Jonas Holland Townsend (sometimes rendered Jonas H. or Jones H. or J. H. Townsend) was a nineteenth-century African American political leader in New York, California, and Texas, where he died on September 5, 1872.

A sketch of his life by Eric Gardner is included in the AANB, and also in a paper by Al Broussard.

In an obituary notice of Townsend, the Pacific Appeal described Townsend as “one of the most talented colored men in the United States,” as well as “a ripe scholar, a fine gentleman, and … the leading spirit of the State Conventions held by colored citizens in this State in 1855-6-7-8, for the repeal of the disabling testimony laws.” After residing in San Francisco from 1849 to 1859, he returned to New York where he was elected Grand Master of the state’s United Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons. Then, “after the close of the rebellion, he was induced to go to Galveston, Texas, to take charge of a school, as principal where he held that position until just before his death, which took place at Galveston, Texas.”¹

See also a mention of him in the published report of Henry Highland Garnet’s memorial address, when he is described as a veteran of debates at Union Hall in New York and part of a group that “went to California to succeed in digging for rights rather than gold, and have made their mark on the statute-book of the Golden State by causing the abolition of its worst pro-slavery laws.”

Early Life

He was born in 1819, according to his passport application. If the census of 1870 entry for him in Waco is accurate, then he was born in New York, not Pennsylvania as sometimes claimed.

In 1840, he became the first African American student to enroll at Hamilton Literary and Theological Institution (now Colgate University), according to research by Diane Ciccone, but he remained there only two years. Around the time he left, the faculty at the college was suppressing a student antislavery society over the fierce objections of Gerrit Smith and others.²

From there, he apparently became active as an abolitionist in New York, signing his name to an open letter from abolitionists in Albany to William Jay on July 18, 1843.³ He also chaired an Albany meeting to praise Governor William H. Seward’s response to Virginia on the rendition of fugitive slaves, and to lament the end of his term as govenor.⁴ At the 1843 Colored People’s State Convention in New York, Townsend was a delegate from Albany. But later articles place him shortly thereafter in Boston as a member of a Baptist church there.

In 1845, Townsend sought admission to Brown University with plans to become a Baptist minister and missionary to the Island of Haiti, but according to a series of articles published that fall in the abolitionist press, he was denied admission by president and moral philosopher Rev. Francis Wayland on account of his color.⁵ The charge was particularly embarrassing to Wayland, both the president of Brown and the leader of the national Baptist convention, who had published a debate with a proslavery southerner earlier that year.⁶ One defender of Wayland’s decision in Townsend’s case later wrote to the National Anti-Slavery Standard to charge that the young man had been expelled from Hamilton for some unnamed immorality, and that Wayland had known of this when he refused him admission.⁷ But a letter around the same time from Judson Benjamin to Professor Warren Leverett commenting on Wayland’s private view of the case does not mention such accusations, and refers instead to the president’s fear of a loss of patronage for the school if Black students were admitted, as well as to his belief that radical abolitionists were injuring the antislavery cause by pressing too far too fast.⁸

After being denied admission at Brown, Townsend instead enrolled in 1845 at Waterville College (later Colby College). The college’s own catalog of officers and students for 1846 confirms that he was a sophomore, living in Room 19 of South College. He also appears as a Junior in the 1847-1847 catalog, which gives his permanent residence as Boston. But according to AANB, he did not graduate from Waterville.⁹

He remained active in abolitionist circles in the 1840s:

• In 1848, he wrote a letter to Frederick Douglass’ Paper the North Star, with dateline of Binghamton, N.Y., which discussed the case of the Pearl captives, Wilmot’s Proviso, and his own abolitionist work in Eastern New York, where he was ordered out of a bar room on account of his race: “The reason given for this act of American barbarity was, that Providence had given me a complexion different from his Satanic landlordship’s.” He ended on a hopeful note that one day “there is a good time coming,” and urging readers to labor for “this great and glorious object,” so that “America, bad as she is, may yet terminate her boundaries by the ocean and her fame by the stars.”
• He apparently was part of an effort to start a new periodical called The New Spirit of the Age, publishing the prospectus in the National Anti-Slavery Standard with dateline New York, November 12, 1848.¹⁰ But the periodical that he eventually produced the next year at No. 136 Nassau St. in New York was titled The Hyperion.¹¹
• He participated in the 1849 Colored Convention in New York.
• He participated in a meeting to welcome Frederick Douglass and raise support for the North Star, on April 20, 1849, in New York at Shiloh Presbyterian Church.¹²

He was apparently criticized by Henry Highland Garnet for joining a group of others in New York City who had reluctantly endorsed the Whigs (rather than the Liberty Party) as the best protection for their rights in the next election, but I haven’t seen the original resolution Garnet is speaking of.¹³

To California

Townsend left for the gold rush with a company of ten Black New Yorkers in November 1849 as part of a group that included Newport Henry, an employee of the abolitionist Tappan brothers. They departed on a ship called Hampden that passed through Panama.¹⁴

California had just declared itself a free state the month before, and the Liberator announced on November 30, 1849, that “A mining company of colored men is fitting out for California, in New York. Among them is J. H. Townsend, late editor of the N.Y. Hyperion, and graduate of Waterville College, Me.” His passport application says that he was residing in New York City at the time at Box No. 404.¹⁵

• In 1852, he addressed a petition along with Mifflin W. Gibbs and William Newby to the state legislature calling for the repeal of anti-Black testimony laws, first passed in 1850.¹⁶
• The Pacific Appeal noted him as one of the “gentlemen [who] were prominent” in movements for the “Right of Testimony” between 1851 and 1855.¹⁷
• He was one of the speakers at a First of August celebration in San Francisco in 1854.¹⁸
• Listed in 1854 as the President of the San Francisco Athenaeum, “recently established in this city for the purpose of diffusing useful knowledge among the colored citizens of California,” according to Daily Alta California; see also “Our San Francisco Letter” in New York Weekly Anglo-African, November 19, 1859, signed by “Tall Son of Pa.” The Athenaeum’s political report in 1854, quoted on Lapp, p. 103, may offer an early view of Townsend’s outlook on California laws.
• Part of the inaugural 1855 colored convention in Sacramento. He also signed the call for the convention reprinted in Lapp, p. 212. It said that since Black easterners had “migrated to the shores of the Pacific, with hopes of bettering your condition, you have met with one continuous series of outrages, injustices, and unmitigated wrongs.” Lapp, 215-216, also notes Townsend’s clash with Newby over the question of whether to appeal to whites’ own self-interest in opposing testimony bans, or simply to advocate for Black civil rights. He was in the end appointed as a traveling agent for the executive committee to raise funds, and issued a closing statement to the whites of California: “Many colored men, who have been educated in your first colleges, are not allowed to testify! and wherefore? our Divine Father had created us with a darker complexion.” Five thousand copies of the proceedings were published by the Sacramento State Tribune over the objection of some subscribers.
• He wrote a letter to Frederick Douglass’s Paper in 1855 to rebut racist claims made in the Evening News about free Black citizens of the United States.¹⁹
• Editor of the Mirror of the Times, which first appeared in September 1856 and continued until 1858; see a later article in the Elevator and in the Pacific Appeal
• Wrote a preamble for 1856 colored convention, and also spoke at the convention (see Lapp, p. 226)
• Remained a Mason in California, according to the Elevator and the Pacific Appeal
• Member of the Young Men’s Repeal Union organized in 1857 at the San Francisco Athenaeum “to work for the overthrow of the Black Laws, which stand upon the statute books of California.”²⁰
• In 1857, Townsend spoke at a meeting wishing C. D. Buchanan, his assistant at the Mirror, safe travels on his return to New England. In his remarks, he referred to “his early education, and the hopes of an indulgent parent who had labored for years to educate his children,” but it is unclear from the context whether this referred to Townsend’s early education, or Buchanan’s.²¹

See the Sacramento Daily Union for an exchange about the testimony controversy in 1858, which sparked what the Pacific Appeal called “the Frazier River, Victoria and British Columbia exodus in 1858.”

Back in New York, 1858 - 1870

According to Snorgrass, Townsend returned first to New York in 1858, when the Mirror ceased publication, and later ended up in Texas.²²

He was back in New York by October 1858, when he served as a secretary of a suffrage convention in Troy, New York, that denounced the Dred Scott decision and advocated for the repeal of New York’s discriminatory property qualifications for voting.²³

In July 1859, he was scheduled to participate as a delegate from Hudson, New York, in the Colored Convention of the New England States in Boston.²⁴ It’s unclear if he went, but a letter from him was read according to the proceedings. He may not have attended because he was instead delivering an address in Poughkeepsie at the 25th anniversary of the First of August.²⁵

Later that year, he spoke at the fifth annual distribution of the Ridgway Prizes by the New York Society, for the Promotion of Education among Colored Children, and the Weekly Anglo-African reported that whether he brought “physical gold back with him [from California] we know not, but are very sure that he has accumulated a good store of the intellectual stuff, the true metal,” and that he was going to take over the columns of Frederick Douglass’s paper during the abolitionist’s upcoming trip to Europe.²⁶

He delivered a lecture on “The Past, Present, and Future of the Anglo-African” before the Hudson Lyceum on December 23, 1859.²⁷

He appeared at a Black Masonic meeting in New Haven on December 27, 1859.²⁸

He was part of a meeting marking the re-opening of “Colored Grammar School No. 1” on Mulberry Street in New York, in March 1860.²⁹

He was on the committee of arrangements for a First of August anniversary in Hudson in 1860.³⁰ And on the resolutions committee, along with Henry Highland Garnet, for a meeting of the Free Suffrage Convention in New York that year.³¹

He was also a regular contributor to the Anglo-African Magazine. Articles in the first volume include:

• “American Caste and the Common Schools”
• “Our Duty in the Conflict”
• “The Policy that We Should Pursue”

He also published a report on the “Struggle for our Rights” in the common schools in California.

In October 1862, he chaired a meeting in New York at Henry Highland Garnet’s church to welcome and celebrate Robert Smalls.³²

And in July 1863, he was part of a group that organized a USCT enlistment meeting in Poughkeepsie.³³ See also “Manifesto of the Colored Citizens of the State of New York, in Convention Assembled,” in Black Abolitionist Papers, vol. 5, 224.³⁴

He was listed as “(col’d), clerk, h 21 Greene” in Trow’s New York City Directory, 1867-68, p. 1034, available on Ancestry.com.

He held a position “in the New York Custom House, during Mr. Lincoln’s administration,” and was still believed to be in that position in May 1869, according to the Elevator on May 21, 1869 and May 28, 1869.³⁵ Additional support for this is found in a brief notice about the formation of the “Colored People’s Cosmopolitan Association” in 1866; among the managers listed for this athenaeum-like reading room and library for promoting “mental culture and the improvement of social qualities” was “J. H. Townsend, Custom-House, Auditor’s Department.”³⁶

He was listed, with address of New York City, among the members of the state committee organizing the October 1866 Colored Convention in Albany, New York.³⁷

In 1867, he was on the committee of arrangements for a public meeting at the Cooper Institute to celebrate equal suffrage in the District of Columbia.³⁸

Did he also live in Port Washington on Long Island and marry Clara E. Seabry in March 1860?

Could he have signed this memorial on emigration signed by “free colored persons of California” in 1862, or was his name appended without his consent?

To Texas

Townsend opened a Freedmens Bureau school in January 1870, submitting reports in March 1870, April 1870, and May 1870.³⁹ He was mentioned in a report from June 1870. That same month, Townsend reported on his day school and a contract for a school building, something he had been urging since January and February.

In a lengthy report to John W. Alvord, the state superintendent of education, in June 1870, Louis W. Stevenson praised Townsend: “The bureau has some teachers that will compare favorably with any in the state, the most conspicuous are Mr. Rowe of Corpus Christi, Mr. J. H. Townsend of Waco, and Miss Nahan of San Antonio.”⁴⁰

He was counted for the census of 1870 in Waco as “James Townsend.”

In November 1870 he writes, along with four other men, to James P. Newcomb, reporting on conditions in Waco and urging him to trust the reports of Mayor B. F. Harris about what is happening there.⁴¹

Later that month, on Thanksgiving Day, the “Freedman’s Institute” was dedicated at Waco with speeches by Harris and “Prof. Townsend, the principal of the school.”⁴² It is probably in a school building built for $3,500 and commissioned by Louis W. Stevenson of the Freedmen’s Bureau in June 1870.⁴³ (Is this the same school that is later incorporated as the Howard Institute? Not sure.)

A July 1870 check for rent of (school?) house by the Freedmen’s Bureau was sent to Townsend at an address in New York.⁴⁴ But in November he is addressed at Waco again.

By March 1871, he is appearing the Houston Daily Union as a McLennan County delegate for state Republican conventions, and he was also at a Union League meeting.⁴⁵ In June, he accepted appointment as supervisor of Public Instruction for the Thirty-second District, still based in Waco.⁴⁶ That same month, he signed his name as a member of the Executive Committee for the Republican Party in McClellan County.⁴⁷ He attended the Republican state convention in Houston that August.⁴⁸ He visited Newcomb at the offices of the State Journal that summer and was welcomed by the editor as one of the “good Republicans and representative influential men.”⁴⁹

He remained connected to the school in Waco, delivering an address at a May Day picnic for “the colored institute” there in 1871.⁵⁰

An August 1871 issue of the Houston Daily Union suggests that he stood with the radical faction in the Republican Party in supporting William T. Clark and opposed the “bolters” who nominated Louis W. Stevenson for Congress.⁵¹

He appears by name about 10 times in Richard Nelson’s Galveston Representative. Of particular note was his role, with George T. Ruby and N. W. Cuney, on a committee to raise subscriptions for the legal aid of W. M. Burton from a railroad car on account of race.

Townsend was in Brazoria County and serving as one of the state’s Republican Presidential Electors in 1872, according to a notice in the California Elevator on August 24, 1872. After his death, the vacancy was filled by Norris Wright Cuney.⁵²

A letter by Townsend to an unnamed New Yorker on violence against schoolhouses in Texas and support for Greeley among unreconstructed Texans was widely reprinted in the northern press:

Jonas H. Townsend, a colored gentleman, educated at Waterville College, now the Principal of an academy at Waco, Texas, is elector at large in that State on the Grant and Wilson ticket. In a letter to a New York gentleman, he says that some of Mr. Greeley’s new friends in that locality have already burned a number of school houses, scourged the teachers, and driven them out of the neighborhood because they teach “n—s to read and write who ought to make crops.”⁵³

His death on September 5, 1872, was reported in the California Elevator on October 26, 1872.

Bibliography

• Douglas Henry Daniels, Pioneer Urbanites: A Social and Cultural History of Black San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), on UC Press E-Books.
• James A. Fisher, “The Struggle for Negro Testimony in California, 1851-1863,” Southern California Quarterly 51, no. 4 (December 1869): 313-324, on JSTOR.⁵⁴
• Rudolph M. Lapp, Blacks in Gold Rush California (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977).
• J. William Snorgrass, “The Black Press in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1856-1900,” California History 60, no. 4 (Winter 1981/1982): 306-317.

Miscellaneous Links

• A 2014 Prezi by Kyle Kreider
• Colored Conventions Project pages on California
• California Colored Conventions page on BlackPast.org
• California Pioneers of African Descent by Guy Washington, National Park Service