Crafting Lives: African American Artisans in New Bern, North Carolina, 1770-1900

ONE: The Setting: New Bern from the Colonial Period to 1900

O N E The Setting New Bern from the Colonial Period to 1900 Complaint having been made that certain persons have lately introduced into this Town a Machine called a flying horse machine [carousel] to which many idle and disorderly persons resort to in the night time as well as in the day whereby the peace of the Town is disturbed, and the Subordination of the Slaves and free Negroes is lessened. It is therefore ordered that hereafter it shall not be lawful for any person whatsoever to use any such machine for the entertainment of any person within this town after Sun down under the penalty of Five pounds for every offence— and further that if any said person shall presume to admit any Slave, free Negro or Mulatto to ride on the sd horses or any of them, or to be within the inclosure when the same is exhibited he, she or they shall forfeit five Pounds for every Offence. —New Bern Town Council Minutes, July 25, 1803 For most of its history, New Bern, North Carolina, was a majority-black community in which people of every color and condition interacted daily. Some aspects of its story differed from those of other southern cities, just as those cities differed among themselves. Among the town’s particular characteristics were its early status as a colonial capital and principal port; its unusually large proportion of free people of color; its status as a liberated city occupied by Union forces from 1862 through the duration of the war; and its role as a center of black political leadership from the mid-1860s until black disfranchisement in 1900. New Bern also shared much with its sister southern cities, including a defining feature of southern towns—the proximity and interaction of black and white residents. Visitors from the North or other countries sometimes found this situation startling, even objectionable. But for southern urbanites, it was simply a fact of life. Amid the hierarchies of race and class, individual paths and personal relationships often crossed racial boundaries. Whatever the efforts of white authorities to exert control, white and black, free and enslaved people met in the marketplace and elsewhere to exchange goods and services and to share pleasures. Free black and white people bought and sold property to one another, including slaves until the Civil War. Blacks and whites attended auctions of debtors’ and decedents’ household goods, flocked to the race track, gathered to witness political orations and public whippings and hangings, and grasped the chance to whirl on a “flying horse.” Colonial and antebellum New Bernians of every rank and hue encountered one another in religious revivals and in established churches. And while some parts of town had a preponderance of one race or the other, the homes and workshops of blacks and whites were dispersed throughout the community. In private, men and women of every race and status engaged in sexual relationships , with white men often taking black mistresses, free or enslaved; in some cases their children were recognized locally, and a few became leaders in their trades or in the community. Free women and men of color married enslaved partners despite laws against such unions and the lack of legal standing for their marriages, and many black parents raised their children to remember family members who had been sold away. In common with most southern cities, but in contrast to many northern locales, free and enslaved black apprentices in New Bern lived in the households of both black and white master artisans throughout the antebellum period. Likewise in common with sister southern towns but unlike most northern 20 : T HE SET T ING ones, New Bern’s enslaved, free black, and white artisans worked alongside one another in shops, on construction sites, and along the wharves and waterways. As elsewhere, the mid- and late nineteenth-century city saw growing separation of races and classes both in residential patterns and in membership in churches and other community institutions. Such divisions increased after the Civil War as whites erected new barriers and newly emancipated blacks sought greater autonomy. Even so, at the end of the nineteenth century the lines of Jim Crow segregation had not been fully drawn. Throughout the years covered in this book, residents of New Bern maintained familiar patterns of connections along with hierarchy, mutual knowledge along with social distance. Black and...