By Russell J. DeSimone
George T. Downing has been overlooked in historical accounts of the mid-and late-nineteenth century. He was a central figure in Rhode Island history with a legacy as important as the famed Providence attorney Thomas Wilson Dorr, who led a short-lived rebellion in Rhode Island in 1842. Downing was a highly successful entrepreneur with diverse business interests in Newport, Providence, and other locations throughout the Northeast. He used his considerable wealth to help finance civil rights and labor reform efforts. He was active in a movement to extend the right to vote to Irish immigrants in Rhode Island.
Despite the challenges, Downing’s determination and resilience shone through. He attended Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, for some time and then, following in his father’s footsteps, entered the food business in New York City. Downing met his future wife, Serena Leanora De Grasse, in New York through the wealthy upstate New York abolitionist Gerrit Smith. Their marriage united two of the city’s most prominent Black families. In 1846, he opened a summer business in Newport, Downing’s Restaurant and Supper Rooms, in a leased house at the corner of Catherine and Fir streets, near Bellevue Avenue. Soon thereafter, he established another restaurant, the Yacht House, opposite the Atlantic House on Bellevue Avenue, which contained several nicely furnished dinner and supper rooms. In 1848, Downing leased a building on State Street (now Liberty Street) in Newport at the foot of what is now Downing Street. In 1850, with his father’s financial backing, he purchased the estate of William Smith opposite Tour Park. Downing’s business savvy allowed him to branch out. That same year, he opened a restaurant and catering enterprise on Benefit Street and later on Mathewson Street in Providence.
In early July 1855, Downing opened the elegant Sea-Girt House hotel in Newport with a beautiful harbor view from the upper floors. Downing maintained his primary residence in Newport from the mid-1840s until his death but also had occasional residences in Providence, Boston, New York City, and Washington, D.C., throughout his long life. In Newport, he was active in town improvements, including working as part of a committee to extend Bellevue Avenue from Perry Street to Bailey’s Beach and raising funds in 1865 for the town to purchase Touro Park for its citizens. He was, in many ways, an asset to his adopted hometown of Newport.
In August 1859, Downing chaired a major Colored Convention at the famed Melodeon concert hall in Boston, a city he also called home for some time so that his children could attend public school as Newport schools were segregated. He discussed citizenship and the “rights” of Black men as men and as Americans at the convention. He authored resolutions that condemned United States Chief Justice Roger Taney for ruling that Black people could not become American citizens. Downing argued that Taney’s ruling was a “defiant contempt of State sovereignty, a wanton perversion of the Constitution of the United States regarding the rights of American citizens, an audacious denial of all the principles of justice and humanity.”
In response to Taney’s ruling, Downing put forth his own version of American history, one in which Black Americans were citizens in the land of their birth, a challenge to the argument about Black inferiority and non-citizenship status that served as the hallmark of Roger Taney’s ruling. Downing envisioned an inclusive America in which Blacks were treated as equals in every arena of life, what he called the “universal brotherhood.” Downing, a prominent “black man,” according to Thurlow Weed, the Republican editor
of the Albany Evening Journal, issued a statement that served to “teach the law” to Taney. In a public letter condemning Taney’s decision, Downing detailed how his father-in-law George DeGrasse, once a subject of Great Britain and a man of mixed race, had paperwork from 1804 describing how he became a naturalized citizen of the United States. Downing also discussed the passport issue with his abolitionist associate Robert Purvis, the president of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society. Downing attacked the “hollow and empty? ruling issued by Taney. “Among the contradictions and confusions growing out of the judicial, legislative and political endeavors at Washington to turn Freedom into Slavery, and to make an aristocracy out of a democracy, this incident of a negro oyster-dealer
teaching law to the Chief Justice of the United States is very remarkable,” wrote Weed.? For Downing, “two hundred and fifty years of residence” in the U.S. was “ample evidence” for claims of citizenship for African Americans. Moreover, according to the “organic law of the Republic,” meaning the ideology in Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, “colored men’ were “equal with white male citizens of the United States.” 8
The remarkable constitutional revolution that occurred in the middle of the nineteenth century was due to the activism of Downing and a host of African American reformers. Their efforts connected racial uplift and the moral reform of free Black communities with an expanded understanding of the nature of citizenship. Measures enacted by Radical Republicans in the U.S. Congress after the Confederate surrender at Appomattox in 1865 represented a culmination of decades of reform efforts in northern states that were grounded in the conviction that Blacks were citizens and entitled to legal protection of civil and political rights.
Downing pushed for an active federal government, a government that waged war against the Slave Power, to continue in the postwar period, implement an expansive set of legal protections, and engage in defining citizenship. Throughout his political career, especially in his tireless efforts for equal rights in Rhode Island, Downing consistently maintained that African Americans were entitled to rights enumerated in the Constitution and that these rights were fundamental and should not be left to the whims of state governments. As a result, the federal government was obligated to protect these rights. Downing was at the forefront of a powerful abolitionist movement that advanced a vision of racial equality grounded in a particular understanding of the meaning of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution that changed America.
In early July 1855, Downing opened the elegant Sea-Girt House hotel in Newport with a beautiful harbor view from the upper floors. Downing maintained his primary residence in Newport from the mid-1840s until his death but also had occasional homes in Providence, Boston, New York City, and Washington, D.C., throughout his long life. In Newport, he was active in town improvements, including working as part of a committee to extend Bellevue Avenue from Perry Street to Bailey’s Beach and raising funds in 1865 for the town to purchase Touro Park for its citizens. He was, in so many ways, an asset to his adopted hometown of Newport.
According to an announcement from Dr. Patrick T. Conley, founder, and president of the Heritage Harbor Foundation, the Foundation awarded a grant to the RI Slave History Medallions to prepare preliminary drawings for a bronze statue of George T. Downing to be erected at Newport’s Touro Park.
George T. Downing was inducted into The Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame in 2003.
Russell DeSimone is a Rhode Island Publications Society member and is a member of the Board of Directors of the Heritage Harbor Foundation.