February 1 - February 5, 2017

February 1: The Butler Medal for Colored Troops, 1865

Reupping an old favorite to mark the beginning of Black History Month, a time for every American to take the opportunity to learn some stories of heroism that didn't appear in your textbooks growing up. In the case of the men who earned this medal in 1864, the fight for freedom was a very literal fight for freedom. As someone who buys and sells historic objects all day every day, it's easy to get jaded. Every once in awhile, something comes along to help you snap out of it. In 1865, Union General Benjamin Butler paid out of his own pocket for a medal to be struck to honor the courage of the men of the U.S. Colored Troops who fought under him on the way to Richmond. "These I gave with my own hand, save where the recipient was in a distant hospital wounded, and by the commander of the colored corps after it was removed from my command, and I record with pride that in that single action there were so many deserving that it called for a presentation of nearly two hundred." 197 medals were struck in silver, most awarded to those who fought. This one actually bears the recipients name on the edge: Abraham Armstead. He was a slave in eastern NC until he got to Union lines and signed up at age 43. Six weeks later, he was the sergeant of his company. Imagine Morgan Freeman in Glory, but real. The medal is inscribed in Latin "Ferro iis libertas perveniet" or "Liberty will be theirs by the sword." Every other one of these I've seen is in nearly perfect condition, laid in a drawer one day in 1865 and forgotten about. It looks like Sergeant Armstead wore this one day in and day out for years. Nobody knows the trouble it's seen.


February 2: American Slave Badges

There are only 28 days in February, so I may be able to keep this up and post one interesting object of African-American historical interest every day this month. I spent a lot of my college career studying this field and have avidly collected it ever since -- there may be a book about it in my future.

Yesterday's medal was pretty uplifting, a tale of overcoming bondage and fighting for freedom. This object is less so. The person who wore this was enslaved. With a life expectancy of those born into slavery of about 21 years, and those who survived to adulthood unlikely to survive to my current age (39), the person who wore this was probably born in the United States after the end of the legal slave trade on January 1, 1808. Of course, slavers continued to arrive as late as 1860; the ship Wildfire was captured that spring off Key West with 450 Africans on board, mostly boys under the age of 16.

Amidst the inhumanity of an object like this (the dog tags of Charleston in this era were made by the same metalworkers and look remarkably similar), there are two potentially uplifting aspects. This Charleston slave hire badge was issued in 1860 to denote that a Charleston slaveholder had paid taxes on the domestic who wore this, thus allowing them to hire out their labors to others. Urban slaves like those in Charleston tended to experience slightly more freedom of movement and association than rural slaves. While the nature of the slave hire system meant that whoever wore this could have been hired to a rural area (Charleston badges have been archaeologically recovered as far away as Mississippi), had they lived in Charleston they could have had access to a social and religious life that offered momentary respites from a life of servitude, along with its attendant uncertainty and horror. The second hopeful aspect of this particular badge is its date. Charleston was handed over to Union forces in February 1865, but most of its population evacuated while the city was under siege in 1863 and 1864, if not earlier. I'll never know if the person around whose neck this badge hung survived those years and found their way to freedom, but many survived the war and flourished after it. After experiencing a lifetime of bondage, surviving four more years must have seemed like a piece of cake.


February 3: Charleston Free Badge

Yesterday I posted an image of a Charleston slave hire badge, worn by an enslaved Charlestonian the year South Carolina seceded from the Union. Today, its converse: a Charleston free badge, issued in the half-decade following the end of the American Revolution.

After the Revolutionary War ended, the phrase "all men are created equal" created significant unease over American slavery. Vermont's 1777 Constitution made slavery illegal, the first law of its kind (though Vermont had no executive branch to enforce it until statehood in 1791). Pennsylvania instituted a law requiring gradual manumission in 1780: all current slaves would be slaves until death but children they bore would be freed at 28. Similar laws were passed in Connecticut and Rhode Island in 1784, and Massachusetts began judicial manumission in 1783. The slave trade was banned in several northern states. Nothing changed in the South.

Unlike the north, laws in South Carolina got more strict instead of less so. By a law passed in 1800, emancipation or manumission was made extremely difficult. By an act passed 1820, manumission would only be permitted by act of legislature. Despite these legal difficulties, there was a substantial number of free African-Americans. Denmark Vesey is the most famous one -- he literally hit the lottery in 1799 and purchased his own freedom.

This Charleston free badge was issued between 1783 and 1789, when a local ordinance required any free African-American to possess and display one of these while in public. Most are holed for wearing. This one, in the collection of the Charleston Museum, isn't -- I haven't examined it in person to determine how (or if) it was displayed. Only 8-10 of these survive. All of them depict a pileus or Liberty Cap, headgear worn by freed slaves in Ancient Rome. The Liberty Cap became one of the most common symbols of the United States during and after the American Revolution despite the fact that nearly 700,000 Americans (nearly 20% of the total population) were enslaved in 1790.


February 4: James C. Napier Signature on $2 Bill

Through three days of Black History Month, I’ve shown three metal items, all from before the end of the Civil War. Now, on day 4, it’s time for something paper from a later era.

James C. Napier was born a slave near Nashville but was freed at the age of 3, along with his parents, in 1848. He was able to attend a local school for free blacks until 1856 when mobs shut the schools down. His family was well off enough to send him to Ohio to complete his schooling, including time at Wilberforce and Oberlin. He became a lifelong advocate for education. After his mentor John Mercer Langston became the dean at Howard University’s law school, Napier got a law degree (and married Langston’s daughter). Napier got some DC experience, clerking in the State Department and other posts, and served as an influential city councilman in Nashville in the late 1870s and 1880s. He organized a boycott of the city’s streetcar system to protest segregation from 1905 to 1907 after the Pullman company’s president refused to meet with him -- that president was Robert Todd Lincoln, the son of the late President.

Napier returned to DC in 1911 to serve as Register of the Treasury, basically the department’s top clerk. He was the 4th consecutive African-American to serve in the post, following Mississippi’s Reconstruction Senator Blanche K. Bruce, Judson W. Lyons of Georgia, and William T. Vernon, president of Western University in Kansas City. The engraved signatures of all four men appeared on US paper money during their term.

Napier was the last of this string of African-American Registers of the Treasury for a reason: he dared to stand up to the racism of the Woodrow Wilson administration. Wilson, though he served as the president of Princeton University, was a Virginia-born segregationist (and a UVa alumnus). Upon Wilson’s order to segregate the staff of the Treasury Department, “James C. Napier, a colored man, resigned as Register of the Treasury rather than enforce an order issued by the Treasury Department to segregate the negro clerks in his department. The radical Democratic Southerners, who seem to be in complete control of the Government, have issued the edict that during the present Administration ‘social equality’ between the white and colored employees must cease.” (New York Times, August 14, 1913, available here: http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf…)

Napier became president of the National Negro Business League, following his friend Booker T. Washington, in 1915. A bank he founded made him a wealthy man, and the attitudes that perhaps derived from his economic comfort put him at odds with those who branded him an “accomodationist,” including W.E.B. Du Bois and others. Napier served on the boards of Fisk and Howard Universities before his death in 1940.

Though dated 1899, this $2 bill was printed between 1911 and 1913, as Napier’s engraved signature appears on it in the lower left. Napier also personally autographed this one for an admirer, adding his title below his name: Register of the Treasury.


February 5: Sprague & Blodget Georgia Minstrels Counterstamp, 1877

Five days into Black History Month, it’s time to talk about something that remains both controversial and historically important: minstrelsy.

Minstrelsy was among the most popular forms of entertainment in the United States during its pre-Civil War heyday, though it survived from the 1830s (when a character named "Jim Crow" launched it into prominence) until aspects of minstrelsy were incorporated into vaudeville shows in the early 20th century. Though minstrel troupes purported to deliver authentic African and African-American musical and dance forms, until after the Civil War nearly all the performers were white. Frederick Douglass (who is no longer alive, incidentally) described minstrel performers as “the filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion denied them by nature, in which to make money, and pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellow citizens." Even as a moral opposition to slavery arose in the North, the popularity of clownish and derogatory minstrel shows grew along with it, letting racism flourish even as many congratulated themselves for overcoming it.

The post-Civil War popularity of minstrelsy has inspired a great deal of modern historical discussion. The minstrel companies of the 1870s and 1880s saw a rise in both African-American performers and audiences, a byproduct of limited outlets for both decent employment in the arts for Northern blacks and public performances that were open to them. LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) wrote about the seeming irony of African-American involvement in minstrelsy in Blues People (1963): “In one sense, the colored minstrel was poking fun at himself, and in another and probably more profound sense he was poking fun at the white man. The minstrel show was appropriated from the white man -- the first Negro minstrels wore ‘traditional’ blackface over their own -- but only the general form of the black minstrel show really resembled the white,” adding that “minstrel companies like the Georgia Minstrels, Pringle Minstrels, McCabe and Young Minstrels provided the first real employment for Negro entertainers.” Baraka connected this to the birth and promulgation of early blues and jazz as African-American musical forms with complex prehistories.

Brooker and Clayton’s Georgia Minstrels are thought to have been the first all-black troupe, founded just after the end of the Civil War. Following their lead, other troupes used the words “Georgia Minstrels” to advertise that their performers were actual African-Americans instead of whites in blackface.

This 1877-dated half dollar served as both an advertisement and admission ticket for Sprague and Blodgett’s Georgia Minstrels, which was managed by Charles B. Hicks, the African-American founder of the Brooker and Clayton Georgia Minstrel troupe a decade earlier. According to Matthew Wittman, now the curator of the theatre collection at Harvard’s Houghton Library, “by June 1878 [Blodgett’s] name was dropped from the advertising. The countermarked coins associated with Sprague & Blodgett were thus produced sometime between the fall of 1876 and the spring of 1878.” The illustrated piece is the one in the American Numismatic Society collection. I have a similar one in my own collection, one of perhaps a dozen or two extant.