Negroes in Rutland, Vermont, 1867

Sep 4, 1867:  In a note to her little brother Herbie, Hattie wrote: “You would be much interested in cars , dogs, Negros etc for a while if you were up here but when the new wore away then you would be poking around to see if you could not find a woodchuck hole I guess.”

               Hattie lists the exciting sights that would interest a 9-year-old farm boy.  He loved dogs and hunting all his life.  The “cars” are the trains that were still a spectacle, especially in busy Rutland with multiple tracks into the station and railyard. 

               The Negroes, too, must have been an unfamiliar sight in rural Vermont.  Even though Negroes were much discussed during and after the Civil War years of Herbie’s childhood, he might never have seen one in Pawlet.  Hattie was sharing a bit of her experience of broadening horizons in the city.  She must have seen some black people on the streets.

               I decided that I should look into the lives of black people in Rutland of this time.  I started by looking at the Federal Census of 1870.  This is probably not the most efficient method.  Probably some earlier researcher has done the primary research and written & published an informative article on the topic.  But I scanned through all 261 pages of the Federal Census online.  I like how much contextual information you can get by virtually strolling through neighborhoods house-by-house to see who lives there, what they do for a living, where they were born, etc.  (Rather like my virtual travel experience.)

               Within a total town population of 9,834 people in 1870 (Rutland County Town Census Records, 2013), I found 74 black and mulatto people, which is less than 1%.   They were a rarity, indeed.  They were not clustered together in town, but lived among their white neighbors, immigrants and natives mingled.

               More than half of them said that they had been born in Vermont, including all of the children.  Would they have had an incentive to claim Vermont birth, if not true, I wonder?  After Emancipation, many blacks migrated and chose new names, trying to start new lives.  But maybe many of these blacks had been in Vermont all of their lives, with a long tradition of freedom, or they had arrived after escaping slavery on the Underground Railroad before the war.  Ten said that they had been born in other New England states and 6 in New York and Pennsylvania.  Four came from the border state of Maryland and 8 from the Deep South.  One man had been born in Missouri.

              Roughly half of the people polled were black, and half were mulatto (half black-half white).  Was this self-reporting or was it the visual perception of the census-taker?  People had complex reasons for claiming one label or the other.  In fact, some lighter-skinned mulattos may have called themselves “white” in this census, as they did elsewhere.  Of those who reported being born in Vermont, twice as many called themselves “black” rather than “mulatto”.  Within such a small sample, it’s impossible to deduce any generalizations.

               The black men of Rutland worked in similar jobs as their neighbors.  There were 9 laborers and farm hands, 5 barbers, 2 “truckmen”, and a teamster.  I don’t understand the distinction between a teamster, who would drive a team of horses pulling a wagon for haulage, and a truckman, who would also drive a horse-drawn wagon, possibly for lighter freight or shorter routes.   One man was a grocer, probably owning his own business and possibly assisted in the store by his wife.  Ten people were employed as domestic servants, including 2 horse stable men.  Two men were listed as cooks, one of them for a hotel.  Other workers at the time worked these kinds of physical and semi-skilled jobs.  The railroads and the local quarries employed many European immigrants, especially Irish, for more demanding and dangerous work around Rutland.

               Wives and widows with their own households were said to be “keeping house”.  It was a respectable & useful occupation.  Six Rutland black women (and 2 men) were listed as domestic servants living with the families who employed them.  Not very many people could afford live-in servants, but many employed a part-time cook, maid, or washerwoman.  Any number of the women listed here could have worked outside their homes like this, but their role “keeping house” at home was the main one they claimed.  At this time, young ladies out of school but not yet married and without a clear occupation were listed as “At Home”.  Only 2 young adult black women were so listed.  Old women living with their families were not expected to have a job, and no entry was made in the “Occupation” space on the Census form.  Three black women, aged 63, 69, and 88, were listed this way, but no elderly men.

               Two mixed-race marriages are shown in this census.  In one, the father and children are listed as black, but the white wife may have been their stepmother.

              

Four Black Marble Players, 1867
by Frank Buchser

Children were expected to attend school, and the Vermont Board of Education was struggling to standardize public education and make it more practical.  The Federal Census included a checkbox for “Attended school within the past year” as well as “Cannot Read” and “Cannot Write”.  At least one older man from another state was marked as illiterate.  Four girls, ages 8-12, and one boy, age 13, had attended school.  But 5 school-age children, ages 6-13 did not.  This seems like a cause for serious concern.  Is this evidence of neglect?  Was it caused by their experiences of discrimination and fear of bad treatment?  Everything I’ve read before attests to African-Americans’ thirst for education.  I know that in the country, children attended school irregularly.  Hattie herself stayed home for at least one winter term, then went to summer school instead.  So I probably need to investigate the attendance rate for white children, too.  Here in the Town of Rutland, what reason could there be for not sending children to school?

               Were there any Negro students at Rutland High School with Hattie?  She doesn’t mention any.  The one 13-year-old black boy who was still in school would have been too young.

               I’ve plunged into this topic way too deep to serve this schoolgirl letter project.  But my curiosity is piqued, and I have more questions to investigate.  I hope to find the trail of previous researchers.