A Treasury of Foolishly Forgotten Americans (10 page)

A small group of freed slaves found a rather inhospitable new home when they first landed on Georgia's Sea Islands in April 1865. The abandoned plantations were overrun with weeds and infested with snakes. Anything of value had already been looted by marauding Union soldiers, and the small cabins once occupied by slaves were in crumbling disrepair. Nevertheless, this land at the heart of the South's rice-growing empire was now theirs. And for their leader, Tunis Campbell, it was where his dream of a free society for those once enslaved would be built, and then—all too soon—destroyed.

 

He was a northerner who never suffered the bonds of slavery, yet when Tunis Campbell went south after the Civil War to help freed blacks achieve equality, he ended up in chains. It was a devastating blow to a movement that began with so much promise, and symbolized in its way the collapse of all that Reconstruction promised. Nevertheless, Campbell's impact had been enormous. For a brief period of time, against implacable white resistance, he showed those who had once been enslaved what it meant to be truly free.

Reared among whites, including twelve years of education as the only person of color at an Episcopal school in Babylon, New York, Campbell grew up to believe himself equal to any man. As a committed abolitionist and activist against the movement to colonize American blacks in the African country of Liberia, he strove to lift the oppressed members of his race to the same level. His efforts received government sanction in 1863 when Secretary of War Edwin Stanton commissioned him to work with General Rufus Saxton in the resettlement of freed slaves in South Carolina.

“I was sent down…to organize civil government,” he wrote, “to improve the colored people in the South wherever I could do it, and…to instruct and elevate the colored race.”

Historian Russell Duncan has noted that Campbell's experiences in South Carolina prepared him well for his future as a leader of freedmen in Georgia. Not only did he meet former slaves and hear firsthand about their hopes and aspirations, he learned from the missionaries, politicians, soldiers, and others he encountered as they worked to facilitate the transition from bondage. He also witnessed numerous abuses by whites, both northern and southern, as they sought to profit from the chaos of the war or to sabotage any strides made by blacks to establish themselves. Campbell absorbed it all, and in 1865 he was given the opportunity to put his practical education to use.

General Saxton, now an assistant commissioner of the recently established Freedmen's Bureau, appointed him to oversee the settlement of liberated blacks on the Sea Islands along Georgia's coast—right in the heart of a region where the “barbarous aristocracy” of rice planters, as abolitionist Fanny Kemble called them,
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once held absolute dominion over other men. On these abandoned island plantations Tunis Campbell would found a society based on the basic American principles of freedom and equality for a group of people who had never known any such thing.

As the Civil War drew to its close, Campbell led the first group of settlers to the islands that had been set aside for them as part of a larger program prompted by General William Tecumseh Sherman's order—issued after his famous march through Georgia—that freed slaves be given land to call their own, without any white interference. Campbell was permitted to operate the settlement on the Sea Islands the way he saw fit, and immediately set about drafting a constitution modeled on that of the United States. There would be a legislature, with eight senators and a twenty-member House, a judicial system topped by a supreme court, and an executive branch, with Campbell himself serving as president.

Land ownership was fundamental in a free and democratic society, Campbell believed, and so the former plantations were parceled into individual farms and distributed. Education was key as well, particularly for people who had been systematically deprived of it. Using his own funds, Campbell imported teachers from the North and invited his family to help as well. “Bring the sons down,” he wrote to his wife, Harriet. “We're going to establish the schools. We're on an island of our own. There are no white people here and we're going to lift up children. Bring all the primers you have, and please join us.”

Campbell hoped the inhabitants of the coastal islands—his microcosm of America, albeit an all-black one—would one day be integrated into the white world and thrive there. But he thought it essential that the races be kept separated at first, and he formed a militia of citizen soldiers to ensure it. “The freedmen needed time to grow,” writes Russell Duncan, “to be instructed in democratic ways, to develop a true feeling of equality, to learn self-sufficiency, and to establish nuclear families free from the watchful eye, instructions, and intimidations of still-hostile whites. Campbell believed that separation for strength was the quickest way to transform the freedmen into free men.”

By the end of 1865, the new colony appeared to be well on its way. Nearly one thousand people had been settled, and, despite the meager rations provided by the Freedmen's Bureau, they were able to sustain themselves on the islands' bounty as well as on their own labor. But the project was doomed. Andrew Johnson had succeeded Lincoln after his assassination, yet inherited little of the late president's wisdom or benevolence. A Southern Democrat, his vision for a reunited nation was to restore confiscated plantations to their owners and thus force freedmen back to their subordinate positions as slaves in all but name.
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A colony of self-sustaining blacks claiming ownership of property that belonged to white men simply did not fit with this president's idea of Reconstruction.

In short order, Rufus Saxton, Campbell's supporter and protector, was fired and replaced by Davis Tillson, who forced the islands open to white planting interests. Many blacks were manipulated into inequitable labor contracts, which Campbell vehemently denounced. As a result, baseless charges of malfeasance were leveled against him, and he was removed from his position as a bureau agent. Though he continued to promote the movement toward independence and self-sufficiency on the islands, it was soon clear that he would have to base his dream elsewhere.

A plantation owner ruined by the war agreed to sell Campbell his 1,250-acre property on the Georgia mainland, with payments to be made in installments and rent due until the price was paid in full. Here Campbell planned to reestablish his island colony as a cooperative community. The land would be divided into individual farms and owned by members who would raise crops both for sustenance and profit. Each would contribute to the payments due on the land, as well as toward the reimbursement of the Freedmen's Bureau for the initial rations and supplies it provided. And, most important, they would all work in various capacities, from sweepers to sheriffs, for the general good of the community. Upon arriving, members made the following promise: “We hereby pledge ourselves, our interest[s] and our labor to the successful issue of this permanent [organization] for our welfare and hope thereby to merit the approbation of our friends who have assisted us and the disappointment of our enemies who seek our downfall.”

Establishing the new community, called BelleVille, proved difficult. The settlers arrived to find no shelter and land that had been left unplowed for years. Yet Campbell's adopted son, E. E. Howard, expressed their greatest hopes: “Soon will this place teem with the fruits of the people's labor and…this land, now almost impenetrable with weeds and underbrush, having grown up so profusely during the year, laid out into little farms of from ten to twenty acres, and what is better still, the people who thus labor will be able to claim it as their ‘home,' where under their own vine and fig tree they may contemplate the goodness of God.”

Torrential rains and a cotton blight dampened expectations at BelleVille somewhat, yet as the new community struggled to establish itself in Georgia, radical changes were taking place in Washington. The Republican-controlled Congress repudiated President Johnson's Reconstruction agenda and launched one of its own. In addition to passing the Civil Rights Act of 1866 (over Johnson's veto) and drafting the Fourteenth Amendment that made blacks full citizens of the United States, Congress enacted harsher measures against the South—again, over the president's veto. The rebellious states were divided into five military districts and had to meet certain conditions before they would be readmitted to the union. They were forced to rewrite their constitutions and to adopt the Fourteenth Amendment. Most odious of all, for many southerners, was the requirement that men they regarded as chattel be registered to vote. As blacks began to occupy state legislatures and even the U.S. Congress, Tunis Campbell saw opportunities for empowerment that extended far beyond BelleVille.

 

Georgia crackled with expectation as Radical Reconstruction took hold, and in this atmosphere General John Pope appointed Campbell to the three-man board of registration for the state's Second District. With all the passion of the preacher he had once trained to be, Campbell extolled the power of the ballot and the virtues of the Republican Party. He also traveled throughout the state promoting black rights, and on Independence Day 1867 he represented McIntosh County at the Republican State Convention in Atlanta.

“The colored men of the Convention…met the white on equal ground, feeling that it was no disgrace to be black,” one newspaper reporter wrote. “They argued well and showed themselves men of ability and task. Take, for instance, the conduct of Mr. Campbell, who won favor everywhere, than who none was more honored and respected…[and who was one of] the leading spirits of the Convention.”

Following his success in Atlanta, Campbell was elected as a delegate to the state convention that drafted the most liberal constitution in Georgia's history. He then ran for the Senate and became one of three blacks to win office. These were heady times indeed, but Campbell would not sit securely. Conservatives who believed that only whites were fit to serve in the General Assembly were outraged by the presence of men they considered inferior beings. On September 12, 1868, the Senate voted that blacks had no right to hold office and expelled Campbell and another senator (a third had been forced to resign a month earlier). Campbell's protest was recorded in the
Senate Journal:

Campbell may have lost his Senate seat, but he remained justice of the peace for the predominately black McIntosh County. And from that position he built a political power base—not for his own aggrandizement, but for the advancement of his race. With severe labor shortages in the South, he counseled blacks on how to use the situation to their best advantage and how to avoid being exploited. He met with them frequently, coalesced them into a vigorous community, inspired them with possibilities, and, with other blacks who held positions of authority in the county government, protected their interests.

“They gaze upon him as having no part in their humanity,” wrote one observer, “a demi-god whose wonderful attributes are quite beyond their comprehension and whose wisdom is past finding out, and they almost worship him and follow withersoever he leads.”

While Campbell helped shield the black people of McIntosh County, others in the state suffered from continuous, often violent coercion and intimidation from the Ku Klux Klan and other racist organizations. As a result, Congress reinstated military rule over Georgia late in 1869, and, under order of the new commander, Campbell and the other black legislators who had been deprived of their seats were reinstated. They were not warmly welcomed back. Democratic papers called Campbell “the Congo Senator,” and referred to one of his speeches against unfair polling practices as “the gorilla's insolent harangue.” The sentiments were deep-rooted, and in time, those who were behind them would crush Tunis Campbell.

 

Radical Reconstruction was faltering in the South, and those who wished to see white supremacy restored—“Redeemers,” as they were known—were on the rise. By 1872 they controlled the governor's office and the legislature in Georgia, but Campbell continued to impede their total domination. The
Savannah Morning News
declared that because of that “monkey-faced evil spirit, Tunis G. Campbell and his ready vassalmen,” McIntosh County remained “one of the strongholds of Radicalism and Grantism [a reference to the Republican president] in Georgia.” The Redeemers fumed over the influence Campbell had over black laborers, his frequent trips to Washington to agitate against white abuses, and, most insidious of all, the power he wielded with the backing of an armed militia. Many feared an armed insurrection. “I never slept without a loaded pistol by my bed,” one planter reported. Yet Campbell was too prominent to kill outright without repercussions from Washington. He would be destroyed instead by a vast conspiracy that reached into the highest levels of government.