Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [439]
During the 1820s prosperous evangelicals, dismayed by what they saw as the ignorance and viciousness of poor African Americans, helped found and finance a black congregation. In the process, they cultivated some outstanding African leaders, most notably Samuel Cornish. Born free in Delaware in 1795, Cornish had moved to Pennsylvania in 1815, where he was tutored for the ministry by members of the Philadelphia Presbytery. Licensed to preach, he was recruited by New York evangelicals to missionize poor blacks in the Bancker Street area. In 1821 Cornish set up a rough-hewn church, held two or three services there on Sunday, conducted a Sunday school, gave Bible lectures, held prayer meetings, and visited families in their homes. The next year he drew together the twenty-four initial members of the First Colored Presbyterian Church. In 1824, with loans from the presbytery and financial aid from Jacob Lorillard, tobacco merchant and real estate investor, the group built and settled into a brick home on Elm Street near Canal, with Cornish formally installed as pastor. (It would later relocate to Duane and Hudson, then to Frankfort and William, where it would remain for the next twenty years.)
Samuel Cornish soon tested the limits of denominational support by refusing to draw sharp lines between the black community’s theological and political concerns. He began by speaking out against the American Colonization Society and then, in 1827, took an even more decisive step. For almost ten years, the city’s white press had cooperated with the ACS by refusing to print the anticolonization resolutions passed by black gatherings in New York and across the country. Cornish now met with a small group that included the Jamaican-born John Russwurm, recently graduated from Bowdoin College (only the second black college graduate in the United States), and church leaders William Hamilton of AME Zion and Peter Williams Jr. of St. Philip’s. In March 1827 they launched Freedom’s Journal, the first black newspaper in the United States. By the summer it had well over twelve hundred subscribers, with perhaps several thousand reading at least parts of each weekly issue.
Freedom’s Journal, as edited by Cornish and Russwurm, covered activities in the African-American community, both the extraordinary (like Emancipation Day) and the everyday (marriages; funerals; the doings of mutual relief, literary, temperance, and fraternal societies), together with advertisements from local black businessmen. Its pages presented a portrait of the community strikingly at variance with the negative picture promulgated by the ACS. Not that the paper denied the existence of a rougher element. But Cornish noted that whites constituted, proportionately, a substantially larger percentage of almshouse residents than blacks. And while he conceded that the per capita number of blacks in prison was higher than whites, he argued that “the coloured man’s offence, three times out of four, grows out of the circumstances of his condition, while the white man’s, most generally, is premeditated and vicious.” Cornish did deplore coarse conduct by unrefined and uneducated blacks—which he attributed to slavery, not emancipation—but believed they should be uplifted, not exiled. Freedom’s Journal exhorted its readers to eschew “loose and depraved habits” and cultivate sobriety, industry, honesty, and self-discipline; like Fanny Wright, the editors hailed education as the way to overcome economic deprivation. They also ran inspirational biographies, published articles on the black revolution in Haiti, of which they were intensely proud, and proclaimed that “every thing that relates to Africa, shall find a ready admission into our columns.”
Freedom’s Journal did not hesitate to lash whites and denounce racism. The paper called for the abolition of property requirements for black