Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City by Carla L. Peterson Read Free Book Online Page A

record as
grand blanc
slaveholders forced to flee Saint-Domingue at the time of the revolution. The Bérard family arrived in New York in the late 1790s with their slaves but without the great fortune they had amassed. 3 I don’tknow who Sophie Guignon was or which Guignon might have fathered Peter—Pierre, Jacques (the French name for James), or yet another. But this man was clearly the “white Haitian” that my family had referred to so vaguely when I was a child. Peter’s mother was undoubtedly a mulatto woman who had come with the Guignons from Haiti, as a slave, a servant, or perhaps a free woman. The deafening silence around their relationship and the father’s absence from Peter’s life suggested to me that they were not married.
    Having reached a dead end, I decided to shift tactics and approach Peter through his in-laws, who I knew from Williamson’s genealogical notes were named Elizabeth Hewlett Marshall and Joseph Marshall. They are the starting point of my story, shadowy figures in the background urging me forward to compose a picture in black and white of early social life in New York City.
The Black Families of Collect Street
     
    Armed with a new family name, I went to the municipal archives and plowed through city directories, tax assessment records, and minutes of the Common Council. Here’s what I found.
    In 1818, the City of New York sold at auction land on Lower Manhattan’s Collect Street to one George Lorillard, a wealthy tobacco merchant and real estate speculator. Among the lots purchased were numbers 17, 18, and 19, also 39 and 40, 51 and 52, and 80 through 83. Lorillard promptly turned the properties around and leased or sold several to a group of black New Yorkers. In 1819, the African Episcopal Society—soon renamed St. Philip’s Episcopal Church—acquired a sixty-year lease on numbers 17, 18, and 19. That same year, George DeGrasse became the owner of lots 79 and 80. In 1820, Boston Crummell acquired lot 51, and Joseph Marshall lot 40. After a house was built on his lot, Marshall’s property was valued at $900. When Collect Street was renamed Centre Street, Marshall’s house was renumbered 72. In 1829, its value was listed at $1,200. After his death, the property passed to his widow, Elizabeth Hewlett Marshall, who built a rear house on the premises. By 1838, the total value of the property had risen to $2,000. 4
    Who were the parties to these real estate transactions? Let’s begin with the black families, the DeGrasses, Crummells, and Marshalls. What were their backgrounds? How were they able to become property owners—or freeholders—in early-nineteenth-century New York? Much earlier, under Dutch rule, the director general of New Netherlands had given farmland north of the city to some thirty Africans in order to create a buffer protecting the Dutch from attacks by Native Americans. But after the slave insurrection of 1712, the New York Assembly passed “An Act for preventing suppressing and punishing the Conspiracy and Insurrection of Negroes and other Slaves.” Among other things, this act prohibited blacks from owning property. Not until 1809 would they once again be allowed to inherit or bequeath property. 5
    I searched for the names of the three men in African American history books and found some information on both Crummell and DeGrasse. Boston was Alexander Crummell’s father. An amazingly prolific writer, Peter’s childhood friend has left us with many letters, essays, speeches, and sermons, some published in collected volumes during his lifetime, others still stored in manuscript form in the Schomburg Center archives. Alexander maintained that his father was born in Africa “in the Kingdom of Timanee” (now Sierra Leone); some even claimed that Boston was descended from Temne chiefs. It was Alexander’s belief that his father “was stolen thence at about 12 or 13 years,” arriving in the United States around 1780. Boston eventually became the slave of Peter