Danbury's Homer Peters—Abolitionist?

African American history can be difficult to research. Census, pension, and if one is lucky, land and probate records, sometimes family stories, or brief items in newspapers must often serve to document persons and events who historians of their time usually left out. However, that is only partly true of one Danbury figure, Lyman H. (Homer) Peters. We can know a fair amount about the life, activities and even the personality of the man known throughout the Danbury area by his nickname, “the Judge. ” In a history of Danbury published in 1896, he is the only African American to be profiled in any depth, and the local newspapers took note of many of his activities. What appears to have been missed, omitted or forgotten is how Peters was also an abolitionist, active in the movement at the state level. Lyman H. Peters, known locally as Homer Peters, was the son of Lemuel Peters, a former slave of Ezra Booth of Newtown who had been emancipated in 1795, and his wife Mary. Though near the bottom of Newtown's Grand List, as a free man Lemuel Peters managed to accumulate more land—19 acres—than any other free Black person in that town. 1 In a home on Codfish Hill, near the boundary of the part of Danbury that would become the town of Bethel and near the Newtown alms house, Homer Peters was born in 1811. Hard work on his father's small acreage likely forged him into a valuable farm laborer at a time when fields of grain and hay were harvested by itinerant workers using scythes and other hand tools. A detailed obituary in the Danbury Evening News noted that he was “a remarkably good workman, excelling most men in haying and harvesting. ”2At age eighteen he moved to Danbury to work on the farm of Captain John Rider, whose house on Main Street is the site of the Danbury Museum. At some point he and his wife Nancy worked at the Meeker tavern, across from the Fairfield County courthouse. There some legal wit tagged him with the nickname “the Judge, ” after a prominent jurist of the time. It is not known if the nickname was meant as mockery, but it followed him for his whole life. Stints at the farms of other prominent Danburians followed until the 1840s, when Main Street clothing merchant Thomas Mootry urged him to take up the barber trade and offered him a room in his store building. Barbering was a customary trade for African Americans at the time, and Peters and his son Lemuel remained the town's only barbers until an influx of Germans in that trade three decades later. Peters acquired Mootry's building when it was going to be replaced on its site. He moved the structure to the foot of Liberty Street, a side street adjacent to Main, which at the time was the main stem of the growing town. In it, he opened Danbury's first ice cream parlor, along with a news service, with music he provided on the side. Eventually, Peters would own three buildings, including his own home. In the 1870 U. S. Census, his net worth of 7, 000 (5, 000 in real estate) far surpassed that of most of his white, mostly immigrant neighbors. 3In his time, Peters was known less for this entrepreneurial streak than for his talents as a musician. Around 1840, he acquired a violin that he would use for the rest of his life. It is not known how he learned to play it, but within a few years he had established himself as the town musician. He was an indispensable part of musical events of all kinds throughout not only Danbury but its surrounding rural towns, including adjacent communities in New York state. A recollection published in the Danbury Evening News shortly before his death and republished in James Montgomery Bailey's History of Danbury, Conn. (1896) states that Peters was also: the town fiddler and furnished dancing music for all festivities—good music, too, and in his hands one violin held the music and force of a dozen. His ‘calling off’ for dances was original, unique and varied. He would sing directions to the tune he was playing, adding, when words fell short of notes, “A tum a tum tum. ”His sister Dolly and wife Nancy would be on hand to serve food. 4In a page from his 1846 diary, farmer and amateur poet David W. Nichols, who lived in Danbury's rural Great Plain district, afforded a firsthand glimpse into one of these performances during a country wedding: “Judge Homer Peters, a finished professor of Music was now called upon to conclude the festivities of the evening with a few scientific cotillions. ” Later in the entry, Nichols saluted “the finished execution of Judge Peters” who played “an infinite variety of jigs, waltzes, reels and cotillions. ” Peters’ obituary made the claim that “There is perhaps no man in the state who furnished music to so large a number as he did. ” With such a widespread circuit of performance over a span of almost 40 years, his playing may have influenced others. 5In the spring of 1860, Peters along with his fiddle, his “well tried and trusted friend, ” appeared on the stage of a sparsely attended concert of the town band. Among the band's musicians was 15-year-old George E. Ives, who would later become the father of composer Charles Ives. Peters was so influential among the musicians and country fiddlers of his time that one can speculate that echoes of his playing may be heard in the country dance sections of such Charles Ives pieces as “Washington's Birthday, ” “Country Band March, ” and others. Peters and his wife Nancy, a native of Maryland whom he married in 1833, raised three children. His obituary described him as “a man of large, good nature and considerable wit, and was as well liked as he was well known. ”6 He was often the subject of anecdotes in the Danbury Evening News. Obsequious he was not. One story that made it into Bailey's ‘History” was of a white woman who attempted to proselytize to him, even though he was a member of the local Episcopal church, St. James. “Homer, you know more than most of your race, ” she said. “Humph, ” said Peters, “or yours either. ”7Peters, then, was an integral part of the life of Danburians of the time, but his status was ambiguous. He achieved respectability and recognition but lacked full citizenship rights until after the Civil War, when the Fifteenth Amendment granted Black men the right to vote. His life would be interesting enough on the local level, or as a case study of a successful Black person in a mid-sized New England city of the mid-nineteenth century. However, there is another aspect of Homer Peters which is the purpose of this article. There are clues that Peters was one of the African Americans in many Connecticut towns who sought full citizenship and social respectability through participation in the abolition movement. For Peters, his involvement occurred during a potentially harrowing time for his personal safety. By the time Peters moved to Danbury, slavery was non-existent in the town. The 1810 federal Census lists a single remaining enslaved person, and none remained by 1840. Most of the 50 to 60 Black people in Danbury at that time had an origin locally or in nearby New York, with few from the slaveholding South. They included hotel workers, former circus performers, laborers and a fortunate few hat workers who could afford to own their own homes. Their economic status varied widely, from abject poverty to several who owned their own homes and one who owned his own small farm. 8However, the prosperity of Danbury's mainstay industry—men's hats—rested in part on its lucrative relationship with the market in high end luxury goods that flourished in commercial capitals of the slaveholding South. This relationship was established by Danburian Zalmon Wildman, who opened the first outlets for Danbury-made hats in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1801. His son, Frederick S. Wildman, would continue as a successful hat manufacturer and bank president. Nancy Carr, Homer Peters’ wife, was working as a domestic servant in Frederick S. Wildman's home when he met her. After a Connecticut anti-slavery society began its work in early 1838, things turned ugly. When the Rev. Nathaniel Culver, an anti-slavery speaker from the state organization, attempted in October of that year to deliver a lecture in Danbury's Baptist church, an organized mob smashed windows and interrupted the event. Though Culver was able to finish his lecture, he was escorted to a safe house by two constables. The noisy mob shadowed them and regrouped around the house, but it eventually dispersed with no further violence. Perhaps shamed by the incident, Danbury citizens hosted a meeting at Danbury's courthouse of an upper Fairfield County branch of the Connecticut Anti-Slavery Society in the following year. 9Homer Peters became active in the abolition movement during this time. He represented Danbury at the 1849 Convention of the Connecticut Anti-Slavery Society, and served as Auditor. In 1849 he was listed as Lyman H. Peters and as a member of the State Committee for the state convention of the group, as well as a member of the society's Corresponding Committee. A tantalizing anecdote appeared in the Danbury Times in 1850. A customer of his barber shop accidentally picked up Peters’ coat on his way out, which the paper reported could have been a tragedy as in the coat pocket was “a copy of (Peters’) address to the convention of the Connecticut Anti-Slavery Society in 1849. . . as well as his correspondence with the patriots of Santo Domingo, with reference to their annexation to this glorious republic. ” Unfortunately, the convention speech mentioned was not reprinted in The Charter Oak, the society's journal, or elsewhere that we know of. It is known that 1850 was the aftermath of the Dominican War of Independence from Haiti, and there had been some discussion of its annexation to the United States. The Times felt compelled to add that “It will prove bad business, if the disclosures by this untoward event, should endanger the personal liberty of the Judge. ”10Shortly after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Peters joined two other men in hosting a celebration for the local Black population. On February 19, 1863, the Danbury Evening Times reported: There was a meeting of the colored people at Military Hall, a testament of approval of the proclamation of President Lincoln. The affair was under the direction of Judge Peters, Warner Whitney, and Nelson Butler, Esquires. The meeting was exclusive, as far as color was concerned, Postmaster Brown being the only white man allowed in. There were refreshments and music of the banjo, guitar and violin. The exclusivity was likely due to apprehension over lingering hostility from some among the local white population. Such caution may have been prudent. In 1870, a brief item in Danbury News mentions an “effigy” being burned near the Pahquioque Hat factory. The burning took place the day before the first election in which Black men could vote, and the factory where it took place was one that employed several Black citizens, members of the Pine family. The next day eight Danbury African Americans went to the polls anyway. 11Historians have long known that the abolition movement in the United States was much more than the work of William Lloyd Garrison and John Brown. It has also long been known that African Americans were heavily involved in efforts to liberate their enslaved brethren, even as some other Americans were seeking to create an unbreakable caste system based on color and enslaved labor in the new country. Further research efforts at the state and local level may reveal and illuminate the efforts of Connecticut African Americans such as Homer Peters who contributed to efforts to promote equality, sometimes at their own peril.