Abstract
In 1839, several white Quaker women in Providence, Rhode Island, founded the Providence Association for the Benefit of Colored Orphans; they sought to take in the city’s orphans. During the first years of operation, dozens of African American parents admitted and withdrew their children from the Association. The vast majority of the children admitted had living parents or were paid boarders. In 1846, the Association incorporated as the Providence Association for the Benefit of Colored Children with an enlarged mission to provide for the support and education of black children. During the final collapse of slavery in Rhode Island, black parents transformed an orphanage into an institution that also offered short- and long-term care and education for wards and boarders. In doing so, they expanded the work of white reformers from raising African American children to supporting their needs as working parents.
On April 29, 1839, six-year-old Anna Elizabeth Potter and her three-year-old brother John Francis Thompson Potter became the first residents of the Providence Association for the Benefit of Colored Orphans (PABCO). They were admitted by their father. Five months later, in early September, seven-year-old William Henry Medley was admitted by his mother. Six months later, eight-year-old James Munroe Livingston was admitted as a boarder by his aunt. Anna Potter was taken out of the orphanage by her father after he remarried, on a date not recorded. John Potter died at the orphanage on October 30, 1842; the cause of his death was not recorded. William Medley was removed from the orphanage by his mother on July 1, 1845. James Livingston was removed by his grandmother in the fall of 1840. 1 In 1839, several white Quaker women founded the PABCO; their constitution stated “The object of this Society shall be to place in the ‘Shelter’ orphan children of color, and to have them suitable educated for their sphere in life.” In the first year of its operation, the PABCO admitted twenty children, only three of them were full orphans—both parents were dead; most of the children were half orphans—one living parent. Many of the half orphans were boarders—children whose parent or relative paid a fee for at least a portion of their maintenance, the other children were wards—those left in the care of the Association with no financial support. Between 1839 and 1845, dozens of African American 2 parents admitted and withdrew their children from the PABCO; of the eighty-six children admitted during the first six years of operation, only five were full orphans, and nearly a third were boarders. 3 In 1846, the PABCO incorporated as the Providence Association for the Benefit of Colored Children (PABCC) with an enlarged mission—“providing for the support and education of indigent colored children, not provided for, and who, for want of paternal care, are in a suffering and dangerous condition.” 4
During the final collapse of slavery in Rhode Island, black parents transformed an orphanage into an institution that also offered short- and long-term care and education for wards and boarders. In doing so, they expanded the work of white reformers from raising African American children to supporting their needs as working parents. The white middle- and upper-class women who established the PABCO sought to save black children who had been orphaned as well as those who been, from their perspective, neglected and subjected to bad influence. It was our desire to provide a suitable house where the children might be placed and taught the habits of industry, improved their morals, and instructed in such branches of knowledge as would enable them to procure respectable maintenance, as domestics in families, or to acquire trades adapted to their capacities or inclinations. The first design of the Institution was to receive as inmates such children as had been bereaved by an all wise Providence of their natural protectors. But we have since thought best to extend our charity to that much larger class who are deprived of parent’s protection by the sad effects of vice and intemperance.
5
Understanding how black families in Rhode Island used a private white institution to care for their children offers a unique opportunity to highlight how severely marginalized communities are able to survive and reconstitute their families amid overlapping transformative historical moments. Rhode Islanders were among the last northerners to abolish slaveholding (1842); however, they had been among the first to pass a gradual emancipation law (1784), which made children born to enslaved women indentured servants rather than slaves for life. Rhode Island was also one of the birthplaces of the American Industrial Revolution; it was home to first water powered mill in the country, The Slater Mill. The Industrial Revolution had profound impacts on the American family in general, and free black Americans, however, were shut out of the factory labor. Moreover, most studies of the black family before the Civil War focus solely on enslaved people as the vast majority of black people lived in bondage. Black Rhode were attempting to reconstitute their families in a new Republic amid the slow, protracted collapse of slavery in the North and rise of the Industrial Revolution all while facing nearly insurmountable race-based discrimination in a nation that denied them citizenship and liberty.
Many of the political, social, and economic challenges faced by African Americans in the antebellum North have been noted and documented; however, how that marginality affected the everyday lives of families has received less attention. All poor working families struggled to care for their children; however, the need for childcare was greater among recently freed families because of the depth and breadth of the poverty that accompanied the collapse of race-based slavery in the northern states. Race-based economic discrimination created the near universal need for African American mothers to work outside the home even while their children were very young. Moreover, in port cities like Providence, many African American households were partially supported by sailors who were gone for weeks and months at a time leaving the task of securing childcare to working mothers.
In the transition from slavery to freedom, black Rhode Islanders struggled to maintain and build their families, and some of these families used an institution initially intended to raise black children as short- and long-term boarding school. This strategy was common among poor people in the latter half of the nineteenth century; the majority of children placed in orphanages in the nineteenth century had one and sometimes two living parents. 9 Historian Jessie Ramey’s Childcare in Black and White, which contrasts the experience of white and black children and parents, details how African American parents and relatives from the 1870s through the 1920s used orphanages as a form of childcare. 10 An examination of the PABCO, one of the first orphanages for children of color, reveals that this strategy was in use by African Americans as early as the 1830s and 1840s, when homes for children of color were first established.
Most studies of orphanages for African American children focus on the post–Civil War period; those that examine the antebellum era often focus on major black population centers like New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. The early experiences of black families in Providence, a small city in a tiny state, deepen our understanding of the African American experience by exploring how free African Americans managed their lives in places where they were few. Focusing on the agency of black parents reveals how a small, vulnerable community survived as they contended with social, economic, and political marginalization.
Moreover, a study of black Rhode Islander’s experiences caring for their children show how freed people worked to build free lives in a state that continued to be entrenched in the business of slavery, that is, the buying and selling of people and goods that sustained the plantation economy. From the colonial period through the antebellum era, white Rhode Islanders transported, fed, and clothed enslaved people throughout the Americas; they dominated the North American trade in African slaves. Their colonial and postcolonial economy depended on bilateral trade with the West Indian plantations, and during the antebellum, they were the leading producers of slave clothing known as “negro cloth.” “Negro cloth” was made in part from slave-picked cotton and sold to enslavers. 11
After the American Revolution, the institution of slavery slowly collapsed in the northern states, and the free black population ballooned. Black northerners became free in a variety of ways, including military service, running away, self-purchase, lawsuits, petitions, and manumissions driven by revolutionary ideals or religious mandates. 12 Enslaved black people also leveraged gradual emancipations laws, which freed but indentured children born to enslaved women after a certain date, to bargain for their freedom. 13 “Free” was a relative term. Free African Americans had ambiguous legal protections and were not universally recognized as citizens nor accorded the rights of citizens. 14 Nevertheless, within the first half of the nineteenth century, most northern states had legally dismantled slaveholding. 15 In Rhode Island, the legal breakdown of race-based slavery spanned seven decades. It began with Quaker manumissions in the early 1770s, followed by the enlistment of enslaved men during the Revolutionary War in 1778, the passing of the Gradual Emancipation Law in 1783 which ended hereditary slavery. Rhode Islanders were among the first northerners to pass a gradual emancipation law, indenturing children born to enslaved mothers after March 1, 1784; however, race-based slaveholding remained legal until 1842, when the state legislators finally abolished it. 16 The protracted emancipation process disadvantaged the free black community. Most freed people were trapped in low-paying menial labor and therefore struggled to care for their children. The women who established the PABCO bore witness to the poverty of families of color in the city of Providence as they transitioned from slavery to freedom.
Life on the Margins—People of Color in Antebellum Rhode Island
The critiques of African American families and communities made by founders of the PABCO acknowledged prejudice faced by black people; however, they did not fully appreciate the multifaceted disadvantages and discrimination that they faced. These discriminations were legacies of race-based slavery. The institution of slavery in Rhode Island had begun as a system of bondage for captured Native Americans but flourished as system committed to black captivity. Starting in the first decades of the eighteenth century, white Rhode Islanders began to replace a familiar “dangerous” indigenous population with African “strangers.” 17 Census data track the shrinking of the enslaved population, from its high in the 1750 colonial census, which reported 3,347 people of African descent, all of them assumed to be enslaved, who accounted for 10 percent of the colony’s population—the highest concentration of black people in New England. 18 Between 1790 and 1840, the number of enslaved people in Rhode Island fell, and the number of free African Americans rose. In 1790, the first US Census reported 958 enslaved people in Rhode Island, 48 in the 1820 Census, and 17 in 1830. By 1840, the Census reported 5 enslaved people and 3,238 free African Americans, living among 108,837 white people. 19 In other words, by the mid-nineteenth century, recently freed Rhode Islanders, described as “black” in the Census, comprised a tiny minority. 20 People of color made up less than 1 percent of the state’s population and half of them, about 1,600, lived in Providence. 21
The PABCO emerged in an era when Rhode Islanders of African descent, just a generation or two removed from bondage, continued to live lives plagued by the legacies of local race-based bondage. In 1822, state legislators voted to bar all black men from voting; prior to the prohibition on black male suffrage, black men who met the property qualification could and did vote. 22 So, in 1839, when the PABCO was established, only white male property holders could vote; Rhode Island was unique among northern states because it limited voting to property owners well into the nineteenth century. When African American property holders from Providence argued that they were subjected to taxation with no representation, a General Assembly member responded, “Shall a Nigger be allowed to go to the polls and tie my vote? No, Mr. Speaker, it can’t be. The taxes don’t amount to more than forty or fifty dollars; let them be taken off [the tax rolls].” 23 The tax for black property holders was rescinded, as was the possibility of voting. 24 Only after black Rhode Islanders had aligned themselves with the state during the Dorr Rebellion, a constitutional crisis centered on the expansion of the vote to landless white men, did the state re-enfranchise black men. 25 Even after that, white Rhode Islanders “threatened to mob any black who dared enter the polls,” and poll officials humiliated African American men by publicly asking whether or not they could sign their names. These tactics decreased the number of black men who registered to vote in Providence from 363 in 1844 to 244 in 1848. 26
Throughout the antebellum North, free black people faced social discrimination with economic consequences. Confined to neighborhoods with high crime and relatively high rents, the little property amassed by freed people was often at risk. On October 18, 1824, white Rhode Islanders destroyed nearly all the homes in the predominantly African American neighborhood of Hard Scrabble. Seven years later, white rioters wreaked havoc for four days in Snow Town, another predominantly black enclave in the city of Providence. It was the first time the state militia was called to put down a public disturbance. 27
Both riots began when blacks refused to show public deference to whites. On the evening of October 18, 1824, several black residents refused to step off the sidewalk near Henry T. Wheeler’s home to let a group of whites pass; Wheeler, a black man, ran a dance hall on first floor of his two-story home in Hard Scrabble. The black residents’ mild assertion of equality and dignity set the stage for violence. An estimated forty to sixty white men, carrying clubs and axes, gathered in front of the Wheeler residence and literally took the home apart, tearing it down to its studs. Altogether they destroyed twenty structures—nearly all of the black-owned homes and businesses in Hard Scrabble.
28
The next day, ten white men were indicted for disturbing the peace and destruction of private property. All the men were residents of Providence, employed as laborers or tradesmen. The defense claimed the rioters had performed a public service.
29
The defense lawyer, Joseph L. Tillinghast, Esq., repeatedly asked the state’s witnesses, “What business was usually carried on in Wheeler’s home,” implying that because it was a dance hall, its owner must have been immoral. The state’s attorney objected that “the character of the house was not on trial” to which Tillinghast replied “they had a right to inquire what sort of a building it was, whether it was a house or a pig-stye.” He then asked whether the defendants could be “indicted for tearing down a pig stye?”
30
In his closing remarks, Tillinghast stated: “Like the ancient Babylon, it has fallen with all its graven images, its tables of impure oblation, its idolatrous rights, and sacrifices, and my client stands here charged with having invaded this classic ground and torn down its altars and its beautiful temples!” The defendants were not alone in their opinion of Hard Scrabble and its residents. The report released by the court read: Among this number [upwards of 1,200 black persons living in Providence] there are a great many industrious and honest individuals who in their departments render themselves useful members of society; but the mass, as might be inferred, can hardly be considered a valuable acquisition to any community, and their return to the respective places from whence they came, probably would not be considered a public calamity. Between this class and the whites bickerings and antipathies would naturally arise. This has long been partially the case, until on the evening previous to the Riot, a sort of battle royal took place between considerable parties of whites and blacks, in consequence of an attempt of the latter to maintain the inside walk in their peregrinations through the town. If such has been the case heretofore, the moral and orderly town of Providence would not have been disgraced by the existence of a Hard-Scrabble, or of a mob to demolish it.
31
A more destructive riot erupted several years later in 1831 when black Olney Lane residents clashed with white steamboat workers in Snow Town. 34 On a Wednesday evening late in September, several white steamboat workers armed with sticks and clubs approached five white sailors on Olney Lane. The steamboat workers told the sailors that they had been involved in fight with the “darkies” and asked the sailors for their help. The group continued up the lane and joined a white crowd of about one hundred people. A shot was fired, and four nights of violence began. 35
The town council condemned the mob for their “lawless attack upon private property, provoking insults and aggravated assaults,” but ultimately blamed black Rhode Islanders. 36 The council assembled a committee to investigate the riot and staffed it with fourteen “respected” white citizens—bankers, lawyers, clergymen, and businessmen, including Richard Arnold, a prominent local merchant who owned and operated a plantation that relied on the labor of enslaved men, women, and children in Georgia. 37 After its investigation, the committee concluded that the rioters targeted “houses of suspicious reputation.” The “targeted” rioting justified the destruction of black property, and the report asserted that respectable black residents of Snow Town did not stop the rioters because they too were tired of the “ordinary evils of the houses of ill fame.” 38 The committee did not consider that the residents of Snow Town were in no position to defend themselves or their neighbors. Outnumbered, they were busy fleeing their homes carrying beds, bedding, chairs, tables, and other personal property. 39 None of the perpetrators were held accountable for the Snow Town riot, and none of its victims were offered compensation. In a just seven years, two black neighborhoods were attacked in Providence, and in both instances, black people—the victims—were blamed. 40
Social and political marginality was accompanied by economic discrimination. Free men of color performed many of the same tasks they had done as enslaved people, but they were increasingly shut out of the skilled trades in which they had labored while in bondage. Free black tradesmen competing with white men were often barred from apprenticeships and trade organizations. Black men were also shut out of the booming textile industry. There were “no blacks were among the general factory operatives,” even though the typical factory job did not require special skills, training, or advanced education. 41 Ironically, the textile industry in Rhode Island was doubly dependent on black slave labor—they bought slave-picked cotton and milled it into clothes for enslaved African Americans—while free black people were barred from employment in nearly all the mills. Most textile mills in Rhode Island manufactured “negro cloth,” a coarse cotton wool material made especially to minimize the cost of clothing enslaved African Americans in the South. By mid-century, 79 percent of all Rhode Island textile mills made slave clothing. 42
With few exceptions, black men were absent from the professional classes—lawyers, doctors, merchants, newspaper editors, and the like. Free African Americans in Rhode Island lacked the population density necessary for significant communal self-sufficiency. At the turn of the nineteenth century, blacks made up less than 5 percent of Rhode Island’s population, and due largely to European immigration, people of African descent made up less than 1 percent of the state’s population by the mid-nineteenth century. In contrast, sizable free black populations in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston supported those cities’ free black artisans, professionals, and storekeepers. By 1810, those cities boasted several thousand free black people, while Providence had fewer than 2,000 and Newport had just several hundred. 43 While a few African American men found success as small businessmen in the service sector as shoemakers, grocers, barbers, gardeners, and retailers, the 1825 Providence city directory classified 60 percent of free black men as laborers: porters, grooms, handymen, ditchdiggers, servants, wagon team drivers, painters, cooks, and stevedores. Unskilled labor was seasonal, and white employers preferred white laborers; as a consequence, most black laborers spent as much time looking for work as working. 44
Black men did, however, find a significant niche as sailors on commercial ships, and they were vastly overrepresented in merchant marine work. Between 1800 and 1820, nonwhites held about 20 percent of all seafaring jobs although they represented just 5 percent of the total population of the region. 45 These men were described on seamen certificates as “African, sable, colored, Indian, black, mulatto, yellow, copper, dark copper, darkish, inclining to brown, and brown and ruddy.” 46 With the exception of whaling vessels, which remained as white as northern factories, 90 percent of trading vessels that left Newport between 1803 and 1865 had at least one nonwhite crewmember aboard; for the period between 1824 and 1831, several merchant ships had majority black crews. 47
African American men were attracted to seafaring because racial boundaries often came second to ship hierarchy. Crewmembers were paid according to rank rather than race, and the work was more consistent and better paying. However, racism kept black men out of higher ranks. Nonwhite sailors rarely rose above the rank of cook, steward, or seaman and, with very few exceptions, did not attain the title of captain regardless of their skill and experience. Moreover, the work was dangerous, especially for black sailors who had to contend with southern “Negro Seamen Acts” that called for black sailors to be imprisoned during their stays in southern ports, imprisonments that sometimes resulted in illegal enslavement. Finally, discipline on the ship was harsh and punitive. 48 Even when the work was relatively steady and safe, it took men away from their families for weeks and months at a time, leaving black women to arrange the care of children while they too sought work.
All poor women had to work to supplement the meager, often irregular income of their husbands, sons, and fathers; for poor African American women, the need to work was exacerbated because black men occupied the lowest rungs of the economic ladder. A few women of color went into business for themselves, selling cakes, vegetables, fruit, candy, bread, and even liquor. 49 However, emancipation did not change white employers’ perception of appropriate work for women versus men, so the vast majority of free women of color labored in the domestic trades including cleaning, cooking, washing, weaving, sewing, childcare, paper making, soapmaking, and taking in boarders. Domestic labor often required women be away from home for long periods of time, and some domestics lived with the families they served. Domestic work was physically demanding, low paying, and offered little opportunity for advancement. 50 The work of free women of color outside the home was essential to gains that the black community made in freedom, but it also exacerbated the need for childcare.
During the gradual demise of slavery, black Rhode Islanders made small but significant financial gains. In 1822, black Rhode Islanders collectively owned about $10,000 in property. By 1830, they owned $18,000, and by 1840, they owned $46,000. The number of independent African American heads of household, which was a marker of financial stability and independence, increased by 121 percent between 1832 and 1844. The number of property holders (African Americans who owned homes and businesses) increased by 305 percent between 1829 and 1860. 51 This small group of property holders represented a small but influential black middle class. It is difficult to accurately differentiate class among free northern black Americans in the nineteenth century; however, education, autonomous work, and home ownership often distinguished the middle-class blacks from their working-class counterparts. Many were the children and grandchildren of black Rhode Islanders who had gained their freedom the post–Revolutionary Period; they established the first black institutions in the state such as the Free African Union Society (1780), the African Benevolent Society (ABS; 1807), the Female ABS (1805), and the African Union Meeting House (1819). By the 1830s and 1840s, there were several black improvement associations such as Harmony Lodge No. 1, a Female Literacy Society, and a Female Tract Society, as well as a few Churches—Zion, Meeting Street, Pond Street, Christ Church, and Second Freewill. 52 However, these modest economic and social gains did not protect black people from political and social marginalization and the virulent racism that came with it and left poor and working-class parents of color with little time and few childcare options.
People of Color and the PABCO
Of the eighty-six children admitted by the PABCO between 1839 and 1845, only five were full orphans. The largest group of children admitted to the orphanage were children whose parent(s) or relatives temporarily lodged them with the PABCO because they could not care for them, and these children were returned when their parent(s) or relatives’ financial conditions or circumstances improved. Twenty-five children, nearly a third of those admitted, were boarders—placed by parents and relatives who paid for long-term care and housing for their children. 53 At a cost of fifty cents a week, boarding a child represented about a third of the average domestic servant’s weekly pay. 54 PABCO’s records indicate that parents and relatives retrieved forty of the sixty-one children who were admitted as wards between 1839 and 1845. In the same time period, fourteen children died, one ran away, and three were inmates admitted by the state. The fate of the remaining three is not indicated in the records. 55
Using the PABCO as a boarding school was one strategy among the many used by newly freed black families. The black community’s multifaceted response to discrimination was key to its survival. In freedom, black Rhode Islanders invested heavily in self-help and uplift organizations and churches. 56 These organizations provided an important site of leadership for black men as well as a place of worship and dignity for the larger black community that had previously been segregated within white churches. Just as black families created their own institutions, they also challenged, changed, and transformed white-run institutions created for “their” benefit by white Rhode Islanders.
Parents’ use PABCO as a short- and long-term boarding school influenced the mission of the founders of PABCO. In 1846, when the Association incorporated as the PABCC, their focus shifted to reflect the needs of the black community. Although they claimed, sought, and did offer shelter for orphans, they also served as a short- and long-term boarding school and safe haven for parents or relatives who found themselves, temporarily, unable to care for or support their children. The records of the PABCC are spotty and incomplete in the first three decades after they incorporated; there are years of missing annual reports, and some reports did not include financial summaries—denoting donations, boarding fees collected, and expenses. Moreover, the annual reports do not indicate the number of children who were full orphans, half orphans, boarders, and wards removed. The first annual report available after the Association incorporated in 1846 was from 1856. There are also reports from 1857, 1859, 1860, 1862, 1863, 1864, 1865, 1866, and 1867. In 1856, there were twenty children housed at the Association. The Association secretary noted: “Our family may seem small, but from the census recently taken, which states there has been no increase in the colored population of our city for the last 30 years, we find the number of children in the Shelter large in proportion to the population, than white children in their kindred Institution.”
57
Parents and relatives who paid to board their children are rarely mentioned in the annual reports, and the fees collected from boarders are not itemized instead they are listed as in one lump sum; donors on the other hand are thanked and listed individually. In 1855 and 1857, they collected $100.00 and $189.00, respectively, from boarders; there was no accounting available from 1856.
58
In 1859, the Association collected $76.00 in boarding fees, the secretary noted “We have recently found homes for several of our children, and other who were boarders in the Institution have been placed out by their parent, thus leaving our family smaller than usual.”
59
The number of boarders must have increased substantially, between 1861 and 1862 the Association collected $280.00 in boarding fees.
60
The Twenty-third Annual Report confirmed the increase in the number of boarders, “We often welcome to the Shelter the children of industrious widowed mothers from whom we receive a small compensation for the care they are unable to give.” The Association reports also noted their engagement with middle class African Americans to bring more children in the Association: We invite our colored friend of intelligence and candor to visit the school and see the children in their hours of study, work or play; and being convinced of the good accomplished, use their influence in correcting this unreasonable prejudice among their people, and thus aid us in the work of filling the Shelter with children who need its fostering care.
61
We are sorry to notice the prejudice which the colored population feel toward us, has not worn away. We are unable to see cause for such feeling, and regret it should prevent us from extending our charity as we might, and would be glad to do. There are surely enough in our city, who need the influence and instruction they could receive here. We have now twenty four children. The house should be full. We hope it is from no lack of effort on our part.
64
Families of Color and White Women Reformers
Scholars have long noted white women’s reform work—abolitionism, child welfare, education, poverty, health care, and temperance—in the nineteenth century.
66
The women who established the PABCO, like Anna Jenkins, the granddaughter of the famed abolitionist Moses Brown, were part of a growing cohort of white middle-class women committed to social reform.
67
In line with their abolitionist predecessors and contemporaries, these women were determined to “save” black children from immorality and slovenly habits. As elite white women, they saw themselves in a position to help children whose families struggled to meet the new ideal of white middle-class life. They envisioned their work as a demonstration of their Christianity and moral superiority.
68
In their first annual report, the orphanage’s founding members declared, The colored population of our city is large, compared with other cities in New England. Many are destitute of every physical comfort, and among this class are to be found the most ignorant and degraded. For the children of such we feel a deep interest. Not only are they deprived of the common necessaries of life, but they are subjected to the blighting influences of evil example, surrounded by the effects of intemperance and vice.
69
Scholars who have begun to examine and detail the work of black upper- and middle-class antebellum women reformers have focused primarily on antislavery work and women’s suffrage. 71 Middle- and upper-class African Americans in Rhode Island had been organizing since the 1780s, and black women had devoted much of their time to education. In Newport in 1809, they established the African Female Benevolent Society (AFBS), an auxiliary to the ABS which had been established in 1807 for the primary purpose of educating black children. State law did not bar African American children from attending public schools; however, schools in Providence, Newport, and Bristol, where the majority of black Rhode Islanders lived, were segregated through local ordinances. 72 One of the founding members of AFBS, Obour Tanner, was a former slave who corresponded regularly with famed black poet Phyllis Wheatley. Women like Tanner understood the freedom of thought and expression that literacy could bring to free blacks. 73 AFBS members “habitually taught and partially clothed twenty-five or thirty children.” 74 Organizational records mention the AFBS School, but not what happened to it. The evidence suggests that the AFBS School merged at some point with the ABS school. 75 Although the women no longer ran a school, the AFBS remained an autonomous organization. The two organizations corresponded regularly, and the female society regularly contributed funds from their treasury to the ABS school. For example, in 1809, they allotted $10.00 for the men’s society to support the school, no small amount considering that in its best years, the ABS collected just over $70.00 in membership dues. 76 The AFBS members, who could afford membership dues and time to devote to charitable work, were likely to have been from middle-class financially secure families.
Although the records of the AFBS reveal the reform efforts of middle-class black women, less attention had been paid to the actions of working-class and poor women and men of color, particularly how they responded to the efforts of reformers. The notes and intake records of PABCO administrators offer a rare but problematic glimpse into the everyday practices of poor and working-class parents of color. First, the records reflect the perspectives of upper- and middle-class white women reformers, who were racist and classist. Second, most of the information concerns the children and not their parents, who are not named. Finally, there are no known records that directly reflect the parents’ perspectives. Despite these shortcomings, the records reveal the actions of black parents who used an orphanage as the boarding school they so desperately needed, and the criticisms levied at parents and children provide insight into the problem faced by a community transitioning out of bondage into a racially hostile state and nation.
PABCO administrators routinely vilified parents. For example, the 1841 Annual Report detailed the deaths of three children, describing their illness as “the result, no doubt, of ill treatment and exposure, previous to their admission to the ‘Shelter’. The report’s writers assert the children were “taken from the abode of the most abject poverty and wickedness, their parents being the slaves of intemperance and vice. The simple statement of such facts as these, are the most powerful arguments we can offer to the charitable in aid of this helpless class.” 77 The concerns about the conditions of children of color were not unfounded. However, the PABCO women who wrote about these conditions did not acknowledge the racist social, political, and economic discrimination that caused the poverty in which many of the children lived. While all poor parents struggled to provide for their families and take care of their children, newly freed black parents faced relentless and multifaceted economic, social, and political marginalization that sometimes led to the “neglect” of black children, who were often poorly housed, fed, and clothed and were routinely left alone at home. 78
Parents’ and relatives’ use of the PABCO as a short- and long-term boarding school reveals a community eager to take care of their children. Their willingness to admit and board their children highlights their willingness to sacrifice for the well-being of their children. Those who could not afford to board their children were willing to temporarily admit them to an institution where children were allowed no supervised contact with relatives, and visits were subject to approval by the board, although there is no record of whether parental visits fell under the same restrictions. At the age of nine, boys were placed with families as domestics or apprentice, while girls lived in the shelter until they were twelve and then were placed with families as domestics, and parents had no say in where their children worked. 79 Boarders stayed at Association regardless of age. 80 But, most parents and relatives came back for their children.
The emotional and financial sacrifices of these parents and families were lost on the administrators of the PABCO. The neighborhoods populated by black Rhode Islanders were indeed “rife with impurity and vice,” but the administrators of PABCO, like other white elites, failed to acknowledge that some of the most violent criminal activity in the black neighborhoods of Providence was perpetuated by whites. This attitude is most visible in Providence’s reaction to two riots that devastated black neighborhoods in the first half of the nineteenth century. Not surprisingly, the women of the PABCO shared the same perspective on the city’s black community as the city’s legal and political system. Like the committee that blamed the victims of the Snow Town riot for the white mob’s destruction of property, the elite white women who established PABCO blamed African Americans for their poverty and did not acknowledge how the legacies of slavery and continued race-based discrimination by local whites affected the care of black children. Like the court’s report on the Hard Scrabble riot, which claimed that “the mass of the black residents in Hard Scrabble, can hardly be considered a valuable acquisition to any community,” PABCO’s second annual report found “a much larger class in the [black] community inhaling an atmosphere rife with impurity and vice, whose parents exerted only an evil influence upon their children.” White elites did not recognize black families, at large, as desirable members of the community or as black men and women as capable parents.
The women of PABCO sought to offer what they thought the community of color in Providence could not—a good upbringing for their children. In 1841, the PABCO annual report noted, “we have sensibly felt the need of enlarged accommodation and a more airy situation, [so] the children under our care may enjoy the benefit of exercise, without being exposed to the ill treatment, to which, we regret to say, their color subjects them.” They believed that, if properly raised and educated, these children had the potential to become contributing members of society—specifically as domestics and laborers. They rejected racial arguments asserting that African Americans were innately inferior. And yet, while they advocated nurture over nature, the women of PABCO made no effort to integrate Providence public schools; in the late 1850s, a few prominent black Rhode Islanders began a campaign to integrate the state’s public schools, there is no evidence that the PABCC was an ally. 81 By consigning nonwhite children to inferior “colored” schools, the city’s white elites reserved for their own children the benefits of better funded, better staffed schools without black classmates. 82
The racial descriptors employed by the PABCO women further reveal their prejudice that children of color embodied characteristics of primitive people, unsullied by (but also incapable of dealing with) the demands and complications of modernity. Nine of the eighty-six children admitted between 1839 and 1845 were identified by racial category. Six-year-old Anna Elizabeth Potter and her three-year-old brother John Francis Thompson Potter, two “Pure Africans,” were described as “mild, docile, easily influenced for good or evil, with little energy of character—all the traits of character said to belong [to their nation].” Four-year-old William H. Mars was described as “a descendent of the aborigines of our country whose forefathers possibly once roamed through the forests which have been swept away by the rude hand of civilization and the poor hunted Indian.” He was marked “a lovely boy remnant of a mighty race.” Six-year-old Henry Thompson and his sister Mary Smith Thompson (age unknown), whose mother was white and father was “colored,” were described “indulged very much.” However, Mary was said to be a “quite a promising girl.” Siblings, ten-year-old Mary Jane Pierce, four-year-old William Henry Pierce, and Hezekiah Pierce (age unknown), were “found in Stamper St. without food or fuel. Their mother, a descendant of the aborigines, had in a fit of intoxication left them with their father who has not provided for their wants.” 83 The father’s race was not noted. The races of the other children were not explicitly mentioned, which suggest they were classified black or “colored.”
The vast majority of the children were described in favorable terms. Of eleven-year-old Rosanna Wilson, it was written that “among all that have received into the institution, none have given greater promise of usefulness than this lovely girl [who] possesses one the sweetest countenances, uncommonly kind and affectionate.” Seven-year-old William Henry Medley’s “superior intellect” and “warm temperament” were noted alongside his being “peculiarly fond of reading and deep study, frequently so buried in thought or absorbed in reading as to be perfectly unconscious of anything around him.” The families he was sent out to work for reportedly “always loved him.”
Nonetheless, several children were maligned in admission notes. For instance, John Henry Hudson was described as “a boy with a large development of combativeness and but little conscientiousness, very indolent possessing a large head and high forehead he usually attracted the attention of visitors—I fear he will yet became houseless, homeless.”
The bad characteristics of the children were often blamed on their parents. Association administrators believed that many parents were irresponsible, slovenly, lazy, and incapable of properly bringing up children. For these white women, the problems of free black and indigenous people did not stem from social, political, and economic marginality but from indulgence in immoral behaviors like excessive drinking and selfishness. Their harshest words were for the parents of the children. The vast majority of the parents were, when mentioned, described in very unfavorable terms. Fifteen-year-old Lewis Temple was said to be “a bad boy through the mismanagement of his parents,” and three-year-old John Francis Thompson Potter “had been trained for the first three years of his life to vicious habits, so that the first words of his infant tongue were those of profanity.” 84 One administrator feared the “promising and lovely” Anna Elizabeth Potter would be corrupted when her father, who had remarried, removed her from the shelter: “God alone can keep her amid the unhallowed influences by which she must inevitably be surrounded.” Another worried about ten-year-old George Sampson, “a good natured, overgrown fellow,” who “was removed by his wretched intemperate father.” Particular scorn was reserved for the mothers of shelter children. Five-year-old George William Robinson’s mother was said to be “entirely reckless of consequences as it regards to her or child.” Seven-year-old James Pratt’s “wretched mother has just been ushered into the presence of her Judge; in a fit of intoxication, she fell into the fire [and] was burned to death, leaving her helpless offspring to suffer the bitter results of her vicious course of life.” Five-year-old Thomas James Hull was “from the most wretched associations, his mother being of a woman of profligate habits.” Eight-year-old Lucy Ann Malbone’s “partially insane” mother “conceived the idea that she was not properly healed and removed here after being in the family a number of months, and the last we hear of her was wandering our streets begging from door to door ragged dirty and saucy—On the accountability of these wretched mothers.” Four-year-old John Bent’s mother was criticized for bringing him to the shelter “in such a condition as almost impossible to tell whether he was a human being or not.” Six-year-old Benjamin Olney’s mother and grandmother were similarly maligned: “This child who has suffered much has wretched grandmother a women of intemperance and licentiousness. The mother of all the most miserable deserted her child and lived in the most polluted parts of Hardscrabble.” 85
Only parents of five children were discussed in a positive light, and four of these five were parents of paid boarders. Eleven-year-old Rosanna and ten-year-old Samuel Wilson’s mother was called “a very respectable woman.” Six-year-old Sarah Freeman stayed at the shelter only a few weeks as her parents had difficulty paying her board; nevertheless, her father was described as “industrious.” Of four-year-old Sarah Spellman’s mother, “who was once a slave at the South,” it was noted that “her industry supports herself comfortably.” Six-year-old Julia Morse’s father was referred to as “a very respectable man” who “placed his child at the Shelter as a boarder that she might receive the benefit of the school.” 86
The silences in the records are just as important as the notes that were taken. None of the parents are named. There are no notes to explain why parents and relatives left their children. Yet an examination of the discriminations and challenges that newly freed people faced tells us that these parents left their children because they struggled to support them and were looking for a place to keep their children safe, cared for, and educated while they worked.
The women of the PABCO failed to seriously consider or actively work against the rampant economic, social, and political racism with which black Rhode Islanders had to contend. This is especially troubling as they were training girls and boys of color to occupy the lowest paying and most vulnerable form of employment—domestic. Moreover, they were training African American boys for the trades, even as black men were increasingly shut out of trade work. Their disregard of the effects of economic, social, and political discrimination that permeated antebellum Rhode Island and the North in general, severed, whether inadvertently or not, to perpetuate racism. These women, like other antebellum white reformers, addressed the symptoms of poverty of free black northerners rather than the root causes of their poverty.
Nevertheless, these administrators did respond to the needs of black parents and relatives. In the same years that the Association’s records described children’s parents as “wretched,” “intemperate,” and “vicious,” they began to give the parents of Providence a more active role in their children’s upbringing. In 1841, PABCO officially enlarged their mission to include children who were not orphaned. And in 1846, six years after its founding, the Providence Association for the Benefit of Colored Orphan incorporated as the PABCC. 87 By admitting their children as paid boarders and by routinely retrieving wards, the black community had made clear that they did not need an orphanage. What they needed was access to childcare and education for their children.
Conclusion
The PABCO was founded by a group of philanthropic white women who saw a need to care for black children they identified as “orphans of color” in Providence. The goals of the PABCO, as outlined in the preamble to the constitution, were based upon two fundamental assumptions: that the situation of “many neglected and destitute children of color” was a consequence of their being orphaned or willfully neglected, that is, lacking parents or relatives to adequately care for them and that this situation in turn left these “orphans” lacking “habits of industry,” “good morals,” and “useful…learning,” that is, training that would make them useful to white elites as domestics or tradespeople. 88 Neither of these assumption were accurate. Most of the black children in Providence, home to more than half of Rhode Island’s black population, had caring and competent parents and did not need an orphanage. Most black children had parents who faced severe political, economic, and social discrimination and sought access to childcare and schools. African Americans transformed the work of white reformers from parenting to educating and from rescue to providing assistance that was supplemental and temporary.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.