Been in the Storm So Long (120 page)

If Elick Mahaly and Nick Williams pointed up the broad spectrum of black leadership and thought, the distinctions blurred in the minds of many southern whites. The quality and opinions of the individual were far less important than the nature of his aspirations. Whatever the range of views expressed, the spectacle of freedmen deliberating, nominating candidates, organizing politically, and preparing to cast ballots was enough to conjure up fearful images. “All society stands now like a cone on its Apex, with base up,” a former governor of South Carolina observed on the eve of Radical rule. After Josiah Gorgas viewed his first freedmen’s meeting, the first black policeman in Selma, and blacks being sworn in as voters, this prominent Alabaman and former Confederate officer could only brood about the extraordinary effort “to convert the Southern States into a Jamaica.” No less alarmed and incredulous were those southern whites who saw in every political gathering of freedmen the specter of insurrection. “Threats of an incendiary & seditious character have been made by them,” the mayor of a North Carolina town dutifully reported to the Freedmen’s Bureau. “I am no alarmist, but I tell you in all sincerity that sooner or later, I fear a conflict will occur between the two races down here.” Usually, as in this case, the Bureau agent reported that his investigation had failed to substantiate the charges.
⁹⁸

When Republicans gathered for a state convention in Richmond, the black workers in the tobacco factories informed their employers that they intended to stop work in order to attend the proceedings. About the same time, John H. Bills, the Tennessee planter, watched his laborers leave the fields to listen to Radical speakers in town; every one of them, he noted, had registered to vote, black registration in the district exceeded that of whites, and he wondered “to what depths of humiliation are we Comeing.” Like Bills, many planters who had barely survived the transition to free labor now faced still further disruptions. After the freedmen had finally been persuaded not to expect any land redistribution or forty acres and a mule, the approach of the elections and constitutional conventions renewed precisely that kind of speculation. “You cannot be sure of any thing when Negro rule commences,” a South Carolina planter wrote two months after passage of the Reconstruction Acts, “and I am making friends of the Mammon of unrighteousness as fast as possible. I still believe we can hold our own but the negroes will have to enjoy more of
the fruits
than before.”
⁹⁹
Once again, the Freedmen’s Bureau dispatched its agents to the plantations to make clear to the laborers that the forthcoming constitutional conventions were powerless to effect any changes in the ownership
of land. Still, despite even the denials of black leaders, many freedmen revived their hopes, and the idea persisted among them that the conventions they were helping to elect would take steps to ease their plight by making land available to them, whether through confiscation or taxation.
¹⁰⁰
Some planters, in fact, may have been uncertain whether they had more to fear from the reactions of freedmen to still another betrayal of expectations or from the possible attempts by the new governments to gratify the demand for land.

Anticipating bad times, some whites appeared to invite the very worst times, as if their only chance for salvation lay in some plunge into the very depths of degradation. “Having reached bottom,” Henry W. Ravenel confided to his diary in March 1867, “there is hope now that we may rise again to the surface in course of time.” To expedite that ultimate triumph, some were content to allow their assumptions about black inferiority to work themselves out in public view. “Let the negroes alone,” a prominent Charleston attorney advised, “give them the necessary amount of rope, let them have their representatives,
all black
, in the Convention, let their ignorance, incapacity, and excesses have full scope and accomplish its ends; dont attempt to modify it, with white sauce; let it be all black, and it will soon cure itself.” The day the first black men entered the halls of Congress, William Heyward agreed, “then comes the revulsion,” and the Yankees would no doubt be the first to deprive them of the ballot. “Such a Government as this cannot stand, and if when the next trial of the strength of parties comes on, they are nearly equal, neither will be disposed to yield to the other, then we may see another revolution.”
¹⁰¹

Before Radical Reconstruction had even begun, before a single black person had announced his candidacy for any office, the white South rushed to pronounce the entire experiment in biracial democratic government a total failure. It made no difference how blacks might choose to use their political power, even if they succeeded in establishing the most virtuous and competent governments in the history of the South. The sentence had already been handed down: this would be “the most galling tyranny and most stupendous system of organized robbery that is to be met with in history.” Nothing that any Radical legislature or constitutional convention did in the next decade could have reversed this initial judgment. If the white South feared anything, in fact, it was not the likelihood of black failure but the possibility of black success. “There was one thing that the white South feared more than negro dishonesty, ignorance, and incompetency,” W. E. B. Du Bois would write, “and that was negro honesty, knowledge, and efficiency.” Neither at the outset nor at the end of Radical Reconstruction did whites deem corruption to be the essential issue. If they could barely distinguish between one black leader and another, they cared even less to distinguish between a corrupt government and an honest government. The issue was the right of black men to participate in any government on any level. And the most terrifying prospect of all remained the possibility that these people might actually learn
the uses of political power. “If the negro is fit to make laws for the control of our conduct and property,” a southern educator would warn some years later, “he is certainly fit to eat with us at our tables, to sleep in our beds, to be invited into our parlors, and to do all acts and things which a white man may do.”
¹⁰²

The fears and despair which gripped portions of the white population drove them into the kinds of defensive preparations once associated with rumors of slave insurrections. “No man lives now at his ease,” a resident of Rockingham, North Carolina, confessed. “When he lies down at night, although his doors and windows are locked and bolted, he puts his gun and pistol, in readiness, not knowing at what hour he may be called upon to use them.” For those who lived in counties or states with a preponderance of blacks, the prospect of black majorities and black mayors, black legislators, black magistrates, and black jurors was almost impossible to grasp and precipitated frantic talk about migration. “What future can we look forward to for our children, different from what they would have, if they were in Jamaica?” a resident of Winnsboro, South Carolina, asked. “To live in a land where Free Negroes make the majority of the Inhabitants, as they do in this unfortunate State of ours, is to me revolting.”
¹⁰³

But most whites neither migrated nor panicked. Since they had once guided the lives and thoughts of blacks as slaves, the assumption prevailed in some circles—albeit uneasily—that they could now exploit the “old ties” and the economic dependency of the freedmen to control them politically. If black suffrage was forced upon whites, a newspaper in Augusta, Georgia, warned, “we will take care to turn the African suffrages to other purposes than those designed by the Republican agitators. The negroes will be in our employ, under our care, and, if controlled by any, under
our
control.… We give fair warning that we stoop to conquer.” With a certain degree of confidence, then, some white Democrats addressed themselves directly to the blacks in their vicinity, urging them not to abandon those who had always cared for them, those who knew them intimately, and those with whom their destiny lay. If they persisted in their political claims, however, they should at least know the futility of it all.

Although some black spokesmen derived satisfaction from the sight of former slaveholders trying to win over the votes of former slaves, they did not minimize the seriousness of the effort. “They basely flatter us in order
to better betray us,” the
New Orleans Tribune
warned. “The deeper they bow, the more their detestation and desire for revenge are growing in their bosom.”
¹⁰⁴

To consolidate any gains they might make among the freedmen, white Democrats even urged groups of “conservative colored men” to organize among themselves. Typical in this respect was a meeting in Montgomery, Alabama, in which black speakers pledged themselves to support in the forthcoming election “the policy of our own tried people, neighbors and friends, whose capital furnishes us employment and whose roofs shelter us, in preference to that inaugurated by strangers and their allies.” The ways in which whites could assess the results of these efforts were easy enough. If the blacks voted with them on election day, that would be a triumph. But if they chose to remain at home, that would be sufficient. Less than a month after noting that most of his laborers had registered to vote, a planter in St. Martin Parish, Louisiana, exulted in what happened on election day: “Not one of the negroes left here to go and vote today. This has been a glorious day—All White!!!”
¹⁰⁵

If verbal appeals failed to achieve the desired results, as so often happened, southern whites fell back on the more effective weapons of economic coercion, intimidation, and violence. Within weeks after the passage of the Reconstruction Acts, for example, a Freedmen’s Bureau agent in Sparta, Louisiana, requested a detachment of troops to protect the right of laborers to register to vote. Far less could be done, however, to counter the actions of employers who suddenly found they had no work for blacks who evinced any active interest in politics.

With negotiations for new contracts coming in the wake of the first elections, employers like William Gamble of Henry County, Alabama, simply inserted a new clause which forbade the laborers to
“attend elections
or political meetings” without his consent. The beatings meted out to black voters, the assassination of black leaders, the intimidation of black candidates, and the breaking up of meetings suggested in 1867 some of the techniques of terrorism that would be embellished in the next few years to expedite the political emasculation of the freedmen.
¹⁰⁶

Despite the threats and economic coercion, blacks voted in overwhelming numbers in their first exercise of political power. On the eve of the election, laborers from the surrounding countryside began to pour into the towns, filling up the streets, attending last-minute rallies, marching in torchlight parades—partaking, in other words, of the traditional election
eve festivities they had once watched from a distance. The next morning, lines formed outside the polling places as freedmen waited anxiously for the moment when they would cast their first vote. With rumors circulating that blacks expected to return from the polls with a mule and a deed to a forty-acre lot, a reporter in one town thought to ask a freedman waiting to vote whether he shared that expectation. “No Sah,” he replied scornfully. “I spect to get nuffin but what I works hard for, and when I’se sick I’ll get docked.” If the lines were long and the process time-consuming, many freedmen seemed in no hurry, as though they wished to prolong the experience, some of them loitering around the polls long after they had voted. Seldom did the freedmen standing in line speak to each other, a reporter noted, apparently deeming silence more appropriate to the solemnity and “sacred importance” of the occasion. Noticing one of his laborers in line, an employer in Montgomery, Alabama, discharged him on the spot; the freedman smiled, looked down, said nothing, and voted.
¹⁰⁷

Except for a few sporadic skirmishes, election day in most of the South passed quietly—and with it, some mistakenly thought, the old political and social order.

Notes
Chapter One: “The Faithful Slave”

1.
Ralph Ellison,
Shadow and Act
(New York, 1964), 92.

2.
Orland Kay Armstrong,
Old Massa’s People: The Old Slaves Tell Their Story
(Indianapolis, 1931), 200, 269.

3.
Mary Boykin Chesnut,
A Diary from Dixie
(ed. Ben Ames Williams; Boston, 1949), 38. For white perceptions of slave reactions to the outbreak of the war, see also Duncan Clinch Heyward,
Seed from Madagascar
(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1937), 130, and William H. Russell,
My Diary North and South
(Boston, 1863), 84. For slave recollections of the bombardment of Fort Sumter, see Armstrong,
Old Massa’s People
, 278.

4.
Armstrong,
Old Massa’s People
, 276–77; George P. Rawick (ed.),
The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography
(19 vols.; Westport, Conn., 1972), IV: Texas Narr. (Part 2), 174, 227; VI: Ala. Narr., 56; XIV: N.C. Narr. (Part 1), 62, 249; XVIII: Unwritten History of Slavery (Fisk Univ.), 3, 198.

5.
Rawick (ed.),
American Slave
, XIV: N.C. Narr. (Part 1), 192. For a nearly identical recollection, see IV: Texas Narr. (Part 1), 122.

6.
Ibid.
, III: S.C. Narr. (Part 4), 171–72; IV: Texas Narr. (Part 2), 100; XII: Ga. Narr. (Part 2), 277–78; Whitelaw Reid,
After the War: A Southern Tour, May 1, 1865, to May 1, 1866
(London, 1866), 52; Weymouth T. Jordan,
Hugh Davis and His Alabama Plantation
(University, Ala., 1948), 155–56; Laura S. Haviland,
A Woman’s Life-Work: Labors and Experiences
(Cincinnati, 1881), 264. Unable to provide properly for their own families, some planters bitterly protested the burdens of slave maintenance. See, e.g., Mary Ann Cobb to John B. Lamar, Nov. 11, 1861, in Kenneth Coleman (ed.),
Athens, 1861–1865
(Athens, Ga., 1969), 28; Rev. John Jones to Mrs. Mary Jones, Dec. 7, 1863, in Robert M. Myers (ed.),
The Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War
(New Haven, 1972), 1121–22; and Chesnut,
Diary from Dixie
, 172, 243–44.

7.
Letter from a slave to his mistress, in Robert S. Starobin (ed.),
Blacks in Bondage: Letters of American Slaves
(New York, 1974), 80–81; Francis B. Simkins and James W. Patton,
The Women of the Confederacy
(Richmond, 1936), 170–72; T. Conn Bryan,
Confederate Georgia
(Athens, Ga., 1953), 132.

8.
Rawick (ed.),
American Slave
, IV: Texas Narr. (Part 2), 131; XVIII: Unwritten History, 206; XII: Ga. Narr. (Part 2), 277.

9.
Ibid.
, III: S.C. Narr. (Part 4), 48–50; VII: Okla. Narr., 46, 312. See also V: Texas Narr. (Part 3), 107, (Part 4), 97, 152; and Charles L. Perdue, Jr., Thomas E. Barden, and Robert K. Phillips (eds.),
Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia Ex-Slaves
(Charlottesville, 1976), 335.

10.
Rawick (ed.),
American Slave
, IX: Ark. Narr. (Part 3), 169, 174; IV: Texas Narr. (Part 2), 29; XIII: Ga. Narr. (Part 3), 300; II: S.C. Narr. (Part 1), 46. See also VI: Ala. Narr., 97, 226, 404; XII: Ga. Narr. (Part 2), 8; Armstrong,
Old Massa’s People
, 316.

11.
Rawick (ed.),
American Slave
, VI: Ala. Narr., 129–32; John W. Blassingame (ed.),
Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies
(Baton Rouge, 1977), 660.

12.
Rawick (ed.),
American Slave
, XVIII: Unwritten History, 14–15; XV: N.C. Narr. (Part 2), 25.

13.
Ibid.
, IV: Texas Narr. (Part 1), 187; Booker T. Washington,
Up from Slavery: An Autobiography
(New York, 1902), 12–13; Blassingame (ed.),
Slave Testimony
, 539.

14.
Rawick (ed.),
American Slave
, III: S.C. Narr. (Part 3), 40; IV: Texas Narr. (Part 2), 100, V (Part 3), 260; XIV: N.C. Narr. (Part 1), 218–19.

15.
David Macrae,
The Americans at Home
(Edinburgh, 1870; repr., New York, 1952), 209; J. T. Trowbridge,
The South: A
Tour of Its Battle-Fields and Ruined Cities, A Journey Through the Desolated States, and Talks with the People
(Hartford, 1867), 68.

16.
Rawick (ed.),
American Slave
, IV: Texas Narr. (Part 1), 135; VII: Miss. Narr., 115; M. F. Armstrong and Helen W. Ludlow,
Hampton and Its Students
(New York, 1875), 110–11. See also Rupert S. Holland (ed.),
Letters and Diary of Laura M. Towne: Written from the Sea Islands of South Carolina, 1862–1884
(Cambridge, 1912), 29.

17.
Bell I. Wiley (ed.),
Letters of Warren Akin: Confederate Congressman
(Athens, Ga., 1959), 5; Mrs. William Mason Smith to her family [Feb. 23, 1864], in Daniel E. Huger Smith et al. (eds.),
Mason Smith Family Letters, 1860–1868
(Columbia, S.C., 1950), 83.

18.
Rawick (ed.),
American Slave
, V: Texas Narr. (Part 4), 192, 193–94.

19.
Ibid.
, VII: Okla. Narr., 88–90.

20.
Simkins and Patton,
Women of the Confederacy
, 162; Bell I. Wiley,
Southern Negroes: 1861–1865
(New Haven, 1938), 51n.

21.
Wiley,
Southern Negroes
, 52n.

22.
E. C. Ball to W. J. Ball, July 23, 1863, Ball Family Papers, South Caroliniana Library, Univ. of South Carolina, Columbia; Simkins and Patton,
Women of the Confederacy
, 174.

23.
Rawick (ed.),
American Slave
, IV: Texas Narr. (Part 1), 14–16. See also Blassingame (ed.),
Slave Testimony
, 537.

24.
Rawick (ed.),
American Slave
, VII: Okla. Narr., 135;
New York Times
, quoting the Louisville correspondent of the
Cincinnati Commercial
See also John K. Betters-worth,
Confederate Mississippi
(Baton Rouge, 1943), 163–64.

25.
Rawick (ed.),
American Slave
, IV: Texas Narr. (Part 2), 77–78; VI: Ala. Narr., 224; Blassingame (ed.),
Slave Testimony
, 535. See also
Douglass’ Monthly
(Rochester, N.Y.), IV (March 1862), 617; Perdue et al. (eds.),
Weevils in the Wheat
, 167; Starobin (ed.),
Blacks in Bondage
, 77–83; and Charles S. Sydnor,
A Gentleman of the Old Natchez Region: Benjamin L. C. Wailes
(Durham, N.C., 1938), 302–03.

26.
Bryan,
Confederate Georgia
, 125; Wiley,
Southern Negroes
, 75–76.

27.
Mrs. Mary Jones to Col. Charles C. Jones, Jr., June 5, 1863, in Myers (ed.),
Children of Pride
, 1068; Simkins and Patton,
Women of the Confederacy
, 164; Russell,
My Diary North and South
, 208–09.

28.
Chesnut,
Diary from Dixie
, 158–59; Kate Stone,
Brokenburn: The Journal of Kate Stone, 1861–1868
(ed. John Q. Anderson; Baton Rouge, 1972), 298.

29.
Simkins and Patton,
Women of the Confederacy
, 164; Edmund Ruffin,
The Diary of Edmund Ruffin
(ed. William K. Scarborough; 2 vols.; Baton Rouge, 1972, 1976), I, 556–57. See also Russell,
My Diary North and South
, 131–32.

30.
Robert F. Durden,
The Gray and the Black: The Confederate Debate on Emancipation
(Baton Rouge, 1972), 7–8; Russell,
My Diary North and South
, 188.

31.
Durden,
The Gray and the Black
, 14, 168; John K. Bettersworth (ed.),
Mississippi in the Confederacy: As They Saw It
(Baton Rouge, 1961), 249. See also Benjamin Quarles,
The Negro in the Civil War
(Boston, 1953), 37, 49–50; John E. Johns,
Florida During the Civil War
(Gainesville, 1963), 174; E. Merton Coulter, “Slavery and Freedom in Athens, Georgia, 1860–66,” in Elinor Miller and Eugene D. Genovese (eds.),
Plantation, Town, and County: Essays on the Local History of American Slave Society
(Urbana, Ill., 1974), 352; Coulter,
The Confederate States of America
(Baton Rouge, 1950), 256.

32.
Memorial of Free Negroes, Jan. 10, 1861, quoted in George D. Terry, “From Free Men to Freedmen: Free Negroes in South Carolina, 1860–1866,” seminar paper, Univ. of South Carolina, Columbia. For examples of free black support of the war, see also Emma E. Holmes, Ms. Diary, entry for Sept. 3, 1861, Univ. of South Carolina; Henry William Ravenel,
The Private Journal of Henry William Ravenel, 1859–1887
(ed. Arney R. Childs; Columbia, S.C., 1947), 50; Betters-worth (ed.),
Mississippi in the Confederacy
, 249; and Bryan,
Confederate Georgia
, 131. For the history of free blacks in the antebellum South, consult Ira Berlin,
Slaves Without Masters
(New York, 1974).

33.
Blassingame (ed.),
Slave Testimony
, 174; James B. Sellers,
Slavery in Alabama
(University, Ala., 1950), 397–98.

34.
Hope Summerell Chamberlain,
Old Days in Chapel Hill: Being the Life and Letters of Cornelia Phillips Spencer
(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1926), 131; Mrs. Nicholas Ware
Eppes [Susan Bradford Eppes],
The Negro of the Old South
(Chicago, 1925), 110; [Sallie A. Putnam],
In Richmond During the Confederacy
(New York, 1867; repr. 1961), 179–80; Emily Caroline Douglas, Ms. Autobiography, c. 1904, Emily Caroline Douglas Papers, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge. See also Susan Dabney Smedes,
Memorials of a Southern Planter
(ed. Fletcher M. Green; New York, 1965), 184. For a description of an unusual statue erected in Fort Hill, South Carolina, dedicated to the faithfulness of the slaves during the Civil War, see Mason Crum,
Gullah: Negro Life in the Carolina Sea Islands
(Durham, N.C., 1940), 82.

35.
Russell,
My Diary North and South
, 119, 131–32, 233, 257–58.

36.
Mrs. Anna Andrews to Mrs. Courtney Jones, April 27, 1862, Andrews Papers, Duke University, Durham, N.C.

37.
“Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb,” reprinted in Gilbert Osofsky (ed.),
Puttin’ On Ole Massa
(New York, 1969), 66; Rawick (ed.),
American Slave
, XVIII: Unwritten History, 134.

38.
Ellison,
Shadow and Act
, 56; James Freeman Clarke,
Autobiography, Diary and Correspondence
(ed. Edward Everett Hale; Boston, 1891), 286.

39.
New York Times
, Dec. 30, 1861, Oct. 2, 1863; Henry Hitchcock,
Marching with Sherman: Passages from the Letters and Campaign Diaries of Henry Hitchcock
(ed. M. A. DeWolfe Howe; New Haven, 1927), 71.

40.
Cincinnati Daily Commercial
, reprinted in Frank Moore (ed.),
Rebellion Record
(11 vols.; New York, 1861–68), IV (Part IV), 10. For comparable slave responses, see
New York Times
, Nov. 20, 1861, Dec. 1, 1862.

41.
George W. Nichols,
The Story of the Great March from the Diary of a Staff Officer
(New York, 1865), 60; Chesnut,
Diary from Dixie
, 158; Rawick (ed.),
American Slave
, IV: Texas Narr. (Part 1), 291. See also John Richard Dennett,
The South As It Is: 1865–1866
(ed. Henry M. Christman; New York, 1965), 174, and Blassingame (ed.),
Slave Testimony
, 383, 576.

42.
Chesnut,
Diary from Dixie
, 159.

43.
Douglass’ Monthly
, IV (Dec. 1861), 566. See also Bishop L. J. Coppin,
Unwritten History
(Philadelphia, 1919), 64; Blassingame (ed.),
Slave Testimony
, 616; Rawick (ed.),
American Slave
, III: S.C. Narr. (Part 4), 52–53; VIII: Ark. Narr. (Part 1), 281; XV: N.C. Narr. (Part 2), 199.

44.
Rawick (ed.),
American Slave
, VII: Miss. Narr., 52; VIII: Ark. Narr. (Part 2), 122; XIV: N.C. Narr. (Part 1), 64, 334; XV: N.C. Narr. (Part 2), 229; XVIII: Unwritten History, 113. See also VII: Okla. Narr., 2; VII: Miss. Narr., 12; VIII: Ark. Narr. (Part 2), 105.

45.
Ibid.
, III: S.C. Narr. (Part 4), 52–53; Elizabeth H. Botume,
First Days Amongst the Contrabands
(Boston, 1893), 6–7; Chesnut,
Diary from Dixie
, 28. For a different account of the “spelling-out” story, see Work Projects Adm. (WPA),
The Negro in Virginia
(New York, 1940), 44.

46.
Washington,
Up from Slavery
, 8–9; Rawick (ed.),
American Slave
, XIII: Ga. Narr. (Part 4), 348. See also III: S.C. Narr. (Part 4), 116; VI: Ala. Narr., 52; and Wiley,
Southern Negroes
, 18n.

47.
Rawick (ed.),
American Slave
, V: Texas Narr. (Part 4), 42–43; XVII: Fla. Narr., 178.