The African Americans

by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

  Christian A. Fleetwood (1840–1914), Alfred B. Hilton (?–1864), and Charles Veal (?–1872) from the Fourth USCT and Thomas Hawkins (1840–1870) and Alexander Kelly (1840–1907) of the Sixth showed such valor that each earned the Medal of Honor, although the initial attack failed. At 7 a.m., the 5th, 36th, and 38th USCT renewed the assault, running over the bodies of their comrades. So many white officers had been killed or wounded that black noncommissioned officers, such as Milton M. Holland (1844–1910), Robert Pinn (1843–1911), and Powhatan Beaty (1839?–1916), took over command of their companies and also won the Medal of Honor. Edward Ratcliff (1835–1915), a sergeant in the 38th from Yorktown, Virginia, was the first enlisted man to enter the rebel trenches, leading Company C of the regiment, for which he too won the Medal of Honor. On September 29, the black units in the assault lost 141 men who were killed and 729 who were wounded.

  Christian A. Fleetwood, circa 1900. Photograph. Collection of W. E. B. Du Bois, Library of Congress.

  In two days of fighting, Union forces suffered 391 killed, 2,317 wounded, and 649 either missing or captured. In total, 14 African American soldiers won the Medal of Honor for their valor in the engagement, an unprecedented instance of heroism. Butler’s strategy succeeded, but once again black men had to pay the highest and ultimate price to combat the aspersions cast upon their courage by racial prejudice.19

  WHILE THE “DAY OF JUBILEE” FINALLY CAME WITH THE RATIFICATION OF THE 13TH AMENDMENT IN DECEMBER 1865, ending the enslavement of almost four million people of African descent, some white Americans still wondered about what now to do with the former slaves. In fact, the question loomed over the war from the moment runaway slaves, the “contraband,” first began entering Union lines at Fortress Monroe. Indeed, many of the central issues of Reconstruction arose at the start of the war. The flood of former slaves gathering at Fortress Monroe caught the attention of the American Missionary Association—the evangelical organization that would take the lead in freedmen’s education. AMA Treasurer Lewis Tappan, an abolitionist for more than 30 years, negotiated an arrangement with General Butler—then in command of Fortress Monroe—to allow the association to teach and care for the many fugitives collecting under the army’s protection. In September, the AMA hired Mary S. Peake (1823–1862), a free black from Norfolk, Virginia, to run its first day school for the “contraband.”

  Peake, born Mary Smith Kelsey in Norfolk, was the daughter of a free black mother and an Englishman, although their names remain unknown. Peake lived with an aunt and uncle in Alexandria, Virginia, for about ten years where she attended school and learned needlework and dressmaking. In 1847, her mother married Thompson Walker and the family moved to Hampton, which possessed a vigorous black community. She joined the First Baptist Church; established the Daughters of Zion, a social welfare organization; and in 1851 married Thomas Peake, a former slave. She also secretly taught slaves to read, against Virginia law. She was teaching in Hampton during the opening months of the war when Confederate raiders burned out the city’s black community. The Peakes then moved to a house near Fortress Monroe in which they lived on the second floor and taught school for the AMA on the first.

  Her school, focusing on the children of former slaves, emphasized basic elementary education and Bible studies, typical of AMA efforts. Although she began suffering from “consumption”—tuberculosis—she also started an evening school for adult former slaves. She pushed herself, displaying exceptional commitment to her students as her health declined. She became so sick that an AMA agent found her bedridden, but surrounded by her students and still teaching. Her commitment to the work remains a heroic example of religious devotion and dedication to black uplift. The disease overwhelmed her, however; and after suspending her school, she died on September 22, 1862.

  The AMA could not be more glowing in its praise of Peake’s work. “Even in death,” her successor remarked, “the radiance of her life … illuminated the society of her race.” The organization would not let her contribution come to naught or go unrecognized, so AMA agents established other schools based on her model and formalized her school, renaming it the “Butler School.” Then in 1869, the AMA chartered Peake’s original school as the Hampton Institute, now Hampton University, which counted Booker T. Washington among its many graduates. Undeservedly obscure, Peake left a fabulous legacy.20

  RIGHT AFTER MARY PEAKE ESTABLISHED HER SCHOOL AT FORTRESS MONROE, THE UNION NAVY MOVED INTO THE CAROLINA SEA ISLANDS AND SET UP COMMAND AT PORT ROYAL HARBOR. One of their first orders of business was to determine what to do with the 10,000 “contraband” there, the former property of so many runaway masters. Under orders from Secretary of the Treasury Salmon Chase, William W. Pierce, a Boston lawyer, directed efforts and organized a group of missionaries and teachers—they called themselves “Gideon’s Band.” In March 1862, 53 Northerners arrived to assist the freed slaves in their transition to freedom. Among the many white volunteers was one black teacher from Philadelphia. Her name was Charlotte Forten (1837–1914), a member of the prominent Forten-Purvis families, and she would, fortunately for us, keep a diary of her experiences. Just like her white colleagues, she possessed little if any understanding of local traditions and Southern, rural African American culture and tended to see the former slaves as exotics, lacking rudiments of “civilization.” Fortunately, she and her colleagues focused on establishing schools for basic literacy training first, and also inculcating Northern middle-class values among the former slaves.21

  They pursued literacy with alacrity, but sickened by a lifetime of enforced labor and the imposition upon them of the desires of white people, some of the former slaves showed little desire to meet the occupational or labor expectations of the missionaries and federal officials. They preferred to raise food crops or no crops at all, instead of the cotton that the government wished them to plant, which only reminded them of their enslavement. (Former slaves in Haiti similarly refused to work on sugar plantations, preferring instead their small subsistence plots.) Many destroyed cotton gins—never wanting to see that cursed machine again—and instead grew corn and potatoes. African Americans knew their own interests and wanted land, which represented the only thing that could safeguard their future, not dollops of cash.

  When the federal government sold the abandoned lands seized from the rebel owners in March 1863, African Americans could only purchase 2,000 of the total of 21,000 acres. Obviously, few had any resources to invest. Most of the land went to government officials and speculators. For instance, the Boston abolitionist Edward Philbrick amassed 7,000 acres and transformed the property into a free-labor cotton plantation, believing that marketplace success offered African Americans the best path to independence. Black people, however, insisted on owning their own land and growing their own crops. This tension between the desires of blacks and those of whites pervaded an effort called “the Port Royal Experiment.” The beginning of the end of this experiment came, ironically, following a tragically brief period of time during which the former slaves had received just what they requested.

  On January 16, 1865, General William Tecumseh Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15, granting to the local blacks about 400,000 acres of land on the Sea Islands and along the South Carolina coast. The order represented the first systematic attempt to provide any form of reparations to newly freed slaves, and it was astonishingly radical for its time. In fact, such a policy—the federal government’s massive confiscation of private property formerly owned by Confederates and its methodical redistribution to black former slaves—would be radical at any time.

  Contraband working cotton field at the Retreat Plantation, South Carolina, by Hubbard & Mix, Beaufort, South Carolina, 1860s. Photograph on stereocard. Library of Congress.

  Although Sherman later said that he had no intention of permanently redistributing these lands, in fact, there was no indication at the time that the confiscation of property belonging to those who had levied war against the United States was anything but l
egal, and even the moral thing to do. Imagine the history of race relations in the United States had this policy stood—had the former slaves actually had access to the ownership of land, of property! If the former slaves could have achieved economic self-sufficiency, perhaps the entire history of race relations in this country would have been markedly different. One of the principal promises of America has been the possibility of average people enjoying the right and the opportunity to own land, and all that such ownership entails. Historically, it is the principal means by which one generation passes on wealth to subsequent generations in this country.22

  Most accounts of Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15, however, leave out the fact that the idea for massive land redistribution actually resulted from a discussion that Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton held four days before Sherman issued the order. They had met with 20 ministers of the black community in Savannah, Georgia, where Sherman was headquartered following his famous March to the Sea. The meeting was unprecedented in American history. At 8 p.m., January 12, 1865, on the second floor of the transplanted Englishman and cotton merchant Charles Green’s mansion on Savannah’s Macon Street, the two Union leaders heard what African Americans had to say.

  Aware of the great historical significance of the meeting, Stanton presented Henry Ward Beecher (Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous brother) a verbatim transcript of the discussion, which Beecher read to his congregation at New York’s Plymouth Church and which the New York Daily Tribune printed in full in its February 13, 1865, edition. Stanton told Beecher that “for the first time in the history of this nation, the representatives of the government had gone to these poor debased people to ask them what they wanted for themselves.” He had suggested to Sherman that they gather “the leaders of the local Negro community” and ask them something no one else had apparently thought to ask: “What do you want for your own people” following the war? And what they wanted astonishes us even today.

  Who were these thoughtful leaders who exhibited such foresight? All were ministers, mostly Baptist and Methodist, and, curiously, 11 of the 20 had been born free in the slave states, and all but one had lived as free men in the Confederacy during the course of the Civil War. The remaining man, James Lynch, was a black abolitionist and minister from Baltimore who had attended Dartmouth College and originally came south in July 1863 to become the new chaplain for the renowned 54th Massachusetts Regiment. Although the unit’s officers voted to make Lynch their chaplain, the army failed to muster him and at some point he resettled in Georgia.23 The other nine ministers had been slaves in the South who became “contraband” and hence free when Union forces liberated them.

  Their chosen leader and spokesman was a 67-year-old Baptist minister named Garrison Frazier (1798–?), who had been born in Granville, North Carolina, and remained a slave until 1857, “when he purchased freedom for himself and wife for $1,000 in gold and silver,” as the New York Daily Tribune reported. The Reverend Frazier had been “in the ministry for thirty-five years,” and it was he who bore the responsibility of answering the 12 questions that Sherman and Stanton put to the group. Clearly, the stakes for the future of African Americans could not have been higher.

  Frazier and his ministerial brothers did not disappoint. What did they tell Sherman and Stanton that the Negro most wanted? Land! “The way we can best take care of ourselves,” the Reverend Frazier began his answer to the crucial third question, “is to have land, and turn it and till it by our own labor … and we can soon maintain ourselves and have something to spare…. We want to be placed on land until we are able to buy it and make it our own.” And when asked next where the freed slaves “would rather live—whether scattered among the whites or in colonies by themselves,” without missing a beat, Brother Frazier (as the transcript calls him) replied that “I would prefer to live by ourselves, for there is a prejudice against us in the South that will take years to get over….” When polled individually around the table, all but one—James Lynch, the Baltimorean—agreed with Frazier.

  Four days later, Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15, after President Lincoln approved it. The response to the order was immediate. When the transcript of the meeting was reprinted in the newspaper of the A.M.E. Church, the Christian Recorder, an editorial note intoned that “from this it will be seen that the colored people down South are not so dumb as many suppose them to be,” reflecting North-South, slave-free black class tensions that continued well into the modern civil rights movement. The effect throughout the South was electric. The Baptist minister Ulysses L. Houston (1824–?), one of those who had met with Sherman, led 1,000 blacks to Skidaway Island, Georgia, where they established a self-governing community with Houston as the “black governor.” By June, 40,000 freedmen had settled on 400,000 acres of “Sherman Land.” The general later ordered that the Army could lend the new settlers mules; hence the phrase “40 acres and a mule.”

  We commonly use that phrase, “40 acres and a mule,” but few of us have read the order itself. Section 1 bears repeating in full: “The islands from Charleston, south, the abandoned rice fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering the St. Johns river, Florida, are reserved and set apart for the settlement of the negroes now made free by the acts of war and the proclamation of the President of the United States.” Section II specifies that these new communities, moreover, would be governed entirely by black people themselves, “… on the islands, and in the settlements hereafter to be established, no white person whatever, unless military officers and soldiers detailed for duty, will be permitted to reside; and the sole and exclusive management of affairs will be left to the freed people themselves…. By the laws of war, and orders of the President of the United States, the negro is free and must be dealt with as such.”24

  The fifth provision is key, whatever Sherman may have later said—or thought:

  In order to carry out this system of settlement, a general officer will be detailed as Inspector of Settlements and Plantations, whose duty it shall be to visit the settlements, to regulate their police and general management, and who will furnish personally to each head of a family, subject to the approval of the President of the United States, a possessory title in writing, giving as near as possible the description of boundaries; and who shall adjust all claims or conflicts that may arise under the same, subject to the like approval, treating such titles altogether as possessory.

  Despite the obvious promise—in writing—President Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s successor, allowed former slaveholders to take back any land that had gone unsold. The following year, Union soldiers forced black settlers off the land if they did not sign a lease agreement, incredibly, with the original white owners. A largely compliant Congress, worried over the constitutionality of the land seizures, permitted the dispossession of the former slaves. As a result, the majority of blacks lost their claim to “Sherman Land” and any hope for a secure future. And this was an augur of things to come for the former slaves. After a brief decade of hope called Reconstruction, the promise offered by the Port Royal Experiment, Special Field Order No. 15, and three amendments to the Constitution could not withstand the social and political tensions that would undermine attempts to grant full equality to African Americans. Still, as W. E. B. Du Bois would put it, the coming decade of Reconstruction would be America’s “finest effort to achieve democracy for the working millions which this world had ever seen.”

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  1 C. Peter Ripley, et al., eds., The Black Abolitionist Papers, The United States, 1859–1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991–1992), 5:43–49.

  2 “Banneker” to Thomas Hamilton, January 22, 1860, in New York Weekly Anglo-African, January 28, 1860.

  3 Ripley, The Black Abolitionist Papers, 5:9.

  4 Donald Yacovone, ed., Freedom’s Journey: African American Voices of the Civil War (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2004), quoted 46.

  5 Henry Loui
s Gates, Jr., and Donald Yacovone, eds. Lincoln on Race and Slavery (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 113–14, 215–17.

  6 Donald Yacovone, ed., A Voice of Thunder: The Civil War Letters of George E. Stephens (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), quoted 12–13.

  7 David F. Allmendinger and William Scarborough, “The Days Ruffin Died,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 97 (1997): 75–96; Weekly Anglo-African April 27, 1861; Yacovone, Voice of Thunder, 14.

  8 Yacovone, Freedom’s Journey, quoted 49.

  9 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Life Upon These Shores: Looking at African American History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), quoted 123; Yacovone, Freedom’s Journey, 90.

  10 Gates, Life Upon These Shores, 124–25.

  11 Yacovone, Freedom’s Journey, quoted 96.

  12 Washington (Penn.) Reporter, June 19, 1862; Yacovone, Voice of Thunder, 292 quoted.

  13 David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass’s Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 115 quoted.

  14 Dudley Taylor Cornish, The Sable Arm: Negro Troops in the Union Army, 1861–1865 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966), 70–76, 79, 92, 96, 98, 103–04; Noah Andre Trudeau, Like Men of War: Black Troops in the Civil War, 1862–1865 (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1998), 6 quoted.

  15 Yacovone, Voice of Thunder, 27, 49.

  16 Gates and Higginbotham, African American National Biography, 1:510–11.

  17 General Colin Powell, Foreword to Hope & Glory: Essays on the Legacy of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, eds. Martin H. Blatt, Thomas J. Brown, and Donald Yacovone (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), xvii.

  18 Benjamin F. Butler, Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences: Butler’s Book, A Review of His Legal, Political, and Military Career (Boston: A.? M. Thayer, 1892), 742 quoted.

  19 USCT Casualties of USCT Units at the Battle of New Market Heights, www.nps.gov/rich/historyculture/casualties.htm.