Black Americans in Victorian Britain

BLACK AMERICANS

IN

VICTORIAN BRITAIN

This study is dedicated to David Killingray who knows why; and to Adam David Greiff and Oliver George Greiff who may get to understand their grandfather.

BLACK AMERICANS

IN

VICTORIAN BRITAIN

Jeffrey Green

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by

PEN AND SWORD HISTORY

an imprint of

Pen and Sword Books Ltd

47 Church Street Barnsley South Yorkshire S70 2AS

Copyright © Jeffrey Green, 2018

ISBN 978 1 52673 759 5

eISBN 978 1 52673 760 1

Mobi ISBN 978 1 52673 761 8

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter 1 Escape from these Regions of Wickedness

Chapter 2 Ellen and William Craft

Chapter 3 Children

Chapter 4 Minstrels and Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Chapter 5 Frauds and Impostors

Chapter 6 Canada

Chapter 7 Jubilee Singers

Chapter 8 Slavery Narratives

Chapter 9 Education

Chapter 10 The Length and Breadth of the Country

Chapter 11 The Temperance Movement

Chapter 12 Women

Chapter 13 Elusive Individuals

Chapter 14 Postscript

Chapter 15 Genealogical Trees do not flourish among Slaves

Chapter 16 What Happened Next?

Notes

Further Reading

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Evidence of people’s lives – history – is scattered. Librarians and archivists have been very helpful and the elderly documents they care for have provided valuable evidence. Their role is easy to overlook when resources have been digitized. To sit in England and check lists of prisoners disembarking in Australia in the 1830s, to read copies of slave narratives from the 1840s and to search numerous newspapers, all online are wonderful facilities. But the help of descendants of the Victorians, family historians, and the downright curious has been essential.

My website www.jeffreygreen.co.uk started in 2009 and has encouraged contacts by individuals, including Geoffrey Gillon who alerted me to his discovery of the 1875 grave of Joseph Freeman, and Chris Clark who shared his interest in his ancestors Ellen and William Craft who escaped slavery in Georgia in 1848 and had six children in England.

Help from the following is acknowledged with many thanks:

Susanna Ashton * Anita Bateson * Richard Blackett * Jenni Blair * Stephen Bourne * Caroline Bressey * Ed Bristow * John Burton * Kathy Chater * Chris Clark * Sean Creighton * Emily DeCosta * Bill Egan * Marjorie Evans * Helen Franklin * Geoffrey Gillon * Harlan Greene * Kyra Hicks * Rita Hughes * Jess Jenkins * David Killingray * Bernth Lindfors * Fay Lock * Rainer Lotz * Greta Morton-Elangué * Hannah Murray * Jill Newmark * John Rogan * Mark Rollason * L. David Roper * Lesley Russell * Howard Rye * Elizabeth Stacey * Beverly Tetterton * Andrew Ward * Mary Watson.

Introduction

In 1986, marking the centennial of New York’s Statue of Liberty, an exhibition noted ‘For most Afro-Americans, the Statue of Liberty is of minor importance except as a symbol of their unfulfilled dreams.’¹ Certainly the huddled masses of Africans who had crossed the Atlantic in the centuries of the slave trade were not included in the thinking behind the monument. They and their ancestors had been shipped from Africa: the last landing in Mobile, Alabama in 1860.² At the time of the statue’s construction, adult Americans of African descent had first-hand knowledge of slavery.

Enslaved black men, women and children were vital to the economic growth of what became the United States of America. The world they created and the hardships they experienced have rightly dominated studies of African American life. They were kept in ignorance and were lacking education, and few had knowledge of anywhere other than their immediate district although African words, social practices and crafts survived in isolation.

There has been much interest in those who, despite so many disadvantages, escaped from servitude in the Southern states. Those who ran to freedom were both a drain on the Southern economy and a political irritation.³ Southern slave states had white patrols which were ubiquitous: they and their dogs sought unauthorized travellers and created fear among the masses. Some have seen runaways as ‘a safety valve for slavery by drawing off those who might have led insurrections’.⁴ Reaching the less restrictive Northern states did not end the risk of recapture nor provide the freedom that many sought, so fugitives went further north into British North America (Canada). Some went to Africa, some to the Caribbean, others to the west including California.

This study is focussed on the east-bound migration to Britain. British attitudes were affected by the testimony of these black witnesses who informed the British and Irish about life in the United States. Individuals made their homes in Britain and married British people to an extent which might have surprised historian Benjamin Quarles who commented in 1969: ‘they posed no threat to the laboring man or to the purity of the national blood stream. Hence they received that heartiest of welcomes that comes from a love of virtue combined with an absence of apprehension’.⁵

Some individuals such as New York-born actor Ira Aldridge, absent from America for forty years, have been studied.⁶ Ezra Greenspan’s study of William Wells Brown, who lived in Britain from 1849 to 1854 and made a visit in 1877, documents this prolific journalist and author, and his daughter Clarissa who died in Leeds in 1874 having lived in Britain for twenty years.⁷ Richard Blackett has examined others who were prominent in articulating black ambitions in Victorian Britain.⁸ Frederick Douglass, who toured Britain and Ireland from the 1840s, is well documented.⁹ Henry ‘Box’ Brown, refugee then entertainer in Britain for twenty years, has been detailed by Jeffrey Ruggles.¹⁰

Some refugees did not return after slavery was abolished and the Confederacy defeated. Sarah Parker Remond, whose brother Charles Remond had been in England in the 1840s, applied to become a British citizen in 1865 and testified that she had been living in Britain for over six years. Citizenship was granted. She studied medicine in Rome, married an Italian, and died there in 1894.¹¹ Nelson Countee, a slave in Virginia, lived in the English Midlands from the mid-1860s where the British census of 1871 lists him as a cooper (barrel maker) and local Methodist preacher. He married a Londoner and died in 1886 aged 53.¹² Descendants live in the Leicester area and California. Thomas Lewis Johnson lived in London then Bournemouth in the 1890s, and his Twenty-Eight Years a Slave was published in Bournemouth in 1909 where he died in 1921, aged 85. Lewis Charlton, recorded as a free man in the US census of Maryland in 1870, toured Britain from 1881 and died in Sheffield in 1888, aged 74. British newspapers, used extensively in this research, reported on the activities of ex-slaves for decades after American slavery had ended.

Many of the newcomers were active in entertainment.¹³ We know three members of the Fisk Singers settled in Britain: Isaac Dickerson died in Plumstead, south-east London, in 1900; his colleague Thomas Rutling died in Harrogate, Yorkshire, in 1915; Mattie Lawrence married an Englishman in Croydon in 1890 and died there in 1907. Isaac Cisco of the Wilmington Singers lived in Lancashire from 1878 and died in Bolton in 1905. His son served in the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment from 1917 to 1919, and died in Bolton in 1935.

Others were conducting campaigns against lynching, notably Ida B.Wells from Mississippi who toured in 1893 and 1894.¹⁴ And, as with Wells Brown, Charlton and Countee, African Americans campaigned against alcohol. All had an impact on the people of the British Isles who attended their lectures, purchased autobiographies, heard their songs and their sermons, and worked alongside them in factories, on ships, and in domestic service.

Moses Roper escaped from slavery in Georgia to reach New England where to avoid recapture he signed on the Napoleon bound for Britain. Aged 20 he arrived in Liverpool in November 1835.¹⁵ He could never have imagined that he would marry a British woman or that their daughters would settle in Australia, Canada and Egypt. Harriet Ann Jacobs who wrote Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl published in 1861 spent much of 1845 as a nursemaid for an American in the village of Steventon, on the Berkshire-Oxfordshire border.¹⁶ Christian evangelist Zilpha Elaw lived in Britain from 1840. She married in London in 1850 and died there in 1873.

William Peter Powell studied in Dublin and Liverpool and qualified as a doctor in 1857, working in Liverpool hospitals until, with his parents and siblings, he returned to New York and served in the Union Army in the Civil War. He died in Liverpool in 1916. George Rice qualified in medicine in Edinburgh in 1874 and worked in the London area into the 1930s. Philadelphia-born Samuel Morgan Smith an actor in provincial England died in Sheffield in 1882. James Cooney was born in Virginia and died in Morecambe, Lancashire aged 67, in 1932. He had been a valet in Ireland, a sailor in the South Atlantic, a migrant to Sierra Leone, and worked in a circus, with the Bohee Brothers showmen in Britain, as a fairground boxer, and as a comedian-entertainer.¹⁷

These and other experiences of African Americans in nineteenth-century Britain reveal overlooked elements in the history of the American people and aspects of the nature of Victorian Britain. Uncovered fragments are part of a mosaic, sometimes with only one piece discovered. This study sometimes has just a name, whilst others have been traced in more detail. The individuals were of African descent, but widely different activities and achievements make it unwise to invent categories. Reuben Nixon established a hairdresser’s shop in Southsea in 1856 – customers would have trusted him.¹⁸ The illiterate Lewis Charlton ordered leaflets from a Bristol printer in 1885.¹⁹ Joseph Freeman worked alongside his son in a Chelmsford foundry according to the 1871 census, and Nelson Countee made barrels.²⁰ Henry Lewis, of Virginian descent and born around 1818 in St John, New Brunswick, was a mesmerist in the 1850s.²¹

Individuals who had lived in the United States but had been raised in Canada or the Caribbean were often regarded as African Americans, as were those who settled in Liberia. I have followed this for allocating a nationality can restrict our understanding of individuals, as with the Revd Thomas Pinckney. Born in South Carolina, ‘a clergyman of colour’ trained in England, he worked in Liberia in the 1850s and then in Canada. He married an Englishwoman in Canada and they moved to Southampton where they are listed in the 1871 census. He died there in 1887, aged 70.

And there is the question of the children. In 1892 an Uncle Tom’s Cabin show reached Birmingham’s Theatre Royal and a locally-born woman, 21-year-old Esther Ann ‘Hettie’ Johnson joined. She was the daughter of an African American singer named John Alexander Johnson who had settled in Birmingham where he was listed in the 1871 census, living with Hannah Greaves. Weeks later on 16 August their daughter Esther Johnson was born. She had an older brother (John Albert Johnson) and Charles Albert Johnson was seven years younger according to the 1881 census. By 1889 their parents had died and in 1891 Hettie was listed as a machine-press operator. In 1901 she married an African American entertainer. She had a career as an actress and died in Fareham in 1973, aged 102.²² Her brothers are untraced.

Escaped slaves Ellen and William Craft lived in Britain from 1850 to 1869, and had six children. The second son, William Ivens Craft, returned to England where in 1884 he married in London and had four children. Like Ira Aldridge’s daughters (who died in London in 1932 and 1956), the nationality of these children is not clear. But official nationality did not really matter in Victorian Britain. After all, no passports were required to enter or leave the United Kingdom – those documents were for other countries – and even destitute aliens could not be expelled.²³ Exposing the hypocrisy of the Statue of Liberty, west-bound migrants ‘always had the thought at the back of their minds that if they were denied entry to America they could return to England and settle there’.²⁴

In naming individuals of African descent in Victorian Britain and Ireland this project hopes to encourage detailed research, whilst acknowledging the testimony of witnesses is sparse and sometimes unreliable. Fugitives, reformists, temperance advocates and associates of abolitionists were unlikely to express their true opinions of Britain, the British and British society, for where else could they run to? Those who communicated with the old folks at home – as several Fisk singers did – would be unlikely to admit major problems and failure.

Having crossed the Atlantic towards the rising sun, they had rejected the United States of America. A number went further east by migrating to Australia and New Zealand suggesting their ambitions had not been satisfied by life in Britain. Thousands of British people migrated to the Antipodes, so we cannot be sure what had encouraged that secondary black migration which like the African American presence in Victorian Britain, is under-researched.

The often superficial nature of newspaper reports and inconsistencies in official documents with the spelling of names (Johnson/Johnston; Lewis/Louis; Countee/County; Pinckney/Pinkney; Lawrence/Lawrance) is one difficulty but the almost total absence of ‘race’ as a concept is a major problem. No British birth, marriage or death registrations indicate ‘race’ or ‘color’ as American documents did. Schools, colleges, churches, chapels, graveyards, and street directories do not distinguish between the people they listed. For migrant African Americans, whose entire lives had been defined by the colour of their skin, this official blindness and its apparent recognition by the majority of Britons was so different to their natal land.

African Americans who had lived in Victorian Britain had an impact on kinfolk in the United States. They influenced the British. It is hoped that this book will encourage others to examine this phenomenon and, whilst not anticipating the Statue of Liberty will be modified to have her waving a handkerchief in farewell to those who sailed east, this black presence at the time of the ever-expanding imperialist Britain will improve our understanding of the era and the men, women and children who turned their backs on America to face the future in a new land.

Chapter 1

Escape from these Regions of Wickedness

Moses Roper escaped from slavery in Georgia to New York where ‘I thought I was free; but learned I was not: and could be taken there.’¹ In November 1835 he sailed to Liverpool, with letters of introduction to sympathizers in London. He spent six months ‘going through the rudiments of an English education’ in Hackney, London and then went ‘to another boarding-school at Wallingford’ in Oxfordshire. He started at University College London but ill-health prevented further education. He lectured all around Britain, and his Narrative of the Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper from American Slavery was published in 1837: it provides these details. He wrote ‘he has hitherto been supported by a few ministers and gentlemen; his object in visiting some of the principal towns now, is to sell a sufficient number of his books to educate himself; which will enable him fully to carry out the object he contemplates, that of being qualified to labor amongst the children of Africa. And he hopes that he may in time be a humble instrument in liberating his mother, brothers and sisters from slavery.’

In December 1839 he married Ann Stephen Price in Bristol. His narrative had five English editions by 1843 and was published in Welsh in 1841, and another was printed in Berwick on Tweed in 1848, which stated sales had been 36,000. Several pages list locations (almost all Nonconformist) in Wales, Scotland and England where he spoke, and they include Oswaldtwistle (Lancashire), Leominster (Herts), Yeovil (Somerset), Axminster, Dorking and Towcester. Roper had told his tale widely. After twelve years the public appearances of this ‘nearly white’ escaped slave still drew crowds. His Narrative had helped finance his education.² Roper was a dramatic speaker, showing his audiences ‘several instruments of torture’. His height (he was 6ft 5in – over 2 metres) added to his appeal.

Scrutiny of the places named reveals many were villages, even hamlets, with fewer than 1,000 inhabitants and less than 200 houses. Although Britain’s rail network was substantial and expanding, the modern mind is struck by the isolation of some venues. Croyde in North Devon is on the coast, 10 miles (16km) from Barnstaple, and both Mursley in Buckinghamshire and Bluntisham in Huntingdon are hamlets, as was Loscoe in Derbyshire although Roper could have walked there from the nearest rail station. Steventon in Bedfordshire is better known as Stevington, and was 5 miles (8km) from the centre of Bedford. The Imperial Gazetteer of the 1870s indicates that it had 148 houses with 606 residents. One of his lectures was in Barton-le-Clay near Luton on 17 August 1860.³

Where did he stay, who came to hear him, who purchased his Narrative ? His appearance at the Bible Christian chapel in Wroxall on the Isle of Wight was in a village with no church. His list indicates he also spoke at town halls and in school rooms of the Church of England, and some locations suggest a planned tour. Perhaps pamphlets announcing his programme will be traced in libraries and at ephemera fairs.

Writing from Daventry in May 1844 he informed the committee of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in London of his eight years in Britain, sometimes lecturing twice a day and visiting 2,000 places. He had accumulated £80 which would take him, his wife and his child (that child seems to have died young) to settle in South Africa but then they would have no funds left. He requested a loan, promising to use his knowledge of cotton, tobacco and maize which he was sure grew in the Cape region. There was enough for the Ropers to go to Canada in the mid-1840s (their daughter Annie was born on the voyage). He had returned by mid-1855 when he spoke in Hereford (the newspaper noted his style had improved since he was last in the town, seventeen years before). A collection helped towards his costs. He was noted by a Guildford newspaper in October 1855.⁴

The Ropers had four daughters. They and their mother were listed in the 1861 census in Merthyr Tydfil, Wales when he was in Cambridge where he was living in a working-class area of the city and described as a ‘Lecturer on Slavery, U. States’. That census shows his family in the house of William Price, the father-in-law of Roper, a Welsh-born widowed tailor, aged 76. Price’s daughter Ann, born in 1819, was described as a teacher in a private school. Roper’s oldest daughter Annie had been born in 1846, and was working as an assistant teacher. Her birthplace was stated to be ‘on the Atlantic Ocean’. Three girls were still at school: Maria was aged 11, Ada Victoria was 9, and May Alice (also known as Alice Maud Mary) was 7. They had been born in Canada. Ada had been born in Lower Canada (Quebec) and May in Nova Scotia.⁵ All four daughters were British subjects.

In 1867 Annie sailed on the Atlanta to Australia, to work as a governess.⁶ There she married Thomas Edward Donehue in 1871. He died in 1886: she died in 1927. In 1883 Alice Maud Mary Roper, aged 26, who declared her ‘Baptist missionary’ father to be dead, married Youhannah El Karey – a Baptist missionary in Palestine – in a chapel in Newport, South Wales, with her sister Victoria Ada Roper (sic) as a witness.⁷ Moses Roper died, a pauper, in America in 1891.⁸

Education, independence, marriage, children, were all aspirations that were often dreams for African Americans in the United States. Running from servitude could take them to Canada, to the apparently friendly Northern states, out west to California, across the Atlantic to Britain, or to the islands notably Jamaica and the Bahamas. Slave catchers anxious to receive rewards for the capture of fugitives had widespread support. American laws regarded the escapees as thieves – they had stolen themselves (the property of others) and also the clothes they wore (likewise, the property of others), and any boat or horse used in the escape. The small minority of African descent Americans who were ‘free people of color’ were constrained and restricted, excluded from white-run activities other than as menials.

Their leaders were often active in Christian churches, independent from whites. The Christian message of redemption and salvation provided comfort. They could worship in a manner compatible to their circumstances, organized outside white ecclesiastical structures. The black-led churches and their ministers had an obligation to represent African Americans.

British reformers and social agitators often had strong Christian beliefs, and the horrors faced by African Americans were not acceptable to many of them. British chapels and churches became places for meetings and lectures on slavery, and Roper was followed by dozens of others, who spread news of American life around Victorian Britain and Ireland.

There was Zilpha Elaw, a Methodist evangelist born in Pennsylvania who was active in Britain from the 1840s, who published her Memoirs of the Life, Religious Experience, and Ministerial Travels and Labours of Mrs. Zilpha Elaw, an American Female of Colour in London in 1846. The book’s dedication suggests that she was about to return to America. She thought that there was a ‘weakness of faith’ in Britain. She had travelled into the slave states which she called ‘these regions of wickedness’.⁹ She wrote of giving over 1,000 sermons around Britain. She had left her daughter and grandchildren in America (her husband had died in 1823). A dispute led to letters in the Kendal Mercury in 1847, when she was supported and praised by her host in the Lake District town of Sedbergh.¹⁰ The Watchman and Wesleyan Advertiser of 15 January 1851 reported that she had married Ralph Bressey Shum in Poplar, east London, towards the end of 1850.¹¹ Their marriage registration at the parish church in Bow Road on 9 December 1850 states that she was a widow and he a widower. Their fathers (her father was Sancho Pancost) had been butchers. Shum died in 1854 and she died in London in 1873. She is listed in the 1871 census at 33 Turner Street close by the London Hospital. Her book, with her portrait, which may have been reissued in 1849, says she arrived in London in July 1840 and mentions locations where she preached and attended