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.
