What followed was “one of the most curious experiences of my life,” Kinsley wrote. Galloway insisted that he swear an oath. Two pistols were held to Kinsley’s head as he took the Bible in his hand. Galloway recited an oath demanding that Kinsley honor his promises. Kinsley repeated Galloway’s words. The deal was done. The black men retreated into the night.
The next day , hundreds of fugitive slaves began filing into the Union recruiting office in New Bern. The following week, a column of several thousand former slaves and their families left the river camps with torchlights and filed into a vacant lot in New Bern. Leading the column were the two preachers from the attic, Felton and Randolph. Marching beside them was Abraham Galloway. Kinsley described the scene: “[Four thousand] men women and children. It seemed to me the entire population of the South, from ‘Old Uncle Ned’ to the baby just born, to all the Aunt Dinahs, and with all the colored minstrel shows were marching to the happy land.”
In all, nearly five thousand black men from the New Bern camps signed up for the Union army. They enlisted in the First North Carolina Colored Volunteers also known as the African Brigade. Galloway would soon help raise three units in New Bern, the Thirty-Fifth, Thirty-Sixth and Thirty-Seventh Regiments of United States Colored Troops, whose soldiers were among the 180,000 black men, most of them former slaves, who ultimately fought for the Union.
CHAPTER FIVE
Ye Men of Unmixed Blood
B Y THE AUTUMN OF 1863, halfway through the war, Abraham Galloway had turned his attention to events beyond New Bern. He embarked on a new venture as a national advocate for expanded rights for blacks and especially for soldiers in the new colored regiments. He built a reputation as a dynamic public speaker who demanded universal suffrage for black men, free of literacy tests or property requirements. He attracted national attention, largely through the reporting of Robert Hamilton, a free black man from New York who published the Anglo-African, the most widely read black-run publication in the country.
The following April, in 1864, Galloway and four other former slaves from North Carolina walked through the front door of the White House—rather than through a rear entrance, as required of blacks in the South. They were taken to meet President Lincoln, who greeted them cordially. Lincoln, who had met with black leaders from the North during the war, had agreed to listen to the concerns of Southern black men. Galloway’s group thanked him for the Emancipation Proclamation, but also demanded the right to vote.
In a signed petition—Galloway’s signature was the first of five names—the men asked the president to grant black men “the right of suffrage, which will greatly expand our sphere of usefulness, redound to your honor, and cause posterity.” Lincoln assured the men that he understood their position, but he was equivocal. He made no promises.
In the autumn of 1865, Galloway moved to Wilmington, drawn to the city by its burgeoning population of freedmen, who lived in wretched encampments along the Cape Fear waiting to see if the Union victory would deliver true freedom or merely a different form of slavery. He plunged into local affairs, delivering ardent speeches that implored freed slaves to confront white domination and demand their rights.
Galloway was unlike any black man the whites of Wilmington had ever encountered. He was neither docile nor obedient—he had a reputation for carrying a pistol—and he defied racial customs. He did not step aside to let white men pass on the street, and he did not allow whites to make purchases ahead of him in shops. Even white supremacist newspapers acknowledged his oratorical skills. The Wilmington Post proclaimed Galloway “a fine speaker—uses grammatical language and has a clear musical voice that can be heard distinctly at a long distance.” A Northern reporter wrote of Galloway: “His power of sarcasm and brutal invective, and the personal influence given him by his fearlessness and his audacity, always secured him a hearing.”
In his speeches, Galloway taunted and ridiculed whites, eliciting guffaws from black audiences. Because freed slaves were routinely arrested on phony charges such as vagrancy, he suggested that it was “a crime to be a black.” He referred to the New Hanover County white judiciary as “a bastard born in sin and secession” and later accused white judges in Wilmington of jailing black men at election time to prevent them from voting.
In July 1867, almost two years after moving to Wilmington, Galloway spoke for an hour during a mass meeting in downtown Wilmington, warning freedmen of a growing danger: a militant new white supremacist threat had emerged in parts of the South, including North Carolina, that was more menacing and more violent than the Home Guard. A secretive band of former Confederate soldiers and white supremacists called themselves, variously, the White Brotherhood, or the Constitutional Union Guards or, more commonly, the Invisible Empire of the Ku Klux Klan. In North Carolina, the leader of the Invisible Empire was a former Confederate officer from Wilmington, Colonel William L. Saunders.
In Wilmington, the Klan was led by a former Confederate colonel, Roger Moore, a wealthy member of the rice gentry. Moore was a descendant of a North Carolina governor, James Moore; and of an earlier Roger Moore, an eighteenth-century Indian fighter and wealthy landowner known as “King Roger.” After the Civil War, Colonel Roger Moore was among those in North Carolina who considered the Klan a noble and necessary endeavor mounted “to protect the South from ravages and depredations of the spoilers who came South immediately after the war.”
In 1868, Moore made a clandestine trip to Raleigh to swear a secret oath of allegiance as commander of the Ku Klux Klan in Wilmington. Moore’s Klan camp in the city claimed to be “made up of the best blood of the South.” Many of Wilmington’s Klansmen had served under Moore in the Third North Carolina Cavalry after Moore had taken command of the Confederate unit from the ailing Lieutenant Colonel Waddell in 1864.
“He did yeoman’s service for his section as Chief of the Division of the Ku-Klux-Klan in Wilmington,” one of Moore’s admirers said. Moore, just thirty years old in 1868, also happened to be a major in the all-white New Hanover County militia, a convenient source of well-trained gunmen for the night-riding Klan.
The Klan considered itself a highly secretive organization—“one of the closest hide-bound secret orders ever known,” one Wilmington Klansman wrote. To operate in a Southern state under federal jurisdiction during Reconstruction, the group felt obliged to adopt a clandestine code of conduct. Some members went to comical lengths, concealing themselves in light-colored robes and caps with veils attached. The robes were made, often by Klansmen’s wives, of bleached linen “starched and ironed, and in the night by moonlight it glitters and rattles.”
The outfits were intended, in part, to terrorize blacks roused from sleep as their homes were besieged at night. The Klan attacked with brutal intimacy in North Carolina—whipping blacks with tree branches, beating them with ax handles, stripping them naked, burning their pubic hair, strangling them, shooting them in the face. Violence and terror were ingrained in the oath sworn by new Klansmen. The penalty for violating the oath was death; for some initiates, a noose was looped around their neck as they held a Bible and swore fealty to the oath:
You solemnly swear , in the presence of Almighty God, that you will never reveal the name of the person who initiated you: and you will never reveal what is about to come to your knowledge … you will oppose all radicals and negroes in all of their political designs; and that should any radical or negro impose on, abuse or injure any member of this brotherhood, you will assist in punishing him in any manner the camp may direct.
The Klan devised secret signals of recognition. Touching the head above the right ear was supposed to prompt a fellow Klansman to touch his own head above the left ear, signifying Klan membership. Another sign was thrusting the right hand into a trouser pocket with the thumb exposed. In response, a fellow Klansman was to jam his left hand into a pocket with only the thumb exposed. The nighttime password was: “I say.” The response was: “Nothing.” When challenged: “Who goes there?” The proper response
was: “A friend.” When asked: “A friend of who?” The correct reply was: “A friend to his country.” Whether such parody was performed with any regularity is debatable, but the terror instilled by the Klan was not. One North Carolina Klansman distilled the essence of the organization: “To keep down the style of the niggers.”
No black man antagonized Wilmington’s whites more than Abraham Galloway, who went out of his way to defy them. Late one night in September 1867, a loud procession of blacks bearing torches and shouting, “Galloway! Galloway!” demanded a speech condemning white supremacy. Galloway responded by delivering an address from the roof of Wilmington’s market house.
“My people stand here to-night fettered! Bound hand and foot by a Constitution that recognizes them as chattel!” he screamed to the crowd.
Galloway promised that within six months blacks would be entitled to vote on a new state constitution that would expand their rights. His demands were anathema to Wilmington’s white supremacists, who continued to behave as though slaves had never been granted their freedom. In 1866, North Carolina’s legislature, controlled by reactionary whites, refused, on a vote of 138–11, to ratify the proposed Fourteenth Amendment, which would grant citizenship to former slaves born in the United States and guarantee equal protection under the law.
That same year, the North Carolina legislature passed a Black Code, which restored blacks to near-slave status. In fact, the new law referred to blacks as “lately slaves.” The code prohibited blacks from serving on most juries or testifying against whites. It severely restricted blacks’ right to own firearms. Interracial marriage was outlawed. Black children could be “bound out” for work by whites without their parents’ permission, and the working rights of black adults were severely restricted.
In 1865 and 1866, other former Confederate states passed similar Black Codes designed to restrict the rights of freedmen and to control their labor and movements. Mississippi was the first, followed by South Carolina. The codes relied on vagrancy laws, which granted whites broad authority to arrest blacks and farm them out as unpaid labor. Other Black Codes imposed onerous labor contracts or required written proof of employment.
In Wilmington, whites embraced North Carolina’s Black Code and worked to stave off any move to grant suffrage or other civil rights to former slaves. The city’s civic leaders formed “white men’s clubs” to agitate against blacks. White-run newspapers derided Republicans for courting potential black votes and for treating blacks as citizens. SHALL NEGROES OR WHITE MEN RULE NORTH CAROLINA ? the Wilmington Daily Journal asked. Even after North Carolina’s Black Code was nullified by a new state constitution in 1868, Wilmington’s whites behaved as if the code were still in effect, intimidating or beating any black man who resisted.
Former slaves continued to make their way to the Cape Fear country in the years after the Civil War, drawn by the promise of jobs, no matter how dirty, miserable, and poorly paid. They were drawn especially to Wilmington, where railroad lines cut razor straight through the longleaf pine forests to deliver the commodities of the countryside to the city’s burgeoning port. Cotton, rice, tobacco, corn, peanuts, turpentine, tar, rosin, guano, hemp, and fruits and vegetables ranging from asparagus and potatoes to strawberries and blueberries—all of it had to be hauled to the port city, unloaded, and then much of it reloaded onto ships bound for the Caribbean and Europe. Black men took exhausting jobs as stevedores, loaders, draymen, haulers, and laborers. For a dollar a day, they hauled and loaded bulky, four-hundred-pound cotton bales onto ships along the Cape Fear.
In the pine forests outside Wilmington, there was an even more punishing form of labor available deep within pocosin swamps infested with snakes, ticks, and mosquitoes. There, a black man could work in the lumber and naval store trades. For a time , North Carolina produced two-thirds of the world’s supply of naval stores—tar, pitch, rosin, and turpentine. It all came, sticky, dark, and smelling of rot, from pines that grew so straight and tall that they were later felled for use as telephone poles.
The longleaf pines had narrow but sturdy trunks above the low wire grass and scrub oak. Blacks were paid to cut “boxes” into the trunks about a foot aboveground. A skilled cutter could carve out a hundred boxes a day. The cutters sliced a V-shaped gash just above each box to encourage the flow of sticky pale sap into the square cavities below. “Dippers” ladled the sap from the boxes into barrels made from shaved and trimmed pine logs by skilled black coopers paid up to $2 a day. As each box and gash dried up, the trees were slashed again, higher and higher, until the trunk was scarred with several boxes that rose toward the green-tipped limbs.
The sap was processed into turpentine in crude ten-gallon copper stills often manned and fired by black workers. They poured the turpentine into barrels and loaded them onto wagons for the long trek to Wilmington. Other unskilled black men found work in the crude, turf-covered kilns that cooked tar out of the heart of longleaf pine logs. Others boiled concentrated tar to produce pitch.
The naval stores trade was a hot, sweaty, unpleasant business, but it paid a subsistence wage that could support a family. Shortly before the war, Frederick Law Olmsted had roamed the Cape Fear swamps and spoken with workers there. “The negroes employed in this branch of industry, seemed to me to be unusually intelligent and cheerful,” he wrote. “Decidedly they are superior in every moral and intellectual respect to the great mass of the white people inhabiting the turpentine forest.”
After the war, freedmen in Wilmington began carving paths to the working class through the naval stores trade or through other unskilled or semiskilled jobs created year after year, as the city steadily grew. Before the war, nearly six hundred free blacks had lived in the city, working as tradesmen and artisans. North Carolina’s thirty thousand free blacks had once enjoyed limited rights; between 1776 and 1835, they had been permitted to vote. After the war, they were joined in Wilmington by former slaves who found work not only as servants, such as maids and butlers, but also as wheelwrights, draymen, barbers, grocers, butchers, tailors, and restaurateurs. Black craftsmen flourished—carpenters, blacksmiths, masons, and bakers. Within a few years after the war, a quarter of the skilled workers in Wilmington’s building trades were black men; black crews helped build the city’s ornate Thalian Hall and several white-owned mansions. By 1880, Wilmington would boast the highest proportion of black residents of any large Southern city—60 percent, compared with 44 percent in Atlanta, 27 percent in New Orleans, and 17 percent in Louisville.
Hard, rough jobs such as road gang work and the dockside labor of stevedores went to unskilled blacks who sought new lives in the city. Jobs were plentiful at the sprawling port, in the cotton and naval stores export markets, and in farming, logging, and railroad work in the flat, sandy pine country where the Cape Fear met the Atlantic. Five railroads set up their eastern terminals at Wilmington’s port, providing unskilled and semiskilled jobs that typically paid blacks less than whites; the Carolina Central Railroad, for instance, paid white brakemen 96 cents a day but black brakemen just 75 cents.
But black men kept coming, and with them their families and their longing for the new lives and new freedoms promised by the triumph of the Union war effort.
The year 1868 was pivotal for all North Carolinians, white and black. Under the Reconstruction Acts, North Carolina and other Southern states were required to hold conventions to write new, postwar constitutions as a prerequisite for readmission to the Union. Congress denied the right to vote and hold office to any former Confederate who did not sign an oath of allegiance to the Union. Many refused and stayed away from the polls, diluting white conservative voting strength just as blacks were on their way to winning the right to vote.
In North Carolina , former slaves were permitted to vote on whether to hold a constitutional convention in 1868, the same year the Fourteenth Amendment was finally ratified, granting citizenship to former slaves born in the United States and guaranteeing equal protection under the law. It would be the
first time former slaves had voted in the state—two years before ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, which prohibited denying voting rights because of “race, color or previous condition of servitude.” Black men in North Carolina were also permitted to run for election as delegates to the 1868 convention. With the help of nearly seventy-three thousand newly registered black voters, the constitutional convention won voter approval. Of the 120 delegate seats, Republicans took 107—13 of them won by black men.
Among the new delegates was Abraham Galloway, who became the star of the convention, which was held in the state capital, Raleigh, in early 1868. He advocated universal suffrage, with no property requirements. Galloway’s prominent role at the convention outraged Wilmington’s white newspapers. His hometown Daily Journal referred to him as a “claybank,” a yellowish-brown horse, and published insulting headlines:
THE NIGGER CONVENTION
THE GORILLA CONSTITUTION
THE KANGAROO KONVENSHUN
In Raleigh, white women and children were kept indoors to avoid what white newspapers called the “motley horde” of blacks, scalawags, and carpetbaggers inside the state legislature building. One newspaper editor professed shock “that a set of apes and hybrids should be holding a brutal carnival in her halls of legislation.” Galloway had the temerity to share a meal of oysters in a restaurant with a white man—the president of the convention—as reported with great indignation on the front pages of Wilmington’s white newspapers.
One morning during the convention, Galloway held aloft a Raleigh newspaper that had referred to black delegates as “niggers.” He told the delegates that if the insult was not publicly addressed at the convention, he would seek redress elsewhere. That prompted an acrimonious discussion of the proper address for a colored gentleman and whether, in fact, the term “nigger” was intended as an insult. A black delegate said the term meant “a low, dirty fellow.” The white reporter who had published the slur said he indeed intended it as an insult. He also said he wouldn’t object to being expelled from the convention. He was.
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