Spatial Organization and the Residential Experience: Black Cincinnati in 1850

Abstract

Although the role of strategically situated black Cincinnati as a gateway to freedom in the period before the Civil War has been well documented, the internal structure of this dynamic black urban community and its evolution within the larger urban setting has proved a more elusive subject (Woodson, 1916; Wade, 1954; Ellwein, 1964; Lammermeier, 1970; Riley, 1971; Berlin, 1976; Curry, 1981; Horton, 1984). In the antebellum period, as in our own age, residential location determined the type and quality of housing one might occupy, the employment opportunities and the public and private facilities accessible to the resident, and the overall physical, economic, political, and social setting in which urban residents lived and raised their families. Moreover, in the commercial era, before the advent of modern intraurban transport, the residential structure was the foundation upon which the entire social life and the organizational structure of urban life was built. An understanding of residential patterns, and of the location of the black community in geographic space and in the context of the evolving urban structure, is therefore a critical prerequisite to understanding what life in the antebellum black urban community was like.