Slavery’s legacy in Erie and the unfulfilled promise of Juneteenth

On June 15, 1825 — 40 years and four days before the unofficial end of human bondage in America, the day that became “Juneteenth” — Pierre Simon Vincent Hamot ran a local newspaper ad seeking recovery of his "19-year-old Negro BOY servant." Hamot described the man as being of "the spirit of Cain … capable of every bad deed." Nearly two centuries later, the image still shocks the conscience. That is in part because the history of human enslavement by some of early Erie’s most prominent early white pioneers — Hamot, Judah Colt, Rufus Reed, and John Kelso among them — is both troubling and unfamiliar. Indeed, lost on most of us today is the fact that Pennsylvania, cradle of American freedom, even had slavery. Although the General Assembly in 1780 had passed a law calling for gradual abolition, a decade and a half later there were still more than 3,500 enslaved persons living in the commonwealth.

Chris Magoc
Chris Magoc

One of them was a former west African man named Boe Bladen, brought from Maryland to Erie by John Grubb at the end of the 18th century. Born in Guinea, Bladen bore striking marks on his body, perhaps indicators of tribal identity. Although details are murky, Grubb — who became actively opposed to slavery — assisted Bladen in becoming owner of a 400-acre tract of land 3 miles south of Erie. Though reduced in size over time, the farm was owned by three generations of Bladens for a century. Today Bladen Road, just off Cherry Street, is the lone marker of an Erie pioneering landowner who was once human property.

When John Kelso died in 1821, the Erie press ran an advertisement selling "the time" of 18-year-old Bristo Logan, whom Kelso had owned. Following his purchase by John Cochran and the passage of the 10 additional years of enslavement allowed under the 1780 law, Logan married and ran his own ice cream business, establishing a long tradition of notable African American success in that enterprise locally. Although their lives remain etched in relative obscurity, the toil of both enslaved and free Black men, women and children helped transform Erie County into the maritime and industrial powerhouse it became by the mid-19th century.

As with every inch of American soil, Erie is linked to a history of not only enslavement but the struggle for what President Lincoln at Gettysburg called a "new birth of freedom." Although Erie had a chapter of the American Colonization Society promoting a "back to Africa" movement, most patriots who believed a better future possible for African Americans joined the anti-slavery struggle. Some became active in the celebrated Underground Railroad, which in the decades leading to the Civil War assisted hundreds of persons every year who escaped to their freedom. Throughout Erie and Crawford counties, citizens Black and white risked fines, imprisonment, community ostracism, and even their lives in the cause of setting others free.

Although much of this history remains shrouded in legend and obscured by a lack of documentation, a number of Erie’s freedom fighters are well known to us. Robert and Albert Vosburgh were father-and-son barbers who used their shop at 314 French St. to harbor and regroom runaway enslaved persons. Indispensable to their work was Hamilton E. Waters. Enslaved in Maryland, Waters was partially blind — likely the result of punishment inflicted by his owner for daring to read. In 1835 Waters purchased his freedom and that of his mother. He eventually made his way to Erie where he co-founded the Wesleyan Methodist Church in the Jerusalem section of the city west of Sassafras Street. Established as a kind of promised land of opportunity for free Blacks and poor whites by abolitionist and iron entrepreneur William Himrod, Jerusalem was also home to Waters’ Benevolent United Equal Rights Society, which provided sanctuary to those seeking freedom.

More:African Americans in Erie County: A Trail of Shared Heritage

Working from Vosburgh’s shop, Waters cleaned, pressed, and sometimes provided a fresh set of clothes for fugitives. Waters often conveyed his runaways to Frank Henry in Wesleyville, who hid them in the belfry of the community’s Methodist Church before directing them eastward or directly across Lake Erie by skiff to Longwood, Ontario. We also know Waters for his work as the city lamplighter following the Civil War. Singing the Negro spirituals of freedom from his enslaved youth, Waters profoundly shaped the musical sensibilities of the grandson he had alongside him: Harry T. Burleigh, who went on to become one of America’s great composers.

The cause of freedom was bolstered by the True American, an abolitionist newspaper published by Henry Catlin from the second floor of the Lowry Building at East Fifth and French streets. For years, runaway enslaved persons were hidden from slave-catchers in the newspaper bins of Catlin’s office. It was Catlin who on April 24, 1858, brought to Erie the nation’s most eloquent anti-slavery voice, Frederick Douglass. After an angry mob nearly ran Catlin and Douglass out of town, the great orator delivered his lecture that evening at Park Hall carrying the title, "Unity of the Human Race."

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More:How Erie County is addressing its other public health crisis: racism

Our Erie forebears threatening an esteemed apostle of American democracy — that image too, should disturb us, despite it happening nearly two centuries ago. For the malignancy of racism that was the foundation of chattel slavery in America remains deeply rooted, entangled with our own crisis of democracy. As 19th-century freedom fighters knew well, the denial of human rights of Black Americans is an injustice to us all. It is from that denial that disproportionate poverty rates of Erie’s Black citizens, as well as yawning racial gaps nationally in wealth and homeownership have grown. Those realities violate the promise of democracy and undermine our collective forward progress in Erie and as a nation. And until we fully confront the horrors of America’s original sin, the promise of Juneteenth will remain unrealized. As Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, compatriot of Dr. King once put it, “If you don’t tell it like it was, it can never be as it ought to be.”

Chris Magoc is a professor of history at Mercyhurst University and author of "A Progressive History of American Democracy Since 1945: American Dreams, Hard Realities." He is part of the team that developed the community history project, African Americans in Erie County: A Trail of Shared Heritage

This article originally appeared on Erie Times-News: Slavery’s legacy in Erie and the unfulfilled promise of Juneteenth