SWEARS TO DECEIVE, SMILES TO DESTROY

      “To him [the African American] your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to him, bombast, fraud, deception, impiety and hypocrisy- a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages….”- Frederick Douglas, Fourth of July Address, Rochester, New York 1852

     Frederick Douglas was the most photographed person (white, black, or Indian) of the 19th Century. His distinctive “handsomeness,” was the genetic stamp of his African/Indian mother, and white master’s bloodlines. He was a striking individual and the camera loved him. The one consistency in all these portraiture plates is that Douglas never smiles. This was a conscious effort on Frederick Douglas’ part, to present a dignified, no nonsense guise, in all his studio portraits. Douglas recognized that, for generations, art had colluded with the racist propaganda of the state, and entertainment, to present African American society in song, text, and image, as “content” and “foolish,” gleefully oblivious to their hard-hearted status quo. Why would anybody care, or help, a bunch of slap-happy, banjo playing, tap dancing knaves, if an alternative image was never presented? The most popular entertainment of the time, minstrel shows, drove the point home with whites in black face, producing elaborate, musical extravaganzas. Douglas projected by example, to white society, and his own people, that there was nothing to sing, dance, or smile about.      

      Due to the pervasiveness of 19th century slavery in the United States, the African American was underrepresented in the antebellum-era prison population. Black human beings, not born of free parents, specifically “purchased,” or legislated “free,” were still considered personal property in most of the United States in 1819. It was one of those glaringly obvious contradictions in a legal system based on privilege and private property. The state had no more right to confine your slave, than your gun, plow-horse, or chest of drawers. 

     The Constitution that gave the white male, freeholder, supreme rights over his property, ignoring the fact that some of that property was human, was confusing within the American legal system. Following that logic, the murder of a slave, or a slave being a murderer, could easily be dealt with extra-judiciously. Often, any punishment could be meted out on the spot, or by locating the nearest tree, alleviating any unnecessary strain on the court system. The police and the courts accepted this minor deviation, turning a blind eye to the lynching of blacks, or Indians. But this homegrown justice model was slowly changing; even in the countryside. The state was taking more responsibility, and a more active role in administration of so-called justice. 

     By the 1820’s New York City had absorbed so many escaped slaves, and an increasingly criminalized free black workforce, incarceration of African Americans, as a new demographic, was on the steady upswing. As abolitionism found firmer ground in the north, and gradual anti-slavery laws were implemented, prison populations of African Americans soared. If you were a black person living in a large city at this time, your risk of arrest and a long sentence for a minor offense, substantially increased with manumission.

   Almost two decades before Frederick Douglas’ palpable eloquence, Rev. Austin Steward warned of the sanguinary results of black urbanization. He recognized that a black family working a farm in the country presented a more sustainable prospect for safety, autonomy and even an amount of respect, amongst the less populated white rural areas of the state. Scattered and isolated as the black family farm could be, it also made for a smaller target in times of racial unrest. On the other hand, the congested slums of the urban centers (north and south) were salient tinder boxes, easily targeted by whites looking for someone to blame if a cracker had a bad day. 

      “I knew many colored farmers,” Steward preached to his Rochester audience on New York’s emancipation day, July 4th,1827 (twenty five years to the day before Frederick Douglas took the same podium), “all of whom are well respected in the neighborhood of their residence. I wish I could count them by the hundreds; but our people mostly flock to the cities where they allow themselves to be made “hewers of wood and drawers of water;” barbers and waiters,- when, if they would but retire to the country and purchase a piece of land, cultivate and improve it, they would be far richer and happier than they can be in the crowded city.” 

    Actually practicing what he preached, Steward joined a group of black refugees fleeing Cincinnati’s Black Codes and 1829 race riots. The emigres purchased land in Canada, electing Austin Steward as their president in 1831; forming the first all black, utopian, frontier settlement— the Wilberforce Colony, deep within Ontario’s boreal  forests. Infighting, corruption, and the brutal reality of trying to farm in the Canadian wilderness, doomed the colony from the start. By 1837 even Austin Steward had had enough of the experiment; returning to his congregation and grocery store in Rochester. It was a historic effort.  

    After generations of systematic abuse on plantations, and the manor farms, (of the old and new worlds) it’s no wonder African Americans, (and many immigrant Irish) resisted setting up family farms; preferring to stay in the slums and work for menial wage. As newly arrived immigrants competed with blacks for these low-paying jobs, it would be the black population in the cities that would suffer most from white supremacism. So-called “troublesome negroes,” (anybody who stood their ground) were arrested and confined with impunity, especially in the large northern urban centers like New York City and Cincinnati. Free blacks, ex-slaves, and new immigrants, formed a growing urban underclass. This massive cheap labor force, both men and women, black and white, were being regularly arrested and incarcerated in rural county jails, as well as in the city; then transferred to serve out their time at larger suburban institutions like Newgate. 

      On the front lines, Jack Hodges was getting a taste of the chains and steam whistle scream of modern mass incarceration. By the time William Coffey, Hodges and Conklin arrived at Newgate, the benevolent Quaker agent Thomas Eddy was long gone. Jack Hodges admitted to Ansel Eddy, that while at Newgate, “he was not over-worked and had enough to eat and drink,” but “there was nothing to win his confidence or to excite his better feelings.” Hodges languished at Newgate, determined to do his twenty-one years as penance for the Jennings murder and serve his times as a model prisoner. The ringing bell, steam whistle, and tug of his irons would signal when Jack moved, didn’t move, ate, went hungry, or hit the ground, and prayed he wouldn’t be shot in the back of the head by the smiling keeper, straddling over him.