An
extract from Jeffrey Green’s talk at
What’s Happening in Black British History?
II
in Liverpool 19 February 2015
The
Powells came to my attention when I read a letter from Powell in Everton,
describing himself as an “outlawed American negro” in a 1974 collection of
letters between British and American abolitionists. Another letter, also dated
1859, stated Powell’s son was a surgeon. I looked him up in the Medical Directory 1859 and investigated
on line to discover Dr Powell had served in the Union forces in the American
Civil War and that his army file showed he was alive into 1915.
William Peter Powell left America with his six
brothers and sisters in 1850, travelling with his namesake father and mother
Mercy Haskins. She was a native American and her husband was of African
descent. “He had come to this country to procure for his children that
education and means of supporting themselves denied them in Boston on account
of their colour” noted Dublin’s Freeman’s
Journal of 8 February 1851. Their father has been called a “militant
champion of black seamen”, and had run boarding houses for sailors in New York
City and in New Bedford, Massachusetts.[1]
The latter was part of the Underground Rail Road – which aided escaped slaves
en route to freedom in Canada.[2]
Powell attended a lecture in
1856 on “the African race” in Liverpool. Also present was “Josephine, the slave
who has lately arrived here from New Orleans … accompanied by several coloured
friends, and the audience loudly cheered her as an expression of their sympathy
and good wishes”. Hidden for the twenty-five days of the voyage by the
boatswain of the Asterion she reached
Liverpool on 16 February 1856. There had been a $500 reward offered in New
Orleans. She was “a mulatto” aged 20 or 23.[4]
“At the close of the lecture, Mr. Powell, a coloured gentleman addressed the
meeting with some humour and considerable ability”.[5]
A later talk by American anti-slavery campaigner Parker Pillsbury claimed
Josephine bribed a customs officer. This was investigated by the Collector of
Customs at Liverpool. His refutation supported by a letter from Powell was
published in the Liverpool Mercury.[6]
Powell was “a coloured gentleman of much intelligence” employed by C. Bushell
and Co., marine brokers of Dale Street, Liverpool. Powell had attended the
investigation. His letter dated 18 March 1856 was from Field Street, in
Everton.
In a letter from there dated 21 January 1859 Powell
informed the white Bostonian Maria Chapman “I came to this country a poor
despised outcast – outlawed American negro – driven from my native country for
no ‘color of crime’ but for the ‘crime of color’”. Two months later leading
Irish abolitionist Richard Webb said that Powell “is a poor man in the
employment of others. His heart is excellent – his judgment very small”.[7]
Where the children went to school is unknown. All the Powells returned to America around
1861 in time for William Peter Powell
(b 1834), Edward (b 1836), Sylvester (b 1838) and Isaiah (b 1842) to serve in
the Union forces in the American Civil War. Mercy was born in 1840, her invalid
sister Sarah in 1845, and Samuel in 1849. The Powells took pride in their
first-born son for he qualified as a doctor in Dublin. Webb was rude about him,
writing in March 1859: “He has a son a surgeon, very intemperate, & one of
the stupidest men I have ever met with, in whose social position his father
takes great satisfaction”.[8] I
have no energy to detail this cantankerous ex-Quaker Irishman.
William Peter Powell had qualified in 1857-1858 (L.M.,
Dublin 1857; M.R.C.S. England 1858) and worked as a house surgeon at St Anne’s
District Hospital, Liverpool and on a temporary basis at the Liverpool South
Hospital (according to page 667 of the Medical
Directory, 1859). Dr Powell then was one of thirteen black doctors
in the Union Army, working in Washington DC.
Dr Powell worked in California but was back in
Liverpool in 1902 where, on 7 June he was present at 46 Prescot Street, West
Derby when his 59-year-old brother Isaiah Amos Powell died from asthma. He was
a cooper (barrel maker). On 12 April 1916 Dr Powell died at the Kirkdale Home
in Kirkdale, West Derby aged 81. The death registration said he had died from
senile decay, had been living at 1 Cotton Street, Liverpool (which was a
lodging house by the docks) and had been ‘a Doctor of Medicine’. His name has
not been traced in medical reference books in the 1910s. His files in
Washington DC indicate he was the last surviving child.[9]
Jeffrey Green
jeffnsue@eastgrin.fsnet.co.uk
[1] Philip
S. Foner (ed.), Essays in Afro-American
History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1978), p 88; Granville
Allen Mawer, Ahab’s Trade. The Saga of South Seas Whaling (New York: St Martin’s Press,
1999) reveals the cosmopolitan nature of Massachusetts-based whaling.
[2] http://www.nps.gov/nebe.
See also Jill L. Newmark, ‘Face to
Face with History’ on www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2009/fall/face.html
which used Powell Jr’s correspondence with the Federal government in the
National Archives in Bethesda ,
Maryland Montgomery ,
Alabama New York in 1873 but the man noted in San Francisco in 1879 may
well be his doctor son (p 107).
[3] ‘Letters
to Antislavery Workers and Agencies’, Journal
of Negro History, Vol 10 No 3 (July 1925), p 471 taken from the Liberator, 22 July 1853 .
[5] Liverpool Mercury, 29 February 1856 .
[7] Clare
Taylor, British and American
Abolitionists. An Episode in Transatlantic Understanding (Edinburgh
University Press, 1974), pp 437, 439. She does not detail Powell but these
brief mentions triggered my research.
[8] Clare
Taylor, British and American
Abolitionists. An Episode in Transatlantic Understanding (Edinburgh
University Press, 1974), p 439.
[9] My
thanks to Jill Newmark.
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