ONE
The Black Mayflower
 
 
Even to the casual waterfront visitor, there would have been something unusual about the departure preparations of the Elizabeth, an otherwise ordinary-looking three-masted ship berthed on New York City’s North River. The goods being loaded onto it—farm equipment, artisan tools, the materials to build a gristmill, enough weaponry to arm a company of troops—were neither the bulk freight of commerce nor the baggage of travelers planning on a return voyage. The appearance of the Elizabeth’s passengers would have likewise caught the eye: they were all either black or mulatto. Most had their families with them, including a couple of dozen children, though there were a few single men and women, too. And on this last day in January 1820, they were about the only people in motion on the normally bustling waterfront.
New York City was then on the cusp of greatness, primed to become the young and unnaturally restless nation’s gateway to the world. The change was most noticeable in the speed and scale of things. Just two years earlier, a transplanted English merchant named Jeremiah Thompson—having made an unparalleled fortune in cotton—launched his Black Ball Line, which offered the first regularly scheduled voyages in modern maritime history. At first devoted to freight, the packet ships were quickly adapted to passenger traffic by former merchants in the now-illegal slave trade eager to wring a profit from the business of moving impoverished immigrants across the Atlantic.
But on that bitterly cold day in early 1820, nature intervened. Global temperatures at the tail end of the “little ice age,” as historians call the three centuries between the early 1500s and 1800s, were on average only about a degree colder than normal, but that was enough for the North River to routinely freeze over. Commerce slowed down but New Yorkers did not. So popular were winter promenades across the ice that vendors, many of them former slave women (New York’s last slave would not be freed until 1827), set up stands to sell smoked oysters, roasted corn, and baked sweet potatoes from the Manhattan docks to the Jersey Palisades.
For the ninety-odd passengers and crew aboard the Elizabeth, however, the ice was no playground. For six days, they struggled with pikes and shovels to break the ship free. As they did so, the passenger list shrank. The Joshua Moses family of Philadelphia, laid low by illness, returned to shore with “seeming reluctance.”1 The body of a two-year-old was carried off the ship to be interred, without fee, in the vault of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, the city’s oldest black congregation.
Then came a thaw and, on Sunday, February 6, the ship weighed anchor off White Hall Street, near Battery Park, the naval escort Cyane by its side. “We left standing on the wharves, I believe some thousands of people, both white and coloured,” recorded one passenger.2 But even though contemporaries likened the sailing of the Elizabeth to that of the Mayflower from England exactly two centuries before, the mood was not celebratory. For the “coloured” people in the crowd, it was a solemn occasion; some were there to bid farewell to friends and loved ones, others to witness a bittersweet moment in the history of their people. For the whites in attendance, there was satisfaction of various sorts. A few saw a group of despised and degraded people at long last set free. Many others simply subtracted ninety or so “niggers” from a population that darkened the soil of a white man’s republic.
For the Elizabeth’s passengers, the first of thousands of black Americans who would eventually settle in what would come to be known as Liberia, it was surely a moment of great, and conflicting, emotion: They would have felt sadness over leaving loved ones behind, fear of what awaited them on a continent none of them knew much about, and relief about leaving the burden of race behind. They watched the harbor come alive to enterprise and opportunity as the ice melted, and beyond the harbor they saw a city and a nation with a limitless future—a nation, they had been told since birth in ways both subtle and crude, that did not belong to them.
Little is known of most of these emigrants. They were a mixed lot. Just over half were male, about one-third were children, and roughly two-thirds were residents of either New York or Pennsylvania. About half had a notation in the ship’s registry indicating if they were literate or not. (Roughly three-quarters of the respondents were.) Twenty or so had their occupations listed. Of these, about a third were farmers and the rest artisans of various kinds, carpenters constituting the largest group. Just two of the passengers, a nurse from New York City and a popular minister from Baltimore, would qualify as professionals. There was, however, one aspect of their lives that unified them and, at the same time, distinguished them from the vast majority of their fellow African Americans: They were not slaves.
The 1820 census revealed that of the roughly 9.6 million persons, other than nontaxed Indians, living in the twenty-four states and various territories between the Atlantic Ocean and the Missouri River, some 1.75 million were nonwhites, all but a handful of them of African or mixed-African origin. And of these people, just 229,620—or 13 percent—were free, all of them exceptions to two of the oldest rules of antebellum American life: race is destiny and blackness equals slavery.
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Daniel Coker and Lott Carey were exceptional men within this exceptional minority. Each had, through hard work and by taking great risks, escaped from bondage and made as much of themselves as early nineteenth-century America allowed a black man to make. And each, as he pushed up against the limits of freedom, would relinquish one struggle only to take up another, abandoning the only country that he knew for a continent that, by all contemporary accounts, was a land of “burning sun and tortuous [sic] insects—poisonous exhalations, corrupted water … unwholesome food,”3 and savage men, a “graveyard” for civilized persons. Coker sailed on the Elizabeth, while Lott would leave a year later on the ship that followed. Each, in turn, would lead the first emigrants as they struggled to survive in West Africa. Beyond these similarities, though, their lives and fates could not have been more different.
Coker was a child of relative privilege, if that word can be applied to a black man of his race and time. He was born in Frederick, Maryland, around 1780, the son of a slave and an Irish indentured servant who worked on a neighboring plantation. While his parentage represented that rarer and more scandalous of interracial liaisons—black man, white woman—mixed-race persons were often the rule rather than the exception in free black communities throughout the South. Mulattoes were typically the first to be manumitted, and they often exited bondage with a trade or a rudimentary education, skills that helped them better navigate freedom. But they also lived in racial limbo, not always trusted by their darker free black neighbors and viewed by many whites as an affront to the God-given racial order. Coker himself would take up such attitudes, later declaring racial amalgamation “truly disgraceful to both colours.”4
Coker was not born free, odd given the laws and customs of the South, where the mother’s status usually passed to the child. But he became a favorite around the plantation and the inseparable companion of one of his ma