William Henry Dorsey (1837-1923) was a bibliophile, artist, scrapbooker, numismatist, social historian, and collector of Black history and art. He was most noted for the 388 scrapbooks he compiled of newspaper and magazine clippings chronicling Black life in his hometown of Philadelphia and across the country during the 19th century.
Early life and family history
Dorsey was born in Philadelphia on Oct. 23, 1837, into a prosperous family headed by his father Thomas J. Dorsey, a noted caterer and part of the Black elite. Thomas escaped slavery from a plantation in Maryland in the 1830s and made his way to Philadelphia with his brothers, including Basil Dorsey. They ended up on the farm of Black abolitionist Robert Purvis. Thomas was captured and returned, but the friends he made in Philadelphia raised money to buy his freedom in 1836.
He was among a “triumvirate of colored caterers ‘who some years ago might have been said to rule the social world of Philadelphia through its stomach,” one newspaper reported in 1896. The others were Henry Jones and Henry Minton.Thomas' catering business was so successful that he and his family lived a privileged lifestyle, owning a home on Locust Street, one of the premier addresses in the city, and other properties.
Some of the major figures of the day ate at his table: abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Pennsylvania Congressman William D. Kelley; Massachusetts Sen. Charles Sumner, an anti-slavery activist, and William Lloyd Garrison, publisher of the abolitionist newspaper the Liberator. Dorsey’s wife accompanied Douglass to President Lincoln’s second inauguration dinner. Son William was bequeathed a letter that Sumner wrote to Thomas. It was among his prized possessions.
Thomas married a free Black woman named Louisa Tobias. William was their oldest and only son, and they had two daughters, Sarah and Mary Louise. Dorsey attended Bird School and the Institute for Colored Youth (which later became Cheyney University), attended by the children of well-to-do parents. He eschewed following in his father’s footsteps as a caterer and deemed himself an artist. He studied with Antonio Zeno Shindler, an Austrian who at one point worked at the Smithsonian Institution.
When Thomas died, he left a trust that ensured his family a life of comfort, but Dorsey also worked for a living. He was a personal messenger for Mayor William S. Stokley from 1872 to 1881. As a member of the Old Reliable Club of Pennsylvania, made up of prominent Black men in the state, he endorsed Stokely for re-election in 1881. After Stokley was defeated, the new mayor Samuel King removed Dorsey as a messenger but later hired him as a turnkey at the Central Station.
Dorsey’s granddaughter described him as somber man who was a loner, big, with high cheekbones and the “reddish color” of a Native American. He was also described as courtly and polished.
In 1859 at the age of 22, he traveled to the slaveholding state of Georgia to marry Virginia Cashin, who had been born in Alabama in 1839. The couple had six children. She was listed as a dressmaker in the 1880 Census. Dorsey was a member of St. Thomas Episcopal Church, the first Black Episcopal church in the country founded in 1792 under the leadership of Absalom Jones.
He was also politically active in the Old Reliable Club, and as vice president and secretary of the Charles Sumner Club, a literary, social and political organization founded in 1873.Both of these Republican groups endorsed candidates.
An ardent scrapbooker
Dorsey caught the collecting bug from his father, who was known for his large array of books and memorabilia. The son’s greatest collection were his scrapbooks, 388 of which are still around today but in derelict condition. Dorsey clipped and saved his first newspaper article in 1866, a short item about the death of his great-grandmother who was 100 years old. He earnestly began scrapbooking in 1870 and continued until 1903 when he posted his last article.