Been in the Storm So Long (110 page)

The moderate tone of their appeals, the conspicuous omissions, the humble posture were all consistent with the conciliatory spirit that dominated the convention. The Raleigh newspapers, as did several northern reporters who were present, quickly lauded the Address as a product of good sense—“a wonderfully conservative document, undisfigured by the marks of levelling radicalism.” Under the circumstances, the Constitutional Convention treated the Address with courtesy, while failing to act on the issues it raised. Like the “respect” and “confidence” which blacks accorded that body, the “courtesy” with which the whites responded seemed like so much playacting, with each side recognizing the inevitability of a prolonged struggle between them. Outside of the convention hall, the white delegates breathed precisely that spirit. “The niggers are having a convention, a’n’t they?” one delegate asked a northern reporter. “What do they want? Equal rights, I suppose. How do they talk, anyhow? Going to vote, be they?” When informed that the blacks had been quite moderate in their speeches and that their principal demand had been the right to testify in the courts, the delegate quickly replied, “No, sir; they won’t get that. It wouldn’t do at all. No, sir.… The people won’t have niggers giving evidence. They’ll never get that. The people won’t have it.”

The tactics of accommodation failed to yield the expected concessions. If anything, the state’s white leadership might have been encouraged to think they could return to the antebellum racial code with a minimum of resistance. Fortunately, the Freedmen’s Convention had not left everything to the white man’s sense of fair play. Before dispersing, the delegates agreed to organize a state Equal Rights League, instructed that organization to press for the repeal of all discriminatory laws, and proposed cooperation with any national group which might be formed with similar objectives. When the National Equal Rights League convened less than a month later in Cleveland, Ohio, James Harris was there to represent North Carolina. Alluding to his extensive travels, Harris declared on this occasion that he had found that “white men are white men” the world over.
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Less than a year after the Freedmen’s Convention, blacks again gathered in the AME Church in Raleigh for a statewide meeting, but this time the rhetoric, the resolutions, and the appeals took on a more aggressive tone, as if to suggest that a year of “moderation” and “conciliation” had been sufficient time to test white intentions and intransigence. This time, too, the delegates recited their grievances with far more openness and with an obvious impatience: “In the counties of Jones, Duplin, Craven, Hyde, Halifax, and many others in this State, outrages are committed, such as killing, shooting and robbing the unprotected people for the most trifling offences, and, in frequent instances, for no offence at all.” The perpetrators of this violence, the convention declared, were permitted to roam freely without any arrest for their crimes. Rather than appeal to the state legislature for a redress of grievances, the delegates expressed their “profound
gratitude” for the recent actions of Congress, particularly the Freedmen’s Bureau bill, the Civil Rights bill, and the proposed Fourteenth Amendment. They denounced taxation without representation as “in direct violation of the sacred rights of American citizens.” And they urged blacks in every county, district, and village to organize branches of the Equal Rights League, so that the Federal government and the entire world would learn of the cruelties to which the freed slaves were being subjected.
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On January 14, 1868, delegates poured into Raleigh for still another Constitutional Convention to draft a new government and document for the state. But this body differed strikingly from its predecessor, both in spirit and in composition. This time blacks were not meeting separately several blocks away, drawing up “moral appeals” to the white conscience; instead, fifteen black delegates, duly elected by the eligible voters of the state, took their seats with the white delegates and prepared to participate fully in the deliberations. Presumably, the grievances and demands of the freed slaves would be reflected in the final results of the convention. Among others, James H. Harris, James W. Hood, and Abraham H. Galloway were on hand to make certain.

T
HE FREEDMEN’S CONVENTIONS
marked the political debut of southern blacks. What made them so unprecedented was that men who had only recently been slaves, along with freeborn blacks, were expressing themselves in ways that had only recently been banned, gathering together for the first time, exchanging experiences, discussing the problems they faced in their particular counties, and sharing visions of a new South and a “redeemed” race. The scenes acted out in Raleigh were being duplicated in Mobile, Charleston, New Orleans, Vicksburg, Alexandria, Augusta, Nashville, Lexington, and Little Rock. Within a year after Appomattox, in nearly every ex-Confederate state, the local political activity which had begun with Federal occupation and the rallies celebrating emancipation culminated in the election of delegates to statewide conventions. And out of these gatherings would emerge a black leadership that would soon be called upon to help in the task of political reconstruction.

Perhaps as important as the conventions themselves was the local political activity that preceded them and the initial politicization of large numbers of blacks, both in the urban centers and in the countryside. Typical of such activity, the blacks of Edgecombe County, North Carolina, met in Tarboro to elect delegates to the state convention; they also took up a collection to defray the expenses of the trip to Raleigh and instructed the delegates on the most pressing concerns in their respective locales. The election of delegates might reveal as much about prevailing sentiments as the resolutions these local meetings passed. In Thomasville, Georgia, for
example, blacks met in a grove near the edge of town and elected the Reverend Jared Wade, a literate clergyman and teacher, over Giles Price, an educated and fairly affluent blacksmith who had been free before the war and who had apparently offended some of his people by the generous and conspicuous support he had given the Confederacy.
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Where the election of delegates in mass meetings proved to be impossible or too dangerous, they were apt to be chosen after church services, by informal gatherings, or by clandestine neighborhood conferences. Even so, the cost and difficulty of travel to the state conventions kept some elected delegates away, while others might refuse to attend unless promised Federal protection when they returned to their homes. The absence of troops or of Federal officials had a way of reducing representation from the back-country or up-country counties, as in Louisiana and South Carolina. Ignoring the advice of local whites and threats to their lives and jobs, some delegates came to the state meetings at considerable personal and economic risk; others made a point of leaving during the night and returning with the least amount of notice, while some never returned after the local newspaper noted their presence at the convention. Isham Swett, a self-educated former slave and a barber in Fayetteville, North Carolina, attended the state conclave in Raleigh as a delegate. When the news became known, his white customers immediately withdrew their patronage. After attending the state convention in Macon, Georgia, several delegates remained in that city rather than return to their homes, fearing the strong stand they had taken on equal suffrage and civil rights would expose them instantly to roving white gangs. During the Convention of the Colored People of Virginia, Peter K. Jones, a delegate from Petersburg, asked, “Why are not more of you here?” and then suggested the answer: “Some of our people have been paid to stay away by our former masters. They told us that coming here would hurt us at home.” At the same convention, a delegate from Williamsburg recited the difficulties in securing representation from his region, with former slaveholders doing everything in their power to prevent elected delegates from attending.
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Despite the absentees, most of the statewide conventions brought together a remarkable cross section of the black population. The sharp contrasts in attire, complexion, and demeanor, and the equally apparent differences in background and education, again impressed outside observers with the uniqueness of these assemblages. There were black soldiers in uniform, and nearly every convention recognized their symbolic importance by appointing at least one of them to some official position. Ministers appeared in substantial numbers, some of them dressed in black broadcloth and several of them only recently chaplains in the black regiments. If lawyers, farmers, and planters dominated the white constitutional conventions, clergymen, teachers, carpenters, mechanics, hotel waiters, barbers, household servants (including the former body servant of Jefferson Davis), and plantation hands made up the bulk of the black conventions. In Louisiana, where the freeborn mulattoes of New Orleans
had met frequently since Federal occupation, the Convention of Colored Men that assembled in January 1865 was the first time delegates from the country parishes had participated, and that scene elicited a special comment from a black editor:

The leadership that emerged at the freedmen’s conventions gained valuable experience for the roles many of them would subsequently play in Radical Reconstruction. Among the delegates to the state convention that assembled in Charleston in November 1865, for example, were a future lieutenant governor, state supreme court justice, and secretary of state of South Carolina, as well as several men destined to serve in the legislature and the United States Congress. The quality of black leader ship, in South Carolina and elsewhere, immediately impressed outside observers, even skeptical native whites who had found the concept of blacks in such roles as either distasteful or incomprehensible. What remained open to question, however, was whether or not a “leader” commanded a significant following and constituency or was simply a self-appointed spokesman whose claims rested on his education, occupation, or northern origins. That was never an easy question to answer, though clergymen, who were in the most advantageous position to gather a following around them, tended to dominate postwar black political life.

In the early stages of organizational activity, especially in places like Charleston and New Orleans, the old free black communities contributed a disproportionate share of the leadership. But that dominance did not necessarily endure, particularly as some freed slaves quickly acquired an education and began to accumulate property. “It is remarkable,” thought Richard H. Cain, who had come to Charleston in 1865, “that the former leading men in these parts, those whom we would have recognized as the great minds of the South among the colored people, have relapsed into secondary men; and the class who were hardly known, have come forward and assumed a bold front, and are asserting their manhood.” In some states, moreover, as in Mississippi, blacks who had been free before the war were considered too dependent on whites to be entrusted with positions of leadership.
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Equally important in the early stages of political organization were
northern blacks, most of them missionaries and teachers, who came to the South during and after the war, in some instances returning to a native land from which they had become exiles. Henry M. Turner, a freeborn South Carolinian who had already distinguished himself as an army chaplain and AME organizer, opened the Freedmen’s Convention in Georgia in 1866 and shared political leadership in that state with Tunis G. Campbell, a Massachusetts-born black and Freedmen’s Bureau agent who had established a virtually independent governnment in the Georgia Sea Islands. Richard H. Cain (a native of Virginia) and Francis L. Cardozo (a native of South Carolina), both of them ministers in Connecticut during the war, came to South Carolina in time to participate in the early convention movement, thereby joining an illustrious group that also included, as recent arrivals from the North, Martin R. Delany (a native of Virginia) and Jonathan J. Wright (a native of Pennsylvania), both of whom served for a time as Freedmen’s Bureau agents.
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But the bulk of the delegates to the conventions were themselves freedmen who came out of the virtual anonymity of slavery to participate in the political life of their localities and states. Some of them were house servants and artisans who had acquired a rudimentary education and a degree of acculturation to white values; still others had spent their bondage in the fields and quarters, having little contact with whites except for the owner and overseer. For many of the freedmen, whatever their varied experiences in slavery, military service had exposed them for the first time to the outside world and helped to accelerate the transition from bondage to political activism and leadership. In South Carolina, Robert Smalls managed to construct a loyal constituency in the Sea Islands on the basis of his wartime exploits, as did Prince Rivers, a former coachman in Beaufort and a sergeant in the Union Army, who had impressed Colonel Higginson as a man “of apparently inexhaustible strength and activity” with extraordinary leadership powers. “He makes Toussaint perfectly intelligible; and if there should ever be a black monarchy in South Carolina, he will be its king.”
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