The Bonfire

by Marc Wortman

  They prepared to live a gracious country life on the outskirts of the town while enjoying its expanding urban advantages. They purchased one hundred acres, for $1,460, out the tree-shaded Marietta Road, a mile and a half from the hubbub surrounding the car shed. The Western & Atlantic trains clattered by in a cut down the hill from their house, but boxwood hedges and orchards they planted sheltered the view. The attractive, sloping woods and fields were topped by a hill where they constructed one of Atlanta’s most imposing estates. They modeled their new home on their former house in Thomasville. Sitting foursquare at the crest of the hill on a large lawn, the house had massively solid stone walls with a thick impasto of whitewashed plaster. The Ponders attached a brick kitchen—a rarity in the period when kitchens were normally kept far removed from the main house for fear of fire. From a rooftop observatory, they enjoyed the fresh breeze and panoramic views over orchards, clipped geometric boxwood, topiary bushes, and parterre beds, far into the surrounding countryside and down towards the center of town. Their slaves could take in work in three large industrial workshops on the property and lived in a neighboring row of slave cabins. Ponder foresaw in Atlanta a comfortable retirement, likely more enriching than anything possible for even a large Black Belt plantation owner.

  NOT SO FOR FESTUS FLIPPER, the Ponders’ most trusted bondsman; the prospect of the Atlanta move drove him to despair. He faced a likely permanent separation from his wife, Isabella, and their three-year-old son, Henry. Mother and child belonged to a Thomasville neighbor, Rev. Reuben Luckey. He ran a prominent local Methodist academy, and neither he nor the Ponders were willing to put up the purchase price to keep the Flipper family together. Flipper’s wife and son would have to remain behind. It was a tragically common fate for slave families. Flipper refused to remain separated from his wife and son.

  He worked his way through the web of laws designed to keep blacks from advancing beyond their day-to-day dependence on their owners. He labored past the daily hours required of him, selling his services on nights and Sundays. He accumulated enough money to buy Isabella and Henry from Reverend Luckey. The Ponders agreed to accept two more slaves onto their estate. They would repay Festus at some point when “convenient.”

  Flipper likely spent more than $1,000 for his wife and child to remain slaves, but the family could now dwell together at the Ponders’ new Atlanta home. “The joy of the wife can be conceived,” their son, Henry, later wrote, “—it cannot be expressed.”

  THE FLIPPERS MOVED WITH their owners to Atlanta. Once there, Flipper and the other skilled slaves were free to contract their own time. Ponder would have nothing to do with their business other than to provide them with necessary permits and travel passes and to collect his “rent.” They became independent businessmen of sorts, in most respects little different from any white man selling his time and skills. But they turned over all they made to their owner, keeping any extra time or bonus earned. When in search of work, each morning bondsmen from the Ponder property would walk downtown to what was long known as “Hungry Corner,” where slaves available for hire would gather to meet those looking for labor.

  The Ponder slaves “acquired and accumulated wealth.” According to Henry Flipper, who grew up on the property, they “lived happily,” lacking “but two other things to make them like other human beings, viz., absolute freedom and education.” Atlanta was not yet ready for that momentous step—far from it. Still, amidst slavery’s unbending constraints, Atlanta’s black population was laying true freedom’s foundations. A black man could not at that point hope to buy his freedom in Atlanta, but he could earn some of freedom’s blessings.

  MANY ATLANTANS RECOGNIZED THE contradictions underlying their slaveholding society. Hired slaves gave whites who could not afford their own bondsmen access to slave labor, but it also provided the rented slave with leverage that came from having an absentee owner and a temporary master whose interests were often in conflict. The bondsman could exploit the situation to gain exceptional benefits never available to him in his normal conditions. Some open-minded whites, as well of course as those who benefited from being able to hire out a slave, supported the new freedom; others rebelled, seeing it as an “evil” undermining the permanent indenture of slave to master. Not surprisingly, large numbers of white Atlantans also resented the competition they faced from black men like Yancey, Badger, and Flipper. They bristled at the partial freedom these putative slaves enjoyed in their midst. The town’s own government seemed unwilling to enforce laws restricting the slaves’ activity. An 1855 Fulton County grand jury pleaded with the “proper authorities of the City of Atlanta to rigidly enforce the law against all persons who allow slaves to hire their own time, and prevent the continual trading of such slaves and free persons of color in the city.” In 1858, two hundred white “regular citizen mechanics” protested to the Atlanta City Council and petitioned for protection from “negro mechanics whose masters reside in other places” who were underbidding them. Not long after, resentment aimed specifically at Roderick Badger and his successful dentistry practice boiled to the surface. On July 15, 1859, white dentists petitioned the city council, bemoaning the fact “that your honorable body tolerates a negro dentist, in our midst, and in justice to ourselves and the community it ought to be abated.” The protestors appealed “for justice.” The city council did not respond. In 1861, another protest to the town fathers against Badger again failed to elicit any restrictions on him. Badger’s largely white clientele kept him in business, but pressure mounted to rein in the growing underground black economy.

  On April 13, 1860, the city council added more restrictions on the business activities of black residents or other people of color coming to town, forbidding “any slave or free person of color from buying or selling or offering to buy or sell any liquor, eggs, chickens, or fish or any other article . . . in the corporate limits of Atlanta.” But the business-minded city dwellers were a practical lot, more attuned to price than purveyor. The order was widely ignored.

  Probably in a direct response to the many Ponder slaves competing with white workmen, the toothless city council made still another attempt to control the hiring of slaves in the first days of 1861, noting that “the employment of Negro Mechanics” whose owners lived outside town “operates very injurious . . . upon the interest of Citizen Mechanics.” The council resolved to impose a $100 annual tax on the Negro mechanics. A week later, the council backed down and tabled the ordinance.

  THIS QUASIFREEDOM BLACK RESIDENTS enjoyed could not be mistaken for real freedom. White citizens made sure that blacks understood that their marginal status could at any moment be stamped out. Race laws designed to keep blacks in their place and to prevent any rebellious acts governed their lives. They could not legally smoke a pipe, walk with a cane, or leave their master’s house or slave quarters after dark. They needed their owner’s written permission to carry tools or drive a carriage. Given the different nature of slave life outside the plantation economy, where an overseer’s whip and citizen patrols, or paddyrollers, doled out summary judgment and punishment, the city itself took measures to ensure obedience. One of the first ordinances passed by the city council directed the marshal to “fix . . . rings and poles on the calaboose for the convenience of whipping nigras.”

  Blacks could never let down their guard. The consequences might prove severe. For instance, if a white person carried a lighted candle or torch into a barn, he might be fined up to $50. A “slave, free person of color or Indian” faced thirty-nine lashes and fifty for abuse of the gas fixtures and streetlamps first installed in 1855.

  White citizens also hoped to keep the region’s rare free persons of color from ever entering town. The city council passed an ordinance requiring that “all free persons of color, coming within the limits of Atlanta, to live . . . pay to the clerk of the council two-hundred dollars.” Failing to pay the exorbitant fee entailed a far higher price: jail and reenslavement until the offender had worked off the $200—plus rep
ayment for food and lodging while in the calaboose. If nobody came forward to hire the offending freeman’s time, he could be sold forthwith back into slavery. In the face of such a risk, freemen stayed well clear of Atlanta.

  Any freemen who needed reminding of what slavery felt like could look in any of the slave yards scattered about town. At 8 Whitehall Street, between a cigar maker’s and a lamp-oil dealer’s storefronts, Crawford, Frazer & Company did a brisk business as the city’s leading slave dealer among its nine “negro traders.” Slaves sat chained to benches lining the Crawford, Frazer display room. A city resident recalled seeing prospective buyers walking through the room and examining the rows of men, women, and children before making “their selections just as they would have a horse or mule at a stockyard.”

  DESPITE THE PRESSURES AND the increasingly vitriolic white resistance, an interdependent interracial community developed. This lent Atlanta a largely unique status in the Lower South. At a time when the vast majority of Southern blacks dwelled in rural isolation with little personal contact with whites, yet depended upon them for virtually everything, a vibrant African community, supported in part by the increasing wealth and independence of men like Badger, Flipper, and Yancey, grew up alongside, and often freely intermingled with, Atlanta’s burgeoning white bourgeoisie. For fortunate and skilled black Atlantans, unprecedented opportunities arose within the interstices of white society for them to better their lives, even as Atlanta clamped down officially on their liberties and chained and whipped the rule breakers.

  Churches played an increasingly important role. Whites and blacks came together on Sundays most typically in the same downtown houses of worship. White men and women sat in the Baptist and Methodist church pews, while blacks filled the galleries overhead or attended services after the whites departed. Legally, blacks could not congregate in public places without a white observer on hand for fear that such meetings might stir up trouble. This was true for religious worship as well. Nonetheless, with Atlanta’s churches’ slave galleries overflowing, religious whites encouraged formation of black congregations.

  The first black church opened in the 1850s, though services, even if led by a black preacher, always included a white pastor or marshal on hand. Henry Wright, a slave hand from a Decatur plantation who eventually found his way to Atlanta, attended Sunday services in a white church as his master required. Once the white pastor finished preaching to his white congregants, he turned to the black audience at the back or in the balcony. “His sermon usually ran,” recalled Wright, “‘Obey your master and your mistress and the Lord would love you.’” Black preachers were “instructed” not to stray from that message. Their words apparently carried little conviction and less effect. “None of the slaves believed in the sermons,” said Wright, “but they pretended to do so.”

  CHAPTER 8

  EARTHQUAKE

  JAMES CALHOUN’S UNIONIST POLITICS seemed out of step with wider Southern sentiment, but he found a welcome in his new Atlanta home. He emerged as a local civic leader. His law practice grew with the growing city. Among his many activities to better the growing community, he served as a trustee in the founding of a new Atlanta medical college in 1854—a precursor to Emory University’s School of Medicine.

  THE CONFLICTING PARTS that made up the Compromise of 1850 quickly became brittle. The terms were scarcely able to hold the fragile, fragmenting nation together. The one-time triumph for conservative Unionists like Calhoun’s Georgia alliance had proved short-lived. All over the country, North and South, radical figures increasingly dominated the debate. There was little margin for bipartisanship. Most Whigs became either Northern or Southern Democrats or, if committed to halting slavery’s spread, joined the new Republican Party. In Georgia, the party realignments drove the Whig Party largely out of existence. Former Whigs Robert Toombs and Alexander Stephens, with whom Calhoun had once warmly served in the state’s legislature, now held higher office in Washington, where they, especially Toombs, moved sharply into the Southern States’ Rights fold. Union Democrats like Howell Cobb kept the Union in their party allegiance only so long as the party was prepared to defend the Slave Power, as Northerners called the Southern slavocracy.

  Any Georgian committed to holding the Union together found keeping his footing on the shifting middle ground increasingly difficult. Calhoun held fast to his principled support for the national union and its constitutional underpinnings, joining men—most of them much older than he—who were willing to reach across the sectional divide. But after the Senate’s compromise, the Whig leadership, Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, died in 1852, two years after John C. Calhoun, whose concept of a national confederation of states enabled by a defense of minority rights died with him. Nationally influential voices for the preservation of the Union were literally falling silent.

  Democratic senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois drafted the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, partially to open the territories beyond Missouri to railroad builders, but also to secure a future Southern electoral base for a presidential run. The act repealed a compromise ban dating from 1820 on slavery north of 36° 30 in the old Louisiana Purchase lands—a resounding victory for Southern Democrats, particularly for Speaker of the House of Representatives Alexander Stephens, who engineered its final passage. The 1854 act permitted slavery in the territories until they became states, at which point their residents could vote by plebiscite whether they wished to enter the Union as a free or slave state. Once slavery was established as an accepted institution outside the South, it seemed any check on its growth would be undone. Kansas became the focus of debate and the locus of confrontation between Free Soilers and Slave Power advocates, who vied for control of the territories—and thus future control of national electoral politics.

  The new situation became a line in the prairies that the South was ready to fight for. Both houses of the Georgia legislature voted unanimously “that opposition to the principles of the Nebraska bill, in relation to the subject of slavery, is regarded by the people of Georgia as hostility to the rights of the South.” As such, any who opposed the principle of free movement of property, including human chattel, anywhere the American flag flew stood, in the minds of large and increasing numbers of Southerners, for the destruction of the Slave Power.

  On the ground in Kansas, angry, determined, and increasingly violent men confronted one another. Few slaves in fact ever reached the plains, but Free Soil and Slave Power ideologues created separate and competing legislatures. “Border ruffians” adhering to each would-be governing body attacked each other, sometimes with guns. Outside agitators streamed in. Bearded like an ancient prophet, John Brown, an abolitionist minister and farmer with roots in Connecticut and Ohio, saw an opportunity in Kansas to spark a wider war he hoped to carry out against slavery. He traveled to Kansas, where his sons were Free Soil homesteaders who now felt threatened by slaveholding neighbors. After a Northern church-based campaign of speeches, Brown came well funded and armed.

  The South would not be outdone in its readiness to meet slavery’s opponents. The sons and daughters of the Virginians, too, were on the move toward the frontier again, motivated this time not just by economic opportunity. Large parties of Southerners bent on homesteading in the territories and tipping the new states-to-be in favor of slavery passed through Atlanta, reported the Intelligencer, “almost daily” after passage of the new law. Mass meetings in town raised funds in their support. An Atlantan group called Emigrants for Kansas Territory organized to send local residents to colonize the plains for the South. The newspaper editorialized, “ We doubt not the[ir] success . . . in the new territory, while the cause of the South will have in them true and efficient friends.” It was not long before open guerilla warfare broke out in Bleeding Kansas and men on both sides lay dead.

  SOMEHOW, WHILE THE SOUTH’S most powerful leaders rattled sabers and demanded respect for Southern rights, Calhoun still commanded his neighbors’ support. A new county, Fulton, encompassing the entirety
of Atlanta and weighted heavily to its residents, was carved out of the more rural and heavily Democratic DeKalb County in 1853. Despite the ever-heavier push of national affairs against his old Whig views, Calhoun won the race to become the new district’s first state senator in 1855. He was reelected in each of the next two years as well. Ever the pragmatist, Calhoun worked in Milledgeville in the area he knew best, winning wide praise for his judicial-reform efforts. He also agitated on Atlanta’s behalf to have the state capitol moved to the city—to no avail. But the effort put the rest of Georgia on notice that the upstart up-country town had mighty ambitions.