance of these local experiences reveals uniqueness when compared to the national scene.

I. THE DEMOGRAPHY OF A PEOPLE

The statistical base for the demographic profile of black Chicago during the antebellum period originates from three census sources—the U.S. censuses of 1840, 1850, and 1860, the Illinois state census of 1845, and the Chicago city censuses of 1837, 1843, and 1848. Relegated into a special category as “Colored” persons, their status as exceptional persons was never doubted. Complementing these numerical data are narratives, chronicles, and remembrances that give a social dimension to the lives of the people involved. In Chicago of the 1830s, a small group of persons of West African descent, never amounting to more than 1 to 2 percent of the fledgling frontier town’s total population, struggled initially to maintain its existence. This group grew to constitute a body comprising 77 persons out of 4,066 residents in 1837. Within their ranks were 41 males and 36 females, probably mostly adults because of the frontier nature of this setting. Elsewhere in the free states of the north, this ratio appeared in opposite fashion.³

As to the states of origins for these free people of color and refugees (usually referred to pejoratively as “fugitives,” as though escape from forced bondage could lack moral legitimacy),⁴ they emigrated from nearby Missouri and Kentucky and throughout the Old Northwest, as well as from faraway Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina. Regarding the last, its highest court could rule that anyone suffering enslavement was “doomed in his own person, and his posterity, to live without knowledge, and without the capacity to make anything his own, and to toil that another may reap the fruits. . . . [S]uch services can only be expected from one who has no will of his own.”⁵ Pennsylvania, long regarded as the haven of liberty for refugees from slavery, took many steps to restrict its African American citizens also. Pennsylvania, especially Philadelphia, had abandoned its progressive stance on race during the aftermath of the War of 1812. By the 1830s, Philadelphia dishonored itself with Negrophobia and mob violence.⁶ The Old Dominion, long majestic in its own eyes,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Prologue: The Birth of Black Chicago
• Part I. Haven of Liberty for Former Chattel and Contraband, 1833–1865
• Part II. Harbor of Opportunity for New Citizens, 1866–1900
• Epilogue: The Foundation of the Black Metropolis
• Appendix A: The Illinois Black Laws
• Appendix B: An Act to Repeal the “Black Laws”
• Appendix C: An Act to Protect Colored Children in Their Rights to Attend School
• Appendix D: Illinois General Assembly, House Bill 45–1885
• Appendix E: Data from “Jubilee”: Chicago’s Black Civil War Soldiers
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author