The Invisible Line

by Daniel J. Sharfstein

  Testifying at the Freedmen’s Hospital hearings two years earlier, Wall had been prickly, defeated—pathetic, but for the ugly accusations against him. Now he was a different witness. Facing a hostile committee ready to charge him with luring blacks to lives of misery in order to rig the 1880 presidential elections, Wall was nimble and defiant. His confidence reflected his commitment to the Negro Exodus. Once again he had a cause worth fighting for.

  Senator Voorhees, for one, was convinced that the Exodusters had no rational reason to leave their homes in the South. “Do you not know,” he asked Wall, “that North Carolina has been more friendly toward the colored race; has been more kind in its treatment of them; more liberal in its legislation in their behalf; and has actually done more for their benefit than any other State, North or South?”28

  Wall could barely contain himself. “Now, Mr. Senator, that is a very nice little eulogy on North Carolina,” he said. Gesturing toward the North Carolina senator at Voorhees’s side, he continued, “Governor Vance, there, himself could not have done it up any better.” Wall’s passive protest—his refusal to give clear answers to Voorhees’s questions—was over. The witness proceeded to take over the hearing. First, Wall preempted Voorhees’s point by appearing to concede it. “Seriously, Mr. Senator, I will agree with you that North Carolina has been one of the mildest and most considerate slave States in the Union,” he said. “Since emancipation she has treated her colored population as fairly as could be expected of a master class toward their ex-slaves.”29

  Then Wall slammed the door: North Carolina, he insisted, was nevertheless a “grand good State to emigrate from.” “If I were a white man and were able to do so; that is, if I had the wealth so that I could, and the privilege of doing so,” he said, “I would go down to North Carolina and would educate and instruct those negroes, not with reference to politics or religion or social systems, but I would say to them if you want to educate your children to be men, to imitate the white race, to own property, to become successful in life in any respect, you must leave this poor, wretched, God-forsaken country, where the soil does not seem able to sprout blackeyed peas, and go out into the broad, rich, fertile West, where they can buy farms on those alluvial prairies at a less price per acre than the rent that they pay every year down there.”30

  When Voorhees challenged Wall’s “sweeping assertions” about North Carolina’s poor soil by asking if he had ever “examine[d] the census returns of North Carolina as regards its productiveness,” Wall cheerfully responded, “O, yes, sir; I certainly have; I love the State.”31

  Exasperated, Voorhees asked Wall to “point out some other evils that you think the people will be relieved of by going to Indiana.” Wall took the opportunity to expound upon the poor state of “the education and schooling of the children” in North Carolina, where students in rural districts received little more than three months of instruction out of the year. “From the fact that school privileges there are not so good as they are in the north generally,” he said, “I would urge them to leave there and seek some place where their children can find better opportunities for education.”32

  Rather than contesting Wall’s facts, Voorhees tried to narrow the inquiry. An Emigrant Aid Society circular had declared that the “disposition to escape beyond the reach of oppression has been of course greatest in those sections of the South where in their opponents have displayed the least regard for their rights to ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ ” Referring to the circular, the senator asked, “Does this emigration come from parts of [North Carolina] where the white people treat the colored people more unjustly than in other parts of the State?”33

  “Well, now, I think they treat them quite unjustly there,” Wall answered simply, without comparing the treatment of blacks in different sections of North Carolina.

  “Quite unjustly in what way?” Voorhees interrupted. Instead of forcing Wall to address the narrow issue presented—what a skillful cross-examiner might have insisted upon—Voorhees gave his witness an opening.34

  “I think they treat them unjustly in the way they take advantage of them in paying them for their labor,” Wall declared.

  “How do you know they take advantage of them?” the senator asked.

  Where Wall had ducked these kinds of questions earlier in the hearing, now he spoke plainly. “I know it, because I have it directly from the mouths of many intelligent, honest-appearing men who have come from there,” he said. “Quite a number of them have told me that ... they can get but about thirty cents a day for their labor . . . After they have made four or five bags of cotton, and so much corn, or whatever else they may be raising, at the end of the year . . . the man from whom they rent, who has the measuring and weighing of the crop, and the handling and calculating of these orders, makes it out, somehow, so that they not only have nothing, but are in debt, with a mortgage on them, as one might say, for the future.”35

  Now it was Voorhees’s turn for sarcasm, as he tried to cut Wall and his claims about Southern injustice down to size. “Have you sufficient knowledge of the world,” the senator asked, “to know whether the same thing is or is not true of large numbers of persons in other places, everywhere, white as well as black; or does everybody get rich outside of North Carolina?”

  “O, no, sir, not everybody,” Wall said, “but in most places, anybody that is hardworking and economical can manage to save up something.”36

  Rather than letting the issue go, Voorhees sensed weakness in Wall’s seemingly naïve answer. Hoping to force Wall to admit that blacks in North Carolina did not understand how the economy worked and were expecting special treatment, the senator repeated his question: “Is it not true of the laboring class in all portions of the country, to a large extent, that at the end of the year they are still behind; is not that a very common complaint everywhere?”

  If Voorhees thought that Wall would fold, he was wrong. With his deceptively simple answer, Wall had lured the senator into inviting him to speak at length. Now Wall would spring the trap. “Mr. Senator, I will frankly give you my reasons for concluding that there is something wrong about this matter,” he said. “I understand a little about human nature. The master class, who have for two or three hundred years held these colored people in abject slavery, have not so soon lost all their feeling of superiority and ownership and their determination to get and to keep the upper hand of them.

  “Human nature,” he continued, “does not change so suddenly but that, if this class to a man remain right there, in the same localities, and in the same relation as servants, as abject hewers of wood and drawers of water, the upper class, with their dislike of labor and their contempt of laborers, are not likely to be so pure, so immaculate as to treat these people fairly and as their fellow-men.”37

  In words that invoked the book of Joshua and echoed abolitionist speeches by, among others, Frederick Douglass, Wendell Phillips, and John Mercer Langston, Wall depicted the Negro Exodus as nothing less than a patriotic response to an unfair, impure, un-American “master class.” While Democrats like Voorhees took on faith that blacks were treated fairly in the South, Wall described the everyday reality faced by his people. “When I hear these statements of unfair and unjust and oppressive treatment from dozens and hundreds of people, bearing upon their countenances the seal of wretchedness and the impress of despair, I hold myself justified in believing it to be true,” he said. “If it be a fact that the whole population of the South cannot do any better by the colored people than they do—if, on account of the poverty of the soil, they cannot do any better—that does not make it any the less their right to leave such a country, nor any less their duty to move to some better one, which will afford them greater advantages in life for themselves and their children.”38

  Senator Voorhees had no response to Wall. He changed the subject.

  THE NEXT DAY, WALL was called back to the committee so that other senators on the panel could question him. Defending his home state, Sena
tor Vance suggested that Wall was wrong about conditions in North Carolina because he did not consult official government reports or “intelligent white men of the State.” The two Republican senators in the minority offered Wall more of an opportunity to attribute the Exodus to “the abuses the colored people have received.” “I think where they are even treated best their treatment is such as to demoralize them and frighten them,” he said.39

  After fifty-three days of testimony from dozens of witnesses, the committee’s Democrats reported to the Senate that their initial suspicions had been confirmed: that the motive for “promoting this exodus of the colored people was purely political,” to traffic blacks to “close States in the North, and thus turn the scale in favor of the Republican party.” They found that no racial inequality, mistreatment, or vote suppression existed in the South. “The condition of the colored people of the South is not only as good as could have been reasonably expected,” they reported, “but is better than if large communities were transferred to a colder and more inhospitable climate, thrust into competition with a different system of labor, among strangers who are not accustomed to them, their ways, habits of thought and action, their idiosyncrasies, and their feelings.”40

  In reaching their conclusion, the Democrats attacked Wall’s testimony by suggesting that he had received kickbacks from the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad—one dollar for every passenger sent to Indiana. Wall insisted that the “drawbacks” went to buy more tickets, and even witnesses who objected to the Exodus as politically motivated testified that no one profited from the Emigrant Aid Society, which aimed solely “to help men fleeing from oppression.” The sharpest attack on Wall came from W. Calvin Chase, a journalist two years away from starting his influential Negro newspaper The Washington Bee. Chase told the committee that Wall’s “only object was to speculate on the ignorant people of the South.” “I have known him for five or six years,” Chase said, “and I know he never enters into anything except he makes something out of it.” Without mentioning the Freedmen’s Hospital investigation by name, Chase suggested that Wall had a reputation for being “very dishonest” and that “the people in the District have no confidence in him.”41

  DESPITE CHASE’S PRONOUNCEMENTS, Wall emerged from the hearings a pillar of Washington’s colored community. “Capt. O.S.B. Wall deserves great credit for his untiring energy and interest in behalf of the fleeing emigrants from the Southern States,” opined the Argus, whose editor opposed the Exodus. “We have a high opinion of Captain Wall . . . He is a public benefactor.” The following winter, the District commissioners appointed Wall to work with the police in his precinct to coordinate relief for the local poor. By early 1882 Wall was chairing the committee to plan the twentieth anniversary of emancipation in the District. On Emancipation Day that April he would ride in a parade down Louisiana Avenue through a “ringing mass” of thousands of black residents and introduce the day’s orator, his fellow Exodus activist Richard T. Greener. In 1884, just four years after publicly denouncing Wall, W. Calvin Chase printed in the Bee that it would be “a very handsome thing” if the president would appoint Wall “to some important position.” “Capt. Wall is a member of the District Bar and a man who is respected by the entire population both white and colored,” Chase wrote. “He is unlike many of our great Negro leaders who is for self all the time, but, he believes in aiding those who aid him and assisting those who have got sense enough to assist themselves.” Once again Wall was confident in his place in the colored community and his claim to racial equality. When his youngest daughter, Laura Gertrude, reached the first grade, he quietly got approval from one of the school board’s colored members for her to attend a white primary school near the family house on Howard Hill.42

  Although Wall maintained that the Emigrant Aid Society had nothing to do with politics, his ties to the Republican Party grew stronger than ever. Almost immediately following the Exodus hearings, Wall was appointed a special agent in the Treasury Department. He was also able to land government positions for his sons, both in their early twenties; Edward was a post office clerk and Stephen an apprentice in the Government Printing Office, learning a skilled trade that promised status and stability. In the fall of 1880 James Garfield—the Union general who as an Ohio congressman introduced a bill to provide $75,000 to aid the Kansas Exodusters—was elected president, and Wall found himself at his peak of influence. When his old political ally Sayles Bowen again sought an appointment as District commissioner, Wall went to the White House to seek a personal audience with the president.43

  As Exodus fever subsided after 1880, the District seemed to hold renewed promise for its colored community. The Exodus had created a sense of progress, the feeling of a certain measure of control over their lives. For the first time since losing the right to vote in 1874, they had shown themselves capable of organizing for social change and restoring something approaching abolitionist fervor among Republicans nationally. Whether blacks would be able to translate the energy of the Exodus into a better life in Washington was a hazier proposition. Fundamentally, the strength of the Exodus among the District’s blacks was that it revived the hope and promise of Emancipation, while allowing a collective outpouring of rage and grief over the death of Reconstruction. But if the Exodus was about movement—political organization and physical migration—the District’s blacks still found themselves standing in the same place. Only at the end of a remote chain of events, only in the most abstract reaches of free labor theory, would the Exodus ever lead the South back from the abyss of, in Wall’s words, “this intimidating, and white-liners, and night-riders, and ku-klux.”44

  Toward the end of Wall’s Senate testimony, New Hampshire’s Republican senator Henry Blair asked him to explain his “philosophy of the exodus.” For Wall, it embodied the tragedy of the past and the uncertainty of the future. “This would be my theory,” he said. “Just after the war our people were in good condition. From the wreck of matter and the crush of worlds that passed over us our people emerged into a condition where there seemed to be a little sunlight, and into what was for a while a better state of things.” It did not last. “We got along for several years very well,” he continued, “until ... the men who had been in the rebellion came into power in those States, . . . and then the things relapsed into pretty much their old condition.” Try as they might to imagine a new life in a new place, blacks were still suffering the loss of that moment in the light. “We have got into a state of things so dark and oppressive that there must be some ventilation,” Wall said. “There must be something to make us free again.”45

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  GIBSON

  Washington, D.C., New Orleans, and Hot Springs, Arkansas, 1888-92

  THE ROOM WAS NEARLY silent. In the squeezing heat, it was as if all possibility of sound had evaporated. Sunlight trickled through small windows high overhead but never seemed to penetrate the thick cloud of steam that billowed from floor to ceiling. Along the sweating marble walls, attendants stood invisible, their white uniforms perpetually on the verge of losing their starch and buckling over black skin.1

  Randall Gibson closed his eyes, and for a moment it seemed that he had fallen asleep. But a low word, a gentle shake, from his attendants could not wake him. They pulled his body from the water and out into the waiting area. Skeletal, slack except for arthritically gnarled fingers and toes, Gibson looked decades older than his sixty years. Unconscious, he was wrapped in a thick white robe and wheeled back to his room, past a line of robed gentlemen in caned rocking chairs, all waiting for their turn in the baths.2

  Gibson had not planned to spend November 1892 in Arkansas, but his doctors had told him that his heart and kidneys were failing. After summering in Westchester and stopping briefly back in Washington, he had gone to New Orleans to campaign for Grover Cleveland’s bid to unseat Benjamin Harrison and win a second term as president. But Gibson could barely leave his room at the St. Charles Hotel. Although he had for years described how the journ
ey home would leave him “flat of my back,” his city friends were aghast at the man they saw—gray hair, gray skin, in panting agony with every slow step. Before Gibson could vote in the election—before he could toast the Democrats’ reconquest of the White House—his doctors ordered him to leave New Orleans immediately before the damp of early winter killed him. He wrote out a codicil to his will and canceled an order of horses and cattle for his property in Terrebonne Parish. He met with his law partner Gilbert Hall in the lobby of the St. Charles, told him about the diagnosis, and said that he dreamed of the day he could retire to his sugar plantation, his “old family mansion, full of rich and comfortable furniture, with a library which he had been gathering for years.” Then he boarded a train to points north and west—to Jackson, Memphis, Little Rock, and finally Hot Springs.3

  Gibson did not know if he would ever see Louisiana again or, for that matter, if Louisiana would even notice that he was gone. During eight years in the House of Representatives and another ten in the Senate, Gibson had channeled millions of dollars to his state: creating federal offices and agencies in New Orleans, committing the government once and for all to building and maintaining Mississippi River levees, fighting to preserve the tariffs that shielded the sugar plantations from competition in Hawaii and the rest of the world. In Terrebonne Parish, the town that was closest to his father’s plantations—Tigerville—had changed its name to Gibson in his honor. But the Louisiana that he had seen on several visits in 1892 barely appreciated what he had accomplished for it, let alone what he aspired for its future.4