The Family Tree

by Karen Branan

  In truth, white Georgia Republicans had for the most part proved as treacherous to their black colleagues as Democrats; most had voted with Democrats to throw blacks out of the General Assembly in 1868, their chief interest being to expand their influence among whites. Nationally the party had always been the party of business, and the nature of struggle between Democrat and Republican was between planter and businessman. The only role either party ever really saw for the freed people in those days was that of political pawn.

  The combination of supporting black churches and schools and allowing a few favored freedmen their political heads served Hamilton’s white leaders well for a time. They needed black votes and by hook or by crook, they got most of them. To ensure black men voted right, worked hard, remained loyal, and acted humble, the extended Williams family both gave and sold small plots of land to many of their former slaves, although—as was customary among white planters—much of this land was not registered in the deed books in order that it might be taken back at short notice.

  One thing outside white control was an increase in black women not working for whites. Many registered as “farm laborer” in 1870 were “keeping house” in 1880. “Keeping house” was the phrase commonly used for white housewives. Black women serving in white homes were called “servant.” This increase in black housewives, regarded with pride by blacks and their white allies, was viewed with hostility by whites, especially women, who increasingly had to scrub their own floors and peel their own potatoes and had long viewed the black woman’s services as their birthright. That census, and many to follow, also showed a high number of young black and mulatto females living alone with single white men and giving their occupation as “housekeeper,” or “cook.”

  Most freedmen continued to work white planters’ land, but within two years after the end of the war, they’d mounted a region-wide struggle against the brutal “gang system” used under slavery. They settled on the sharecropper system, long employed by the planters with poor whites. In comparison to gang work, this seemed to offer more freedom but would quickly become a quagmire of endless, debilitating debt.

  A century of pain and penury would follow, faced not only by poor blacks and whites, but by the entire South as the new slavery of sharecropping, undergirded by increasing racism and violence, a low-intensity continuation of the Civil War, took its toll on the region. While freed people struggled to build a new world for themselves within the harsh limits imposed, white planters and yeoman farmers proceeded immediately following war’s end to reconstruct their former lives. My ancestors and their like, having lost the bulk of their wealth in slaves, clung to their land and grappled however they could for more, while instituting laws and practices that kept blacks as close to slavery as possible. As waves of economic depression washed over Georgia, Williamses and Mobleys—in their strategic positions as sheriff, judge, legislator, senator, lawyer, moneylender, clerk of court, and Democratic Party official—increased their property holdings exponentially.

  The greatest source of wealth was, doubtless, the infamous convict labor system, in which hundreds of thousands of prisoners, mostly black, were sold to the highest corporate or individual bidder. Sheriffs, judges, justices of the peace, and other county officials throughout the South were in on this massive take, and my relatives, paternal and maternal, were almost certainly at this trough, though the higher their ranks, as with the Williams side, the greater their reward.

  In 1872 Congress outlawed the KKK and the War Department shut down the Freedmen’s Bureau. By 1877 a compromise won the White House for the Republicans and promised Democrats that President Rutherford B. Hayes would remove remaining troops from the South. This led to the exodus of many white Republicans, putting black rights back into the hands of white southerners. Reconstruction was dead and black citizens were left to the mercy of their former masters and the protection of the abolitionist network of the North, which continued its philanthropy.

  The Compromise of 1877, fashioned in the U.S. Congress, assured southern whites political autonomy and nonintervention in matters of race and promised them a share in the new economic order. It also freed the white South to fashion a new form of slavery, using labor contracts, peonage, and discriminatory laws written into their state constitution. With large numbers of poor whites and blacks of every ilk flooding into Georgia’s cities, the framers of Georgia’s 1877 state constitution, including James Monroe Mobley, gave Georgia’s rural counties power over the cities vastly unequal to their population.

  In 1883 the U.S. Supreme Court determined that the Civil Rights Act of 1875, the only law forcing compliance with the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, could be used only on rare occasions; henceforth, civil rights became a local matter. As Frederick Douglass wrote, “We have been grievously wounded in the house of our friends.” In 1895, Booker T. Washington, a man most southern blacks saw as a savior, rose in Atlanta to declare, in what became known as the Atlanta Compromise, that black people should settle for manual labor, the goodwill of the white man, and a gradualist approach to rights. A year later, in Plessy v. Ferguson, the U.S. Supreme Court declared racial segregation constitutional.

  I lay all this out in detail because little about Georgia politics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—certainly not the lynching of a woman and three men in 1912 Hamilton—makes sense without understanding the shifting, yet reactionary class structure. In the beginning, the idea was that all white men could someday own a slave and that ownership would make them part of the aristocracy of white men. In the first three decades of the county’s existence a lot of those dreams came true. In the 1850s, a Georgia farmer with two slaves and a small farm was five times richer than the average northerner. More and more white men acquired slaves. Cotton production became increasingly lucrative.

  By the time the war ended, two-thirds of Harris County’s roughly 15,000 population was poor and black; one-third were white, and of those, roughly 65 percent were poor. The fight over secession had inaugurated a new era of resentments of the poor against the rich. While many wealthy planters opposed secession, it was their class that misled the South into war with their fiery speeches and votes to secede, which is why the men who actually fought called it a “rich man’s war and poor man’s fight.” The rich passed laws that made it possible for their sons to stay home. Many also refused their new government’s orders to cease cotton production, honor blockades, send slaves to build fortifications, and grow food, measures that leaders believed were necessary to win the war. From the war’s first year, southern editors predicted the South’s failure would be due to planter greed and disloyalty. Later historians would also blame the loss on “states rights,” which made it difficult for states to unite.

  In Hamilton, daughters of the wealthy continued their studies at the Female College during the war, holding elegant Christmas balls and shopping for satins and sweets at well-stocked Beall Mercantile, while Henry’s Confectionary, selling soaps, toiletries, and pharmaceuticals, refused credit and countless shopkeepers used the war as an excuse to gouge customers.

  In these and other ways the rich all over the South inflamed the poor against them and contributed to the ultimate loss of the war. Because of this vast white resentment and the large numbers of white radicals in Columbus and counties surrounding Harris, planters saw fit to curry black votes in their own way, which included supporting their right to vote and paying for those votes. Due to their long history of slavery, freedmen were, for a time, far easier to manipulate than truculent whites and so the races were played against one another in dozens of ways over the next century as wealthy white men successfully maintained power.

  The problem facing the former slave owners after the war: how could a small minority, at most 35 percent, or one-third—250 to 300 white men at most, after you eliminate all the war dead, women, and children—of the population maintain power? The answer: with the carrot—an acre or two of land, a dollar bill, an old dress, favors large an
d small—and the stick—no credit, no job, an unjust jail sentence, a small group of hooded, sheet-shrouded, gun-toting men circling a cabin on a dark night, a hapless “darkey” blowing in the breeze.

  The political gatherings of the Harris County elite included large numbers of black voters, former slaves still laboring on large plantations who were hauled in on planters’ wagons, seated at separate tables that groaned like the white folks’ tables with barbecue, collards, corn bread, and yams, and lectured to on the largesse afforded them by their former masters. Shamelessly the whites played the Civil War card by having weeping mothers beg their Populist-leaning sons to remember the sacrifices of their veteran fathers and vote Democrat.

  In Hamilton in 1893, Ben Williams, running for the Georgia Senate, arranged for a large chorus of the favorite “darkeys,” as they called them, to serenade the dying William Hudson, whose seat Ben sought, outside his antebellum mansion on the square and thank him for his years of service in the Georgia House and Senate. These tactics, coupled with rampant vote-buying, worked to keep the old guard safe. But for myriad reasons, whites of every stripe would soon decide or had already decided the Negro should not vote at all: it encouraged them to be “bumptious on the street,” as gubernatorial candidate Hoke Smith would proclaim; the Negro vote, many believed or claimed, was the cause of increasing charges against black men of the rape of white women, which led to increased lynchings; the black franchise made it harder for whites to completely control the labor-management relationship or, as they put it, “to get good help.” Most importantly, they were too inclined to populist alliances, too fond of progressive legislation to increase spending on schools and taxes on the rich.

  In 1877 a poll tax law had been passed, instantly eliminating large numbers of poor blacks from voting. In 1900 Georgia Democrats established a statewide primary system open only to whites. Since Democrats dominated the state, whoever won the primary won the general election. Blacks could still vote, but their votes were meaningless. Even that measure was not enough and soon cries rang out for total disenfranchisement. It would not be long before that most precious and essential of all rights would be entirely removed from the hands of southern black men.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Unveiling

  The old masters did something else to bind poor and rich whites together. Working with women, they created the Lost Cause movement, designed to glorify the antebellum South and the Confederate cause, honor the war dead, and provide poor and middling whites with a sense of aristocratic belonging. No longer were there privates and colonels; no more would be mentioned the deserters and the anti-Seceshers, the privileged rich and the put-upon poor; now they were all brave and simple soldiers—true patriots, not traitors—who’d fought the good fight to defend Constitution, hearth, and home (not slavery, which for public purposes was now deemed “wrong” and, even before the war, was said to be “in its last days”). Only because there were too few of them to fight on, they had so tragically lost. Beginning in the late 1880s, statues of this humble soldier were erected in cities and towns all over the South.

  Each year Hamilton’s largest public events—Confederate Memorial Day, General Robert E. Lee’s birthday, and numerous gatherings of the United Confederate Veterans’ Williams Camp Meeting, made up of every old veteran still living in the county—drove home these messages, at the heart of which was the eternal crusade for white superiority. With whites unwilling to face up to the wrong their leaders had wrought by starting and continuing a hopeless war, or to bring their economy in line with reality, or to democratize their system after the war to welcome blacks and poor whites alike, the main thrust of southern life became the preservation of its traditions and the creation of myths. For fifty years they’d carried their propaganda north, laced with lurid tales of black inferiority, disease, and criminality. They’d been enormously successful in this. Since the early 1900s, mainstream, even liberal, magazines like Harpers, the Atlantic Monthly, and Good Housekeeping often played their tune. Chief propagandist at the outset was General John B. Gordon, who’d commanded Harris troops, led Georgia’s Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan, become governor after the war, and was then the first southerner to return to Congress. Dead now for six years, General Gordon had been a distant cousin to a ragtag bunch of Gordons living out by the Chattahoochee River, men and women who would loom large in the tragedy soon to happen in Hamilton.

  Lest the war and its just causes be forgotten, the old soldiers—all former slave owners—had ramped up their celebrations and their propaganda. At a turning point in black-white relations, a time when all black efforts at equality and unity were being systematically dismantled, Lost Cause activity was at an all-time high. And nowhere so energetically as in Hamilton, Georgia.

  On Tuesday morning, November 29, 1910, several thousand people thronged Hamilton to witness the long-awaited unveiling of a Confederate soldier statue in the center of the square. For two years the village had thrown itself into a flurry of rebuilding and modernizing. Today the white townfolk strode about well dressed and proud, their heads held high amid so many city visitors because of a new Gothic Revival courthouse, the judge’s new brick Investment Building, Mobley Bros. Farm Implements, and an array of freshly painted cottages ringing the square. In the evening, if the visitors tarried, they’d notice new acetylene lamps, which gave the town a welcoming appearance. This morning the air was frosty; the atmosphere festive. The brass band struck up at 9 a.m. and led the welcoming committee to the tiny train depot to meet guest speaker Governor (and soon-to-be U.S. senator) Hoke Smith, whose potential presidential candidacy added to the allure.

  Only four years earlier, Smith, running for governor, had not been welcome here. Many blamed his heated racial rhetoric for the disastrous Atlanta race riots of 1906 and the town had supported his opponent. After his election, and except for making good on a campaign promise to the ultraracist Tom Watson crowd to disenfranchise black voters, he’d returned to his more moderate stances and once more won favor in the eyes of the Hamilton elite, most of whom deplored incendiary speech. They’d seen the damage it could do not only in the Atlanta riot (where the judge’s son-in-law commandeered state militia troops) but in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898, where distant Williams cousin Colonel Alfred Waddell had riled crowds of white men to a frenzy, resulting in wide-scale death and destruction aimed at ridding the city of black leaders and officeholders. Even though the ends in that case were to their liking, they preferred more legalistic means.

  Seated with Hoke Smith at the podium, in the shadow of the white-satin-shrouded twenty-one-foot marble soldier, was Master of Ceremonies Judge James Fenimore Cooper Williams, who’d led a sharpshooter battalion throughout the war. Next to him was his first cousin Miss Lula Mobley, corresponding secretary of the Ladies Memorial Association. At seventy years old, Cooper’s tall, lanky frame was stooped. Mobley, almost child-size at fifty, was defiantly straight. She was dressed neck to toe in black watered silk. The shadow of the man who’d formed their political outlook, his uncle and her father, Colonel James Monroe Mobley, dead now for seven years, hovered about.

  It was the ladies who’d raised the $1,360 to pay for the statue and the ladies and their servants who had put this occasion together, rising at dawn to barbecue pigs and possum and make potato salad. The purpose of the memorial was to show their devotion to those rebel vets both dead and still living and to teach their increasingly irreverent sons the true meaning of the Lost Cause. This gave them, many of whom were college graduates, a sense of purpose; they were the teachers and it was in the schoolroom and the Sunday school room that the most important work of indoctrination took place. In addition, the women’s suffrage movement was making itself felt throughout the country and the men reckoned on Lost Cause activity keeping their women safe from that.

  At 10 a.m. the brass band blared Dixie and a bevy of white-gloved ladies pulled the velvet cord that removed the white satin cloak from the gleaming statue. A gasp ran throu
gh the crowd. Hamilton had no public artwork, precious little private artwork, and no one could deny it was magnificent. The welcome address was given by Colonel Leland Stanford, the man who’d helped make it possible for Georgia’s first black legislators to be unseated.

  And so it was on that brisk late autumn afternoon in 1910 that Hamilton’s old masters remained masters and could say with straight faces that their war had been vindicated, despite the fact that, as the inevitable result of this great denial, their children—black, white, mixed—were at war with one another.

  They had silenced the loudest and most threatening of the black leaders and once again docile Negroes labored in their fields, bringing forth bale after bale of the cotton they called “white gold.” White-on-black violence had quieted down, except for that which arose out of the nocturnal cavorting of blacks and whites. In 1900 a conference had been held in Montgomery, Alabama, to discuss the problem of “white bullies” and “black brutes.” White men had lost touch with their “plantation manners,” likewise black men not raised in slavery. What was to be done?

  While Harris County in 1910 was a hotbed of sex between black women and white men, it was the white-on-white “honor killings” that concerned the county the most. Here on the square, a decade earlier, City Marshal Will Robinson, a Williams in-law, had been shot dead by the clerk of court’s son over a white woman. In 1908, just before the new courthouse opened, Henry Mobley, son of James Monroe Mobley, had shot and killed that same clerk of court’s son in the drugstore on the square in another fight over a white woman. They’d all claimed self-defense and only Henry was tried, though quickly exonerated. The code of honor among these former slave owners or sons of slave owners, which painted self-defense in broad swaths and quietly glorified gore spilled in the defense of women, was alive and well in Harris County. It was a key piece of the Lost Cause ideology and one that the women, at least, were starting to see as unfortunate.