Capitol Men

by Philip Dray

  Some whites, determined to frighten black workers into staying put, revived the hoary myths of the 1862 Yankee invasion of the Sea Islands, suggesting to blacks that emigration was in reality a secret plan to carry blacks to Cuba and reenslavement. The Columbia Daily Register denounced "the Liberian Fraud" as a scheme "gotten up by a few sharpers of your own race and a lot of white rascals, who would delude you by first robbing you of your little hard earnings and then leave you to die in the jungles." The Liberian relocation project did have a millenarian aspect: its boosters described a "promised land" of deliverance where potatoes grew so large that one sufficed to feed a family, syrup flowed from trees as if from a spigot, and the sunlight shone so intensely that there was never a need to build a fire.

  As black South Carolinians waited throughout the autumn of 1877 for the Liberian Exodus Joint Stock Steamship Company to produce a ship, Senator Blanche K. Bruce submitted in Washington a petition from more than four hundred black Mississippians asking for $100,000 to move to Liberia. Bruce explained that he had begun to see "mischievous consequences not only to my race, but to the section generally in which they live," from the prospect of an exodus, but he felt that he could not in fairness disregard a request from so large a number of his constituents. In a letter to the Cincinnati Commercial he worried that the back-to-Africa movement was dangerously out of date, for "the motives that inspired and prompted the creation of [the American Colonization Society] were derived from a historic period of the Negro utterly unlike the present." The ACS, Bruce reminded readers, had indeed acted to put the free blacks somewhere where they could enjoy freedom, but the organization also "looked to the protection and perpetuity of the institution of domestic slavery, as it then existed in the Southern states, by removing from all contact with the subordinated Negro communities of the South the freemen of color, whose example was supposed to breed discontent among his subject brethren."

  Recent history had dislodged these presumptions, Bruce asserted. Now black Americans had participated in a "great revolution" that had made them citizens; they had earned a stake in the agricultural South, a region whose economy would collapse, were the blacks to disappear. Furthermore, Bruce suggested, the black American of the late 1870s would surely find Liberia an alien experience—"a land without roads and without vehicles of transportation; a community without a system of public schools, and a Republic without a press." With native Africans "he would find no common bond of union except simply in the color of the skin." After all, "the Negro of America is not African, but American—in his physical qualities and aptitudes, in his mental development and biases, in his religious beliefs and hopes, and in his political conception and convictions ... He is not a parasite, but a branch, drawing its life from the great American vine, taking on the type of American civilization and adapting himself to the genius of her institutions, as readily and unreservedly as his Caucasian brother."

  In Congress, Bruce was consistently humane; he fought against efforts to restrict Chinese immigration and suggested civilizing the Plains Indians rather than exterminating them; he was also pragmatic, one of the first national figures to call for badly needed federal coordination of navigation and flood control improvements along the lower Mississippi River. But his vision of a coming racial enlightenment in the South—that blacks would someday "entertain independent political opinions without prejudice, and ... assert and exercise all rights without hindrance and without danger"—no doubt felt very remote and unreal to those who remained there, dwelling in fear of white violence, mourning their loss of the vote, and harnessed in the traces of the crop-lien system. With recent "reforms" in that institution increasing the size of the lien and hence the economic power of landowner over tenant, black farmers had to fight even harder for their family's sustenance and scrap of land, and more than a few, understandably, had come to see the struggle as futile.

  At Charleston, meanwhile, the Liberian Exodus Joint Stock Steamship Company, with inexperienced management and only $6,000 in hand, was under siege from those who had put down money for their trip to Africa. Hundreds of emigrants had arrived in Charleston in anticipation of a spring sailing. Finally, a battered but sturdy old sea-wagon, the Azov, was purchased and lashed to a Charleston wharf; the boat, despite its dilapidated condition, became an object of fascination to all who rushed to gaze upon her. The ship was so overbooked when it finally departed for Liberia in late April 1878 that some 175 would-be pioneers were left standing with their luggage on the dock, watching their dream of emigration sail away over the horizon.

  The Azor tacked out of Charleston Harbor with its passengers shouting joyful hallelujahs and declaring, "The Gospel ship is sailin'! We're boun' for the promis' land!," according to Alfred B. Williams, a Charleston News & Courier reporter who was aboard for the journey. Williams noted that most of the men and women had never seen the ocean before, let alone sailed on it, but that none expressed remorse as the coastline of America faded from view with the first sunset. Their chief complaint was that the sea was a more monotonous place than they had anticipated, as they did not find the "whales, leviathans, sharks, mermaids, sea cows, and all the real and mythical monsters of the deep" they had heard about. But more substantive difficulties lay ahead. Many suffered for days with seasickness, supplies of food and water were soon badly diminished, and in violation of a law requiring that a physician be aboard any transatlantic vessel, the Azor's passengers had to rely on the ministrations of a volunteer named George Curtis, "a blundering ignoramus," according to Williams, with as much knowledge of proper healing methods "as a street car mule." Shipboard burials of children and the elderly became common. Of the 206 emigrants aboard the outgoing vessel, 23 died before reaching their ancestral homeland.

  Forty-two days out from Charleston, the Azor arrived in Monrovia, where the emigrants found a stark, brutal country with few amenities and little infrastructure. Some who later made their way back to South Carolina reported that they had survived only by relying on handouts from native Africans. Although the tales of hardship brought home were probably exaggerated and were told by those who had not succeeded in resettling (many others did remain in their new home), the apparent failure of the Azor experiment broke the enthusiasm for African migration in South Carolina. The Liberian Exodus Joint Stock Steamship Company soon floundered and went bankrupt, its single ship sold quickly to the highest bidder; never again would the Azor or any other vessel carry black emigrants over the Charleston bar.

  The fascination with Liberian emigration was soon eclipsed by a domestic resettlement of far greater significance—the mass departure of thousands of disaffected black Southerners for the Kansas frontier, the so-called Exoduster Movement. Like the interest in Liberia, the western exodus was fueled by the perception that Reconstruction's demise had rendered life untenable in the South. "The government of every Southern state is now in the hands of the old slave oligarchy, and ... both departments of the national government soon will be," Frederick Douglass observed, "and [blacks] believe that when the government, state and national, shall be in the hands of the old masters of the South, they will find means of reducing the freedmen to a condition analogous to slavery." As one migrant told a reporter, who rendered his statement in Black Belt patois, "The Democrat party was de party dat kep' us in slavery, an' de Republican party was de party dat sot us free. When de party dat sot us free goes out, an' de party dat kep' us in slavery comes in, it's time for de nigger to look out for himself."

  Because the western exodus was seen as a far more threatening crisis than its Liberian counterpart, the movement's root causes were weighed closely by the national press. The Atlantic Monthly explained to its readers that the theft of the vote could only have a staggering impact on the freedmen who, only a dozen years before, had been handed this precious right and whose self-image was now bound up with it. "Voting is widely regarded at the North as a disagreeable duty, but the negro looks upon it as the highest privilege in life. To be frightened out of the exe
rcise of this privilege or compelled to exercise it in conflict with his convictions and preferences, is to suffer from a cruel injustice."

  In addition to a loss of political standing, the migrants most often cited dissatisfaction with sharecropping. A reporter from the New York Tribune who toured rural South Carolina in 1878, the year before the exodus began in earnest, found that black families who managed to farm their own property "live as happy as a big sunflower," raising cotton, corn, peas, sweet potatoes, and rice, and keeping livestock such as pigs and chickens. Those who worked a piece of someone else's farm, however, were often given the poorer land; were expected to supply their own seed, manure, mules and labor; and were at the mercy of the landowner in terms of rent charged and the ultimate sale of their crop, from which proceeds the owner deducted for various equipment or provisions. Many, after an entire year of work, received—less the expenses the landlord took—as little as five or ten dollars from the sale of their crop. The hardest lot was that of the day laborers, who picked cotton or corn for forty or fifty cents a day, much of which was paid in provisions whose value was adjudged by the landowner.

  Sharecroppers of course had more than the landlord to reckon with. "The Negro's necessities have developed an offensive race, called merchants by courtesy, who keep supply stores at the crossroads and steamboat landings, and live upon extortion," a Northern magazine wrote. "These people would be called sharks, harpies, and vampires in any Northwestern agricultural community." ("The male [Negro] is an enormous consumer of tobacco and whiskey," the writer added, and "the female has an inordinate love of flummery; both are fond of sardines, potted meats, and canned goods generally.")

  Piled onto the inequities of sharecropping and farm labor was the fear of white harassment or problems with the law. With slave labor no longer available, many Southern states had turned to convict labor programs to construct state roads, monuments, and public buildings; they also profited by selling prisoners' labor to municipal or, at times, private enterprises, such as farms or railroads, in what was known as the convict lease system. To busted state economies, convict lease arrangements were irresistible; they were self-supporting and in many cases profitable. But for those trapped inside it, the system was a kind of living purgatory. Arrested for even a minor violation of the law, a black man could find himself stuck for weeks or months on a convict work gang, working off his "debt to society" under a blazing sun.

  Abject violence, night riding, lynching, and other forms of terror were of course also a powerful inducement to exit the region. An elderly man arriving in the exodus at its main transfer point in St. Louis related that "I know, within the last three years, of seventy-five men who left their houses at night, and were never found until the buzzards found them in the fields or in the valleys." Such accounts were often belittled by Southerners as shopworn rumors being repeated by impressionable blacks. But President Grant, on December 6, 1876, sent to Congress a catalog of outrages carried out against Louisiana freedmen—ninety-eight pages of atrocities, including murders and whippings from 1868 through 1876 that had left about 4,000 blacks dead or maimed. General Philip Sheridan quoted official records indicating that in 1868 alone, 1,884 people had been killed or wounded in Louisiana.

  In the white South, debate about the exodus focused on possible political chicanery. Some suspected it was a Republican plot to take over neighboring states or to diminish the South's political representation by reducing the number of its black citizens. It was whispered that the Yankees had sent agents provocateurs into the South to effect these developments. "The Southern white man is inconvertibly fixed in the belief that the negro is incapable of any such thing as an independent, self-assertive movement," observed a Northern paper. "He looks upon every migrative or aspiring tendency as the result of some outside ... malignant influence." The idea that anyone other than the black emigrants themselves was responsible for the exodus struck Frederick Douglass as amusing. "Political tricksters, land speculators, defeated office seekers, Northern malignants, speeches and resolutions in the Senate," he advised, "could not have, of themselves, set such a multitudinous exodus in motion." In an allusion to the 1875 redemption in Mississippi, Douglass joked that the state's departing black residents had simply gotten around at last to presenting whites with their own "Mississippi Plan." The magazine Puck neatly captured the reversal in a cover illustration: an immaculately dressed, smiling black family, luggage and tickets in hand, ask of a haggard white planter who is laboring miserably with a shovel in a ditch, "Now, boss, how you like it you' self?" In any case, the possibility that Republicans would foment a black migration to "take over" Kansas was dubious since the state was already largely Republican. It was, in fact, the state's well-known rejection of slavery that helped attract migrants. Given its history, a congressional committee noted, "It is not surprising that the Negro looks with longing eyes to that great and noble state..." The Missouri Republican extolled Kansas as the place "where John Brown's soul is doing perpetual guard duty."

  But recriminations in the South swelled as whites began to appreciate "the humiliating fact," as Douglass put it, "that the prosperity and civilization of the South are at the mercy of the despised and hated Negro." The New Orleans Times in April 1879 urged planters to lose no time in assuring laborers and sharecroppers that their rights would be protected, that they would be safe, and that it would ultimately be possible for them to purchase land. P.B.S. Pinchback suggested that the exodus might be quelled if planters would quickly enact policies that offered blacks a route to land ownership, although, as historian Nell Painter observes, such promises and inducements "smacked too much of the Freedmen's Bureau and Radical Reconstruction" and would have been a very hard sell to the freedmen at this late date.

  In mid-March 1879 Pinchback decided to have a firsthand look at the exodus, and traveled by steamboat from New Orleans to what had become a staging area, the river town of Delta, Louisiana, just south of Vicksburg. "You may ... judge of my surprise, on nearing the Delta ferry landing," he wrote in a dispatch, "to find the banks of the river literally covered with colored people and their little store of worldly goods." Mingling with the travelers, who were waiting to pay four dollars for passage to St. Louis, Pinchback noted that while "numerous reasons are alleged for this remarkable exodus ... so far as I have been able to learn, the real cause is an apprehension of undefined danger in the near future." He was assured by those fleeing Louisiana that an upcoming state constitutional convention, under the sponsorship of "home rule" Democrats who had reclaimed their state in April 1877, aimed to reinstitute slavery. "They religiously believe that the constitutional convention bodes them no good; that it has been called for the express purpose of abridging their rights and liberties ... They are absolutely panic stricken." He also heard a number of completely groundless reports, including one that Jefferson Davis himself "was on the loose again, this time in command of ten thousand troops, supported by a flotilla of four gunboats, and he [has] threatened to send back into slavery every black who tried to go up the river."

  One can imagine the gentlemanly Pinch, walking among the rough-hewn, desperate emigrants, listening to their stories and patiently trying to quell their fears. He came away fully convinced that the travelers' dread fear of the new Democratic governments in the former Confederate states, of worsening conditions or even reenslavement, were genuine and unfeigned. "There is no doubt in my mind," he concluded, "that this movement has assumed formidable shape and, unless some means are devised to arrest it, this portion of the state will soon be entirely depopulated of its laboring classes."

  While there were, as Pinchback witnessed, elements of anguish and uncertainty in the western exodus, the migration was not the panicked stampede that some correspondents had implied. The idea of departure from the Southland had germinated among the freedmen for several years, through word of mouth and through the educational and promotional efforts made by homegrown black advocates of emigration.

  Henry Adams of L
ouisiana, a former slave and Union soldier, had as early as 1870 become concerned about anti-black violence and the assault on political freedoms, and with some other war veterans he helped form a committee, the Colonization Council, to "look into affairs and see the true condition of our race, to see whether it was possible we could stay under a people who had held us under bondage." Adams, described later by a Congressional report as "an uneducated colored laborer, but a man of very unusual natural abilities," helped orchestrate one of the most impressive grassroots information-gathering campaigns in American history, dispatching "investigators" across the former Confederacy to examine the conditions under which blacks lived and forwarding the group's findings to the Justice Department in Washington.

  Worried that his agents would learn very little if they simply asked questions and moved on, Adams insisted they work and live in the communities they were studying. "You can't find out anything till you get amongst them," Adams later reported. "You can talk as much as you please, but you got to go right into the field and work with them and sleep with them to know all about them." Monitoring the trend in violence and intimidation closely, Adams and his cohorts were among the first to sound the alarm that retrenchment in the area of voting rights and civil rights might soon make life unsustainable for blacks in parts of the Deep South. One of the more consistent, and depressing, findings reported to the council was that white bulldozing, as the routine harassment of black voters was termed, usually worked. Counties with solid Republican majorities, once its black residents were visited by political terrorism, tended to be reborn as Democratic strongholds; in some elections, not a single Republican vote was cast.