Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [279]
Two-thirds of the free black community, however, resided in independent black households, headed by men who for the most part earned their livelihoods as laborers. Perhaps one in four retained artisanal skills from slavery days, and while black men were increasingly excluded from many crafts, some managed to earn a living in shoemaking, baking, butchering, tanning, and carpentry. A few black New Yorkers established themselves as tavern or dance hall keepers, shopowners, peddlers, and service providers. A majority of the city’s two dozen oystermen (and later its oyster shops) and probably all of its two-hundred-odd chimney sweeps, for example, were free blacks, and several freedmen became well-known tobacconists, barbers, and caterers.
Given their limited options, perhaps 40 percent of adult freedmen took to the sea, and there were some appealing aspects to life as a black Jack Tar. During the war years, seafaring jobs were plentiful, and seamen’s wages on risky but profitable “neutral” voyages were three times what they had been previously. Captains offered new sign-ups a portion of their wages in advance—especially important for recently freed slaves. And not only did African Americans receive equal pay for equal work, but maritime custom and the rough egalitarianism of deep-sea tars helped insulate skilled black seamen from white antagonism and broke down racial barriers. Black and white sailors not only lived, worked, and ate together, they often looked alike, wearing their hair in queues secured with eelskin and tattooing themselves with a similar array of anchors, mermaids, and crucifixes.
But if racism weakened at sea, it hardly disappeared—as John Jea, an ex-slave from New York, found out in 1806 when he took a job as ship’s cook (a position, like that of steward, often reserved for blacks). Initially Jea “was very much pleased in going on board the vessel, but the case was soon altered” as brutal white sailors “used to flog, beat, and kick me about, the same as if I had been a dog.”
During their stints on land, many black sailors supplemented their pay by working as day laborers—toting and hauling in warehouses, rigging ships, and unloading cargoes along the docks. While they were at sea, their wives bore the burden of keeping the household together by taking in washing and ironing. If their husbands abandoned them or were lost at sea, they might have to resort to prostitution. Black men too might turn to crime as an available option, and African-American New Yorkers were active in the establishment of a thriving underground market in stolen clothing.
Most freed blacks in New York thus lived a precarious existence in which sudden unemployment, illness, or old age could easily push them into pauperism. In some years, as many as 70 percent of black families in the city received outdoor relief, and the number of those in municipal institutions rose steadily, from nine in 1790 to 72 in 1810: ten in debtor’s prison, seventeen in the public hospital, and forty-five in the almshouse.
They weren’t alone. As the commissioners of the almshouse reported in 1795, the ranks of the truly impoverished included a growing percentage of white immigrants —some 44 percent, in fact, of the 620-odd paupers under their care. Two years later the commissioners observed that the Irish alone accounted for 148 out of the 770 paupers in the almshouse. The problem became steadily worse after the turn of the century. In 1801 the New-York Gazette reported that nine hundred immigrants had entered the port in a four-week period, many “without money, and without health and strength to enable them to earn even the most scanty subsistence.” Camped out in outerward hovels, some were actually “expiring from the want of sustenance.”
Then, too, notwithstanding the general prosperity of the 1790s and early 1800s, more city residents than ever were becoming vulnerable to the seasonal fluctuations of trade that always