"A superior colored man ... and a Scotch woman": interracial marriages in New York City, 1850-1870.

AuthorDabel, Jane

When interviewed by a pension official in 1893, Ellen Davis stated that she was fifty-nine years old, employed as a washerwoman, and that she was born in Scotland. The widow spoke affectionately of her husband John Davis, a veteran of Company G of the 26th United States Colored Infantry who had passed away in 1887 at the age of seventy. The two had married at their home in Brooklyn in 1879 and settled down to raise Ellen's three children from her previous marriage. She recalled, "I had three children by my first husband [.H]is name was James Ronald [and] he was a Scotsman. I married him in Chanden, Scotland in 1859. We went to Australia within two weeks after we were married.... and lived on a sheep farm.... I lived there two years when his health began to fail and we moved back to Scotland." Her husband died soon thereafter and Ellen Davis moved to New York City in 1874 to stay with her cousin. Three years later, she met John Davis who worked as a sawyer in a mill. The Davis couple was well-liked in their neighborhood. According to a local official, "He was a superior colored man, a sawyer by trade, and was considered an honest and truthful man.... [she] is a Scotch woman [who] speaks with a strong Scotch accent [and] appears to [be] honest and truthful." (1)

The marriage of John and Ellen Davis was one between a white woman and an African-American man, a Scottish immigrant and a native New Yorker, and two working class laborers. While one might assume that such relationships were rare in the nineteenth century, a close examination of United States Manuscript Census Records in New York City for 1850, 1860, and 1870 indicates that such interracial, cross-cultural marriages constituted five to seven percent of married couples living in predominantly black neighborhoods. The number of interracial marriages varied over the twenty year period under investigation but skyrocketed following the Civil War. Census records indicate that there were 29 interracial marriages in 1850, 19 in 1860, and 116 in 1870. The vast majority of such relationships occurred between black men and white women often between an African-American male born in the United States and a woman who had immigrated from Europe, most of whom were Irish, Scottish, or English. (2) While mixed-race couples in different regions and in different eras faced tremendous resistance, such couples were not uncommon in mid-nineteenth-century New York City. Interracial couples often married in black churches in New York, worked in the city, sent their children to local African schools, and successfully interacted with government institutions, including pension officials, local court representatives, and census takers.

This article examines why such interracial relationships were not unusual to New York City from 1850 to 1870. A number of factors contributed to these unions. Interracial relationships met three criteria that reflected ideas about race, class, and gender during this era. First, these relationships were almost exclusively between immigrant women from Scotland and Ireland and native-born African-American men. They did not take on the taint of improper behavior because these immigrant women were not perceived to be "white." (3) Second, these relationships generally occurred between people of the same class background and between individuals who lived in close proximity to one another in working class neighborhoods. As a consequence, these relationships did not cross class lines and did not violate ideas about proper behavior within a certain class. Third, since these immigrant women were not held to middle class gender standards such liaisons did not infringe on ideals of proper female behavior in the mid-nineteenth century.

Scholars have long discussed the incidence of interracial marriage in the nineteenth century. Such studies have usually focused on the prevalence of such unions in the American South. These works have examined how such relationships fit into the racial caste system in an agricultural society and how they shed light on ideas regarding proper gender roles. (4) As part of the wave of new scholarship on such relationships, historian Martha Hodes, in White Women, Black Men (1997), argues that interracial relationships in the South were not always illicit affairs. She proves, in fact, that such relationships did not meet with widespread public and legal resistance until the 1850s. (5) In contrast, an examination of interracial relationships in northern cities during the nineteenth century raises many issues unique to the North. An analysis of interracial relationships in the North calls into question ideas about immigrant and black interactions, highlights the experiences of people from similar backgrounds, and sheds light on gender roles for women from all class backgrounds. (6)

During the mid-nineteenth century, African Americans flooded into New York City. With the passage of the 1827 Gradual Emancipation Act, which put an end to slavery in New York, free African Americans founded schools, published newspapers, built churches, and raised funds for community institutions. Although most blacks were relegated to jobs as waiters, servants, and laborers, a small black middle class emerged, comprised of teachers, ministers, and doctors. In the antebellum era, African Americans agitated for political rights in spite of a state law that required property in order to vote, virtually disfranchising all black men. Black New Yorkers knew that racism limited their lives and labors but they also believed that this discrimination was temporary. They clung to the hope that the end of Southern slavery would improve their economic, social, and political position. (7)

New York City was a hotbed of black activism where African Americans battled the twin evils of Northern racism and Southern slavery. The community fought for the civil rights of all African Americans and believed that no black was truly free as long as the institution of slavery existed anywhere in the United States. New York City was home to one of the largest free black populations in the mid-nineteenth century with 13,815 blacks residing in the city in 1850, 12,574 in 1860, and 13,072 in 1870. (8) Blacks lobbied for emancipation through protests, boycotts of items produced by slave labor, and the publication of pamphlets and newspapers. In 1827, Samuel Cornish founded the nation's first black newspaper, Freedom's Journal, to promote the abolition of slavery. Articles in his newspaper described the horrors of slavery in an effort to garner support for the abolitionist cause. In 1835, black New Yorkers organized the Committee of Vigilance, a community-based association to prevent the kidnapping of free blacks. The Committee sheltered Frederick Douglass after his escape from servitude in Maryland in 1838. It also Offered aid to many other fugitive slaves who sought anonymity in the crowded streets of the city. At the same time, a vocal group of black New Yorkers opposed colonization plans promoted by the American Colonization Society as well as the 1850 emigration proposal put forth by Martin Delany, a local black leader. African Americans in New York City viewed America as their home and believed that racism would end when the institution of slavery was abolished. (9)

Meanwhile, African Americans had to cope with a wave of immigrants from Ireland that entered the city and began to compete with the black population for jobs, housing, and political power. Between 1821 and 1850, one million Irish immigrated to New York. (10) In New York City, the Irish immigrant population jumped from 133,730 in 1850 to 204,000 in 1860. Indeed, by 1855 one-quarter of the population of Manhattan and Brooklyn was born in Ireland. (11) The Frederick Douglass Paper took note of the impact of this large number of Irish immigrants on the city's black population:

The floods of emigration that have flowed in upon us for the last ten or fifteen years--in fact, directly on the heels of the emancipation acts, by the different northern States, were evidently opened with the view of supplying the places of the colored people, and have ever since tended greatly to that end. (12) As Irish immigrants flooded into New York City, they settled in the poorest neighborhoods, primarily in the Fourth and Sixth Wards, which also had high proportions of black populations. Irish immigrants quickly found work in the lowliest jobs in the city, the only sector where they could find employment. Irish men overwhelmingly worked as laborers while women took jobs as domestic servants. These positions were most commonly held by blacks until the wave of Irish immigration pushed them out of such occupations and into lowlier jobs. The Irish in New York City built a strong community by establishing churches and benevolent societies. They also exercised their right to vote which was granted to all white men in 1827 and threw their support behind local Democrats. Irish soldiers also joined a volunteer militia--the 69th Infantry Regiment--to fight in the Civil War. (13)

Blacks and Irish immigrants lived together in New York City and, in many respects, did so peacefully. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, New York City's neighborhoods were racially heterogeneous and racial lines were quite fluid. (14) Class, rather than race, defined residential patterns prior to the Civil War. Nonetheless, certain neighborhoods had large clusters of blacks. African-American New Yorkers tended to reside on the Lower West Side of the city. Irish immigrants and blacks lived together in the Fourth and Sixth Wards. In 1851, city planners formed the Twentieth Ward from a section of the Sixteenth Ward. A large number of blacks subsequently moved to this neighborhood, located north of the original areas settled by blacks. In 1853, the Twenty-first and Twenty-second Wards were formed and, twenty years later, the city annexed the Twenty-third...

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