Free Persons of Color occupied a small and narrow niche in Charleston's population before the Civil War because their numbers were small. In 1790, Charleston's census showed 8,089 whites, 7,684 slaves, and 586 Free Persons of Color; by 1861, there were 26,969 whites, 17,655 slaves, and 3,785 Free Persons of Color. Despite their small numbers, their influence was outsized because of their wealth and the (watchful) esteem in which they were held by the white community, which saw them as a desirable buffer* between whites and enslaved blacks.
The terms are deliberately broad here: Charlestons were either free or slaves, and either white or black—but as is so often the case with broad generalizations, these categories could break down around the edges, and what appear from a distance to be sharp and clear boundaries turn out to be curiously fuzzy. The closest we can get to a fixed category is if we say that no white folks were slaves in the South. But the intricacy of Charlestonian society was such that the boundaries between these supposedly-fixed boundaries was constantly being negotiated and re-negotiated.
Many of Charleston's Free Persons of Color were mixed-race/mulatto and so fell somewhere between white and black. Many of them were also the offspring of or even heirs to white slave-owners, who would free them directly or through the provisions of their wills, sometimes even leaving them assets to provide for their continued well-being. They often came to be known as "colored" or "brown" rather than "black" and took great pride in that distinction and great pains to preserve it.
The history of the Brown Fellowship Society embodies all of these dynamics and more. To retrace that history, we start at the "mother church of the Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina," St. Philip's Episcopal. The freed sons and daughters of slaveowners often attended the churches of their white parents, and St. Philip's Episcopal was one such. Ante-bellum Charleston's churches sometimes had mixed congregations, although the white folks typically came in the front door and sat in the pews on the main floor while the slaves came in the back and sat in the balcony.
Of course, Charleston's Free Persons of Color were neither white nor slave, so where did they, the brown folks, sit? In fact, they sat on the main floor in the pews of their white forefathers—as if they were white folks. No balconies for them, no, no. But a complication arose when these brown folks died: they might have been able to sit in the pews of their white parents, but their white ancestry didn't suffice to allow them to be buried in the churchyard alongside their white ancestors. What to do?
In 1790, the rector of St. Philip's, the Rev. Thomas Frost, recommended to a group of these Free Persons of Color that they form their own independent burial society/association, which they promptly did. Calling themselves the Brown Fellowship Society, the five charter members were James Mitchell, George Bampfield, William Cattle, George Bedon, and Samuel Saltus. Their stated "foundationstone" was charity and benevolence and their "capstone" was "Social Purity."
The Brown Fellowship Society purchased a plot at 52-54 Pitt Street, just south of Boundary Street (now called Calhoun). I haven't yet found the record for the first person to be buried there, but if the official municipal death records for Charleston are accurate, hundreds of burials took place in that cemetery.
But the Society didn't just provide a place to bury its members and family members: it provided a web of social insurance in terms of financial assistance for widows and orphans of deceased members and financial assistance to members should they find themselves in difficulty.
Bernard Powers in Black Charlestonians (U of Ark Press: 1994) reports (p. 52) that the Society would also provide for apprenticeships for the children of deceased members who became of age. Attesting to what he calls earlier a sense of noblesse oblige, Powers further reports (pp. 52-53) that around 1807, the Society requested of Thomas S. Bonneau that he establish a school for the members' children, which he did. (You will remember Thomas Bonneau as the father-in-law of Furman Weston, brother to Elizabeth Weston Thorne.)
Although the membership criteria of the Brown Fellowship Society did not explicitly restrict membership to "brown" men, the understanding was clear that only free brown men of means should apply. In consequence, other similar societies sprang up among both free brown men of lesser means and free black men, all attempting to provide some sort of social safety net for their members and families. The groups included the Friendly Moralist Society, the Minor's Moralist Society, and the Humane and Friendly Society. At least one group, the Society of Free Dark Men a/k/a the Humane Brotherhood, made clear that their memberships were not reserved exclusively for brown men, whereas the minutes of the Friendly Moralist Society document discussions about the procedures for distinguishing between "colored" and "black."
There are several historic cemeteries associated with these groups that survive in North Charleston, near the entrance to Magnolia Cemetery: Brotherly Association, Friendly Union (Philip and Elizabeth Weston Thorne's gravesite), Humane and Friendly, Unity and Friendship, and the sucessor site to the Brown Fellowship Society Cemetery on Pitt Street.
E.L. Drago from the College of Charleston has written a history of the Avery Institute/Research Center in which he has done an interesting comparison of several of the more prominent societies by comparing the membership rolls with the Charleston taxpayer lists and corresponding real estate valuations for 1859, in 1859 dollars of course. Here is what he writes in his Charleston's Avery Center (History Press: 2006):
"....I was able to calculate that the average value of real estate per member in each society was as follows: Brown Fellowship, $8,272.85; Friendly Moralist, $2,768.75, and Humane Brotherhood, $1,832.00..." (p. 297, fn. 60)The demographic is clear: the Brown Fellowship Society generally represented the richest and most privileged of Charleston's mixed-race/light-skinned Free Persons of Color. Poised between white society and slave society because they were not either one, they nevertheless aspired to the social conditions of whiteness—wealth, freedom of movement, and freedom of association—while carefully distancing themselves from slave society.
Sometimes this distancing took painfully concrete form. Here is the very next sentence from the above-quoted footnote from Drago:
"Nine members of the Brown Fellowship owned a total of thirty-six slaves; three Friendly Moralists had seven, and two in the Humane Brotherhood owned two..." (p. 297, fn. 60)Yes, some of Charleston's Free Persons of Color owned slaves before and perhaps even during the Civil War.
The War of course erased the boundary between slave and free. The burial societies continued but played a gradually diminishing role in Charleston's African American community.
Were there slaveowners in our Cheesy Grits family? I'll answer that in a subsequent post.
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*Southern white were terrified of the possibility that the Haitian Revolution of 1791 might be repeated in the South. The Wiki account of the failed Denmark Vesey rebellion of 1822 and in particular, white Charleston's reaction to the incident, is instructive. What is missing from the Wiki account is the role played by a Brown Fellowship Society member in exposing the rebels.
Sources:
Bernard Powers, Black Charlestonians: A Social History, 1822-1885 (U of Ark Press: 1994) This is the most comprehensive study of Charleston's nineteenth century African-American social history currently available—in fact, it's hard to imagine it will be superseded in the near future. The bibliography alone is worth the price of the book.
Edmund L. Drago, Charleston's Avery Center: From Education and Civil Rights to Preserving the African American Experience (History Press: 2006). As complete as Powers is, Drago has nevertheless made a significant contribution. Drago gives us a better understanding of the dynamics that led to the creation of Avery Normal Institute and the central role it played in post-Civil War Charleston's African American history. There are several Cheesy Grits ancestors/relatives from among the Thornes who attended Avery.
There is also a paper (master's thesis) on-line that compares four of Charleston's African American benevolent societies, taking particular note of the cemeteries each maintained. It may currently be found at this link.
Finally, here is a link to an article with a Google Earth map of Charleston that identifies some key locations in the history of Charleston's Free Persons of Color. It works best if your browser has the Google Earth add-on.
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