Less than a year after the Freedmen’s Convention, blacks again gathered in the AME Church in Raleigh for a statewide meeting, but this time the rhetoric, the resolutions, and the appeals took on a more aggressive tone, as if to suggest that a year of “moderation” and “conciliation” had been sufficient time to test white intentions and intransigence. This time, too, the delegates recited their grievances with far more openness and with an obvious impatience: “In the counties of Jones, Duplin, Craven, Hyde, Halifax, and many others in this State, outrages are committed, such as killing, shooting and robbing the unprotected people for the most trifling offences, and, in frequent instances, for no offence at all.” The perpetrators of this violence, the convention declared, were permitted to roam freely without any arrest for their crimes. Rather than appeal to the state legislature for a redress of grievances, the delegates expressed their “profound gratitude” for the recent actions of Congress, particularly the Freedmen’s Bureau bill, the Civil Rights bill, and the proposed Fourteenth Amendment. They denounced taxation without representation as “in direct violation of the sacred rights of American citizens.” And they urged blacks in every county, district, and village to organize branches of the Equal Rights League, so that the Federal government and the entire world would learn of the cruelties to which the freed slaves were being subjected.4
On January 14, 1868, delegates poured into Raleigh for still another Constitutional Convention to draft a new government and document for the state. But this body differed strikingly from its predecessor, both in spirit and in composition. This time blacks were not meeting separately several blocks away, drawing up “moral appeals” to the white conscience; instead, fifteen black delegates, duly elected by the eligible voters of the state, took their seats with the white delegates and prepared to participate fully in the deliberations. Presumably, the grievances and demands of the freed slaves would be reflected in the final results of the convention. Among others, James H. Harris, James W. Hood, and Abraham H. Galloway were on hand to make certain.
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THE FREEDMEN’S CONVENTIONS marked the political debut of southern blacks. What made them so unprecedented was that men who had only recently been slaves, along with freeborn blacks, were expressing themselves in ways that had only recently been banned, gathering together for the first time, exchanging experiences, discussing the problems they faced in their particular counties, and sharing visions of a new South and a “redeemed” race. The scenes acted out in Raleigh were being duplicated in Mobile, Charleston, New Orleans, Vicksburg, Alexandria, Augusta, Nashville, Lexington, and Little Rock. Within a year after Appomattox, in nearly every ex-Confederate state, the local political activity which had begun with Federal occupation and the rallies celebrating emancipation culminated in the election of delegates to statewide conventions. And out of these gatherings would emerge a black leadership that would soon be called upon to help in the task of political reconstruction.
Perhaps as important as the conventions themselves was the local political activity that preceded them and the initial politicization of large numbers of blacks, both in the urban centers and in the countryside. Typical of such activity, the blacks of Edgecombe County, North Carolina, met in Tarboro to elect delegates to the state convention; they also took up a collection to defray the expenses of the trip to Raleigh and instructed the delegates on the most pressing concerns in their respective locales. The election of delegates might reveal as much about prevailing sentiments as the resolutions these local meetings passed. In Thomasville, Georgia, for example, blacks met in a grove near the edge of town and elected the Reverend Jared Wade, a literate clergyman and teacher, over Giles Price, an educated and fairly affluent blacksmith who had been free before the war and who had apparently offended some of his people by the generous and conspicuous support he had given the Confederacy.5
Where the election of delegates in mass meetings proved to be impossible or too dangerous, they were apt to be chosen after church services, by informal gatherings, or by clandestine neighborhood conferences. Even so, the cost and difficulty of travel to the state conventions kept some elected delegates away, while others might refuse to attend unless promised Federal protection when they returned to their homes. The absence of troops or of Federal officials had a way of reducing representation from the back-country or up-country counties, as in Louisiana and South Carolina. Ignoring the advice of local whites and threats to their lives and jobs, some delegates came to the state meetings at considerable personal and economic risk; others made a point of leaving during the night and returning with the least amount of notice, while some never returned after the local newspaper noted their presence at the convention. Isham Swett, a self-educated former slave and a barber in Fayetteville, North Carolina, attended the state conclave in Raleigh as a delegate. When the news became known, his white customers immediately withdrew their patronage. After attending the state convention in Macon, Georgia, several delegates remained in that city rather than return to their homes, fearing the strong stand they had taken on equal suffrage and civil rights would expose them instantly to roving white gangs. During the Convention of the Colored People of Virginia, Peter K. Jones, a delegate from Petersburg, asked, “Why are not more of you here?” and then suggested the answer: “Some of our people have been paid to stay away by our former masters. They told us that coming here would hurt us at home.” At the same convention, a delegate from Williamsburg recited the difficulties in securing representation from his region, with former slaveholders doing everything in their power to prevent elected delegates from attending.6
Despite the absentees, most of the statewide conventions brought together a remarkable cross section of the black population. The sharp contrasts in attire, complexion, and demeanor, and the equally apparent differences in background and education, again impressed outside observers with the uniqueness of these assemblages. There were black soldiers in uniform, and nearly every convention recognized their symbolic importance by appointing at least one of them to some official position. Ministers appeared in substantial numbers, some of them dressed in black broadcloth and several of them only recently chaplains in the black regiments. If lawyers, farmers, and planters dominated the white constitutional conventions, clergymen, teachers, carpenters, mechanics, hotel waiters, barbers, household servants (including the former body servant of Jefferson Davis), and plantation hands made up the bulk of the black conventions. In Louisiana, where the freeborn mulattoes of New Orleans had met frequently since Federal occupation, the Convention of Colored Men that assembled in January 1865 was the first time delegates from the country parishes had participated, and that scene elicited a special comment from a black editor:
There were seated side by side the rich and the poor, the literate and educated man, and the country laborer, hardly released from bondage, distinguished only by the natural gifts of the mind. There, the rich landowner, the opulent tradesman, seconded motions offered by humble mechanics and freedmen. Ministers of the gospel, officers and soldiers of the U.S. army, men who handle the sword or the pen, merchants and clerks,—all the classes of society were represented, and united in a common thought: the actual liberation from social and political bondage. It was a great spectacle, and one which will be remembered for generations to come.7
The leadership that emerged at the freedmen’s conventions gained valuable experience for the roles many of them would subsequently play in Radical Reconstruction. Among the delegates to the state convention that assembled in Charleston in November 1865, for example, were a future lieutenant governor, state supreme court justice, and secretary of state of South Carolina, as well as several men destined to serve in the legislature and the United States Congress. The quality of black leader ship, in South Carolina and elsewhere, immediately impressed outside observers, even skeptical native whites who had found the concept of blacks in such roles as either distasteful or incomprehensible. What remained open to question, however, was whether or not a �
�leader” commanded a significant following and constituency or was simply a self-appointed spokesman whose claims rested on his education, occupation, or northern origins. That was never an easy question to answer, though clergymen, who were in the most advantageous position to gather a following around them, tended to dominate postwar black political life.
In the early stages of organizational activity, especially in places like Charleston and New Orleans, the old free black communities contributed a disproportionate share of the leadership. But that dominance did not necessarily endure, particularly as some freed slaves quickly acquired an education and began to accumulate property. “It is remarkable,” thought Richard H. Cain, who had come to Charleston in 1865, “that the former leading men in these parts, those whom we would have recognized as the great minds of the South among the colored people, have relapsed into secondary men; and the class who were hardly known, have come forward and assumed a bold front, and are asserting their manhood.” In some states, moreover, as in Mississippi, blacks who had been free before the war were considered too dependent on whites to be entrusted with positions of leadership.8
Equally important in the early stages of political organization were northern blacks, most of them missionaries and teachers, who came to the South during and after the war, in some instances returning to a native land from which they had become exiles. Henry M. Turner, a freeborn South Carolinian who had already distinguished himself as an army chaplain and AME organizer, opened the Freedmen’s Convention in Georgia in 1866 and shared political leadership in that state with Tunis G. Campbell, a Massachusetts-born black and Freedmen’s Bureau agent who had established a virtually independent governnment in the Georgia Sea Islands. Richard H. Cain (a native of Virginia) and Francis L. Cardozo (a native of South Carolina), both of them ministers in Connecticut during the war, came to South Carolina in time to participate in the early convention movement, thereby joining an illustrious group that also included, as recent arrivals from the North, Martin R. Delany (a native of Virginia) and Jonathan J. Wright (a native of Pennsylvania), both of whom served for a time as Freedmen’s Bureau agents.9
But the bulk of the delegates to the conventions were themselves freedmen who came out of the virtual anonymity of slavery to participate in the political life of their localities and states. Some of them were house servants and artisans who had acquired a rudimentary education and a degree of acculturation to white values; still others had spent their bondage in the fields and quarters, having little contact with whites except for the owner and overseer. For many of the freedmen, whatever their varied experiences in slavery, military service had exposed them for the first time to the outside world and helped to accelerate the transition from bondage to political activism and leadership. In South Carolina, Robert Smalls managed to construct a loyal constituency in the Sea Islands on the basis of his wartime exploits, as did Prince Rivers, a former coachman in Beaufort and a sergeant in the Union Army, who had impressed Colonel Higginson as a man “of apparently inexhaustible strength and activity” with extraordinary leadership powers. “He makes Toussaint perfectly intelligible; and if there should ever be a black monarchy in South Carolina, he will be its king.”10
Not many of the freedmen in the black conventions initially assumed leadership roles. More often, the ministers, as the most educated and articulate members, effectively controlled the proceedings by displaying their oratorical talents and their political knowledge and, if necessary, by manipulating the finer points of parliamentary procedure with which most of the delegates were unfamiliar. But even if many of the ex-slaves “sat mute on the benches,” as one observer described them, the delegates who most underscored the remarkable character of these conventions were those who came dressed in the cheapest homespun clothes, who could neither read nor write, whose faces and bodies still bore the marks of their recent bondage, and who spoke a language, said one reporter, “that no northern white man can understand.” The only comparable assemblages in their experience had been for religious purposes, and if they spoke at all during the proceedings they might on occasion approximate in their gestures, shouts, and singsong oratory the rural prayer meetings they knew so intimately.11
When the ex-slave delegates pressed their grievances before the conventions, they lacked the style, the propensity for intellectual abstractions, and the ability to embellish their points with literary and biblical references that characterized, sometimes all too ostentatiously, their ministerial colleagues. But they spoke from their own individual experiences. “My dear brothers,” one of them declared, “I don’t place myself in this honorable convention as a Henry Clay or a Webster, fur I know I kin not do it, nor to speak afore you. I know I’s a poor, destituted, onlarnt don’t-know-A-from-B. I’s been rocked in a hard cradle, from my youth up to the present age.” Occasionally, they would rise to familiarize the delegates with conditions in their respective counties; some of them lost their patience altogether and scolded their more experienced colleagues for wasting precious time in parliamentary wrangling and trivialities and urged them to get on with the more pressing issues of freedom from economic oppression and the two-faced judicial system—issues that they confronted in their daily lives. Whatever their limitations in education and vocabulary, they often projected a wisdom that few of the wordy ministers and northern-educated delegates could surpass. “There is an eloquence in experience,” one black reporter wrote after hearing an ex-slave relate the problems his people confronted, “which can never be had elsewhere; no, not even by the most polished culture of the schools.” And if the white newspapers chose to dwell upon the ungrammatical utterances and plantation speech of some delegates, and mock their pretensions to oratory, several of the more literate blacks who were present saw no reason to be embarrassed. “I hope the reporters will take me down as saying ‘dis,’ ‘dat,’ ‘de oder,’ and the ‘deformities of de constitution,’ ” James D. Lynch told the State Convention of the Colored People of Tennessee. “I know more of syntax than all of them put together.” Nor would he tolerate the demeaning ways in which whites addressed black people, both the ex-slaves and the freeborn, outside the convention hall. “A white man said to me this morning, ‘Well, Uncle, how are you getting along?’ I was glad to know that I had a white nephew.”12
That these were conventions of black people, called and managed and financed by black people, was a source of considerable pride. Although whites (usually Freedmen’s Bureau officers) were invited to address them, and dignitaries (like Horace Greeley) sent messages replete with moral injunctions, the delegates wished to make clear that they were not the dupes of white men. A delegate to the Virginia freedmen’s convention proudly asserted that the Appeal to the American People, which had just been read aloud, was “the production of our own people, and not the work of our northern friends.” He knew the charge would be made and he wanted to forestall it. The point would have to be made more than once, that having been controlled and manipulated as slaves, they had no desire to perpetuate that relationship in freedom, even with whites who claimed to be their liberators. After all, some would argue, the underlying purpose of these meetings was to show the world that black people, most of them only recently slaves, were perfectly capable of coming together to discuss and act upon the critical issues of the day. In New Orleans, after a Federal official criticized the actions of a recent colored convention, the Tribune lashed out at his presumptuousness. “He seemed unwilling to understand that the Convention felt as colored men feel, while Mr. Conway could only feel as a white man feels.… We need no apprenticeship to take the place of slavery, no social minors, no political children.”13
To proclaim their independence of white influence did not always make it so. Actually, the question of what relations they should sustain with their white friends remained an ongoing source of divisiveness within the ranks of black leadership. The matter came to a head at the Freedmen’s Convention of Georgia in early 1866 when a majority committee report nominated a
white Freedmen’s Bureau official as president of the newly formed Georgia Equal Rights Association, while a minority report nominated a black clergyman. After some debate, the delegates elected the white man, who proceeded to commend them for the wisdom they had exercised “in choosing your President from among your white friends.” But in Mobile, Alabama, when a black meeting considered a proposal to make a white man the editor of their newspaper, at least one participant strongly dissented. Such an appointment, he argued, would acknowledge that blacks still needed whites to act and think for them. “There is none but colored men that can truly sympathize with their race! None but those who have been subjected to the degrading influence of slavery that can truthfully lay our grievances before the world and claim its sympathy!”14
Since their white friends from the North were thought to be nearer to the sources of power, some blacks thought it in their best interests to cultivate close relationships, even at the risk of compromising their own independence. Still others deferred to them as men of experience and education who were in advantageous positions, whether as Freedmen’s Bureau agents or the representatives of benevolent societies, to render them immediate relief and assistance. But in those places where a black leadership quickly emerged in the aftermath of the war, impatience with white dictation and advice manifested itself from the very outset. Not surprisingly, the New Orleans Tribune voiced the strongest opinions on this question. Without intending any disrespect for “our white friends,” and while appreciating “the disinterestedness, the courage, the sound sense and the fraternal feeling they have displayed during their long crusade in behalf of liberty,” the newspaper insisted that black people make their own policies, decide on priorities, and select leaders from among themselves. “Who can better know our interest than we do? Who is more competent to discern what is good for us than we are?” How blacks answered those questions went to the very heart of their freedom, and the Tribune thought their white friends could best demonstrate their friendship by immediately conceding that fact.
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