WILLIAM WHIPPER HDT WHAT? INDEX WILLIAM WHIPPER WILLIAM WHIPPER 1804 The Underground Railroad was “incorporated” in Columbia, Pennsylvania after General Thomas Boudes, a slaveholder, declined to surrender an escaped slave to authorities. The New Jersey legislature enacted “An act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery” (P.L. 1804, chap. 103, p. 251). This law required the registration of births of slaves’ children born after July 4, 1804 and declared such children to be “free,” but bound as servants to the owners of their mothers for a period of 25 years for males and 21 years for females. No provision was made for slaves born before July 4, 1804, slaves such as Betsey Stockton who had been born in Princeton as the property of Robert Stockton, a local attorney, in 1798, who thus at this point was about six years of age. (She would be presented to Stockton’s daughter and son-in-law, the Reverend Ashbel Green, then President of Princeton College, as a gift. In that new capacity, she would be permitted to attend evening classes at the Princeton Theological Seminary, manumitted, and accepted into membership by the American Board of Commissions for Foreign Missionaries.) PRINCETON UNIVERSITY Subsequent to this legislation, no further legislation would be enacted in New Jersey substantially affecting the manumission of slaves. February 22, Wednesday: William Whipper was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania to Nancy, a black house slave, and her white slavemaster. His father would have him taught to read and write by the private tutor who educated his white half-siblings. The Trevithick, Richard Trevithick’s 2d steam locomotive, made the initial verified trip on rails of a motorized vehicle but collapsed the rails (hey, that’s something that can be fixed). It would be put to work in Pennydarnen, South Wales. Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 22nd of 2nd M 1804 / Many Mercies we receive from the Bountiful giver of all good things. And on my own part I acknowledge that both from within & without I receive more than I deserve. Afresh visitation of divine love, at this time attends my mind for which I desire to be thankful & merit a continuance thereof believing that humility of mind is a profitable & safe state to be in —— ———————————————————————————————— RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX WILLIAM WHIPPER WILLIAM WHIPPER 1818 The last of the original grove of black walnut trees that had been preserved in Philadelphia, a tree in front of the office of J. Ridgeway opposite the State House on Chestnut Street, was in this year chopped down. Richard Harlan graduated at the medical department of the University of Pennsylvania. He would be employed as a teacher of anatomy in Joseph Parish’s private medical school, and publish a text on the human brain, ANATOMICAL INVESTIGATIONS. He would practice as a physician in Philadelphia. A group of manumitted persons, from Henrico County, Virginia, arrived in Columbia, Pennsylvania. The citizens of Columbia began a Columbia Abolition Society. Located just north of the Mason/Dixon line separating Pennsylvania from slaveholding states such as Maryland, Columbia would be important as a waystation on the Underground Railroad. HDT WHAT? INDEX WILLIAM WHIPPER WILLIAM WHIPPER 1820 Since Mr. and Mrs. Nathan Johnson and Mary “Polly” Johnson are not listed as having their own New Bedford household in the federal census of this year, clearly at that point they had not yet become householders. In all likelihood they were at that time living in the home of the young Quaker merchant Charles Waln Morgan, who moved from Philadelphia to New Bedford in that year, since in Mrs. Morgan’s journal we find the notation “Polly Johnson (came to us 1st mo 22nd 1820),” and since Rhoda Durfee, a child of Polly’s first marriage, and Nathan Johnson, also worked for the Morgans. Since 1790, the town of Columbia, Pennsylvania had included a proportionately large free black population, and by this point that community had grown to include 288 persons. HDT WHAT? INDEX WILLIAM WHIPPER WILLIAM WHIPPER 1821 Another group of manumitted persons, from Hanover County, Virginia, arrived in Columbia, Pennsylvania. After many years of lobbying by the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons, the Pennsylvania Legislature approved funding to build Eastern State Penitentiary to house 250 inmates. Four architects submitted designs for this massive new structure. The design of John Haviland, a British architect who had settled in Philadelphia, was selected, and he was awarded $100. William Strickland, whose design had been rejected, was hired to oversee the construction. The citizens of Philadelphia sent a petition in regard to bankruptcy to the federal Congress: The poor African, ...devoid of the intellectual torments which are produced by dependence and subjection, to a mind nurtured in the habits of liberty and intelligence, stands on ground far more enviable that than maintained by the insolvent debtor. (It is clear from the text of this 1821 petition that said “insolvent debtors” who were sending this missile off in the direction of the federal Congress, who although “nurtured in the habits of liberty and intelligence” were presently reduced to “dependence and subjection,” were all and only white people completely lacking in any recognition of or sympathy for the intellectual torments that come with being nonwhite in a racist culture.) Dr. Thomas Low Nichols, in FORTY YEARS OF AMERICAN LIFE, 1821-1861 (NY: Stackpole Sons, originally issued in 1864, reissued in 1937), would characterize the following four decades of his experience as a period of constant unsettled scratching and scraping to keep ahead of the Joneses. It is clear that, where he is speaking of “everyone” and of “all,” actually he is confining his attention to the American white people: Every one is tugging, trying, scheming to advance — to get ahead. It is a great scramble, in which all are troubled and none are satisfied. HDT WHAT? INDEX WILLIAM WHIPPER WILLIAM WHIPPER 1828 At the age of 24 William Whipper lectured about the commitment he had made to Christian non-resistance against offensive aggression (this address would be published in New-York in 1837). HDT WHAT? INDEX WILLIAM WHIPPER WILLIAM WHIPPER 1834 Nathan Johnson and the Reverend Jacob Perry, minister of the African Christian Church (New Bedford’s first black religious congregation — remember, Johnson had in 1822 petitioned the all-white Quakers for membership in the Religious Society of Friends, and had of course been utterly stonewalled on account of his race) and president of the New-Bedford Union Society (its first antislavery society, formed not by the all-white New Bedford Friends but by the local free people of color), attended the 5th National Negro Convention in Philadelphia. This Convention adopted a nonviolent declaration similar to the Declaration of Sentiments of the American Anti-Slavery Society, as written by half-black William Whipper of Pennsylvania. SERVILE INSURRECTION In this year John Brown was acting as a postmaster under President Andrew Jackson, at Randolph, Pennsylvania — evidently this job was a political plum issued as a reward for support. He wrote his brother Frederick Brown that he purposed to make active war upon the institution of human slavery, by bringing together some “first-rate abolitionist families” and by undertaking the education of young blacks. If once the Christians of the free states would set to work in earnest teaching the blacks, the people of the slaveholding states would find themselves constitutionally driven to set about the work of emancipation immediately. This letter was officially franked and sent for free by Postmaster Brown, as was then the practice. Stephen Smith joined with David Ruggles, John Peck, Abraham Shadd, and John B. Vashon, who were the initial black agents for Freedom’s Journal and later for The Emancipator, in soliciting subscriptions and collecting what were termed “arrearages.” ABOLITIONISM HDT WHAT? INDEX WILLIAM WHIPPER WILLIAM WHIPPER Spring: From this point until early in 1835, Jones Very would be chewing and stewing over George Gordon, Lord Byron’s CHILDE HAROLD. White rioting began in a number of American municipalities, such as Columbia, Pennsylvania, in which there had come to be a black presence. Summer: White rioting that had begun that spring in a number of Northern cities, inclusive of the town of Columbia, was continuing into the summer. The number of black residents in that locale of Pennsylvania had been increasing. To some white residents they were a necessary evil because they provided a labor force for lumber merchants along the river, especially during the busy season, but for other white residents and in other seasons of the year, some white residents were considering them an unnecessary evil. Traveling to England, Robert Purvis was equipped with letters of introduction from William Lloyd Garrison to a number of British reformers including Daniel O’Connell and Sir Thomas Foxwell Buxton. A passport had been first denied, and had then been granted only through the intervention of the President, Andrew Jackson. Purvis was probably the first black American to receive a US passport. When the passport controversy hit the gazettes, a Virginia slaveholder who was ticketed to travel on same ship to England pressured the shipping line to deny Purvis passage, and he was forced to take passage on another vessel. (On the return trip Purvis would deliberately obtain a ticket on the same vessel as that Virginian in order to eat and drink with this racist and his cronies and, tall and handsome, dance with the Southern white ladies — on the last day of the voyage he would with glee and aplomb disclose his racial identity to his new white “friends.”)1 1. For a comparison situation, during our own timeframe: The Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.