The African Americans

by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

  20 Joe M. Richardson, Christian Reconstruction: The American Missionary Association and Southern Blacks, 1861–1890 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), 3–5; Gates and Higginbotham, African American National Biography, 6:292.

  21 The best account of the South Carolina story remains Willy Lee Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (New York: Random House, 1964).

  22 The following account is based on Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “The Truth Behind ‘40 Acres and a Mule,’” 100 Amazing Facts about the Negro, The Root (January 7, 2013), http://www.theroot.com/views/truth-behind-40-acres-and-mule.

  23 Yacovone, Voice of Thunder, 272.

  24 Freedmen and Southern Society Project, http://www.history.umd.edu/Freedmen/sfo15.htm.

  6

  RECONSTRUCTION AND REDEMPTION 1865–1900

  IN JANUARY 1865, THE CHAPLAIN OF THE UNITED STATES HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, WILLIAM H. CHANNING, A BOSTON-BORN ABOLITIONIST AND UNITARIAN MINISTER, INVITED THE REVEREND HENRY HIGHLAND GARNET TO ADDRESS CONGRESS. Prior to him, the only African Americans allowed into the halls of the Capitol carried brooms and dustpans. Channing knew who he was inviting and what Garnet’s selection symbolized. Born a slave in Maryland, Garnet rose to become a minister, editor, and intellectual, one of the leading voices of black abolitionism prior to the Civil War.

  His best known speech remains his 1843 “Address to the Slaves of the United States” in which he called for slave insurrections. The address proved so disturbing to his fellow abolitionists and white supporters—even John Brown—that the Buffalo National Convention of black leaders where Garnet delivered the address refused to endorse it, and an accurate version of it did not appear in print until March 1863, after the North had declared war on slavery. During the war, Garnet received the call to Washington, D.C.’s 15th Street Presbyterian Church. This had been the pulpit of the Reverend John F. Cook, Sr. (1810?–1855), whose son, John F. Cook, Jr. (1833–1910), had been a member of the delegation that had met with President Lincoln in August 1862 to discuss the president’s colonization plans—and the same one later filled by the Reverend Francis J. Grimké (1850–1937), who would in 1909 become one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).1

  On February 12, 1865, Garnet became the first African American to speak officially in the Capitol building. He urged the nation to ratify Congress’s constitutional amendment permanently to end slavery in the United States. In his own words, the black minister asked Congress and the nation to “speedily finish the work he [God] has given you to do.” In his Memorial Discourse, Garnet drew upon Matthew 23:4 to advise Congress that a heavy responsibility now lay upon its members to act. For too long, others bore the “heavy and grievous burdens of duties and obligation.” Of this, Garnet could speak with authority: “The first sounds that startled my ear, and sent a shudder through my soul, were the cracking of the whip, and the clanking of chains.” Congress must act, Garnet explained, and do so until “emancipation shall be followed by enfranchisement, and all men holding allegiance to the government shall enjoy every right of American citizenship.” No better encapsulation of black aspirations for the postwar period could have been expressed.2

  Now that the war had been won, what was to be done with the former slaves? Whites asked this question repeatedly, but it was the wrong question. Formerly enslaved African Americans wanted the same things that white people wanted. The real question centered on what actions whites would take to advance or restrict black freedom—would justice and fairness guide their actions, or would they reestablish slavery but under another name? Frederick Douglass had formulated this very question as early as 1862, in the second year of the Civil War:

  What shall be done with the four million slaves if they are emancipated? This question has been answered, and can be answered in many ways. Primarily, it is a question less for man than for God—less for human intellect than for the laws of nature to solve. It assumes that nature has erred; that the law of liberty is a mistake; that freedom, though a natural want of human soul, can only be enjoyed at the expense of human welfare, and that men are better off in slavery than they would or could be in freedom; that slavery is the natural order of human relations, and that liberty is an experiment. What shall be done with them?

  Our answer is, do nothing with them; mind your business, and let them mind theirs. Your doing with them is their greatest misfortune. They have been undone by your doings, and all they now ask, and really have need of at your hands, is just to let them alone. They suffer by every interference, and succeed best by being let alone.

  Douglass spoke for the race when he advised whites: “Let us stand upon our own legs, work with our own hands, and eat bread in the sweat of our own brows.” The path to national reconciliation and justice was clear. “Deal justly with him,” Douglass advised. “He is a human being, capable of judging between good and evil, right and wrong, liberty and slavery, and is as much a subject of law as any other man.” So simple—but Douglass’s sentiments represented as distant a dream as could be imagined for an angry, defiant, defeated South, and even for some Northerners anxious about the economic competition represented by the sudden appearance of nearly four million new workers in the marketplace, hungry for jobs and wages.3

  With the nation pondering its own future, the former slaves were quick to leave the constraints of the plantation behind. They explored the parameters of their new freedom in countless ways, reorganizing their lives, families, and communities, even taking new names to signify that they were free men and women. Eager to solemnize bonds that had been treated with contempt under slavery, they rushed to marry, sometimes in mass weddings for as many as 70 couples. They established their own churches, which became centers of their communities. Many took to the roads, seeking out the lost family members from whom they’d been forcibly separated. Some former slaves who had succeeded in establishing a life of freedom in the North returned to the South in an attempt to find lost relatives and see what changes the war had wrought. Jermain Loguen’s experiences offer a good example of this.

  Jermain W. Loguen (1813–1872) had escaped Tennessee slavery in 1835 and eventually became a respected A.M.E. Zion minister and a leader of the Underground Railroad in Syracuse, New York. At the close of the war in July 1865, he returned to Columbia, in central west Tennessee, in search of his past and what had changed. He looked for the familiar whipping post and auction block, but both had disappeared. The slave pens remained, however, places where the “poor, innocent and almost heartbroken slaves” had waited to be chained together and driven to the sugar or cotton fields, places where the “young slave mother begging for her only babe” had “no mercy shown her.” Much to his delight, the region’s former slave owners and traders had taken up residence in the pens. At last, a measure of justice, he reasoned.

  In earshot of those new residents, Loguen preached to both whites and blacks—some of whom had come simply to see what had happened to old “Jarm,” the slave who had run away so long ago. But even Loguen wasn’t ready for one member of the audience. “The Lord was with me and gave me great liberty on that occasion, as we Methodist preachers sometimes say. My old mother, though very feeble, rode ten miles that she might hear her long-lost son.” The lucky few, such as Loguen, found parents or lost siblings, but many of the former slaves were left with nothing but their freedom.4

  Wallace Turnage (1846–1916), a former slave from North Carolina, embodied what “luck” really meant for a slave during the Civil War—and after. Turnage was born in Green County, North Carolina, on a small tobacco and cotton farm that had only seven slaves. His mother was a slave named Courtney and his father turned out to be Sylvester Brown Turnage, the white stepson of Turnage’s owner. Since Courtney had given birth to Turnage when she was only about 15 years old, she clearly had been the victim of sexual abuse and intimidation—an all too common fact of slave life. Turnage remained with his mother until 1860, when his owner
fell into debt and sent the 14-year-old boy to a Richmond, Virginia, slave dealer. In the late spring, the dealer sold Turnage for $1,000 to a Scottish-born Alabama cotton planter named James Chalmers. Richmond, the nexus of the internal slave trade, was the country’s largest market for slaves involved in the Second Middle Passage. Headed to the Deep South, the young Wallace had every reason to believe that he would never see his mother or familiar surroundings again.5

  His first day at the Alabama plantation proved a shock. A cruel overseer grabbed a poor woman in the field, hauled up her dress and applied the bullwhip. “Then he shook his whip at me and said hurry up young man.” The threat was a real one, as later in the year the same overseer expressed his dissatisfaction with the amount of cotton picked by his slaves by making one woman lie down in the field and pull her clothes over her head, then beating her mercilessly. He “gave that woman about two hundred lashes and I thought that was enough except he was going to kill her. I could see the skin fly near about every lick he struck her.”6 By the fall, after seeing enough horrifying abuse and feeling the bullwhip three or four times himself, Turnage decided to flee. But such resistance only enflamed his owners who, in one instance, applied 95 lashes to his back. For as long as Turnage remained in slavery, he plotted his escape. With the Civil War coming to northern Alabama and Mississippi, Turnage tried his best to escape to Union lines. During his third attempt he was caught in Mississippi, ironically turned in by another slave who feared the presence of a fugitive would only cause trouble. Returned to his owner, he received another 25 lashes.

  But neither recapture nor the bullwhip would keep Turnage on the farm. His fourth attempt nearly brought him within gunshot of Union lines at Corinth, in far northern Mississippi. Returned to his owner, Turnage fled again in the late summer of 1862 but was recaptured, this time after a mauling by several dogs sent to track him down. Fed up with his chronic runaway, Chalmers sent Turnage to Mobile, where he could be sold. He worked in a store—far easier labor than anything he had done previously—until a nephew of former President William Henry Harrison bought the 16-year-old for $2,000 in Confederate money, intent on making the boy a carriage driver and house slave. Turnage proved a disappointment because, once again, he immediately fled. Upon his return, his master had him brutally whipped—his back must have been a cascade of welts and scars—the worst beating of his young life. In response, Turnage again fled, once again unsuccessfully. While he did receive some assistance from other blacks, Turnage’s repeated attempts and failures reveal just how hard it was for a slave to escape his chains.

  While Turnage had exerted enormous energy and showed astounding courage in his attempt to reach Union lines, in the end the Union lines found him. In August 1864, the Union Navy under Admiral David Farragut famously ran the gauntlet of Confederate forts at the mouth of Mobile Bay, finally closing the last important rebel fort open to commerce. Turnage took advantage of the chaos of the battle and the inattention of rebel soldiers and frightened whites to carefully pick his way through the swamps, avoid the countless snakes, hide in the tall grasses, and eventually use an abandoned rowboat to reach Union forces—at long last seizing his own freedom. “I now dreaded the gun, and handcuffs and pistols no more…. I could now speak my opinion to men of all grades and colors, and no one to question my right to speak.”7

  The story does not stop there, however. It should not surprise us that Turnage—who appeared to have an unfailingly good sense of direction and enormous energy—found his way back to North Carolina, where, astonishingly, he reunited with his mother and his half brothers and sisters. Eventually, he settled in New York City, where he worked a variety of jobs, primarily as a waiter, moved his mother and siblings north, and married in the 1870s.

  While Turnage managed to save himself and his family from the retribution visited upon African Americans in the South by their former masters, the North hardly proved to be the promised land. Poverty and limited opportunity relegated the family to tenement squalor. His mother remained in Manhattan, managing to live until age 67, dying in 1898, after a career as a nursemaid, cook, and washerwoman—perhaps the very tasks she had performed in North Carolina. By the 1880s, Turnage had had his fill of Manhattan life and moved his wife and two children across the Hudson River to Jersey City, where he remained until his death in 1916. He still worked in Manhattan, however, and beginning in 1885, took the ferry to work, cruising every day past the Statue of Liberty.

  Those African American former slaves who remained in the South, however, confronted formidable obstacles. At the close of the war, most faced their freedom without land, money, a home, and in some cases, even without clothes. Congress established the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands in an attempt to mitigate the problems facing the former slaves and to negotiate labor contracts that would keep the slaves working, their former owners from bankruptcy, and all from facing ruin. But as General Sherman and Secretary Stanton learned when they asked those Southern black ministers in Savannah in January 1865 what they wanted for themselves, they heard unexpectedly clear and explicit answers. The government appeared to listen at first, as we have seen, and gave them the land they desired and deserved. But before long, the head of the bureau, General O. O. Howard, visited the Sea Islands and advised the former slaves that they would have to give up their land. “Why, General Howard,” the assembled freedmen asked, “Why do you take away our lands? You take them from us who are true, always true to the Government! You give them to our all-time enemies! That is not right!”8

  The disappointment of the Port Royal Experiment did not define the black response to freedom and their hopes for Reconstruction, but it did foretell much. For as long as Radical Republicans could keep Union troops in the South and fight off the determined efforts by President Andrew Johnson to return former Confederates to power and reinstate white racial domination, hope persisted that a new future could be created by African Americans. With new civil rights legislation and three constitutional amendments, and with allies like the Boston abolitionist Wendell Phillips and Senator Charles Sumner advancing their cause, African Americans achieved unprecedented levels of equality. As W. E. B. Du Bois once remarked, the former slaves “stood a brief moment in the sun.”9

  THE FORMER SLAVES FLOCKED TO FREEDMEN’S BUREAU SCHOOLS, AND IN PLACES WHERE THESE DIDN’T EXIST, THEY ATTEMPTED TO FORM THEIR OWN. They joined Union Leagues and organized to resist reinstatement of onerous and degrading black codes. Where the Army could enforce the peace, they voted and ran for office. More than half the officeholders in South Carolina between 1867 and 1876 were black men. Some of them, like Stephen Swails (1832–1900), hailed from the North. Swails had served in the 54th Massachusetts Regiment during the war, then decided that his duty still lay in the cause of freedom, so he remained in the South to help in the former slaves’ transition to full freedom. Swails served in the South Carolina state constitutional convention of 1868 and in the state senate. He edited a Republican newspaper, practiced law, and was even elected as a trustee of the University of South Carolina. He lasted until 1878, when “Redeemers”—former Confederates determined to restore as best they could the old order and the economic enslavement of the former slaves in all but name—drove him out of office and threatened his life. Others, even the famous fugitive slave narrator Harriet Jacobs (1813–1897), returned to the South to help in the work of Reconstruction. Many Northern blacks felt similarly committed and saw their work, whether for the AMA, the Freedmen’s Bureau, the Equal Rights League, or any number of other Northern freedmen’s aid societies, as integral to their antislavery commitment.10

  South Carolina proved especially rich and fertile soil for the nurturing of black political leaders. Robert Smalls, who, as we have seen, gained national attention by commandeering a rebel warship, went on to serve in the state constitutional convention of 1868 and in both houses of the state legislature from 1868 to 1874, and in 1872 and 1876 was a delegate to the Republican National Convention. Most signifi
cant, the former slave served as a congressman from 1875 to 1878 and from 1881 to 1886. He represented the state’s Fifth Congressional District, which included Beaufort, Smalls’s home, which is today on the national historic register. In the aftermath of Reconstruction, which ended in 1876, any African American serving in the U.S. Congress faced steep challenges. Intense white resistance limited the chances of sponsoring any important civil rights legislation, eliminating the possibility for real structural change. Nevertheless, the presence of black elected officials such as Smalls, even in the twilight of Reconstruction, gave a public, legislative voice to those who before war’s end had none.

  When Smalls took his seat in Congress in 1875, the House had become dominated by the Democratic Party, 169 delegates to 109 Republican ones. Of the 107 Southern Democrats, 80 were Confederate veterans, and 35 had been rebel generals. For African Americans and their antislavery allies, the 44th Congress looked more like 1858 than 1868. Nevertheless, Smalls forged ahead with his work, assuming a seat on the House agricultural committee. He also began filing bills, ones that would favorably affect both the white and black constituents in his district. He not only requested funds to erect public buildings like a customhouse and post office, but he also supported the naval presence at Port Royal and presented several private relief bills, even one for Henry McKee, his former master. He became known for his extemporaneous commentary and effective rebuttals to his racist colleagues.

  While his political enemies attempted to characterize Smalls as inept and corrupt, in fact he was an effective and astute legislator who properly represented his district. A voice for justice and equal rights at a time when the North was abandoning blacks to the tender mercies of the white South, he bravely co-authored a bill that in effect sought to end segregation in the Army—which would remain segregated until 1948—and make “no distinction whatever … on account of race or color.”11