The Cassey House - Joseph Cassey

Joseph Cassey

Joseph Cassey (1789–1848) arrived in Philadelphia from the French West Indies some time before 1808. He prospered in the barber trade and as a perfumer, wig-maker, and money-lender. An 1823 engraved ad for Joseph Cassey's barber shop at 36 South 4th Street states, "Keeps a general assortment of perfumery, scented soaps, shaving apparatus, ladies work and dressing boxes, fine cutlery, fancy hair, pommade, “huil antique”, combs, &c."

Cassey bought and sold real estate, often with his sometime business partner, Robert Purvis, another African-American of note in Philadelphia. Among the properties that Cassey amassed were several in the neighborhood of his home near Society Hill, the back of the property at 243 Delancey Street, and a farm shared by Cassey and Purvis in Bucks County known to have been visited by Lucretia Mott where, she wrote, she was entertained handsomely. Cassey also owned property in Burlington County, New Jersey. He was a landlord, at one point collecting rents from families totaling no less than 27 people living at 243 Delancey Street.

The 1820s and 1830s were the highest public profile years for Joseph Cassey in community service. He served as Treasurer to the Haytien Emigration Society of Philadelphia in 1824, a group recruiting free people of color to emigrate to Haiti. Supporting education was a strong priority with Cassey. In 1818, he served as an officer at the Pennsylvania Augustine Society which networked him with some of the strongest supporters on Haitian resettlement.

The ill-fated “Canterbury Affair” of the 1830s saw Cassey supporting the transition of a school for local white children in Canterbury, Connecticut, to a “High School for Young Colored Ladies and Misses”, as advertised in the Liberator abolitionist newspaper. The local townspeople rose up against the school teacher and threw her in jail, closing down the school permanently. Laws were enacted preventing students of color from outside the area to be educated within Canterbury. Unfortunately, this was not an isolated incident.

In the early 1830s, Joseph Cassey also funded the efforts to start a manual labor college in New Haven, Connecticut, home of Yale University, which met with resistance from the local townspeople, to the extent that they would “resist the establishment of the proposed College…by every lawful means”. In 1839, Cassey joined with colleagues, sailmaker James Forten and lumber merchant Stephen Smith, to establish a ten year scholarship for poor but deserving black students at the Oneida Institute in upstate New York which had a race-blind admissions policy.

Joseph Cassey was a noted abolitionist, anti-colonizationist, and intellectual activist. Introduced to William Lloyd Garrison by James Forten, Cassey became the first agent in Philadelphia of The Liberator, an early abolitionist newspaper from 1831 published in Boston by Garrison. Cassey actively funded and distributed the newspaper in Philadelphia. He was appointed Vice President of the New England Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. He was on the Board of the American Anti-Slavery Society from 1834 through 1836 and Treasurer of the American Moral Reform Society from 1835–1841. He and wife Amy were founding members of the Gilbert Lyceum (1841) for scientific and literary interests, the first of its kind established by African-Americans and which included both genders. The Lyceum organized lectures on “Physiology, Anatomy, Chemistry & Natural Philosophy”.

Involved in the church, Cassey was a member at St. Thomas’ Church on 5th Street, active as an officer in the Sons of St. Thomas benevolent society and in the nondenominational Benezet Philanthropic Society. By 1840 he had amassed an estimated net worth of $75,000, mostly in real estate. He claimed only $2,000 in net worth to the census takers in 1847, excluding his real estate holdings. He retired and moved from his residence over his barber shop at 36 South Fourth Street to more elegant accommodations at 113 Lombard Street, not far from his friend James Forten who was living at 92 Lombard Street (these addresses are from the former street numbering system). Cassey was one of the few men of color to retire to the status of “gentleman”. Upon his death in 1848, his will divided his estate between his wife, Amy, and six surviving children (5 sons, 1 daughter); Francis L., Joseph C., Alfred S., Peter William, Sarah, and Henry.