Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

When my great-grand-aunt Maritcha Lyons recalled in her memoir that the backroom of James McCune Smith’s store served as a “rallying centre” for public-minded black New Yorkers, she was quite specific about those who came and went. Smith’s room, she wrote advisedly, was “visited daily by men, young and old.” It was these men, she continued, who constituted the “constructive force that molded public sentiment which had much to do in bringing about a more favorable state of things affecting the colored people of the State.”

Why were women not among those who visited Smith’s backroom? After all, women had been activists since the founding of the Republic. Whether white or black, northern or southern, upper or lower class, inhabitants of urban or rural communities, women had banded together from the 1790s on to form benevolent associations, mutual aid societies and church organizations. In the early decades of the 19th century, the Second Great Awakening gave further impetus to their public work: convinced of the sinfulness of humankind, this evangelical revival preached individual repentance and surrender to God; but it also insisted that redeemed sinners engage in moral action and so convert the world. It became the motivating force behind the antislavery movement, providing women with a justification for becoming involved.



Societal gender norms, however, restricted the activism of middle-class women, both white and black. Complaining about the constraints imposed on her because of her sex, white feminist-abolitionist Angelina Grimké famously lamented that “the investigation of the rights of the slave has led me to a better understanding of my own. Human beings have rights,” she proclaimed, “because they are moral beings. Now if rights are founded in the nature of our moral being, then the mere circumstance of sex does not give to man higher rights and responsibilities, than to women.” Women — white and black — chose to ignore these constraints and pushed their way into public activism.

In the early 1830s black women joined forces in Philadelphia to establish the Female Literary Society of Philadelphia, and in Boston formed the Female Afric-American Intelligence Society. Although these societies ostensibly focused on study of the literary world, they also functioned as networking organizations to promote issues of abolition and moral reform. Their members were not shy. Rabble-rouser Maria Stewart, for example, so antagonized black Bostonians with her charges of apathy within the community that she was practically run out of town.

Boston and Philadelphia black women benefited from the unparalleled influence in their cities of white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who championed both the emancipation of slaves and the rights of women. In Boston, the New England Anti-Slavery Society, which Garrison helped found in 1833, welcomed black women like Susan Paul. When white women in Boston established the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society without a single black member, Garrison shamed them into integrating their ranks. From its inception, the more progressive Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society brought together white, mostly Quaker, women — Lucretia Mott, Mary Grew, sisters Sarah and Angelina Grimké — and black — Margaretta Forten, Sarah McCrummell, Charlotte Forten, Sarah Forten, Harriet Purvis, Grace Douglass, Sarah Mapps Douglass and Mary Wood. The society adopted Garrisonian goals: immediate emancipation of slaves; antislavery petitions to Congress; suppression of the global slave trade; ensuring the rights of escaped slaves. But they also branched out on their own, joining the free produce movement (the boycott of slave products), organizing fundraising fairs and attending to the well-being of the city’s black community, especially the education of black youth.

In New Yorker Alexander Crummell’s view, however, black women in his city showed little interest in social causes. Writing retrospectively from the vantage point of the 1870s, Crummell, by then an eminent Episcopal theologian, recalled his first meeting with Maria Stewart, who had recently arrived in New York. He expressed surprise at encountering “a young woman of my own people full of literary aspiration and ambitious authorship.” In those days,” he maintained, “the desire for learning was almost exclusively confined to colored young men. There were a few young women in New York who thought of higher things, and it was a surprise to find another added to their number.”

Crummell was accusing New York’s black women of small-mindedness. But he could have been more broad-minded himself. He could have explained the peculiar culture of New York’s black community, whose leadership focused its energies on two causes: entrepreneurship and restitution of black male suffrage, both of which relegated women to the sidelines. (Suffrage was not a dominant issue in Massachusetts, where black men had retained the right to vote.)

He could have acknowledged that black men in Boston and Philadelphia found their New York counterparts strangely out of step with the antislavery movement. As proof, he could have cited a letter written to the Liberator in the early 1840s. “The spirit of virtuous ambition and emulation,” the Boston reader complained, “has died in the bosoms of the young men in New York … some of whom have earned the reputation of lukewarmness and indifference for the success of the anti-slavery cause.”

Finally, Crummell could have acknowledged that, to the extent that New York’s black men did engage in abolitionist work, it was under the aegis of the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, which, unlike Garrison’s organization, supported involvement in party politics and opposed merging women’s rights with abolition.

In contrast to Boston and Philadelphia, the archive on black women’s activism in New York is thin. But that hardly means that we need to accept Crummell’s contention that New York’s black women were incapable of thinking of higher things. In fact, the traces that do exist in the archives suggest that they did indeed have ambition. The little that has come to light is largely limited to lists — of women’s names, of female societies — to which no stories are attached.

Related Disunion Highlights Explore multimedia from the series and navigate through past posts, as well as photos and articles from the Times archive. See the Highlights »

These records suggest that New York’s black women were above all dedicated to education. Many became schoolteachers. In 1838, the Public School Society (predecessor of the Board of Education) compiled a list of black women teachers — Caroline Roe, Elizabeth Roe, Eliza Richards, Sarah Ennalls, Maria DeGrasse, Fanny Tompkins, Rebecca Peterson — but said nothing about their accomplishments. Around the same time, a Ladies’ Literary Society, founded by Charles B. Ray’s wife, Henrietta, and comprising many of the same schoolteachers, held a public celebration. Extolling the importance of education for young women, the keynote speaker demanded that they “awake and slumber no more — arise, put on your armor, ye daughters of America, and stand forth in the field of improvement.”

To the extent that we know anything about these women it is because of their relationships to prominent men in the community. Maria deGrasse was married to prominent businessman George deGrasse; Rebecca Peterson was the daughter of the revered schoolteacher John Peterson; Henrietta Ray’s husband was the activist Charles B. Ray.

It’s questionable how much support these men gave their womenfolk. In 1840, for example, Charles Ray agreed with those in Garrison’s American Anti-Slavery Society who held that women — white or black — had the right to be officeholders, and actually put forth the name of a female candidate, only to have her rejected. But a mere year later he vociferously (and successfully) opposed the proposal that women be allowed to attend a Convention of Colored Men as observers, insisting that a man could “do more work abroad without a wife than with her.” Perhaps lack of male support inhibited the activism of these wives and daughters; maybe it also explains the dearth of written records preserved in the archives; surely, it more than hints at why they were kept out of Smith’s backroom.

Black New York women’s greater involvement in public life was inevitable, however, and was perhaps due to Smith himself. In the late 1830s a group of white women had founded the Colored Orphan Asylum to care for the city’s homeless black children. The women maintained an all white Board of Managers, but eventually hired Smith as the asylum’s doctor. So it might well have been Smith who was responsible for the gradual transformation of the asylum into an outlet for black women’s activism. In the 1850s, a black woman, Adelaide Butler, known as Aunt Delia, became matron. Wives, widows and daughters of prominent men — among them Smith’s wife — organized fairs to raise funds on behalf of the orphans. Little did these women suspect that some few years later a violent mob would burn the asylum to the ground on the first day of the Draft Riots. After that, nothing could stop them from moving out into the public sphere to join the war effort.

Follow Disunion at twitter.com/NYTcivilwar or join us on Facebook.

Carla L. Peterson, a professor of English at the University of Maryland, is the author of “Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City.”