Julie Winch

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Julie Winch | The Making and Meaning of James Forten's Letters from a Man of Colour | The William and Mary Quarterly, 64.1 | The History Cooperative

The Making and Meaning of James Forten's Letters from a Man of Colour

IT was purely by chance that any copies of Letters from a Man of Colour on a Late Bill Before the Senate of Pennsylvania survived. A short eleven-page pamphlet, it was not the kind of publication likely to find its way into most private libraries. James Forten wrote it in haste, used his own money to get it printed, and probably relied on his various white antislavery friends to help him place it in the hands of Pennsylvania lawmakers and people who might influence them.¹ He acted quickly to address a crisis. The crisis passed and its author moved on. Forten was a busy man with much to occupy him besides pamphleteering. He never mentioned his 1813 pamphlet in any of his surviving correspondence. Happily, though, at least a few of his contemporaries were more farsighted than Forten himself and found it worth preserving. They recognized that Letters from a Man of Colour was not an ephemeral piece that had lost its meaning once the events that had prompted its author to take up his pen were over. They understood that what this black veteran of the American War of Independence had written as the nation grappled with the consequences of that independence was a passionate plea for equal rights, a fervent appeal to America to live up to what he firmly believed was its founding promise.	1
The crisis that led to the writing of Letters from a Man of Colour was decades in the making. In 1780, amid the Revolutionary War, Pennsylvania lawmakers passed the state's Gradual Abolition Act. Though not freeing a single slave then living in Pennsylvania, it established the emancipation at age twenty-eight of children born to enslaved women after its passage. In theory the first cohort would not be legally free until 1808, yet some individuals secured their liberty sooner through private acts of manumission when, for instance, their masters agonized over the morality of holding another human being in bondage even temporarily. Other owners were simply eager to rid themselves of unproductive or troublesome bondpeople. Even those diehards determined to hold on to their property as long as the law allowed rapidly discovered that the lure of freedom was too strong. Their property took every opportunity to abscond. The place of refuge that beckoned many black Pennsylvanians—those legally free and those running away in search of freedom—was Philadelphia. Urban life offered anonymity and economic opportunity, and the city's growing network of black churches, schools, and social organizations held the promise of a vibrant community life.	2
A black presence in Philadelphia was nothing new. Black people, the vast majority of them enslaved, had lived in the city since its founding. By 1813, though, the prevailing condition of black Philadelphians was no longer bondage but freedom. To Pennsylvania-born free blacks moving to Philadelphia were added many hundreds more escaping slavery or oppressive laws in the South. The 1810 census recorded some ninety-five hundred African Americans in Philadelphia, almost all listed as free. Hostile whites contended there were several thousand more who had evaded the census taker.²	3
Intensifying white Philadelphians' unease about the growing free black population was a sense of economic uncertainty. As a major port city whose lifeblood was international trade, Philadelphia had suffered as a result of the disruptions brought about by war in Europe. President Jefferson's embargo had hit especially hard. Whites were dismayed at the thought of competing with free blacks for scarce jobs. On the one hand, there was fear of blacks elbowing whites aside in the labor market. On the other there was the conviction that African Americans were parasites, incapable of working without the threat of the lash and only too ready to turn to crime. Just weeks before the publication of Letters from a Man of Colour, a white correspondent to one Philadelphia newspaper summed up the racial attitude of many white residents. He called for men of color to be used as cannon fodder in the war with Britain, since they "could be better spared than any other class of the population."³	. . .

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