Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [684]
Despite these occasional successes, the 1850s were dark days for African-Americans. Even some of the most militant began to abandon hope for a future in the United States and to reconsider their opposition to colonization. Henry Highland Garnet, despite his impeccable antislavery credentials, had become convinced, as had many western land reformers before him, that emigration might provide opportunities unavailable in New York City. In the summer of 1858 Garnet became the first president of the African Civilization Society, a group that included wealthy whites, and he promoted efforts to develop black colonies in Africa.
Garnet was vigorously opposed by those like Frederick Douglass, Dr. James McCune Smith, and the Rev. James Gloucester (of Brooklyn’s Siloam Presbyterian Church) who preferred to stay and struggle within the political arena. This was no easy matter, however, as most blacks were still barred by stiff property requirements from voting at all. Such eligible voters as existed had organized themselves, in 1838, as the Colored Freeholders of the City and County of New York. During the 1840s and 1850s they met periodically with other such groups from around the state to demand universal suffrage. By the late 1850s there were forty-eight local suffrage clubs in Manhattan, eighteen in Brooklyn, and an umbrella organization, the New York State Suffrage Association. In 1860 they succeeded in getting the legislature to submit the question to the voters. James Gordon Bennett—who the year before had called for the reenslavement of northern blacks—rallied the opposition, urging “white men” not “to consummate the act of self-degradation which will bring them down to the level of. . . the niggers of the Five Points.” The referendum lost by only 337,900 to 197,000 at the state level. But in New York City, it was rejected by 95 percent of the voters.
Given this generally dismal situation, it is not surprising that the rise of the Republican Party kindled hopes in the black community. In September 1858, at a New York Negro Suffrage Convention, the majority urged the state’s eleven thousand eligible black electors to vote Republican to ensure the “defeat and ruin of the so-called Democratic party, our most inveterate enemy.” But Garnet noted that Republicans loudly protested they had no intention of abolishing slavery in the South and that even those who did support equal suffrage rights, such as Horace Greeley, routinely disparaged blacks as “indolent, improvident, servile and licentious.” Garnet counseled support for the Radical Abolitionist Party, the favorite of white abolitionists like the Tappans. Nevertheless, African Americans would overwhelmingly identify with—and be identified with—the Republican Party, to such a degree that it would be called by its enemies the “Black Republican” Party.
WHITE REPUBLICANS
Among the city’s earliest white converts to Republicanism were journalists and ministers. Before taking up his Central Park duties, Frederick Law Olmsted had won prominence as a commentator on the southern way of life. In a series of books about his travels below the Mason-Dixon line, Olmsted had cast a critical eye on the world the slaveholders had made, less for its effect on suffering slaves than for its inefficiency. Horace Greeley of the Tribune stressed slavery’s barbarity more than its supposed unprofitability. Citing British and Dutch precedents, he pronounced slavery a retrograde movement, contrary to the laws of