Sites Associated with James McCune Smith and Family in New York City #2
Rev. Peter Williams Jr’s House Site
To visit the next site associated with James McCune Smith that I visited in my recent research trip to New York City (see my previous post), I took the subway south to the Spring Street station. I pointed my feet toward where the old Five Points neighborhood, in the Sixth Ward, used to be. On the way, I stopped at 68 Crosby Street in Manhattan, in the 14th Ward. This is one of the few sites I visited for which the street number is unchanged from McCune Smith’s time.
This is the site of the home of the Rev. Peter Williams Jr, who was a profound influence on McCune Smith’s life. Williams was the pastor of St Philip’s Episcopal Church,[1] the church which would come to count McCune Smith among its lifelong parishioners. McCune Smith also served as a vestryman from 1843 until his death, and was among those who struggled, eventually successfully, to secure St Philip’s full admission to the Episcopal Diocesan Convention. St Philip’s had, like ‘other congregations of colored people,’ been denied this privilege.[2] McCune Smith’s goddaughter Maritcha Lyons later wrote of McCune Smith in the memoir of her life:
The doctor was very prominent in the church, though he laid no claim to an autocratic leadership. He influenced more by indirection than by mandate, [and] he had a wholesale contract as a godfather, not only sharing with the secular life but also with the spiritual existence of practically most of the children of his personal friends.[3]
It seems that the deep fatherly instincts that led him to be such a doting physician to the children of the Colored Orphan Asylum also led him to take a great interest in the well-being of his friends’ children and the children of St Philip’s as well.
Lyons also described Williams in her memoir:
The first rector, as is well known was Rev. Peter Williams; of his personal history I know next to nothing as his death preceded my birth fully eight years. His wife “Aunt Sally” I knew well [sic] she resided in the house of Dr. J. McCune Smith and as the doctor and his wife were my god-parents I saw her frequently… I got the impression, however, very early in life that the good rector was exceptional in many ways, his parishioners adored him and he found his way into all hearts by his geniality, unselfishness manifested both directly and otherwise. Long after his demise those who has known him spoke of him with a reverent affection which indicated both his worth and his usefulness.[4]
Williams (who played a key role in founding the Asylum) served as a strong example for McCune Smith of fatherly concern for the community’s children from a very early age. Lyons also wrote: ‘It may be referred that the family with which his mother was connected was his patron.’[5] This appears to refer to Williams and his family. McCune Smith’s mother Lavinia’s connection to the Williams family is evidenced by other sources as well. For example, Lavinia’s listed address in a New York City directory in the late 1820’s was the same address as St Philip’s.[6] After Williams’ death in 1840, Williams’ widow Sarah (‘Aunt Sally’) joined Lavinia in living in the Smith-Barnett family household.[7]
Williams’ close connection to McCune Smith is even more clearly revealed in a greater variety of sources than that with Lavinia, including the census records cited above. In an 1834 address ‘To the Citizens of New York,’ Williams said: ‘I selected two lads of great promise, and made every effort to get them a collegiate education. But the Colleges were all closed against them.’[8] Abolitionist newspaper editor Joshua Leavitt wrote that one of these lads was McCune Smith.[9] In that editorial, Leavitt cited an earlier one by the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who wrote of his visit to ‘the house of the Rev. Peter Williams, [who was] in company with two colored students, who gave promise of extraordinary genius and talent.’[10] McCune Smith’s close lifelong friend Philip A. Bell indicated that the other student was Isaiah DeGrasse. He also wrote that ‘through the influence of our beloved pastor, Rev. Peter Williams, means were raised to send [McCune Smith] to Europe’ after American institutions of higher refused to admit McCune Smith on account of race.[11]
McCune Smith’s travel journal, written when he was journeying from New York City to Glasgow in August-September 1832 to pursue his education at the University of Glasgow, reveals more about how close he was to both Williams and DeGrasse. (The original journal is no longer extant; only excerpts survive because they were published in the Colored American in the late 1830s after McCune Smith returned home to New York City.) In one entry, McCune Smith wrote that he was ‘dreaming of dear home, and wishing for the companionship of that dear friend who has hitherto trod with me the uphill path of learning. Cruel is the fate that has separated us at the very moment when we began to appreciate the beauties of ancient lore!’[13] Here, McCune Smith was referring to the time he and DeGrasse were studying the classics together under Williams’ tutelage. In another entry in his travel journal, written just as he was about to depart on the last leg of the journey (from Liverpool to Glasgow), McCune Smith wrote that he ‘Made up a package of letters for home. There were two for dearest mother, five for my excellent friend, Rev. P.W. [Peter Williams]; one for dear friend I. [Isaiah DeGrasse]…’[14] Unlike McCune Smith, whose mastery of the classics appears to have been comparable, DeGrasse had been accepted into New York’s Geneva College while McCune Smith was not. This was apparently because DeGrasse’s non-European ancestry was not evident in his skin color or features, while McCune Smith’s was.[15]
Williams continued to take a great interest in his young protégé after he crossed the Atlantic to pursue his studies. In the summer of 1836, Williams was in Europe fundraising for a new school he was planning to establish with Rev. John Frederick Schroeder and probably others.[16] Schroeder had also been among those who, along with Williams, helped McCune Smith pursue an advanced classical education after graduating from the African Free School.[17] In June, Williams wrote to Schroeder from London that ‘James is well, and is a fine promising young man. He will return with me.’[18] Bell also wrote in his obituary for McCune Smith that ‘Rev. Peter Williams, being in Europe at the time, they [McCune Smith and Williams] visited London and Paris …’[19]
So, back to the site of Williams’ home at 68 Crosby Street. McCune Smith certainly did study at Williams’ house, as we’ve seen from Garrison’s account. But I also included this site in my list of places to visit because it’s possible – I think even likely – that McCune Smith lived here with Williams, at least for a time. For one, the fact that Bell described Williams as McCune Smith’s ‘guardian’ suggests to me that McCune Smith may have lived with him, especially when Williams was guiding his studies. Also, the 1830 federal census for the Williams family household includes, among its four members, a male between ten and twenty-three years old.[20] (It wasn’t until the 1850 federal census that they began listing every individual by name.) McCune Smith was seventeen at the time. The Williams family had no son, just one daughter. And Williams’ address in 1830, according to a New York City directory, was here at 68 Crosby Street.[21]
[1] Leslie M. Alexander, ‘Williams, Peter’, in Encyclopedia of Emancipation and Abolition in the Transatlantic World, ed. Junius P. Rodriguez (New York: Sharp Reference, 2007).
[2] John H. Hewitt, Protest and Progress: New York’s First Black Episcopal Church Fights Racism (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000), 61–62, 64–72, 130; Carla L. Peterson, Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 169.
[3] Maritcha Remond Lyons, ‘Memories of Yesterdays: All of Which I Saw and Part of Which I Was - An Autobiography’ (New York, 1929), 78, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library.
[4] Lyons, 72–73.
[5] Lyons, 77.
[6] Thomas Longworth, Longworth’s American Almanac, New-York Register, and City Directory (New York: Thomas Longworth, 1829), 520; Thomas Longworth, Longworth’s American Almanac, New-York Register, and City Directory (New York: Thomas Longworth, 1828), 651.
[7] 1850 United States Census, New York, New York County, New York, digital image s.v. “James McCune Smith,” FamilySearch.org; 1855 New York State Census, New York County, New York, digital image s.v. “James McCune Smith,” FamilySearch.org; ‘1860 United States Census, New York, New York County, New York, digital image s.v. “Jas. M. Smith,” FamilySearch.org; 1865 New York State Census, Kings County, Brooklyn, Ward 13, digital image s.v. “James M. Smith,” FamilySearch.org.
[8] Peter Williams, Jr., ‘Rev. Mr. Williams, to the Citizens of New-York’, The Liberator, 19 July 1834.
[9] Joshua Leavitt, ‘James M’Cune Smith, Esq., M.D.’, The Emancipator, 7 September 1837.
[10] William Lloyd Garrison, ‘Interesting Facts’, The Liberator, 30 June 1832.
[11] Philip A. Bell, ‘Death of Dr. Jas. McCune Smith’, The Elevator, 22 December 1865.
[12] Amy M. Cools, ‘The Life and Work of Dr. James McCune Smith (1813-1865)’ (PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2021), 82, https://era.ed.ac.uk/handle/1842/38333.
[13] James McCune Smith, ‘Extracts from Dr. Smith’s Journal [9-11 September 1832]’, The Colored American, 3 February 1838.
[14] James McCune Smith, ‘Dr. Smith’s Journal [Liverpool, 13-15 September 1832]’, The Colored American, 16 March 1839.
[15] Leavitt, ‘James M’Cune Smith, Esq., M.D.’; Craig Steven Wilder, ‘“Driven … from the School of the Prophets”: The Colonizationist Ascendance at General Theological Seminary’, New York History 93, no. 3 (2012): 176.
[16] Peter Williams, Jr., ‘Peter Williams, Jr to John Frederick Schroeder, 30 July 1836’, n.d., W.E.B. Du Bois Center-Great Barrington: Museum of Civil Rights Pioneers. Courtesy of Randy F. Weinstein.
[17] Robert Hamilton, ‘Dr. James McCune Smith’, The Anglo-African 5, no. 13 (9 December 1865): 2; ‘Colored Men as Physicians’, Nemaha County Republican, 19 March 1885.
[18] Williams, Jr., ‘Williams, Jr. to Schroeder, 30 July 1836’, n.d.
[19] Bell, ‘Death’.
[20] ‘1830 United States Census, New York, New York County, New York, Digital Image s.v. “Peter Williams” (Ward 14), Ancestry.Com’, n.d.
[21] Thomas Longworth, Longworth’s American Almanac, New-York Register, and City Directory (New York: Thomas Longworth, 1830), 641.
[22] William Perris, Plate 30: Map Bounded by Spring Street, Elm Street, Broome Street, Centre Street, Canal Street, Mercer Street, Maps of the City of New York, Volume 3, Comprising the 5th, 6th, 8th, and 14th Ward (New York: William Perris, 1853), 30, NYPL: Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division.