1 MODULE III: The Emergence of Free Black Communities in Connecticut, 1800-1830 Introduction: Between 1800 and 1830, the free black population of the state would grow steadily. Many of these individuals moved to Connecticut’s growing towns including New Haven, Hartford, and Middletown where more work could be found. In those locations, the free black population began to cluster in fledgling communities. New Haven witnessed the growth of a remarkable black community under the leadership of William Lanson, a prosperous landholder, stone mason, and stable owner. Prospects for the state’s free black Americans however began to dim in the 1810s when an anxious General Assembly disfranchised them. A growing voice of citizens began to call for the removal of free black residents in the 1820s and condemned them as a degraded people. 1. First Communities  Numbers of free black individuals in Connecticut grew in the first decades after 1800. Many migrated towards the larger towns and cities of the state where they began to gather with others in early neighborhoods.  As these fledgling communities became more settled, free Afrodescendant people began to create institutions such as churches and improvement societies to serve the needs of their communities. Prominent individuals from among them also began to assume positions of leadership. The free black population of the North grew dramatically between 1790 and 1830. In 1790, free black individuals in the North numbered about 27,000; in 1810, 75,000; and in 1830, 145,000. The numbers of free black persons had grown since the Revolution even more dramatically in the South, especially in the upper South states of Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, and North Carolina. However, their importance continued to be outweighed by a much larger and even more rapidly expanding body of slaves. In the2 North, freedom was becoming the rule for African Americans as slavery steadily declined. This new free African American presence was pronounced in the growing cities of the early nineteenth century North, especially the three eastern seaboard cities of Boston, New York City, and Philadelphia. In 1790, over 5000 free black Americans lived in these three cities alone; in 1810, 18,000; and in 1830, 26,000. Many thousands more, especially after 1810, settled in older smaller cities like Providence (Rhode Island), New Haven (Connecticut), Brooklyn and Albany (New York) and in newly emerging cities such as Buffalo (New York), Cincinnati (Ohio) and Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania). Free black populations were drawn to cities because of the greater economic opportunities available in comparison to more rural locales where work was limited and black people were largely barred by local practices from purchasing property. Cities also provided another enticement welcomed by free black Americans—the occasion to gather together in large numbers to form their own distinctive neighborhoods and communities. In the early nineteenth century, free people of color launched such neighborhoods in Philadelphia’s Cedar Ward, on the north slope of Boston’s Beacon Hill, and in the Fifth and Sixth Wards of Lower Manhattan. As the free black population grew in Connecticut, black residents similarly tended to move towards the larger towns and cities of the state. While the state had a little more than 2500 free blacks in 1790, by 1810, it had 6500, and by 1830, more than 8000. During slavery, the enslaved had been spread throughout Connecticut to help meet the predominant agricultural needs of the colony. For example, the following small agricultural towns had also the following numbers of slaves in 1775: Milford, 158; Farmington, 106; Ridgefield, 36; Pomfret, 65; and Wallingford, 135. Yet, by 1800 and3 after, these black populations had diminished significantly: Pomfret reported in 1800 that it had “very few, if any Negroes”; in the same year, Ridgefield had only 8; in about 1810, Farmington indicated it had no more than 30 blacks; in 1812, Wallingford reported 22; and in 1816, Milford stated that its black population was “small.” Moreover a number of these resident black people were still slaves and unable to move freely. On the other hand, the black population in the growing urban centers of Connecticut was swelling. While New Haven, for example, had a large enslaved population—262—in 1775, its free black population in 1810 was 390 and by 1820 would surpass 625. The free black population in the cities was usually undercounted as well because a surprising number of fugitives from slavery in the South fled to these towns to avoid official detection. In New Haven in 1820, one townsperson observed that enslaved fugitives from the South “come northward and are rapidly increasing in this town” Another estimated in 1823 that New Haven contained no less than “about seven hundred free black people.” In New Haven and in other large towns such as Hartford, New London, and Middletown, free black workers could find employment as sawyers, bootblacks, domestics, launderers, day laborers, barbers, mariners, and as other service providers. Some, like William Lanson of New Haven, became property owners and businessmen. Homer Peters of Danbury opened a barber shop at the town’s Meeker Hotel. Work, although menial and poorly paid, was still readily available in the large towns allowing the black Americans a chance to maintain their independence. Largely impoverished and treated with mounting disdain by the masses of whites, urban free black Americans sought increasingly to gather together, living, worshipping and socializing in spaces free from white control. In the decades after the Revolution,4 many settled on the outskirts of towns like New Haven in makeshift dwellings, etching out a life as best they could. Due to costs and community customs, property and home ownership was beyond the reach of the vast majority of free black Connecticut residents.. Those renting places to live in large towns like New Haven often found a selection of dwellings which included squalid cellars or huts in the rear of backyards. In New Haven, however, by the 1810s, William Lanson began purchasing inexpensive lots in a relatively undeveloped section of New Haven called the New Township. By 1820, he owned a remarkable amount of land there and had constructed a number of buildings with small residences for rent, many of which he rented to