Been in the Storm So Long (119 page)

Few prospective black voters needed any “political education” to recognize that their best interests lay with the party which had made possible their citizenship and franchise. But the candidates who might best advance Republican principles while acting on issues of daily concern to blacks were not so easily discerned. “They see clearly enough that the Republican party constitutes their political life boat,” the
Tribune
observed. “But they claim the right to select the captains whom they can trust.” In the many meetings called to mobilize support for the party, participants often utilized such occasions to define their concerns and to draw up a platform on which they expected candidates to run. Invariably, the demands included state-supported public schools (preferably without racial distinctions), unrestricted right of testimony, representation on juries, equal access to public facilities, and legislation that would ameliorate the plight of landless agricultural laborers.
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Reflecting regional concerns, a former slave asked a political meeting in New Orleans to condemn the imminent introduction of Chinese coolie labor into the cotton and sugarcane fields, warning that such an immigration “will fill our jails, our lunatic asylums and our State prisons.” In South Carolina, a black candidate coupled his opposition to confiscation with a promise to tax lands in such a way as to force the owners of large tracts to make some of that land available for purchase by freedmen. And when a black candidate in Georgia vowed to repeal taxes which discriminated against small farmers, he had only to share his personal
experience with the audience. “Last year I rented a small farm of Dr. Simmons, of this county. After paying him the rent, I had 5 bales of cotton. On them I paid a tax of $15 a bale, making $75. It is needless for me to tell poor men how much I have needed that money this year. It would have breaded my family the whole year. I have felt its hardness.”
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Not since the weeks preceding secession had the South witnessed as much intensive and enthusiastic political activity. But this time the participants were people who had been politically voiceless, most of them only a few years removed from slavery. When the Virginia Republican convention got under way in the African Church in Richmond, more than three thousand blacks waited outside to gain admittance, forcing party leaders to move the next day’s session to Capitol Square. More important than any head counts, however, was the spirit in which black participants entered into these meetings, resembling in many instances the emotional fervor and call-and-response techniques they brought to their religious gatherings. More often than not, they heard what they had come to hear and cheered their avowed champions, while making certain the candidates understood their concerns. But if necessary, they revealed a political shrewdness capable of unmasking any candidate, white or black, old friends and professed converts alike. In Lebanon, Tennessee, a white Republican candidate and former slaveholder found his talk interrupted by a freedman who demanded to know if he had freed his slaves unconditionally. No less insistent was a freedman in Charlottesville, Virginia, who found unconvincing a candidate’s recital of his Unionist record and opposition to secession. “While I believe a white man instantly who comes out flat-footed and says he was for the war, when there is no profit nor advantage in his saying so; when I hear another say that he was against the war … I cannot help suspecting him instantly.” And in Washington County, Georgia, a white candidate quickly discovered that he had stretched the credulity and patience of his audience too far when he sought to win them over by advocating social equality even if that resulted in intermarriage; the blacks shouted him down and refused to listen to the remainder of his speech. With slightly more toleration, an assemblage made up largely of freedmen listened to “a very intelligent, educated Negro” tell them that most of his people were not yet prepared to exercise the suffrage and he feared they would vote with their old masters as a way of gaining their good will. Before the speaker could proceed, an elderly freedman asked to be heard. “Every creature has got an instinct,” he explained, punctuating each of his words. “The calf goes to the cow to suck, the bee to the hive. We’s a poor, humble, degraded people, but we know our friends. We’d walk fifteen miles in war time to find out about the battle; we can walk fifteen miles and more to find how to vote.”
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The overwhelmingly black participation in these meetings raised the inevitable cry that the Republican Party in the South had become a “black man’s party” in fact as well as in spirit. When Laura Towne, the white schoolteacher, attended “a mass meeting of Republican citizens” in the Sea
Islands, she was surprised to find only one white man on the platform and few if any whites in the audience. Even white Republicans did not attend, she noted; “they are going to have a
white
party, they say.” When one black speaker indicated he wanted no whites on the platform, the others took him to task for his intolerance. “What difference does skin make, my bredren, I would stand side by side a
white
man if he acted right. We mustn’t be prejudiced against their color.” After some further verbal exchanges of this kind, the assembled freedmen agreed that men should be judged by their acts, not by their color, and they invited whites to join them at their next meeting. When talk of a “black man’s party” began to circulate in Louisiana, no doubt inspired by the aggressive stance of the New Orleans colored community, the black newspaper in St. Landry Parish recoiled at such a prospect and suggested it would be tantamount to political suicide. “Not only would we be crushed in the attempt, in most of the Southern States; but we may be sure the Northern States would not countenance our plan.”
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With white men—both Northerners (Carpetbaggers) and natives (Scalawags)—assuming the prominent positions in the Republican Party, while remaining dependent on their overwhelmingly black constituencies, certain questions were bound to surface, and the talk of a “black man’s party” only begins to suggest the dimensions of the problem. Forced in every state to coalesce with whites, what price would black leaders be willing to pay to maintain that coalition? Would the political influence they wielded, the posts they held in the party, and the number of elective and appointive offices they filled be commensurate with the electoral strength of their people? On the eve of Radical Reconstruction, black leaders in some instances acknowledged the need to defer to their more experienced and better-educated white allies. If nothing else, the fear persisted that if blacks pushed themselves too quickly into the center of the political arena, they would confirm the worst fears of native whites, fracture the party, and provoke a backlash in northern public opinion. When a leading clergyman in the AME Church advised blacks to restrict their political aspirations, he warned that “a colored ticket” would most likely turn thirty million white people against them. And when one overly enthusiastic abolitionist suggested that a Negro be nominated for Vice-President of the United States, many black leaders thought the proposal ill-timed and counterproductive. While he wished “to see black men (or colored, if you prefer the term) in every position socially and politically, attainable,” Martin Delany wrote from South Carolina, such objectives need not be achieved at the cost of destroying the Republican Party and uniting “the conservative Negro hating elements North and South.” Like Delany, black leaders found initially acceptable the maxim “Let us not attempt to reach the top of the tree without climbing by means of the lower branches,” and thought it best to curb their political aspirations, leaving the more prestigious and conspicuous places to their white allies. “What fuel that would be to feed the flame of prejudice!” James H. Harris of North Carolina would declare in refusing
a nomination to Congress in 1868. “I am not willing to sell out my race, for such a sale would my acceptance virtually be.”
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Whatever considerations prompted some blacks initially to refuse nominations to public office, the projected political apprenticeship would be short-lived. Within two years of the elections to the constitutional conventions, Martin Delany himself told a political rally in Congo Square, New Orleans, that in every state in which blacks comprised a substantial portion of the electorate, “a
pro rata
of positions and places belong to them.” That stand must have gratified those black spokesmen who from the very outset had advocated proportional representation and had warned their people not to concede anything to which their political strength entitled them; in Louisiana, in fact, where the population was nearly evenly divided between whites and blacks, the Republican Party in 1867 pledged itself to reserve half of all nominations and appointive offices for blacks. “That plank is our protection against absorption and intrigue,” said the
New Orleans Tribune
. “It is the safeguard of the destinies of the African race in the State.” Nor did the
Tribune
have much patience with those who argued for a delay of black political ambitions until they had acquired more education and experience. No people possessed more experience and education in the meaning of oppression than former slaves, the
Tribune
editor noted, and that fact alone would ensure democratic safeguards in any constitution they helped to frame.
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With the elections approaching, black canvassers and newspapers cautioned black voters about the critical importance of their political debut. If the “black vote” became the means by which “unscrupulous renegades” and “political vagrants” were elevated to office, the very legitimacy of this experiment in biracial democratic government might be jeopardized. Without wishing to reject the friendship and assistance of northern whites, the
New Orleans Tribune
, among other black spokesmen, found little reason to place any dependency on politicians who “cannot be so well informed as to our wants as we are ourselves.” All too often, that same newspaper warned, their “good friends” from the North came to them “not through philanthropy, not for the affection they have for black men, but for the love of power and spoils which is devouring them.” Such individuals invariably took credit for emancipating the slaves, offered blacks a “tutorage” that only perpetuated the dependency of slavery, and lavished praise on black people only when able to control them. If a Union officer came to them claiming their votes on the basis of his service in the war, the
Tribune
asked black voters to “unbutton his uniform coat and feel the heart throbs of the man within it.” If, on the other hand, a former Confederate officer came to them professing to believe in Republican principles, the
Tribune
advised black voters to be skeptical of such sudden conversions. “After a five years’ struggle we do not choose to join the Confederates today.” And finally, the
Tribune
suggested that if any candidate replied to their demands with the familiar refrain of “too soon,” it was to be interpreted as “a lack of courage” to carry out the reform at any time.

Despite the emphasis placed on racial unity, black leaders were hardly immune to the usual political vices of sectarianism, dissimulation, and unbridled ambition. Nor did they necessarily agree on what relations they should sustain with the former slaveholding class or with their friends from the North. The extent to which they intended to act as “race men” if elected also tended to vary. Elick Mahaly, an ex-slave who ran for office in Crawford County, Georgia, demonstrated little of the moral fervor that could be found in the pages of the
New Orleans Tribune
or in the speeches of such Georgia blacks as Henry M. Turner and Tunis G. Campbell. He addressed himself almost exclusively to local agricultural problems and pledged himself to reconcile the interests of his own race with the need to ease the economic plight and political disabilities of the former slaveholding class. In offering himself to the voters in 1867, he played upon the theme of reconciliation.

But to have listened to the anguished cries of southern whites, the disaster they anticipated could best be summed up in an individual like the Reverend Nick Williams. This black preacher reportedly stormed through the interior of South Carolina in 1867, inculcating the minds of the freedmen with ideas subversive of the political and social order and bound to provoke a racial conflagration. Although skeptical of Reconstruction (“Will it put muskets in your hands or mine?”), he urged blacks to vote for none but their own color. The rights of the planter class to their lands, he declared, were no more legitimate than the previous rights they had claimed to their slaves. “Land we must have or we will die,” and he expected no help in this regard from the North. Any agent of the Freedmen’s Bureau could be easily bought—for as little as $2.50. The Negro in the North was treated no better than the slave in the South, perhaps even worse, and he advocated a massive exodus of northern blacks to the southern states, where they would combine with the freedmen to establish their
own nation. That was the Reverend Williams’ message, at least as white witnesses reported it. “No one can imagine, unless he was present among us,” one such observer wrote, “the extent and character of the excitement among the negroes. All labour is suspended; our fodder withers in the fields; whilst crowds attend the reverend gentleman everywhere he goes.” The district Freedmen’s Bureau office was sufficiently alarmed to dispatch a detail of soldiers to arrest the Reverend Williams.
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