Michael and Susan Douge: Albany’s African American Power Couple

We’ve been taking a deep dive into the African American population in Albany in the 1800s, to try to get a sense of what their lives were like before the Civil War -the defining event of the century., and after.

One couple, Michael and Susan Douge, stands out for their dedication for decades – to their community and to the causes of abolition before the Civil War and equal rights after the War. They were perhaps the most influential couple in Albany’s African American community during the 19th century.

Michael was born in New Yok City in 1804, son of a freeman. There is some evidence that his father had been enslaved in Haiti, but made his way New York after the slave revolt in the 1790s. Susan was born in Albany; we know little of her origin story. Census data indicate her mother, Mercy Franks, was born in Dutchess County in the 1780s; she’s identified as a free woman in the 1820 Albany census. She may have been married to John Franks  who appears in the 1833  city directory.  By 1844  Mercy is identified as a widow. The Franks may have once been enslaved by the Franks family in the Hudson Valley who were slave importers and sellers for several generations.

 

In 1827 the Freedom’s Journal, the first African American newspaper in America (published in New York City) carried the wedding announcement of Michael Douge (New York City) and Susan Ames (Albany) on April 25, 1827 . The ceremony was performed by Rev. John Chester of Albany’s Second Presbyterian Church.

In 1830 Michael is identified as a hair dresser, living and working at 14. South Pearl, close to State St.

By the time Michael was in his late 20s he became publicly involved in Albany’s African American community. In 1831 the Albany African Clarkson Society (Thomas Clarkson was an Englishman who campaigned vehemently against the slave trade) held a major event, including a procession, accompanied by music through the streets celebrating the 4th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in New York State; Michael Douge gave the major address.

Throughout the 1830s he continued his involvement. He writes letters to  The Liberator the anti-slavery newspaper published by William Lloyd Garrison. He was one of the founders of the Philomethean Society, a Black literary association in 1835, (modeled after a similar society in New York City); an officer in the “Colored Person Union” of Capital District (est. 1837) dedicated to moral improvement and education of the Black population, and active in a group vehemently opposed to African American colonization in Liberia and elsewhere, outside of the United States.

Both Michael and Susan were active in establishing the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Albany.

In 1833 Susan was one of the founding members of the Female Lundy Society. (The Society was named after Benjamin Lundy, a white abolitionist who published the newspaper “The Genius of Universal Emancipation”);it was dedicated to charitable works in the African community and anti-slavery activities.) In 1837 she was also part of the group of Black women that established Albany’s Female Lovejoy Society. (Elijah Lovejoy was a white abolitionist and newspaper publisher murdered in Ohio in 1837 for his anti-slavery views. His murder shocked the nation.)

In 1840 Michael was an attendee of first New York State Convention of Colored Citizens , which happened to be held in Albany. The same year he was part of a group of men who lobbied to establish a publicly-funded school for Black children as the city had done for white children. Ultimately they was successful and by the mid-1840s the Douge’s daughter Catherine Mary was a teaching assistant at the segregated Wilberforce School for African American children. (Although records indicate that the Douge children, along with children of some other African families may have been allowed to attend white schools.)

In 1843 he was part of a group of men, including, Rev. Benjamin Paul (one of the founders of the Black Wilberforce Colony in Canada), Thomas Paul (the noted teacher in Albany and Boston and one time William Lloyd Garrison printing apprentice),  and Benjamin Lattimore and William Topp (active members of the Underground Railroad in Albany) who presented an address to Governor William Seward, thanking him for what he had done for the Black community. (Seward would go on to be a U.S. Senator from New York State and Lincoln’s Secretary of State.)

During the 1830s and 1840s the Douges were busy raising their children – (Catherine) Mary, (Susan) Cornelia, Francis, Julius , and John. Michael’s barbershop seems to have thrived. In early Albany city directories they’re listed various as living at 14 South Pearl St., just in from State St. Through the 1830s and early 1840s they remain in the South End, living in in various locations on South Pearl St.

At one point in the mid-1830s the Douges lived at 9 Plain St,, owned by Benjamin Lattimore, Jr. Lattimore was one of the first Albany men to attend Colored Conventions (the first national expressions of abolition and political equality for African Americans). He was a friend of William Lloyd Garrison, and anyone of consequence in the early days of the anti-slavery and political equality movements in the 1830s. It’s safe to assume that through him and others the Douge family shared similar linkages to the world outside Albany. These would come to include Frederick Douglass, who had close ties to many white and Black abolitionists in the city.

By the mid-1840s the Douges moved to 100 Franklin St,. where they remained for a number of years.

While teaching the Wilberforce School Mary married the principal Henry Hicks. Sadly Henry died only a few years after the marriage; in 1855 Mary is identified as living with her parents and her two small children, along with her younger brothers.

Abolition is a Douge family affair. When Mary was just 17 she became a subscriber to Frederick Douglass’ Northstar newspaper. (In 1853 Michael and other local prominent African American abolitionists gathered at the A.M.E church to endorse the Frederick Douglass Paper\ the successor to the Northstar.)

By the mid-1850s the Douge sons had assumed the role held by their father. and were participating in the Colored Conventions and delegate selection for Frederick Douglass’ nascent National Council for Colored People.

After the Civil War Mary went south to teach freed Blacks under the auspices of the Freedman’s Bureau while her parents raised her children. Susan continued her activities with the Female Lundy and Lovejoy Societies.

Michael appears to have been slowing down, but he did play a role, along with his sons Julius and John in Black Republican politics in the city. Julius was also one of a about a dozen prominent African American men in the city who lobbied the Board of Education to permit Black children to attend local (white) public schools, and to admit Black children to the Free Academy (High School) over a number of years (In 1873 they were successful.)

Julius was cut from the same mold as his father, and was soon a member of the African American Masonic Lodge and the Black chapter of the Oddfellows The Douge men were members of the Charles Sumner Association – a mutual aid society for African Americans in Albany (its motto was “ We care for our sick and bury our dead”), as well as the Burdett-Couts Benevolent Association.

But the battle for equal rights was not over. Mary Douge Williams stepped up for women’s suffrage, and became a vice president of the newly formed Albany Woman’s Suffrage Association in 1880. There is a wonderful description in a suffrage newspaper of very dignified Mary leading a contingent of African American women, including her mother Susan, then in her late 70s, to register in Arbor Hill (where the Douges were now living at 25 Lark St.) and vote in the School election of 1880. (This was the first time New York State allowed women to vote.) We know that Mary and Susan voted in subsequent years.

Then tragedy struck. Michael died at the age of 79 in late 1883 and Mary, at age 51, less than six months later in 1884. (Their children Cornelia and Francis had both passed in 1859.)

But Susan continued to play an active role in her community as a member and sometimes officer of both the Lundy and Lovejoy Societies until she died in 1897 at the age of 92. She would live to see her grandson Robert Douge become only the second Black man to graduate from Albany Law School in 1890.

Michael and Susan Douge and other family members are buried in Lot 3 Section 99 of Albany Rural Cemetery.

Copyright 2021 Julie O’Connor

James Gardner: The first African American Graduate of the Albany College of Pharmacy

James Gardner was born in 1864 just before the end of the Civil War to William and Elizabeth Gardiner.

His father William was a barber. By the early 1850s he been active  for some time in Albany African equal rights politics, and attended several New York State Colored Conventions.

In the 1850s he was the Vice President of the Albany Vigilance Committee, tasked with financing Albany’s Underground Railroad (UGRR) to help fugitive slaves escape from South.

After the Civil War he was very active in the Republican Party, and a member of the group of men who lobbied the Albany Board of Public Instruction to desegregate Albany Schools. Elizabeth was active in Albany’s African American female charitable organizations – the Female Lundy Society and the Female Lovejoy Society. Mr. Gardiner was trustee of the African Baptist church.

The family lived for several decades on Second St. (first at #49 and then #67) in Arbor Hill in the close knit community bounded by Hall Place, Third St., Lark St. and Livingston Ave.

William Gardiner was fast friends and a business partner of Dr. Thomas Elkins. They were both officers of the Vigilance Committee, and involved in other political and community affairs. Elkins was the only black druggist in Albany in the 1800s, and during James’ childhood Elkins lived with the family. We think that it was the influence of Elkins that led Gardner to attend the Pharmacy College.

Gardner graduated from the Albany College of Pharmacy in 1888 when it was co-located with Albany Medical College on Eagle St. between Lancaster and Jay Streets. He was vice president of his class and won a cash prize of $20 from the Alumni Association for the best graduation thesis on “Percolation”.

Albany College of Pharmacy co-located with Albany Medical College on Eagle St.

The same year he married Caroline Deyo from Jefferson St.; after their marriage they lived with his parents. His best friend, Robert Douge, served as his best man. In 1890 Douge would be only the second African American graduate of Albany Law School. In the late 1890s the couple moved to Livingston Ave.

After graduation Gardner worked for the drugstore owned by Clement & Rice at the corner of Broadway and Clinton Ave., Huested’s Pharmacy at the corner of State and Eagle Streets, and for Thomas Pennington at his drugstore in Saratoga Springs (he was the only black druggist in the city at the time).*

State St., just below Eagle St.

It appears Gardner also had a love of music, spent some time working for a music store at 46 North Pearl St., and listed himself in several city directories as a music teacher But it’s also quite possible that it was difficult for Gardner to find employment as a druggist because of his race. (Thomas Pennington recounted the serious problems he encountered in Saratoga Springs because of racial prejudice.)

Sadly James died in late 1901 at the age of 37. He was found drowned in the river off New York City. We have been unable to discover the details. Why was he in New York City? How did he drown?

Caroline outlived James by another 18 years; never re-marrying and working at various jobs, including seamstress.

*Thomas Pennington apprenticed with Dr. Elkins in the mid-1850s, and they remained lifelong friends. The presence of Pennington in Albany speaks to the relationships in Albany and the larger world ante-bellum world of African American activism against slavery and for equal rights. Pennington’s father, the Rev. James Pennington was the president of the National Colored Convention in Rochester in 1853, attended by two Albany men – Stephen Myers who ran the Albany UGRR and William Topp, a member of the UGRR and of its Vigilance Committee. Pennington’s association with Elkins again demonstrates the outsize role and political importance of Albany, in both African American politics and the anti-slavery movement in the ante-bellum period.

Copyright 2021 Julie O’Connor

Albany’s Remarkable William Topp

Some of you may know of William Topp – he was an African-American member of the Vigilance Committee of Albany’s Underground Railroad. (UGRR). He and his wife Eliza were actively involved in smuggling fugitive slaves to freedom, using their home as a safe house.

We decided we wanted to know more about him; we discovered a man of extraordinary talents.

Topp was born free in Albany to Lewis and Phillis Topp in 1813. It appears they were people of little means, but Lewis was active in, and well–respected by, the African-American Community. We know nothing about William until he first appears in his late 20’s as a political leader, among men twice his age, in the abolitionist community in Albany in 1841. By then he’s co-owner of a men’s tailoring shop and clothing store.

In 1842 when he was 28 he married Eliza Vogelsang, from NYC. Through this marriage Topp cements his place in both the African American and White political world of anti-slavery activism. Eliza was the daughter of Peter Vogelsang and Maria Miller. Vogelsang was one of the founders of St. Philip’s Episcopal Church in New York. Thomas Miller, Eliza’s grandfather, was one of the founding members of the A.M. Zion Church in NYC, known as “Mother Zion”. Both men were founders of New York African Mutual Relief Society. By 1840 the Miller and Vogelsang families were part of African-American political and social aristocracy of the City.

The importance of this marriage can’t be under-estimated. It’s unlikely that Peter Vogelsang would have sanctioned a marriage to just anyone. Jane, Eliza’s older sister, married James Forten, Jr. in 1838. James Forten, Sr. had served in the Revolution, and came to be one of the wealthiest men in Philadelphia of either race. He’s befriended William Lloyd Garrison, funded the publication of Garrison’s “The Liberator”, and was one of the founders of the American Anti-Slavery Society, the dominant abolitionist organization in the North.

Over the next 15 years William Topp became the wealthiest African-American in Albany. In 1845 he opened his own business as a merchant tailor and was enormously successful. Business reports over a decade say: “without means, he had made money, retains all his customers”, “does the most fashionable business in the city”, “industrious, attentive”, “frugal habits” and “very aristocratic”. His wife’s younger brother Thomas comes to work in the shop, and he hires a NYC tailor, Bisset Barquet.

He continues to be an important part of the Albany Colored Citizens Committee, and a trustee of the Albany’s African Baptist Church. But his activity transcends the city and he begins an almost meteoric political career. He serves on important committees of the annual national and state “colored” and anti-slavery conventions in Philadelphia, Boston and Ohio, and serves as president of several New York conventions.

He becomes good friends with Gerritt Smith, the wealthy abolitionist politician and philanthropist, a leader in the New York Anti-slavery Society and founder of the Liberty Party, the only political party in the country devoted solely to the elimination of slavery.

He is close to Lydia and Abigail Mott, Quaker sisters who were part of Albany’s UGG and dear friends of Frederick Douglass. After Abigail’s death in 1850 the Topp family embraces Lydia, and through Lydia he comes to know her best friend, Susan B Anthony. Topp becomes one of the few African-American men, along with Frederick Douglass, to take up the issue of women’s suffrage.

The Library of Congress (LOC) contains an amazing artifact – an inscribed copy of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” given to Lydia Mott by Topp in 1853. Lydia, 20 years later – just before her death, gave her treasured copy to Susan B. Anthony. When Anthony donated the book to the LOC, she writes a note in which she calls William Topp “a splendid man”

Then the world started to come crashing down on the Topps. Eliza’s sister Jane and her husband James Forten had come to live in Albany and their daughter Maria died in the late 1840s, Jane passes in 1852 and William’s mother Phillis in 1853.
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Within 2 months in 1854 William and Eliza’s son Alfred and and Tom’s wife died Rebecca . (Eliza’s brother Tom had married Rebecca Bishop, a young women from one of the wealthiest and most respected African-American families in Annapolis Maryland). By 1855 Tom was a widower with 3 small girls living in the same house with his widowed brother in law. The misery must have been palpable. Unable to cope by himself, Tom’s Aunt Gennet Miller, comes to live with them and tend to the children, one of whom, Charity, was deaf and mute. (She would later be placed in an institution in NYC for similarly challenged children and adults.)
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And in late 1857 William Topp’s brief but remarkable life ended. For many months he had been suffering from tuberculosis; he died at the age of 44.

Aaron Powell, a Quaker abolitionist from Ghent, Columbia Co., wrote the notice of Topp’s death that appeared in “The Liberator”.

“Few there are whose lives have been more uniformly and so religiously consecrated to labor for the promotion of the best interests and well-being of their fellow man”.

About a month later there was an announcement in “The Liberator” of the $100 Topp had bequeathed to the newspaper. B

William Topp and his wife and children are buried in Lot 25, section 12 of the Albany Rural Cemetery. In the same plot are his sisters-in-law Jane Vogelsang Forten and Rebecca Bishop Vogelsang, as well as his sister Mary, who married Bisset Barquet.

And in one of the quirks of fate, Barquet’s brother Joseph served in the Civil War in the 54th Massachusetts Colored Regiment (portrayed in the movie “Glory” )as a sergeant alongside Eliza Topp’s oldest brother Peter Vogelsang, Jr, who was a lieutenant.

Copyright 2021  Julie O’Connor