Navigating a Complicated Society
Excerpted from American Furniture 2013, The Missing Chapter in the Life of Thomas Day. Patricia Dane Rogers and Laurel Crone Sneed. The Chipstone Foundation.
“Freedom” for a free Black person in North Carolina before the Civil War did not mean the same thing as it would for a White person. As John Hope Franklin wrote, “Free blacks in North Carolina, as Thomas Day came into manhood, could not move freely from one community to another. If you wanted to go from Milton or Yanceyville to Raleigh, you needed permission to
do that. And it was dangerous for you to do that, because…if you turned up where nobody knew you, it would be assumed that you were a runaway slave, and you had no defense against an accusation that you were a runaway…Now if that free black, let’s say it was Thomas Day, said, ‘I am not a slave, I am free,’ they’d say, ‘Yeah, how’re you going to prove it?’ ‘I can prove it in court.’ They’d say, ‘You have no standing in court. You cannot take an oath. You cannot swear on the Bible because you are not a person.’ You see?” (John Hope Franklin, filmed interview by Laurel C. Sneed for Thomas Day, American, October 1995, TDEP.)
In an era when most free African Americans in the South were illiterate, untrained in a marketable skill, and denigrated as a group, Thomas Day stood out as an educated, accomplished artisan, businessman, and family man whose talent, personal integrity, work ethic, and seeming acceptance of prevailing regional values won him the respect of the White community.
Day was certainly treated as an exception, not only because he owned slaves but also because his trade served the needs of the local planter class. In addition to making household furniture, Day’s shop produced cribs, caskets, and architectural components. Although he kept up with the latest designs, Day’s repertoire was innovative and, occasionally, idiosyncratic.
The ways in which Day needed to operate in
order to ensure his own financial success and local acceptance of his family, could at times seem complicated and counterintuitive. In the North, free African Americans and former slaves, like Frederick Douglass, who escaped enslavement in Maryland in 1838, could risk taking strong public stands against slavery. Day’s situation, below the Mason-Dixon Line, however, was far more precarious and required subtle forms of resistance. According to Ira Berlin:
He [Day] accepts the law but requests exceptional treatment. This makes him different from someone like Douglass who challenges the legal system and demands the abolition of slavery and the discriminatory racist laws that support it.... We see a “personal” approach—enlisting one’s customers and neighbors rather than . . . directly challenging the . . . system.
*As with many other successful African American business people, Day developed strategies that allowed him to live and work within the prevailing system and thrive as a member of the local community. By all outward accounts, he appeared to be someone who played by the rules of the day and did not stray too far afield from accepted social practice. But as was the case with many other free people of color, Day seems to have led a far more complicated life, one that was characterized by covert actions and beliefs that ran counter to his public persona.
Thomas Day took a hands-on approach to his business, acting as workshop manager, craftsman, and salesman. As the owner of his shop, he employed whites and free blacks as well as slaves throughout his career. When he recruited five white Moravian artisans, including the Siewers brothers from Salem at the end of the 1830s, Day owned three slaves and employed “some fifteen hands, both white and colored.” Records show that he owned slaves for at least three decades, increasing his holdings
from two in 1830 to fourteen at the apex of his career in 1850. The “Slave Schedule” for the U.S. census that year indicates that six of the fourteen were males between the ages of fifteen and thirty and four were children under ten, the youngest being seven years old. According to this same census, five of the seven cabinetmakers in the shop were white, the only free blacks being Day and his seventeen-year-old son Devereux, both designated mulatto or mixed race. By 1860 he was one of only eight free black slaveholders remaining in North Carolina, with two slaves listed in residence and one as fugitive. Many free blacks left the state in the decades before the Civil War as a result of increasingly constricting social and economic conditions.
Day bravely countered the rising racial restrictions by traveling beyond the scrutiny of white Milton, in part to explore what the abolitionist movement had to offer, including educational and professional opportunities. The 1835 convention, which took place at Philadelphia’s second largest black church, had been heavily promoted in the abolitionist press, and the city was packed with attendees who “despite their wealth and degree of refinement . . . could not be sure of getting a room in one of Philadelphia’s hotels.”
With the newer understanding of Day’s ties to abolitionist events, schools, and ideational leaders, questions emerge about exactly how he might have interacted with or supported his own slaves. Aside from extolling their good character to Mary Ann, all that is known from the written record is that he and his wife hosted a church session meeting at their home when their “servant,” Cory, joined the Presbyterian congregation, and that Day trusted two slaves, Samuel and David, to handle money. Oral history in the Milton area continues to circulate stories of Day’s hiding fugitive slaves in his basement and smuggling them out in furniture and caskets. Some descendants of Thomas Day and of other free black families in North Carolina also mention hearing that Thomas Day was protecting and assisting slaves. Existing documents, including one of Day’s letters to his daughter, suggest that this hypothesis merits further investigation.