A Free Woman of Color in Antebellum Salem: Charlotte Forten's Struggles against Slavery, Racism, and Female Dependence
2023; The MIT Press; Volume: 96; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1162/tneq_a_01002
ISSN1937-2213
Autores Tópico(s)Poetry Analysis and Criticism
ResumoIN 1859, philanthropist Nathaniel Ingersoll Bowditch, the son and namesake of the noted navigator, contributed funds to aid impecunious female students training to be teachers at Salem's Normal School. His letters to the principal, Alpheus Crosby, singled out one student for his largesse—Charlotte Forten. After graduating from the Normal School in 1856, Forten continued to take classes in this institution's Advanced Program while teaching at her alma mater, the nearby Higginson Grammar School. She deeply impressed Bowditch. Declaring Forten “the finest specimen of a colored woman, for character, talent, taste, & accomplishment that I know,” Bowditch added that supporting her studies was a “matter of high philanthropic & national importance.”1Charlotte Louise Forten Grimké (1837–1914) merited Bowditch's confidence in her. By birth and marriage, she belonged to antebellum Philadelphia's most prominent Black families, the Fortens and the Purvises, noted for their commitment to racial equality and community organizing stretching back to the Revolutionary period, as well as their support of Garrisonian radical immediatism.2 Charlotte continued her family's tradition of activism. Now best remembered for her detailed diary, she was a poet, essayist, abolitionist, teacher, and advocate for racial and gender equality.3 She was also the first African American woman to publish in the Atlantic Monthly.4 Her 1864 articles for this journal offered a riveting account of her teaching formerly enslaved people in South Carolina's Sea Islands.5 During and after the Reconstruction Era, Forten published essays denouncing racist violence and Jim Crow segregation.6 In the 1870s, she became active in the American Woman Suffrage Association.7 She continued her activism when in 1878 she married another human rights leader, the Reverend Francis J. Grimké, pastor of the Fifteenth Presbyterian Church, one of the leading Black churches in Washington, DC.8 In 1892, Charlotte Forten Grimké became a founding member of the Colored Woman's League, precursor to the National League of Colored Women, arguably the first national club for African American women. These organizations improved Black lives in various ways, including establishing a network of kindergartens, day nurseries, savings banks, night schools, and orphanages; campaigning against lynching and other racist violence; and supporting Black enfranchisement.9This essay focuses on Forten's formative years in the 1850s, spent mostly in Salem, Massachusetts, to explore how issues of race, gender, and class shaped the lives of young, single women from prominent Black families in the antebellum urban North. It argues that several factors made Forten's time in Salem a transformative period in her life. This was where she was educated, became active in the struggle for abolition and racial equality, and began her career as a teacher and poet. Forten also endured various personal and professional difficulties that anguished but also matured her. To develop these arguments, the article investigates the impact that the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, the plight of freedom seekers, and personal experiences with racial discrimination had on Forten. It also discusses how she grappled with serious illness, frequent depression, the deaths of loved ones, and other misfortunes. Finally, the essay examines how Forten's published poems furthered her abolitionist work and nurtured her hopes for an independent, creative life as a writer.I build on the work of literary scholars and historians who have argued that Forten experienced a conflicted racial identity as she straddled Black and white cultures.10 Even as she campaigned for African Americans’ emancipation from slavery and acceptance as full citizens, Forten internalized the racism of mainstream white society. This was evident when she doubted her own dignity and worth, disparaged darker skinned Blacks, and fulsomely praised prominent white abolitionists. Forten also embraced Anglophilia, praising middle- and upper-class Anglo-Saxon culture as the epitome of civilization.My article explores how Forten's complicated views about race shaped her personal life and impacted her career as a student, teacher, poet, and civil rights activist in 1850s Salem. Discussion of the Forten and Purvis families and conditions for Black people in antebellum Salem, particularly for those who housed and befriended Charlotte, the Remonds and Putnams, provides a needed context for examining these issues.By the time Forten arrived in Salem in November 1853, she had already experienced the deaths of loved ones, as many antebellum youths did. In July 1840, when Charlotte was less than three years old, her twenty-six-year-old mother, Mary Virginia Wood Forten, died of tuberculosis. Her death occurred a little over a month after Charlotte's baby brother died.11 Despite these sorrows, Charlotte enjoyed a happy, stable, and privileged childhood, spent largely in the Forten household.12Her paternal grandfather James Forten was a free-born, literate Black man whose successful sail-making business and speculation in real estate and money lending made him Philadelphia's wealthiest African American by the early 1830s.13 Robert Purvis, who married Charlotte's Aunt Harriet, used his own business acumen to increase the wealth his father, a Charleston cotton merchant, had left him.14 Both men and their families led Black Philadelphians’ efforts to end slavery and racism.15 Like other antebellum African American activists, they denounced racialized, restricted notions of citizenry and insisted that white Americans live up to the nation's democratic ideals by embracing an egalitarian society.16 They petitioned legislators, became public speakers, and participated in antebellum America's print culture by publishing pamphlets, poems, and other texts. The Forten and Purvis families befriended William Lloyd Garrison and were major financial contributors to his newspaper, the Liberator.17 James Forten, his older sons, and Robert Purvis also formed or led various civic and political organizations, especially major abolitionist societies, such as the New England and American Anti-Slavery Societies.18 James Forten's wife and daughters as well as Charlotte's mother, Mary Virginia Wood [Forten], were founding members of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society (PFASS).19Despite their exceptional political and financial prominence in Black Philadelphia, the Fortens and Purvises experienced growing difficulties by the early 1850s. During the 1830s and 1840s, a series of white mobs attacked Philadelphia's Black community, and targeted the Forten and Purvis families due to their activism and wealth.20 In August of 1834, for example, whites rampaging through Black neighborhoods badly beat one of Forten's younger sons. After James Forten received death threats, Philadelphia's mayor posted guards around his house.21 During an August 1842 riot, white gangs singled out Robert Purvis for attack, surrounding his house and threatening to kill him. Although they did not breach the Purvis home, Robert sat with a loaded rifle on the front stairs ready to defend himself and his family. Concerned about their safety, the Purvises soon left Philadelphia, and moved to a nearby country estate in Byberry.22Although Charlotte was too young to comprehend the above events at the time, she undoubtedly heard about the racism and violence her family and others experienced in Philadelphia. By the early 1850s, she was old enough to realize that her family not only suffered from growing racism but also from financial reverses. After James Senior's death in 1842, his business declined and his sons were forced to sell the sail loft business to fend off creditors. Charlotte's father, who remarried in 1845, scrambled to earn a living for himself and his second family, first as a farmer in Warminster, Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and later in Canada.23Limited educational opportunities as well as her family's economic decline and Philadelphia's racism threatened Charlotte Forten's future. Schooled mostly by private tutors and members of her family, including her Aunt Margaretta, Charlotte had reached an educational dead end in her adolescence. Philadelphia's racially segregated public schools and private academies prevented her from gaining further education in her hometown.24 Fortunately, she could continue her studies by attending Salem's integrated schools.Salem's Black community was in decline when Forten arrived there in November 1853. The city's transition from a major seaport to a manufacturing-based economy hurt the African American community. Many Black men lost their jobs as sailors and other maritime workers while racial discrimination made them unable to find work in emerging industries like textile production. Like most Black people in other Northern cities, Salem's African American residents were usually relegated to low-paying positions as common laborers or servants and lived in the most impoverished, unhealthy, and dangerous parts of the city. They also faced whites who harassed and even physically assaulted them with impunity.25But as difficult as conditions were for antebellum Salem's Black citizens, the city offered them a better life than Philadelphia did. First, Salem did not experience the race riots that repeatedly devastated Philadelphia's African American community. Salem's proximity to Boston, approximately fifteen miles away, was also a boon for Black residents who could afford to travel to their state's capitol and take advantage of its numerous activities, including its abolitionist lectures and conventions.Salem made its own singular contribution to abolitionism. In 1832, African American women organized the first female anti-slavery society in the United States. Two years later the Salem Female Anti-Slavery Society (SFASS) opened its membership to white women. Committed to Garrisonian principles, the SFASS raised money to fund the Liberator. It also denounced racial discrimination and sponsored various activities to help Black people in their city. Members aided fugitive slaves, funded African American schools, and provided clothing and other needed supplies to the indigent.26Salem was also the first municipality in Massachusetts to prohibit racially segregated schools. This occurred in 1844 after years of protests by Black parents. In the fall of 1843, they brought matters to a head when they withdrew their children from the “colored” school, with its inferior facilities and inadequate teaching.27 Many of Salem's white people supported the school committee's decision to end racially separate schools for several reasons. As the Salem Register noted, the city could save itself 700 dollars annually if it ended maintaining separate schools for the small “colored” population. But the paper also stressed that “a principle of human, constitutional, or even legal right” necessitated integrated schools.28Antebellum Salem had a Black elite who forged successful lives for themselves despite the racism they encountered. The most prominent African American family in Salem were the Remonds, who prospered by engaging in various activities, including barbering, hair dressing, catering, and selling various foodstuffs and beverages.29 They were also committed to the struggle for Black freedom and citizenship. Patriarch John Remond, for example, was a lifelong member of major anti-slavery organizations.30 But the most renowned abolitionists in the family were Charles Lenox Remond and his younger sister Sarah Parker Remond. They achieved national prominence for their successful abolitionist lectures throughout the North, sponsored by the American Anti-Slavery Society.31The bonds between the Fortens and the Remonds were especially close because of Charles's wife Amy Matilda Cassey Remond. Her first husband was Joseph Cassey, a free Black immigrant from the French West Indies who prospered as a barber, perfumer, and wigmaker in Philadelphia.32 As members of Philadelphia's Black elite, the Casseys had numerous ties to the Purvis and Forten families. Joseph Cassey was business partners with Robert Purvis in various real estate ventures. Cassey's closest friend and mentor was James Forten who encouraged him to participate in various causes, especially abolitionism.33Despite managing a large household and raising eight children, Amy Cassey also embraced the abolitionist movement. She was one of the founders of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society.34 Widowed in 1848, she increased her Garrisonian activism after marrying Charles Remond in 1850 and moving to Salem. She helped organize the National Anti-Slavery Bazaars, held in Boston, during the first half of the 1850s.35 She also became a prominent member of the SFASS, where her husband periodically lectured. In 1855, the society elected Amy Remond one of its two vice-presidents and re-elected her the following year.36The world that Amy Remond personified, one grounded in commitment to family and the struggle for racial justice, highlighted the values that sustained the small minority of free, educated, politically active people of color living in the antebellum urban North. It enabled them to forge close bonds with each other, no matter in which city they lived. The Fortens therefore knew that Charlotte would be well looked after by Amy Remond and her family when she boarded with them during her stay in Salem.Forten enjoyed a comfortable life in Salem while pursuing her education. She forged especially close bonds with Amy Remond and her two older children from her first marriage, Henry and Sarah, respectively fourteen and twenty-two, in 1854.37 She loved visiting Amy Remond's room, where the “cheerful little party round the fire” read out loud and discussed various books (100). She also befriended the Putnams who ran a flourishing hairdressing business while advocating for abolitionism and Black citizenship.38 Both the Putnams and the Remonds embraced the pastimes of Victorian families. Forten spent many happy evenings with them reciting poetry, playing whist and chess, singing, and listening to music played on family pianos. She also enjoyed long walks, especially with Amy Remond and her children, to the nearby countryside or to Marblehead Beach.39But Forten spent a great deal of her time in a mostly white environment. Most if not all of the other students at the Higginson Grammar School were white.40 She was also the first Black student to matriculate at Salem's Normal School, which opened in the fall of 1854 and had a rigorous three-term curriculum.41 Forten excelled as a student. As the Salem Register noted, she graduated from Higginson with “decided éclat.”42 She also earned applause from faculty, students, and their parents when her poem, “A Parting Hymn,” was sung at the last day of the school's examination.43 She reprised this success at the Normal School. One of her poems was read at the graduation ceremonies in 1856. After noting that many of the graduation addresses were of a “high order,” the Salem Register singled out Forten's text for praise. It was “skillfully written,” “gracefully delivered,” and highlighted its author's “mental endowments and propriety of demeanor.” The paper added that Forten's poem was “an honorable vindication of the claims of her race to the rights of mental culture and the privileges of humanity.”44The above comments highlight the rare educational opportunities Forten enjoyed. Whereas most African Americans were denied even basic schooling, she was able to study and graduate with distinction from reputable schools that admitted youths of color. Not surprisingly, Forten cherished her time as a student. At the end of her first year at the Higginson Grammar School, she stressed how “very happy” she was because for the “first time” the “field of knowledge” was “widely open” to her, and she had “learned more than during any other year of [her] life.” Impending graduation from the Normal School filled Forten with “sad regrets” that her “school days” were “indeed over.” But she was grateful for the privilege of learning from the “best and kindest teachers” (119, 160–61).Forten's school days also enabled her to establish friendships with several white people who became “very dear” to her (119). Her closest friendship was with Higginson's principal and teacher Mary Lakeman Shepard. Both the annual reports of Salem's School Committee as well as local newspapers praised Shepard for being an innovative, effective educator who encouraged students to discuss and analyze, rather than merely memorize material. A writer herself, Shepard conveyed her love for literature, especially poetry, by reciting it aloud to her students and encouraging them to do likewise.45Forten repeatedly described Shepard as “my beloved teacher” and “dear friend”46 They often went on long walks and Forten also relished the times she spent in Shepard's home where she lived with her mother and father, a seafaring captain.47 It was, Forten stressed, “very delightful” to spend an evening in her teacher's “pleasant old-fashioned room,” filled with her “beautiful books and many elegant curiosities” (102, 87).Even before she graduated from the Normal School, Forten earned an unprecedented distinction. In June 1856, the school board hired her to teach at Salem's Epes Grammar School, a co-educational school with eighty-seven pupils. Forten would earn a salary of 200 dollars a year as an assistant teacher.48 She was the first Black teacher chosen to instruct white students. Forten was both delighted and “completely astounded” that Salem would hire her (157). Her amazement was understandable. It was unheard of for an antebellum public school to have a Black teacher instructing white students, even in a relatively progressive northern city like Salem.Neither extant school records nor local newspapers discussed if there was any public controversy over this decision. But when Forten resigned her position early in March 1858 due to ill health, the Salem Register noted that hiring a “young lady of color” to teach at the Epes school had been an “experiment.” The paper asserted, however, that this experiment had succeeded since Forten had been “graciously received by the parents of the district, and soon endeared herself to the pupils (white) under her charge.” She also gained the “approbation” of her principal and the school committee.49 Whether matters went as smoothly as the Salem Register claimed, the fact remains that Forten had been recognized for her outstanding work and gotten an excellent teaching position even before completing her studies at the Normal School.Abolitionist papers heralded Forten's educational success and teaching appointment. The Anti-Slavery Bugle, for example, proudly noted that Forten had graduated with “high honors” from Salem's Normal School and had been publicly lauded for her graduation poem.50 The Liberator also singled out Forten for praise and took her teaching position as a “heart-cheering token to the friends of progress.”51Forten seemed to live a charmed life in Salem. She earned accolades for her academic successes, became friends with the city's leading Black families and educated, middle-class whites like Mary Shepard, and had the distinction of being the first African American teacher at the local grammar school. But these experiences made it difficult for Forten to identify with most Black people who were either southern slaves or poor, uneducated laborers in the North. Significantly, her diary never mentioned her interacting with the mass of Black people in Salem who lived hardscrabble lives. Forten was segregated not only culturally and economically from them but also spatially, since the Remonds and Putnams lived in a predominantly white neighborhood in northwestern Salem.52Indeed her diary reveals Forten's disparaging remarks about Black northerners. She often blamed them for the terrible conditions in which most of them lived, even as she recognized how racism and structural inequities in American society limited their opportunities for advancement. One particularly revealing diary entry in November 1854 highlighted Forten's contradictory explanations for Black people's plight and her ambivalence towards them. She readily admitted that many African Americans experienced “unsurmountable difficulties,” and identified with them as fellow sufferers from the horrible legacy of racism when she stated that it was “almost impossible not to despond entirely of there ever being a better, brighter day for us [emphasis added],” given the “constant, galling . . . cruel injustice and wrong” African Americans experienced. Yet Forten quickly distanced herself from downtrodden Blacks by denigrating their abilities and alleged lack of perseverance. If only there were “far more intelligent colored people” who strove to excel under the motto “‘Excelsior,’” she asserted, then Black Americans could not “fail to make some improvement” (111).At times Forten expressed hostility towards African Americans who failed to prosper and meet her standards of Victorian probity. While discussing the Black community with her uncle Robert Purvis, she excoriated “the colored people and their wicked folly.” “It is really deplorable,” she fulminated, that “they do nothing themselves, yet continually abuse their only friends. I am perfectly sick of them” (232). Forten was also not above invoking racist stereotypes. For example, she once described the youth who drove the carriage on which she was a passenger as “an odd, wide awake, droll little black boy” who “amused” her (326).In sharp contrast to her derogatory view of many Black Americans, Forten admired British people, especially the middle and upper classes. Like many other African American abolitionists, she was an Anglophile, grateful that Great Britain had taken the lead in outlawing the slave trade and establishing a transatlantic abolitionist movement. Like them, she embraced a romanticized view of Britain as a land committed to human rights, a foil for the supposedly more racist United States. Forten contrasted the “bitter and cruel oppression” she endured in America, simply because of her “dark skin,” with the liberty she believed characterized Britain. Her idealized portrait of British culture made her yearn to leave the “wicked land” of America and travel to a country she regarded as “my beloved England.”53Forten viewed British culture as the apotheosis of civilization and refinement as well as liberty. She loved noted British writers, such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Walter Scott, and Robert Burns.54 Forten also enjoyed viewing pictures of “the grand old ruins of feudal castles, and ancient abbeys” (133). She particularly relished seeing portraits of Queen Victoria and her husband Albert in their “robes of State.” “How magnificently [sic] they look,” she effusively declared (304). Getting the autographs of various members of the British aristocracy, including the Duchess of Sutherland and the Earl of Shaftsbury, also delighted her (288).Forten's fulsome admiration for a civilization that colonized and exploited peoples of color throughout the world reflected how closely she identified with white, Anglo-Saxon culture and ignored the racism permeating British society. She sought to be accepted by “respectable” white people as an educated, genteel lady and therefore their equal. But since she was identifiably a woman of color, Forten was not accepted by most whites. Ultimately, she was a liminal figure, straddling a racial divide that she could not transcend.55This was painfully evident when many of her classmates discriminated against her. As Forten complained in her diary, she often met fellow students who were “thoroughly kind and cordial” to her in the classroom but shunned her when they met in public. Forten regarded these whites with “scorn and contempt” and wondered how any “colored person” could not be a “misanthrope.” She declared: “Oh! It is hard to go through life meeting contempt with contempt, hatred with hatred, fearing, with too good reason to love and trust hardly any one whose skin is white” (140).The growing sectional crisis over the expansion of slavery in the western territories, the return of fugitives from slavery to the South, and intensifying campaigns by free Blacks in the North for their rights as American citizens forced Charlotte Forten to confront the problem of race in America. As she grappled with the above issues, she became active in the abolitionist movement while she also struggled to become a successful teacher and published author.Forten was angry when she wrote in her journal on May 25, 1854, about the plight of Anthony Burns, a fugitive from Virginia who had been living in Boston for the past several months. He had been arrested by a deputy marshal and his posse of men under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 which expanded the federal government's ability to find and return to captivity runaway slaves. This law also required ordinary citizens to aid in this effort, provoking widespread opposition throughout the North, especially among African Americans. They feared the capture of thousands of fugitives who had built new lives for themselves in the North and the enslavement of Black people who lacked legal documents to prove their free status.56Passage of the Fugitive Slave Act radicalized many Black leaders who had initially supported Garrison's renunciation of violence in the struggle against slavery. Increasingly, they urged the use of force to protect fugitive slaves. One of those leaders was Charles Remond. Six days after Burns was captured, he delivered an angry, defiant address to the New England Anti-Slavery Convention, calling for the dissolution of the Union, a compact he saw as steeped in “negro hate.” He also urged his colleagues to “rescue” Burns before he was returned to slavery and to use any means necessary to uphold the “laws of eternal justice and right.”57But Burns was not rescued. Instead, a court determined that he was indeed a fugitive and must be returned to his enslaver, provoking thousands of Bostonians to protest. An attempt to free Burns led to the killing of one officer defending the courthouse where he was imprisoned. Several thousand troops were needed to maintain order and march Burns to the vessel that would return him to Virginia. His case galvanized mainstream public opinion about the evils of slavery as nothing previously had. As Amos Lawrence, the scion of the wealthy textile manufacturing family, stated, “We went to bed one night old fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs and waked up stark mad Abolitionists.”58As the granddaughter and daughter of leading Black activists, Charlotte Forten already supported the abolitionist movement. But the Burns case deepened her commitment to the Black struggle for freedom and equality. It seared her conscience and riveted her attention. Bitterly she wondered why a man, “whom God has created in his own image,” was denied the “freedom” with which all human beings are “endowed.” Shortly after Burns’ arrest, Forten hoped Bostonians would not return him to a “bondage worse than death” (60). She also excoriated Northerners who helped white Southerners hunt down fugitives. There was “nothing too bad for those Northern tools of slavery to do,” she bristled, and asserted that their “cowardice and servility” made her “blood boil” (62, 64). Forten was disconsolate when the commissioners hearing the Burns case decided that he must return to his master. “Massachusetts,” she angrily declared, “disgraced” herself due to “her submission to the Slave Power.” She mournfully added that “A cloud seems hanging over me, over all our persecuted race, which nothing can dispel” (65, 66).The Burns case was a turning point in Forten's life. It infused her studies with a new urgency. She now had a “fresh incentive to more earnest study” because education was a means to an end—working for the “holy cause” of improving the lives of her “oppressed and suffering people.” But this case also exacerbated Forten's frustration with most of her white classmates at the Higginson Grammar School who did not seem upset by Burns’ capture and return to bondage. If only, she declared, they could “sympathize” with her anguish over Burns’ plight and view “all God's creatures without respect to color” (67). Even Mary Shepard, whom Forten described as “thoroughly” antislavery, disappointed her when it came to the Burns case. When Forten asserted that “the churches and ministers are generally supporters of the infamous system [of slavery],” Shepard disagreed (60–61). Forten also found it “very difficult” to follow Shepard's advice that she must “cultivate a Christian spirit in thinking of my enemies” (67).Fortunately, the Remonds’ commitment to abolitionism heartened Forten. She “lik[ed] very much” Charles Remond's 1854 speech before the New England Anti-Slavery Convention (77). The Remonds and the Putnams also took Forten to numerous antislavery meetings and fairs in Salem, nearby towns, and most importantly to Boston. There she listened to speeches by America's leading abolitionists. Many of these activists had visited the Forten and Purvis homes and probably met Charlotte when she was a child. But now she was old enough to listen to their speeches and socialize with them.William Lloyd Garrison most impressed Forten. Like her relatives, she viewed Garrison as a “truly good and great man” because of his uncompromising commitment to Black freedom and equality. She was thrilled when he and his wife stayed in the Remond home. It was a “delightful time,” “one of the happiest days of my life,” she recalled (84, 148). Forten also praised Garrison's supporters. After listening to Parker Pillsbury speak, for example, she proclaimed: “‘my Luther’ was full of fiery, earnest
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