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Black Sailors During the War of 1812 Lauren Mccormack, 2005 Revised by Kate Monea and Carl Herzog, 2020

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Black Sailors During the War of 1812 Lauren Mccormack, 2005 Revised by Kate Monea and Carl Herzog, 2020 Black Sailors During the War of 1812 Lauren McCormack, 2005 Revised by Kate Monea and Carl Herzog, 2020 A publication of the USS Constitution Museum, Boston © 2020 USS Constitution Museum | usscm.org Black Sailors During the War of 1812 Lauren McCormack, 2005 Revised by Kate Monea and Carl Herzog, 2020 CONTENTS Introduction .............................................................1 Free Blacks in the Post-Revolutionary American North ........................2 Free Blacks in Boston, Massachusetts ........................................5 Black Participation in the Maritime Trade ....................................7 Life at Sea for Black Sailors in the early United States Navy ....................10 Black Sailors on USS Constitution ..........................................17 A publication of the USS Constitution Museum, Boston © 2020 USS Constitution Museum | usscm.org Introduction At the beginning of the nineteenth century, free black men from the northeastern United States, struggling to make their way in a highly discriminatory American society, went to sea in the merchant marine and the U.S. Navy, including aboard USS Constitution. By no means did shipboard life completely extract them from the prejudices of a white-dominated culture, but it often provided them with better opportunities than they had on land. Like their fellow white sailors, black seamen in the Early Republic could count on stable pay with the benefit of room and board. For many, sea service and its pay provided a path to a better life ashore. Because race was not specifically noted in U.S. Navy personnel records at the time, much remains unknown about these men. However, a survey of the status of life for free blacks on shore sheds light on why some may have found seafaring an attractive opportunity. Moreover, anecdotal evidence, research into individual sailors, and ex- trapolation from British Prisoner of War records provides a better window into the lives of free black sailors in the War of 1812. © 2020 USS Constitution Museum | usscm.org 1 Free Blacks in the Post-Revolutionary American North Following the American Revolutionary War, there was a growing opposition to- ward slavery in the northern United States. While Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont quickly outlawed slavery, the institution held fast in southern New England and the Mid-Atlantic States.1 Even among northern abolitionists, though, there was a distinct separation between anti-slavery beliefs and notions of equality. These disparate forces and opinions determined the social and economic environ- ments in which free northern blacks conducted their lives in the Early Republic and Antebellum north. The end of the Revolutionary War did not mark the end of slavery for all the blacks in northern states. Those who were emancipated, though, faced a difficult assimila- tion into the white-dominated, free society. Freed blacks often stayed in the house- holds of their former masters, continuing to act as domestic servants or laborers.2 Unskilled free blacks who wished to leave the site of their former enslavement had to fend for themselves, finding their own employment or artisanal training. Even blacks who had learned skills while enslaved found it difficult to find work in their trades since most white employers would hire blacks only for unskilled, menial jobs.3 This unofficial restriction of free blacks to menial jobs was a result, in part, of north- ern whites’ racial mindset. Even those who supported emancipation, such as Bos- ton’s Harrison Gray Otis, mistrusted blacks, feared them, or generally felt disdain for them.4 According to Winthrop D. Jordan, white northerners wanted equality in law but not in society, and continued to view blacks as little more than “beasts of bur- den.”5 Perhaps the greatest influence on northern whites’ attitudes towards blacks was Thomas Jefferson’sNotes on the State of Virginia, an extremely popular book at 1 In practice, slavery in New Hampshire lasted for at least 15 years after the American Revolutionary War ended. See: Mark J. Sammons and Valerie Cunningham, Black Portsmouth (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2004), 77. 2 Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), 238. 3 Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America, 245. 4 Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, VA by the University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 328. 5 Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812, 329 and quoted in Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812, 322. © 2020 USS Constitution Museum | usscm.org 2 the time, in which Jefferson argues for the inferiority of blacks.6 The persistent fear of slave revolts also tainted northern whites’ view of their black neighbors. It did not seem to matter that free northern blacks did not participate in slave uprisings in the south; the mere threat of violence slowly chipped away at the Revolutionary ideology of equality that drove the post-war abolitionist and integra- tionist movements.7 The fear and prejudice led to widespread segregation and discrimination. For the most part, blacks were kept out of local schools or were forced to form their own separate educational institutions that either did not receive public funding or re- ceived less than white schools in the area. Some whites considered black education a waste of time and money while others did not believe that blacks had a right to education. There was also great resentment among whites toward the idea of a black franchise.8 As a result of this white mindset, blacks were very aware of their public image and often encouraged their communities to maintain and project moral, upright, hard-working, and typically “American” lifestyles. Blacks strove for this ideal so as not to provoke whites against them, who, in turn, might take away their already meager rights.9 By the end of the War of 1812, black leaders began to cite black Americans’ war records as proof of blacks’ patriotism, usefulness, and rights to full citizenship. Black men, such as William C. Nell, Russell Parrot, and others, lectured and published works celebrating black participation in the American Revolutionary War and the War of 1812.10 Nevertheless, leading up to and during the War of 1812, blacks struggled to over- come the obstacles placed in their way by whites. Faced with stiff competition from an influx of Irish immigrants and a general desire on the part of whites to keep blacks in the same or similar subservient positions they held as slaves, blacks had difficulty finding a place in society. Often times, blacks found it necessary to- seg regate themselves by forming their own communal institutions because of the in- equality practiced in white-controlled religious, educational, and social organiza- tions. Throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, blacks in the major cities throughout the north established black churches, schools, mutual aid 6 Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812, 429. 7 Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812, 329, 375, 401. 8 Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812, 355, 413. 9 Elizabeth Rauh Bethel, The Roots of African-American Identity: Memory and History in Free Antebellum Communities (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 88, 89. 10 Bethel, The Roots of African-American Identity: Memory and History in Free Antebellum Communities, 91, 92. © 2020 USS Constitution Museum | usscm.org 3 societies, and social organizations. In an era before strict racial or even class-based housing segregation, blacks often chose to congregate around these institutions, forming, as a result, strong, viable, and relatively independent black communities within and amongst their white neighbors in the north’s major urban centers. During the first decades of the nineteenth century, free blacks flocked to northern cities in the hopes of finding, among other things, greater employment opportuni- ties. As a result, the major northern cities became home to large, free black com- munities, where blacks could be educated, participate in safe and inviting religious activities, and interact with other free blacks in their own social institutions. That is not to say that northern free blacks were isolationists. They worked and even lived alongside whites, and many no doubt had some form of regular interaction with whites be it socially, economically, or both. © 2020 USS Constitution Museum | usscm.org 4 Free Blacks in Boston, Massachusetts In most respects, it seems that Boston’s black experience in the first two decades of the nineteenth century largely resembled that of other large, coastal cities, such as Philadelphia and New York. However, Massachusetts was the first state to abolish slavery, doing so in 1783. Therefore, when the War of 1812 began, most of the black seamen from Massachusetts had been born free or spent only a few of their early years in slavery. In this way, Boston’s blacks differed from those in New York City, Portsmouth, and the southern cities, where the specter of slavery remained either physically present or a part of very recent memory. Regardless, Boston’s black population of approximately 1,200 faced discrimination in many forms, particularly in the limited opportunities concerning employment.11 Most blacks were relegated to service positions. Laborer and other unskilled occu- pations by far comprised the majority of black Bostonians’ job titles, though some blacks found skilled work as, among other things, carpenters, painters, and bar- bers.12 Boston’s blacks, regardless of occupation, tended to cluster in two areas of town, the North End and the north slope of Beacon Hill. The North End neighborhood of Boston was a convenient locale for those blacks who worked on or near the docks.
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