In 1863, on the first day of the year, Emilie Frances Davis, sat in her room in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, pulled out her pocket diary, wrote her name in ink and in cursive on the first page, and proceeded to describe her day. The day was historic: it was Jubilee Day, the moment when the “throat of slavery” intersected with the “keen knife of liberty” as the nation began its slow march toward liberty. It was a day of celebration, the one that free and enslaved black people in America had been hoping, working, and praying for since approximately 1662, the year that Virginia’s House of Burgess became the first state to shift from legalized to permanent to inherited slavery (whereas black children received their free or enslaved status from their mothers rather than from their fathers, which was the English law).
history.
It was also a day of marked contradictions. While some enslaved people were dancing, singing, and working hard spreading the good news; some former plantation owners were crying, mourning, and working hard to circumvent the spreading of the news and the planned migrations of their enslaved community.
Designed for speed and efficiency, the horse-drawn streetcars seated 20 to 25 people, moved at a speed of six to eight miles per hour over the rails, and cost about five cents per ride. In contrast, the omnibus was slow, sat only 10 to 12 passengers, traveled directly on the cobblestones and in the mud, and catered primarily to businessmen and wealthy merchants. Streetcars changed the face of the Seventh Ward, as areas that were previously inaccessible were pulled into the heart of the city. Even though Philadelphia had a bustling and thriving black community, there were still some areas that
On one Virginia Plantation, an enslaved person reported that when they heard the news, they “didn’t care nothing ‘bout Missus—was going to the Union lines. An all dat night de niggers danced an’ sang right out on de cold.” Up North, in the Seventh Ward of Philadelphia, the mood was both somber and joyous. Emilie Davis, in writing about the day, noted that many were celebrating and reflecting as “the day was religiously observed,” “all the churches were open,” and the community enjoyed “quite a Jubilee.” Emilie’s Jubilee Day experience as a Northern free black woman was obviously much different from the experience of a Southern black woman. As a freeborn resident of Philadelphia, a well-known hotbed of antislavery activism, Emilie viewed enslavement from the outside in. She was familiar with the intricacies of enslavement but she had not personally experienced it. As a result, she celebrated Jubilee but it did not change her social status. The Jubilee Day celebrations may also have prompted Emilie’s decision to keep a pocket diary. It was a historic time and perhaps Emilie felt that her voice and her experiences were significant enough to be recorded in the annals of
The Seventh Ward, which had the largest concentration of black wealth on the East Coast and where 12 percent of its population was black, was a close-knit community that had actively been working for the abolition of slavery for over one hundred years through the resident churches, benevolent societies, and fraternal organizations. It was a large community with boundaries to the East and West from Seventh to Twenty-Fifth Streets and to the North and South from Spruce to South Streets. Walking down the streets of the Seventh Ward, it is easy to get a sense of what Emilie’s daily walks may have been like: the wide cobblestone streets were home to both the omnibus and horsedrawn streetcars, pulled over iron rails.
remained closed. Long before Jim Crow, Philadelphia had one set of streetcars for whites and one for black passengers. Black people had two choices, either wait for a streetcar for people that looked like them so they could sit and ride in peace or catch one for whites and stand outside, on an iron and wood platform, near the horses, gripping the side windows. On any given weekday, nearly 46,000 people moved in and out of the center of the city, which bordered the Seventh Ward, on their way into and out of Philadelphia. During the summer, traffic was constantly held up as horses, exhausted from the work and overheated, frequently dropped dead in the streets. During the winter, wood fires were lit during the early morning hours and burned throughout the day. The blocks were lined both with Victorian-styled brick houses with large windows, columns, and wide steps sitting next to confectionary and bazaar shops and crowded wood-frame houses. Depending upon the direction that Emilie walked, she would have encountered everything from a middle class and workingmen’s section to the South, a low-income section to the East, the river and an industrial section to the West, or an upper middle-class residential and business district to the North. The sidewalks were narrow, and people moved in close contact with one another. The dress was conser-