Ella D. Barrier: White, Black, or Mulatto?

In reconstructing the life of Frederick Douglass as it intersected with women -- or even in reconstructing the less "important" and famous parts of his life, the paparazzi types of information -- I often find myself chasing down details that sometimes become important, sometimes become unimportant, and sometimes illustrate interesting tidbits about life in 19th century America.

Writing to her father in the 1870s, Rosetta Douglass Sprague mentioned several women, including  "Miss Barrier." From this letter I knew that Barrier was unmarried and that she lived somewhere around Rochester. Scanty enough details but they can sometimes take you pretty far in Ancestry.com (seriously, the best investment I ever made for research). To narrow the search, I guesstimated her age about 20, since Rosetta called her "Miss" and I could assume that the number of of women designated "Miss" declined rapidly as they aged. I've been wrong there before, finding that Miss Julia Wilbur had about two more decades on her than I anticipated -- but that's another story for another time.

These are the results for a search including "Barrier," "Monroe County, New York, USA," and birth year 1850.:

1860 U.S. Census, Sweden, Monroe County, New York:

Here we see (or could see if we could enlarge the image)the household of Anthony Barrier, a 34-year old barber born in Pennsylvania, with a total estimated $2,500 worth of property. With him live Harriet, age 25; George, age 11; Ellen, age 9; Frances, age 6; [illegible -- and I've tried very hard to lege -- maybe Pesmilie]Prince , age 24; and Alfred L. and Susan [Hombalk]. Prince was a servant, possibly the Barrier's. The [Hombalks] appear to be boarders, with Alfred also working as a barber. If the children belong to both Anthony and Harriet, then Harriet began having babies at age 14. While not entirely unusual, motherhood at 14 meant Harriet started awfully young. Perhaps she appeared younger than she was to the Census taker. Certainly Anna Douglass's age varied wildly in the census for such a reason.

In any case, the column labeled "Race" interested me. The census taker designated all as "M" -- Mulatto. The reason that their race interested me? Well, first, I am desperately trying to reconstruct the black women who worked around Douglass. Most of the abolitionist women seem to be white and I have to work harder to find his associations with black women. Second, I had actually encountered the next document first.

1870 U.S. Census, Sweden, Monroe County, New York:

Same place, slightly different household composition. Anthony Barrier, now 46 and still a barber born in Pennsylvania, has a net worth of $4000. Harriet, now 36, still keeps house. George has become "Gio" (the abbreviation for George was "Geo"). Now 20-years old, Gio works as a barber like his father. Ella, 18, attends school, making her quite well-educated for a young, black woman of her time. Francis, called "Fanny," two years younger than Ella, also attends school. Nothing unusual, right?

Except, if you look at the race column, the census taker identified them as "W" -- white.

So, did the Barriers "pass"? That is, were they so light that they could pass for white? More importantly, did they try to pass?

Ella being my primary focus, I followed her into 1880:

1880 U.S. Census, Washington, D.C. (Massachusetts Avenue):

Ella has moved to Washington, D.C., putting her education to use as a teacher. She, now age 28, and her sister Fanny live in the household of Henry Tilghman, a 70-year old caterer from Maryland. The Tilghman family includes Henry's wife, Margaret, and daughters, Jerusha and Amelia, a dressmaker and teacher respectively. They also have a servant, Lilly Cross.

Tilghman, by the way, was a common last name in Talbot County, Douglass's birthplace.

In this case, the census taker identified all but Cross as "M." Cross was "B."

Damn fire for taking the 1890 census!

In 1900, however, I came across this little anomaly:

1900 U.S. Census, Washington, D.C. (17th Street):

Here I've found Ella D. Barrier. Ella in 1870 has a middle initial "D," but the age of the other Ellas all place her birth about 1852. This Ella, also from New York and also a teacher, says she was born in February 1860. Her passport application says the same thing, and also placed her birth place more specifically in Brockport, NY. (If you look back up at the link to Sweden, New York, you might notice that Sweden encompasses Brockport.) An 8 year difference seems significant, if not unheard of (again, Anna Douglass had a wide range of ages). Still, a consistent age for three censuses, then she shaves off 8 years?

Here, too, she lives with four other teachers and two students, all from North Carolina, as well as a dressmaker from Virginia. They or the census taker all identified as "B" -- black.

The head of this household of educated black women and their domestic? Anna J. Cooper. That is, Anna Julia Cooper, former slave, Sorbonne-educated professor and activist.

What does this all mean? Right now, I have no idea, and this exemplifies the ways that I range far afield from my primary research focus and book narrative. Nonetheless, this ranging produce an "ah-hah!" insight.

As I wrote above, I'm having a difficult time pulling together Douglass's interactions with black women. The earlier, abolitionist period of his life and the familial relationships have preoccupied my attention thus far. My weakness lies in the later, public part of his life. From the Civil War onward, from the rhetoric of manhood in recruiting black soldiers to the patronage positions awarded him, he moved in a much more masculine world than the one of his early career. Sure, he tangles with the suffragists over the 15th Amendment, and supports woman's suffrage afterward; but I think he gets too much credit for being a "woman's rights man." He certainly is not as analytical about women's issues as he is about African American issues.

Then, again, I'm hampered by the old "all the women are white and all the blacks are men." Where are the brave ones?

They are teaching. In this latter period of his life, the woman's suffrage is not the only place where he interacts with women. Black education, the cornerstone for a better future for African Americans, the bedrock of his own sense of self since Sophia Auld taught him the alphabet, black education was the field in which he and women, black women, worked together. How could I be so blind?

At least, for now, this has become my hypothesis. As in science, I must now test it with evidence.

The 1860 Census, Mrs. Marks, and Ottilia Assing

Alas, some time has passed since my last post, what with the research, and the moving, and the moving again, and the moving yet again but across the ocean and then the writing of papers and the writing of a book and so forth. This little blog kind of got left out of the fun. Yet, I still have so many little, silly observations and things to share.

Here is one. When I was researching in the Walter O. Evans Collection in Savannah, he showed me a framed letter. He didn't think it was of much use because it had been mounted and framed with Douglass's picture by the seller, and he had bought it early in his collecting days. On the face of it, the letter wasn't on the level of, say, the one from Lewis Douglass, written to his fiancee' the night before the Massachusetts 54th Colored Infantry Volunteer Infantry stormed the barricades at Fort Wagner (that's the final scene of the film Glory, if you want a reference point). The letter was just a note from Douglass to "Mrs. Marks" saying that, no, he had heard nothing from their friend, Ottilia Assing.

Ottilia Assing was a German Jewish journalist who was friends with Douglass for about 20 years. The German, American Studies scholar Maria Diedrich wrote about this relationship in her 1999 book, Love Across Color Lines. I could go into this book and its methods and conclusions, but not yet. Suffice to say that there are some contradictions, but I'm not sure how important they are until I see the documents on which much of the book is based, and those documents are written in German handwriting and living in Krakow. Let's just take the conclusions as they are. The conclusions say that Douglass and Assing had an extra-marital affair for those twenty years. Any mention of it could be a clue toward fleshing out parts of the story. So, I made a note to investigate Mrs. Marks, which also served to let me engage in my fantasy of being a mystery novel detective.

I had come across Mrs. Marks, who turned out to be a different person, in another document in the Post Papers up in Rochester before I finally sat down and focused on her. Since Douglass had written to her in connection with Assing, I looked in the index of Diedrich's book. There she was, "Marks, Mrs., 143, 217, 218, 260, 275." Turns out she was Assing's landlady in a house on Washington St. in Hoboken, NJ. Assing boarded there with Marks, her daughter, and other boarders from 1857 until 1865. She supposedly gave Douglass shelter as he escaped from arrest after being implicated in the Harper's Harpers Ferry raid, and she supposedly had no problem with two unmarried people engaging in open miscegenation under the same roof as her adolescent daughter.* 

I wanted to know more about Mrs. Marks. Why, for instance, was she no longer able to provide Assing with a home? Who else was living in the boarding house? What was her first name? None of this was probably going to end up in the book, but I just can't stop my impulse to annotate a letter.


If you have not already, or if you don't have access to a good genealogical library, or if you don't have a friend with a subscription, get one to Ancestry.com. HeritageQuest, available in many public libraries, is not as good. In HeritageQuest, you have to write the name correctly, or at least as it is spelled in the document, and it will only return the head of household's name for the U.S. census. Ancestry.com will think a little more creatively for you and turn up variations on the spellings, names, and places and provide you with a list of alternate possibilities. That is much better because databases of public documents have all sorts of variables that will make the name you are looking for appear much differently in the database than in your notes. The transcriber may not be familiar with abbreviations of names, the handwriting on the document may be so impenetrable that one person's guess about the name as good as another's, the census taker or other bureaucrat may have written the name differently or phonetically, and so forth. Ages are always fun, as are skin colors. Anna Douglass, for instance, is never consistently older than her husband. Ruth Cox Adams was mulatto in one census and black in another. Sally Hemings was white the one time she appeared. We aren't even getting into the people who weren't at home the day the census taker showed up. They didn't try to track people down in those days like they do now.

All of this is to say that I had some difficulty with Mrs. Marks. I knew where to find her at one point in time, but she would not show up there. She actually showed up at other times, but not where she was supposed to be when she was supposed to be, or anywhere else during that time. So, I began to look for variations on her name. Then, I began to look for any female with a name beginning with M living in Hoboken. Finally, I just resorted to scrolling through each page of the 1860 U.S. Census for Hoboken. Do I know how to spend a Saturday night,  or what?

This is what I found:

Here is the closeup of the relevant part:

The head of household is "Clara Morse" and one of the people in the household in "Otilla Hassie," who is also listed as a male. Now, I know from the census before and after this that Mrs. Marks is named Clara, and I know that she has a daughter named Pauline, and I have a questionable source that says Assing taught music (which is the profession that she has listed here) and was from Hamburg (her place of birth listed here). All of the ages match with those of the other sources. So, is this my Mrs. Marks and Ottilia Assing?

Incidentally, the Neel or Neil Douglas a the bottom there, doesn't have any aspects of his description that match any aspect of Frederick Douglass's description except the phonetic spelling of the last name. Wouldn't that be interesting if it were otherwise? No, Douglass was back at home in Rochester with his family, for perhaps the only time in the census with no boarders in his house.

Of course, the census taker misspelled Rosetta's name as "Rosana" and Lewis as "Louis." This is why a good historian should always corroborate their sources.
-------------------------------------
* As did the Koehler family, with whom Assing boarded after she left Marks's home. I would jest "those Germans and their libertine ways!" but that seems to be the argument in answer to that question. Apparently, no one, including Douglass had that problem, either. Those Victorian New Yorkers and their libertine ways! But, I said I was not going to engage with the arguments of the book yet, and here I am, kidding-on-the-square about them.

------------------------------------
ETA: Strike-throughs are corrections made courtesy of proofreading by Douglas Egerton. Thank you!