Been in the Storm So Long (109 page)

Despite the occasional setbacks and discouragement, the energy expended by blacks to educate their children, like the simultaneous movement to worship by themselves, reflected a growing if not fully developed sense of community and racial pride, even as it sharpened the separation from and accentuated the differences with both their northern friends and native whites. It was not as though blacks consciously adopted a policy of self-imposed separation. But there did emerge a growing conviction that full admission to white society might have to be achieved through the development of independent and separate movements, organizations, and institutions. This would require not only self-recognition as a people and a community but the willingness to act on that consciousness. Neither illiteracy nor poverty, they also came to realize, would be extinguished in their own lifetimes, but even the poor and the illiterate in American society—white and black—possessed certain rights and could claim protection in the exercise of those rights. Ultimately, an elderly and illiterate freedman suggested, education would eliminate illiteracy among his people. But in exercising their freedom and attacking the critical problems that now beset them, they could ill afford to depend upon “book larnin’ ” alone.

To define themselves as a people and to act upon their grievances, blacks in every one of the ex-Confederate states would begin to organize at some level. Freedmen and freeborn alike, the educated and the illiterate, preachers and field hands, teachers and artisans gathered together after church services, in the new schoolhouses, in town meetings, and in county and state conventions to discuss their condition and to frame a response. Previously barred by law, such meetings now took on additional significance as they set the stage for the entrance of freedmen into the political arena and for the fullest expression of their new status as black citizens.

T
HE SCENE HAD NO REAL PRECEDENTS
. Seeking to underscore that fact, a white reporter thought it nothing less than “the great sensation of the day” and a harbinger of “great and dreaded innovations.” On September 29, 1865, more than 115 black men, most of them only recently slaves, filed into the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Raleigh, North Carolina, designated themselves a Convention of Freedmen, and elected a northern-born black minister who had never experienced slavery to preside over their deliberations. They had come together from all parts of the state, chosen in some fashion by their people and instructed by them to find ways to eradicate the legal inequities of the past that still circumscribed their new freedom. Meanwhile, several blocks from this site, the same number of white men, some of them former slaveholders, assembled in a legislative chamber to frame a civil government for North Carolina and to determine what they could preserve of a seemingly shattered past.

The dramatic contrasts in the meeting halls and purposes of these two conventions extended as well to the political and economic power whites and blacks wielded and to the occupations, class biases, attire, and formal education of the respective bodies. The distinctions in native intelligence and capacity for self-government were less discernible. Although the delegates to the Constitutional Convention were more literate, how they used
their accumulated intelligence in the next six days of deliberations made that advantage less than obvious. If some of them retained charitable feelings for the former slave, in the belief that he bore no responsibility for his freedom, that did not mean they would entertain any foolish notions about his right to participate in the political life of the state.

Located in a back street of Raleigh, the church in which the Freedmen’s Convention assembled was a modest wooden structure, scantily furnished, able to accommodate about 300 persons on the floor and another 100 in the gallery. During the four days of the convention, every seat would be filled with delegates and interested spectators, most of them also black. Affixed to the wall directly behind the pulpit, a lifelike bust of the martyred Abraham Lincoln remained shrouded in mourning more than five months after his assassination, and the inscription overhead repeated the classic words of his last inaugural address: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right.” That proved to be the spirit of this unique gathering. Several of the delegates, however, among them Abraham H. Galloway, a light-skinned man whose black mother had been a slave of the distinguished Galloway family, would have preferred less charity, more firmness, and at least a suggestion of malice if charity and firmness yielded no results. Whatever might have been Galloway’s blood ties to the aristocratic clan whose name he bore, he harbored no affection for his former owners. Having escaped to Ohio in 1857, where he became an ardent abolitionist, Galloway returned to his native state after the war exuding what one observer called an “exceedingly radical and Jacobinical spirit.” At this Raleigh gathering, he would agree to compromise his advocacy of immediate and universal manhood suffrage only if an educational test for voting was applied equally to both races. But he thought it unlikely that white North Carolinians would wish to disfranchise more than half of their eligible voters. And he refused to believe the threats of leading whites to exile themselves if blacks won political equality. “It wouldn’t be six months,” he thought, “before they would be putting their arms around our necks and begging us to vote [for] them for office.”

Although Galloway called the Raleigh convention to order, the dominant mood was quickly established by the man the delegates chose as their permanent chairman—James W. Hood. Born in Pennsylvania, Hood had been a minister in Bridgeport, Connecticut, before coming South in 1864 as a missionary for the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. The election of a northern-born black to preside over a gathering of ex-slaves did not go unchallenged. “I myself am an adopted citizen of the State,” Hood said in his defense, “having lived here for some two years, and if I am not a citizen here, I am not a citizen of any State.” Upon hearing that some delegates were displeased with his election, he offered to resign, but the convention would not hear of it. In his opening address, Hood implored the delegates to refrain from “harsh language” and recrimination. “I say that we and the white people have to live here together.… We have been living together for a hundred years and more, and we have got to live
together still; and the best way is to harmonize our feelings as much as possible, and to treat all men respectfully. Respectability will always gain respect …”

Voicing a similar moderation, James H. Harris, a native of North Carolina, emerged as the most influential figure of this and subsequent gatherings. Although born a slave, he had obtained his freedom in 1850 (his certificate of freedom described him as a nineteen-year-old “dark mulatoe” with a scar upon his head), migrated to Ohio, where he received some formal education, visited Liberia and Sierra Leone to observe the Afro-American settlements there, and returned to the United States in 1863 to help recruit blacks for military service. Two years later, as a delegate from Raleigh to the Freedmen’s Convention, he shared with his new colleagues the results of his varied experiences. He had met enough northern whites, he told them, to know that the “intelligent white class in the South” remained the “best friends” of colored people. He had seen enough of the North to know the depth of racial animosities in that region, manifested in the exclusion of blacks from most non-menial employments and in wartime riots that ranked among the most “diabolical and murderous” exhibitions of racial hatred in history. He had come to recognize, too, that only the law of military necessity, not a benevolent crusade of the Union Army, had freed his people. Finally, his travels elsewhere in the world—“40,000 miles in search of a better country”—had convinced him that neither Africa nor the West Indies were places of asylum for American blacks. The freedmen’s place was here on southern soil, and the only way to win the confidence of white men was to work faithfully and show “a patient and respectful demeanor.” This was no time for recrimination, nor was this the proper moment for radical manifestos. If the present tensions and ill feeling were only permitted to subside, the freedmen would surely “receive what they had a right to claim.” After all, he suggested, God was on their side, and he envisioned “a glorious future” for the black race in the South.

Like many of the postwar black conventions, the Raleigh conclave came to be dominated by those who thought it more expedient to request than to demand and who preferred to take their stand on the more abstract and less controversial principle of equality before the law rather than immediate admission to all political privileges. The effect of speeches such as those of Hood and Harris not only blunted the radicalism symbolized by Galloway but did much, said one relieved reporter, to disabuse the minds of fearful whites about the intent of these unprecedented and only recently prohibited meetings. Nevertheless, the delegates sometimes took a position at variance with this deliberately cultivated tone of moderation. The resolution revering the memory of John Brown would hardly have endeared them to the great mass of southern whites. Nor would native whites have appreciated the resolution praising the efforts of “that portion of the Republican party of which Messrs. Chase and Sumner and Stevens and Greeley are the heads” to secure blacks their rights through congressional
action. And even as James Hood made his plea for conciliation, he rejected any return to the old days of subserviency, declared that blacks had waited long enough for their rights, and scoffed at the notion that they were unprepared to exercise those rights.

Nor did he hesitate to enumerate the rights which properly belonged to black people, as much as to their white fellow citizens.

That could hardly have been clearer. But the Appeals, Addresses, and Petitions adopted by the convention, and intended largely for white audiences, often failed to reflect the aggressive spirit with which individual blacks pressed their demands in speeches intended for their fellow delegates and the black spectators. With the Constitutional Convention meeting nearby, the Freedmen’s Convention drew up an Address to that body which was the very model of circumspection—“moderate in tone,” a white reporter wrote of it, and “unexceptionable in its phraseology and demands.” Avoiding the issues of testimony in the courts, representation on juries, and suffrage, the Address acknowledged instead the powerlessness of the freedmen, their dependence upon “moral appeals to the hearts and consciences of the people,” and their confidence in the “justice, wisdom, and patriotism” of the Constitutional Convention. Surely, that body would protect the interests of “all classes,” including a people who were now “helpless” after 250 years of slavery, who had been raised in intimate association with the dominant race, and who in the Civil War had “remained throughout obedient and passive.” Although they had no wish to return to slavery, they chose to emphasize the positive side of that sense of mutual obligations which had bound the masters and the slaves together. Rather than look to the North for protection and sympathy, they preferred to win their rights by “industry, sobriety and respectful demeanor.” But whites needed to reciprocate this commitment by compensating them properly for their labor, by respecting the sanctity of their family relations, by providing for the education of their children, and by abolishing
“oppressive laws” which made racial distinctions. “Is this asking too much?” the Address concluded.