Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [438]
Even servitude couldn’t be taken for granted. Irish women were rapidly displacing black women in domestic service jobs, driving some to the streets to hawk fruits or vegetables, or themselves. Most black men found work as waiters, coachmen, servants, or unskilled laborers, though their political powerlessness barred them from most licensed trades (notably jobs as cartmen) and public offices (such as weighers and measurers). Hackney drivers and chimney sweeps were an exception, as their ranks had been opened to blacks by grateful Federalists.
Many black men still took to the sea, as sailors, stewards, or cooks, so many that in the late 1820s the African Free School added navigation to its curriculum. Though wages and working conditions were miserable as ever, foredeck gangs were substantially integrated, forecastles (the cramped bunkrooms below decks in a ship’s forward end) maintained a rough equality, freedmen could get wages equal to those of whites, a ship’s job came complete with room and board, and often one’s compatriots constituted the majority. In 1835 nearly 25 percent of the black men sailing out of New York City were members of predominantly black crews.
Although blacks formed mutual aid societies—like the African Clarkson Association (1829)—to provide sick benefits, burial allowances, and widows’ allotments, with economic options so pinched, many nevertheless wound up in public institutions. Here too they received “special” treatment. The almshouse was segregated. Until 1833 the House of Refuge refused to accept black juvenile delinquents. And blacks landed in jail more readily than whites, in part because authorities arrested them for minor infractions ignored when committed by Caucasians.
Things were no better in most churches. Trinity had actively encouraged formation of St. Philip’s as a separate (though closely watched) institution, but the General Theological Seminary continued to reject black applicants, and when the New York Diocese did vote to admit a black man to candidacy in holy orders, it stipulated that neither he nor any congregation he might head would be entitled to a seat in the diocesan convention. White churches that received blacks at all sent them aloft to “Nigger Heaven” or shunted them to a “Nigger Pew” (with seats marked B.M. for Black Members). Whites who deeded pews to their children generally covenanted that blacks never be permitted to purchase them, lest this depreciate the value of adjacent pews.
Finally, of course, there was the all but total exclusion from the polls.
Some whites, unsatisfied with this segregated status quo, wanted blacks out of the city altogether. The American Colonization Society (ACS, 1817), whose New York branch was run by the cream of Manhattan society, advocated shipping blacks to Liberia in Africa, or elsewhere out of the country. David Hale, editor of the Journal of Commerce, declared that New York City would be much better off without its black population, and Tammany spokesman Mordecai Noah agreed. After all, he asked in 1826, “what do our colored citizens do but fill our almshouses and prisons and congest our streets as beggars?”
As late as the latter 1820s, leading evangelicals like Arthur Tappan and Anson Phelps backed the American Colonization Society’s efforts, with Phelps actually serving as president of the organization’s New York branch. In Brooklyn, Adrian Van Sinderen, president of the Long Island Bible Society and the Brooklyn Temperance Society, also headed the Brooklyn branch of the ACS (founded in 1830). It was only when Arthur Tappan realized how deeply the New York African-American community detested