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circle was the black community. New York City’s African American population was never very large. In 1810, it numbered 7,470 free persons and 1,446 slaves out of a total population of 91,660. In1830, the city’s slave population had dwindled to 17 while the number of free blacks stood at 13,976 out of approximately 202,600 inhabitants. In 1840, the black population peaked at 16,358 (out of 312,700), and then it slowly declined to 12,574 (out of 813,700) in 1860. 14 In Brooklyn the numbers were even smaller: in 1860, there were 4,900 blacks out of a total of 266,000 inhabitants. They lived, as social historians like to say, in the black community that cohered around a number of institutions: the African Society for Mutual Relief; the Mulberry Street School; churches like St. Philip’s or Mother Zion; newspapers like
Freedom’s Journal
, the
Colored American
, the
New York Globe, Freeman
, and
Age;
and the annual conventions of colored people.
    Neither Peter, Philip, nor their friends remained confined to the black community, however. They inhabited a third circle, the city itself as well as its “vicinity” (Brooklyn). In a time before residential segregation hardened, they and other black New Yorkers lived and worked in racially mixed neighborhoods next to people of differing ethnicities and, at least in the early years, of different classes. In these neighborhoods, blacks interacted on a daily basis with whites of all classes—poor Irish and German immigrants as well as upper-class whites. Despite their differences, they were all subjected to the same indignities of metropolitan life: filth, epidemics, disease. Beyond the geographical confines of their neighborhoods, Peter, Philip, and others who worked in trades or professions had a wide variety of contacts with whites throughout the city—as colleagues, employers, or customers. As political reformers, they worked alongside white activists. During their leisure hours, they mingled with whites in public venues like the Crystal Palace. My most fascinating discovery was that of the Lorillard family—tobacco merchants, tanners, city officials, cultural power brokers—whose lives intersected with those of my family over several generations in surprising ways.
    The fourth circle was that which lay beyond the “city and vicinity.” The black elite interacted with relatives, friends, and fellow activists in other cities—Philadelphia, Boston, Rochester, for example. But in addition, frustrated by the racism that pervaded the city of their birth, many chose to go into self-imposed exile—to other cities, to upstate New York, or across the Atlantic to England or the African continent.
    Yet with few exceptions these men and women returned to New York, almost as if the city held them in thrall. It was, I think, the chance of beating the odds, the intellectual ferment, the social activism, and the political energy of the city that brought them home.
    The last circle was the cosmos itself. As they struggled to define what it meant to be a black American, members of the elite rejected any narrow and parochial definition of themselves. I was astonished to discover that one hundred years before my father and my aunt, many among them had acquired a cosmopolitan sensibility. Reading, study, work, and travel abroad gave them an opening onto a new world of culture, taste, and aesthetic appreciation that extended far beyond their racial group, their city, and even their nation. The more they read and traveled, the more determined they were to expand their identity beyond that of “colored American” to include “citizen of the world.”
    Over the course of my narrative I deepen my lens as more archival material about my great-grandfather’s life became available to me from the 1850s on. As a consequence, Philip White emerges as the hero of my book. Nevertheless, I’ve been frustrated in my efforts to gain access to what Morrison called “the unwritten interior lives” of