held the whip hand and nowhere greatly
refrained from the use of their power, the lot of the colored freeman
was one hardly to be borne without the aid of habit and philosophy. They
submitted to the regime because it was mostly taken as a matter of course,
because resistance would surely bring harsher repression, and because there
were solaces to be found. The well-to-do quadroons and mulattoes had
reason in their prosperity to cherish their own pride of place and carry
themselves with a quiet conservative dignity. The less prosperous blacks,
together with such of their mulatto confreres as were similarly inert,
had the satisfaction at least of not being slaves; and those in the South
commonly shared the humorous lightheartedness which is characteristic of
both African and Southern negroes. The possession of sincere friends among
the whites here and there also helped them to feel that their lives lay in
fairly pleasant places; and in their lodges they had a refuge peculiarly
their own.

The benevolent secret societies of the negroes, with their special stress
upon burial ceremonies, may have had a dim African origin, but they were
doubtless influenced strongly by the Masonic and other orders among the
whites. Nothing but mere glimpses may be had of the history of these
institutions, for lowliness as well as secrecy screened their careers.
There may well have been very many lodges among illiterate and moneyless
slaves without leaving any tangible record whatever. Those in which the
colored freemen mainly figured were a little more affluent, formal and
conspicuous. Such organizations were a recourse at the same time for mutual
aid and for the enhancement of social prestige. The founding of one of
them at Charleston in 1790, the Brown Fellowship Society, with membership
confined to mulattoes and quadroons, appears to have prompted the free
blacks to found one of their own in emulation.[83] Among the proceedings
of the former was the expulsion of George Logan in 1817 with a consequent
cancelling of his claims and those of his heirs to the rights and benefits
of the institution, on the ground that he had conspired to cause a
free black to be sold as a slave.[84] At Baltimore in 1835 there were
thirty-five or forty of these lodges, with memberships ranging from
thirty-five to one hundred and fifty each.[85]

[Footnote 83: T.D. Jervey, _Robert Y. Hayne and His Times_ (New York,
1909), p. 6.]

[Footnote 84: _Ibid_., pp. 68,