and towns—hawking buttermilk, hot corn, and oysters, talking and laughing in
the streets, jostling their way through city crowds. More than a few whites were
disturbed. The New York journalist Mordecai Noah, like many other elite
whites, had expected freed slaves to be grateful and deferential to their former
masters, but “instead of thankfulness for their redemption, they have become
impudent and offensive beyond all precedent.”
African Americans with money established businesses and institutions of
their own. At one end were black-owned gambling houses, saloons, brothels,
oyster cellars, and dance halls, which often served a mixed clientele. At the other end were institutions built by self-consciously “respectable” free blacks. Most
prominent among these were churches, which sprang up wherever African
Americans lived. In Philadelphia, black preachers Richard Allen and Absalom
Jones rebelled against segregated seating in St. George’s Methodist Church and,
in 1794, founded two separate black congregations; by 1800, about 40 percent
of Philadelphia’s blacks belonged to one of those two churches. The African
Methodist Episcopal Church grew from Allen’s church, and established itself as
a national denomination in 1816. Schools and relief societies, usually associated with churches, grew quickly. Black Masonic lodges attracted hundreds of members. Many of the churches and social organizations took names that proudly
called up the blacks’ African origins. In Philadelphia, for instance, there were
African Methodists, Abyssinian Baptists, the Daughters of Ethiopia, the African
Dorcas Society—to name only a few. Not only their names and activities, but
their presence as black-owned buildings filled with respectable former slaves
caught the attention of their white and black neighbors. It was from this matrix
of black businesses and institutions that black abolitionists—David Walker
in Boston, Fredrick Douglass in New Bedford and Rochester, the itinerant
Sojourner Truth, and many others—would emerge to demand abolition of slav-
ery and equal rights for black citizens.
The Beginnings
In post-revolutionary America, the most important social
of Modern
and political distinction was not between black and white or
Racism
rich and poor. It was between the heads of independent
households and the women, slaves, servants, apprentices, and
others who were their dependents. Wage labor and tenancy reduced the number of
northern whites who were, by traditional measures, independent. They fought that
threat in a number of ways: their skills and labor, they said, constituted a kind of property; their manhood conferred judgment and strength and thus independence.
These were assertions of worth and independence that had little to do with the
ownership of property. In ways that were sometimes subtle but just as often brutal, they often made those assertions at the expense of African Americans. Along with
the value of their labor and their manhood, white men discovered the decisive
value of white skin.
Whites in the early 19th century began refusing to work alongside blacks, and
some of the earliest and most decisive racist assaults came when whites asserted their control over some occupations and relegated blacks to others. They chased blacks
out of skilled jobs by pressuring employers to discriminate, and often by outright Race
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violence. As a result, African Americans disappeared from the skilled trades, while many unskilled and semiskilled blacks lost their jobs on the docks and in warehouses. In 1834, a Philadelphian reported that “colored persons, when engaged in
their usual occupations, were repeatedly assailed and maltreated, usually on the
[waterfront]. Parties of white men have insisted that no blacks shall be employed in certain departments of labor.” And as their old jobs disappeared, blacks were
systematically excluded from the new jobs that were opening up in factories.
Even whites that remained in positions of personal dependence (servants,
waiters, and other jobs that were coming to be defined as “black” work) refused
the signs and language of servility. White servants refused to wear livery, which became the uniform of black servants of the rich. Whites also refused to be called servants. As early as 1807, when an English visitor asked a New England servant
for her master, the woman replied that she had no master. “I am Mr.___’s help,”
she said. “I’d have you know, man, that I am no sarvant; none but negars are
sarvants.” The Englishwoman Frances Trollope, who spent the late 1820s in the
United States, explained: “It is more than petty treason to the republic to call
a free citizen a servant.”
There was trouble off the job as well. As early as the 1790s, whites had
disrupted African American church meetings, and they frequently attacked black
celebrations of northern emancipation and Haitian independence. Black neigh-
borhoods and institutions came under increasing attack. In the late 1820s and
early 1830s, every northern city experienced anti-black rioting. In 1829, white
mobs destroyed black homes and businesses in Cincinnati. Hundreds of blacks
fled that city for Canada; many others sought refuge in slaveholding Kentucky.
Another major race riot broke out in Philadelphia in 1834 between working-
class whites and blacks at a street carnival. While blacks seem to have won the
first round, the whites refused to accept defeat. Over the next few nights, they
wrecked a black-owned tavern, broke into black households to terrorize families
and steal their property, attacked whites who lived with, socialized with, or operated businesses catering to blacks, wrecked the African Presbyterian Church, and
destroyed a black church on Wharton Street by sawing through its timbers and
pulling it down.
Sporadic racial violence wracked Philadelphia, reaching its height in 1849.
That summer an Irish firehouse gang called “the Killers” attacked the California
House, a black-owned tavern and gambling hall. The blacks fought back with
guns, and five Killers were shot. For two months, tempers simmered. Finally, the
Killers set a fire at the California House that spread to nearby houses, then fought off neighborhood blacks, rival firemen, and the police. The riot ended only when
the city sent in four companies of militia.
Above all, white populists pronounced blacks unfit to be citizens of the repub-
lic. Federalists and other upper-class whites had often supported various forms of black suffrage; less-privileged whites opposed it. The insistence that blacks were incapable of citizenship reinforced an equally natural white male political capacity.
The most vicious racist assaults were often carried out beneath symbols of the revolutionary republic. Anti-black mobs in Baltimore, Cincinnati, and Toledo called
themselves Minute Men and Sons of Liberty. Philadelphia blacks that gathered to
hear the reading of the Declaration of Independence on the Fourth of July were
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