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

Schermerhorn, a member of an old and prominent Dutch family, who had increased the family’s wealth through the shipping industry and speculation in Manhattan real estate. Legend has it that Boston “was never emancipated,” but simply told Schermerhorn one day that “he would serve him no longer” and “notwithstanding all remonstrations and intimidations could not be got back.” Proud of his father’s act of resistance, Alexander frequently referred to himself as “the boy whose father could not be a slave.”
    Boston married Charity Hicks, a free woman from Long Island, who was reported to have been brought up in “the same family that produced the celebrated Quaker, Elias Hicks.” Hence, his “
maternal
ancestors,” Alexander asserted, “have trod American soil, and therefore have used the English language well nigh as long as any descendants of

    Alexander Crummell, abolitionist, Episcopal minister, and missionary, circa 1890s (Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library)
     
    the early settlers of the Empire State.” In freedom, Boston took up the trade of oysterman and became a highly respected member of the black community. Yet he never forgot his place of birth. Etched in Alexander’s mind were Boston’s “burning love of home, his vivid remembrances of scenes and travels with his [own] father into the interior, and his wide acquaintance with divers tribes and customs.” In later years, Boston hoped to return to Africa and establish a farm in Liberia, but died beforedoing so. It was left to his son to make that journey with his wife and children in the 1850s. 6
    George DeGrasse’s background could not have been more different. Neither African nor European, he was a Hindu, born in Calcutta, and reputed to be the foster son of Admiral Count de Grasse, the commander of the French fleet that had helped George Washington triumph over the British at Yorktown in 1781. Before that, Count de Grasse had served in the French navy in the Mediterranean and India where he likely adopted George. He died in France in 1788, leaving his son in the United States.
    In 1802, Vice President Aaron Burr, who had undoubtedly become acquainted with the older De Grasse during the revolutionary war, wrote a letter to his daughter Theodosia in which he referred to “my man George (late Azar Le Guen, now George d’Grasse).” Two years later, George DeGrasse petitioned the Court of Common Pleas to become a U.S. citizen. The court agreed that he had resided in the United States for a period of five years and in New York state for one. So upon showing proof of good moral character, swearing to uphold the Constitution of the United States, and promising to renounce allegiance to all foreign states, “the said George DeGrasse was thereupon, pursuant to the laws of the United States in such case made and provided, admitted by the said Court to be, and he is accordingly to be, considered a citizen of the United States.” Had George DeGrasse been a black born in Africa, he undoubtedly would not have received U.S. citizenship. 7
    A naturalized Hindu American, DeGrasse chose to cast his lot with New York’s black community when he married Maria Van Surlay. Maria’s racial background was even more complicated than that of her husband. It’s believed that sometime in the early seventeenth century a Dutchman by the name of Jan Jansen Van Haarlem entered the service of the sultan of Morocco and married a local woman. One of their sons, Abram Jansen Van Salee, settled in Brooklyn, where the phrase “alias the mulatto” or “alias the Turk” was regularly appended to his name. Maria was born some eight generations later. One of her and George DeGrasse’s children, John, became a doctor and moved to Boston; another, Isaiah, was a Mulberry Street School classmate of Peter Guignon and Alexander Crummell. According to his contemporaries, Isaiah wasso light skinned it was