BOSTON’S AFRICAN MEETING HOUSE

(THE OLDEST STANDING IN THE USA)

And yet — in fact you need only draw a single thread at any point you choose out of the fabric of life and the run will make a pathway across the whole, and down that wider pathway each of the other threads will become successively visible, one by one. — Heimito von Doderer, DIE DÂIMONEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

AME AFRICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL

1783

November: The British vessel Peggy sailed out of Staten Island, New York for , with many former American slaves, freed in recognition of their labor services to the British army and in fulfilment of promises made, aboard. GOODBYE, COLUMBUS by Jill Lepore (The New Yorker, issue of 2006-05-08)

When America won its independence, what became of the slaves who fled for theirs?

What with the noise, the heat, and the danger of being forced back into , sometimes it’s good to get out of the city. Such, at least, was the assessment of Harry Washington, who, in July of 1783, made his way to the salty, sunbaked docks along New York’s East River and boarded the British ship L’Abondance, bound for Nova Scotia. A clerk dutifully noted his departure in the “,” a handwritten ledger listing the three thousand runaway slaves and free blacks who evacuated New York with the British that summer: “Harry Washington, 43, fine fellow. Formerly the property of General Washington; left him 7 years ago.” Born on River around 1740, not far from where he would one day die, Harry Washington was sold into slavery sometime before 1763. Twelve years later, in November, 1775, he was grooming his master’s horses in the stables at Mount Vernon when the royal governor of , Lord Dunmore, offered freedom to any slaves who would join His Majesty’s troops in suppressing the American rebellion. That December, , commanding the Continental Army in Cambridge, received a report that Dunmore’s proclamation had stirred the passions of his own slaves. “There is not a man of them but would leave us if they believed they could make their escape,” a cousin of Washington’s wrote from Mount Vernon, adding bitterly, “Liberty is sweet.” In August of 1776, just a month after delegates to the Continental Congress determined that in the course of human events it sometimes becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the bands that have connected them with another, Harry Washington declared his own independence by running away to fight with Dunmore’s all-black British regiment, wearing a uniform embroidered with the motto “Liberty to Slaves.” Liberty may not have been as sweet as he’d hoped. For most of the war, he belonged to an unarmed company known as the Black Pioneers, who were more or less garbagemen, ordered to “Assist in Cleaning the Streets & Removing all Nuisances being thrown into the Streets.” The Black Pioneers followed British troops under the command of Henry Clinton as they moved from New York to Philadelphia to Charleston, and, after the fall of Charleston, back to New York again, which is how Harry Washington came to HDT WHAT? INDEX

AME AFRICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL be in the city in 1783, and keen to leave before General Washington repossessed it, and him. No one knows how many former slaves had fled the United States by the end of the American Revolution. Not as many as wanted to, anyway. During the war, between eighty thousand and a hundred thousand (nearly one in five) left their homes, running from slavery to the freedom promised by the British, and betting on a British victory. They lost that bet. They died in battle, they died of disease, they ended up someplace else, they ended up back where they started, and worse off. (A fifteen-year-old girl captured while heading for Dunmore’s regiment was greeted by her master with a whipping of eighty lashes, after which he poured hot embers into her wounds.) When the British evacuated, fifteen thousand blacks went with them, though not necessarily to someplace better. From the moment that Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, in 1781, American allies reported seeing “herds of Negroes” fleeing through Virginia’s swamps of pine and cypress. A few made it to a warship that Washington, under the terms of the British surrender, had allowed to sail to New York. Some ran to the French, on the not unreasonable supposition that earning wages polishing shoes in Paris had to be better than planting tobacco in Virginia for nothing but floggings. “We gained a veritable harvest of domestics,” one surprised French officer wrote. Hundreds of Cornwallis’s soldiers and their families were captured by their former owners, including five of Thomas Jefferson’s slaves and two women owned by George Washington. Those who escaped raced to make it behind British lines before the slave catchers caught up with them. Pregnant women had to hurry, too, but not so fast as to bring on labor, lest their newborns miss their chance for a coveted “BB” certificate: “Born Free Behind British Lines.” As runaways flocked to New York, or Charleston, or Savannah, cities from which the British disembarked, their owners followed them. , an escaped slave from South Carolina, saw American slave owners “seizing upon their slaves in the streets of New York, or even dragging them out of their beds.” A Hessian officer reported, “Almost five thousand persons have come into this city to take possession again of their former property.” (It was at Washington’s insistence that the names of those who boarded British ships were recorded in the “Book of Negroes,” so that owners might later file claims for compensation.) In Charleston, after the ships were full, British soldiers patrolled the wharves to keep back the black men, women, and children who were frantic to leave the country. A small number managed to duck under the redcoats’ raised bayonets, jump off the wharves, and swim out to the last longboats ferrying passengers to the British fleet, whose crowded ships included the aptly named Free Briton. Clinging to the sides of the longboats, they were not allowed on board, but neither would they let go; in the end, their fingers were chopped off. But those who did leave America also left American history. Or, rather, they have been left out of it. Theirs is not an undocumented story (the “Book of Negroes” runs to three volumes); it’s just one that has rarely been told, for a raft of interesting, if opposing, reasons. A major one is that nineteenth-century African-American abolitionists decided that they would do better by telling the story of the many blacks who HDT WHAT? INDEX

AME AFRICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL fought on the patriot side during the Revolution, and had therefore earned for their race the right to freedom and full citizenship and an end to Jim Crow. “Not a few of our fathers suffered and bled” in the cause of American independence, Peter Williams, Jr., declared in a Fourth of July oration in New York in 1830. (Williams’s own father, who had joined American troops in defiance of his Loyalist master, later managed to purchase his freedom and went on to help found the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.) When the Boston abolitionist William Cooper Nell published “The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution,” in 1855, Harriet Beecher Stowe supplied an introduction: The colored race have been generally considered by their enemies, and sometimes even by their friends, as deficient in energy and courage. Their virtues have been supposed to be principally negative ones. This little collection of interesting incidents, made by a colored man, will redeem the character of the race from this misconception. Best not to mention those who fled to the British. Having abandoned the United States, they not only were of no use in redeeming “the character of the race”; they had failed to earn the “passport” to citizenship that Nell believed patriot service conferred. They were also too shockingly unfree to be included in grand nineteenth-century narratives of the Revolution as a triumph for liberty. As the historian Gary Nash observes in “The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution” (Harvard; $19.95), slavery is so entirely missing from those histories that “it would appear that the British and the Americans fought for seven years as if half a million African Americans had been magically whisked off the continent.” In 1891, the Harvard scholar John Fiske took notice of Dunmore’s proclamation in his two-volume “American Revolution,” only to dismiss it. “The relations between master and slave in Virginia were so pleasant,” Fiske wrote, that Britain’s “offer of freedom fell upon dull uninterested ears.” It wasn’t until Benjamin Quarles’s landmark “The Negro in the American Revolution,” in 1961, that what Harry Washington might have had to say about that became clear: Liberty is sweet. Many fine scholars have followed in Quarles’s wake, but it would be fair to say that their work has yet to challenge what most Americans think about the times that tried men’s souls. With no place in any national historical narrative, black refugees of the American Revolution have been set adrift. Perhaps, then, it is hardly surprising that they have been taken up recently not by American historians but by historians of the places they went to. Two new histories of their travels, the most ambitious yet, have just been published, one written by an Englishman, the other by an Australian. The British historian Simon Schama’s “Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves, and the American Revolution” (Ecco; $29.95) follows the exiles to Nova Scotia and but keeps London, and English antislavery activists, at its center; Cassandra Pybus’s “Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty” (Beacon; $26.95) follows them everywhere, including to HDT WHAT? INDEX

AME AFRICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL the Australian penal colony of Botany Bay; she teaches at the University of Sydney. Schama writes like no one so much as Dickens. Here is how he introduces the founder of England’s antislavery movement, leaving his brother’s house on Mincing Lane, “neither the worst nor the best address in the City of London,” in 1765: The door opened and out stepped an angular man looking older than his thirty years. His tall but meagre frame, hollow cheeks, lantern jaw and short curled wig gave him the air of either an underpaid clerk or an unworldly cleric; the truth is that Granville Sharp was something of both. Schama’s book is divided into two parts. The first part chronicles Sharp’s career. With close colleagues, including the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson and the former slave Olaudah Equiano, Sharp led Britain’s extraordinary campaign to put an end to what he called the “Accursed Thing”: human bondage. It took years, but they succeeded. England took a dramatic step toward abolishing slavery on its soil in 1772, in a landmark case in which a man named James Somerset won his freedom. In 1807, the British Parliament outlawed the slave trade. The following year, the U.S. Congress did the same. In other words, England banned domestic slavery decades before making it illegal for British merchants and ships’ captains to buy and sell slaves. The United States did the reverse, outlawing the overseas slave trade in 1808 but not declaring an end to slavery until Lincoln’s Proclamation, in 1863. Schama points out that news of the Somerset case, as much as Dunmore’s proclamation, is what led so many American slaves to flee to British lines during the American Revolution. They wrongly believed that the Somerset judgment’s nuanced and limited ruling meant that “as soon as any slave sets his foot on English ground he becomes free.” For one American refugee, the link between England and liberty was so close that he renamed himself British Freedom. Or consider “Yankee Doodle, or, The Negroes Farewell to America,” a minstrel song popular in London in the seventeen-eighties: Now farewell my Massa my Missey adieu More blows or more stripes will me e’er take from you... Den Hey! for old Englan’ where Liberty reigns Where Negroe no beaten or loaded with chains But, more often than not, the price of British freedom was poverty. “I am Thirty Nine Years of Age & am ready & willing to serve His Britinack Majesty,” Peter Anderson told a relief commission in London. “But I am realy starvin about the Streets.” At the beginning of the war, Anderson had left behind his wife and three children in Virginia to join Dunmore’s regiment. He was wounded, captured, and sentenced to be hanged. After six months as a prisoner, he escaped and foraged in the woods until he found his way back to the British Army. All this he endured only to land in London, reduced to begging. The commissioners were not sympathetic. “Instead of being sufferers of the wars,” they concluded, black veterans had benefitted from it. Penniless they might be, but they had “gained their liberty and therefore come with a very ill-grace to ask for the bounty of government.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

AME AFRICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL Not everyone who evacuated with the British sailed to England. Like thousands of white Loyalists, black Loyalists were relocated to Britain’s northern colonies: mostly to Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Ontario. Some fifteen hundred settled in Birchtown, Nova Scotia, making it the largest free black community in North America. It was also a disaster. By the time Harry Washington arrived there, in August of 1783, there was nothing to eat, it was too late to plant, and the topsoil was too thin for anything much to grow. In 1789, the settlers were still starving. Boston King reported, “Many of the poor people were compelled to sell their best gowns for five pounds of flour, in order to support life. When they had parted with all their clothes, even to their blankets, several of them fell down dead in the streets, thro’ hunger. Some killed and ate their dogs and cats.” Meanwhile, in London, Granville Sharp and his colleagues on the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor began making plans to send England’s beleaguered blacks to Africa. This seems now, as it did to many people then, a preposterous plan, as if the slave trade could somehow be undone by this reverse voyage, settling freed slaves just a stone’s throw from British slave- trading forts. While the emigrants waited on board ships in Portsmouth Harbor, the African-born writer and former slave Quobna Ottobah Cugoano warned that they “had better swim to shore, if they can, to preserve their lives and liberties in Britain, than to hazard themselves at sea ... and the peril of settling at Sierra Leone.” But sail they did. In May of 1787, nearly four hundred reached Sierra Leone, where they settled at a place they named Granville Town, and elected as their governor a runaway slave and Revolutionary War veteran from Philadelphia named Richard Weaver. Within five months, plagued by disease and famine, a hundred and twenty-two of the settlers were dead. And, just as Cugoano had predicted, some were kidnapped and sold into slavery all over again. In 1790, a local ruler burned Granville Town to the ground. That was not to be the end of it. In the second part of “Rough Crossings,” Schama turns to the journey of John Clarkson (“the ‘other’ Clarkson-second born, perfectly affable, sweet-tempered Johnny”), chosen by Sharp and the elder Clarkson to head a second attempt to settle Sierra Leone, this time with the “poor blacks” who had settled in Nova Scotia. In January, 1792, nearly twelve hundred black men, women, and children found berths on fifteen ships in Halifax Harbor. Among them were British Freedom and Harry Washington. Before the convoy left the harbor, Clarkson rowed from ship to ship, handing to each family a certificate “indicating the plot of land ‘free of expence’ they were to be given ‘upon arrival in Africa.’” The colony’s new capital, on the Sierra Leone peninsula, was called the Province of Freedom; it did not live up to its name. There was death: along with dozens of others, Boston King’s wife, Violet, died of “putrid fever” within weeks of arrival. There was intrigue: in 1792, Clarkson took what he thought would be a brief trip to England, but the colony’s directors, dissatisfied with his failure to turn a profit from plantation crops, never sent him back. And there was avarice: despite the promise of free land, Clarkson’s successors demanded exorbitant rents. “We wance did call it Free Town,” some weary settlers wrote to Clarkson in 1795, “but since your absence we have a HDT WHAT? INDEX

AME AFRICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL reason to call it a town of slavery.” By 1799, Sierra Leone’s settlers had grown so discontented, so revolutionary in their rejection of the colony’s tyrannical government, that they were, in the words of one London abolitionist, “as thorough Jacobins as if they had been trained and educated in Paris.” The next year, a group of rebels declared independence. They were crushed. Tried by a military tribunal, they were banished from Freetown to the other side of the Sierra Leone River. In their exile, they elected Harry Washington as their leader, just months after George Washington died at Mount Vernon, having freed his slaves in his will. Cassandra Pybus wants to rescue Harry Washington from the “callous indifference of history,” to call attention to what he shared with the first President of the United States: “a commitment to the transforming ideals of liberty and self- determination.” Schama is more interested in one of Harry Washington’s fellow-rebels. “Rough Crossings” begins by imagining British Freedom “scratching a living from the stingy soil” of Nova Scotia and ends with his exile outside the Province of Freedom: We can picture him surviving . . . on a few acres, or more likely finding a way to do business with the local chiefs. And if he did indeed cling to that name, he could only do so by not crossing the river to Freetown. For he must have understood that he had had his day. Over there, no one had much use for British freedom any more. Over there was something different. Over there was the British Empire. But picturing British Freedom is about all that we can do; apart from his name, we know almost nothing about him. (Because Freedom renamed himself, he can’t be traced in records like the “Book of Negroes.”) “British Freedom’s name said something important: that he was no longer negotiable property,” Schama writes. Names count-they mattered to the parents who named their BB-certified daughter Patience Freeman-but sometimes names aren’t enough. Among Schama’s many enviable talents as a historian and as a stylist is his ability to turn a name into a meditation on liberty and empire. But the asymmetry, borne of the asymmetry of the evidence, is not without consequences: the black expatriates in “Rough Crossings” have names and ages and imagined motives, while the lantern-jawed architect of their freedom, Granville Sharp, is rendered in all his Dickensian detail. Sharp is focussed; the settlers are a bit of a blur. Pybus uses a different lens. She pays scant attention to the likes of Granville Sharp. Instead, she trails the fugitives relentlessly, including the unlucky few who, convicted of petty crimes in London, were shipped thirteen thousand miles away, to Botany Bay, a place whose staggering deprivations made it worse than London, worse than Birchtown, worse than Granville Town, worse than the Province of Freedom. Here’s a hint: in 1790, the punishment for stealing food was increased from a thousand to two thousand lashes. What Pybus offers is a collective biography, made possible through her painstaking-breathtaking-examination of tax lists, muster rolls, property deeds, court dockets, parish records, and unwieldy uncatalogued manuscripts like the papers of General Henry Clinton. It allows her to rattle off details like this: in Botany Bay in 1788, “John Randall, the black ex-soldier from HDT WHAT? INDEX

AME AFRICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL Connecticut convicted of stealing a watch chain in Manchester, was married to Esther Howard, a white London oyster seller, convicted at the Old Bailey of stealing a watch.” In case it escaped your notice, that’s months of eye-straining archival research on three continents in just thirty-four words. (She later, and still more casually, throws out that Randall eventually found work as a kangaroo-hunter; that by 1792 he had received a land grant of sixty acres; and that, widowed twice, he married three times and had nine children before his death, in 1822.) Men like Randall, Pybus argues, “carried to the far corners of the globe the animating principles of the revolution that had so emphatically excluded them.” Maybe. But, at journey’s end, it’s hard to know what to make of the travails of British Freedom or Harry Washington or John Randall. To follow them is, still, to leave American history behind. The story of the British abolition movement has been elegantly told by Adam Hochschild, in “Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves” (Houghton Mifflin; $26.95). It is also at the heart of an excellent new biography by Vincent Carretta, “Equiano the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man” (University of Georgia Press; $29.95). These, like Schama’s and Pybus’s, are rich and wonderful books. All the same, with their praise of prophets and rebels and self- made men on a global quest for liberty, some readers might conclude that English abolitionists and American runaways ought to serve as honorary Founding Fathers, as though the likes of Washington and Jefferson will no longer do. (Damn those slave- owning sons of liberty!) In the midst of this, it’s easy to forget that many eighteenth- century Americans considered the British hypocritical about slavery. After the Somerset decision, Benjamin Franklin complained: Pharisaical Britain! to pride thyself in setting free a single Slave that happens to land on thy coasts, while thy Merchants in all thy ports are encouraged by thy laws to continue a commerce whereby so many hundreds of thousands are dragged into a slavery that can scarce be said to end with their lives, since it is entailed on their posterity! Moreover, it was far easier for Britain, where there were few slaves to begin with, to free its slaves than it was for the American colonies, where there was considerable support for ending the slave trade, something many patriots had come to see as having been imposed on them by a tyrannical king, to Britain’s profit and not their own. In Thomas Jefferson’s mind, promising freedom to the very people whom British slave traders had enslaved constituted George III’s last, and most unforgivable, act of treachery. In a breathless paragraph at the end of his original draft of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson blamed the King for the slave trade (“He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery”); for his vetoes of the colonists’ efforts to abolish it (“Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce”); HDT WHAT? INDEX

AME AFRICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL and for Dunmore’s proclamation (“He is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them”). It was the Declaration’s last, longest, and angriest grievance. The other delegates could not abide it: they struck it out almost entirely. To some, it went too far; to others, it didn’t go far enough. And, as everyone knew, it was they, and not the British, who were by now most vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy. (As Samuel Johnson had wryly inquired in 1775, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”) Best, then, to leave slavery out altogether. Historians have hardly known what to make of Jefferson’s rant. Nash deems it “patently false.” Schama calls it a “tour de force of disingenuousness.” But at least part of what Jefferson meant was that it was the Revolution itself that derailed the American antislavery movement. In the seventeen-sixties and early seventeen-seventies, the colonists were arguably more ardent opponents of slavery than the British were. In 1764, the patriot James Otis, Jr., declared that nothing could be said “in favor of a trade that is the most shocking violation of the law of nature, has a direct tendency to diminish the idea of the inestimable value of liberty, and makes every dealer in it a tyrant.” Not long after the Boston Massacre, in 1770, John Hancock’s uncle preached a sermon urging the provincial legislature of Massachusetts to support the abolition of slavery, warning, “When God ariseth, and when he visiteth, what shall we answer!” In April, 1775, just five days before a shot was heard round the world, Philadelphians founded the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage. By no means did everyone in the colonies oppose the slave trade, and even fewer could imagine emancipation. Still, if the patriots hadn’t needed to forge a union to protect their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, they might have come to some agreement on ending slavery. But uniting the colonies in their opposition to the King and Parliament meant, by 1776, putting slavery to one side. It meant editing the Declaration of Independence. It also meant that Harry Washington, and John Randall, and British Freedom, and thousands more, decided to leave. They did not fare well.

WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF

African Methodist Episcopal “Stack of the Artist of HDT WHAT? INDEX

AME AFRICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL

1784

December 24, Friday: The United States Congress adjourned in Trenton, New Jersey.

Richard Allen and another person of color attended the 1st general conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Baltimore, Maryland.

“HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE” BEING A VIEW FROM A PARTICULAR POINT IN TIME (JUST AS THE PERSPECTIVE IN A PAINTING IS A VIEW FROM A PARTICULAR POINT IN SPACE), TO “LOOK AT THE COURSE OF HISTORY MORE GENERALLY” WOULD BE TO SACRIFICE PERSPECTIVE ALTOGETHER. THIS IS FANTASY-LAND, YOU’RE FOOLING YOURSELF. THERE CANNOT BE ANY SUCH THINGIE, AS SUCH A PERSPECTIVE.

African Methodist Episcopal “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

AME AFRICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL

1786

Richard Allen moved back to Philadelphia and joined St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church. He conducted prayer meetings for blacks, and occasionally was allowed to preach to the congregation.

AN ESSAY ON THE SLAVERY AND COMMERCE OF THE HUMAN SPECIES, PARTICULARLY THE AFRICAN, TRANSLATED FROM A LATIN DISSERTATION, WHICH WAS HONOURED WITH THE FIRST PRIZE IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE, FOR THE YEAR 1785, WITH ADDITIONS; [One line from Livy] London: reprinted by Joseph Crukshank, in Market-Street, between Second and Third-Streets, Philadelphia, MDCCLXXXVI.

YOUR GARDEN-VARIETY ACADEMIC HISTORIAN INVITES YOU TO CLIMB ABOARD A HOVERING TIME MACHINE TO SKIM IN METATIME BACK ACROSS THE GEOLOGY OF OUR PAST TIMESLICES, WHILE OFFERING UP A GARDEN VARIETY OF COGENT ASSESSMENTS OF OUR PROGRESSION. WHAT A LOAD OF CRAP! YOU SHOULD REFUSE THIS HELICOPTERISH OVERVIEW OF THE HISTORICAL PAST, FOR IN THE REAL WORLD THINGS HAPPEN ONLY AS THEY HAPPEN. WHAT THIS SORT WRITES AMOUNTS, LIKE MERE “SCIENCE FICTION,” MERELY TO “HISTORY FICTION”: IT’SNOT WORTH YOUR ATTENTION.

African Methodist Episcopal “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

AME AFRICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL

1787

Richard Allen, , and others established the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

The Free Africa Society was founded at Philadelphia by Richard Allen and other Africans.

November: Black Americans attempting to pray on their knees at St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia were pulled up off their knees and physically ejected over their refusal to be seated in the church’s new Negro Section (which is to say, the racially segregated gallery). The Richard Allen, 27 years of age, the Reverend Absalom Jones, the Reverend William White, and some of the other participants in this interrupted public prayer would go on to form the Free African Society. Allen, with Absalom Jones (who had like Allen been a pupil at the school of Anthony Benezet), and others, would establish an African Methodist Episcopal Church.

IT IS NO COINCIDENCE THAT IT IS MORTALS WHO CONSUME OUR HISTORICAL ACCOUNTS, FOR WHAT WE ARE ATTEMPTING TO DO IS EVADE THE RESTRICTIONS OF THE HUMAN LIFESPAN. (IMMORTALS, WITH NOTHING TO LIVE FOR, TAKE NO HEED OF OUR STORIES.)

African Methodist Episcopal “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

AME AFRICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL

1796

In New-York, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion communion was organized as a semi-detached entity by members of the Methodist Episcopal Church. This was the city’s 1st black church. HDT WHAT? INDEX

AME AFRICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL

1801

The African Methodist Episcopal Zion communion which had been organized in 1796 by members of the Methodist Episcopal Church was recognized by that parent organization. AME

TRALFAMADORIANS EXPERIENCE REALITY IN 4 DIMENSIONS RATHER THAN 3 AND HAVE SIMULTANEOUS ACCESS TO PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE. THEY ARE ABLE TO SEE ALONG THE TIMELINE OF THE UNIVERSE TO THE EXACT TIME AND PLACE AT WHICH AS THE RESULT OF A TRALFAMADORIAN EXPERIMENT, THE UNIVERSE IS ANNIHILATED. BILLY PILGRIM, WHILE CAGED IN A TRALFAMADORIAN ZOO, ACQUIRES THEIR ATTITUDE TOWARD TIME, AND SO WHEN HE RETURNS TO EARTH, HE BECOMES A HISTORIAN VERY LIKE ALL OUR OTHER HISTORIANS: ALTHOUGH HE CANNOT HIMSELF SEE INTO THE FUTURE THE WAY THE TRALFAMADORIANS DO, LIKE ALL OUR OTHER HUMAN HISTORIANS DO HE PRETENDS TO BE ABLE TO SEE ALL PERIODS OF OUR PAST TRAJECTORY NOT WITH THE EYES OF THE PEOPLE WHO WERE LIVING DURING THOSE PERIODS, BUT WITH THE OVERARCHING EYE OF GOD. THIS ENABLES HIM TO PRETEND TO BE VERY VERY WISE AND TO SOUND VERY VERY IMPRESSIVE!

African Methodist Episcopal “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

AME AFRICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL

1805

August 8, Friday: Thomas Paul, a black preacher whose congregation had been meeting at Faneuil Hall, formed Boston’s 1st African Baptist Church. In the following year this would be the first congregation to worship at the African Meeting House. AME HDT WHAT? INDEX

AME AFRICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL

1806

December 6, Saturday: Dedication of the African Meeting House at what has become 8 Smith Court off Joy Street on the back slope of Beacon Hill in Boston. This is now the oldest church building in the United States built by and for black Americans. The $7,700 needed to build the African Meeting House had been raised in the black and the white communities of Boston. One African native, Cato Gardner, is credited with himself raising more than $1,500 of the cost, and his effort is still memorialized in an inscription above the front door: “Cato Gardner, first promoter of this building, 1806.” The façade of the Meeting House was based on a design by the architect Asher Benjamin. AME HDT WHAT? INDEX

AME AFRICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL

1815

In Philadelphia at this point, there were more black Methodists than white.1 AME RICHARD ALLEN

ESSENCES ARE FUZZY, GENERIC, CONCEPTUAL; ARISTOTLE WAS RIGHT WHEN HE INSISTED THAT ALL TRUTH IS SPECIFIC AND PARTICULAR (AND WRONG WHEN HE CHARACTERIZED TRUTH AS A GENERALIZATION).

African Methodist Episcopal “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project

1. Just as today, on a worldwide basis, there are far more black Quakers than white ones. HDT WHAT? INDEX

AME AFRICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL

1816

The initial meetinghouse had been erected in Dorchester in 1631. It had been a log cabin with a thatched grass roof. This was replaced at some point by a 2d structure on the same site, and then that building was moved in 1670 to Meetinghouse Hill. A 3d meetinghouse was erected during 1678, on another site, with the first meeting taking place there on November 17, 1678. In 1743 this building was replaced on almost the same site. In 1816 a 5th meetinghouse was erected, on that site. This meetinghouse would last for the remainder of the ministry of the Reverend Thaddeus Mason Harris, D.D., and beyond.

In Philadelphia during this year, the organization of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. AME

April 9, Tuesday: Johann Nepomuk Hummel gave a solo performance in Prague (this was his first time in the city in a couple of decades).

Over the following few days, formation of the African Methodist Episcopal denomination under the leadership of Richard Allen. AME METHODISTS

YOUR GARDEN-VARIETY ACADEMIC HISTORIAN INVITES YOU TO CLIMB ABOARD A HOVERING TIME MACHINE TO SKIM IN METATIME BACK ACROSS THE GEOLOGY OF OUR PAST TIMESLICES, WHILE OFFERING UP A GARDEN VARIETY OF COGENT ASSESSMENTS OF OUR PROGRESSION. WHAT A LOAD OF CRAP! YOU SHOULD REFUSE THIS HELICOPTERISH OVERVIEW OF THE HISTORICAL PAST, FOR IN THE REAL WORLD THINGS HAPPEN ONLY AS THEY HAPPEN. WHAT THIS SORT WRITES AMOUNTS, HDT WHAT? INDEX

AME AFRICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL LIKE MERE “SCIENCE FICTION,” MERELY TO “HISTORY FICTION”: IT’SNOT WORTH YOUR ATTENTION.

African Methodist Episcopal “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

AME AFRICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL

1818

When some black Methodists attempted to withdraw from the churches of Charleston and form their own African Methodist Episcopal congregation, their ministers were fined and threatened with flogging. AME

THE TASK OF THE HISTORIAN IS TO CREATE HINDSIGHT WHILE INTERCEPTING ANY ILLUSION OF FORESIGHT. NOTHING A HUMAN CAN SEE CAN EVER BE SEEN AS IF THROUGH THE EYE OF GOD. THE UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO’S CENTER OF THE AMERICAN WEST HAS AS ITS OFFICIAL MOTTO “TURNING HINDSIGHT INTO FORESIGHT” — WHICH INDICATES THAT ONLY PANDERERS ARE WELCOME THERE. IN A BOOK THAT IS SUPPOSED TO BE ABOUT HISTORY, ISSUED BY RANDOM HOUSE IN 2016, I FIND THE PHRASE “LOOKED UPON FROM THE BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF HISTORY, ....” ONLY A MERE STORYTELLER, NEVER A HISTORIAN, COULD HAVE PENNED SUCH A PHRASE — BECAUSE NO BIRD HAS EVER FLOWN OVER HISTORY.

African Methodist Episcopal “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

AME AFRICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL

1821

Friend Moses Brown wrote A SHORT HISTORY OF THE AFRICAN UNION MEETING AND SCHOOL-HOUSE ERECTED IN PROVIDENCE... (32 pages, printed by Brown & Danforth in Providence). Although he had donated land atop the hill in Providence, Rhode Island, he had rather that his name have been omitted from this document as published, “as I don’t approve of Singing Meetings and some other parts yet if it suit the Coloured people I shall not oppose them.” AME

A horse pulling a sleigh ran over Friend Daniel Ricketson at the age of 9. His right hip would bring him pain for the entirety of his life.

The African Methodist Episcopal Zion communion of the Methodist Episcopal Church officially became a separate denomination, under the leadership of James Varick. (It would be this African Methodist Episcopal Zion church that Frederick Douglass eventually would join in New Bedford, and for which he would become a lay exhorter.) AME

NO-ONE’S LIFE IS EVER NOT DRIVEN PRIMARILY BY HAPPENSTANCE

African Methodist Episcopal “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

AME AFRICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL

1822

August 8, Thursday: In a renovation of the Quaker meetinghouse in Providence, Rhode Island, Friend Moses Brown reported, “what was called the Negros Gallery” had been removed.

The questions of course arises, why specifically was it that this “Negros Gallery” was constructed in the first place — and why lately had it come to be disused, so that it might at this point be demolished? –And why has this demolition of seating been papered over with Fake News?

The answer, I speculate, is going to be (after adequate research has been done — research which has not yet been begun), that the Quakers had had segregated seating in their meetinghouses, with their servants of color seated away from the white people in such a “Negros Gallery,” but that by the turn of the century these slaves had all been granted manumission documents, and were therefore no longer obligated to accompany their Quaker masters and mistresses to worship. When they made use of the meetinghouse, they made use of it in off hours when the white Quakers were not present, and so of course they no longer went up to the dilapidated “pigeon loft” but sat anywhere they pleased. My speculation would be that with freedom had come a decision to affiliate, not with these Quakers who as white racists were never ever going to accept anyone else as a whole and genuine human being (to my knowledge not one single person of color would ever be accepted as a convinced Friend during this period, despite numerous applications for such consideration), instead along color lines with one another in the African Methodist Episcopal denomination that had been set up in 1816.2 AME

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 8th of 8 M / Our Meeting today was a pretty good one Two appearances in the Ministry Vizt Father Rodman & Anne HDT WHAT? INDEX

AME AFRICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL Dennis. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

2. Subsequent to my writing the above, my suspicions have been confirmed by reading, in the autobiography of William J. Brown, a grandson of one of the men manumitted by Friend Moses Brown, that: PAGE 25: Some attended the Congregational church, Rev. James Wilson, pastor; some attended the Methodist church; some attended the Episcopal church, Dr. Crocker, pastor; a few attended the Unitarian church, Rev. Mr. Cady, pastor; and a large number attended the First Baptist church, Dr. Gano, pastor. Some were members of each of the above named churches; the largest number, however, were Baptists, and belonged to the First Baptist Church, but many attended no church at all, because they said they were opposed to going to churches and sitting in pigeon holes, as all the churches at that time had some obscure place for the colored people to sit in. HDT WHAT? INDEX

AME AFRICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL

1832

January 6, Friday: In Providence, Rhode Island, Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 6th day 6th of 1st M 1832 / This evening recd a letter from my old & long loved friend Thomas Thompson of Liverpool it contained a pleasant acct of the travels of our friend John Wilbour now in that country on a religious visit as well of Stephen Grillett & Christo Healy - it also contained the information of the decease of our dear friend Jonathon Taylor of Ohio, in Ireland, who was also in that country on a religious Mission, I was comforted with receiving a letter from Thomas & think I shall now renew my correspondence with him. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS That evening 12 abolitionists, William Lloyd Garrison and others, walked up “Nigger Hill” in Boston in a northeaster snowstorm to meet in the basement of the African Meeting House off Belknap Street and constitute themselves as a New England Anti-Slavery Society, in opposition to the agenda of the American Colonization Society which was seeking to return the freed Africans to Africa. There were “a number of colored citizens” present as observers as these white men filed to the front and placed their signatures in the meeting book. A number of black elders placed their names in a parallel column as a gesture of general support. Friend Arnold Buffum of Old Smithfield and Providence became president. Garrison became corresponding secretary, but declined to allow the new society any control over the editorial policies of his newspaper. AME HDT WHAT? INDEX

AME AFRICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL

1837

August: On vacation on the Hudson River above Newburgh, Lewis Tappan and a daughter attended a Presbyterian church at which he knew the pastor.

TAPPAN FAMILY When it came time for communion, the black members came down from the gallery and seated themselves upon a narrow bench near the pews, to await their turn to receive communion after the white members. Startled by this, Tappan rose, taking his hat but leaving his daughter in the pew, and reseated himself on the bench with the black members. He reported later that what he was thinking at the time was, there could be no “Nigger Seat” at the Lord’s Table, for all are equal before the Lord. When the minister saw Tappan sitting on the special bench, he must have had the same thought, for when he served the communion bread, that day, he served blacks and whites at the same time. After the service, bread was discovered on some of the pews. Some of the white members had brought the Body of Christ back to their seats with them and, finding they were unable to swallow it, had abandoned it reverently on the pews as their only available alternative. Afterward the accusation was indignantly made, that Tappan and the reverend must have plotted this action beforehand. AME HDT WHAT? INDEX

AME AFRICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL

1850

November: In Providence, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Charles Calistus Burleigh, and Charles Lenox Remond addressed the annual meeting of the Rhode Island Anti-Slavery Society. This would be the first of Sojourner’s antislavery speeches that has been documented.

I think it likely that it would have been at this point that William J. Brown met Frederick Douglass: PAGES 93-94: When Frederick Douglass paid us a visit, I met him in company with several brethren, and he was introduced as a Methodist preacher. He said he had heard we were brought up on election day on crackers and cheese. He received his information from an Abolitionist in the Democratic party. It came about in this way: When the colored people were first called upon to vote to see whether the people wanted a constitution or not, the Suffrage party threatened to mob any colored person daring to vote that day. We proposed to meet at the old artillery gun house the day before. We had a meeting that evening and thought it best to get the people together and keep them over night, so they would be ready for the polls in the morning. In order to keep them we must have something to eat, for if the Democrats got hold of them we could not get them to vote, for they would get them filled up with rum so that we could not do a thing with them; so in order to secure them we had to hunt them up, bring them to the armory, and keep men there to entertain them. I met with them in the afternoon and found men of all sorts, from all parts of the city, and all associating together. They had coffee, crackers, cheese and shaved beef. During the time a lot of muskets were brought in, and put in a rack. It is said they were brought in to use in case of disturbance, some said good enough, let them come. They scraped the hollow and every place, getting all the men they could find; then coffee, crackers and cheese were plenty, and no one disturbed them. When the polls were opened, those in the first ward went to vote in a body, headed by two powerful men. They voted in the Benefit Street school house; the officers went ahead to open the way. They all voted and then went home, that ended the crackers and cheese. Mr. Bibb tried hard to get the colored voters to vote the Liberty ticket. We made him understand it was not all gold that glitters. He left our quarters and went about his business, and the Law and Order party elected their candidates. I received six dollars for my work. Mr. Bowen employed me after election to go around and see if there were strangers that had been here long enough to vote, and see that their names were registered, and at the next election he would pay me. I collected quite a number who had never taken the trouble to register their names. HDT WHAT? INDEX

AME AFRICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL

1859

It was reported in the Boston Courier that the custom of segregated pews, for black members to be seated separately from white members, was “in New England’s churches largely a memory.” The newspaper meant, of course, in its good-sounding story, New England’s Protestant churches — for no Catholic edifice in New England had ever permitted black attendance of any sort and thus no Catholic church in New England had ever had any occasion for such embarrassing segregation of its seating. Also, the paper failed to mention just how it was that the problem of segregated seating in the Protestant churches had been solved: largely, the issue was being defanged by taking the pressure off the white Protestant churches, by the creation of new Protestant churches that were de-facto 100% black. Segregation, rather than being eliminated in the Protestant churches of America, was being totalized, just like it always had been in the Catholic churches of America. AME HDT WHAT? INDEX

AME AFRICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL

1881

Touro Synagogue had remained closed until this point, except for occasional services conducted by summer visitors. However, at this point, new Jewish inhabitants, people unconnected to the previous group of Marranos,3 petitioned the city council of Newport, Rhode Island, which had been acting as trustee for the Judah Touro fund, for permission to use the synagogue and the income on a regular basis. When the rights to the building would be transferred to this new Congregation Shearith Israel, it would proceed to make provision for Sephardic services to be held there on high holy days.

At some point during the late 19th Century, as the black population of Boston migrated to Roxbury and the South End, they sold their African Meeting House to a Jewish congregation (the building would remain a synagogue until 1972).

3. Marrano = a Spanish or Portuguese Jew of the late Middle Ages who converted to Christianity, especially one forcibly converted but adhering secretly to Judaism. HDT WHAT? INDEX

AME AFRICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL

1972

What goes around comes around: Boston’s African Meetinghouse of 1806, long in use as a synagogue, was restored as a museum of black history. AME

During this year of the grand new post-Civil War, post-Reconstruction America in which everything had been made all better through people killing each other with rifles and artillery, two black men in Columbia SC were found to be holding nine white farm laborers, migrants, in peonage and involuntary servitude. Their practice was that they would hold such laborers in a remote location where there was not transportation or other source of supply for items of basic need, charging exorbitant prices for supplies of soap, cigarettes, etc. and then forcibly detaining them “until they had worked off their debt.” Clearly, not only is black on white not better than white on black, but, also, the racial-discrimination component of this human enslavement problem is not determining and thus has been greatly exaggerated. Although we offer various excuses under various circumstances, the fact is that we humans fuck each other over where and when we achieve the ability to do so: this is just generic with us.

Baldwin, Lewis V. “INVISIBLE” STRANDS IN AFRICAN : A HISTORY OF THE AFRICAN UNION PROTESTAND AND UNION AMERICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCHES, 1805-1980. Metuchen NJ, 1983 Essig, James G. THE BONDS OF WICKEDNESS: AMERICAN EVANGELICALS AGAINST SLAVERY, 1770- 1808. Philadelphia 1982 Evans, Paul Otis. “The Ideology of Inequality: Asbury, Methodism, and Slavery.” Ph.D. dissertation at Rutgers, 1981. George, Carol V.R. SEGREGATED SABBATHS: RICHARD ALLEN AND THE EMERGENCE OF INDEPENDENT BLACK CHURCHES, 1760-1840. New York, 1973 Mathews, Donald G. SLAVERY AND METHODISM: A CHAPTER IN AMERICAN MORALITY, 1780-1845. Princeton NJ: Princeton UP, 1965 Nash, Gary. FORGING FREEDOM: THE FORMATION OF PHILADELPHIA’S BLACK COMMUNITY, 1720- 1840. Cambridge MA, 1988 Richardson, Harry V. DARK SALVATION: THE STORY OF METHODISM AS IT DEVELOPED AMONG BLACKS IN AMERICA. Garden City NY, 1976 Richey & Rowe, eds. RETHINKING METHODIST HISTORY, especially Gravely, Will B. “African Methodisms and the Rise of Black Denominationalism” (pages 111-124) and Baldwin, Lewis V. “New Directions for the Study of Blacks in Methodism” (pages 185-193) Sernett, Milton C. BLACK RELIGION AND AMERICAN : WHITE PROTESTANTS, PLANTATION MISSIONS, AND THE FLOWERING OF NEGRO CHRISTIANITY, 1787-1865. Metuchen, 1975 HDT WHAT? INDEX

AME AFRICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2018. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: April 4, 2018 HDT WHAT? INDEX

AME AFRICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button.

Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in HDT WHAT? INDEX

AME AFRICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with . Arrgh.