Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, October 20, 1866; Library of Congress
By 1868, George had his own cabin and had started to eke out a living on sixty acres he leased from a white farmer who furnished the stock and feed and seed and would pay George half of the crop. This system of farming was called sharecropping, or tenant farming. Under the sharecropping system, the landowner sold the worker food and supplies such as seed, mules or horses, and permitted him a parcel of land to farm. This arrangement allowed families to work together, setting their own pace and profiting from their own labor. Each sharecropping family kept a share of the crop—usually one-third—and gave the rest to the landowner to sell.
Many white landowners refused to rent land to black people, but others, land rich and money poor, found that sharecropping suited them. The war had devastated their finances, leaving them without cash or sources of credit to pay wages. This form of farming eased their labor problems, providing them with a dependable, year-round work force.
At first, sharecropping seemed a desirable compromise for the freed people and the landowners. It even satisfied racist white Northerners who preferred to keep black labor in the South, thereby reserving the better-paying mine, mill, and factory jobs for white men, women, and children.
In Virginia, white men shoot at black workers, driving them off the fields they had harvested, depriving them of wages.
Harper’s Weekly, March 23, 1867; General Research Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundation
But soon sharecropping proved disastrous for many freed people. Although some landowners were fair and honest, others cheated their workers. They set the workers’ shares at the lowest possible level and overcharged them for supplies. With the help of the Ku Klux Klan, they robbed the workers at harvest time, forcing the sharecroppers off the land and keeping the crop for themselves.
The military governor of Virginia reported that some planters killed their workers so they wouldn’t have to honor the labor contracts. In most places, it proved futile to arrest the planters. “A gentleman who commits a homicide of that kind gets his gentlemen friends together—and they are nearly all magistrates—and they examine and discharge them,” said Governor John Schofield.
Some landowners looked for any infraction, no matter how small, as an excuse not to honor the labor contract. “In the months of August and September mostly,” said Robert Meacham, a black state senator from Florida, “when the crops are laid by, the slightest insult, as they call it, or the slightest neglect, is sufficient to turn them off, and according to the contract, they get nothing.”
Other planters simply refused to pay, resenting the idea of paying their former slaves. “Old marse said, ‘You is all free, but you can work on and make dis crop of corn and cotton; den I will divide up wid you when Christmas comes,” said Fred James from Newberry, South Carolina. “Dey all worked, and when Christmas come, marse told us we could get on and shuffle for ourselves, and he didn’t give us anything. We had to steal corn out of de crib.”
In these instances, the Freedmen’s Bureau sent out agents to arrest the planters and farmers. White Southerners resented the way that the bureau sided with the freed people, taking their word against a white man’s word. “They listened to every sort of tale that any dissatisfied negro might choose to tell,” complained P. T. Sayre, an Alabama planter. “They would send out and arrest white men, bring them in under guard, try them and put them in jail.”
But the Freedmen’s Bureau could not effectively protect the four million freed slaves from unscrupulous employers or from Klan violence, because Congress never provided enough money or staff to carry out the tasks. At most, the Freedmen’s Bureau had only nine hundred agents spread across the eleven Southern states, with often only one agent per county. The agents faced a daunting job, considering one county might have a population of ten thousand to twenty thousand freed people.
Still, in Colbert County, Alabama, where George Taylor lived, sharecropping satisfied him, and he considered the landowner a fair man, saying, “He was as fine a man as I ever lived with in my life.”
George was proud of his success. “I had a bargain for two horses and had commenced paying for it,” he said, “and bought my meat and sugar and coffee, and had several things in my house which mounted to a heap.”
For several months, George and his wife managed fine. Aware of the terrible things that Kukluxers did to black men who voted Republican, George registered Democrat, hoping they would leave him alone.
But in January 1869, at about three o’clock one morning, a rapping at the cabin door awakened George and his wife. The next thing they knew, six Klansmen stormed through the door like a tornado. They wore black gowns and white cloth sacks over their heads, with marks drawn for eyebrows and holes cut for eyes and noses. Horns sprouted from the masks.
In this optimistic cartoon, a Freedmen’s Bureau agent stands between angry whites and blacks, suggesting that the agency can keep tensions from escalating into a race riot. The accompanying editorial praised the agency’s work.
Harper’s Weekly, July 25, 1868; Library of Congress
The men told George they were “just out of the moon” as they dragged him from bed and away from the house. George kicked and fought, but the men overpowered him, pinning him facedown in the dirt and then whipping him, hundreds of strokes, the lash cutting to his backbone.
They gave George three days to leave the county. If he didn’t, the Klan warned him, they would return and “put him up,” or hang him. Fearing for their lives, George and his wife fled, abandoning their house and the crop, leaving behind all of their belongings.
“My losses, according to my judgment, were over $500 [about $8800 today],” said George later. “I had two mules and sixty acres of land, and all my provisions to last all the year, and never got it.”
The attack bewildered George. “I worked and labored hard,” he said. “I had married there and behaved myself and never gave any offense at all. They [white people] seemed to think highly of me.”
Other black Americans understood kukluxism better. “If they find a Negro that tries to get nervy or have a little bit for himself, they lash him nearly to death and gag him and leave him to do the bes’ he can,” said W. L. Bost, a former slave from North Carolina.
In county after county, state after state, outrages against successful sharecroppers such as George Taylor occurred as Kukluxers fought to prevent black people from acquiring land and working for themselves. Kukluxers drove black families from their homes, stole their crops, and killed their livestock.
In an odd twist, the Ku Klux Klan added to the economic troubles of the South as they drove off the field hands and sharecroppers that some landowners desperately needed. “The running off of these hands by whippings etc. has driven away our labor,” said George Garner, a white farmer from South Carolina. “We cannot get labor to cultivate our farms.”
In Choctaw County, Alabama, after four murders in one black community and no arrests, many freed people fled their cabins and farms. “I tell you this [kukluxism] is just ruining that country,” said Mack Tinker, who abandoned his crop and hid in the woods for six weeks after the murders. “I don’t reckon there is a colored man in ten miles around me who has got any heart to work. I reckon I have as good a crop as the general run of darkeys, and I declare I can’t get it. I have no heart to work all day and then think at night I will be killed.”
For victims, there seemed little recourse. Many rural freed people owned hunting guns, good for shooting rabbits and other small game but no match for the Klansmen’s service revolvers and powerful Winchester rifles. Those freed people who resisted or defended themselves risked the Klan’s revenge on their family.
It also proved futile for Klan victims to report the attacks, since many corrupt sheriffs, justices of the peace, and other local officials belonged to the secret order; those who didn’t belong often refused to uphold the law out of fear. When individuals pressed charge
s and arrests were made, witnesses refused to testify and juries failed to return guilty verdicts, even when presented with clear evidence.
This lithograph reflects the views of most Northerners and the Republican Party: It depicts a white Southerner who refuses to give up white supremacist beliefs, even though he is drowning.
Currier and Ives, Library of Congress
In Mississippi, a black man was whipped for suing his white employer for wages owed him. “They told him that darkeys were through suing white men, getting their rights in that way,” said Allen P. Huggins, a white tax collector who sympathized with the free people.
In Alabama, a white man named John Tayloe Coleman received an elaborately penciled coffin notice from the Ku Klux Klan, warning him that he would “pull roape [sic]” after he recommended a black man for a job as route agent on a train. “They did not intend to allow no negro route agents, or negro firemen, or negro brakesmen,” said Coleman.
The Freedmen’s Bureau sent a military officer to investigate the Ku Klux problem in Tennessee. The officer was horrified at what he found throughout the state. “There is no intention or desire on the part of the civil authorities to the community at large to bring the murderers to justice,” wrote Joseph W. Gelray. “Those who could will not, and those who would are afraid.”
The artist Thomas Nast depicts the double standard of justice in the South. No matter how heinous the crime, it was simply a good joke if the perpetrator is a “Southern gentleman.” The reason was simple: equal treatment under the law would mean racial equality.
Harper’s Weekly, March 23, 1867; New York Public Library, Schömberg Center for Research in Black Culture
Despite the great risk, black Americans pursued their dream of owning land and becoming independent farmers, often to their peril. In Live Oak, Florida, the Klan attacked a black landowner and his entire family, including his wife and his three young sons and daughter. “They beat my breath clean out of me,” said Doc Roundtree. “They said they didn’t allow damned niggers to live on land of their own. They gave me orders to go the next morning to my master John Sellers and go to work.”
In some parts of the South, Kukluxers drove black families from land that white people wanted for themselves. In Clay County, Florida, Samuel and Hannah Tutson bought three acres of land from their white neighbor and homesteaded an additional 160 acres, planting cotton, corn, and potatoes. Hannah earned extra money doing wash for the neighboring white families.
The K.K.K. sent this coffin notice to John Tayloe Coleman for recommending a black man for a job.
Reprinted in KKK Report, John Tayloe Coleman, Alabama, vol. 2, p. 1054
Although these men are not wearing Klan disguises, they are participating in similar violence against a freedwoman whose crime was defending herself from an attack by a white girl. Five men whipped her 126 times with a thick rod.
Harper’s Weekly, September 14, 1867; General Research Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundation
For two years, the Tutson family made improvements to the land, building a cabin and planting and harvesting two crops. In the spring of 1871, they had just planted their third crop when Byrd Sullivan and several other white men visited Hannah, threatening her to give up the land to another white man, who recognized the land’s increased value and wanted it for himself.
But Hannah told him resolutely, “I am going to die on this land.”
Infuriated, Byrd Sullivan told Hannah to pay good attention to what he had to say. “You can tell your old man to give it up,” he warned, “or in a month’s time, or such a matter, they will come here, and the lot will push him out of doors and let you eat this green grass.”
Hannah had already lived through worse times, the “red times” of slavery, and she wasn’t going to let his threats intimidate her. “In the red times, how many times have they took me and turned my clothes over my head and whipped me?” said Hannah. “I do not care what they do to me now if I can only save my land.”
Three weeks later, disguised men forced their way into the Tutsons’ cabin in the middle of the night. Samuel and Hannah recognized their attackers right away. The men belonged to the very families for whom Hannah worked. “I had been working and washing for them,” said Hannah. “I had not been two weeks from his mother’s house, where I had been washing.”
This 1865 illustration contrasts the reality of Southern black life under the Confederacy with the hope for the freed people’s life in the future: a home, education for their children, fair wages, and justice.
Library of Congress
Several men pounced on Samuel. He fought back, kicking and punching, but the men overpowered him and dragged him outside and away from the house. One of the men, George McCrea, who was a deputy sheriff, rushed toward Hannah as she clutched her ten-month-old baby in her arms. He grabbed her throat, choking her, and then snatched the baby’s foot, yanking the baby out of Hannah’s arms. He threw the baby across the room, hurting its leg.
The men grabbed Hannah and carried her to a field, where they tied her to a tree and began to beat her with saddle girths with the buckles on them. “They whipped me from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet,” said Hannah. “I was just raw. The blood oozed out through my frock all around my waist, clean through.”
When they stopped beating her, four of the men left. George McCrae remained behind, and he raped Hannah before abandoning her. Battered and bloody, Hannah stumbled home, where she found her house torn down and her children gone.
Frantic, she made her way to a neighbor’s house. “I told them to give me a light as quick as they could so that I might go back and hunt up my children,” said Hannah.
Hannah estimated that she walked twelve miles that night, searching by torchlight for her children. The next day, she had nearly given up in despair when she found them hiding in a field. “My little daughter said that as the baby cried,” said Hannah, “she would reach out and pick some gooseberries and put them in its little mouth.”
Samuel was whipped terribly too, but survived. Although many Klan victims were too frightened to report the attacks, Hannah reported the men to the town authorities. Several of the attackers were arrested but quickly acquitted. To add insult to injury, Hannah was arrested and fined for filing a false report. She was released from jail after a neighbor pawned the Tutsons’ ox and a cart to pay her fine.
“Negroes had to go to school fust and git larnin’ so that they would know how to keep some of them white folks from gittin’ way from ’em if they did buy it.”
—Jefferson Franklin Henry, age seventy-eight, a former slave and the son of a Georgia sharecropper
CHAPTER 7
“A Whole Race Trying to Go to School”
As stories about the Klan’s violence traveled north, the idea of grown men who dressed up like ghosts to attack innocent people sounded too terrible to believe.
A young Northern schoolteacher had often heard talk about murderous nightriders who called themselves the Ku Klux Klan, but he didn’t pay much attention to the stories. “I was inclined for a long time to believe they were like ghost stories,” said Cornelius McBride, an immigrant from Belfast, Ireland. “I did not much believe in it.”
In 1869 the twenty-three-year-old McBride traveled from Ohio to teach black children in Mississippi, first at a private school and then a public school.
When Harper’s Weekly published this illustration in spring 1867, the reporter trumpeted optimistically about black schools, “The schools are firmly established and successful, are now seldom interrupted by the rebels.” Such statements made Klan violence difficult for Northern readers to believe.
Harper’s Weekly, May 25, 1867; Library of Congress
McBride was one of more than four thousand Northern men and women who traveled south to establish public schools and teach under the guidance of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Many teachers were members of the American Missionary Association. Others were supported by privat
e Northern philanthropic organizations. In all, the Freedmen’s Bureau worked with thirty-one religious and twenty secular societies. Together with the Freedmen’s Bureau, these organizations contributed nearly $5 million to establish schools in the South.
The Zion School for Colored Children, Charleston, South Carolina, was established in 1865 by the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Zion Church, which devoted itself to religious, social, and educational causes. By 1866, this school had 850 children and 13 teachers, all of whom were black.
Harper’s Weekly, December 15, 1866; Library of Congress
Most Northern teachers were white and came from middle-class or well-to-do backgrounds. Although some were former Union soldiers, doctors, and nurses, many were white female college students or recent graduates. Most shared a deep religious faith. Many had been abolitionists, fighting against slavery before the war, and a good number came from towns that had been stations along the Underground Railroad.
About 20 percent of the teachers were black men and women, a number that would grow to 50 percent by 1870. A small percentage was former slaves with limited education. Black churches such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church also established schools and provided teachers. Despite their great poverty, black communities contributed nearly $1 million of their own hard-earned money to build schools and pay the salaries of their teachers.
They Called Themselves the K.K.K. Page 7
