Civil War & Beyond (1861 – 1867)

The abolition movement, from its emergence in the 1830s, allowed women to seize expanded opportunities outside of the traditional roles of mother, daughter, and wife.

Female abolitionists in Brooklyn and beyond ran mutual-aid, anti-slavery, and literary societies to improve their local communities.

In particular, black women across Brooklyn and New York worked to fund Manhattan’s Colored Orphan Asylum. Founded in 1835 by Anna Shotwell and Mary Murray, two white Quaker women, the Colored Orphan Asylum provided an essential service in antebellum New York. For African Americans living in poverty, the Asylum offered a temporary refuge. Parents could send the children to the asylum to receive better care – often an agonizing decision –while they improved their own economic circumstances at home.

On February 22, 1860, organizers held a four-day fair at Montague Hall, next to Brooklyn’s City Hall. The fundraiser “brought together all the elite and fashion of this portion of the Anglo-African world, and much of the Anglo-American in the bargain.”
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On May 15, 1863, Frederick Douglass appeared at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Montague Street, where he spoke to a packed house. In a fiery speech, Douglass argued that black men had been “regarded only as the means of putting money in the white man’s pocket, like a bale of cotton, but hereafter he must be regarded as a man.”

Douglass and other abolitionists, including James W.C. Pennington, believed that African Americans would be central to a Union Army victory despite the fact that they were initially banned from serving. He concluded his speech by praising the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, the first black regiment raised in the North, and hoped to see them march down Manhattan’s Broadway to the music of “Old John Brown.”

After the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect, the Union Army began allowing African American men to enlist for the first time. Despite receiving lower wages, poor supplies, and lesser chances for promotion than their white colleagues, these men demonstrated tremendous bravery to end slavery and be recognized as equal citizens of the United States.

Ironically, many Americans blamed black people for the Civil War, especially following the Emancipation Proclamation, when ending slavery became an explicit goal. This ugly resentment towards African Americans erupted during Brooklyn’s Tobacco Factory Riots (1862) and Manhattan’s Draft Riots (1863).

Brooklyn’s Tobacco Factory Riots (1862) were an important and often overlooked precursor to the Manhattan’s Draft Riots (1863).

In August 1862, African American workers, mostly women and children, were assaulted by Irish mobs at the Tobacco Factory on Sedgwick Street in Brooklyn. Even the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, often responsible for some of the most derogatory passages about black Brooklynites during the 19th century, wrote:

We regret most profoundly that, a city, so justly celebrated for its law and order as Brooklyn, should have been so disgraced.

Fear that fugitives and newly emancipated people would move to Brooklyn and take scarce jobs exacerbated hostilities between Irish and African American workers. The Irish, impoverished and marginalized themselves, had emigrated to America to escape the horrors of Ireland’s devastating Potato Famine between 1845 and 1852. But they were greeted with discrimination and limited economic opportunities. Irish immigrants and African Americans competed for the same occupations as laborers, waiters, servants and washerwomen.

Black New Yorkers suffered the worst atrocities in the Draft Riots. A twenty-year-old disabled man named Abraham Franklin called at his mother’s house to check that she was safe. Before he was able to leave her house, a mob burst in and beat Franklin before lynching him and mutilating his body.

15-year-old Maritcha Lyons was among the many terrified African Americans who fled their homes in Manhattan during the city’s Draft Riots. The Lyons family were prominent anti-slavery activists. Maritcha, her sister, her mother Mary, and father Albro all ran to Brooklyn for safety and refuge. They never returned to Manhattan. As an adult, Maritcha dedicated her life to Brooklyn’s public schools.

On March 3, 1865, Congress created the Freedmen’s Bureau. It was intended to provide employment opportunities for newly emancipated people and white veterans. The New York and Brooklyn Freedmen’s Bureau was located on the corner of Court and Joralemon. Brooklynites could hire children aged 10 to 15 years old and women aged 18 to 35. Most would have worked as domestic servants.