Oswego, New York

“ As therefore the harbour at the mouth of Oswegatchee is so much better than that at the mouth of Oswego River, and as they are nearly an equal distance from New York, there is reason to suppose, that if the river navigation should prove equally good, the trade between the lakes and New York will be for the most part, if not wholly, carried on by means of Oswegatchee rather than of Oswego River. With a fair wind, the passage from Oswegatchee River to Niagara is accomplished in two days; a voyage only one day longer than that from Oswego to Niagara with a fair wind. ”

“ Lawrence and Ontario, with Watertown and Oswego as their respective division headquarters. Just why the system was divided in that way no one seems to know. It would have been more logical to have made the former Rome road, east of Oswego, a single division with headquarters at Watertown, and have split the old Lake Ontario Shore into the main line divisions of the western part of the state. Yet this is history, and not a criticism. The men who have run the New York Central have generally known their business pretty well. ”

“ While these transactions were passing in New England, symptoms of that jealousy which an unsettled boundary must produce between neighbours, began to show themselves in Canada and New York. The geographical situation of these colonies had, at an early period, directed the attention of both towards the commerce of the lakes. Mr. Burnet, the governor both of New York and New Jersey, impressed with the importance of acquiring the command of lake Ontario, had, in the year 1722, erected a trading house at Oswego in the country of the Senecas. ”

“ The voyageurs, after several days of hard labour and difficulty, emerge into the little lake Oneida, lying in the north-western part of the State of New York, through which they pass with ease and pleasure. The most difficult part of their journey has been overcome. In due time they reach the Onondaga River, and soon pass down it to Oswego, then an old fort which had been built by the French, when they were masters of the country, as a barrier against the encroachments of the wily Indian. ”

“ The Lower Oswego Falls circle, New York, is doing a most excellent work by downright hard study, in their class meetings.
The circle in Hartford, Conn., with Secretary Steven for its president, issues a fine program for its meetings, which already for this winter run into the twenties.
A new circle has been organized in Chicago, called the Oakland circle. All of its members belong to the Pansy class, though that can not account for their all being ladies. They are doing a most excellent work.
Great gifts are not given to all,
Great tasks from all not required. ”

“ Be that as it may, the author was brought an infant into this valley, and all his first impressions were here obtained. He has inhabited it ever since, at intervals; and he thinks he can answer for the faithfulness of the picture he has drawn. Otsego has now become one of the most populous districts of New York. It sends forth its emigrants like any other old region, and it is pregnant with industry and enterprise. ”

“ How almost interminable seems the prospect to our hopes or our affections!—but let Time turn his perspective glass—let us look at it in the past, and how it shrinks and becomes as a day in the history of our lives! So was it with Philip Oswald's two years of absence, when he found himself, in the earliest dawn of the spring of 1838, once more in New-York. ”

“ Indeed what mode of life could be happier or more free, for a healthy, strong-limbed youth of fifteen, than to live as he then did, almost entirely in the woods? Then too, his daily route lay in the midst of some of the finest scenery to be found anywhere in New York, even in that grand old county of St. Lawrence.
To a lover of nature nothing could be more alluring than the locality through which Willard, at that period of his life, trapped and hunted. To follow the winding waters of the Oswegatchie is to enjoy a perpetual feast. ”

“ People are always talking about the joys of youth—but, oh, how youth can suffer! I’ve not forgotten; those hot southern Illinois nights, when Oswald was in New York, and I had no word from him except through Liddy, and I used to lie on the floor all night and listen to the express trains go by. ”

“ Few of New York's citizens are so American as the colored, few show so little that is unusual or picturesque. The educated Italian might have in his home some relic of his former country, the Jew might show some symbol of his religion; but the Negro, to the seeker of the unusual, would seem commonplace. The colored man in New York has no associations with his ancient African home, no African traditions, no folk lore. ”

“ It is a daring person who attempts to answer. We, who have studied the Negro in New York, may perhaps venture to predict a little regarding his future in this city, his possible status in the later years of the century; whether he will lose in opportunity and social position, or whether he will advance in his struggle to be a man.
Looking upon the great population of the city, its varied races and nationalities, I confess that his outlook to me begins to be bright. New York is still to a quite remarkable extent dominated socially by its old American stock, its Dutch and Anglo-Saxon element. ”

“ The lower East Side of Manhattan, a many-storied mass of tenements and workshops, where immigrants labor and sleep in their tiny crowded rooms, was once a fashionable American district. At that time Negroes dwelt near the whites as barbers, caterers, and coachmen, as laundresses and waiting-maids. But with the removal of the people whom they served, the colored men and [Pg 43] women left also, and it is difficult to find an African face among the hundreds of thousands of Europeans south of Fourteenth Street. ”

“ The city grew rapidly after 1875, and the colored society, the little group that had attained to modest means and education, bought homes, chiefly in Brooklyn, where land was easier to secure than in Manhattan, and strove to enlarge the opportunities for those who were to come after them. Color prejudice had waned, and they often met with especial consideration because of their race. Had they been white they would have slipped into the population and been lost, as happened to the Germans and the Irish, who had been their competitors. ”

“ As it was, they formed a society apart from the rest of the city, meeting it occasionally in work or through the friendship of children, who, left to themselves, know no race. They had battled against prejudice and had won their rights as citizens. ”

“ Home charities also help to drain the Negro's purse. Manhattan and Brooklyn have a number of colored philanthropies, orphan asylums, old people's homes, rescue missions, Young Men's and Young Women's Christian Associations, and social settlements. [Pg 180] Some are supported entirely by white people, but the greater number receive some contributions from the colored, and a few are dependent for money upon that race alone. Thousands of dollars are raised yearly, among the well-to-do New York Negroes, for these institutions. ”

“ The road dipped sharply, and became all at once a pleasant, tree-lined street with pretty suburban cottages on either hand. To the east and north hung the smoke cloud of countless factories, but their way led them through the modest residential quarter. The street presently turned into a paved one, and trolley lines appeared; then brick buildings and shops, and before they knew it they were in the busy, crowded business thoroughfare.
Lou would have paused, gaping and wondering if New York could be anything like this, but Jim hurried her down the steep, cobbled way which led to the ferry. ”

“ Aldrich was of like mind, and readily accepted Osgood’s invitation to “the Hub” and to the editorship of Every Saturday. Years after he wrote to Bayard Taylor, who could understand: “I miss my few dear friends in New York—but that is all. There is a finer intellectual atmosphere here than in our city.... The people of Boston are full-blooded readers, appreciative, trained.” And later, to Stedman: “In the six years I have been here, I have found seven or eight hearts so full of noble things that there is no room in them for such trifles as envy and conceit and insincerity. ”

“ Loving sociability, these new-comers to the city—and it is in the most segregated districts that the greater number of southern and British born Negroes are found—keep to their own streets and live to themselves. If they occupy all the sidewalk as they talk over important matters in front of their church, the outsider passing should recognize that he is an intruder and take to the curb. He would leave the sidewalk entirely were he on Hester Street or Mulberry Bend. New-comers to New York usually segregate, and the Negro is no exception. ”

“ But these old New York colored families, sometimes bearing historic Dutch and English names, have diminished [Pg 177] in size and importance as have the old white families beside them. The younger generation has gone west, or has died and left no issue. And into the city has come a continual stream of Southerners and more recently West Indians, some among them educated, ambitious men and women, full of the energy and determination of the immigrant who means to attain to prominence in his new home. ”

“ The colored child, especially if he is in a segregated neighborhood, is not greatly inclined to mischief. My own experience has shown me that life in a tenement on San Juan Hill is devoid of the ingenious, exasperating deviltry of an Irish or German-American neighborhood. No daily summons calls one to the door only to hear wildly scurrying footsteps on the stairs. ”

“ Quite another group of laborers are the longshoremen who, far from lounging indolently in a hallway, are straining every muscle as they heave some great crate into a ship's hold. The work of the New York dockers has been admirably described by Mr. Ernest Poole, who says of the thirty thousand longshoremen on the wharves of New York—Italians, Germans, Negroes, and Swedes, "Far from being the drunkards and bums that some people think them, they are like the men of the lumber camps come to town—huge of limb and tough of muscle, hard-swearing, quick-fisted, big of heart." ”

“ There is some truth in this comparison of economic conditions among the Negroes in the North and in the South, but it must not be taken too literally. Today's tendency to minimize southern and maximize northern race difficulties, while strengthening the bonds between white Americans, sometimes obscures the real issues regarding colored labor in this country. We need to look carefully at conditions in numbers of selected localities, and we can find no northern [Pg 77] city more worthy of our study than New York. ”

“ The land in this narrow valley appeared tolerably good, but principally in the hands of pioneers. We reached Owego, the capital of Broome County, at 11 o'clock. It is handsomely situated on the Susquehanna, which is here crossed by a bridge, and is a thriving little place. We now crossed the river, and started for Montrose, distant thirty-one miles—and now I may safely say we arrived at the back woods. All that appears to have been done here by man, is the making of a very bad road up and down tremendous hills—the rest is nature in her roughest and most repulsive appearance. ”

“ In those businesses in which he comes in contact with the white, the most pronounced success of the colored man has been real estate brokerage. The New York Negro business directory names twenty-two real estate brokers, and though a dozen of them probably handle altogether no more business than one white firm, a few put through important operations. The ablest of these brokers, recently clearing twenty thousand dollars at a single transaction, turned his operations to Liberia, where he went for a few months to look into land concessions. ”

“ As we look at the life of a segregated people, however, we see that we tend always to regard not the individual but the group. The Negro is a man in Europe, because [Pg 30] there he is an individual, standing or falling by his own merits. But in America, even in so cosmopolitan a city as New York, he is judged, not by his own achievements, but by the achievements of every other New York black man. So we will leave these able colored Americans, who won much both for themselves and for their race, and turn to the mass of the Negroes, the toiling poor, who dwell in our tenements today. ”

“ Rarely does a father or mother strike a child. Travellers in Central and West Africa describe them as the most friendly of savage folk, and where, as in our city, they live largely to themselves, they keep something of these characteristics. But it is only a step in New York from Africa into Italy or Ireland; and the step may bring a sad jostling to native friendliness. To hold his own with his white companions on the street or in school, the Negro must become pugnacious, callous to insult, ready to hit back when affronted. ”

“ The captain walked the deck impatiently, and, as the Italians went in leisurely fashion about their task, declared, "If I had those men in New York I could get twice the amount of work out of them." That is what New York does; it works men hard and fast; sometimes it mars them; but it pays a better wage than Genoa, and there is an excitement and dash about it that attracts laborers from all parts of the earth. The black men come, insignificant in numbers, ready to do their part. ”