Been in the Storm So Long

by Leon F. Litwack

  With the elections approaching, black canvassers and newspapers cautioned black voters about the critical importance of their political debut. If the “black vote” became the means by which “unscrupulous renegades” and “political vagrants” were elevated to office, the very legitimacy of this experiment in biracial democratic government might be jeopardized. Without wishing to reject the friendship and assistance of northern whites, the New Orleans Tribune, among other black spokesmen, found little reason to place any dependency on politicians who “cannot be so well informed as to our wants as we are ourselves.” All too often, that same newspaper warned, their “good friends” from the North came to them “not through philanthropy, not for the affection they have for black men, but for the love of power and spoils which is devouring them.” Such individuals invariably took credit for emancipating the slaves, offered blacks a “tutorage” that only perpetuated the dependency of slavery, and lavished praise on black people only when able to control them. If a Union officer came to them claiming their votes on the basis of his service in the war, the Tribune asked black voters to “unbutton his uniform coat and feel the heart throbs of the man within it.” If, on the other hand, a former Confederate officer came to them professing to believe in Republican principles, the Tribune advised black voters to be skeptical of such sudden conversions. “After a five years’ struggle we do not choose to join the Confederates today.” And finally, the Tribune suggested that if any candidate replied to their demands with the familiar refrain of “too soon,” it was to be interpreted as “a lack of courage” to carry out the reform at any time.

  When will the right time come? Is it, per chance, after we will have separated for ten or twenty years the two races in different schools, and when we shall have realized the separation of this nation into two peoples? The difficulty, then, will be greater than it is today. A new order of things, based on separation, will have taken root. It will, then, be TOO LATE.95

  Despite the emphasis placed on racial unity, black leaders were hardly immune to the usual political vices of sectarianism, dissimulation, and unbridled ambition. Nor did they necessarily agree on what relations they should sustain with the former slaveholding class or with their friends from the North. The extent to which they intended to act as “race men” if elected also tended to vary. Elick Mahaly, an ex-slave who ran for office in Crawford County, Georgia, demonstrated little of the moral fervor that could be found in the pages of the New Orleans Tribune or in the speeches of such Georgia blacks as Henry M. Turner and Tunis G. Campbell. He addressed himself almost exclusively to local agricultural problems and pledged himself to reconcile the interests of his own race with the need to ease the economic plight and political disabilities of the former slaveholding class. In offering himself to the voters in 1867, he played upon the theme of reconciliation.

  I was born a slave on the plantation of Benjamin Lockett, Warren county, Miss. I remained with my old master until 1864, when I was brought to Georgia and sold to Mr. Isaac Dennis. My old master raised me as well as slaves are usually raised, giving me the rudiments of a common English education, and instilling into my youthful mind the principles of honesty and virtue. And I will say here, that I have never departed from them.… I am in favor of reconstruction under the military bills; though, if I am elected, I shall use my influence to have the disqualifications removed from all.96

  But to have listened to the anguished cries of southern whites, the disaster they anticipated could best be summed up in an individual like the Reverend Nick Williams. This black preacher reportedly stormed through the interior of South Carolina in 1867, inculcating the minds of the freedmen with ideas subversive of the political and social order and bound to provoke a racial conflagration. Although skeptical of Reconstruction (“Will it put muskets in your hands or mine?”), he urged blacks to vote for none but their own color. The rights of the planter class to their lands, he declared, were no more legitimate than the previous rights they had claimed to their slaves. “Land we must have or we will die,” and he expected no help in this regard from the North. Any agent of the Freedmen’s Bureau could be easily bought—for as little as $2.50. The Negro in the North was treated no better than the slave in the South, perhaps even worse, and he advocated a massive exodus of northern blacks to the southern states, where they would combine with the freedmen to establish their own nation. That was the Reverend Williams’ message, at least as white witnesses reported it. “No one can imagine, unless he was present among us,” one such observer wrote, “the extent and character of the excitement among the negroes. All labour is suspended; our fodder withers in the fields; whilst crowds attend the reverend gentleman everywhere he goes.” The district Freedmen’s Bureau office was sufficiently alarmed to dispatch a detail of soldiers to arrest the Reverend Williams.97

  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.

  It is impossible that your present power can endure, whether you use it for good or ill.… Let not your pride, nor yet your pretended friends, flatter you into the belief that you ever can or ever will, for any length of time, govern the white men of the South. The world has never seen such a spectacle, and its whole history, and especially the history of your race, gives no ground for the anticipation.… Your present power must surely and soon pass from you. Nothing that it builds will stand, and nothing will remain of it but the prejudices it may create.

  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.

  This morning I discharged 3 of my hands.… I gave them from last Monday until Saturday night to decide as to whether or not they would vote. They being unwilling to give me a positive answer, I thereupon told them I would dispense with their services.… I retain two who promised me last week without any parley that they would stay at the mill & attend to their work.

  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 festivitie
s 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.