The Invisible Line

by Daniel J. Sharfstein

  The tragedy befalling Negro suffrage was played as farce. Newspapers breathlessly reported that upon the dissolution of the legislature, members of the House of Delegates looted the assembly building. Never mind that there were only a couple of blacks in the legislature. The District’s experiment with equal voting rights was dismissed as an inevitable failure because blacks were unfit to govern. The dailies developed a derisive shorthand for this failure after one delegate was reportedly caught on his way out of the assembly building with a cleaning implement stuffed in his sock. O.S.B. Wall was no longer a pioneer, leader, or public servant. All black politicians, according to the press and much of its readership, were mere “Feather Dusters.”8

  As the District turned away from civil rights, day-to-day life became markedly more hostile for everyone from freedpeople to colored aristocrats. Blacks and whites stopped socializing. Restaurants routinely refused blacks service despite the local law that guaranteed equal access to public accommodations.9

  As a justice of the peace and former delegate, Wall remained prominent in the colored community. He agitated for restoring voting rights to the District and led efforts to urge the president to appoint the former mayor Sayles Bowen as one of the new commissioners. When another citizens’ group voted to propose a different man to be commissioner, Wall was respected enough to be brought in to inspect and count the ballots. He petitioned Congress for federal land “for the purpose of endowing a home for the indigent poor of the District of Columbia” and helped arrange events celebrating the unveiling of a “Freedmen’s monument” in Lincoln Park on Capitol Hill.10

  Outside his community, however, Wall’s stature was fading. Newspapers started ridiculing him. In 1873 he was castigated for a conflict of interest when as justice of the peace he issued an arrest warrant for an accused lumber thief, only to defend the man in his hearing at the police court. The next year the National Republican printed a letter full of misspellings that Wall supposedly wrote to the District of Columbia Supreme Court, asking for a copy of his law license because he “lost the fust one.” Wall sued the paper’s editor for $10,000 for suggesting that he was “an illiterate ignorant and stupid man and a shallow pretender in his profession.” A few years later Wall was blasted for issuing an arrest warrant for a three-year-old child. In a letter to the editor of one paper, Wall explained that “justices who issue warrants for the arrest of parties . . . are obliged to depend entirely upon the exparte statement of the complainant as to the facts,” but for many, the incident confirmed his reputation as a bumbler. “Wall knows as much about law as he does about conic sections,” wrote one man to The Washington Post. The Daily Critic called him “Oh! S. B. Wall.”11

  Wall’s reputation suffered its most serious blow during the 1878 congressional hearings into the conditions and administration of the Freedmen’s Hospital. Witness after witness accused Wall of sparking the investigation with baseless charges of corruption and patient mistreatment, all because the hospital’s chief, Gideon S. Palmer, refused to buy food from a grocery store that Wall had started. For two years, Dr. Palmer said, he had been “constantly beset” by Wall, “directly and indirectly, to induce me to purchase supplies from him, and to purchase supplies from persons recommended by him.” The owner of a clothing concern said that in exchange for the discharge of a forty-dollar debt, Wall promised to use his influence to land him a contract to supply the Freedmen’s Hospital with coats, blouses, stockings, and cotton ticking. Wall, another witness testified, often said that he was “entitled to patronage” because he had worked to get the old hospital administrator fired and Dr. Palmer hired.12

  The testimony revealed a man in financial trouble, alternately begging and bullying for scraps of hospital business. The hearings also showed someone who had learned some fundamental lessons about politics during the Boss Shepherd years. For Wall, power, patronage, and material gain were indistinguishable. He had the confidence to organize alliances and agitate for change, however dubious the cause. He was unafraid to throw his weight around, even with whites. “You will see trouble, I think,” he icily threatened Dr. Palmer. “We are going to look into the crookedness of the Freedmen’s Hospital, and when we get through I will shake hands with you.”13

  The details only got more damaging for Wall. According to Dr. Palmer, Wall would implore him to “give the patronage to a colored man” and “would often use language like this, ‘You won’t give a poor fellow a chance to live; it was intended in these appropriations to give us poor fellows a chance to make something.’ ” Wall’s own brother Albert, a dairy farmer who supplied the hospital with fresh milk—and perhaps was struggling to keep his contract—testified that Wall said that if “he should accomplish his purpose, which he was positive of doing, if he would put a man in that hospital whom he could control . . . I would have more patronage from the institution; and a great many things I cannot just think of at present.” Wall’s old friend Charles Purvis, a doctor at the hospital, called Wall a “rascal” and a “scoundrel.” The hospital’s meat supplier testified that Wall promised extra cents per pound in exchange for support in his quest to oust Dr. Palmer. “I told him I was not going to place myself in the hands of any colored man as my owner,” said the meat dealer. “I never owned a colored man in my life, and I would not own one, or suffer one to own me.”14

  Buried within the bluster and bad behavior was a deep anger over what life in the District had become for an ambitious black man. Wall reportedly called Dr. Palmer a “Yankee scoundrel” and vowed that the “Yankee scoundrels shall not have the patronage down here to do as they please with.” The city’s colored institutions were run by whites. Howard University in 1875 had rejected John Mercer Langston as its first black president, even though he had ably served as acting president.15

  Dr. Palmer’s predecessor at the hospital—Robert Reyburn, the surgeon who had treated Wall’s gunshot wound—was, according to Wall, a member of an all-white medical society and was “indispos[ed] to grant certain privileges . . . to the colored students” studying medicine at Howard. Wall successfully got Reyburn fired but was frustrated in his efforts to get Charles Purvis hired as the new head. “I had my reasons” for “trying and exhausting on Purvis to get him appointed,” Wall said, “and they were simply that he was a colored man.” Amanda Wall and Carrie Langston led a petition drive, also unsuccessful, to get another colored doctor, Alexander T. Augusta, chosen to lead the hospital. Only a few years before, Wall had been one of the “ruling spirits of the Bowen and Public Works regime.” Now that his moment of power was over, he and his race were left with very little. Desperate and disillusioned, Wall risked his reputation over groceries—and lost.16

  Three months after the Freedmen’s Hospital fiasco, President Hayes submitted Wall’s name to the Senate for reappointment to another term as justice of the peace. The nomination did not go unnoticed. “Everyone knows he has been charged with being notoriously corrupt,” one man wrote The Washington Post. “Besides his corruptness, the public is well aware of the fact that many of his warrants have been thrown out at the Police Court on the ground of informality.” Even though others described Wall as having “unimpeached integrity” and a solid professional record, the Senate rejected his appointment in June 1878, along with the one other colored nominee for justice of the peace. After almost a decade of public life, Wall was left scratching out a living as what he called a “one-horse lawyer,” representing petty criminals in the police court. In his spare time he started occupying himself with a new political cause. It was about freedom, equality, and, above all, escape.17

  AT THE DEPTH OF his disgrace in the spring of 1878, Wall had become president of a group called the Western Emigration Society. Its goals mirrored his work eleven years earlier in the local field office of the Freedmen’s Bureau: to find the District’s indigent blacks land and jobs elsewhere. One of Wall’s first acts on behalf of the Emigration Society was to petition the Senate in May 1878 for $75,000 “to enable the helpless
poor of our race in this section to locate as farmers on lands of the United States dedicated to homestead purposes.” He asked Oliver Otis Howard, now commanding an army in the West, to send him “some reliable information respecting the advantages offered to settlers in Wash’n Territory . . . What we want to know is with reference to the climate, productiveness of the soil, present condition and future prospects of the Territory &c., &c.” Wall’s focus on migration was a focus on escape—escape from what his friend and fellow emigrationist Richard T. Greener would call the “fetid and vitiated political and social atmosphere of Washington which we have breathed so long.” The District no longer promised blacks a rising community, a pathway to equality. Blacks had lost the vote. Congress was retreating from its commitment to civil rights. Whites in Washington were expressing their racial contempt openly. Just about the only “manly and dignified step” that blacks could take, Wall supposed, was to exercise their right to move away.18

  If the Emigration Society initially had modest goals, it would soon be swept up in a much larger tide. By 1878 whites had forcibly pushed blacks out of government in every Southern state, resorting to military-style campaigns responsible for thousands of murders. Terrorized blacks were stuck in sharecropping contracts and trapped in spiraling debt. Their children had little hope of getting an education. Blacks across the South had long been gathering quietly to discuss leaving for the western states or Liberia. Outraged at Southern atrocities, Northern Republicans started speaking publicly about “emigration.” In January 1879 Senator William Windom of Minnesota proposed convening a committee to explore the possibility of “a partial migration of colored persons from those States and congressional districts where they are not allowed to freely and peacefully exercise and enjoy their constitutional rights as American citizens.”19

  Two months later, after the cotton crop failed in Louisiana and Mississippi, river landings were thronged with hundreds of blacks boarding boats for points north. Groups from other states—Arkansas, Tennessee, and Texas among them—were also reported to be leaving. Almost immediately the mass migration had a name: the Exodus. Within weeks The Atlanta Constitution was reporting, “If the negro exodus continues, St. Louis won’t know whether she is in Missouri or Africa.” Most of the “exodusters”—numbering some twenty thousand—were heading onward to Kansas, where they had heard by word of mouth and from railroad circulars that jobs and freedom awaited.20

  Wall recognized that the “modern exodus . . . of the colored people,” “linking their destiny for weal or woe with that of the young and thrifty States of the great Northwest,” was “really the most practical or available solution of one of the most vexed political problems which has thus far menaced the Republic.” In April 1879 the Western Emigration Society became the National Emigrant Aid Society, newly dedicated to the “immediate assistance to persons already immigrating . . . from the South to the West.” Wall assembled a group of notable District residents to serve on its board, including former mayor Sayles Bowen, First Congregational Church pastor Jeremiah Rankin, and Daily Republican editor A. M. Clapp. The society also gave him the opportunity to have regular contact with top Republican Party officials, black leaders including Frederick Douglass and Senator Blanche Bruce, and even his erstwhile enemy Charles Purvis. In May, Wall organized his first mass meeting at the grand downtown auditorium Lincoln Hall, where Senator Windom and Richard T. Greener, among others, appealed to a “good audience” to contribute money to pay for train and boat tickets for exodusters.21

  The Exodus created an excitement that the District’s blacks had not felt in years, and it restored their commitment to one of the original Republican articles of faith—what had guided Wall as a Freedmen’s Bureau agent—that free labor in a free market could cure the nation of its most serious political, economic, and moral failing. In early October, Wall arranged another meeting, this time featuring John Mercer Langston. “Neither the old slaveholding spirit, nor the old slaveholding purpose is dead in the South,” Langston told a packed auditorium. “That plantocracy, with its fearful power and influences, has not passed away; . . . the colored American under it is in a condition of practical enslavement, trodden down and outraged by those who exercise control over him.” Langston was speaking like the abolitionist orator he had been decades ago, and his words took the crowd—colored and white—back to a time when it was easy to distinguish right from wrong, when the call to action was clear. “It is . . . possible and practicable to so reduce the colored laborers of the South by emigration . . . as to compel the land-holders—the planters—to make and to observe reasonable contracts with those who remain,” Langston said, “to compel all white classes there to act in good faith; . . . obeying the law and respecting the rights of their neighbors.”22

  Whatever interest among the District’s blacks the Exodus had sparked in the abstract, the movement entered a new phase on a November afternoon when more than fifty men, women, and children from eastern North Carolina appeared in Washington, asking the Emigrant Aid Society for train fare to Indiana. For six months they had been meeting in churches to discuss leaving for the West. In September two leaders of their movement stopped in Washington on a trip to scout out possible locations for resettling. At the suggestion of a member of the Emigrant Aid Society, they went to Indiana. The two men returned to Carolina with a circular written by a black minister extolling how “in Indiana all stand equal before the law—the black man being protected in his contracts, property, and person the same as the white.” “Thousands of good farm hands and house servants can readily find employment at remunerative wages,” went the circular, “and when you have earned your money the law will compel payment, should it be refused, which is not likely to be the case.” It was all anyone needed to hear.23

  Wall met with the refugees, talked with them about conditions in North Carolina, and negotiated a group rate with the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad—nine dollars a head, with a one-dollar “drawback” going to the National Emigrant Aid Society. The society contributed $270 to send them to Indianapolis. Two weeks later 164 more arrived in Washington. Wall created committees to organize another mass meeting, a fund-raising lecture, and a benefit concert by local church choirs and to solicit donations from the District commissioners, churches, federal workers, and more. The goal was to raise $1,000. Soon after, another three hundred people arrived.24

  As the Exodus got more and more attention, Wall started receiving letters from people in Pennsylvania, New York, and Ohio expressing their willingness to employ “Exodusts Emigrating to Our Western States,” as well as testimonials from emigrants describing Indiana as a place with “a greate meny friendes” where blacks could “meate with suckses.” At the same time the newfound prominence of Wall and his cause drew attacks from blacks and whites. Some opposition in the colored community tracked the views of Frederick Douglass, who routed large contributions to the society but warned that the Exodus was “an abandonment of the great and paramount principle of protection to person and property in every State of the Union.” Others, particularly blacks who remained leaders in the South, railed against the disappearance of communities and constituencies that still had some strength. A newspaper editor in North Carolina gave a speech advocating that “our righteous indignation and censure should be unsparingly poured” on Wall and Richard Greener, whom he identified as “the original promoters of the exodus movement.” “We say to Professors Greener, . . . Wall, and to all others engaged in the nefarious work of deluding the negro by misrepresentation and falsehood—stop; hands off; let us alone,” the editor said. “You do not represent us, you have no constituency, you have nothing but impudence, cheek, and cunning, and an inordinate greed for filthy lucre.” For a third group, the opposition was more personal. At the end of December 1879 a small number of prominent local blacks gathered to denounce the Exodus. One attendee, reported The Washington Post, “made allusions which were assumed to be attacks on Mr. O.S.B. Wall,” describing him as someone who “believ
ed neither in God nor Heaven” and who had “arranged with the railroad companies for a drawback of fifty per cent. on the fares, which went into their own pockets.”25

  Among white Democrats north and south, the Exodus was a sham, a naked plot by Republicans to “ship negroes enough to doubtful States to change their political complexion.” Beyond the political machinations, the causes of the emigration, according to Democrats, were simple: unscrupulous railroad agents eager to drum up business and other outsiders who profited by sowing discontent. Wall was not a hero—he was the “colored manipulator of the Exodus movement.” As Democrats saw it, life in the North was inevitably terrible for the emigrants, and conditions in the South were perfectly fair.26

  AT THE START OF the hearing on the Negro Exodus, Senator Voorhees asked Wall to list everyone he knew who was helping thousands of Negroes leave the South for points north and west—their names, the names of their organizations, how the groups operated, whether and how regularly they communicated with one another. Wall parried even the simplest questions with artful indirection. Asked if the Emigrant Aid Society—the group he had founded—had any branches, Wall answered, “None that I know of.” Asked if there were “other similar societies . . . in the United States,” Wall said he had learned of some “by the papers and by hearsay,” but he never actually named a single one. Was the Emigrant Aid Society’s correspondence secretary “white or colored”? Wall answered that the young man holding the position was a “very handsome mulatto.” Who kept the Emigrant Aid Society’s records? “We have been going on very much as the English Government does,” Wall said, “without any written constitution.”27