Tag Archives: North Carolina

February 7, 2014 · 3:49 am

Thomas Day – “A Free Person of Color”

In my novel New Garden, p. 140, I make a brief reference to Thomas Day:

Ellen McAllister had selected all of the home’s furnishings with the exception of those in her husband’s study. Some came from her childhood home in southside Virginia, but most were made by Thomas Day, a free African-American furniture maker who operated a shop in Milton, North Carolina.

Statue of Thomas Day

Statue of Thomas Day (Source: NCPedia.org)

Anyone familiar with the work of Thomas Day knows that antebellum wealthy citizens of North Carolina and Virginia, especially tobacco plantation owners in the Dan River Basin on the Virginia-North Carolina border, prized furniture manufactured by Day.

Day was born in 1801 in southern Virginia, the child of “free persons of color.” He learned his cabinet making skills from his father, who moved the family to Warren County in 1817. In 1825, Day moved to Milton in Caswell County on the Virginia border.

Day quickly acquired a reputation for excellence. Buyers sought not only his furniture, but also fireplace mantles, stair railings, and newel posts for their homes. His pieces were largely of the popular Empire style, but some details often deviated from the norm, giving them a unique sought-after Thomas Day touch. Demand grew to a point that by 1850, he operated the largest furniture factory in North Carolina. He used the latest tools of the period, including machinery powered by steam engines. His employees included slaves that he owned, who worked alongside white employees. In 1838, his white employees included five Moravians of German descent.

As was true in many other states in 1830, North Carolina law prohibited free blacks from migrating into the state. Day had fallen in love with a free black Virginian, Aquilla Wilson. Day’s reputation within North Carolina’s elite was such that 61 white citizens of Milton signed a petition to the state legislature asking that an exception to the law be made for Miss Wilson. The exception was granted, allowing Thomas and Aquilla Day to live together as man and wife.

Milton Presbyterian Church

Milton Presbyterian Church (Source: LearnNC.org)

Day straddled two worlds. He catered to the white elite while negotiating the laws that restricted the movements of persons of color. He sent his children to Wesleyan Academy in Massachusetts for their education. He attended at least one abolitionist meeting in New York City in 1850. On the other hand, his shop built the pews for Milton Presbyterian Church, where his family sat among the white parishioners while slaves and other free persons of color sat upstairs. By 1850, he also owned fourteen slaves, but they likely were slaves in name only, as North Carolina law placed severe restrictions on manumission of slaves. New Garden, p. 202.

Like most American businesses, Day’s enterprise suffered from the economic downturn brought on by the Panic of 1857. Day died in 1861, but he had left an indelible mark on the North Carolina economy, an example of what a free African American could accomplish if given only the slightest chance to succeed.

Thomas Day's workshop in Milton, NC

Thomas Day’s workshop in Milton, NC (Source: LearnNC.org)

For more about Thomas Day, go to the following sources:

Leave a comment

Filed under 1800s, American history, Civil War, history, North Carolina, slavery

Tagged as , , , ,

November 7, 2013 · 1:04 am

Pass the Jug or Feed the Children

This May 1863 illustration, titled “Southern women feeling the effects of the rebellion, and creating bread riots,” shows the uprising in Richmond. In addition to food, the rioters took candles, shoes, bolts of cloth, hats and jewelry.

This May 1863 illustration, titled “Southern women feeling the effects of the rebellion, and creating bread riots,” shows the uprising in Richmond. In addition to food, the rioters took candles, shoes, bolts of cloth, hats and jewelry.

During the Civil War, middle class and poor Southerners suffered shortages of many food commodities – meat, coffee, salt, corn, and wheat among others. Corn and wheat were particularly dear, but shortages did not deter corn whiskey manufacturers, who found an eager market for their product.

Let me be clear. Citizens north and south drank, but Northerners produced grains in sufficient quantity to satisfy both their hunger and their thirst. The Union blockade, occasional droughts, and soldiers’ absence from their fields contributed mightily to Southerners’ limited capacity to feed their population.

As early as September 1862, Floyd County, Virginia citizens petitioned the Virginia General Assembly to outlaw the production of alcohol to enable soldiers’ families to obtain bread, noting that “the needy and unprotected families of the poorer classes were the primary sufferers of a recent drought.” [Robinson, “Prohibition in the Confederacy,” American Historical Review (October 1931)]

A group of Catawba County, NC women condemned the liquor manufacturers in an 1862 public notice:

It is but the common and spontaneous voice of the land, that if our country is lost, whiskey will be the cause of it. *** A bountiful Providence has given enough for man and beast; but distillers have already converted so much corn into poison, that prices look like famine ahead . . . .  And now distiller, we ask you, in heaven’s name, is it manly, is it brave, is it not dastardly and unalterably mean to force such prices for bread on us and our children?

Several weeks later, the women followed up their words with action. Armed with axes, they marched into a depot and, over the protests of the distillers, broke open barrels of whiskey totaling almost one thousand gallons. [Yearns and Barrett, North Carolina Civil War Documentary, pp. 177-178, UNC Press (1980)]

While most Southerners suffered, the social elite lived well. “In June 1863, only two months after the Richmond bread riot, Phoebe Pember attended a party with the Cary sisters and a bevy of local belles where she ate strawberries and ice cream and promenaded with handsome ‘cavaliers.’” [Rable, Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism, Univ. of Ill. Press, p. 198 (1989)]

For those not so fortunate to indulge in luxuries, the choice was to pass the jug or feed the children.

Other Resources: Article on the Richmond food riot from the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Link: www.timesdispatch.com/special-section/the-civil-war/civil-war-th-richmond-bread-riots-were-biggest-civil-uprising/article_faa79410-99a9-11e2-a04a-001a4bcf6878.html

Leave a comment

Filed under 1800s, American history, Civil War, history, Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , , ,

September 23, 2013 · 1:36 am

Quakers as Slave Owners

Levi Coffin (Source: The Full Wiki)

Levi Coffin (Source: The Full Wiki)

Anyone who has studied the antebellum period knows that slavery violated Quaker principles and that some Quakers participated in the Underground Railroad. One of the most notable Quakers in the Underground Railroad was Levi Coffin, who was born in Guilford County, North Carolina, but as a young man moved to Indiana and later to Cincinnati, Ohio, where he served in the unofficial capacity of “president” of the Underground Railroad). But it was not always so. For well over one hundred years, slave ownership did not violate Quaker principles. Some Quakers owned slaves prior to the American Revolution and others retained that status even after the American colonists won their freedom from Great Britain.

The Levi Coffin House (Source: LittleIndiana.com)

The Levi Coffin House (Source: LittleIndiana.com)

In that most propitious of years, 1776, the Society of Friends made the purchase of slaves a disownable offense (i.e., a Quaker who persisted in violating that principle would be taken off the rolls of the Society). The issue then became how to handle those Quakers who already owned slaves or those who inherited slaves at a later date. The Society of Friends’ practice with respect to all Quaker principles was to persuade non-compliant Quakers to desist from actions inconsistent with those principles.

That was easier said than done in North Carolina, where state law forbade owners from freeing their slaves absent proof of some “meritorious” act, largely defined as some form of heroic conduct. The owner was also required to post bond with the court in an amount equal to the slave’s value – not easy when money was in short supply.

So how did North Carolina Quakers bring themselves into compliance with their religious principles if they lacked the wherewithal to post bond or proof of meritorious conduct? The North Carolina Yearly Meeting  (hereinafter “NC Society of Friends”) remedied the issue in 1808 by providing that Quaker slave owners could clear their consciences by transferring the slaves, in trust, to – drum roll please – the Society of Friends! Thus, the NC Society of Friends became one of the largest slave owners in the state.

In 1828, the NC Society of Friends owned more than seven hundred slaves. Of course, these African Americans were not treated as slaves, although they retained that status under North Carolina law. Over the years, the Quakers gradually achieved the slaves’ freedom by transferring the slaves to Quakers who left North Carolina to live in free states. Upon arrival in a free state, the Quaker “slave owner” would then set the slave free.

Thus, one should understand that although Quakers reached their anti-slavery principles almost ninety years before the Civil War and the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed the practice, they, too, took time to reject the institution as inconsistent with their moral principles and religious beliefs. Of course, they reached that conclusion without a bloodbath that took over six hundred thousand American lives.

For a more detailed discussion of this topic, see Seth B. Hinshaw’s The Carolina Quaker Experience (Chapter 12, “Effects of Slavery in the South”), Thomson-Shore, Inc., Dexter, MI (1984).

3 Comments

Filed under 1800s, American history, Civil War, Quakers, slavery, Uncategorized, Underground Railroad

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , ,