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AFRICAN-AMER. IN ANTEBELLUM U.S.   Term Paper ID:24332 Click to get this paper

Essay Subject: Analyzes sociologist Ira Berlin's theory that blacks freed before the Civil War formed a caste distinct from whites & black slaves, with political & socioeconomic subcastes in North & South.... More...

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Paper Abstract: Analyzes sociologist Ira Berlin's theory that blacks freed before the Civil War formed a caste distinct from whites & black slaves, with political & socioeconomic subcastes in North & South. Paper Introduction: This essay investigates Ira Berlin’s thesis (1974, 1976) that free Negroes in the antebellum United States formed a caste distinct from free whites and black slaves, and that this caste contained three distinct regional subcastes, in the North, the Upper South, and the Lower South. The investigation, using more recent and more detailed historiography, will consider whether Berlin’s categories remain viable, whether they need to be replaced in toto, or whether they need merely further elaboration, and, if so, what sorts of elaboration will be needed. The general perspective arrived at here is that Berlin’s categories need detailed elaboration within each of his three major regions. Freed African-Americans formed local communities and unique personal identities that cannot be forced into Berli Text of the Paper: The entire text of the paper is shown below. However, the text is somewhat scrambled. We want to give you as much information as we possibly can about our papers and essays, but we cannot give them away for free. In the text below you will find that while disordered, many of the phrases are essentially intact. From this text you will be able to get a solid sense of the writing style, the concepts addressed, and the sources used in the research paper. The structure of the free Negro caste in theantebellum United States. . Berlin, I. In fact, almost allAfrican-Americans were clustered on either side of the boundary between thetwo wards, and that area was considered one large neighborhood, called"Nigger Hill" by the whites. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press. Attention willnow be turned to recent historiographical studies of specific African-American communities, to see what light they may shed on the adequacy ofBerlin's formulation. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press. Louisiana History, 6 (Summer), 273-285. ThePhiladelphia community thus straddled the divide between two of Berlin'scategories, calling their relevance into question. After thewar, throughout the South, a new wealthy class arose among the formerslaves freed by the Emancipation Proclamation and the Northern victory, andtheir wealth tended to derive from previously unavailable sources:landholding, government employment, and light industry. 129). Schweninger, L. . In the Middle Georgia plantation belt, however, members of this small group led vastly different lives from similarly designated people in the border states, around the port cities of the Deep South, or certainly north of slavery (Alexander, 1991, pp. Conclusions African-American identity on both the individual and social levelsseems to have been dependent on class structure, not on lightness ofcomplexion, which was a symptom of class structure, not a cause of it.Whereas differences in skin color played a useful social role in theantebellum South, they ceased to do so in the postbellum period, partlybecause a new leadership made up of freed black slaves was arising, partlybecause, in reaction to Reconstruction, southern whites began erecting theJim Crow system that recognized only two categories: white and nonwhite. Horton then turns to considering the effects of mixed ancestry on thesocial dynamics of the antebellum African-American communities in threenorthern cities: Boston, Buffalo, and Cincinnati, cities chosen foranalysis because of their clear differences in demographics, economic andsocial orientations, and geographic locations. Berlin, I. New York: The New Press, 1974. Horton (1993, p. Horton: Free People of Color In a chapter entitled "Shades of Color: The Mulatto in ThreeAntebellum Northern Communities," Horton (1993) demonstrates that mixedancestry was of far more social importance in the Upper South and the Norththan one would gather from Berlin. Blassingame: Black New Orleans Blassingame (1973) precedes Berlin, and yet his description of blackNew Orleans tends to support Berlin's description and to contradictSchweninger's conclusions. Hereagain Berlin's generalizations about differences between southern andnorthern urban African-American populations tend to break down. Philadelphia, PA:Temple University Press. In addition, whereasall southerners had reason to be angry at the Federal government overReconstruction, southern African-Americans could now realize that they hadto make common cause with northern African-Americans in order to haveallies in their struggle for full political rights and equality withinAmerican society. It was linked to the southern plantations by theriver traffic, and a large proportion of its population, both white andAfrican-American, was southern-born. In black Cincinnati there appearedto be substantial clustering by color, which grew in the decades before theCivil War." In the four Cincinnati wards with the largest African-Americanpopulations (amounting to 69 percent of the city's total African-Americans), mulattoes, who were 6 percent of the African-Americanpopulation, were overrepresented in two of the wards and greatlyunderrepresented in one ward. 13 ). By 186 the pattern had intensified: in thefive wards with the largest African-American populations, mulattoes (5 percent of all African-Americans) were overrepresented (being 6 , 63, and85 percent) in three wards, significantly underrepresented (being 3 and 4 percent) in two wards (Horton, 1993, p. 199-2 1), as well as on the pervasiveness of beliefin or influence by the conglomerate Catholic/West African religion thatevolved in the West Indies, that was imported by fugitives or emigrantsfrom the Caribbean islands into New Orleans and Louisiana, and that hasusually been called Vodoun or Voodoo (Blassingame, 1973, pp. This pattern was further reinforced by the sexual imbalance in thecity's population: there were far more African-American females than males,and far more white males than white females. E., Jr. (1991). In Boston, the percentage of southern-born African-Americans ranged from 17 to 24 percent before the Civil War, and mulattoesreached a peak of 37 percent of the African-American population by 186 ,which was roughly the same percentage as in the New England and MiddleAtlantic states generally. The activist elite that emerged . As a result, throughout the South,free African-Americans in skilled occupations in both the antebellum andpostbellum periods were much more likely to be of mixed ancestry than ofpure African descent. This pattern thus breaks down thedistinctions that Berlin draws between the three regions. Horton, J. Examination of specific communities within his three regionsshows that there was no one, or even three, fixed communal or individualidentities among African-American freemen during the antebellum period. Berlin's perspective is that there was significant continuitybetween the antebellum and postbellum African-American communities in eachof his three regions. A major regional distinction between North and South was in terms ofrelative political and economic freedoms. 168). Alexanderargues that the Hunt family maintained its identification with the largerAfrican-American community out of a sense of loyalty engendered by thefamily's experience in maintaining its own identity as a family during thedifficult years both before and after the Civil War. A. All the authors consulted seem to agree that manumission tendedstrongly to be preferential. For example, in 186 , over 6 percent ofthe free African-Americans in the North lived in cities, but only 35percent of those in the South did, which is further offset by the fact thatabout 53 percent of free African-Americans in the Lower South lived in thelargely mixed ancestry communities of the large cities (Berlin, 1976, p.3 ). was smaller but far more cohesive than the earlier group. By 186 , it had become virtually impossible forAfrican-Americans to live outside these two wards, and so the mulattoes,now 37 percent of the African-American population, were less likely to beable to live at a distance from their darker brothers. He places special emphasis on the importance of Roman Catholicism, and thefact that the Catholic churches refused to segregate their congregations(Blassingame, 1973, pp. This relative tolerance meant that an active political life wasoften the best career opportunity for free African-Americans, first withinand as spokesmen fort the Abolitionist movement, and then later within theRepublican party (Berlin, 1976, p. However, since thefamily was also partly of Cherokee origin, it had an additionaldisincentive against identifying with the white society that had forced theCherokee nation out of its homeland and along the Trail of Tears toOklahoma. In Boston, African-Americans tended to live in the Fifth and Sixthwards; mulattoes, 21 percent of the African-American population, made up 48and 14 percent of the African-American populations of these two wards,respectively, in 185 . Unlike the African-American communities in most northerncities, the Philadelphia community was relatively wealthy, like those inthe South, and because their economic prosperity depended on good relationswith the larger white population, the Philadelphia African-Americans weremuch less identified with the antislavery and abolitionist movements thanwere northern African-Americans in general. Place as well as time also influenced their experiences. In the North, freed slavesenjoyed a fair degree of political freedom but a great deal of economicdeprivation, since they were perceived as economic competitors by whitelaborers, but were not numerous enough to be perceived as a politicalthreat. The fact that New Orleans and Louisiana contained French-speakingmulattos, blacks, and whites created a "Creole" caste that cut acrossracial lines. The great and deciding factor behind African-American slavery in theUnited States was, of course, the antebellum system of agriculturalplantations in the South. 25 -269). The evolution ofa detailed vocabulary to label degrees of racial mixture (mulatto,quadroon, octaroon, etc.) is a clear index of the social importance of suchdistinctions in American society at that time, an importance whose fadingis indicated by the fact that such terms have almost vanished from thegeneral American vocabulary since at least the Civil Rights and Black Powermovements of the 196 s. This essay investigates Ira Berlin's thesis (1974, 1976) that freeNegroes in the antebellum United States formed a caste distinct from freewhites and black slaves, and that this caste contained three distinctregional subcastes, in the North, the Upper South, and the Lower South.The investigation, using more recent and more detailed historiography, willconsider whether Berlin's categories remain viable, whether they need to bereplaced in toto, or whether they need merely further elaboration, and, ifso, what sorts of elaboration will be needed. The free Negro in the New Orleans economy,185 -186 . Blassingame perceives great continuity betweenthe antebellum and postbellum African-American elites of New Orleans.However, to some extent he does also contradict Berlin, since he emphasizesthe extent to which New Orleans' originally French culture distinguishedits society, both black and white, from that of other Southern port cities. 161-162, 166, 179-18 ). The economic freedom of the blacks depended ontrade with and employment by the whites, who were quite suspicious that thefree blacks might be inciting slaves to rebel; such suspicions had to beavoided at all costs. . He comments that "The roleof the mulatto differed from one region to another in the North just as itdid in the South. . 124). Slaves without masters: The free Negro in theantebellum South. As Winch says, from 1787 to 1848, the leadership of the African-American community in Philadelphia did not encounter any serious oppositionto its authority from within their community, partly because of theirpaternalistic care for the community, partly because it was not a closedclique and so could co-opt the talents of newcomers who might otherwisehave formed an opposition group. In the four Southern cities with the largestpopulation of freemen, the percentage of mulattos in certain occupationscould reach ten times their percentage of either the free black or thetotal African-American population. Similarly, "by 186 mulattoes in the lower South accountedfor only about 9 percent of the slave population but for three-quarters ofthe free blacks," and the proportion was even more disparate in fivesouthern states (Horton, 1993, p. This latter pattern wasmost common in areas, especially the North, where slavery was not ofsignificant economic importance, and it especially intensified during theperiods of religious revivalism known as the Great Awakenings. But when those interests were diametrically opposed, theleadership faced some difficult decisions. However, there was feuding within its ownranks as "too many able men and women aspired to the limited positions ofinfluence within Philadelphia's black community" (Winch, 1988, p. . As a result, a system ofcommon-law marriage called plaçage between white men and African-Americanwomen (especially the quadroons and octaroons) grew up, and even thoughinterracial marriage had been made illegal, violations of that law were notactively sought out nor punished severely if discovered by chance orbecause of someone's complaint (Blassingame, 1973, pp. Of this last group, 4 percent had been free beforethe war, 96 percent were literate, and 186 of its members had acquired realestate holdings worth $1, or more. Ambiguous lives: Free women of color inrural Georgia, 1789-1879. . In addition, one could make out a case that all southerncities resembled one another more than they resembled the rural South, andthat a distinction between urban and rural South might provide a morecoherent picture of African-American social structures than does adistinction between Upper South and Lower South. In other areas of the country free persons of color were more concentrated, and documentation of their lives has been more accessible. This balancing act had alwaysbeen difficult, and by 1848 the leadership divided into two. African-Americansand whites of similar economic and/or social status tended to live togetherin mixed neighborhoods, and although African-Americans were excluded fromthe exclusively white organizations that held the reins of real politicalpower, whites usually did attend events and gatherings that in other citieswould typically have been exclusively nonwhite. That is, a slaveowner was much more likely tofree a slave whom he knew personally, such as his mistress and theirchildren, than one who was merely a face in the crowd. With perhaps rare individual exceptions, mostly of persons withmixed ancestry in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, allpersons of African descent continued to arrive in the British colonies asslaves until the slave trade was ended after the American RevolutionaryWar. (1994). In addition, African-Americans who continued to be employed by and often to live with theirformer masters in what was then a predominantly rural society were kept inisolation from one another in this way, and thus had no means by which toevolve a community of their own. (1976). TheHunts were often so light-skinned that many of them could easily have"passed for white," and yet only one, who became a professor at theUniversity of California at Berkeley, is known to have done so. . . Beyond that, in the Lower South the mixed-ancestrysubcaste enjoyed what almost amounted to economic autonomy within their owncommunities. 299). Philadelphia's black elite: Activism,accommodation, and the struggle for autonomy, 1787-1848. 132-133). The general perspective arrived at here is that Berlin's categoriesneed detailed elaboration within each of his three major regions. Black over white: Negro political leadership inSouth Carolina during Reconstruction. These differences arose primarily from theeconomic, social, cultural, and demographic differences between theseregions. In contrast, former slaves who lived in or migrated to cities didbegin forming communities of their own, with their own economic and socialinstitutions, but the overall pattern of these communities, according toBerlin, differed greatly between the three major regions that heidentifies. rejecting the attempts of whites to determine how they exercised their authority, . Holt, T. One maynote that Reinders (1965) also seems to corroborate Blassingame'sdescription of New Orleans. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, African-Americansgradually started becoming free, sometimes simply by saving enough money topurchase their freedom as a strictly economic transaction, but sometimesbecause the conscience of a white slaveowner would bother him enough thathe would free his slaves as a matter of principle. One may presume that the freedom was appreciated, but in practice itwas often only a legal technicality, and the working conditions of such"freed" slaves were often not at all improved. 3 1). References Alexander, A. . Journal of Social History, 9 (3), 297-318. This followed the general pattern thatnorthern cities were almost always more racially segregated than southerncities. For example, Horton (1993, p. However, the general trend everywhere was for African-Americans to be gradually and steadily more ghettoized, as had certainlybecome obvious by the end of the nineteenth century. What is perhaps most impressive about Alexander's historiographicresearch in the context of this paper is that the life experience of thisfamily, and especially of its women, simply do not fit into Berlin'scategorical description of African-American life in the Lower South. 2 -2 1). In general, Holt and Powers do not specifically contradict Berlin'sconcepts, but they do describe a more complex society than Berlinenvisioned. 135). W. Mulattoes were generally better off than darker African-Americans inall three cities, but enjoyed a great occupational advantage over theirdarker brethren only in Cincinnati, where southern traditions and localeconomic conditions allowed African-Americans to be employed in the skilledoccupations they were excluded from in Boston and Buffalo. As a result, thepostbellum Upper South resembled the North in the degree to which African-Americans lived in communities segregated from whites, but resembled theLower South in the kinds of occupations and sources of economic improvementaccessible to African-Americans. In the antebellum Upper South, wealthy African-Americans were "black"rather than mulatto, and tended to be slaveowners themselves. L. agitated for the recognition of the civil and political rights of blacks in Pennsylvania. As aresult, by 186 , about half of the free African-American population in theUnited States lived in the North, even though the great majority of theAfrican-American population of the United States was in the South (Berlin,1976, p. The "poor blacks" were concentrated in "Bucktown" onthe east of the city; the mulattoes were concentrating on the west of thecity. Throughout the United States, both before and after the Civil War,African-Americans were everywhere at best second-class citizens, but therewere great differences from region to region in what sort of restrictionsof rights and privileges (relative to those enjoyed by free whites) African-Americans were subjected to, and in what sort of personal and communalidentities they evolved. . However, much of this apparent difference derives from the fact thatBerlin's is a traditionally "thin" description, whereas Alexander's, inkeeping with recent paradigms in women's and ethnic studies, is richlythick, painting a vivid picture of real people as recalled by theireyewitnesses and family members. Because it depended on local conditions, generalizationsnecessarily misrepresent the place of mulattoes in black society" (Horton,1993, p. Their opponents . Over the years, societal upheavals and evolutions, as well as unique circumstances and familial rites of passage shaped the Hunt women. In Cincinnatimulattos, 6 percent of the African-American community, held 75 percent ofits wealth. 169). 3 3). That is, mulattoes, generally economically better off than persons ofpurer African descent, were tending to form their own communities withinthe larger African-American community, as the mulatto elites had done insouthern port cities. By 185 , for example, mulattoes constituted 65 percent of Virginia'sfree black population but only 22 percent of the state's slaves" (Horton,1993, p. . Further,slaveowners often took care to educate their mulatto children and get themtraining in some useful occupation. The mixed-ancestry subcaste in the port cities of the Lower South werealso largely of French background, were often French-speaking, and broughtmuch of French Caribbean culture with them in the 179 s, including RomanCatholicism. From the FAS arose the African Methodist Episcopal Church,whose importance in America, and not merely for African-Americans,continues to be obvious. Powers and Holt: South Carolina Powers (1994) gives a detailed social history of African-Americans inCharleston between 1822 and 1885. Winch, J. The labor-intensive cultivation of cotton(especially), tobacco, rice, and other crops could be carried out byslaves, no matter how reluctant and inefficient they may have been asworkers. Chicagoand London: University of Chicago Press. His description of the socioeconomicclasses among African-Americans in Charleston reveals a working class ofunskilled and semi-skilled laborers making up about 67 percent of theAfrican-American population; a middle class of skilled workers, making upabout 3 percent; and an upper class of 356 members in 188 , made up ofprofessionals, proprietors, and persons who had risen from the ranks of thetwo lower classes, and who constituted less than 2 percent of the African-American population. The actual number of African-Americans increased during the first half of the nineteenth century, butthe white population grew even faster, so that the African-Americanpopulation fell to about 2 percent of the total population by 186 (Horton,1993, p. Black Charlestonians: A social history,1822-1885. Berlin: Slaves Without Masters Persons of African descent first arrived in the British, Dutch,Spanish, and French colonies as slaves, after the settlers discovered thatthe native Americans simply could not successfully be enslaved and forcedto work. Horton concurs with thisobservation, sating, "Mulattoes were the slaves most likely to be freed. It has often been argued that, in cold, hard fact, EliWhitney's cotton gin did far more than either warfare or humanitarianism toend slavery as an economic institution. As she concludes, This story of an admittedly atypical family, covering about a century in the lives of a small group of people in middle Georgia, also illustrates the danger of compressing the "black experience" into a single picture . The members of this subcaste considered themselves to besuperior in many ways to slaves and poor blacks of relatively pure Africanancestry, and in practice often took sides against them with the whitesociety. 132) comments that indexes of dissimilarity showthere was as much geographic and social distance between mulattoes and"darker blacks" in Cincinnati as between whites and blacks in Brooklyn orSan Francisco. . 124)cites the work of Joel Williamson, who points out that "in the Upper South,where mulattoes were likely to have resulted from unions between blacks andnonelite whites, their status was lower than that of mulattoes in the lowerSouth, where they were generally the product of unions between slaves andthe planter aristocracy." Berlin does point out that it was the latter who were most likely tobe manumitted, and who therefore contributed to "lightening the complexion"of the free African-American population. 125). The preceding covers the highlights of Berlin's model. FreedAfrican-Americans formed local communities and unique personal identitiesthat cannot be forced into Berlin's neat categories, which remain useful inshowing how regional differences shaped the different outlooks of freed"Negroes," but are limited insofar as they impose a fixed identity on suchpersons. However, the mulatto percentage of the African-Americancommunity was 6 and 53 in 185 and 186 , respectively, far exceeding thenorthern urban average of 31 percent, and exceeded only by the 76 percentof mulattoes among free African-Americans in the lower South (reaching 9 percent in some southern port cities). In these ways Cincinnati was far more like many southerncities than it was like most northern cities (Horton, 1993, p. . . In any event, the common public concept of the antebellum SouthAfrican-Americans consisting primarily of huge plantations holding hundredsor thousands of African-American slaves is almost completely wrong. Onemight almost think that these two writers were describing different worlds. Further, although American society had certainly not become an openbanquet for African-Americans, there were many more occupations open toAfrican-Americans after the Civil War and Reconstruction than there everhad been before. Infact, the Southern system of almost total segregation of whites from"colored" people was an artifact of the reaction to Reconstruction; before187 , there was much more peaceful interpenetration, intermarriage, andeconomic cooperation among people of the poorer classes than there wasgenerally between approximately 187 and 196 (Berlin, 1974, pp. Often enough,as in times of common danger, the interests of the two communities could bereconciled. Black New Orleans: 186 -188 . Whereas their political activism had allowed free blacks in the Northto identify and make common cause with the slaves, the free blacks in theSouth could not do so. 5-6). In 1848 Philadelphia's African-Americanpopulation was about 2 , , 5 percent of the entire city's population, andsecond only to Baltimore's African-American community in size (Winch, 1988,pp. Horton (1993, p. Free people of color: Inside the African-American Community. limited the scope of their activism and abandoned any cause that they believed would provoke a hostile reaction from whites. In the South, but not as clearly in the North, persons of mixedancestry generally formed a subcaste considered socially superior to"black" persons but socially inferior to whites in general. However, itwas not then and is not now completely clear whether a wealthy mulatto wasin practice treated as being socially inferior to all poor whites. Especially in the South, and especially in suchformerly French areas as New Orleans, persons of mixed descent (largelythough not exclusively offspring or descendants of the offspring ofslaveowners and their African "mistresses") clearly tended to form asubcaste separate from that of "black" slaves or freemen. .. There continues to be scholarly debate over whether this systemwas ever economically sound, compared to what might have been possible byuse of free and therefore much more efficient labor, but a consensus onthis issue is difficult to reach because of a lack of sufficient hardeconomic data. Washington: The Smithsonian Institute Press. Inaddition, this elite struggled with the tension inherent in its role asmediator between the white and African-American communities. One can thus see that within the space of about a decade theleadership of the Philadelphia African-American community managed totransform itself and its community from great resemblance to a laissez-faire Lower South elite into a force for African-American solidarity. Although this was apparently generally true for theNorth, Schweninger demonstrates that almost all affluent African-Americansin the South were so because of their ties to the overall Southernsocioeconomic system. (1974). C. This greater access to education and toskilled occupations also resulted in the pattern during the Reconstructionera that the new African-American leadership in the South was dominated byAfrican-Americans who had been free before the Civil War, and was dominatedespecially by mulattos, out of all proportion to their percentage in thetotal African-American population after the Civil War. 17-19). (1988). There were especially great differences between these regionsin the degree to and rate at which freed slaves were segregated andghettoized, or instead lived in mixed communities with persons of the sameeconomic class. Prosperous blacks in the South, 179 -188 .American Historical Review, 95 (Feb.), 31-55. (1977). The Jim Crow system did force all southern people of color to beginthinking of themselves as constituting a coherent social body, as hadalways been more or less the situation in the North. In contrast, in the South, colored freemen lacked almost all politicalrights, but a great deal of economic freedom, since they were numerousenough to be a political threat, as manifested during Reconstruction, butwere allowed to dominate certain fields of labor that were considered to be"colored work," such as agricultural labor, domestic work, and various semi-skilled and a few skilled occupations (Berlin, 1976, p. Urbana and Chicago: University ofIllinois Press. (1993). 13 ) argues that "Differences in the significance ofcolor is suggested by [differences] in the residential patterns within theblack communities of the three cities. (1973). . . The pattern, Horton says, was quite different in Boston and Buffalo.Buffalo faced eastward, linked to New York City via wagons and then via theErie Canal. Reinders, R. These new opportunities also began transforming African-American consciousness, and providing new bases and methods for socialorganizing. Its African-American population was largely northern-born, andonly a third had been born in the South; likewise, mulattoes were onlyabout 23 percent of the African-American population in 185 and 186 (Horton, 1993, p. Blassingame, J. Powers, B. Thenetworks of affluent mulatto families that had formed a distinct subcastebetween whites and darker African-Americans in the Lower South of theantebellum period proceeded to unravel and disappear during theReconstruction period. (199 ). Holt (1979) describes South Carolina and henceCharleston very much as Powers does, adding an observation that slavesocieties, as in Jamaica, seem always to develop a mulatto leadership (p.67). 3 6). Schweninger: Prosperous Blacks in the South Schweninger (199 ) also tends to undermine some of Berlin'sassumptions. 131). However, the nature of these "ghettos" or geographically circumscribedAfrican-American communities also differed greatly between and withinregions, partly because of economics, partly as a function of whether thefreed slaves were of almost pure African descent or were instead of mixedracial backgrounds. The Free African Society had been founded in Philadelphia in 1787,and became the center of African-American political and social life, soonjoined by the Prince Hall Lodge, the first African-American Freemason Lodgein America. Some were even slaveowners themselves. One group of activists resolved to conform to the white concept of black leadership . Alexander also deals extensively with the question of how African-Americans formed their own sense of personal and/or communal identity. . Alexander: Ambiguous Lives Alexander's thickly rich description of the generations of the Huntfamily demonstrates how different lives could be within the overallAfrican-American population. This linguistic caste therefore tended to contribute to NewOrleans' having much less social segregation than even other Southerncities, and so far less than in typical Northern cities. For example,in 1855 only 12.5 percent of free African-Americans in New York City workedin skilled trades, whereas in 186 in Charleston, SC, 76 percent did(Berlin, 1976, p. Thepercentage of Southern slaveowners who owned more than a few slaves issmall, and that of those who owned a hundred or more slaves is quite tiny.In the South, as throughout the United States, the vast majority of slaveswere owned by small farmers, by small businessmen, or as domestic help inindividual households, and the general pattern that gradually developed wasfor such slaveowners to free their slaves but continue to employ them aslegally free labor. Further, within this upper classthere was an "aristocracy" defined by membership in several exclusivebenevolent societies that limited their membership to either the antebellumfree brown elite or their descendants; the patriarch of such societies wasthe Brown Fellowship Society, which had been founded in 179 (Powers, 1994,pp. [It] emerged as the true leaders of the black community in the 185 s and eventually mobilized that community in support of the Union cause (Winch, 1988, p. As a result, when that system was destroyed by theCivil War, the fortunes of African-Americans were destroyed as well. (1965). 152-153). Winch: Philadelphia's Black Elite According to Winch (1988), Philadelphia's African-American eliteapparently resembled the African-American elites of the Lower South morethan any other group in the North. 125). In Buffalo in 185 , 96 percent of the city's mulattoes lived inthe Fourth Ward, the largest and most affluent of the city's African-American wards, and were underrepresented or completely absent from wardswhere poor African-Americans lived; any pattern is harder to describe for186 because of an increase in the number of wards and redrawing of allward boundaries (Horton, 1993, pp. Cincinnati was a northern city with clearly southern economic andsocial orientations. If this paper is not what you are looking for, you can search again: Search for: or Click here to request an essay written just for you.