Race and Class in 19th Century Philadelphia

Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Memorial Irish railroad workers 1832

“...no one gave a damn for the poor Irish.” p.178

“In the United States of North America, every independent movement of the workers was paralyzed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded. But out of the death of slavery a new life at once arose. The first fruit of the Civil War was the eight hours’ agitation…,” Karl Marx

Noel Ignatiev

Noel Ignatiev How the Irish Became White was my LeftBook group’s reading for the last two sessions. It is a provocative history of the Irish in Philadelphia 1800 through Reconstruction, and a New Left classic (although published in 1995). Some might complain Ignatiev unduly demonizes the poor Irish immigrants for defending slavery and adopting American race prejudice. But it is largely the ugly story of white supremacy in American history, and not particular to the Irish. My favorite history teacher at Temple University Center City, Herb Ershkowitz, called the US a slave republic until the Civil War. Thereafter it might be called a white republic. Congress voted in 1790 that only white persons could be naturalized as citizens. It took the 13, 14, and 15th Amendments in 1865 to establish the citizenship of black people, and presumably other non-white persons. The Irish fled British colonialism and the potato famine in the Old World, only to encounter new social and racial conflicts in the New World. Like many subsequent immigrant groups to the US, the Irish were poor and scorned by native born Americans, but gradually climbed the class ladder and became natives themselves. Of course, this option was not available to African Americans.

Noel Ignatiev (aka Noel Ignatin) teaches history at Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. He has a lengthy resume on the Left. He joined the Communist Party as a teenager in West Philadelphia in 1958, and soon left with a breakaway faction called the Provisional Organizing Committee to Reconstitute the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party (POC, 1958-1966). His memoir of the POC is online. Ignatiev and POC comrade Ted Allen introduced the concept of “white-skin privilege” to the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in their 1967 pamphlet White Blindspot. They argued “The US ruling class has made a deal with the mis-leaders of American Labor, and through them with the masses of white workers. The terms are these: you white workers help us conquer the world and enslave the non-white majority of the earth’s laboring force, and we will repay you with privileges befitting your white skin.” This concept was widely adopted in the New Left.

In 1969 Ignatiev and others founded Sojourner Truth Organization (1969-1986) in Chicago. They held two principle positions: (1) White workers must repudiate their white skin privileges and support African American and Latino struggles to unite the working class; and (2) workers must form independent workers’ organizations outside the unions to develop proletarian consciousness and autonomy. The second idea was inspired by syndicalist ideas from the IWW, and the works of Trinidadian Marxist C.L.R. James, who advocated workers councils as the foundation of real socialism. Our group Philadelphia Solidarity held similar views. We met Ignatiev in the 1970s when he visited family in Philadelphia. When he got laid off from the steel industry in the 1980s, Ignatiev enrolled in graduate school, and wrote his thesis on the Irish in his hometown Philadelphia, and began his academic vocation. How the Irish Became White is informed by his perspective on race and class derived from long years in industry and on the Left. He is not an ivory tower Marxist.

C.L.R.James

Ignatiev details the complicated interplay between race and class, ethnicity and religion, native and immigrant. The early Irish immigrants were mostly so-called Scotch-Irish, ie Protestants from Northern Ireland. Eight of the 56 original signers of the Declaration of Independence were Irish Americans. In the 19th century the Irish came in large numbers, and were poorer and Catholic from Ireland proper. According to censuses, a third of all immigration to the US between 1820 and 1860 were Irish. Ignatiev puts the number between 800,000 to one million. These Irish were escaping British oppression, and later the potato famine in the 1840s. 

In the 18th century Irish Catholics were ruled by the British Penal Laws. Catholics could not vote or hold public office; they could only own or rent small plots of land; they were barred from most professions; Protestants who married Catholics lost their civil rights. In mid century Catholics held only 7% of Irish land. They were essentially an oppressed people in their own country. A movement for Home Rule, or Repeal, led by Lord Mayor of Dublin Daniel O’Connell campaigned for an independent Irish Parliament and civil rights in the 1830s and 1840s. The Repeal movement in Ireland was also abolitionist, and implored their Irish cousins in America to oppose slavery. William Lloyd Garrison and the abolitionist movement in America had great hopes that poor Irish immigrants would find common cause with enslaved African Americans. Frederick Douglass even visited Ireland in the 1840s to promote abolition, although he was careful not to criticize England.

Unfortunately, the Irish in America did not heed Daniel O’Connell and the Irish clergy’s call to oppose slavery. Ignatiev argues new Irish immigrants were not initially considered “white” in America’s racial and class hierarchy. They had to compete against slaves and free Blacks to secure employment. They arrived in the US largely without skills and took jobs as servants, laborers, and factory hands. Ignatiev describes how Irish labor was hired to dig canals and build roads because they would work for less than free Blacks or slaves, who were too valuable to lose to injury or disease. Irish immigrants and free Blacks were packed into the same neighborhoods in Philadelphia. There was both fellowship and conflict.

Nativists opposed Irish and Catholic immigration. In Philadelphia, Protestants rioted against the growing Irish population regularly during 1830-1850s. The disputes were about labor conditions in the mills, religion in the public schools, and the Irish support of slavery. The Irish embraced the Democratic Party and the nascent labor movement in self-defense. Early labor unions began in Philadelphia in the 1820s and were largely English and “white”. The Irish gradually became central actors in the unions and the Democratic Party in the city. In Philadelphia this included the control of the police and fire departments, and local politicians. By the end of the 19th century, half the presidents of AFL unions nationwide were Irish or their descendants.

The Irish also displaced free Black labor. This is the thesis of Ignatiev’s book. He argues Irish immigrants used their white skin privilege and the race prejudice of white unions to claim jobs in manufacture and domestic work that had formerly employed free blacks. He feels the New Labor Historians of the 1960s, much like the Old Left, romanticized the labor movement of the 19th century which was an exclusive club for white workers only. 

Of course, this is the central dilemma of American history for the left and labor. Why couldn’t white workers ally with their working class black brothers and sisters to oppose chattel and wage slavery? Why did white workers in the South go to war and 100,000s die to defend the Southern planters and aristocrats? In this regard, I don’t see how the Irish were any better or worse than other white workers. Many Irish died for the Union as well as the Confederacy. Racial ideology was used successfully to divide the working class, and the divide continues to this day.

Ignatiev states abolitionists did not address the cause of free labor, which was also exploited. I know abolitionist Lucretia Mott preached for the eight hour day in the 1850s, and other advanced thinkers may have also. The abolitionists made a big impact despite their small numbers, but they missed the opportunity to connect the emancipation of free labor- black, white, other- and enslaved labor.

How the Irish Became White was reprinted in 2008, so Ignatiev is still being read. The lineage of white supremacy is receiving renewed attention with the ascendancy of Trump. Noel Ignatiev’s book is sadly contemporary.

Judith Giesberg, “Civil War, Civil Rights: African American Women in Civil War-Era Philadelphia”

Judith Giesberg, ed. Emilie Davis’s Civil War: The Diaries of a Free Black Woman in Philadelphia, 1863-1865. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014. Transcribed and annotated by the Memorable Days Project editorial team: Theresa Altieri, Rebecca Capobianco, Thomas Foley, Ruby Johnson, and Jessica Maiberger.

Laundress in Philadephia

This was another wonderful program July 19, 2017 at The Library Company of Philadelphia, founded in 1731 by Benjamin Franklin and fifty of his closest friends. The speaker Judith Giesberg is Professor of History at nearby Villanova University,  Editor of the Journal of the Civil War Era, a prolific author,  founder of the Emilie Davis Diaries Project (aka Memorable Days Project) and the Information Wanted Ad Project. In 2012 Giesberg and her graduate students started transcribing three diaries of Emilie Davis (1839-89), a young free black woman in Philadelphia, and posted them on their Memorable Days website. The diaries had been recently acquired by Pennsylvania Historical Society. The complete work was published in 2014 entitled Emilie Davis’s War: The Diaries of a Free Black Woman in Philadelphia, 1863-1865, edited by Judith Giesberg and transcribed and annotated by the Memorable Days Project. The diary describes everyday life for African American women in the city during the Civil War. Giesberg first talked about Emilie’s life and Civil War Philadelphia, and then her new Information Wanted Project about African American’s effort to locate lost love-ones after Emancipation.

Judith Giesberg, Professor of History Villanova University

Judith Giesberg’s talk was part of a three-week National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) summer seminar for K-12 school teachers. My sister teaches third grade in Northampton, MA and has taken several NEH summer classes at Smith College in recent years. I hope these programs survive Trump’s budget cuts. We need an educated and critical electorate. The summer seminar Director is Lori Ginzberg, Professor of History and Women’s Studies at Penn State. She introduced her students and the speaker, and promoted The Library Company’s unique programs and collections. Philadelphia has many many historical institutions which are under appreciated.

Philadelphia was a tough town for black people free or slave during the Civil War. According to the 1860 census, there were 22,000 “free colored men and women” in Philadelphia County. There was general support for slavery despite the Quaker and abolitionist heritage in Pennsylvania. Philadelphia voted heavily Democratic in the 1860 election. The city was a Southern neighbor and economically dependent on slave cotton, sugar and agriculture. Frederick Douglass said there was not a city “in which prejudice against color is more rampant than in Philadelphia.” 

Nonetheless African Americans built a strong community. Emilie Davis was a student at the Institute for Colored Youth, which later became Cheney University. She attended Seventh Street Presbyterian Church, aka First (Colored) Presbyterian Church near 7th and South Street. She attended lectures by Frederick Douglass and Ellen Watkins Harper sponsored by The Social, Civil, and Statistical Association of the Colored People of Pennsylvania. She raised money for the Ladies Union Association to provide supplies for sick and wounded United States Colored Troops (USCT) at local hospitals. Emilie Davis’s complete diary is posted at the Memorable Days website.

Black women in Philadelphia also succeeded in integrating the trolley cars so they could visit wounded soldiers in hospital. They visited the USCT at Camp William Penn in the present-day La Mott neighborhood of Cheltenham on the northern edge of the city. Black women were leaders in the civil rights struggle of the day.

Professor Giesberg and her students have launched another project informationwanted.org to transcribe advertisements from nineteenth century African American newspapers seeking information about lost family members after Emancipation. They have posted thousands of ads on their website Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery. The project seeks volunteers to help transcribe ads- just sign up. One major source for ads was the Christian Recorder published by Mother Bethel AME Church in Philadelphia. The ads give a human picture of the devastation wrought on black families over 200 years of enslavement. A few African Americans have succeeded in tracing their ancestors using the informationwanted.org database. This should improve as the archive grows. The project is supported by Villinova University, AME Bethel Church, and the Philadelphia Abolition Society (another historic institution still active in the city).

Information wanted

Emilie Davis concludes her diary “all is well that ends well” on December 31,1865. It is a small uplift for our dark times today.

The Slave Business in Philadelphia

Phillip Seitz, Slavery in Philadelphia: A History of Resistance, Denial and Wealth (Create Space: Philadelphia, 2014).

"Your cotton smells of blood." William Lloyd Garrison in The Liberator, 1852

List of Negroes at & belonging to Whitehall, c. 1803

Friday night March 31 my neighbor, wife and I attended Phillip Seitz's talk about his recent book Slavery in Philadelphia: A History of Resistance, Denial and Wealth at Chestnut Hill Friends Meeting in Philadelphia. This is the story of the privileged Chew family of Cliveden House, the National Trust Historic Site at 6401 Germantown Ave. in Mt. Airy, and their slaves. The grounds were the site for the bloody Battle of Germantown during the Revolutionary War in 1777. Seitz was the Curator of History at Cliveden House from 2000-2011, and still lives in Mt. Airy. His book is a vignette of Philadelphia's deep connection to slavery, and in a larger sense, the role of slavery in financing the North and emerging capitalism. This is not the history we learned in school. Nor is it the romantic history generally told at colonial monuments and museums. But it should be.

Phillip Seitz

The family story begins with John Chew (1587-1668) arriving at Jamestown VA in 1623 attended by two indentured servants. John was a successful merchant seeking fortune in the New World. He became a trader, planter, and legislator in the Virginia colony. On his death, he bequeathed four slaves to his second wife Rachaell. It should be noted by this date chattel slavery (ie slaves for life) had been firmly established in the colony for Africans. Half the immigration from Europe before Independence were indentured servants, but they earned their freedom in five years typically.

There are many Samuels and Benjamins in this chronology. It is confusing.

John's third son Samuel Chew (1630-1677) settled in Maryland and served in the Assembly and the Provincial Court. In a propitious development, he met the Quaker founder George Fox in 1672 and joined the Society of Friends, and became associated with the William Penn family, future owner of Pennsylvania and the "Three Lower Counties" (DE). Samuel's will left a 600 acre plantation to his wife and first born son, as well as slaves and indentured servants. Samuel's eldest son owned 160 slaves. Samuel's sixth son Benjamin Chew (1671-1699) more modestly owned ten slaves and contracts for three indentured servants. 

Benjamin's (1671-1699) first son Samuel Chew (1693-1743) became a hard working doctor and secured the financial fortunes for future Chew generations in Philadelphia. Samuel became the legal representative to the Penn family, moved to Philadelphia in 1734, and received a grant of 3000 acres in Delaware from Penns' private reserve. He later moved to Delaware (then known as the Lower Counties) and managed his three plantations. He was the largest slaveholder in Delaware. He was still a Quaker.

Samuel's (1693-1743) first son Benjamin Chew (1722-1810) obtained a first class education at Middle Temple in London, and had a long legal career including Chief Justice of Pennsylvania in 1774. He built his elegant summer retreat Cliveden House in then suburban Germantown between 1763 and 1767. He was wealthy. He was legal counsel to the Penn family, a money lender, and landowner of nine plantations in Delaware and Maryland, and large slaveholder. Like the Penns, he left the Society of the Friends in the 1760s for the Anglican Church (Church of England). Because of his association with the British rulers, he was detained by the Continental Congress during the British occupation of Philadelphia. The Chew family were persona non grata for 20 years after the Revolutionary War, but their wealth remained intact. Benjamin's only son Benjamin Chew Jr. (1758-1844) managed the family estates in Maryland and Delaware and speculated in land with indifferent results. One successful investment was Philadelphia's earliest railroad in the 1830s connecting suburban Germantown to downtown Philadelphia. Benjamin Jr. and his son also named Benjamin (1793-1864) dissipated their fortune by the 1850s.

It was up to grandson Samuel Chew (1832-1887) to restore the family fortune and Cliveden House. He married the daughter of David S. Brown, a wealthy textile magnate in Philadelphia and New Jersey. Samuel became a manager in Brown's corporation, and later the executor of Brown's estate in 1877. This became the basis for the Chew family wealth up to the present day.

Cliveden House 1878

Seitz could recount this complicated history because the Chew family saved extensive written records from the earliest days. In 2006 the Historical Society of Pennsylvania received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (now threatened by Trump budget cuts) to catalog the voluminous Chew Family Papers, which filled 885 boxes. Seitz began mining this material, and discovered accounts of slaves who worked the Chew plantations and estate in the 18th and 19th century. This is the part of American history that has generally been omitted from history books. Just recently Washington's slaves in Philadelphia and Mt. Vernon, and Jefferson's slaves at Montecello have been acknowledged and included in the historical memorials. Chattel slavery and wage slavery built this country. These are the true founding fathers and mothers, rather than the wealthy landowners who met at Carpenters' Hall in Philadelphia in 1774. Seitz tells some of their stories.

Slaves were not passive victims. Seitz devotes one chapter to Chief Justice Benjamin Chew's (1722-1810) Whitehall Plantation, the largest in Delaware with 1000 acres and 60 slaves. He first grew tobacco, and later diversified into wheat, fodder and livestock. Seitz reprints correspondence between Benjamin Chew in Philadelphia and his overseers during the 1790s. The overseers were having trouble with recalcitrant slaves and seeking assistance from Chew. The slaves were so unruly that Benjamin Chew finally decided to sell Whitehall in 1803. He could not find a buyer willing to purchase the land with its troublesome enslaved Black people. Delaware law prohibited selling slaves out of state, and Chew could not find a buyer for his slaves in state. He finally liberated his slaves at Whitehall and sold the plantation at a loss to a neighboring farmer.

In Pennsylvania the Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery passed in 1780. It was a conservative bill. It freed a child of a slave woman at age 28, which meant slavery lingered on in Pennsylvania for decades. It also stated any slave brought into Pennsylvania and retained for more than 6 months would be freed. This complicated life for slaveholders in Philadephia like George Washington and Benjamin Chew.

Charity Castle 

Seitz tells the story of the enslaved woman Charity Castle at Cliveden House in 1814. Charity accompanied her mistress Harriet Chew, who was escaping an abusive marriage in Maryland, back to her family home at Cliveden. As the six month deadline approached, Harriet's husband made efforts to retrieve Charity from Philadelphia before she could legally claim her freedom. Charity did not want to return to slavery in Maryland. She had also been abused- probably raped- by Harriet's husband. Charity then fell on the woodpile behind Cliveden, and was badly injured and could not travel. A contentious legal battle ensued between Benjamin Chew Jr., Harriet's husband, and Philadelphia lawyer William Lewis representing Charity Castle's free black husband. William Lewis argued "accident made her a slave, accident made her free, and it seems right that she should avail herself of it." Phillip Seitz does not know how the case resolved. Sometimes the abolitionists won.

During the 19th century the Chew family gradually sold or lost their plantations and slave holdings in Delaware and Maryland. With Samuel Chew (1832-1887) they became manufacturers and capitalists in David Brown's Washington Manufacturing Company. The Philadelphia Chews no longer owned slaves; instead they owned mills that processed slave cotton with waged labor. Actually, much of Phildelphia's economy depended on the products of slavery- tobacco, wheat and cotton. In the run-up to the Civil War, the Philadelphia ruling class and many white workers defended slavery. It brought wealth and jobs to the city, even though slavery was manifestly inhuman and unstable. Once secession and the Civil War commenced, the North had to win the war to save their industries, save the republic, and subsequently emancipate the slaves.

Cliveden today

The legacy of slavery in America is exemplified by the Chew story at Cliveden House. Much of the industrial revolution and Northern wealth was financed by slave labor. How much is hotly debated by historians. The large present day wealth gap between white families and black families in the US derives from 250 years of chattel slavery and 100 years of de jure discrimination. The divisions of race and class are still with us, and still dominate US politics today. Phillip Sietz's local history of the Cliveden House in Mt. Airy is sadly contemporary.

Abolitionist Legacy in LaMott PA

Donald Scott Sr., Camp William Penn (Images of America: Pennsylvania). (Charleston SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2008).

Historic La Mott, Pennsyvania, http://www.historic-lamott-pa.com/content/thegrowthofthevillage/index.cfm

Recruitment poster for Camp William Penn, 1863

I live in an historic neighborhood. My township of Cheltenham PA on the northern boundary of Philadelphia was a center of abolitionist activity in the 19th century. The area was known as Chelten Hills then. It is now divided into Elkins Park, Melrose Park (my home), and LaMott. 

"Roadside" home of James and Lucretia Mott

La Mott was the site of the first and largest Union training ground for African American troops at Camp William Penn during the Civil War from 1863-1865. The land was leased to the Federal government by Edward M. Davis, who was the son-in-law of abolitionist and reformer Lucretia Mott. Lucretia and husband James retired to their son-in-law’s Chelten Hills farm in 1857 to an old farmhouse called “Roadside”. Their home was a stop on the underground railroad en route to freedom for escaped slaves. She hosted many prominent abolitionist leaders at Roadside – Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Octavius V. Catto, William Still, Robert Purvis, Sojourner Truth, William Lloyd Garrison. Even Mary Brown stayed at Roadhouse while her husband John Brown awaited trial for his raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859.

AME Church of LaMott

Chelten Hills was also home to Lucretia’s banker friend Jay Cooke

(1821-1905), who became known as the financier of the Civil War. Between 1862 and 1865 he sold $830 million in war bonds, at a commission of .375%. It was good politics and good business. He and Edward Davis were members of the Union League of Philadelphia (ULP), formed in 1862 “to discountenance and rebuke by moral and social influence all disloyalty to the Federal Government.” The ULP raised money to recruit troops for the Union, and sponsored five black regiments of US Colored Troops (USCT) at Camp William Penn. Before the Civil War, abolitionist sentiment was weak in Philadelphia. Abraham Lincoln received only 2000 votes out of 76,000 cast in the city in the 1860 election. The ULP converted Philadelphia to the Republican cause during the war. They even endorsed Radical Reconstruction after the war, including desegregating the streetcars.

Donald Scott Sr. has written two books about Camp William Penn -

Camp William Penn (Images of America: Pennsylvania), and Camp William Penn: 1863-1865 (2012). Scott is an English Professor at Community College of Philadelphia, and a Cheltenham resident and booster. He has assembled an amazing collection of 19th century photographs of the Camp and the township. I wish more historians made an effort to include illustrations. It adds interest and sells books. Old history books and fiction always had photographs or artwork. Maybe modern publishers will revive this tradition. It would create employment for illustrators and photographers. All that remains of Camp William Penn today is the restored front gate and main entrance on Sycamore Street. A neighborhood community group, Citizens for the Restoration of Historic LaMott, has made an on-and-off effort over the years to establish a museum and park commemorating the unique history of LaMott. The old 1910 LaMott fire station on Willow Avenue is the temporary home to archives and artifacts from Camp William Penn. Tours of the museum are by appointment only.

Camp William Penn served as the training ground for 11 regiments, 10,940 men, between July 1863 and July 1865. 1056 soldiers from Camp William Penn perished during the war. It is an ugly story, but many black soldiers and their white commanders were executed if they were captured in battle by Confederate troops. The burial ground for local US Colored Troop veterans of the Civil War is Butler Cemetery in Camden NJ at Ferry Avenue and Charles Street. I have not visited the site, but it appears to be incorporated into present-day Evergreen Cemetery on Google Maps.. There is also the African American Civil War Museum in Washington DC which documents the history of the US Colored Troops. I must investigate. After the War, some USCT veterans served as Buffalo Soldiers and fought in the Indian wars in the West.

After Camp William Penn was decommissioned, Edward Davis sold off lots and became the prime real estate developer of the new working-class neighborhood called Camptown. As a devout Hicksite Quaker, Davis sold to blacks and whites. To encourage development, Davis built a schoolhouse in 1878, and donated land for a community church in 1888, now the site of the AME Church of LaMott on Cheltenham Avenue. In 1885 the village received its first US post office and changed its name officially to LaMott in honor of their revered resident Lucretia Mott (1793-1880). In the late 19th century it became one of the early interracial communities in the nation. It remains so today. The latest arrivals to the township have been Asian-Americans in the last 40 years. The 2010 census reports the population was 56.6% White, 32.8% Black or African American, 0.2% Native American, 7.7% Asian, and 2.5% were two or more races, 3.9% of the population were of Hispanic or Latino ancestry.

African American Memorial, Washington DC

I think Lucretia Mott would be pleased. She wrote her sister in 1863, “The neighboring camp seems the absorbing interest just now. Is not this change of feeling and conduct towards this oppressed class beyond all that we could have anticipated, and marvelous in our eyes?” This from a staunch pacifist. The Civil War would finally banish chattel slavery from the US, as nonviolent efforts had failed.

John Brown Lives

Louis A. DeCaro Jr.. John Brown: The Cost of Freedom. New York: International Publishers, 2007.

_____. John Brown: The Man Who Lived. Essays in Honor of the Harper's Ferry Raid Sesquicentennial 1859-2009. New York: Lulu, 2009.

_____. John Brown, Emancipator. Middletown, DE, 2012.

Robert L. Tsai. "John Brown's Constitution." Boston College Law Review Vol 51 Issue 1 (2010): 151-207.

The John Brown Society
Box 1046, Canal Street Station
New York, NY 10013

"From the night spent with John Brown in Springfield, Mass. 1847 while I continued to write and speak against slavery, I became all the same less hopeful for its peaceful abolition. My utterances became more and more tinged by the color of this man's strong impressions." Frederick Douglass

I attend the Left Forum in NYC every year hoping to learn something new. My discovery this year was the John Brown Society panel with Society Chairman Larry Lawrence, actor and playwright Norman Thomas Marshall, and historian Louis A. DeCaro Jr. The John Brown Society promotes John Brown education and scholarship, and speaks at events like the Left Forum, and John Brown Day (his birthday) at the John Brown Farm State Historical Site in Lake Placid, NY in May. Norman Thomas Marshall and director George Wolf Reily are co-authors of the one-man drama John Brown: Trumpet of Freedom, which Marshall has performed in theaters and schools for twenty years. Louis A. DeCaro Jr. is an Associate Professor at Alliance Theological Seminary in NYC, and a prolific John Brown biographer. His John Brown the Abolitionist-A Biographers Blog reports on his current scholarship, and related news. He is also the pastor of a small urban congregation in the Bronx.

John Brown 1856

John Brown is one of the most controversial religious and political figures in American history. His fortunes in the popular culture track the state of race relations in the US. During the Civil War and immediately following, Brown was a hero and martyr. Black and white Union soldiers sang The John Brown Song while marching off to war: "John Brown's body lies amouldering in the grave, His soul is marching on!" When Reconstruction waned with the Long Depression (1873-1879), Southern lost-cause historians and racists North and South recast John Brown as fanatic and failed businessman. Even civil rights activist Oswald Garrison Villard (1872-1949), the grandson of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, called Brown "a principled murderer" in his influential book John Brown 1800-1859: A Biography Fifty Years After (1909). Villard indicts Brown for killing five pro-slavery neighbors along the Pottawatomie Creek in 1856 during the bloody Kansas conflict. At mid-20th century, liberal Southern historian C. Van Woodward and psychologist Kenneth B. Clark both called Old Man John Brown mentally unstable, and the instigator of a "needless war." This is the version I learned in my white suburban high school in the 1960s. Louis A. DeCaro Jr. has a great essay The John Browns of History in his John Brown: The Man Who Lived. Essays in Honor of the Harper's Ferry Raid Sesquicentennial 1859-2009, wherein he catalogs the myriad accounts of abolitionist John Brown over the years. Historian Louis DeCaro, activist Larry Lawrence, and performer Norman Marshall are leading a revival of John Brown studies to restore Brown's complex role in American history.

Of course, John Brown was most revered by the left and African Americans. His left admirers included labor journalist John Swinton (1829-1901), socialist Eugene Debs, civil rights founder W.E.B. Du Bois, and Communist historian Herbert Aptheker. Both Du Bois and Aptheker wrote biographies of John Brown. Brown's abolitionism was inspired by religious faith, like M. L. King, not by populism or socialism which was just emerging before the Civil War. A few African American critics disdained Brown. Vincent Harding regarded Brown as paternalistic and Ralph Ellison called Brown "demonic" and "utterly impractical." But most black leaders in the late 19th and early 20th century held John Brown in high esteem. Harriet Tubman said, "When I think how he gave up his life for our people, and how he never flinched, but was brave to the end, it's clear to me that it wasn't mortal man, it was God in him (1863)."

Harriet Tubman

Louis A. DeCaro Jr. John Brown: the Cost of Freedom (2007) is a concise biography of abolitionist Brown. It includes an appendix of recently discovered Brown letters and documents, which reveal more intimately Brown's thinking and character. John Brown was born May 9, 1800 in Connecticut of abolitionist and Puritan parents. He apprenticed in his father's tannery business, and then operated his own tannery in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Later he became a cattle trader and breeder, and an authority in the sheep and wool business. He had 20 children with two wives! Eleven children survived to adulthood. His first wife Dianthe died in childbirth. He had several business failures. Somehow he and second wife Mary Ann Day (1817-1884) overcame hardship and tragedy. They raised a huge family, and later organized a social movement as well.

John Brown was always anti-slavery and active in the cause. In 1837 he took a public vow at church, "Here, before God, in the presence of these witnesses, from this time, I consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery." This was prompted by the murder of abolitionist journalist Elijah Lovejoy by a pro-slavery mob in southern Illinois a few days earlier. When he moved his business to Springfield, MA in 1846, he became deeply engaged with the abolitionists there. He joined the African American Stanford Street "Free Church" (aka St. John's Congregational Church) where he met the luminaries of the movement: Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, William Lloyd Garrison, and the literati who later bankrolled his raid on Harper's Ferry in 1859.

John Brown at Springfield League of Gileadites meeting

What is striking about John Brown is that he regarded African Americans as his equal, as brothers and sisters. This was rare in his time, even among white abolitionists. He crossed the color line. In 1850 he founded the League of Gileadites in Springfield MA , a militant interracial group in response to the Fugitive Slave Act to protect escaped slaves in the free states. According to historian Louis DeCaro Jr., John Brown was already formulating more radical plans to attack slavery ten years before the raid on Harper's Ferry. He argued that moral suasion had failed, and that compromise had failed. In reality guns, not votes, would decide the fate of slavery. As John Brown later testified in his trial for treason in 1859, the country was "on the eve of one of the greatest wars in history". If the slaveholders won, it would mark "an end of all aspirations for human freedom."

The Brown home in Springfield MA

In 1849 Brown moved his family to a black settlement in North Elba NY in the Adirondacks near Lake Placid. Wealthy abolitionist Gerrit Smith donated thousands of acres to freemen as an agrarian refuge from urban poverty and racism. The colony was affectionately known as "Timbucto". This was Brown's last home and the site of the John Brown Farm and Gravesite, a national historical landmark. I would like to visit the farmstead on John Brown Day. I would also like to explore the museums and St. John's Congregational Church in Springfield MA for John Brown history. Brown's Bible remains on display at the church.

Between 1855 and 1858 John Brown joined his older sons in Kansas to lead the armed defense of the free state settlers. Bleeding Kansas was the first act of the Civil War. Brown became a wanted man. He had to go underground to avoid arrest. He began organizing his fateful raid on the Harper's Ferry US Armory and Arsenal in ernest. Louis DeCaro Jr. argues Brown's plan was well conceived but badly executed. Brown's idea was to establish guerrilla resistance in the Southern mountains to attract runaway slaves, and undermine the viability of the slave economy over time. He raised money and recruits in the North as well in free black communities in Canada. He even held a constitutional convention on May 8, 1858 in Chatham, Ontario, where 34 blacks and 12 whites committed to abolish slavery, and passed the "Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States." This would be the founding document of the "Appalachian State" and would govern their guerrilla republic in exile. The document included many features from the US Constitution while abolishing slavery and enfranchising women. Harriet Tubman (Brown called her "General Tubman") supported the plan, but in the end, Frederick Douglass opposed it which created a terrible rift between the old comrades.

Frederick Douglass

On Sunday morning, October 16, 1859, Brown led a solemn reading of the Provisional Constitution, and then set off with 21 men to capture the Harper's Ferry Armory with its 100,000 muskets and rifles. Remarkably, they succeeded with little bloodshed. He seized local slaveholders as hostages, and notified their slaves liberation was at hand. Unfortunately, John Brown tarried too long in Harper's Ferry. The next day he was pinned down in the Engine House by local militia, and the second day the US Marines commanded by Colonel Robert E. Lee arrived and subdued Brown's band. Brown was swiftly tried and convicted of treason by the state of Virginia and hung in public December 2, 1859. Eleven months later, Lincoln was elected President and the Civil War began.

Slavery and race are so central to US history and politics. The story of John Brown merits scrutiny. Abolitionists were a small but diligent group in antebellum America. Education and religious appeals had ended slavery in the North, but were ineffectual in the South and new territories. Compromise was not possible. When the Civil War began, Lincoln's goal was to preserve the union, not abolish slavery, which was still too difficult to contemplate. Emancipation and arming black soldiers only came after three years of brutal war. John Brown foretold these events. Evidently many white Americans are still not reconciled to a multiracial and multicultural society 150 years later - witness the current 2016 presidential contest. John Brown remains contemporary.

Louis A. DeCaro Jr. has written six books on John Brown, the most recent Freedom's Dawn: The Last Days of John Brown in Virginia (2015). He is probably not done yet.

Philadelphia's Finest 18th Century Abolitionist

Jackson, Maurice, Let This Voice Be Heard: Anthony Benezet, Father of Atlantic Abolitionism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009.

–---, “Anthony Benezet: America's Finest Eighteenth-Century Antislavery Advocate.” The Human Tradition in the American Revolution, ed. Nancy L. Rhoden and Ian K. Steele. Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 2000.

Crosby, David L., ed. The Complete Antislavery Writings of Anthony Benezet 1754-1783: An Annotated Critical Edition. Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 2013.

Germantown Ave. and Wister St., Philadelphia

I don't know how I missed discovering Anthony Benezet in my undisciplined readings in US history. He may be the founder of the abolitionist movement in 18th century America, as well England and France, argues biographer Maurice Jackson in Let This Voice Be Heard: Anthony Benezet, Father of Atlantic Abolitionism. And he was a Philadelphia homeboy, living in Germantown and what is now Old City sections of Philadelphia, and born a French Huguenot. This first piqued my interest. My Gerould family (my father's side) was French Huguenot. According to our family genealogy, compiled by Mrs. Mildred Gerould Wood in 1970, Jacques Jerauld fled the Province of Languedoc, France, sometime after the Crown's revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, which had formerly offered religious tolerance to Protestants. My forebear Gamaliel Gerould was born in Medfield, Massachusetts, in 1719.

Anthony Benezet was born in Saint-Quentin, France in 1713 to a French Huguenot family. His family fled France in 1715, settled in London, then emigrated to Philadelphia in 1731 when Anthony was 18 years old. Anthony joined the Religious Society of Friends (also known as Quakers) in England in 1727, and joined the Friends in Philadelphia and environs at several meetings during his lifetime. He married Joyce Marriott of Burlington, NJ in 1731. She had been made a Quaker minister by the Philadelphia Meeting, surely a unique role for a young woman in colonial America. They had two children, who died in early childhood.

Benezet spent some years working unhappily in the trades. But his bookish nature, and love of children, led him to teaching. In 1739 he took a job as schoolmaster in Germantown (a neighborhood of Philadelphia, then a suburb), succeeding Francis Daniel Pastorius. He also worked as a proofreader, fluent in French, German, and English. In 1742 he began teaching at the Philadelphia Publick School, English (later known as William Penn Charter School), then located at 4th and Chestnut St. in present-day Old City Philadelphia. About 1750, Benezet also began teaching free black children in the evenings at no cost in his home, which he continued for 20 years. During this period he began an association with Quaker mystic John Woolman to advocate the end of the slave trade, and the abolition of slavery in the colonies. Quakers had debated the issue of slavery since at least 1688 when the Quakers of Germantown issued the first resolution condemning slavery. Slavery became a contentious issue in Quaker meetings in the colony and England for the next 100 years.



In 1753 John Woolman wrote Epistle to the Friends of Virginia, and in 1754 Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes: Recommended to the Professors of Christianity of Every Denomination, which called for the end of the slave trade and slavery. Benezet urged the Philadelphia Meeting to adopt Woolman's Epistle. The following year the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting decided that Friends may no longer import or purchase slaves. Many Quakers freed their slaves. Benezet became the most outspoken advocate for abolition in the colonies, enlisting Woolman, deist Benjamin Franklin, and physician Benjamin Rush in the cause. From his daily association with free and enslaved Africans in Philadelphia, Benezet regarded blacks as the intellectual equals of whites, a very advanced position for the times. He cited Acts 17:24-26: “God, that made the world, hath made of one blood all nations of men, for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the bounds of their habitation.” And he set out to prove it with a steady stream of tracts, the mass media of the day, which are all collected in The Complete Antislavery Writings of Anthony Benezet, 1754-1783: An Annotated Critical Edition, ed. David L. Crosby. He documented the horrors of the slave trade in West Africa, and achieved mass circulation in the colonies, England, and France. His arguments were religious and secular/philosophical, drawing from theology and Scottish Enlightenment thinkers. He corresponded or influenced all the major abolitionists in England and France: John Wesley, founder of Methodism; Tom Paine, son of an English Quaker; Granville Sharp; Thomas Clarkson; William Wilberforce; Olaudah Equiano. It is inspiring in our dispirited times to see what he accomplished. This humble Philadelphia Quaker was a brilliant organizer.

Other Benezet exploits: in 1754 he resigned from the Publick School and opened the first school for girls in America under the auspices of the Society of Friends in Philadelphia; in 1755 he organized the relief for hundreds of Acadian French expelled from Nova Scotia, refugees of the French and Indian Wars; in 1775 he organized The Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage with Pennsylvania Quakers, with Benjamin Franklin the honorary chair after the Revolution War. Benezet died in 1784, and bequeathed his estate to the African Free School which he founded. He said, “I can with truth and sincerity declare, that I have found amongst the negroes as great variety of talents as among a like number of white; and I am bold to assert, that the notion entertained by some, that the blacks are inferior in their capacities, is a vulgar prejudice, founded on the pride or ignorance of their lordly masters.” He was buried at the Friends Burial Ground at 4th and Arch Street, Philadelphia in an unmarked grave, as was the custom.

Observations on the Enslaving, Importing and
Purchasing of Negroes, Anthony Benezet 1759

The biographer Maurice Jackson is Associate Professor of History and African-American Studies and Affiliate Professor of Performing Arts (Jazz) at Georgetown University. He also scores points with me as a former shipyard rigger, longshoreman, housepainter, community organizer, and fellow Antioch College alumnus. He did a lot of research in Philadelphia at the Library Company and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania on Locust Street. I'm sorry I missed his lecture at the Library Company in December 2013, available on YouTube. I hope he comes again.