Capitol Men

by Philip Dray

  Adams and his council wrote letters of appeal to President Grant, asked Congress to set aside a territory for black settlement, inquired about transportation to Liberia, and even considered approaching "governments outside of the United States to help us get away from the United States and go and live there under their flag." By 1877 he and his team had given up hope of remaining in the South and resolved "to go anywhere on God's earth, we didn't care where; we said we was going if we had to run away and go into the woods."

  In addition to studying and collating information about conditions in the South, representatives of emigration societies such as the Colonization Council as early as 1871 sent emissaries to the West to examine the prospects there for black settlement. A report on agricultural conditions in Kansas, submitted by Alabama's George F. Marlow to an 1872 convention of blacks, noted that

  The weather and roads here enable you to do more work here than elsewhere.

  The climate is mild and pleasant.

  The country is well watered.

  Fine grazing country; stock can be grazed in winter.

  Climate dry, and land free from swamps.

  Railroads are being built in every direction.

  Marlow concluded,

  It is within the reach of every man, no matter how poor, to have a home in Kansas. The best lands are to be had at from $2 to $10 an acre, on time. The different railroads own large tracts of land, and offer liberal inducements to emigrants. You can get good land in some places for $1.25 an acre. The country is mostly open prairie, and level, with deep, rich soil, producing from forty to one hundred bushels of corn and wheat to the acre. The corn grows about eight or nine feet high, and I never saw better fruit anywhere.

  More than any other individual, it was Benjamin "Pap" Singleton of Nashville who came to personify the spirit of the exodus. A former slave who supported himself as a carpenter, Singleton wore his own humble provenance on his sleeve. Educated blacks he derided as "tonguey men" and believed that "the colored race ... invests too much confidence in Professor Tom Cat, or some of the imported slippery chaps from Washington, Oberlin, Chicago." He held that the success of prominent "race men" such as Frederick Douglass, Robert Brown Elliott, and Blanche Bruce, and their acceptance as spokesmen by white society, was exceptional and, in any case, left them incapable of relating to the quandary of Southern blacks. "They had good luck, and now are listening to false prophets," he stated. "They have boosted up and got their heads a whirlin', and now they think they must judge things from where they stand, when the fact is the possum is lower down on the tree—down nigh to the roots." The Louisiana minister and editor William Murrell concurred with Singleton when he said of the exodus, "Those who had been leading the colored people in political matters could not lead them any more when it came to this matter."

  Born in 1809—the year of Lincoln's birth, as Singleton himself liked to point out—Pap had been a most troublesome slave. His owner sold him a dozen times, often to planters far from Nashville, but he managed to escape each time and return home. When he did depart for good, it was by his own volition; he made his way to Canada along the Underground Railroad. Back in Nashville after the war, Singleton worked as a carpenter, and one of his tasks was building coffins for black victims of local political violence and occasionally for young black women who had been sexually outraged and murdered by whites. He also dabbled in real estate, and his Tennessee Real Estate and Homestead Association helped blacks buy small tracts of land, although success was limited because the only land they could afford consisted of worn-out plots "where peas would not sprout." Deciding that the local whites lacked even the small amount of noblesse oblige the planter class had exhibited before the war, Pap became convinced of the need to separate the races. "I had studied it all out," he recalled later, "and it was clear as day to me. I don't know how it come to me; but I suspect it was God's doing. Anyhow I knowed my people couldn't live there." In 1873, after a number of Nashville blacks went to Kansas to work on railroad construction crews and returned speaking favorably of the locale, Singleton organized the first group of three hundred emigrants. "Place and time have met and kissed each other," he told his followers, before leading them to Kansas to found the "Singleton Colony." They sang,

  We have Mr. Singleton for our President,

  He will go on before us, and lead us through;

  Marching along, yes we are marching along,

  To Kansas City we are bound...

  Pap knew the value of printed promotional materials, and his colorful broadsides and circulars were distributed widely; he made a special effort to get them into the hands of train porters, steamboat employees, and ministers. Thanks to his own formidable marketing skills and the help of two other dedicated Tennessee emigrationists, Columbus M. Johnson and A. D. DeFrantz, Singleton quickly became the movement's best-known advocate, proclaiming himself "the Moses of the Colored Exodus" and boasting ultimately of having brought more than seven thousand blacks to settle in Cherokee and Lyons Counties, Kansas.

  AN ADVERTISEMENT FOR SINGLETON'S SETTLEMENT PLAN

  Singleton's promotions, and those of other agents, exhorted potential travelers with posters exclaiming "Ho for Kansas!, Brethren, Friends, and Fellow Citizens," "All Colored People That Want to Go to Kansas ... Can do so for $5.00," and "See What Colored Citizens Are Doing for Their Elevation." Representatives of the Kansas Pacific Railroad also encouraged the move, circulating pamphlets that showed "illustrations of high colored life in Kansas" accompanied by enticing captions. A black landowner was seen "lassoing a buffalo going through a rich corn field" and relaxing beneath a tree on his property, "surrounded by squirrel, coon, rabbit, and chicken, so dear to his heart." The Vicksburg Commercial Daily Advertiser complained that "gloriously illuminated chromolithographs of Kansas scenes have been distributed among the blacks," showing "Old Auntie ... on the veranda knitting stockings while she gazes on herds of buffalo and antelope, which are feeding on the prairies beyond the wheat fields." Complicating efforts to separate fact from myth was the traditional tendency of western communities to exaggerate their attractiveness to prospective residents; some emigrants arrived in St. Louis clutching a brochure that had been prepared by the state of Kansas for the nation's centennial gathering at Philadelphia, listing its scenic and civic virtues.

  Unlike many other blacks who endorsed or joined the exodus, Singleton gave no credence to the idea that the move might improve blacks' political status. He had little patience for men and women foolish enough to think the whites would ever give them their equal rights; rather, he saw himself as a divinely inspired actor in a much grander struggle akin to the biblical story of Exodus, in which an eternally suffering people kept in bondage are at last set free. Like the pharaohs of Egypt, Singleton preached, Southern whites would be punished for slavery: when crops ripened on the stalk and fruit withered on the vine, with no labor to bring in the harvest, perhaps then they would recognize the error of their ways.

  Senator William Windom of Minnesota didn't share Pap's millennial vision, but he likewise wondered if the exodus might have a re-forming effect on the South. "If such a policy [of federally aided black migration] could be inaugurated," he stated, "it would do more to keep the peace and put the 'bulldozers' on their good behavior than would 20,000 soldiers marching through that country." A Minnesotan of Quaker background who had first learned of the exodus from Blanche Bruce, Windom was a longtime advocate of homesteading. On January 16, 1879, he introduced a resolution that Congress study the westward exodus with an eye toward assisting it. Predictable voices decried the resolution as unwarranted meddling, although Windom believed that blacks had the right to depart "those states and congressional districts where they are not allowed to freely and peacefully exercise and enjoy their constitutional rights," and enter "such states as may desire to receive them."

  Several days later Windom met with the South Carolina congressmen Robert Smalls, Richard Cain, and Joseph Rainey, as well as Richard Greener,
Harvard's first black graduate, who had served as professor of metaphysics and logic at the University of South Carolina but departed after Wade Hampton's election and was now a law professor at Howard University. Greener was blunt about the choices facing black Southerners in light of the collapse of Reconstruction. Black people had become accustomed to liberty and suffrage, he told Windom, and would no longer submit meekly to injustice, adding, "If the advice of leading colored men had been listened to ten years ago, many of the mistakes of Reconstruction might have been prevented, and the black man would not have been left, as now, naked and helpless in the hands of his enemies." Smalls, Cain, and Rainey suggested that a western territory might be formally set aside for black Southerners, one headed by recognized black leaders whose presence would in turn help attract and reassure black farmers and workers considering relocation. They pointed to the example of the South Carolina Sea Islands, where blacks were in a comfortable majority and lived in relative peace and prosperity. The capital of the islands, the town of Beaufort, had itself become a kind of black "promised land," they explained; as many as fifteen hundred black emigrants from elsewhere in South Carolina had arrived there during 1878 and 1879. Smalls had always disapproved of emigration to Liberia or other foreign lands (as did Windom), but he continued to welcome to his beloved Beaufort any blacks whose lives were made unbearable in other parts of the cotton South.

  Gatherings of prominent black leaders supported Windom's idea of government sponsorship. In May 1879 Congressman John Roy Lynch of Mississippi presided at a Nashville meeting that voted to request half a million dollars from Congress to enable "the colored people [to] emigrate to those states and territories where they can enjoy all the rights which are guaranteed by the laws and Constitution of the United States." This request, like many others, was turned down. Indeed, no legislation to aid the Exodusters ever emerged from Congress, despite a significant number of proposals. Southerners on Capitol Hill opposed vehemently any federal aid that would, by appearances, grant legitimacy to the exodus and encourage more departures from the fields, while the Democratic Washington Post labeled the Minnesotan's efforts misguided, referring to those blacks decamping from the South as "the wretched dupes of Mr. Windom's windy rhetoric." The paper blamed the exodus on "rascally demagogues" who had already robbed the freedmen "through the agency of the Freedmen's [sic] Bank." Flabbergasted at being accused of having instigated the exodus, Windom fired back that it was Southern Democrats who were truly responsible, having subjected blacks to "outrages never before practiced upon any free people on the face of the earth," including shooting at them as they waited to board northbound steamboats.

  The sole exception to Congress's passivity was an agreement to allow a Kansas aid society to avoid paying import duty on a 1879 shipment of used clothing sent by a reform group in England. Blanche Bruce won that bill's passage by reminding his Senate colleagues that money was often raised in America to aid the Irish poor overseas, and he asked that the English organization's charity be honored similarly. Most of the $40,000 in relief funds and gifts of food, clothing, and bedding that did reach exodus-assistance groups such as St. Louis's Refugee Relief Board and the Kansas Freedmen's Relief Association, based in Topeka, came from Quakers back east, Christian women's groups in the Midwest and Northeast, and communities in Kansas.

  EXODUSTERS LEAVING VICKSBURG

  President Hayes, who held a benign view of the migration, managed to steer clear of direct involvement until a black cleric named Thomas W. Conway, incensed at stories that steamboats had stopped picking up black passengers en route to St. Louis, made public his idea that the government should dispatch boats armed with troops to ferry emigrants north. Hayes had met with Conway and apparently given him some mild encouragement, but Democrats pounced on the rumor that Conway's armed federal "invasion" of the South might enjoy the president's approval. At his aides' urging, Hayes quickly disavowed any "endorsement" of Conway, not only to placate Democrats but to discourage emigrants from the belief that the government would guarantee their transportation.

  Of course, the world of presidential disclaimers and senators' resolutions was far removed from the disorder and uncertainty of the exodus itself, where black families of three and four generations, "fluttering in rags and wretchedness," their bundles and boxes stacked upon wagons, sat waiting for a steamboat to carry them north to St. Louis. "It is computed that up to date about 5,000 colored persons have left this region," a Northern reporter based in New Orleans wrote in early April 1879, "and the Anchor Line of steamboats, which plies between Vicksburg and St. Louis, takes them to the latter place at half price, where they are met by the Kansas Immigration Committee. They sell out their little stock, such as mules, etc., at great sacrifices." One emigrant from Mississippi said he had sold his home, valued at $400, for $6. A Missouri resident who aided a boatload of emigrants determined to reach Kansas recalled, "There was an offer of $80 a month for 500 of them to work on a railroad in Iowa, but they didn't know where Iowa was. They were afraid it was down South somewhere."

  Most observers who saw the hundreds of souls camped for days on the shores of the river, or huddled in tents or makeshift charity housing in Missouri or Kansas, would doubtless have considered them refugees rather than emigrants. But despite the hardships, few considered turning around.

  Elected black officials and other prominent men were made uncomfortable by a mass movement that negated their significance and whose homespun leaders publicly mocked them as superfluous. Senator Blanche Bruce was among the first national figures to discern and sympathize with the westward exodus, yet the impulsiveness of so vast a relocation ran counter to his own sense of what constituted progress for black Americans. "It is a matter of sincere regret," he said of the Kansas fever in the pseudonymous column he wrote under the name VINDEX for Pinchback's Louisianian, "that hundreds of our people, listening to the wild quixotic stories of railroad and steamboat agents, have been induced to abandon their homes at the South, and, without preparation or a definite idea of the geography, climate or productions of the new Eldorado to which their hopes point, have started on what may be called 'a wild goose chase.'"

  What troubled Bruce about the exodus was both the chaotic scenes of mass flight along the Mississippi shore and the celebrity of men like Pap Singleton, who insisted on seeing the movement in biblical terms.

  I feel that I do not overstate the case if I say that this criminal mismanagement ... is due largely to the influence of an illiterate and un-guided clergy ... The truth is ... that the negro has too much religion, rather than not enough, of the kind now in vogue. If less attention was paid to sensational prayer meetings, class meetings, festivals, bazaars, lotteries, societies of all sort ... and a thousand and one other fooleries, upon which the clergy of today live and luxuriate ... the colored people would be in far better condition than we now find them.

  A stampede of frightened people led by strange black men claiming divine appointment represented everything that Blanche Bruce was not. He suggested that a halt be called "until this matter is at least better understood and better organized."

  Bruce was concerned that the exodus would "jeopardize the industrial interests of at least eleven states," endangering the livelihoods of the sharecroppers, laborers, and their families who remained, and that the abrupt departure from the South would for many blacks prove unsuitable, even unnatural. "The colored people are the most unmigratory class of people in the world," he wrote. "Their love of home, the places rendered sacred by old associations, the buried places of their dead, and numerous other charms which fill their imagination, render them the most immovable of any of the races." Bruce's Mississippi congressional colleague James R. Chalmers believed that blacks possessed a "climatic fitness" for the South that worked to their advantage, since the intense sun and heat inhibited the ability of other races to work there. "The sun is the colored man's friend," Chalmers told his constituents. "Stay where your friend, the sun, aids you in the contest." />
  The black congressman Joseph Rainey of South Carolina differed sharply from Bruce; he saw not chaos in the exodus but the refreshing sign of the freedmen's determination to enjoy the citizenship rights won by the war. Theirs was a positive act of free will. As he told the New York Herald, "The freedman may lack education, but I'll assure you he is not quite the fool imagined ... Humanity forbids that this patient people should longer remain in the midst of their persecutors."

  It was Frederick Douglass who voiced perhaps the most significant disapproval of the exodus. Despite his basic admiration for the emigrants' initiative, he felt their movement constituted a retreat from the principle that all citizens deserved fair and equal treatment anywhere in the United States. Fleeing the South, he said, only postponed the inevitable struggle that must occur to ensure civil rights. He viewed that battle as one the blacks could ultimately win, given their concentrated political power in the region, but he feared that very power would be dissipated by the exodus. "Bad as it is," he wrote of the conditions in the South, "it is temporary. It will soon be seen that the South cannot suppress a half million of voters without great damage to itself ... The resentments and passions of the war must wear away." He also thought it prudent that blacks learn to stand their ground. "It is sometimes better to bear the ills we have than fly to others we know not of ... When I you part with your pig, your pony I and your little lot to go a thousand miles to look for a pig and a pony, your money will be gone, and your pig and your pony will not easily be replaced. Life is too short, time is too precious to be wasted in such experiments."

  FREDERICK DOUGLASS

  Douglass's views on the subject were so unpopular, his name was booed at Southern Exoduster gatherings. "Some say 'stay and fight it out, contend for your rights, don't let the old rebels drive you away, the country is as much yours as theirs,'" remarked the novelist William Wells Brown, referring to the great abolitionist. "That kind of talk will do very well for men who have comfortable homes out of the South, and law to protect them [Douglass resided in Washington]. But for the negro, with no home, no food, no work, the land-owner offering him conditions whereby he can do little better than starve, such talk is nonsense." At a meeting in New Orleans, someone raised the question as to how Douglass, who had himself escaped from the South to the North as a runaway slave, could now object to those who also sought to depart. Douglass replied in the pages of the New York Herald, "I doubt very much if I had found in the Constitution a Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendment, if I had seen a powerful political party pledged to the maintenance of my liberty, I would have run away. I think I would have stayed there ... I have full faith in the ultimate establishment of justice and liberty in the Southern states, and would have the colored man stand in his place and bide his time."