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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. 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. 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.

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), 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." 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. The Old Dominion, long majestic in its own eyes, proved itself as mean as any other state in the antebellum Union when it came to the status of free persons able to liberate themselves from bondage. The Virginia legislature passed the infamous Law of 1806 to curtail the number of free persons of color living in the state, relegating them to the precarious position of having to leave Virginia within twelve months or face reenslavement.

By 1840, the sixth census of the United States showed a decline in Chicago's African American population as it plunged to 53 persons. This presented a problem when focusing on increases and decreases and determining net in-migration without information as to gross in-migration over specific periods, for example, U.S. census years. Whether those who left were persons who migrated elsewhere because of coercion, either occasioned by peripatetic slave catchers, or the lure of a more permanent freedom in British Canada (which abolished slavery late in the previous century), is unknown. Then, the dire economic influence of the Panic of 1837 could have caused the migration of labor-seeking individuals elsewhere. However, there can be no doubt that Chicago's status as a major terminus on the Underground Railroad played a major role in any fluctuations in population.

Significantly, the likelihood of the emergence of family life within this smaller population seemed reasonable, something unusual for a frontier environment such as this, but indicative of the rapidity at which development was occurring in various facets of town life. Among whites, ready-made institutions, such as churches, fraternal associations, businesses, and schools, were quickly replicated in their New England and New York forms. In particular, the 1840 ranks of the fifty-three African Americans included fourteen children under the age of ten (nine boys and five girls), along with nine males and females between the ages of ten through twenty-four. Only three persons more than fifty-five years of age lived among them, with the bulk of the group being the twenty-seven individuals who ranged from twenty-four to fifty-five years of age. Prominently positioned in the midst of the latter were fifteen males and seven females between the ages of twenty-four and thirty-six.

By the time of the second Chicago census, completed three years later in 1843, the African American population had risen again, now to sixty-five persons. With the city's total increasing slightly, the black numbers contained a glimmer of hope for the future establishment of a community, for there were twenty-two persons in the youngest age category, those who were less than twenty-one years of age. The remaining forty-three members of this band of free people and refugees included thirty men and thirteen women. The populational glimmer was transformed into a sunburst within months, as the Illinois state census of 1845 shows a near-doubling of the black population of 1837, counting 140 African Americans. Overall, this was an increase of 115 percent over the 1843 population that occurred in the midst of an explosion of the white population, which nearly trebled its size to 11,948.

Possibly missed in that census was the November birth of James Stewart, the newest member of the city's small African American community. He would attend public school, live as other youngsters of his circumstances did, and, importantly, in 1864 enlist as an eighteen-year-old in the Illinois all-black Twenty-ninth Infantry Regiment, to fight for family, friends, and nation.

The power of the influence of these trying times and burdensome experiences resulted in an important wellspring of memories that would be used to reinvigorate life in future days. As an index to this momentous era, the records of the Old Settlers Social Club, organized in 1904, testify poignantly to the importance of arrival in the City of Refuge. Strong historical memories served to link dreamed-of freedom with its realization. In a gesture to humanity, the names of some of the historically unseen and usually overlooked African American settlers who arrived in the city during these early days are herein listed as they appeared in the Membership Rolls of the Old Settlers Social Club. In 1845, Lavinia Lee arrived; in 1846, Rachel Collins Grant and James Early Powell reached the city; in 1849, Clinton Artist, Ella Randall Lewis, and George Walker Mead took up residence. Coincidentally, in March of that same year, future community leader John Jones and his wife, Mary, and infant daughter, Lavinia, headed northward from Alton with their freedom papers in hand.

Moreover, certain composite recollections of African Americans who either lived through this period or heard from their parents about this period were printed in this group's most powerful voice, the Chicago Defender, in 1930. They make interesting reading and hint at another set of reasons for the flux in population. In the development of Chicago, "the Race member was playing his part. In the late '40s he was with the westbound pioneers who left the East for the exploration of the Oregon country. Many of them took the trail to the gold fields and many of them stopped in or returned to the Chicago region. They helped fight the Indians when necessary and traded with them when the redskins were friendly. They helped carve out a metropolis which we now look upon with pride."

With impressive speed, the frontier atmosphere receded, allowing family life to form upon a base of urban stability (Figure 1). Chicago historian Bessie Louise Pierce found that the necessary conditions for such a metamorphosis had occurred by the city's second decade of existence. For African Americans, a favorable population mix as to males to females had also emerged. The sexual ratio in the Illinois state census of 1845 was nearly balanced by this time, with 73 males and 67 females, implying the possibility of a suitable mix between marriageable males and females for family formation. Two individuals who serve as examples were Pennsylvanian Abram Thompson (A. T.) Hall and another recent arrival, Joanna Huss, who had come to the city in the company of her mother, Adelphia Stewart, of North Carolina. As chronicled by their son, Hall and Huss fell in love; they "met, loved, wooed and [were] united in marriage in 1846." The groom was twenty-four years of age and the bride was sixteen, the typical ages for marriage on the frontier. By 1848, the couple welcomed their first child, Amy, as a resident of Chicago. These social interactions made Chicago comparably consistent with the pattern of two-parent, independent households that dominated the early-nineteenth-century social landscape of other northern cities.

However, little Amy Hall did not hold the distinction of being the first African American child born in Chicago. That signal event took place earlier in 1845 as Amy's parents were arriving in Chicago. Mr. and Mrs. Henry King became parents to a son, Cassius. This baby boy was the first black child born within a family structure since Jean Baptiste and Catherine Du Sable's daughter, who was born late in the eighteenth century in the period preceding American military occupation and civilian settlement. Soon, Joseph and Mary Hudlin also welcomed their daughter, Joanna, to the new community. An increasing number of births were recorded as family life flourished. Among these pioneers, the presence of children already born must also be factored, as shown in the arrival of little Lavinia Jones with her parents, John and Mary. In Chicago, the trend of growing families, now a pattern, stood in contrast to what urban historian Leonard Curry found for the north in general among African Americans. No high percentage of children was being born to African Americans, even with the pool of free women increasing. In addition, he found that African Americans had a lower fertility rate coupled with a higher mortality rate. Out-of-wedlock births appeared rare for both slaves and free females of color. Last, families in the north, and probably in Chicago, who lived with their white employers, must also be factored into this scenario along with independent black households.

The local census of 1848 listed 288 persons of African descent out of a total population of 20,028. By virtue of their transient status, refugees consistently missed being included in the censuses. One group of five adults and an infant passed through town around the time the 1848 tally was taken. Having fled from the Kentucky farm or plantation of a master named Tyler, they were anxious to move farther northward, away from any pursuers. Among their ranks was future Chicago Civil War soldier James Green, who, along with his Kentucky slave companions, reached Whitehall, Michigan, after a journey made safe by abolitionists in the Chicago Underground Railroad. They carried a letter of introduction and support from Chicago abolitionists that they delivered to their new benefactors, including African American stationmaster Walter Duke. The latter aided them in their adjustment and displayed the soundness of judgment and action that would win him the praise of his white neighbors over the next several decades. Once they settled in, they attempted to move beyond their marks and memories of Southern bondage — with James, the stripes on his back from beatings, and with Mariah, the infant she brought with her that was her former master Tyler's son. After establishing themselves in the workforce, James Green married his fellow escapee Mariah and adopted her infant son, John Tyler. The Greens established a family that numbered six within a decade, and then dwindled to three with the deaths of two of the children and Mariah. By 1857, James Green returned to Chicago as a permanent resident until his service in the Twenty-ninth Regiment, Illinois, United States Colored Troops (USCT).

Meanwhile, far to the south in North Carolina, little Edward Maybin was born under the most difficult circumstances imaginable. Three years after his birth, he and his mother, Jane, were sold to a new slave master in Tennessee. Hating her condition and that imposed on little Edward, and possessed with the strength of spirit, mind, and body to resist slavery even though caring for a very young child, Jane escaped with her toddler. Unfortunately, the pace of their escape and the physical needs of Edward prevented a safe flight. As Edward recalled, "she had tried to escape taking me with her, but after about 4 days, we were captured & taken back. I remember that very distinctly, for I had got tired out & had laid down by the side of the road, and when they came after us on horses, they took me first. After we were taken back, our master John Maybin sold my mother to a man in Kentucky." This is one story that resulted in a happy ending, although one of long duration, for mother and child were reunited in the City of Refuge after the war.

Consistent with the pattern of continuing increase, the federal government's census of 1850 showed another leap in Chicago's growth, astoundingly placing the city's overall population at 29,963 denizens in a town laying claim to the sobriquet of the "Queen City of the North West." The African American population now reached 323 persons, with the gender ratio standing at 181 males and 142 females. These African Americans now accounted for 1.08 percent of the total population. Moreover, these data represented an increase for blacks of 131 percent over the 1845 figure. Two factors of consequence affecting this figure were mortality and migration. The cholera epidemic of 1849 caused the deaths of over nine hundred inhabitants. Its devastation was such that a contemporary noted in retrospect that "from that same gate in the cholera year I watched eight funerals in one afternoon in half a square. It was a dreadful time. Everyone left the city who could, even some of the doctors fled." The direct effect on African Americans is unknown at this time, but some members of their community were obviously also victims of this time, but some members of their community were obviously also victims of this tragedy. Other urban diseases that threatened all Chicagoans included typhoid fever and dysentery.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Black Chicago's First Century 1833-1900"
by .
Copyright © 2005 The Curators of the University of Missouri.
Excerpted by permission of University of Missouri Press.
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