In the course of this research it became clear that there is a distinct lack of available, comprehensive data surrounding the incarceration of black Americans in the years preceding the Civil War.  Prior to emancipation, black Americans were primarily enslaved despite the free status of northern states.  By 1804, all states north of the Ohio River had outlawed slavery but there was still an overwhelming majority of enslaved black Americans.  By 1850, the total population of the United States sat at 23,191,876 people, and 3,204,313 were enslaved African Americans.  At this point, the population of free African Americans was a measly 434,495.¹

Only 11.9% of African Americans in the United States were free in the year 1850.  

The marked difference in distribution of African Americans in the United States in 1850 serves as an indicator as to why there seem to be very few records of incarcerated African Americans in the northern states during this time. According to the Report of the Prison Association of New York in 1846, there were a total of 854 people incarcerated at Sing Sing Prison.  Of the 854 incarcerated, 216 were African Americans.²  From looking at the raw numbers, it seems like the population of African Americans incarcerated is small compared to the population of white people incarcerated.  Although, if we compare the percentage of African Americans in Sing Sing in 1846 with the percentage in the total population of New York it becomes clear how disproportionately represented they were in prison. In the region of the Middle Atlantic, there were approximately 126,000 African Americans among nearly 6 million whites. New York alone had a black population of 49,000 compared to 3 million whites.³  25.2% of people who were incarcerated at Sing Sing in 1846 were African American.  1.6% of the total population of New York State were African Americans. 

With African Americans composing not even 2% of the overall population of New York it is alarming that they made up 25% of the population in only one of the prisons in New York.  The high numbers of African Americans in prison at the time are shocking when we consider how low their overall population in the free states was.  

Despite the lack of comprehensive data available, a few trends arise from Isaac T. Hopper’s diary and the Annual Report of the Prison Association of New York concerning the reasons that African Americans were incarcerated. 

An overwhelming proportion of African American convicts and ex-convicts were incarcerated for grand larceny or burglary of some degree.  Grand larceny is defined by the New York Penal Codes as “…larceny committed in either of the following cases: 1. When the property taken is of value exceeding twenty-five dollars; 2. When such property, although not of value exceeding twenty-five dollars in value, is taken from the person of another.”⁴  According to Isaac Hopper’s diary, 41.2% of the African American ex-convicts he encounters were convicted of grand larceny.  This was likely because grand larceny was not only a hard crime to prove in 1850, but also an easy crime to convict a person of.  

There was little to base accusations on in the 19^thcentury other than a person’s word or an eye-witness.  Both of these were easily fabricated and difficult to disprove. 

Despite the free status of New York in 1850, it was likely that any judge would trust the testimony of a white man or woman over the denial of a black man or woman.  The same is true for burglary, which is defined in multiple degrees by the New York State Penal Codes as, “Every person who, with intent to commit some crime therin, breaks into and enters in the night time the dwelling house of another, in which there is at the time some human being…”⁵  From this definition, burglary seems to be quite loosely defined.  Intent to commit a crime is the basis of burglary, which is difficult to prove definitively.  Isaac Hopper records 23 black ex-convicts being arrested for and convicted of burglary, which means that 37% of the African Americans Hopper speaks to were incarcerated for burglary.  Like larceny, burglary is hard to prove and easy to convict.  

One of the men Hopper meets with, Israel Boles, was arrested on suspicion of attempt to commit burglary and spent 7 years in Sing Sing Prison. Boles came to Hopper looking for employment after his sentence expired, and he was released from prison to find out that his entire family had died.  

Boles was accused of burglary after he had been released from his first prison sentence for only 15 days and was sentenced for 7 years.⁶  

Cases like Boles’ were common, as burglary and grand larceny were crimes committed out of desperation when they were rightly accused, and were very easy to sway a jury in disfavor of a black person when they were wrongly accused.  

Experiences of African American’s who were incarcerated in the antebellum era were seldom recorded, and even then, the records likely no longer exist.  Isaac T. Hopper’s diary is a crucial resource in discerning the treatment and experiences of African Americans who were incarcerated.  His interactions with black ex-convicts can tell us a lot about their experiences in New York prisons during the 1800’s.  What becomes clear upon a close reading of the diary excerpts concerning African Americans is that their experiences were actually quite similar to their white counterparts.  The abuse and torment of incarcerated people within these prisons was universal. 

Prisoners were held in dismal conditions and forced to work everyday.  Many prisons at the time required prisoners to remain silent at all times, and prisoners were punished for speaking.  Experiences among prisoners, regardless of race, were generally very abusive and physically and mentally taxing.  Every person who was incarcerated in Northern prisons during the antebellum era experienced the struggles of daily hard labor and capital punishment.⁷

Until 2009, there were no first-hand accounts of Northern prisons authored by African Americans. Discovered in an estate sale, The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict is a memoir recorded by a free black man born and incarcerated in New York, Austin Reed.  He addresses details of prison life in the 19^thcentury that had never before been considered and documents the daily torments of being an incarcerated black man.⁹  

Austin Reed, alias Rob, began his life in the prison system as a young kid at the House of Refuge in New York.¹⁰  The House of Refuge was a place for juveniles who committed crimes and were not old enough to be placed in prison.  It was intended to reform their behavior and allow them to reenter society as law-abiding adults.  The population in the House of Refuge was composed primarily of Irish immigrant children, usually under the age of 12.  At the same time, African American youths who were being committed to the House of Refuge and other reformatories never composed more than a minority.¹¹ Unfortunately, more often than not the juveniles eventually graduated to incarceration in adult prisons.  The House of Refuge attempted juvenile reform in the same ways that adult prisons did: solitude, physical labor, and religious education.¹² 

Boys who were kept in the House of Refuge were exposed to just as much torture and torment as men who were incarcerated.  Reed writes of an experience he had while attempting to leave the House of Refuge,

…the hard, pruney, clumsy old hand of Hayse grabbed me and took me back to the House of Refuge, and for making my escape I was brought to the post with my shirt off and received thirty nine blows on my bare back with the cat of nine tails, and two days after…He then ordered us to take off our shirts right in the presence of Thom King, and gave us about one hundred and fifty lashes a piece on our bare backs.¹³  

Reed’s experiences in the House of Refuge are never identified as being a result of his race, rather it seems that the brutality was consistent no matter what the race of the boys. At one point he expresses sympathy for his friend with “beautiful milk white skin” who was “to be lash and stripped like a slave.”¹⁴

The invocation of slavery here is quite significant because Reed was born free in New York, but he is still very aware of slavery and the brutality that slaves were experiencing in the South at the time.  It’s interesting as well because he almost implies that since his friend is white, it is more significant that he is being whipped, although we know from Isaac Hopper’s diary that white men in prison were not strangers to the cat of nine tails.  Despite being raised and incarcerated in the North, Reed understood even at such a young age that the whip was an emblem of slavery.  He knew that it was more than a weapon used to maintain order in prison; that it was a tool in controlling threats to the social order, a mechanism for preventing insurrection within an America based on racial as well as caste hierarchy.  

After leaving the reformatory in 1839, Reed enters the adult prison system when he is just thirteen years old and is treated as a man even though he had barely left boyhood at that point.  

Incarcerated at Auburn State Prison, Reed is subjected to seemingly constant and excruciating punishments.¹⁵  

For the next twenty, or so, years of his life Austin Reed is incarcerated at Auburn State prison.  He experiences small stretches of freedom, but never enough to consider himself an ex-convict for very long.  Reed begins his time in prison by trying to fly under the radar of brutal Keepers and discriminatory Wardens, but eventually he was marked as insurrectionary.¹⁶

Keepers begin to punish him constantly, never for anything specific and always on a scale unmatched by any other.  His attitude in prison was consistently marked by a type of confidence, in the sense that he knew no punishment they could deal him at the prison was worse than what he experience in the House of Refuge. 

As he aged and spent more time incarcerated, Reed was flagged by the Keepers as a leader within the prison.  They knew that he could convince any of the inmates to follow his lead, no matter what his request was.  This distinctive quality was dangerous to the social order within the prison and he was punished for what seemed like every move he made.¹⁷  

Austin Reed's literacy and compulsion to record his experiences is extremely significant in his context.  Not only could he read and write but he wrote a memoir in a way that informs readers in the present about his experiences in prison as an African American man.  He was so aware of the climate of the United States at the time that penning this memoir was a subtle, but powerful, act of rebellion and grounding in his personhood.

Though Reed experiences egregious torture over the course of the 20 years he was incarcerated, he never directly addresses his race as distinguishing his treatment from that of his white counterparts.  By recording what happened to him, Austin reclaims the humanity that is stripped away from anyone who is incarcerated.  Inmates were given numbers, and forced to dress in identical clothing, making them indistinguishable from each other.  Reed writes of the coldness that prisoners were treated with by the Keepers, 

"Though it may seem strange to the reader, yet truth is stranger than fiction, that the inmate of the prison never receives one soft word of kindness from the officers, from the day he enters the prison until the day he is discharged."²⁰  

Though African Americans were incarcerated at far higher rates comparatively, once in prison they were leveled with the white prisoners.  All people incarcerated at this time were stripped of their identity and forced to fall inline.  Social interaction was not allowed, denying them of the basic human need for connection.²¹  

From the data available, we can conclude that African Americans were clearly incarcerated at far higher percentages than their white counterparts.  In the antebellum era, while most of the African American population in the southern United States was still enslaved, a disproportionate number of free African Americans in the north were being sent to prisons.  

African Americans were grossly overrepresented in the New York prison system, and the men and women that Isaac Hopper spoke to were generally incarcerated for crimes of desperation that were based primarily on speculation.  

Austin Reed's memoir is a revolutionary discovery in the search to discover what the experience of African Americans incarcerated in the antebellum North was like.  

His journey through adolescence was marked by his prompt incarceration in the House of Refuge and then later in Auburn State Prison when he was of age.  

Reed clearly distinguishes himself as an African American man, though he never cites his race as a reason for his brutal treatment in jail.  We can speculate that the guards were influenced by the color of his skin, but without their own accounts of the situation there is no concrete evidence that links his race to his abuse.  

Knowledge of the racial tension present in the United States at the time attributes even more significance to Reed penning his own memoir.  He uses his ability to read and write to make a statement and bring validity to his experiences in prison.  All prisoners were dehumanized as a way to justify their poor treatment and removal from society.  Reed recovers his humanity in his writing and in turn brings new perspective to the treatment of all prisoners at the time.  He reminds whoever reads his diary that people who are incarcerated are still people.

The Roots of Black Incarceration by Joy James: http://bostonreview.net/books-ideas/joy-james-austin-reed-life-adventur…

Manuscript of The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict: https://beinecke.library.yale.edu/collections/highlights/austin-reed-li…

Written Behind Bars, This 1850s Memoir Links Prisons to Plantations by Lynn Neary: https://www.npr.org/2016/02/26/467805819/written-behind-bars-this-1850s…

1. William Loren Katz, ed., Negro Population in the United States, 1790-1915 (New York, NY: Arno Press, 1968), 53, HathiTrust.
2. Annual report of the executive committee of the Prison Association of New York (New York, NY: Prison Association of New York, 1846), 80, HathiTrust.
3. Katz, Negro Population, 44.
4. New York Field Codes 1850-1865, vol. 1, The Code of Civil Procedure of the State of New York (Clark, NJ: The Lawbook Exchange, 2003), 213.
5. New York, 194.
6.  Isaac T. Hopper, Records for the Prison Association of New York, 1852, New York Public Library, New York, NY.
7. Twenty Third Annual Report of the Board of Managers of the Prison Discipline Society (Boston, MA: T.R. Marvin, 1848), 135.
8. Austin Reed, The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict, ed. Caleb Smith (New York, NY: The Modern Library, 2017), 180.
9. Reed, The Life, xvi.
10.  Reed, The Life, xxvii.
11. Christopher M. Span, "Educational and Social Reforms for African American Juvenile Delinquents in 19th Century New York and Philadelphia," The Journal of Negro Education 71, no. 3 (Summer 2002): 112, JSTOR.
12. Sanford J. Fox, "The Early History of the Court," The Future of Children 6, no. 3 (Winter 1996): 30, JSTOR.
13. Reed, The Life, 71.
14.  Reed, The Life, 61.
15. Reed, The Life, 149.
16. Reed, The Life, 199.
17. Reed, The Life, 200.
18. Reed, The Life, 95.
19. Reed, The Life, 96.
20. Reed, The Life, 174.
21. Reed, The Life, 174.