Been in the Storm So Long (113 page)

Notwithstanding the often severe condemnations of slavery, the black convention movement in its appeals and strategy reflected far greater concern with the oppressions of the present than with the atrocities of the past. But blacks willingly drew upon the past, and in particular the revolutionary heritage of the American people, to press their case for a future. To be subjected to taxation without representation, said Missouri blacks,
was as “gross and outrageous” a violation of their rights as that which had moved colonists to wage a war for independence. Not only did blacks revive the issues of the American Revolution but they invoked its imagery as well. The Zion Church in Charleston, for example, where delegates to the statewide black convention assembled in 1865, was compared to Faneuil Hall in Boston, where patriots had plotted the struggle against British tyranny, and Martin R. Delany, who spoke at the Charleston meeting, was introduced as “the Patrick Henry of his race in this, the second revolution for the rights of the colored man.” The several conventions which drew up Declarations of Rights and Wrongs modeled their recitation of grievances on the most revered document of the nation—the Declaration of Independence—and black spokesmen borrowed heavily from it to underscore their claim to the “inalienable rights” guaranteed every American.
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Few moments in the freedmen’s conventions were as dramatic and emotional as those set aside to hear the reports of individual delegates about conditions in their respective localities. Clerics, teachers, field hands, and urban artisans rose to their feet to describe the brutalities inflicted upon their people back home—the mutilated bodies fished out of local rivers, the restraints placed on black movement, the promised wages and crop shares that remained unpaid, the churches and schoolhouses set afire, the intimidation of their leaders, and a judicial system that operated largely to deprive them of justice rather than to redress their grievances. The same themes kept repeating themselves. They were taunted with their inferiority and ignorance by men who had conspired in the past to keep them illiterate and who now refused to accord them even minimal opportunities for an education. They were told of their incapacity for self-government and voting by men who had never taught them to be anything but slaves and who now refused to introduce them, even gradually, to any political responsibilities. They were denounced as cowards by men who had kept them disarmed and who now deprived them of any means to defend themselves.
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To strike a balance, as some conventions sought to do, between the need to articulate their grievances, to demand full citizenship, and to allay white suspicions of their actions proved to be a formidable undertaking. And it would ultimately fail, largely because blacks could neither resolve the contradiction between their advocacy of agitation and conciliation nor compromise any of the demands they thought absolutely indispensable to a free people. Few black activists, whatever their professions of conciliation, expected the deeply entrenched and pervasive racial ideology of the white South to wither away by itself. Their optimism about the future rested on their conviction that racial prejudices were susceptible to change through legislation, equal enforcement of the law, and relentless black agitation. To win their freedom, they had been entrusted with the rifle and the cartridge box. To maintain that freedom, they now insisted upon equal access to the ballot box, the jury box, and the schoolhouse. In drawing up their demands, delegates to the Convention of the Colored People of South
Carolina stated the minimal position assumed by nearly every black leader and meeting in the immediate post-emancipation years:

The preponderance of concern in nearly every black convention lay with political and civil rights. Nothing, in fact, seems more perplexing about these meetings, with their often eloquent appeals, petitions, and declarations, than the virtual absence of any substantive economic content. To read the convention documents is to learn little about the most immediate and critical problem facing the great mass of former slaves—how they would fare as free laborers working for employers who had only recently been slaveholders. No convention debated the democratization of land proprietorship as an alternative to the perpetuation of the old dependency, nor did delegates express alarm over the eviction of ex-slaves from abandoned plantations which they claimed as their own. Only the Freedmen’s Convention of Georgia went so far as to propose that slaves freed under the Emancipation Proclamation be paid for any labor performed after January 1, 1863.
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But compensating black workers for years and decades of unpaid labor as slaves never even warranted the same consideration given in some white circles to compensating slaveholders for the losses they had sustained by emancipation.

While paying lip service to the land aspirations of the ex-slaves, the black convention movement rejected any interference with the rights of private property. Presuming to speak for the freedmen of Alabama, a state convention in Mobile declared that they neither desired nor expected to receive any man’s property without giving him “a just equivalent.” The Freedmen’s Convention of Georgia suggested only that the Federal government dispose of Federal land in the South by offering it for sale to freedmen under reasonable terms. The black newspaper in Opelousas, Louisiana, envisioned families of freedmen in possession of independent homesteads, but it made clear at the same time that blacks harbored no confiscatory notions, such as those proposed “by some of the leaders of the Republican Party in the North.”
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The restraint exercised by black leadership on this issue reflected more than its tacit acceptance of the prevailing middle-class ideology of white Americans. In their overriding concern for realizing the same rights to life, liberty, and property as whites enjoyed, black spokesmen did not wish to undermine their own position by appearing to advocate confiscation. Perhaps,
too, they recognized the futility of that cause and the turmoil and resentment that would inevitably fall on their heads if any such policy were adopted. Whatever the reason, the black convention movement contented itself with demands for “even-handed justice” rather than “special privileges or favor,” though such justice was apt to mean very little to propertyless laborers caught up in the web of indebtedness and dependency.

To listen to black leaders, the way for propertyless ex-slaves to achieve economic success differed in no significant respect from the advice traditionally proffered to propertyless whites. Rather than affirm the need for government action and planning to protect the interests of black agricultural laborers, the black convention movement, like most black newspapers, repeated the moral and economic injunctions and shibboleths that were standard fare in nineteenth-century American society: success came ultimately to the hard-working, the sober, the honest, and the educated, to those individuals who engaged in “faithful industry,” practiced “judicious economy,” cultivated habits of thrift and temperance, made their homes “models of neatness,” and led moral, virtuous, Christian lives.
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Jonathan C. Gibbs, destined to be a leading black force in Reconstruction politics in Florida, laid down a simple set of rules in the aftermath of the war: “If we can secure, for the next ten years, three clean shirts a week, a tooth brush, and spelling-book to every Freedman in South Carolina, I will go bail (a thing I seldom do) for the next hundred years, that we will have no more slavery, and both whites and blacks will be happier and better friends.”
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Nearly every black convention, cleric, editor, and self-professed leader repeated in one form or another these time-honored middle-class verities, discountenanced vagrancy and pauperism, and extolled the virtues of the Puritan work ethic. If blacks would only heed such advice, the doors that were now closed to them would swing open and they would achieve the respect and recognition of white Americans. That assumption would prove to be as naïve and mistaken as it was persistent.

When patronizing public places and riding in public transportation, the most successful blacks invariably found themselves sitting in separate compartments with the least successful blacks. Color, not class, made the essential difference, and the black convention movement addressed itself to this problem by insisting on equal access with whites to all public facilities. That was not the same thing as social equality, they assured whites, nor did they intend or desire to thrust themselves into the private lives and circles of whites. “We deem our own race, equal to all our wants of purely social enjoyment,” the Freedmen’s Convention of Georgia resolved. If anything, blacks sought protection from white miscegenationists and transgressors—that is, from a perverse form of “social equality” in which whites presumed to invade the sanctity of black families and approach their women with “insulting and degrading propositions.”
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The equality blacks insisted upon was equality before the law, in which black testimony would be admitted into the courtroom and blacks seated
on the juries. If this demand often loomed the largest, that was because many black spokesmen viewed it as essential for the protection of their lives and families and the necessary base on which suffrage and the acquisition of property would rest. Even if some whites still recoiled at the thought of black testimony and jurors, black leaders also perceived that these measures were deemed far less controversial than the right to vote and hold office. After all, blacks had enjoyed for some years the right of testimony in northern states which refused to permit them to vote, and many southern whites who were uncompromising on the suffrage issue seemed willing to yield on the lesser evil of equal rights in the courtroom, if only to restore the courts to civil authority. That would simply extend to blacks a right the Constitution already specified all free citizens should enjoy. Far less acceptable to whites were the proposals made by several black conventions that the proportion of blacks on juries reflect the racial composition of the region.
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After the Virginia black convention drew up a powerful Declaration of Rights and Wrongs, Henry Highland Garnet, a prewar abolitionist who participated in the meeting as an “honorary member,” suggested a critical change in the wording. Since blacks were in no position to retaliate in the event whites refused to heed the Declaration, he thought it more respectful, “as humble petitioners,” to use the word “ask” instead of “demand” when submitting their grievances to the American people. The delegates agreed with Garnet and approved his amendment. The question raised by Garnet’s move was by no means trivial. With the many appeals, petitions, and declarations directed by these black conventions toward whites, what if no one bothered to listen and the constitutional conventions and state legislatures refused to act on even the most humbly worded requests? Few black spokesmen addressed themselves directly to this possibility, except to assure whites that they would never countenance insurrection or violence. No matter what happened to their memorial, Mississippi blacks told the forthcoming constitutional convention, “rest assured that we shall still remain your friends, and keep the Star Spangled Banner above us.” Similarly, the Colored People’s Convention in Alabama advised their people to be law-abiding, no matter what trials they might be forced to endure. “We must rather suffer wrong, if evil-minded men inflict wrong upon us than do wrong, while we seek to have those wrongs righted by law.” That same meeting rejected insurrection as “inconsistent with our history as a people, and the farthest from our desires or possible intentions.”
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While rejecting violent alternatives, black spokesmen and conventions tried to wield whatever leverage they thought they commanded to exact from native whites a recognition of their legal rights. The arguments they advanced, incorporating warnings of continued Federal intervention in the affairs of the South, revealed a certain political sagacity. In the event the constitutional conventions and legislatures rejected their demands, the white men who controlled those bodies should be prepared to pay a political price for their actions. If, for example, blacks who had loyally supported
the Federal government had no right to representation, neither should whites who had lately taken up arms against the government complain of being denied representation in Congress. If blacks were deprived of the right of testimony or representation on the juries, southern whites should not expect to regain control over the judicial system. With similar shrewdness, blacks turned native white hostility to the Freedmen’s Bureau to their own advantage by suggesting to Congress that the Bureau remained an “indispensable necessity” until such time as they were in a position to protect themselves through the vote, equal justice, and the right to bear arms.
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The ultimate leverage, as black spokesmen began to discern, lay in a reorganization of the ex-Confederate states that would provide the freed slaves with a political muscle commensurate with their electoral strength. That perception increasingly found its way into the black newspapers and conventions. While identifying themselves with their southern homeland and adopting a conciliatory stance toward the old ruling class, black spokesmen developed simultaneously a conception of postwar reconstruction that most native whites would have thought downright traitorous. And the longer whites persisted in denying them their demands and in writing white supremacy into the legal codes of the states, the more blacks would turn to the North and to Congress with their appeals. Even as blacks denied any insurrectionary intent, they gave their support and subsequently their votes to a reconstruction with revolutionary implications and possibilities.