Capitol Men
Page 48
Increasingly finding himself an artifact of a time few knew or understood, his influence and health waning and his brand of political activism eclipsed, Pinchback left New Orleans and settled in Washington, where he and Nina lived out the rest of their days. Their son Bismarck, who had attended Yale to study medicine, and their daughter Nina died, and the two remaining children, Walter and Pinckney, were by now long gone from the house, Pinckney a pharmacist in Philadelphia, Walter an attorney. Nina's son, the Harlem Renaissance writer Jean Toomer, reflected later that Pinchback, conscious of his own unpolished background, may have too forcefully demanded that his children attain conventional academic distinction; all four Pinchback children spent time at Northern universities or finishing schools. "In doing all this, my grandfather had the very best intentions, without doubt. But ... though part of his nature was affectionate and sincerely good-wishing, another part was egotistical, domineering, and headstrong. With too little wisdom he cut his children's patterns, particularly the boys', and then tried to force them to fit in." Toomer recalled that Pinchback never relinquished his love of entertaining and fine things, of attending banquets and stag parties, and that even in Washington, many years and miles removed from the heady days of Reconstruction New Orleans, friends and family unfailingly addressed him as "Governor."
There was the occasional monument unveiling or testimonial dinner to attend, and he still corresponded and advised where he could, but for the most part he was the historically interesting black gentleman in coat and top hat who, it was said, had once been the governor of Louisiana. With his dignified bearing and handsomely trimmed Vandyke beard, he bore a strong resemblance in old age to the philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, for whom, much to his amusement, he was occasionally mistaken in his perambulations around the capital. After Pinchback's death in 1921, when Toomer brought his grandfather's body back by train from Washington, barely a quorum of his gray-haired former associates gathered at the New Orleans depot. The local press took scant notice; the Daily Picayune headlined its short obituary "Negro Who Held State Office Dies" and inexcusably referred to Henry Clay Warmoth as "Womack."
While surviving black Reconstruction figures grew accustomed to such slights, John Roy Lynch of Mississippi chose to make a corrective response. Never relinquishing his egalitarian vision of American race relations, he became an active memoirist of the Reconstruction period because he was concerned that most historians and other commentators were distorting it. He would produce two informative books, The Facts of Reconstruction (1913) and an autobiography, Reminiscences of an Active Life (not published until 1970), but his most daring literary exploit was to challenge two of America's most prominent early historians of Reconstruction, James Ford Rhodes and Claude G. Bowers. Rhodes's multivolume history dealing with the war and Reconstruction, History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 to the Final Restoration of Home Rule at the South in 1877, appeared in 1906, although a decade passed before Lynch saw it. He then informed his friend George A. Myers, a black Ohioan who managed the barbershop in the lobby of Cleveland's Hollenden Hotel and who knew Rhodes, of his displeasure with the work's inaccuracy. Rhodes replied through Myers that Lynch's objections did not surprise him since he (Lynch) "was a severely partisan actor at the time while I, an earnest seeker after truth, am trying to hold a judicial balance and to tell the story without fear, favor, or prejudice." Myers offered to introduce the two men, but Rhodes declined, instead saying, "Why does not Mr. Lynch write a magazine article and show up my mistakes and inaccuracies and injustice?"
Taking Rhodes's suggestion, Lynch produced a lengthy two-part article titled "Some Historical Errors of James Ford Rhodes," which appeared in the Journal of Negro History in October 1917 and April 1918 (both sections were published together in book form in 1922). Lynch began with a shot directly across the bow, writing of Rhodes's work, "I regret to say that, so far as the Reconstruction period is concerned, it is not only inaccurate and unreliable but it is the most biased, partisan, and prejudiced historical work I have ever read." He took issue with the very title of Rhodes's book, pointing out that in terms of the region's demographics, the South had actually enjoyed home rule, if that phrase meant democratic rule by the broadest number of residents, only under the Reconstruction governments of the late 1860s and early 1870s. Lynch parodied Rhodes's contentions that it had been wrong to enfranchise blacks after the war, that those who entered politics were incompetent, or that they ever dominated Southern politics. He argued that blacks in elected offices were no more incompetent or corrupt than whites and that the Reconstruction governments achieved many significant breakthroughs; indeed, Lynch ventured that "the Southern reconstructed governments were the best governments those states ever had before or have ever had since." Myers sent Lynch's lawyerly article on to Rhodes with his own scribbled admonishment: "I think one of your mistakes was made in not seeing and talking with the prominent Negro participants that I could have put you in touch with."
Years later Lynch also laid siege to one of the most popular books ever written about Reconstruction, Claude G. Bowers's The Tragic Era: The Revolution After Lincoln, published in 1929. Bowers's entertaining work drew ruthless caricatures of Republicans, blacks, and carpetbaggers and offered a vivid purplish-prose account of the era's drama, while suggesting that the nation had erred in not accepting President Andrew Johnson's version of Reconstruction. To Bowers, a veteran author of popular nonfiction in the 1920s, the complete marginalization of blacks in American society was so much the entrenched status quo that congressional Reconstruction could perhaps only appear as a sad, painful burlesque; but Lynch was merciless in taking the white author to task for numerous inaccuracies.
His high-society marriage to Ella Somerville having ended in a bitter divorce, Lynch ultimately married a woman much younger than him and lived out the rest of his ninety-two years in Chicago, dying there in 1939.
While Lynch had the satisfaction of knowing he had tried to set the historical record straight, Richard Cain of South Carolina lived to see the partial realization of his own long-held dream, that of enabling people of color to own their own land. Having watched his plans for congressional underwriting of land distribution and the state's own land commission flame out ingloriously, Cain in 1871 founded his own land development company. It was a project launched perhaps less on sound business principles than on Cain's charisma and the support of his religious followers, but it would see tangible results.
The scheme began, legend has it, with an epiphany beside a railroad track. Daddy Cain was leaving Charleston one day in the company of six other A.M.E. church trustees when their train stopped for wood and water about twenty miles west of the city at a depot known as Pump Pond. Glancing out the window, he became intrigued by a land-for-sale sign, and to his colleagues' surprise, insisted they immediately get off the train.
Cain ultimately purchased about two thousand acres of land around Pump Pond. Renaming the location Lincolnville, he subdivided it into lots of two to ten acres and offered them for sale at reasonable prices to settlers who agreed to clear their own property and erect homes. Over the next decade Cain sold about sixty of these lots, including one for the construction of an A.M.E. church. Unfortunately, he had begun selling off land parcels in Lincolnville before he could make the first payments on the land, which were due six months after the purchase agreement. Therefore a grand jury indicted him for taking money under false pretenses, that is, selling land that he did not himself own. He was arrested, but his legal counsel and friend, Robert Brown Elliott, arranged for Cain's case to be dropped under the condition the money be refunded.
When the New York Times, reporting on Cain's troubles on June 15, 1874, noted that, "It can very safely be said that South Carolina has more criminals in office than any other state in the Union," Cain fired back a lengthy letter, which the newspaper published. "I have settled more colored people in comfortable houses than any other man in the state," he asserted, "and not one family have
lost a dollar by any sale which I ever made to them. Anyone may go to South Carolina today and find the people who know me, and they will testify to the facts. The village of Lincoln[ville], twenty miles from Charleston, is a settlement of colored people. If your correspondent will take the trouble to go there he will find 40 odd families comfortably situated—a church, a school, and a most happy and prosperous community, and not one of them will charge me with defrauding them."
Despite the long-ago retraction of General Sherman's Field Order Number 15, the mismanagement that plagued the state land commission, and the quixotic nature of real estate ventures like Lincolnville, South Carolina fared surprisingly better than most other states in promoting black ownership of land during Reconstruction. The land commission had bought 168 plantations, for a total of almost ninety-three thousand acres, and about two thousand black families were able to take advantage of the land offered for sale on reasonable terms. Between these efforts and the land forfeitures of the immediate postbellum period, it is estimated that four thousand black South Carolina families obtained land in the decade or so following the war, as compared with the thirty thousand who had done so across the South by 1870. By the 1890 census, the number of landholding black South Carolinians had more than tripled, as families subdivided lands under their control and whites continued to sell off small parcels of once-vast plantations.
Lincolnville, notwithstanding its rocky start, was by the mid-1880s a nearly all-black town of one hundred homes, and the community Cain had brought into being maintained its growth even after he died in Washington in 1887. Today, it remains a biracial working-class enclave of suburban Charleston, where residents chiefly own their own property; many continue to honor the locale's history, which is ennobled by an "official town poem":
Seven men of color had a dream, where men could live and toil
Among the stately pines that stand, enriched infertile soil,
Soil that had been nurtured by those who fought and died,
Oh Lincolnville, Oh Lincolnville, what heritage and pride.
THE PROSPECT OF "OWNING A PIECE OF THE LAND THAT HAD OWNED THEM" TANTALIZED THE FREE PEOPLE.
Cain's insistence on land for South Carolina's freedmen and even the validity of the land commission he'd done so much to instigate were to an extent later vindicated by Carol Bleser, a researcher who in the 1960s met with descendants of some of the original land commission settlers. They resided in an upcountry hamlet known as Promised Land, created in 1870 and consisting of seven hundred acres sold by the commission; by 1872 fifty black families had settled there, paying ten dollars down for farms of fifty to one hundred acres. Unlike the Sea Islands, with their overwhelming black majority, Promised Land was situated in an area where blacks were in the minority and tended to reside in isolated settlements. "Those we talked to were devoid of the embarrassment often felt by Negroes who have had the color line constantly emphasized in meeting white people," Bleser reported. "The possession of land gave them a sense of self-assurance and a certain feeling of equality, both attitudes usually lacking in black tenants and urban workers in the South."
According to Bleser, Promised Land settlers thrived in part by having little to do economically with the surrounding whites. Instead of raising a potentially profitable cash crop like cotton, they diversified their agriculture and concentrated on subsistence farming, growing vegetables and corn and keeping livestock. Crop diversity protected them from the vagaries of the cotton market and allowed them to steer clear of the ruinous debt that haunted many black sharecroppers; they also were able to avoid buying seed, fertilizer, and other goods at overpriced plantation stores. "The genius of this kind of farming," another researcher would conclude, "was that it kept them from getting trapped in the 'crop lien' system that destroyed so many other families, both black and white. They did not get rich, but they endured."
Like P.B.S. Pinchback and John Roy Lynch, many black figures prominent in Reconstruction ultimately drifted away from the South, relocating to Washington, New York, or Chicago. A notable exception was Robert Smalls. His political career at an end following the Tillman-dominated constitutional convention of 1895 in South Carolina, he returned to live out the remainder of his life in Beaufort, in the same house on Prince Street where he and his mother had once served as slaves and which Smalls had purchased at government auction in 1864. Smalls's wife, Hannah, died in 1883, and in 1890 he married Annie Wigg, a teacher from Savannah, whom the News & Courier considered "an exceedingly handsome woman of respectable connections"; they had a son, William. Of the three children from his first marriage, Robert Jr. had died as a child, Sara became a music teacher, and Elizabeth, who had served as her father's secretary in Washington, married the editor of the Beaufort Free South; when her husband died she became the Beaufort postmistress.
President William McKinley, for whom Smalls had campaigned, appointed him collector of customs for the port of Beaufort, a position of authority and extensive patronage that suited Smalls well. Whatever local observers thought of his politics, there was no question that Smalls was devoted to his Sea Islands community and its people; from long habit, it seems, he never stopped thinking of them as his constituents. When a hurricane swept over the islands in late August 1893, drowning four hundred men, women, and children and causing an estimated $2 million in damage, Smalls assumed a leading role in the rescue and recovery. "These sea islands are the homes chiefly of negroes who by thrift and industry have made themselves homes, with no one to molest or make them afraid," Smalls wrote of his friends and neighbors. "In one night all has been swept away."
With the turn of the century Smalls remained a familiar figure in the scenic coastal town, a genial old war hero whose most visible public role arrived each May 30, Decoration Day, when he led a procession to the national cemetery just beyond the city limits. The cemetery was the largest enduring testament to the substantial federal presence in Beaufort during the Civil War, as it contained the remains of Union dead from Pennsylvania, Indiana, New York, and numerous other Northern states, as well as African Americans who had served with the federal forces. For the occasion, blacks from the vicinity would pour into Beaufort, and Smalls, now a portly, stooped, but still exceedingly proud man, strapped on his sword and other ceremonial effects and marched at the head of the Beaufort Light Infantry, up Carteret Street to the graveyard. Later there would be a reception at his house, perhaps with distinguished out-of-town visitors. One year he arranged for Booker T. Washington to attend. Surely Washington had Smalls in mind when he observed that "one of the surprising results of the Reconstruction Period was that there should spring from among the members of a race that had been held so long in slavery, so large a number of shrewd, resolute, resourceful, and even brilliant men, who became, during this brief period of storms and stress, the political leaders of the newly enfranchised race."
Lionized as he was in Beaufort, however, Smalls was made to ride Jim Crow when he traveled to Columbia or Charleston by train, seated in a dirty coach with cigar stubs on the floor and broken windows; in 1904 he was told to move to the back of a Charleston streetcar. As he had in Philadelphia forty years earlier, he chose to get off rather than be humiliated, but this time no citywide protest gathered to defend his rights.
Smalls's long connection with federal patronage finally ran out in 1913, when, with the advent of the Democratic administration of Woodrow Wilson, he lost his post as a customs official; at the same time his health began to deteriorate. It was said that as long as he could muster the strength, prior to his death in February 1915, he liked to visit the local schoolhouse set aside for use by black students, where he urged the youngsters to take seriously the opportunity for education he had never had. Invariably, the children reported to their parents that "the General" had come by again, telling the story of the great war and the night he had run the Confederate ship Planter out of Charleston Harbor.
Beaufort still talks of how, in the days immediately after the end of that confli
ct, Jane McKee, the wife of Smalls's former master, showed up at the house on Prince Street late one evening, disoriented and without means. Smalls took her in. Mrs. McKee, apparently unable to countenance a world so utterly changed, continued to believe that she was living in earlier times, and Smalls allowed her to stay with him in her old house until her death, never confronting her with the fact that a terrible war had been fought, that slavery had ended, and that her former slave had gone off to the nation's capital to serve in Congress, make laws, and confer with presidents.
The story may well be apocryphal, but Smalls did assist Jane McKee and other members of the McKee family during Reconstruction, and there would have been a kind of elegant symmetry to the fact that Smalls, who in a sense kept Reconstruction alive in Beaufort longer than anywhere else in the South, was at the same time maintaining a private fantasy of antebellum life for his former owner's widow. It was a deception only the "Boat Thief" could have managed, or would have been gracious enough to perform.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
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