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A question

of manhood

BLACKS IN THE DIASPORA Darlene Clark Hine, John McCluskey, Jr.,

and David Barry Gaspar

general editors

Edited by

Earnestine Jenkins and Darlene Clark Hine

INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS BLOOMINGTON & INDIANAPOLIS

a question

of manhood

History and Masculinity

A Reader in U.S.

Black Men’s

Volume 2

The 19th Century: From Emancipation to Jim Crow

This book is a publication of

Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street

Bloomington, IN 47404-3797 USA

http://iupress.indiana.edu

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Orders by e-mail [email protected]

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and

recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of

American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Perma- nence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A question of manhood : a reader in U.S. Black men’s history and masculinity / edited by Darlene Clark Hine and Earnestine Jenkins.

p. cm. — (Blacks in the diaspora) Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents: v. 1. Manhood rights v. 2. The 19th Century

ISBN 0-253-33639-2 (v. 1 : alk. paper). — ISBN 0-253-21343-6 (v. 1 : pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN 0-253-33924-3 (v. 2 : alk. paper). — ISBN 0-253-21460-2 (v. 2 : pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Afro-American men—History. 2. Masculinity—United States— History. I. Hine, Darlene Clark. II. Jenkins, Earnestine.

III. Series. E185.86.Q46 2001

305.38'896073—dc21 99-24464

1 2 3 4 5 06 05 04 03 02 01

In memory of my father, World War II veteran Levester Clark (1921–1983)

—Darlene Clark Hine

In memory of my grandfather, World War I veteran Garvin Fouse Sr. (1893–1983)

—Earnestine Jenkins

C o n t e n t s

xi foreword by bill strickland xv preface by darlene clark hine and earnestine jenkins xix acknowledgments

Introduction / earnestine jenkins and darlene clark hine

PART ONE: CONSTRUCTING CITIZENSHIP: THE EVOLUTION OF

BLACK MALE LEADERSHIP

one. “Your Old Father Abe Lincoln Is Dead and Damned”: Black Soldiers and the Memphis Race Riot of 1866 / kevin r. hardwick

two. Black Politicians in Reconstruction Charleston, South Carolina: A Collective Study / william c. hine

three. The Freedmen’s Bureau and Local Black Leadership / richard lowe

four. For Justice and a Fee: James Milton Turner and the Cherokee Freedmen / gary r. kremer

contentsviii

Part Two: “To Own Our Own Labor”: Black Men, Economic Self-

Sufficiency, and Working-Class Consciousness

five. Black Policemen in New Orleans During Reconstruc- tion / dennis c. rousey

six. Negro Labor in the Western Cattle Industry, 1866–1900 / kenneth w. porter

seven. The Politics of Black Land Tenure, 1877–1915 / manning marable

eight. “Like Banquo’s Ghost, It Will Not Down”: The Race Question and the American Railroad Brotherhoods, 1880– 1920 / eric arnesen

nine. “A Constant Struggle Between Interest and Human- ity”: Convict Labor in the Coal Mines of the New South / alex lichtenstein

Part Three: Black Men, the Professions, and Fraternal

Organizations

ten. A High and Honorable Calling: Black Lawyers in South Carolina, 1868–1915 / j. r. oldfield

eleven. Entering a White Profession: Black Physicians in the New South, 1880–1920 / todd l. savitt

105

129

139

174

189

200

contents ix

twelve. The Courtship Letters of an African American Couple: Race, Gender, Class, and the Cult of True Womanhood / vicki howard

thirteen. The African Derivation of Black Fraternal Orders in the United States / betty m. kuyk

Part Four: Proving Black Manhood: The Allure of Sport and the Military

in the Late Nineteenth Century

fourteen. Peter Jackson and the Elusive Heavyweight Championship: A Black Athlete’s Struggle Against the Late Nineteenth Century Color-Line / david k. wiggins

fifteen. The Black Bicycle Corps / marvin e. fletcher

sixteen. African Americans and the War Against Spain / piero gleijeses

Part Five: End-of-the-Century Archetypes: Symbolic Constructions in Black Manhood and Masculinity

seventeen. The Anatomy of Lynching / robyn wiegman

eighteen. The Heroic Appeal of John Henry / brett williams

nineteen. Stack Lee: The Man, the Music, and the Myth / george m. eberhart

234

249

283

309

320

349

370

387

contentsx

twenty. Where Honor Is Due: Frederick Douglass as Representative Black Man / wilson j. moses

sources selected bibliography index

441

455 457 469

foreword

bill strickland

In 1897, a little more than a century ago, W. E. B. Du Bois, fresh from the Herculean task of sociological investigation that would result in The Phila- delphia Negro, delivered a paper before the American Academy of Political and Social Science in which he urged a longitudinal study of “the group of social phenomena arising from the presence in this land of eight million persons of African descent.” Du Bois justified this research on the grounds that “the phenomena of society are worth the most careful and systematic study and whether this study may eventually lead to a body of knowledge deserving the name of science, it cannot in any case fail to give the world a mass of truth worth the knowing” (my emphasis).

In the publication of this second volume of A Question of Manhood, Darlene Clark Hine and Earnestine Jenkins have taken up the cause es- poused so eloquently by Du Bois so long ago. They have cast the historical net widely, and with care, bringing to the surface, as Du Bois predicted, some insights which may not as yet have attained the stature of established “truths,” but are nevertheless suggestive of hypotheses “worth the knowing.”

Using the lens of gender, this anthology takes us into a nineteenth-century world both old and new, triumphant and downtrodden; a world where Peter Jackson is not permitted to fight for the heavyweight championship of the world, and where the feats of other black champions of his time, such as jockey Isaac Murphy and cyclist Major Taylor are conveniently dropped down what George Orwell in his novel 1984 dubbed “the memory hole.”

It is a world where a black baseball team may beat a white team only at its peril, and where black men newly mustered out of the Union Army may be killed for real, imaginary, or anticipated “effrontery.” It is also a world where black women may be beaten and raped solely because of their real, imagi- nary, or suspected association with these military “sons” of “Father Abra- ham.” This world of perpetual menace and perpetual threat circumscribed the lives, hopes, behavior, and world view of the black men whose fifteen decades of history are thematically portrayed in the two volumes of A Ques-

forewordxii

tion of Manhood. But there is also another world, another space that black men have inhabited, and the editors have guided us into this world as well.

In this more autonomous sphere, young black men like Calvin Lindsey Rhone successfully court their sweethearts, marry, raise a family, and edu- cate themselves and their children. In this world, black lawyer James Milton Turner straddles the two political parties like a black mini-Colossus—secur- ing, after a protracted legal and political struggle, the government subsidy due the black former bondsmen of the Cherokees.

Focusing on the impact of gender on the plight of nineteenth-century black men, Darlene Clark Hine and Earnestine Jenkins usher us into the brittle worlds of black men across time and space—men from different classes; men who live in different regions, represent different levels of educa- tional attainment, and subscribe to different religions, or to no religion at all. They belong to different political parties and pursue different careers. They are doctors and lawyers and politicians, policemen, soldiers, musicians, and cowboys. They are unimaginably abused convict laborers, and routinely discriminated-against railroad workers. They are not a monolithic group. But they do share one overriding reality in common: They must contend against a system of racial privilege that is fluid, dynamic, and resilient in its ability to change the rules, rewrite the laws, disown the meaning of language (as in “freedom,” “democracy,” and “equality”), and alter the agenda in order to preserve and uphold racial advantage. The challenge, therefore, of—and to—their manhood was to try to survive and even, somehow, to prevail against the ever-present possibility of victimization.

This struggle may be interpreted from the point of view of gender, because white men have constructed a society that reflects their image, interests, and values. But in such a racially constructed society, race and gender are often, if not always, conflated: each signifying a reinforcing power that leaves those on the outside bereft of status, identity, potency, and rights. Thus the struggle of black men for self and gender cannot, in the final analysis, be meaning- fully separated from the struggle of black people itself.

Nowhere is this dual identity/responsibility more clearly seen than in the famous 1863 Civil War recruitment call by Frederick Douglass and others:

Men of color. To arms! in which black men were told it was, now or never . . . fail now and our race is doomed. . . . For generations we have suffered under the horror of slavery, outrage and wrong, our manhood has been denied, our citizenship blotted out, our souls seared and burned, our spirits cowed and crushed, and in the hopes of the future of our race involved in doubt and darkness. . . . (My emphasis)

Forty-three years later, in 1906, the Douglass appeal for black men to take up military arms was echoed at the second annual gathering of black men and women of the Niagara Movement, held at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, the site of John Brown’s historic raid. Only this time black men were called upon to take up political arms, not against a slave-owning South, but against a rights-denying, vote-depriving, lynching-ignoring Republic.

foreword xiii

Led by W. E. B. Du Bois, the men and women of Niagara II asked, “In the name of ten million the privilege of a hearing.” They stated, “We will not be satisfied to take one jot or tittle less than our full manhood rights. . . . We claim for ourselves every single right that belongs to a freeborn American, political, civil, and social; and until we get these rights we will never cease to protest and assail the ears of America” (my emphasis).

Though the equality and citizenship claims of Niagara were framed in terms of “manhood rights,” the intent—like the assemblage—was mani- festly racially and gender-inclusive. That is why the history of black men, examined within the context of America’s racial history, cannot fail to be mindful of its gender-inclusive political dimension. For only then can that history be accorded its full significance.

In the years from Douglass to Du Bois, an evolution of sorts occurred in the historic role of black men, which was symbolized by the Niagara Decla- ration. This bold racial manifesto went beyond the traditional boundary of race to appropriate the grandeur and moral authority of the American Democratic Ideal itself. But it also reached out to fair-minded white Ameri- cans—even as it condemned their morally negligent nation for its indiffer- ent attitude toward the besieging of black people.

The battle we wage, it is said, is not for ourselves alone, but for all true Amer- icans: it is a fight for ideals, lest this, our common fatherland, false to its found- ing, become in truth the land of the Thief and the home of the Slave—a by- word and hissing among the nations for its sounding pretensions and pitiful accomplishments. (My emphasis)

In the dawning twentieth century, black men thus expanded their salva- tory role from race to nation. They reaffirmed their Americanness and pro- pounded their claim to all the prerogatives associated with the American Heritage. At the same time, they demonstrated a new readiness to criticize America as their notions of how to attain “manhood rights” evolved from a quasi-innocent hope in America’s willingness to truly embrace its darker native sons—and daughters—into a more radical critique of America’s racial failings.

A decade before Marcus Garvey crossed the sea to America, and twenty years before Malcolm X was born in Omaha, Nebraska, we see the seeds of consciousness subsequently identified with the “New Negro” in the plowed ground of militancy out of which will come the next stage of black men’s struggle—and, presumably, the next volume of A Question of Manhood.

preface

darlene clark hine and earnestine jenkins

Class, race, and gender: These pivotal categories of analysis have come to permeate our view of the world in the second half of the twentieth century. Now, as the century comes to an end, the last of them is finally being applied to our view of the past. In the past few decades, the field of women’s studies has caused a conceptual shift in scholarly thought, focusing for the first time on gender as a crucial category of historical analysis. Women’s historians have shown that gender is as important as race and class in understanding the past and comprehending modern society, and historians in all fields have been forced to acknowledge that men not only are as influenced by their gender as women, but have actively participated in a history of gender construction, shaped by certain prevailing notions about what it means to be a man in American society and culture.

However, although there is no dearth of historical studies concerning in- dividual “great” men—and/or the world viewed from a generic male per- spective—few have examined men as gendered beings, whose lives and actions have been shaped by specific constructs of masculine identity and manhood. Historian Bruce Dorsey declares in the journal Radical History Review (1996) that the main task before historians of gender is the “intellec- tual quest to engender all of American history,” and men’s studies has only recently begun that task. Most of men’s studies is situated in the present and, having been very much influenced by the feminist movement, is concerned with modern-day male behavior, in particular the ramifications of white male dominance and its legacy. It is necessary now for historians to dem- onstrate how concepts of manhood have been subject to change over time. Throughout American history, social, economic, and political changes— along with race, class, and even sexuality and region of birth—have all in- fluenced the development of gender systems.

At present, there still exist only a few dozen monographs that have at- tempted to add a historical context to men’s studies. Among the representa- tive and innovative works are Peter Stearns’s Be a Man! Males in Modern

prefacexvi

Society (1979); Him/Her/Self: Sex Roles in Modern America by Peter Filene (1986); The American Man, edited by Joseph and Elizabeth Pleck (1980); and Manhood in America by Michael Kimmel (1996). Stearns deals with how the roles of middle- and lower-class men have changed since the eigh- teenth century, concluding that industrialization created more rigid gen- der roles for men and women. Filene analyzes masculine behavior from the late nineteenth century to the present in the context of the family, work, war, sexuality, and social reform movements. The American Man offers a new periodization, dividing men’s history into Agrarian Patriarchy (1630– 1820), the Commercial Age (1820–1860), the Strenuous Life (1861–1919), and Compassionate Providing (1920–1965). Kimmel’s work examines the changing culture of masculinity, suggesting that being required to “prove” manhood eventually became a dominant theme in American history. He goes on to describe how this particular idea paralleled the rise of capitalism in U.S. society, leading to the construction of a hegemonic manhood bereft of a strong inner self and making manhood into a “possession” that males are forced to “acquire.”

The methodologies and topics covered in these texts are indicative of the direction in which historical men’s studies is headed, influenced signifi- cantly by social history. In the past, traditional historical scholarship focused on the public accomplishments of great men, a perspective that margin- alized or even obscured certain groups of men and women. This view also negated the importance of collective identities and group action on the part of those who were considered minor players in American history. Contem- porary men’s studies has begun to investigate the experiences of working- class men, as well as the middle class and the elite. This social-historical approach has highlighted the role of gender in class formation and the pol- itics of power. It has revealed the existence of hegemonic masculinities lying at the heart of social distinctions that are divisive within groups of men and groups of women, even as they divide men from women.

Social history has also focused our attention on race. As a result, the field of men’s studies has begun serious research into the life experiences of Af- rican American men. Actually, few groups have received as much public scrutiny as black men. This is understandable, given that being black and male in America has always been, as social philosopher Kenneth Clatter- baugh says in Contemporary Perspectives on Masculinity (1997), a “socio- political issue.” Unfortunately, however, past and present scholarship has been obsessed with black men as a sociological ill. Since the early twentieth century, academe has been influenced by schools of thought that portray black people as America’s great social problem, drawing attention away from the real culprit, racial oppression. Within that theoretical framework, the few contemporary academic studies on black men have for the most part been written by those outside their experience, who see only the impact of historical oppression, drugs, imprisonment, fatherlessness, and unemploy- ment. It is no surprise, then, that black manhood has been stereotyped as

preface xvii

negative and dismal. In Slim’s Table: Race, Respectability, and Masculinity, sociologist Mitchell Duneier admits that sociological research has produced invaluable insights into the lives of black men. But he describes how the discipline has also contributed to one-dimensional images of the black man as hustler and criminal, navigating his way through the mire of the urban ghetto. These contemporary images of a negative, self-destructive black masculinity tend to validate historical assumptions about black men as vio- lent, oversexed, ignorant, and immoral. Certainly there should be serious concern about the status of all groups of black men and women in American society, but to present only the negative is simply not historically accurate. What it means to be a black man in America cannot be reduced to the sum total of negative experiences and stereotypes.

A Question of Manhood: A Reader in U.S. Black Men’s History and Masculinity is a wide-ranging exploration of the history of African American men from a gendered perspective. We need to examine black male behavior in response to the dynamics of slavery and racial oppression across regions and centuries. The essays in this anthology analyze how black masculinities were constructed to resist the dominance of white middle-class male iden- tity. However, it is well to underscore that the evolution of black manhood has been more than a history of public contests between white men and black men. Clearly, by the early National era black men were born into existing slave and free communities and cultures, where they first learned about manhood from other black men and women, family members, friends, and the community. The process of constructing a viable black manhood continued in the decades following emancipation. Just as the examination of black women’s history and womanhood proved to be of transformative significance, the study of black men’s history and manhood is enormously instructive and will greatly facilitate the ongoing project of reconstructing American history.

acknowledgments

The second volume of A Question of Manhood was as much a pleasure to complete as was the first volume of this project. We benefited enormously from the assistance and support of a special group of friends and colleagues.

We begin by recognizing the critically important contribution made by Linda Werbish, assistant to Darlene Clark Hine. Linda typed all the charts and graphs of the articles included and served as an overall manager for this two-volume reader. Joan Catapano remained fiercely committed to this project and provided just the right spark to keep us on schedule. We con- tinue to derive inspiration and energy from the wonderful graduate students of the Comparative Black History Ph.D. program at Michigan State Univer- sity who helped with the research, photocopying, and critical readings of our essay: Kenneth Marshall, Julia Robinson-Harmon, Jacqueline McLeod, Hil- ary Jones, Marshanda Smith, and Matthew Whitaker. We appreciate the insightful comments of William Strickland. We treasure the support of our families.

Introduction

We are highly gratified by the appellation by which the colored soldiers are addressed by their officers, viz: men; and we urge the colored men in all places, at all times, and under all circum- stances to cease using that vulgar phrase, “nigger.”

—black soldiers stationed in memphis, 1863

Black men and women irrefutably staked their claim for freedom during the Civil War. However, black people did not experience freedom as an ideal. It was a “lived” struggle. Everyday racism, political terrorism, the failure of Reconstruction, and the onset of legal segregation toward the end of the nineteenth century, all marred the era of emancipation.

This second volume of A Question of Manhood: A Reader in Black Men’s History and Masculinity continues to focus on gender, examining the tumul- tuous period following the Civil War through the end of the nineteenth century from the perspective of African American men. The writings in- cluded in this volume touch on themes in the lives of black men such as leadership, work and the professions, family and community, sports and the military, and the image of black men in the larger society.

The essays in Part One are studies in the evolution of African American political leadership. After emancipation, black men and women looked to singular individuals for guidance as they faced the exhilarating, and often inhospitable, challenges that freedom had wrought. Most of these essays explore black men’s political leadership in Reconstruction politics. How- ever, black soldiers, having most recently fought on the front lines of battle, occupied a deserving place in the minds of black Americans as natural leaders. Kevin R. Hardwick therefore leads off this section with “‘Your Old Father Abe Lincoln Is Dead and Damned’: Black Soldiers and the Memphis Race Riot of 1866,” a discussion of black soldiers as leaders in a black urban community after the Civil War. Thousands of freed people migrated to

earnestine jenkins and darlene clark hine2

Memphis because of the presence of black troops in the city. Former slaves, with reason, saw uniformed, armed black men as their protectors. Hardwick argues that black soldiers seriously began to accept this view of themselves and to conduct themselves accordingly. They were not above drawing their arms in response to threats from white policemen, advising former slaves against unscrupulous white landowners, and protecting their women and children from the aggression of white people. Hardwick’s emphasis on the manner in which one postwar black urban community began to construct grassroots leadership reminds us of the importance of scholarship from the inside out. Freedmen and -women were clearly developing some well- defined beliefs and values concerning leadership.

William C. Hine and Richard Lowe inquire into black Reconstruction politics. These case studies, based respectively in South Carolina and Vir- ginia, are focused on the local level. One of the more insightful lines of thought in both essays is how class functions in the construction of leader- ship. In the past, scholarship assumed that black Reconstruction politicians were invariably of mixed heritage, and a class removed from the people they actually represented. To some extent, this may be an accurate appraisal of black political leadership on the national level, but it does not hold true for local politics.

In “Black Politicians in Reconstruction Charleston, South Carolina: A Collective Study,” Hine illustrates that most black politicians in the state of South Carolina were identifiable as such (based upon census records), instead of as mulatto. More significant, though, is Hine’s discovery that free status before the war played more of a role in the career success of black politicians than color consciousness among their black constituents.

Lowe’s case study, “The Freedmen’s Bureau and Local Black Leader- ship,” investigates how white agents working for the Freedmen’s Bureau in Richmond, Virginia, identified those whom they perceived as the state’s local black leaders. Lowe also found that free status was a factor in the selection of leaders. White bureau agents overwhelmingly selected mixed- race black men who had been free before the war. However, their list of leaders did not correspond to the men that black Virginians identified as political leaders in their local communities. Former slaves predominated as leaders in Virginia’s local towns and cities.

In “For Justice and a Fee: James Milton Turner and the Cherokee Freed- men,” Gary R. Kremer investigates the activities of a black politician named James Milton Turner, who was a respected educator, orator, and lawyer in his community. Former slaves living with the Cherokee nation in Oklahoma asked Turner to lead the fight for their civil rights in Indian territory. This piece enlarges our understanding of relations, both friendly and acrimoni- ous, between freed blacks and Native Americans, some of whom were former slave owners. While James Milton Turner engaged in some political maneuvering that caused his attackers to label him an “opportunist,” such as

Introduction 3

aligning himself with the Democrats, he facilitated the passage of a bill that gained the Cherokee freedmen their full tribal rights.

The studies in Part Two address issues related to black men’s labor history. The dominant theme here is black men’s transition to wage-earning work. The Civil War exacerbated anxieties about American manhood and chal- lenged white America’s stereotypical notions about black people and work. It is a well-documented fact that most blacks ended up in the sharecropping system by the end of the 1870s. Sharecropping was yet another traumatic system of inequality. Still, emancipation marked black men’s introduction into the American workplace as paid workers. African Americans gained their freedom as the country was poised to become a world economic power, and was experiencing the pains of urbanization, industrialization, and tech- nological innovation. The family farm, with its independent male head, was beginning its slow, inexorable decline. The essays in this section examine black men in the labor force in contexts other than sharecropping. More- over, they illuminate how black and white men interacted and competed for jobs that white men often claimed as theirs only.

In “Black Policemen in New Orleans during Reconstruction,” Dennis C. Rousey focuses on post–Civil War New Orleans, where black men emerged as some of the country’s first policemen of color. Rousey cites the influence of the Radical Republicans, but also analyzes the historical and class differ- ences between whites, mulattos, and blacks in the city that affected the extent of freedom and opportunities for work available after the war. The New Orleans police department hired members of the city’s free Creole or mulatto population, but not former slaves. It was the Creole population’s long history of freedom and participation in military service that made it possible for this group to pressure the Republican party and the federal government to integrate the police force.

Kenneth W. Porter’s essay, “Negro Labor in the Western Cattle Industry, 1866–1900,” reintroduces us to the history of the African American cowboy. Its detailed attention to the everyday experiences of the black men who worked the cattle trails out west remains unique in the scholarship. Contem- porary popular culture glamorized the cowboy as the romantic icon of the American West. In reality, cowboys performed extremely dirty, arduous, and dangerous work, the type of job that the average middle-class American male would not have chosen as a profession. Cowboying was work done by poor whites, former slaves, Mexicans, and immigrants.

Cowboys were men of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds, who worked under the auspices of the Texas Trail Drivers Association, and as such formed the cornerstone of a major post–Civil War industry. During the height of the cattle industry, from 1866 to 1895, they were responsible for herding cattle over western trails, and for the daily maintenance of ranches. Approximately 9,000 of the estimated 35,000 American men who rode the western frontier were African American. In this early experiment in integrat-

earnestine jenkins and darlene clark hine4

ing the American workforce, the average outfit consisted of two black males, along with seven whites, one Mexican, and one white trail boss.

Porter points out that despite the relative equality, independence, and equal pay, racism and segregation affected black male workers in the cattle industry. Black men worked all positions, but white males sought to main- tain their authority and leadership roles by relegating black males to the lower-ranked jobs. Blacks were rarely placed in the top-level position of trail boss, or foreman over a cattle ranch. White men claimed that black cowboys lacked the prerequisite intelligence and capabilities. Most important, they explained that even if black men possessed such skills, white men would not follow them as leaders, or respect them as authority figures.

The black farmer and landownership is the subject of Manning Marable’s essay, “The Politics of Black Land Tenure, 1877–1900.” Like most Ameri- cans, freedmen and -women associated the ownership of property with economic security and middle-class respectability. In spite of a great desire to obtain land, by the late 1870s black people were increasingly trapped in the exploitative and oppressive sharecropping system. Marable describes how a small group of black agricultural workers eventually began to acquire land. These landowning black farmers were the origins of what Marable defines as the southern, rural, black middle class. One of the most interest- ing aspects of this study is its connection of the emergence of this particular class to late-nineteenth-century developments in black community build- ing. African American landownership was made possible by the black banks and other businesses that loaned black farmers money, and by the black agricultural institutions that trained them, so that they could compete with white farmers.

In “‘Like Banquo’s Ghost, It Will Not Down’: The Race Question and the American Railroad Brotherhoods, 1880–1920,” Eric Arnesen zeroes in on white racial attitudes and discrimination directed toward black male workers in the railroad industry. In presenting the other side of racism—why and how a certain group practices this type of social behavior—the author re- veals the highly “functional” nature of racism. Arnesen shows that racism has historically provided white American workers with what he describes as a “non-quantifiable advantage,” or “psychological wage.” No matter how disadvantaged white workers might be, they possessed advantages over black workers. Arnesen identifies the psychological function of racism as an effec- tive way in which white males were able to construct race, to emphasize difference, and to protect their identity.

The last essay in this section, Alex Lichtenstein’s “‘A Constant Struggle between Interest and Humanity’: Convict Labor in the Coal Mines of the New South,” explores yet another dimension of black men’s labor history. Growing out of the iron industry in Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia, the coal-mining industry was built by exploiting cheap prison labor. Between 1870 and 1928, thousands of black male convicts performed forced labor in southern coal mines. The whites in charge of this brutal system whipped

Introduction 5

black men like slaves with a leather strap they called the “negro regulator.” Yet black men devised ways to resist, such as feigning illness and developing indifferent attitudes about work performance. Sometimes they loaded freight cars with slate instead of coal, and in more extreme instances they would strike, trigger mine collapses, and commit arson. Eventually this system was replaced by the infamous chain gangs, which were particularly well suited to the goals of social control and suppression associated with Jim Crow. Black men were forced to toil on the South’s state infrastructure, or road and rail systems. Their labor was also leased out to other businesses. Chain gangs were an unsettling image because they were reminiscent of slavery.

Sam Cooke, one of the architects of soul music, immortalized this aspect of the black male experience in America with his song “Chain Gang” (1960). In the biography You Send Me: The Life and Times of Sam Cooke (1995), author Daniel Wolfe writes that Cooke was inspired to compose the song while he and singer Jackie Wilson were touring the “Chitlin Circuit” down south in the 1960s. While driving past the endless red dirt fields, they saw “a dozen coal-black men dressed in eye-stunning pure white uniforms.” They thought it was a striking picture until they got close enough to see the mounted guards with their double-barreled shotguns, and realized that the men were prisoners, chained ankle to ankle. Sam Cooke started writing the song immediately. When he returned to the RCA recording studios in Manhattan, Cooke hammered out a classic that was social commentary, a message song, and a lively dance tune that reached number two on the pop and r&b charts. Lichtenstein’s purpose in researching black men and the penal system was twofold: to bring attention to a neglected episode in American history, and to note that these events are not only in the past, but remain with us still.

Part Three looks at African American men in the professions, their per- sonal relationships, and fraternal organizations. In “A High and Honorable Calling: Black Lawyers in South Carolina, 1868–1915,” J. R. Oldfield exam- ines the experiences of black lawyers, while in “Entering a White Profession: Black Physicians in the New South, 1880–1920,” Todd L. Savitt presents the difficulties that black physicians encountered during emancipation, Recon- struction, and Jim Crow. Both lawyers and physicians struggled to find schools that would admit them for higher learning. Ultimately, most black professionals in the South would be trained at what we now call historically black colleges. In addition, black professionals had to overcome the initial distrust and lack of confidence frequently exhibited toward them in the black communities they served. Circumstances demanded that they create internal systems of professional support, and strong “group allegiance” as well, in order to surmount the racial barriers at local, state, and national levels.

In “The Courtship Letters of an African American Couple: Race, Gen- der, Class, and the Cult of True Womanhood,” Vicki Howard provides a rare glimpse of romanticism in her examination of the courtship between a

earnestine jenkins and darlene clark hine6

young middle-class African American couple living in rural Texas in the 1880s. The letters that Calvin Lindsey Rhone wrote to Lucia J. Knotts during their nineteen-month courtship form the basis of Howard’s investiga- tion into the ways a black couple negotiated their respective gender roles before marrying in 1887. The letters reveal values and beliefs about men’s and women’s roles that parallel the larger society, yet exhibit conflict and resistance to white middle-class American culture. Diaries and letters writ- ten by blacks are scarce documents. Hence Howard’s work brings a much- needed personal dimension to African American gender studies and history.

Calvin and Lucia reached a crossroad in their relationship when they addressed Calvin’s expectations that Lucia would adopt an entirely domestic role after the marriage. His position was in conflict with Lucia’s desire to continue her college education and to work outside the home as a teacher. Calvin soon gave in to Lucia’s wishes. According to Howard, their concerns and decisions were directly related to African American culture, commu- nity, and history.

She describes how economic necessity usually required that working-class and middle-class black women work outside the home after marriage. Among the middle classes, the ideology of racial uplift was a factor as well. Black men and women viewed the skills derived from a “career-oriented education” as a necessary means of survival for the black family and commu- nity. Black women’s educational training was a recognized asset. It was an unaffordable luxury for a black woman to pursue an education, then aban- don her hard-won skills, because of attempts to fit in with certain white, middle-class notions about class, work, and womanhood. Neither were black men in a position to demand black women’s complete subordination to the “cult of true womanhood, “ when women had performed the same fieldwork as males during slavery. Black women’s educational work was viewed as a “mission,” and of invaluable benefit to the race as a whole.

Betty M. Kuyk’s “The African Derivation of Black Fraternal Orders in the United States” addresses similar ideas about community and benevolent work. Gender-based organizations have historically been an important ex- pression of self-respect and identity, and an important opportunity for black men and women to provide leadership and community service. These asso- ciations fulfilled political, economic, and social functions in black commu- nities. Members of the associations collectively built banks, founded busi- nesses, started newspapers, created educational opportunities, and provided black politicians with a political base. In the past, scholars have attributed the origins of black male associations to white male organizations. Kuyk, however, searches for their origins closer to home, in West African brother- hoods.

Kuyk’s research is especially interesting in its analysis of religious, class, and cultural similarities and differences. But her strongest argument may be her assertion that the functions of the chief, the priest, and the father are traditional African male gender roles, social patterns of behavior and cul-

Introduction 7

tural expression that remain deeply embedded in African American male organizations, particularly secret societies and fraternities.

Kuyk finds that rites and rituals in African and African American all-male organizations revolve around the expression of strong religious beliefs and practices, and place equal emphasis upon the election of elder and re- spected male figures, whose role is to provide experienced spiritual and moral leadership. No official meeting of a secret society or fraternity can take place without the presence of a priest in the African context or a minister in the American setting to lead the recitation of prayers and blessings or the singing of religious songs. The elder members elected to serve as father figures offer advice, counsel, and guidance to younger members of the group. It is no surprise that the highest-ranking officers in African and African American male associations tend to be priests and ministers.

Part Four looks at the influence of sports and the military on black men’s perceptions about manhood in the second half of the nineteenth century. In “Peter Jackson and the Elusive Heavyweight Championship: A Black Ath- lete’s Struggle against the Late Nineteenth Century Color-Line,” David K. Wiggins relates the little-known story of a boxer who was probably the most internationally known black athlete of the late nineteenth century. Wiggins places Peter Jackson within the context of the other great black men of that century who struggled to participate in the sport on an equal playing field. Jackson followed in the footsteps of Bill Richmond and Tom Molineaux, ex- slaves whose boxing skills had gained them their freedom. Richmond mi- grated to England, which was then the center of the boxing world, where he became a notable pugilist. He was there to receive and train Molineaux, who left America for England in 1809. Molineaux became the first black man to have a shot at the heavyweight title when he fought Tom Crib, the British heavyweight champion. Molineaux lost the battle, but the 39-round fight is considered one of the most celebrated bouts in boxing history. It established Molineaux as the first in a long line of great black heavyweights.

By the time Peter Jackson arrived on the scene in the 1880s and ’90s, he had to contend with America’s growing intolerance for interracial sport. Boxing was just beginning to achieve popularity in the United States in the 1880s. The world heavyweight champion, John L. Sullivan, who fought bare-fisted in championship bouts, promoted the sport by touring the coun- try and fighting all challengers. Sullivan, however, persistently refused to fight Jackson. Jackson’s inability to arrange a championship fight for him- self, according to Wiggins, makes for one of the most frustrating careers in the history of sports. While the other major black athletes of the late nine- teenth century were able to compete and emerge victorious in their respec- tive professions, Jackson was never allowed to fight for the greatest of prizes, the heavyweight championship of the world.

Wiggins suggests that increasing racism in American sports, segregation, and intolerance for interracial social contact all factored into America’s unwillingness to see black and white fighters in the ring on equal terms.

earnestine jenkins and darlene clark hine8

Boxing became popular at a time when pseudo-scientific theories about race were strongly influencing social views. As a result, the sport emerged as a symbol of white Anglo-Saxon purity and racial superiority. In contrast to team sports, boxing pits an individual against his opponent in face-to-face, fist-to-fist, body-to-body combat. The man with superior skill and intelli- gence, strength, will, and bare-knuckle courage triumphs. When black men and race entered the arena in the nineteenth century, boxing became America’s dominant metaphor for the racialized conflict between black and white men.

When Jack Johnson finally achieved the unimaginable by defeating Jim Jeffries in 1910 to become the world’s first black heavyweight champion, he “took” something for men of color that white men had always believed to be theirs alone. Since then, the sports world has waited for a “great white hope” to appear on the horizon. Even the language used in boxing is reflective of the sport’s racial and masculine symbolism.

Two recent events in the history of boxing have woven together the threads of American racism, championship boxing, and the icon of the heroic black male. When USA Today selected Muhammad Ali as “Athlete of the Century,” many of the newspaper’s readers found fault with the decision. They named other deserving candidates, among them Jim Thorpe, Babe Ruth, Jesse Owens, and Jackie Robinson. But none of those men seems to have possessed the combination of male virility, talent, and charisma, and the idea of the heroic individual male, that Ali’s position as the fighter/boxer personified, as expressed in his public battles against racism and his refusal to participate in the Vietnam War.

In addition, Hollywood, which has produced several outstanding films about the theme of boxing in American culture, recently released Hurri- cane, the real-life story of Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, the middleweight champion who in 1967 was railroaded into prison on trumped-up murder charges. Carter spent twenty years in prison before he was freed. He, like Ali, was a black fighter whose outspoken behavior and bold racial male pride provoked white fear. Carter was able to endure his physical confinement in prison only through the development of an individual, austere inner strength, self-reliance, and the physical discipline that is most associated with the sport of boxing.

In their prime, Ali and Carter were feared and hated by many whites. Black fighters symbolized black men as conquerors. They beat white men at their own game with bare fists. In the double-faceted sport of American box- ing, race pride and white racism are two sides of the same coin. It is interest- ing to note that when the ancient sport of boxing was revived in western Europe, specifically in England in the seventeenth century, it was popu- larized as a democratic sport, one that traversed acrimonious class divisions by attracting the avid interest of kings and paupers, elites and urban work- ing poor. At the beginning of the second millennium, boxing’s masculine

Introduction 9

mystique is associated with African American champions, and has become synonymous with the black heroic ideal.

“The Black Bicycle Corps” is an important contribution to the history of black men, sports, and the military. Marvin E. Fletcher writes of the history of the 25th Infantry, one of the four black regiments stationed west of the Mississippi after the Civil War. Better known as the Buffalo Soldiers, the 24th and 25th Infantries, along with the 9th and 10th Cavalries, guided and protected American settlers as they moved out west, and managed relations between the settlers and Native Americans as a peacekeeping force. The 25th was posted on the Texas frontier until the 1880s, when it was reassigned to Dakota Territory, and then to Montana eight years later. In the cold northern frontier, black soldiers assisted the homesteaders in relief opera- tions, rescuing white settlers and domestic animals, who were often stranded in severe weather conditions. They delivered supplies to distant settlements, patrolled railroad mines during strikes, and even fought forest fires. One of their more unusual and little-known assignments was to test bicycles for military service. In the late 1880s, bicycling had become one of America’s most popular pastimes, and the bicycle had been tested in Europe as a useful vehicle for transport services in the military. The U.S. Army’s first experi- mentation with bicycles was carried out with black soldiers from the 25th Infantry.

Fletcher’s essay recounts the range of racial difficulties that the bicycle squad encountered in the performance of their task. The corps’ most chal- lenging test occurred in 1897, when they rode 1,900 miles from Fort Mis- soula, Montana, to St. Louis. The trip lasted forty days, and took them through Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Missouri. Al- though the military eventually decided that bicycles were of limited use, the experiment was considered a success: The 25th Infantry had more than demonstrated the feasibility of using bicycles in the field.

The Spanish-American War was the last major conflict of the nineteenth century. Piero Gleijeses’s study “African Americans and the War against Spain” takes an innovative approach that focuses on the debate among black men about their participation in the war. Using black newspapers as his main source material, Gleijeses highlights the increase in segregation and racism during this period, especially the practice of lynching. The black press provided detailed coverage of the increased confrontations between black and white men during the last decade of the nineteenth century. Physical violence and confrontations escalated when black men appeared in uniform, a pattern witnessed in earlier periods. Not surprisingly, riots and accusations of rape against black men increased as well.

Black newspapermen who voiced their objections and resistance to mili- tary service were at the center of the controversy and turmoil. A. L. Manley, the founder and editor of Wilmington, North Carolina’s, only black newspa- per, The Daily Record, wrote an editorial that castigated white men for

earnestine jenkins and darlene clark hine10

creating the myth of the black male rapist as an excuse for lynching. Like Ida B. Wells before him, he said that white women were usually the aggressors in relationships with black men. Manley boldly reminded white people of the “unpublicized crime of white men raping black women.” In the riot that followed on November 10, 1898, white men burned the offices of Manley’s paper.

In Part Five, aspects of late-nineteenth-century white terrorism provide a closer look at symbolic constructions of black manhood. “The Anatomy of Lynching,” by Robin Wiegman, is pivotal research in this field. Scholars delving into the history of white terrorism have begun to unravel what Wiegman calls “the enduring power of the black male rapist mythos.” This essay probes the psychological ramifications of black freedom and white terrorism. Weigman analyzes how the myth functioned to script the disturb- ing changes that occurred in racial relations in the United States during the late nineteenth century.

Brett Williams and George M. Eberhart search for the historical reality behind two of America’s most enduring legends with black male protago- nists. In “The Heroic Appeal of John Henry,” Williams defines the character of the “steel drivin man” as exemplifying the heroic ideal. He attributes the story’s steadfast appeal as well to its versatility. Ever since the legend’s local beginnings in West Virginia and its close relationship to the country’s rail- road industry, John Henry has represented the American laborer, the rail- road worker and history, the African American experience, American cul- ture, and the family.

While the origins of John Henry remain unknown, Eberhart had more success in nailing down the origins of Stagger Lee. As he tells us in “Stack Lee: The Man, the Music, and the Myth,” the American archetype for the “bad” black man can be traced back to an altercation between Lee Shelton, alias Stagger Lee, and Billy Lyons, which took place in St. Louis on Decem- ber 25, 1895. Most of us are familiar with the ballad, but the facts surround- ing the murder case are less widely known. Lee Shelton went to trial not once but twice for the murder of Billy Lyons. Why? Because the St. Louis community, familiar with the character of both men, believed that Shelton had acted in self-defense. The fascinating, little-known story of the trial connects the real-life events to political rivalries between black Republicans and black Democrats. Hence the shooting was viewed as a misunderstand- ing between two friends that escalated to murder, fueled by drink and political argument. Lee Shelton acted in self-defense. He was neither the murderer nor the “bad” black man that his metamorphosis into Stagger Lee made him out to be.

The last essay, “Where Honor Is Due: Frederick Douglass as Represen- tative Black Man” by Wilson J. Moses, focuses on how that major Ameri- can icon, Frederick Douglass, manipulated American ideals about “Anglo- Saxon manhood” in order to project his own image of the self-made man. Moses portrays Douglass as the ideal symbol of the black American male,

Introduction 11

because he was, in fact, quite typical of black men’s experience. On one hand, Douglass was a slave who escaped, then became a member of a free class of black men who were literate and were guided by Christian principles in their thought and work. His ideas about manhood were influenced by other black males important in his life, including those who befriended him, those whose intellect and courage he admired, and those with whom he experienced conflict and disagreement.

This study’s most important contribution, however, lies in Moses’s per- ceptive analysis of Douglass’s ambivalent actions and character. As much as he was admired, and unquestionably a man of courage, principle, and dignity, Douglass was equally self-serving and opportunistic, and made his way in the world by cultivating his own myth. Furthermore, he exhibited as much confusion and concern as any other black man about the explosive issues of his time. Among them, Moses identifies separation versus integra- tion, Afrocentric ideology versus Eurocentrism, and the dynamics of male- female relationships. These same issues continue to confront black men and women today. In the final analysis, it appears that Frederick Douglass’s very human, personal failings, as well as his triumphs, are the very things that make him a “Representative Black Man.”

It is hoped that the two volumes of A Question of Manhood: A Reader in Black Men’s History and Masculinity will contribute to the growing interest in African American masculinities. Much erroneous information about black men exists, and is widely circulated in the popular media. Most of it depicts black men as negligent, criminal, and genetically prone to violence. But we have chosen historical essays that tell a more complex reality. They convey some sense of the depth and complexity of black men’s multifaceted experiences in the United States. Historically, the great struggle that has engaged black men and women since the first days of their sojourn in the western world has been the survival of all peoples of African descent in the diaspora. As Aldon D. Morris wrote in the foreword to the first volume, we embrace and place before you “the noble side of the notion of what it means to be a man.”

earnestine jenkins darlene clark hine

january 2000

Part One lk

Constructing

Citizenship:

The

Evolution

Black

Male

Leadership

ONE “Your Old Father Abe Lincoln Is Dead and Damned”: Black Soldiers and the

Memphis Race Riot of 1866

lk kevin r. hardwick

Your old father Abe Lincoln is dead and damned.1

—Statement made by an Irish police officer to black soldiers at the start of the Memphis Riot, Tuesday, May 1, 1866

Between May 1 and May 3, 1866, racial conflict erupted violently in Mem- phis, Tennessee. Irish policemen and firemen, together with white laborers and small businessmen, rioted in the southern part of the city. For three days they attacked the black residents living in the shanty settlement surrounding Fort Pickering, a Union military installation on the outskirts of the city. The rioters initially focused their attacks on the former soldiers of the Third United States Colored Heavy Artillery regiment, which had disbanded April 30—the last of three black regiments to be mustered out of United States service at Memphis. On May 2 and 3, however, the rioters increasingly tar- geted the civic institutions and property of the black community of south Memphis, including schools, churches, and black-owned houses. By May 4, when federal military authorities declared martial law and detachments of white troops enforced order in the city, two whites and at least forty-six blacks had been killed, between seventy and eighty others had been wounded, at least five black women raped, more than one hundred people (mostly black) robbed, and four churches, twelve schools, and ninety-one houses burned.2

Contemporary observers attributed the violence to the unruly conduct of black soldiers in Memphis and to the longstanding animosity between blacks and the Irish, who competed for work as manual laborers. The Memphis Daily Avalanche, for example, argued, “it is only with the negro soldiers that

kevin r. hardwick16

trouble has ever existed. . . . With their departure, will come order, con- fidence, and the good will of old days. Had we had [white troops] instead of negro troops, neither this riot, nor the many lawless acts preceding it dur- ing the past six months, would have occurred.” The superintendent of the Memphis Freedmen’s Bureau, Major General Benjamin P. Runkle, stressed that “there was also a conflict of labor between the Irish hack-drivers, dray- drivers, porters, laborers, &c, and the negroes employed in the same occupa- tions; there was a good deal of bitterness felt upon the part of the Irish, from the fact that these southern gentlemen preferred to hire negro servants.” Another observer, Ewing O. Tade, a representative of the American Mis- sionary Association, stated succinctly that “the late Memphis Riot was be- yond a reasonable doubt instigated by the Irish Police of this city.”3

The rioters, however, were a diverse lot, and their ethnic and occupational background does not support such a narrow, socio-economic interpretation of the violence. While the Irish overwhelmingly dominated the city’s police force and fire companies, they represented only 50 to 60 percent of the identifiable rioters; at least 40 percent of the rioting mob, and quite likely more, was American born. Most of the rioters were artisans, professionals, and small shop keepers, not the “lower sort” and “rowdies” described by contemporary accounts. Only 27 percent of the identifiable rioters came from the occupational groups that observers considered most likely to be in competition with blacks for employment.4

Nor was the riot a spontaneous eruption of racial hatred. The contempt that many whites maintained for blacks, after all, was pervasive both before and after the riot. Racism cannot in itself explain the violence. To under- stand what happened in Memphis during the first three days of May 1866, the events of the riot must be placed within the local context of Memphis and its particular history as a center for the recruitment and administration of black military units.

Black soldiers, whose uniform conferred upon them the authority of the victorious Union army, occupied a particularly strategic and powerful posi- tion within the larger community of black people living in Memphis, and were prominent in the efforts of the former slaves to redefine their position within southern society. The freedmen sought to repudiate the strictures of the traditional order and to claim their independence. Many of the white citizens of Memphis were committed to the enforcement of an altogether different vision of racial relations, in which blacks, while legally no longer slaves, remained subordinate to white authority. The violence of early May culminated numerous lesser confrontations in the preceding months. Con- flict over the appropriate deportment and behavior of black men and women in Memphis had been festering for some time, as black soldiers insisted that whites treat them in a more dignified and equalitarian fashion.

Black soldiers, prominent in the Memphis garrison since 1863, were culturally significant both to blacks and whites. The experience of military life in the victorious Union army empowered many black soldiers, and

“Your Old Father Abe Lincoln Is Dead and Damned” 17

thousands of blacks hastened to cities like Memphis to enlist in the Union army. Black non-commissioned officers exercised responsibility in active leadership roles in the military and figured prominently in the political leadership of black communities after the war. Black soldiers had access to firearms and training in their use, an inversion of social norms that, prior to the war, had reserved access to firearms almost exclusively to whites. Fur- ther, the social role of soldier, carrying with it the authority and prestige of the Union army, in itself enhanced the power and self-image of black soldiers. At a mass meeting in Memphis held on the first anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, participants expressed the sense of dignity that military service provided. “We are highly gratified by the appellation by which the colored soldiers are addressed by their officers, viz.: men; and we urge the colored men in all places, at all times, and under all circumstances, to cease using that vulgar phrase, ‘nigger.’”5

When black men acted as provost guards in Memphis and other southern cities, they enforced a new order that, from the standpoint of many white Southerners, represented the world turned upside down. Thus, black sol- diers were at once deeply threatening to those whites committed to the old order, and psychologically, as well as actively, liberating to blacks struggling to create the new. The presence of black soldiers in Memphis, and their relations with both black and white residents of the city, are central to understanding the riot. The riot was in part directed at stripping these men, in the most direct and brutal way possible, of the authority that federal service had provided them.6

The violence of the riot, and the social tension that underlay it, ultimately derived from the wartime migration of thousands of black men and women. Memphis, like most southern cities, experienced a vast influx of former slaves during and after the war. By March 1863, General Stephen A. Hurlbut was writing from Memphis requesting instructions on what to do with “the vast numbers of worthless negroes” that congregated around the city. Hurl- but reported the presence of almost 5,000 black men and women directly dependent on federal forces, as well as “a very large number . . . not sup- ported by the Govt.” In 1865, when a city census was taken, the population stood at 28,000 of whom 11,000 were blacks. Large numbers of black people lived in the suburbs of Memphis, however, and a Freedmen’s Bureau report of September 1865, estimated the total black population “in and about” the city at 16,000. In less than five years the black population of Memphis had expanded more than four-fold.7

Throughout the war the status of Tennessee slaves remained ambiguous, and federal policy regulating their treatment evolved as the exigencies of fighting the war and occupying the region demanded. Federal troops in- vaded Tennessee in February 1862, occupying Memphis in June. General

kevin r. hardwick18

William T. Sherman, who assumed command of Memphis in July 1862, hoped at first to avoid disputes about the status of fugitive slaves. However, he, like other Union commanders in Tennessee, quickly recognized the value of slave labor to the Confederate army, and took steps to deprive his opponents of its benefit. Sherman thus welcomed fugitive slaves and put them to work constructing fortifications around Memphis. In October 1862, assuming control of law enforcement in Memphis, Sherman ordered police to treat all blacks in the city as freedmen, until federal courts determined otherwise. A month later he issued orders declaring that “runaway slaves must be treated as free, and people encouraged to give them employment as such.”8

Federal policy in Tennessee was complicated by the fact that many slaveowners, especially in the eastern part of the state, were unionist, and many army officers felt compelled to protect the slave property of such men. President Lincoln recognized the support of Tennessee unionists by ex- empting the state from the emancipation proclamation in January 1863. As a practical matter, however, slavery in west Tennessee was a dying institution following the passage in July 1862, of the Second Confiscation Act. That law confiscated and freed the slaves of secessionist slaveowners at the time that slaves came within Union lines, and complicated the efforts of unionist authorities throughout Tennessee to enforce local slave codes. In November 1862, Sherman declared the superiority of the Second Confiscation Act over local laws regulating slavery in Memphis, effectively ending the ability of local civil authority to enforce the slave codes. While the status of freed- men in Memphis remained ambiguous, by late 1862 they were no longer subject to the full repression of legal bondage.9

Memphis was an attractive destination for black men and women. While the war was in progress and the formal freedom of slaves belonging to unionist masters still unsure, the presence of Union military units, especially black military units, offered fugitive slaves some security from irate planters seeking to reclaim their property. Further, many black men were attracted to Memphis by the opportunity to enlist in the Union army. In fall 1863 Memphis became the military collection depot for black soldiers in west Tennessee, and a number of black regiments were raised there. By the end of the war, 39 percent of all Tennessee black men between the ages of 18 and 45 served in the Union army.10

After the war large numbers of former slaves migrated to Memphis to avoid difficult labor conditions on plantations. In the countryside, blacks were vulnerable to exploitation and violence when dealing with plantation owners and other whites. One Freedmen’s Bureau official wrote from Mem- phis in April 1866 that “numerous outrages have been committed upon the Freedmen in this Sub-District and that Freedmen have, by reason of such outrages, been compelled to flee from the country and seek protection within the limits of the city. . . .” In late 1865 another Union officer in Memphis reported that “large numbers of negroes are arriving daily from

“Your Old Father Abe Lincoln Is Dead and Damned” 19

North Miss. many of the latter alleging that they have been driven out of Miss. by the militia organizations of that state who under the pretext of disarming them take all their property.” For thousands of black men and women, the continued presence of U.S. troops, particularly black troops, and the Freedmen’s Bureau offices in Memphis offered some protection from white aggression and greater power in asserting control over their own lives.11

Once large numbers of black soldiers came to be stationed at Memphis, members of their families began to settle there as well. Many Union officers, however, disapproved of the presence of the families of black soldiers. Colo- nel John Foley, commander of the 61st U.S. Colored Infantry Regiment, which was stationed at Fort Pickering, complained bitterly about the disrup- tive effect of the families settled near the fort. The “several hundred negro women living in Temporary huts, between the camp of this regiment and the city” he reported in January 1865, “are, for the most part, idle, lazy vagrants, committing depredations, and exercising a very pernicious influ- ence over the colored soldiers of this Post.” These women, he continued, “are generally in a destitute condition, and their wants are partially supplied by soldiers of colored regiments who claim them as wives.” Foley was par- ticularly incensed that family members “carry off rations from the compa- nies in spite of the utmost vigilance of company commanders, and also carry off axes, shovels, spades, and picks . . . to use in building and maintaining these households.”12

Union officers several times attempted to force the families of black soldiers to move to locations more isolated from the fort, but to small avail. Captain Thomas A. Walker commanded a detail to relocate the families of black soldiers to nearby President’s Island, where they would work as field hands on neighboring plantations. He reported in a January 1865 letter that “the people are unwilling to be moved, and will give no assistance them- selves, but lock their doors, and run to their husbands in the various military organizations for protection—the husbands swear their families shall not be moved to the Island and in some instances have come out in arms to prevent it.” Earlier efforts to relocate the families of black soldiers to plantations around Helena, Arkansas, where “they can have daily communication by Boat with their husbands at Memphis,” had been similarly unsuccessful.13

As the numbers of slaves and former slaves living in Memphis grew, connections between soldiers and the rest of the black community became increasingly complex. Many families depended on military wages to meet exorbitant rents and high food prices. Lieutenant Colonel Robert Cowden, commander of the 59th U.S. Colored Infantry Regiment, investigated the conditions in which the families of the men lived. “In the largest house which is probably 18 x 35 feet and two stories high and containing four or five rooms there are seven families of soldiers of this Regiment most if not all of whom pay Mr. Boyle $8 per month.” Another officer observed in Decem- ber 1865 that “probably three fourths of these [colored] troops have families

kevin r. hardwick20

depending upon them for support—they have not been paid during the last six months and cannot provide for their families who being destitute trespass upon the property of citizens and many of them resort to stealing.” Tensions mounted when landlords threatened black tenants with eviction, and sol- diers responded to protect their families. In August 1865, Colonel Cowden defended the actions of one of his men. A local property owner had “sent a number of colored men to tear down the house in which a sick woman the wife of a soldier in the fort lay lying and her husband stopped them with threats until he could move his wife which he has done. This is what [the landowner] reported as one of the 59th having a gun and threatening to shoot &c. . . .”14

Soldiers provided clothing for their families and perhaps for others in the black community as well. Colonel John Foley observed that “the soldiers of my regiment also steal each others clothes for their families to wear and dispose of. . . .” Colonel A. Von Schrader, a Freedmen’s Bureau inspector, noted in January 1866, “that a great many [black] people are found to wear more or less parts of the Uniform prescribed by the U.S. Army. . . .” Such a widespread dispersal of federal military clothing had important implications for the black soldiers, since it linked them even more tightly to the rest of the black community and made it more difficult for the casual observer to distinguish between soldiers and black civilians. “Some of these People as instances have proved, have used the Uniform of the U.S. Soldiers as a garb under which to Commit Crimes in order that Persons belonging to the Army by Suspicioned of their foul deed,” Von Schrader wrote. “If there can be no measures adopted to prohibit persons not belonging to the Army, to wear its Uniform, the best disciplined troops, will unjustly be charged with depreda- tions which were not Committed by them.”15

One important consequence of emancipation was a reduction in black labor. Since a planter’s coercion could not match that possible under sla- very, blacks did not work as hard or as long as they had before they became free. In addition, many withdrew entirely or partially from the labor force. Old people, children, and women removed themselves from plantation labor whenever possible. “Rather than work like slaves, the freedmen chose to offer an amount of labor comparable to the standard for free laborers of the time,” two recent analysts of the postwar southern economy write.16 The result was a massive shortfall in plantation labor that affected most parts of the black belt. In Memphis, as the magnitude of the labor shortage in the surrounding plantation districts became apparent, observers focussed on the growing population of freedmen living near Fort Pickering.

Early in the war many Union army officers wished that the problem of fugitive slaves would just go away. General Hurlbut, for example, rather naively remarked in March 1863 that “if the fugitives now lurking about

“Your Old Father Abe Lincoln Is Dead and Damned” 21

Memphis could return to their homes in the city & vicinity & their former owners would receive them & treat them kindly until the final determina- tion of their status much of the misery and vice which infests the city & vicinage would be removed.” By 1865, however, it was clear that large numbers of freedpeople would not voluntarily return to plantation labor. One officer reported “from my experience here I am entirely satisfied that the larger proportion of the freed persons will not hire out of their own choice but will rely on such a precarious living as they can make in the city.”17

Efforts by blacks to escape plantation labor and to remove women and children from the labor force received scant sympathy, even from the officers of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Planters and businessmen in Memphis com- plained constantly to federal officers about the “idleness” of former slaves. Many employers agreed with the Memphis attorney who remarked, “almost everybody is aware that the negro does not work as faithfully or as much as he did formerly while a slave, and persons who employ them are irritated a good deal by their shirking.” Communications between officers in the army and the Freedmen’s Bureau often echoed these concerns. John H. Grove, report- ing in September 1865 on the conditions of black life in Memphis, asserted that while many blacks in Memphis lived comfortably and had jobs, “a large number are vagrants, who left the plantations upon which they were for- merly employed . . . who are idle and destitute. . . .” General Nathan A. M. Dudley, Freedmen’s Bureau superintendent for the Subdistrict of Mem- phis, wrote to his superiors in Nashville on September 30th, 1865. “There is a surplus population of at least six thousand colored persons women and children in and about Memphis who have no visible means of support who are, however, in a great measure induced to remain about the city by the employed colored people. Very many of this number are lazy, worthless vagrants who will never be induced to leave the life they are now leading except by use of force, as long as they can beg, steal, or obtain sufficiencies to sustain life.” P. D. Beecher, a Freedmen’s Bureau surgeon, offered an equally stern assessment of the situation of the black population, writing “I am satisfied, . . . great numbers lead a life of prostitution, . . . idleness or depending as means of support upon those who are more industrious.” For onlookers like Dudley, Grove, and Beecher, the presence of black children, women, and old people who were capable of work but not actively working merely confirmed racist stereotypes of freedmen as lazy and indolent.18

As the summer of 1865 drew to a close, the Freedmen’s Bureau in Mem- phis, headed by General Dudley, came under increasing pressure from military officers, planters, and white citizens to relocate the city’s “surplus” black population to the plantations of the surrounding countryside. Major William Gray, one of Dudley’s officers, remarked in September, that “I am daily urged by influential persons in the city” to compel freedmen and wom- en to accept plantation jobs. Dudley’s attitude regarding the status of the freedmen is apparent in a letter that same month, in which he wrote “worth-

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less, idle, persons have no rights to claim the same benefits arising from their freedom that the industrious and honest are entitled to.” In October he ordered that the streets be patrolled by soldiers from Fort Pickering to pick up “vagrants” and force them to accept labor contracts with rural planters.19

To some, and especially to blacks, this policy seemed akin to the reimpo- sition of slavery. Warner Madison, a freedman, protested the Freedmen’s Bureau policy of forcing blacks to accept labor contracts. “If you dont want to go with Mr. who every it may be they dont find out whether you want to go or not atall they make out the agreement sell you for the price that the man give them,” he wrote. “It is positively a fact that they get one dollar a head from these worst secession Men. and i have seen one case where a boy was made to go by the point of a bayonet. . . .”20

Many whites in and around Memphis, however, approved of Dudley’s use of coercion. The Daily Appeal, a conservative Memphis newspaper, sup- ported the Freedmen’s Bureau policy. “While jealously guarding the rights of freedmen,” the Appeal opined, Dudley “inflexibly requires of them to labor for the support of themselves and their families, and to fulfill faithfully their contracts. If the Freedmen’s Bureau, everywhere, was administered by such officers as Gen. Dudley, vagabondage would disappear, [and] labor would be reorganized harmoniously with the interest of both races. . . .” The Memphis Daily Avalanche, another of the city’s conservative presses, de- scribed the inhabitants of the black shantytown about Fort Pickering. Living in “wretched, miserable huts and hovels, rudely constructed, with capacity of holding barely one person, and yet many of them crowded almost to suffocation,” the people who lived in South Memphis were, in the eyes of the Avalanche, “the most drunken, blasphemous and licentious wretches that can be found among the negro race, in any city on this continent.” Such people deserved no mercy or consideration, especially since their refusal to accept plantation work threatened starvation on themselves, and financial ruin on the planters.21

Northern republicans in Memphis were appalled by the Freedmen’s Bureau policies. The Reverend T. E. Bliss, the white pastor of Union Church in Memphis, fired off a scathing letter to Dudley. “How is it that the colored children in Memphis even with their spelling books in their hands are caught up by your order & taken to the same place & there insolently told that they ‘had better be picking cotton.’ Is it for the purpose of ‘concili- ating’ their old rebel masters & assisting them to get help to secure their Cotton Crop? Has it come to this that the most Common rights of these poor people are thus to be trampled upon for the benefit of those who have only wronged them all their days?” Bliss concluded indignantly “What a mockery to call those ‘Freedmen’ who are still subject to such things!” A subsequent investigation of the situation in Memphis revealed that Dudley and his officers had indeed been bribed to supply planters with the black laborers picked up by their patrols, and that many blacks were bound over to planters by force. Dudley was removed from charge of the Freedmen’s Bureau in

“Your Old Father Abe Lincoln Is Dead and Damned” 23

Memphis in December 1865, but his successors continued to encourage the freedmen of Memphis to accept contracts to labor in the countryside.22

Union officers far more scrupulous than General Dudley were troubled by the large number of freedmen who appeared to have little to no regular work. General Davis Tillson, who served as head of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Memphis in the summer of 1865, also attempted to induce the Memphis freedmen to accept labor contracts on the surrounding plantations. In a report of August 1865, he wrote, “we are proceeding cautiously but at the same time vigorously in removing the colored people who are without means of support from this city and vicinity. Precaution has been taken to have the freedpeople understand that the action of the Bureau is not in disregard of their rights or freedom but for their own good.”23

Tillson’s concern, at least in his view, was humanitarian. From his per- spective (and many Union officers shared his view) the conquered South faced a massive food shortage if the former slaves refused to work. The large numbers of freedmen concentrated in places like Memphis, without jobs and therefore without the money to buy food, would be vulnerable to famine. Tillson justified his policy of relocating freedmen to the country- side, in some cases forcibly, by proclaiming that it was “to prevent inevitable suffering and dearth during the coming winter, among the large numbers of Freed people in and about this city.” Major Arthur T. Reeve, superintendent of the Freedmen’s Bureau for Shelby County (in which Memphis was located), likewise asserted in a December 1865 circular that unless the freedmen accepted contracts in the countryside they would find themselves destitute come winter. “If you neglect to enter into contracts . . . you will find yourselves at the close of the present contracts homeless and without means of support.” Reeve concluded paternalistically: “To the colored people in this city I would say, unless you have a good business to support you, you had better leave the vice and strife of the Crowded City and return to the Country, where the fields are needing your labor, and where you can secure comfortable and healthy homes, and good wages for your work.”24

The freedmen, however, were not receptive to efforts to remove them from the city and put them to work on the plantations. Neither Tillson and Dudley’s use of force, nor Reeve’s paternal rhetoric succeeded in reducing the large numbers of former slaves in and about Memphis. John H. Grove noted in September 1865, that, “it seems almost impossible to induce [freedmen] to accept an offer to give them work upon a plantation. There are daily a number of planters, mostly from the states of Mississippi and Tennessee, who call on the office of the Superintendent to employ these people . . . but in most cases they meet with no success.” Indeed, black soldiers actively undermined the efforts of the Freedmen’s Bureau to force freedmen to accept plantation work. General Tillson complained in August 1865 that “the [white] soldiers employed to visit the Freed people in and about Memphis and inform them that none but those having sufficient means or so permanently employed as to be able to take care of themselves

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will be allowed to remain” had reported that “colored soldiers interfere with their labors and tell the freed people that the statements made to them . . . are false, thereby embarrassing the operations of the Bureau.” One black man, protesting Tillson’s labor policy, noted “I know laborers were wanted in the Country Many thousand would have Remained in Country & worked for wages if they had been treated Right.” For most blacks, the situation in Memphis, difficult as it was, remained preferable to a return to plantation labor.25

iii

At public meetings, private parties, and informal interactions in taverns and on sidewalks, the freedmen, and especially the black soldiers, challenged traditional norms for black behavior and demeanor. Blacks held mass public meetings at least three times in Memphis in the summer of 1865, including a parade led by the Fort Pickering military band on May 30 that began at Main and Beale streets, on the edge of the Memphis business district. In each instance officers at Fort Pickering released off-duty soldiers to attend. Captain Woodruff, adjutant to the commander of the Defenses of Mem- phis, reported to the commander of the fort that “it is the desire of the managers [of the parade] to have as many soldiers present as possible.” Two months later, the Sons of Ham, a black fraternal organization, organized a celebration for the first of August that gathered in the heart of central Memphis. Colonel Ignatz G. Kappner, commanding officer of a black regiment at Fort Pickering, detailed a squad of a dozen men and a white officer, “as guards, . . . to report at 7 o’clock A.M. tomorrow the 1st of August (in dress uniform) to the Managers of the Festival of the Sons of Ham,” and announced in a circular “that as many of you men of this command as can be spared, be permitted to witness said celebration in charge of commis- sioned officers who will be responsible for their good behavior.” Such mass displays, prominently attended by black soldiers, were disquieting for whites who remained committed to the cultural order of slavery.26

Union military officers routinely detailed black soldiers to police dances and other social events. In June 1865, for example, the commander of one black regiment received orders to “detail from your command (1) one non commissioned officer & two (2) men as guards for a colored ball.”27 Three months later the commander of the Third U.S. Colored Heavy Artillery Regiment at Fort Pickering reported to his superior “I have never received any orders to stop Negro dances, but have been ordered many times to furnish guards for such to prevent disturbances by citizens.”28

Many white observers perceived dances (and other social events at which independent black community was prominent) as disorderly, and both the civil and military authorities attempted to regulate them. Dances were the occasions of violence and confrontation between blacks and the white

“Your Old Father Abe Lincoln Is Dead and Damned” 25

community. In late September 1865, Brigadier General John E. Smith barred all further black dances. “The public entertainments, balls, and parties heretofore frequently given by the colored people of this City, having been the cause of much of the disorderly conduct, late of nightly occur- rence, by which the peace and quiet of the city are disturbed, hereafter no more balls, or parties of the character mentioned, among the colored people, will be permitted.” Smith’s policy was apparently less than successful, since Brigadier General Benjamin P. Runkle, Freedmen’s Bureau Superinten- dent for Shelby County, deemed it necessary to issue orders regulating the operation of dance houses for the use of freedmen in early 1866.29

When the city police attempted to enforce these orders, trouble resulted. At one ball in February 1866—held with the permission of the Mayor of Memphis—police broke in and arrested a number of soldiers’ wives on charges of being prostitutes. “The husbands and brothers then interfered & prevented the arrest. The two policemen then went to the Engine house and returned with a force of some seven men armed with muskets & carbines and cocking their weapons demanded a surrender. They behaved in a very rough and boisterous manner crying ‘Shoot the damned niggers.’” On sev- eral other occasions black soldiers responded violently when their dances were interrupted by the police. “I saw about twenty or thirty [black soldiers] going right by my house,” stated one observer, “firing in every direction, and the policemen had to get out of the way. I understood there had been a ball or something broken up. They came firing and cursing, and everybody had to get out of the way.”30

Tension often arose between black soldiers who patrolled the area imme- diately surrounding Fort Pickering (including most of the black shanty town of South Memphis) and the Irish police that enforced order in Memphis itself. In the southern part of the city, especially along South Street where there were numerous taverns and bars that sold liquor to off-duty troops, conflicts frequently arose between the Memphis police force and drunken soldiers. Such conflicts were further heightened by ill-defined jurisdictions, since military patrols shared responsibility with the city constables for polic- ing off-duty soldiers, and since many soldiers worked in Memphis when not on active duty. “Occasional disturbances take place on South Street caused by soldiers furnished with whiskey by citizen store keepers there,” reported the commander of Fort Pickering. “Frequent arrests are made by patrols sent out by the officers . . . at the first notice of a disturbance.” Policemen attempting to maintain their perception of social order, particularly when they were heavy handed, provoked violent responses from the soldiers. “There have occurred on one or two occasions a conflict between parties of the colored soldiery and the city police,” reported an officer in January 1866, “the police were in the first instance blameable for attempting the arrest of an innocent soldier and in the second place the colored troops for using arms and violence to effect the release of the prisoner.” This kind of conflict

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would more than likely have been endemic regardless of any other antago- nism between the soldiers and the police, and indeed, occurred between the constables and white troops as well.31

But conflict between the Irish police and black soldiers suggested a deeper animosity. H. G. Dent, like other observers, noted “within the last four or five months the negroes in South Memphis have been very annoying, firing off pistols at all hours of the day and night.” Henry Parker, a captain in the Memphis militia, described the behavior of the black soldiers. “As a general thing, when they’ve had whiskey in them, they’ve certainly been very bois- terous. I’ve once been shoved, myself, off the sidewalk by a negro in United States uniform, for the simple reason that he did not wish to get into the mud. . . . I’ve seen them push citizens off the sidewalk, using language not fit to be used by white or black.” Such behavior on the part of black soldiers was fundamentally challenging to the Memphis police, who prior to the war had been charged with enforcing the local slave codes. The soldier’s conduct was disorderly, but it was flagrantly so by comparison with the expectations of black public behavior under slavery.32

While the police could not systematically enforce black behavior appro- priate to slavery, they took out their frustration on black soldiers whenever they could. When black soldiers refused to get off the sidewalks for white policemen, which blacks had normally been obliged to do before emancipa- tion, the police responded forcefully on a number of occasions. First Ser- geant Peter Robinson of the 88th U.S. Colored Infantry Regiment described an incident involving a fellow noncommissioned officer in November of 1865. “A policeman came along with his hand in his bosom, and threw his whole weight against Sergt Backner.” Harry Brown, another witness, told a commission investigating the incident, “he just walked along and shoved him with his elbow as he passed hard enough to push sergt. Backner out of his place up against the other wall.” Likewise, black “insolence” on occasion received violent retaliation from police. Joe Brown, a sergeant in a black regiment stationed at Fort Pickering, testified about an encounter with a policeman. The policeman, Brown related, “said to me I wish I could get a chance to kill all the Damned Nigger Soldiers and I said you cant kill me— he then stepped back a few paces and ran up and struck me with his club, on the head—at that time another Policeman came up and he struck me several times. And they thru me down and stomped me in the back while lying on the ground.”33

Conflict between soldiers and policemen became routine in the weeks before the riot exploded on May 1. Captain A. W. Allyn of the 16th Regi- ment of regulars stationed at Fort Pickering, whose men put a temporary halt to the riot that evening, was accustomed to wild and disorderly behavior in

“Your Old Father Abe Lincoln Is Dead and Damned” 27

South Memphis. He did not intervene earlier, he claimed, because he did not realize that a riot was occurring. “Disturbances had been going on for a week, more or less; pistol firing and carousing.” When asked who made these disturbances, Allyn replied, “I discovered it was a disturbance made by the negroes at a dance-hall where they were in the habit of going to dance. I heard several shots, but I thought the negroes were, as usual, discharging their pistols in the air.”34

On Monday, April 30th a party of black soldiers, just mustered out of service, got into a fight with a number of city policemen. No one was killed, but one of the soldiers “was struck with a pistol [and] appeared to be considerably hurt; the blood ran from his nostrils and the side of his head.” Many witnesses remembered the fight between the black soldiers and the police on April 30th as the real beginning of the riot.35

Certainly the mood of the city was tense at the end of April. The black veterans of the 3rd U.S. Colored Heavy Artillery, mustered out of service on the last day of the month, were not given their discharge pay at their final muster. Many of them, without duties to perform, wandered into Memphis while they waited to collect their pay. On the first of May at about three o’clock several policemen attempted to arrest a black man, charging him with disorderly conduct, and were prevented from doing so by some fifty uniformed black veterans. The police came back about an hour later with reinforcements and arrested two of the soldiers, who again resisted. Shooting broke out, apparently started by the soldiers, who fired into the air, but then returned by the outnumbered police. At the end of the first skirmish one of the policemen was dead, and the police retreated in disarray.36

The police withdrew into Memphis, where they collected reinforcements and raised a citizen posse to quell the disturbance. They quickly spread the word throughout the city that the soldiers were rioting. Ellen Dilts, a resi- dent of east Memphis, just north of the shanty town, recalled, “the police went up and down and spread the alarm, and I should think there were a hundred policemen congregated.” Large numbers of men throughout Mem- phis moved towards the neighborhoods around Fort Pickering. One busi- nessman watched the crowd of citizens and police move past him. “I stopped one on the corner and asked what was the matter. They said if I’d go up there I’d see what was the matter; that the negroes were shooting everybody.” U.S. Marshal Martin T. Ryder stopped an excited policeman and asked him if the trouble was over. “He said it was not; that the negroes were all armed with guns, and that they could not fight them with pistols, but were going back to get guns.”37

As rumors of black insurrection spread, Memphis city officials appealed to the local Union military commander, General Stoneman, to suppress the riot, and then organized citizen posses to suppress it themselves. One wit- ness recounted how J. C. Creighton, Memphis City Recorder, spoke to a crowd on Adams street later that evening. “He put his hand in his pocket and

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took out his revolver. ‘By God,’ he said, ‘I am a brave man; we are not prepared now, but let us prepare to clear out every God damned son-of-a bitch out of town.’”38

A mixed crowd of policemen and local whites descended on South Mem- phis, and the soldiers fought a brief skirmish with them, and then retreated to Fort Pickering. There Captain Allyn’s garrison disarmed them. Allyn dispatched two squads of Regulars to patrol South, Shelby, and Main Streets. These men dispersed the crowd (although they did not disarm the Memphis police), and ordered the black veterans that they met to return to the fort. About ten o’clock Allyn’s troops left South Memphis, and some time there- after a larger “posse” arrived in the area. Finding no organized resistance, this new group split up into small groups to look for black soldiers. Under the pretext of searching for arms, and led by policemen and local community leaders, these men entered the homes of many blacks, beating and killing the inhabitants, robbing them, and raping a number of black women.

The white crowd rampaged in South Memphis until early Wednesday morning before dispersing, but returned later on Wednesday and the riot continued for another day. Small groups of whites, many from the surround- ing neighborhoods, attacked blacks in the streets, and burned black houses, churches, and businesses. General Stoneman declared martial law the next day, effectively ending the riot on Thursday, May 3.39

The violence of the riot was not random. It was targeted at those black individuals and institutions most symbolic of black empowerment—the soldiers themselves, and the institutions that their presence sheltered. It was no coincidence that the riot occurred the day after the last black troops in Memphis were mustered out of federal service. As soon as these men lost the protection, and the ability to protect others, that their status as Union soldiers afforded them, they became vulnerable to white repression.

From the beginning the rioters focused on black veterans. Horatio N. Rankin, a black schoolmaster at Memphis, testified that “the policemen commenced shooting at the negroes on South Street but seemed to fire principally at those dressed in uniform.” Thomas Leonard, Judge of Shelby County, similarly remembered seeing a number of unarmed black men and women during the riot. “The crowd was not firing at these colored people, but seemed to be looking after and pursuing the colored soldiers.” Shelby County Coroner Francis Erickson who examined the bodies of thirteen black men killed in the riot, reinforced this testimony. “The bodies of all the negroes were dressed in soldier’s clothes,” he reported.40

White posse members assaulted blacks under the pretext of looking for firearms. It is clear, however, that while the rioters were very much con- cerned with disarming blacks, they sought more fundamentally to subjugate the black community, and especially community members with Union military connections. Dr. S. J. Quimby, formerly the surgeon of a black regiment, witnessed an assault upon a black veteran. “There was one man by the name of Fayette Dickerson, who had formerly been a soldier in the

“Your Old Father Abe Lincoln Is Dead and Damned” 29

fifteenth colored infantry; he was standing by his house; two men came up and struck him over the head with a stick; they then shot him in the head, a glancing shot; they then shot him in the abdomen.” They “then asked him if he had any arms about himself or the house.” Another veteran was killed under similar circumstances. The rioters “went into the house of one man and asked him if he had any arms; he said not. They then went into his house and searched it and took everything valuable in the shape of watches and jewelry. They asked him if he had been out that day. He told them no; that he was in government service; they then shot him through the head.”41

White policemen or citizens interrogated many blacks to determine if they were former soldiers. “Six white men stopped me in front of the Gayoso house, and one of them asked me if I had been a soldier,” one freedman testified. “I told him I had been on a gunboat. He then called me ‘a damned smoked Yankee,’ and struck me on the left arm with a club, and broke my arm between the wrist and the elbow. One of the other men struck me on the head with a club, and knocked me down.” Taylor Hunt was attacked by a policeman under similar circumstances. “After he had shot me,” Hunt remembered, “he asked me if I was a soldier. I said no. He said it was a good thing I was not, and he then went along.” The men who broke into Obadiah Stockley’s house gave him some timely advice. “They asked me if I had been a soldier; said I had better not own it if I had.”42

The rioters targeted homes where they believed soldiers could be found. Phyllis Premier described the actions of the men who broke into her house. “They got twenty dollars out of one of the trunks belonging to my brother; said they wanted to kill him because he was a soldier.” Primus Lane was asked why he thought the mob selected his house to burn. “I will tell you as near as I can. I had a son in the army and my son came here; there was a grocery right opposite. They came to that store, and they must have let them know about my boy, and they came after him, I think.”43

Likewise, the rioting crowd assaulted people wearing blue or wearing parts of a Union uniform. Dr. Quimby described the death of one of the soldiers from his regiment. “This corporal was either going or coming from some work he was doing. He was unarmed, but he had on at that time blue pants.” One black woman described how the mob had refused to let a neighbor out of her burning house. A man in the crowd recognized her: “He seemed to know this woman said ‘That is a very good woman; it is a pity to burn her up, let her come out.’ She came out with her little boy with her. The boy had blue clothes on. They pushed him back, and said ‘Go back, you damned Son of a Bitch.’”44

Four of the five black women who were raped during the riot had clear ties to the Union army. Francis Thompson testified that seven men entered her house Tuesday afternoon. “They said they must have supper, and asked me what I had, and said they must have eggs, and ham, and biscuit.” Lucy Smith, who was with Thompson and whom the rioters also raped, recounted how “we got up, and made a fire, and got them supper. . . . What was left of

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the sugar, and coffee, and ham they threw into the bayou.” After the men forced the women to make them food, “they drew their pistols and said they would shoot us and fire the house if we did not let them have their way with us. All seven of the men violated us two. Four of them had do with me, and the rest with Lucy.” The men then broke open a pair of trunks owned by Thompson and robbed her of the money that was stored there. “We had some quilts in the room that we had been quilting red, white, and blue,” Smith recalled. “They asked us if we had made them before or after the Yankees came. We said after. They said, ‘You niggers have a mighty liking for the damned Yankees, but we will kill you, and you will have no liking for anyone then.’” Smith explained at the end of her testimony: “There were some pictures in the room: we had General Hooker and some other Union officers, and they said they would not have hurt us so bad if it had not been for those pictures.”45

Two other rape victims, Lucy Tibbs and Harriet Armour, were likewise associated with the army. The men who raped Tibbs robbed her of $300, which had belonged to her brother, a private in the 59th Colored Infantry. She testified of the men who broke into her house, “I think that there were folks that knew all about me, who knew that my brother had not been long out of the army and had money.” Harriet Armour’s husband was a soldier, and he was with the other soldiers in Fort Pickering while the riot was occurring. A neighbor described seeing men enter Armour’s house. “I saw them going into the house and saw them coming out, and afterwards she came out and said they [had raped her]. She has sometimes been a little damaged since then, her husband left her after he found out what had been done, he said he would not have anything to do with her any more. They drew their pistols and made her submit.”46

Much of the behavior of the mob served to emphasize and reinforce the powerless and dependent position of blacks. Thus, for example, the woman whose child was forced back into the burning building “fell on her knees and begged them to let the child out. . . . They let her little boy out afterwards.” Another black woman who the crowd forced into a burning house got out by a back exit. “When I was running away with my babe,” she recalled, “a man put a pistol to my breast, and said he ‘what are you doing?’ ‘I am trying to save my babe.’ ‘Sit down,’ said he, and I sat down, and they did not trouble me any more.” For these women, supplication to white authority was sufficient to mollify the crowd. W. B. Greenlaw described the manner in which two black men were similarly intimidated. “At this time two white men spoke to the negroes and ordered them to get down on their knees, threatening to kill them.” J. M. Randolph, a white witness, did not see any blacks killed, but he did see them “maltreated.” “Maltreated in what way? Such as catching them by the head or throat and jerking them off the sidewalk. . . . Occasionally a policeman would catch a little darkey and jerk him across the sidewalk.” Incidents like these created in actuality the white goal of black subordina- tion. White Southerners could achieve this goal in Memphis only by de-

“Your Old Father Abe Lincoln Is Dead and Damned” 31

stroying the most potent symbols of black power in the city—the soldiers themselves.47

The Memphis riot was a brutal episode in the ongoing struggle that contin- ued well past the actual moment of emancipation to establish the bound- aries around and possibilities for action by blacks. The rioters asserted dominance over blacks and attempted to establish limitations on black behavior. Where one cultural code had governed racial interaction under slavery, another, more appropriate to the new black status, had to be estab- lished after blacks claimed their freedom. The riot in Memphis was one of a series of similar incidents that occurred in urban centers throughout the south. “Whatever the precipitating incident,” Leon Litwack has remarked, “nearly every race riot reflected that growing conflict between how ex-slaves and whites chose to define emancipation and the determination of whites to retain the essentials of the old discipline and etiquette.”48

While the houses, schools, and churches of the black community in Memphis were repaired or rebuilt in the years following the riot, the three days of violence placed limits upon the ability of black men and women to assert their freedom. The riot was a graphic demonstration of white power and authority, a threatening manifestation of white determination to control and subordinate the black community. “The chief source of all our trouble being removed,” the Daily Avalanche exclaimed, “we may confidently ex- pect a restoration of the old order of things. The negro population will now do their duty. . . . Negro men and negro women are suddenly looking for work on country farms. . . . Thank heaven, the white race are once more the rulers in Memphis.” Austin Cotton, a freedman, explained to the Congres- sional committee investigating the riot why he was not maltreated. “No one abused me,” he said. “It was because I was humble as a slave, almost. I have heard them say to me, ‘You are right, Uncle; you are humble, just like a slave.’”49 Not every former slave chose to behave like Cotton. But the savage attacks on the former soldiers—those members of the black community most empowered to assert authority in post-emancipation Memphis—se- verely circumscribed the options of blacks who chose to behave differently.

notes

1. “Memphis Riots and Massacres,” 39 Congress, First Session, House of Representa- tives Report 101, 1865–1866 (1866), p. 7, henceforth cited as Report. This document has been reprinted. See United States Congress, House, Select Committee on the Memphis Riots, Memphis Riots and Massacres (reprint ed., New York, 1969).

2. Report, pp. 35–6; James Gilbert Ryan, “The Memphis Riots of 1866: Terror in a Black Community during Reconstruction,” Journal of Negro History 62 (July 1977): 243. For other studies of the riot, see Jack D. Holmes, “The Effects of the Memphis Race

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Riot of 1866,” West Tennessee Historical Society Papers 12 (1958): 58–79; Idem., “The Underlying Causes of the Memphis Race Riot of 1866,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 17 (Sept. 1959): 195–221; Altina L. Waller, “Community, Class and Race in the Mem- phis Riot of 1866,” Journal of Social History 18 (Winter, 1984): 233–246.

3. Memphis Daily Avalanche, May 12, 1866, p. 3, as quoted in Holmes, “Effects of the Memphis Race Riot,” pp. 73–74; Report, pp. 276–277; E. O. Tade to Rev. M[ichael] E. Strieby, 21 May 1866, in Joe M. Richardson, ed., “The Memphis Race Riot and its Aftermath: Report by a Northern Missionary,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 24 (Spring- Winter 1965): p. 64.

4. Waller, “Community, Class and Race in the Memphis Riot,” pp. 234–237. See Table 1, “Occupation of Rioters,” for Waller’s analysis of the occupation of rioters. I derived the twenty-seven percent figure by assuming that all artisans, laborers, unem- ployed persons, and persons whose occupations was unknown were from groups that competed with blacks for employment. It is thus likely that the figure errs on the high side.

5. Philadelphia Press, July 18, 1863; Boston Liberator, January 29, 1864, as quoted by John Cimprich, Slavery’s End in Tennessee, 1861–1865 (University, Alabama, 1985), p. 104.

6. See Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, ser. II, The Black Military Experience, ed. Ira Berlin, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland (Cambridge, U.K., 1982), pp. 733–737, 765–770. For further discussion of the military experience of black soldiers, see Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York, 1979), pp. 79–103, 267–274.

7. See Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long, pp. 310–22, on black migration to southern cities. Maj. Gen. S. A. Hurlbut to President Lincoln, Memphis, TN, 27 March 1863, Vol. 1/18, 16 AC, pp. 83–85 (#187), Letters and Telegrams Sent, Ser. 385, 16th Army Corps, U.S. Army Continental Commands, RG 393, pt. 2 [henceforth abbrevi- ated RG 393], National Archives and Records Administration [henceforth abbreviated NARA] [C-4861 FSSP]; Major General S. A. Hurlbut to Lt. Col. Jno A. Rawlins, Vol. 1/ 18 16 A&C, p. 83 (#186), Letters and Telegrams Sent, Ser. 385, General records, 16th Army Corps, RG 393, pt. 2, NARA [C-4860 FSSP]; J. H. Grove to Capt. W. T. Clark, Nashville, TN, 21 Sept. 1865, Box 2, G-41 (1865), Letters Received, Ser. 3379, Head- quarters, Office of the Assistant Commissioner, TN, Records of the Field Offices of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, RG 105, TN and VA [hence- forth abbreviated as RG 105], NARA [A-6130 FSSP]; on the 1865 city census, see Kathleen Berkeley, “Like a Plague of Locusts: Immigration and Social Change in Memphis, Tennessee, 1850–1880” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1980), p. 168.

8. Order issued by D. C. Anthony, Provost Marshall of Memphis, Memphis, TN, 11 Nov. 1862, enclosed in F. A. Nitchy to Maj. Gen. Curtis, 19 Nov. 1862, in Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, ser. 1, Volume I, The Destruction of Slavery, ed. Ira Berlin, Barbara J. Fields, Thavolia Glymph, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland, (Cambridge, U.K., 1985), p. 439. See also Cimprich, Slavery’s End in Tennessee, pp. 19–45.

9. See Ira Berlin, et al., Destruction of Slavery, pp. 251–268. See also Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, pp. 11–15, and the extended discussion of federal policy in Tennessee in Cimprich, Slavery’s End in Tennessee, pp. 33–45, 81–97.

10. Holmes, “Underlying Causes,” p. 216; Ryan, “The Memphis Riots of 1866,” p. 244; Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, Table 1, p. 12.

11. Special Order No. 50, Bvt. Brig. Gen. [Benjamin P. Runkle], Memphis, TN, 7 April 1866, Vol. 151, p. 30, Special Orders and Circulars Issued, ser. 3523, Subassistant Commissioner for the Subdistrict of Memphis, RG 105, NARA [A-6497 FSSP]; Bvt. Maj. Gen. Jno E. Smith to Bvt. Brig. Gen. Wm. D. Whipple, Memphis, TN, 20 Dec. 1865, No. 183, vol. 1/2 DWT, pp. 192–93 (#402), Letters and Telegrams Sent, Ser. 2865, District of West TN, No. 183, RG 393, Pt. 2, NARA [C-2237].

12. On efforts to reestablish family ties after emancipation, see Berlin et al., Destruc-

“Your Old Father Abe Lincoln Is Dead and Damned” 33

tion of Slavery, pp. 1–56, 249–269; and Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long, pp. 229– 247. Lt. Col. John Foley to Lt. Col. T. Harris, 11 Jan. 1865, filed with Capt. T. A. Walker to Capt. J. S. Lord, 24 Jan. 1865, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, p. 719.

13. Capt. T. A. Walker to Capt. J. S. Lord, 24 Jan. 1865, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, pp. 719–720; Circular issued by Lt. Col. John Phillips, 4 April 1864, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, note, p. 720.

14. Lt. Col. Robert Cowden to Bvt. Brig. Gen. W. W. Morgan, Memphis, TN, 17 Aug. 1865, Letters Received, Box 39, 59th USCI, Regimental Books and Papers USCT, Colored Troops Division, RG 94, NARA [G-215 FSSP]; Bvt. Maj. Gen. Jno E. Smith to Bvt. Brig. Gen. Wm. D. Whipple, Memphis, TN, 20 Dec. 1865, vol. 1/2 DWT, pp. 192– 93 (#402), Letters and Telegrams Sent, Ser. 2865, District of West TN, No. 183, RG 393, pt. 2, NARA [C-2237 FSSP]; Lt. Col. Robert Cowden to Bvt. Brig. Gen. W. W. Morgan, Memphis, TN, 17 Aug. 1865, Letters Received, Box 39, 59th USCI, Colored Troops Division, RG 94, NARA [G-215 FSSP].

15. Lt. Col. John Foley to Lt. Col. T. Harris, 11 Jan. 1865, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, p. 719; Lt. Col. A. Von Schrader to Brig. Gen. Wm. D. Whipple, Mobile, AL, 31 Jan. 1866, Vol. 53/95, pp. 39–40, Reports Sent, Ser. 1056, Inspector, Records of Staff Officers, Department of the Cumberland and Division and Depart- ment of TN (P), RG 393, Pt. 1 NARA [C-89a FSSP].

16. See Roger Ransom and Richard Sutch, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation, (New York, 1977), pp. 44–47. Quotation is from p. 44.

17. Maj. Gen. S. A. Hurlbut to President Lincoln, Memphis, TN, 27 March 1863, Vol. 1/18, 16 AC, pp. 83–85 (#187), Letters and Telegrams Sent, Ser. 385, 16th Army Corps, RG 393, pt. 2 [C-4861 FSSP]; Major Wm. Gray to Capt. W. T. Clark, Memphis, TN, 13 Sept. 1865, Box 66, Unregistered Letters Received, Ser. 3522, Subassistant Commissioner for the Subdistrict of Memphis, RG 105, NARA [A-6501 FSSP].

18. Testimony of Henry G. Smith to Congressional Delegation, Report, p. 294; J. H. Grove to Capt. W. T. Clark, Nashville, TN, 21 Sept. 1865, Box 2, G-41 (1865), Regis- tered Letters Received, Ser. 3379, RG 105, NARA [A-6130 FSSP]; Bvt. Brig. Gen. N. A. M. Dudley to Capt. Clark, Memphis, TN, 30 Sept. 1865, Box 1, D-66 (1865), Registered Letters Received, Ser. 3379, Headquarters, Office of the Assistant Commissioner, TN, RG 105, NARA [A-6108 FSSP]; P. D. Beecher to Gen. Runkle, Memphis, TN, 18 May 1866, Unregistered Letters Received, Ser. 3380, Headquarters, Office of the Assistant Commissioner, TN, RG 105, NARA [A-6057 FSSP].

19. Major Wm. Gray to Capt. W. T. Clark, Memphis, TN, 13 Sept. 1865, Box 66, Unregistered Letters Received, Ser. 3522, Subassistant Commissioner for the Subdis- trict of Memphis, RG 105, NARA [A-6501 FSSP]; Bvt. Brig. Gen. N. A. M. Dudley to Capt. Clark, Memphis, TN, 30 Sept. 1865, Box 1, D-66 (1865), Registered Letters Received, Ser. 3379, Headquarters, Office of the Assistant Commissioner, TN, RG 105, NARA [A-6108 FSSP]. For a larger discussion of the policies of the Freedmen’s Bureau, see Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York, 1988), pp. 153–170.

20. Warner Madison to Gen. Fisk, enclosed in Bvt. Brig. Gen. N. A. M. Dudley to Capt. Clark, Memphis, TN, 30 Sept. 1865, Box 1, D-66 (1865), Registered Letters Received, Ser. 3379, Headquarters, Office of the Assistant Commissioner, TN, RG 105, NARA [A-6108 FSSP].

21. Memphis Daily Appeal, 8 Nov. 1865; Memphis Daily Avalanche, 17 May 1866, quoted in Holmes, “Causes of the Memphis Race Riot,” pp. 204, 209. See for a wider discussion, Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long, pp. 336–449.

22. Rev. T. E. Bliss to Gen. N. A. M. Dudley, Memphis, TN, 3 Nov. 1865, enclosed in W. T. Clark to Gen. Fisk, Memphis, TN, 18 Nov. 1865, Box 1, C-93 (1865), Registered Letters Received, Ser. 3379, Headquarters Office of the Assistant Commis- sioner, TN, RG 105, NARA [A-6100 FSSP].

23. Brig. Gen. Davis Tillson to Capt. W. T. Clark, Memphis, TN, 30 Aug. 1865, Unregistered Letters Received, Ser. 3380, Headquarters, Office of the Assistant Com- missioner, TN, RG 105, NARA [A-6054 FSSP].

kevin r. hardwick34

24. Circular No. 5., Office Supt. R. F. and A. L. Subdist. Memphis, TN, 28 Aug. 1865, Unregistered Letters Received, Ser. 3380, Headquarters, Office of the Assistant Com- missioner, TN, RG 105, NARA [A-6054 FSSP]; Maj. A. T. Reeve, Circular, Memphis, TN, 19 Dec. 1865, Vol. 151, p. 19, Special Orders and Circulars Issued, Ser. 3523, Subassistant Commissioner for the Subdistrict of Memphis, RG 105, NARA [A-6494 FSSP].

25. J. H. Grove to Capt. W. T. Clark, Nashville, TN, 21 Sept. 1865, Box 2, G-41 (1865), Registered Letters Received, Ser. 3379, RG 105, NARA [A-6130 FSSP]; Brig. Gen. Davis Tillson to Bvt. Brig. Gen. Morgan, Memphis, TN, 26 Aug. 1865, Vol. 133, pp. 42–43 (#86), Letters Sent, Ser. 3517, Subassistant Commissioner for the Subdistrict of Memphis, RG 105, NARA [A-6577 FSSP]; Anthony Motley to Gen. Fisk, 28 Sept. 1865, M-84, Registered Letters Received, Ser. 3379, Headquarters, Office of the Assis- tant Commissioner, TN, RG 105, NARA [A-6501 FSSP].

26. See, for further discussion of mass public activity by blacks, Cimprich, Slavery’s End in Tennessee, pp. 104–117. These large public gatherings are documented by several circulars issued by Col. Ignatz Kappner; see Circular; Col. I. G. Kappner [Commanding 59th USCI], Memphis, TN, 24 May 1865; Circular; Col. I. G. Kappner, Memphis, TN, 30 May 1865; Circular, Col. I. G. Kappner, Memphis, TN, 31 July 1865, Issuances, Box 40, Regimental Books and Papers USCT, 59th USCI, RG 94, NARA [G- 217 FSSP]. Quotes are from Capt. J. G. Woodruff to Col. I. G. Kappner, Memphis, TN, 30 May 1865, CN 181, box 2, Letters and Reports Received, Ser. 2842, Headquarters, Post and Defenses of Memphis, No. 181, RG 393, Pt. 2, NARA [C-8517 FSSP]; Special Order No. 138: Col. I. G. Kappner; Circular: Col I. G. Kappner, Memphis, TN, 31 July 1865, Issuances, Box 40, Regimental Books and Papers, 59th USCI USCT, Colored Troops Division, RG 94, NARA [G-217 FSSP]. Emphasis is Kappner’s.

27. Capt. Chas. P. Brown to Col. I. G. Kappner, Memphis, TN, 21 June 1865, C#179, Letters Received, Ser. 2821, Ft. Pickering, No. 179, RG 393, Pt. 2, NARA [C-1830 FSSP].

28. Col. I. G. Kappner to Bvt. Brig. Gen. W. H. Morgan, Ft. Pickering, TN, 13 Sept. 1865, Box 2, K E 110 DWT 1865, Letters Received, Ser. 2869, District of West TN, No. 183, RG 393, pt. 2, NARA [C-2218 FSSP].

29. Special Order No. 240, Bvt. Maj. Gen. J. E. Smith, Memphis, TN, 24 Sept. 1865, Issuances, Box 40, Regimental Books and Papers USCT, 59th USCI, RG 94, NARA [G- 217 FSSP]; Bvt. Brig. Gen. Benjamin P. Runkle, Circular, n.p., n.d. [entered in vol. between orders of 28 Feb. and 21 Mar. 1866], vol. 151, p. 24, Special Orders and Circulars Issued, Ser. 3523, Subassistant Commissioner for the Subdistrict of Memphis, RG 105, NARA [A-6495 FSSP].

30. Affidavit of Charles Swear, Robt. R. Church, and John Green, in Lt. S. S. Garrett to Maj. Wm. L. Porter, Memphis, TN, 17 Feb. 1866, Box 72, Affidavits and Statements, Ser. 3545, Provost Marshal of Freedmen, Memphis TN, RG 105, NARA [A-6586 FSSP]; Testimony of H. G. Dent before Congressional Delegation, Report, p. 166.

31. One white regiment, the 11th Missouri, was sent to Memphis to allay fears of a black uprising rumored to be scheduled for Christmas of 1865. However, the soldiers proved to be so disruptive and uncontrollable that they were removed several days after they arrived. Indeed, compared to white troops, many observers thought the black soldiers were remarkably well behaved. See e.g., Bvt. Maj. Gen. Jno E. Smith to Bvt. Brig. Gen. Wm. D. Whipple, Memphis, TN, 9 Jan. 1865, Vol. 1/3 DWT, pp. 20–4, Letters and Telegrams Sent, Ser. 2865, District of West TN, RG 393, Pt. 2, NARA [C- 2237 FSSP]; Lt. Col. A. Von Schrader to Brig. Gen. W. D. Whipple, Mobile, AL, 31 Jan. 1866, Vol. 53/95 DT, pp. 38–51, Reports Sent, Ser. 1056, Inspector, Records of Staff Officers, Department of the Cumberland and Division and Department of TN (P), RG 393, Pt. 1, NARA [C-89a FSSP]. Quotes are from Col. I. G. Kappner to Bvt. Brig. Gen. W. H. Morgan, Ft. Pickering, TN, 13 Sept. 1865, Box 2 K E 110 DWT 1865, Letters Received, Ser. 2869, District of West TN, No. 183, RG 393, pt. 2, NARA [C-2218 FSSP]; Bvt. Major Gen. Jno E. Smith to Bvt. Brig. Gen. Wm. D. Whipple, Memphis,

“Your Old Father Abe Lincoln Is Dead and Damned” 35

TN, 9 Jan. 1866, Vol. 1/3 DWT, pp. 20–4, Letters and Telegrams Sent, Ser. 2865, District of West TN, No. 183, RG 393, pt. 2, NARA, [C-2237 FSSP].

32. Testimony of H. G. Dent before Congressional Delegation, Report, p. 166; Testimony of Henry Taylor before Congressional Delegation, Report, p. 130. Col. I. G. Kappner of the 3rd USCHA at Fort Pickering reported that “the complaints of contin- ued discharge of fire arms are certainly exaggerated, although hardly a night passes without some firing east of the fort.” Kappner to Bvt. Brig. Gen. W. H. Morgan, Fort Pickering, TN, 13 Sept. 1865, K E DWT 1865, Box 2, Letters Received, Ser. 2869, District of West TN, No. 183, RG 393, NARA [C-2218 FSSP].

33. Testimony of Peter Robinson and Harry Brown before the Military Commission in the Case of John J. Magevney, Memphis, TN, 8–22 Dec. 1865, MM3338, Court Martial Case Files, ser. 15, RG 153, NARA [H-8 FSSP]; Statement by Sgt. Joe Brown, 11 Sept. 1865, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, pp. 743–744.

34. Testimony of Captain A. W. Allyn before Congressional Delegation, Report, p. 245.

35. Testimony of Ellen Dilts before Congressional Delegation, Report, p. 64. 36. See Ryan, “The Memphis Riots of 1866,” for an excellent description of the events

of the riot. See also Testimonies of Ellen and Rachel Dilts, Dr. S. J. Quimby, and William Brazier before Congressional Delegation, Report, pp. 63–8, 104, 119–21.

37. Testimony of Ellen Dilts, David T. Egbert, and Martin T. Ryder before Congres- sional Delegation, Report, pp. 64, 121, 252.

38. Testimony of George Todd before Congressional Delegation, Report, p. 256. 39. See Ryan, “Memphis Riots of 1866,” and Waller, “Community, Class and Race,”

passim. 40. Testimony of H. N. Rankin and Thomas Leonard before Military Commission

Organized by Order of General Stoneman, Report, pp. 313–314; testimony of Francis Erickson before Congressional Delegation, Report, p. 109.

41. Testimony of Dr. S. J. Quimby before Congressional Delegation, Report, pp. 104– 105, 107.

42. Testimony of Louis Bennett before the Military Commission Organized by Order of Major General George Stoneman, Report, p. 330. Testimony of Taylor Hunt before Congressional Delegation, Report, p. 101. Testimony of Obadiah Stockley before the Commission Organized by the Freedmen’s Bureau, Report, p. 336.

43. Testimony of Phillis Premier before the Commission Organized by the Freed- men’s Bureau, Report, p. 338. Testimony of Primus Lane before Congressional Delega- tion, Report, p. 97.

44. Testimony of Dr. S. J. Quimby and Cynthia Townsend before Congressional Delegation, Report, pp. 107, 163.

45. The rapes of these women are discussed in Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York, 1976), pp. 24–28. Testimony of Frances Thompson and Lucy Smith before Congressional Delegation, Report, pp. 196–197.

46. Testimony of Lucy Tibbs and Cynthia Townsend before Congressional Delega- tion, Report, pp. 161, 163; see also Testimony of Harriet Armour, pp. 176–177.

47. Testimony of Cynthia Townsend, Mary Jordan, and J. M. Randolph before Con- gressional Delegation, Report, pp. 125, 163, 234–235. Testimony of W. B. Greenlaw before the Military Commission Organized by Order of Major General Stoneman, Report, p. 316.

48. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long, pp. 280–281. 49. Memphis Daily Avalanche, 5 May 1866, p. 2, as cited in Holmes, “Effects of the

Memphis Race Riot,” p. 71. Testimony of Austin Cotton before Congressional Delega- tion, Report, p. 102.

william c. hine36

two Black Politicians in Reconstruction

Charleston, South Carolina: A Collective Study

lk william c. hine

Few groups in United States history have provoked greater controversy and inflamed passions more than the black men who rose to political promi- nence during Reconstruction. Reviled and vilified as ignorant and incompe- tent by more than one generation of historians,1 their reputation in recent years has markedly improved as the racial attitudes of contemporary histori- ans have moderated and as those scholars have intensified their study of black political leadership during that era.2

Yet, aside from David C. Rankin’s pathbreaking inquiry into the back- grounds of black leaders in New Orleans, virtually nothing is known of the hundreds of men who participated in the lower echelons of politics in the urban South during Reconstruction.3 This study represents an effort to rectify that situation by examining the origins and the patterns of life of the black men who were politically active in Charleston, South Carolina, from 1865 to 1877.

In the century prior to the secession crisis of 1860–1861 Charleston had achieved fame and notoriety as a bustling port and lively center of antebel- lum culture. The city was dominated by wealthy planter-aristocrats, who reigned magisterially over it and South Carolina’s low country.4 But the inception of Congressional Reconstruction in 1867 dramatically altered the political picture as dozens of black men both from within Charleston’s sizeable black community as well as from other localities surged forward and grasped for the political reins of power in the decade after the Civil War.5

In order to identify these grass-roots black politicians and probe their

Black Politicians in Reconstruction Charleston, South Carolina 37

backgrounds the names of more than five hundred political activists were culled from Charleston newspapers published between 1865 and 1875.6 By methodically combing a variety of records, including the eighth and ninth United States censuses, registers of free Negroes in Charleston, city censuses of 1848 and 1861, city directories, military service records, and tax records, it was possible to isolate 234 black men (including 39 Democrats) who participated in politics in Charleston.7 Every effort was made to ascertain accurately the race and residence of each individual to confirm that they were indeed black and lived in the city of Charleston.8

Not all these 234 men would be strictly defined as political leaders. Aside from depending on officeholding as the main criterion, it is difficult to determine with precision the attributes of political leadership. Men such as Jonathan C. Gibbs, Martin Robison Delany, Macon B. Allen, and Samuel Dickerson, for example, were important in Republican circles in Charles- ton, but none of them ever held elective office. Therefore, to include the broadest spectrum of black political involvement, minimum criteria were established for inclusion in this study: to have been nominated for political office by one of the parties (or a faction of one party), to have served as an officer with a party organization, or to have been elected at least as a ward delegate to a city or county convention for one of the parties or their factions at some time during Reconstruction. Those who were alternate delegates or merely served in an appointive governmental capacity were not included. The 234 men thus represent the most active black politicos down to the lowest levels of organized politics in Charleston during Reconstruction.

The overwhelming majority of these politicians had spent the pre-war years in Charleston and South Carolina (Table 1). Nearly half had resided in Charleston, and that figure was no doubt higher because the United States censuses in 1860 and 1870 listed origins only by state and not by city or county.9 Altogether more than three-quarters of these men had lived in South Carolina before the war. Many of these men who entered politics had whatever advantages that accrued from living in Charleston in the antebel- lum era. They were molded and conditioned by the cosmopolitan environ-

TABLE 1

Prewar Residence of Charleston Black Politicians during Reconstruction

All Black Politicians (N = 234) Black Democrats Only (N = 39) Locality Number % age Number % age

Charleston South Carolina Other States Unknown

110 70 16 38

47.0 29.9

6.8 16.2

20 7 1

51.3 17.9

2.6 28.2

william c. hine38

ment and diversity of life in the city. Fewer than 7 percent of the Reconstruc- tion politicians came from other states, and only Ohio with three and New York with four contributed more than one.10

In a city where the free black population was less than one-fifth of the total black population in 1860, nearly one-half of the black politicians had been free prior to the Civil War (Table 2).11 The advantages of having grown up free, perhaps with some degree of economic security and independence as well as limited educational opportunities, seem to have manifested them- selves in the postwar world of politics. Remarkably, though freedmen were frequently attracted to politics and participated fairly extensively, not one of their number ever became a key political figure and/or major Republican officeholder in Charleston. The early and the complete dominance of free black men from Charleston and from the North effectively excluded the ex- slaves. It can be determined with certainty that only one ex-slave, Frank Brown, was elected alderman, and he served as a Democrat. Ex-slaves who served in the legislature from Charleston invariably represented the rural parishes of the county and not the city. Furthermore, just thirty-four men could be identified with a reasonable degree of certainty as having been slaves. That figure was undoubtedly higher, but there are few prewar records which identify individual slaves.

TABLE 2

Antebellum Legal Status of Black Politicians in Charleston during Reconstruction

All Black Politicians (N = 234) Black Democrats Only (N = 39) Status Number % age Number % age

Free Slave Unknown

115 34 85

49.1 14.5 36.3

19 9

48.7 23.1 28.2

TABLE 3

Color of Black Politicians in Charleston during Reconstruction

All Black Politicians (N = 234) Black Democrats Only (N = 39) Color Number % age Number % age

Black Mulatto

148 86

63.2 36.7

30 9

76.9 23.1

Black Politicians in Reconstruction Charleston, South Carolina 39

Determining with accuracy the color of Afro-American politicians proved difficult (Table 3). Records were not carefully and consistently complied. Census marshals were too often imprecise in distinguishing between brown men and black men, or octoroons and quadroons. But if the records are only partially accurate, a substantial majority of the black men involved in poli- tics had a dark complexion. Yet many, but by no means all, of the prominent Afro-American leaders and officeholders were light-skinned men. Francis Louis Cardozo, Robert C. De Large, William McKinlay, Benjamin A. Boseman, Edward P. Wall, and several others were brown men. Some of these politicians were related to prominent white families in Charleston. Francis Cardozo was the son of Isaac Nunez Cardozo, a prosperous Jewish merchant.12 Benjamin Kinloch was a light-skinned Democrat, whose ances- tors formed one of Charleston’s well-known Scottish families.13

Though ex-slaves were virtually barred from the higher levels of political leadership, the same was not always true of dark-skinned men. There was generally, moreover, a high correlation between being free before the Civil War and light skin color, and yet there were a number of dark men who rose to major positions of leadership. Richard H. Cain became a state senator and later a congressman. Malcolm Brown was an alderman. Martin Delany ran on a reform ticket in 1874 for lieutenant governor. The evidence strongly suggests that prewar status as a slave was a greater hindrance to political mobility than a dark complexion.

Typically, the black Reconstruction politician was neither a particularly young or old man (Table 4). As of 1870 nearly 40 percent of them (39.6 percent) were over thirty-five years of age. Many older men, in their forties and fifties, took their first plunge into politics in the late 1860s and early 1870s. Yet there was a healthy infusion of younger blood as well. Seventy- eight black politicians, or one-third (33.3 percent), were under thirty-five

TABLE 4

Date of Birth of Black Politicians in Charleston during Reconstruction

All Black Politicians (N = 234) Black Democrats Only (N = 39) Dates Number % age Number % age

1794–1804 1805–1814 1815–1824 1825–1834 1835–1844 1845–1854 Unknown

4 15 38 36 56 22 63

1.7 6.4

16.2 15.4 23.9

9.4 26.9

1 1 7 3 8 5

2.6 2.6

17.9 7.7

20.5 12.8 35.8

william c. hine40

years of age in 1870. Thus, the black Reconstruction politicians in Charles- ton combined age and experience with a substantial measure of youth and vitality.

At least half the Negro politicians were literate or semiliterate according to available records (Tables 5 and 6). Those who were semiliterate possessed the ability to read but not write.14 Of the nearly 36 percent whose literacy was unknown, surely some were literate, though a substantial number of adult blacks were classified as unable to write in the 1870 census. A relatively small number totaling almost 14 percent of the politicians were categorized as illiterate. A number of black leaders were very well educated and had at- tended various institutions of higher learning. Benjamin A. Boseman spent a term at Dartmouth College and was a graduate of the Bowdoin Medical School.15 Francis L. Cardozo had received a classical education at the Uni- versity of Edinburgh.16 Richard H. Cain had attended Wilberforce College in Ohio for at least a year.17 Martin R. Delany completed one term at the Harvard Medical School in 1850–1851 before he was summarily dismissed with two other black students.18 Others had gone as far as high school. Rob- ert C. De Large claimed to have attended Wood High School.19 George H.

TABLE 5

Literacy of Black Politicians in Charleston during Reconstruction

All Black Politicians (N = 234) Black Democrats Only (N = 39) Literacy Number % age Number % age

Literate Semiliterate Illiterate Unknown

105 13 32 84

44.9 5.6

13.7 35.9

15 3 5

38.5 7.7

12.8 41.0

TABLE 6

Charleston Population Age 21 and Over Unable to Write 1870

Total Population Male Female Total (All Ages)

Black White

3,736 216

5,688 388

9,424 604

26,173 22,749 48,922

Black Politicians in Reconstruction Charleston, South Carolina 41

Lee, a transplant from Massachusetts, had attended Salem High School in his native state.20

Two-fifths of Charleston’s black politicians were skilled workers, and more than half of these craftsmen were tailors, carpenters, and butchers (Table 7). The men in these particular occupations showed a greater proclivity for politics than did men with other skills. For example, in the 1848 city census there were the same number of black bricklayers as tailors—seventy-eight. Yet, during Reconstruction sixteen tailors were involved in politics and only eight bricklayers. There were thirty-seven bakers listed in 1848. Only one baker participated actively in politics. Of twenty-three shoemakers listed in the 1848 census five of that trade emerged in Reconstruction politics.

Almost 20 percent of the black politicians were unskilled laborers— porters, draymen, stevedores, and chimney sweeps. (No house servants were listed as politicians.) Thus, fully 60 percent of the black politicos in Charles- ton were laboring men. There were many who held more than one occupa-

TABLE 7

Occupations of Black Politicians in Charleston during Reconstruction

All Black Politicians (N = 234) Black Democrats Only (N = 39) Occupation Number % age Number % age

Agriculture Business

Cotton Shipper Wood Factor Livery Stable Fish Factor Factor

Professional Minister Attorney Physician Teacher

Skilled Carpenter Tailor Butcher Bricklayer Barber Shoemaker Others

Unskilled Unknown

6 6

1 2 1 1 1

15 8 1 2 4

97 21 16 13

8 6 5

28 46 64

2.6 2.6

6.4

41.5

19.7 27.4

1 3

13 4

6 8

2.6 7.7

5.1

33.3

20.5 30.8

william c. hine42

tion over the years from the antebellum era through Reconstruction. Joseph J. Grant was a drayman and a carpenter. Peter Frost was a carpenter and a painter. Samuel Johnson was listed at various times as a butcher, carpenter, and minister. Malcolm Brown was a farmer before the war and a contractor during Reconstruction. Men like Francis Cardozo and H. H. Hunter com- bined careers in religion and education. The multiplicity of occupations may have been due in many instances to unstable economic conditions in Charleston after the war. Men searched about for work in the turbulent postwar world and were willing to try several jobs and occupations in hopes of achieving a modicum of economic security.

The absence of a substantial class of black professionals in Charleston was reflected in the small number of teachers, ministers and physicians in- volved in politics. Just eight ministers (some evidently part-time), four teach- ers, and two physicians were politically active. However, three of the minis- ters—Francis Cardozo, Richard Cain, and Benjamin F. Randolph—were among the most influential of South Carolina’s leaders during Reconstruc- tion. Nor were there many black businessmen deeply committed to politics. Some businessmen, like Joseph Dereef and Richmond Kinloch, avoided politics entirely. Perhaps they and others were too preoccupied with their businesses, or possibly they had no desire to take part in an activity that demanded so much public exposure. Those businessmen who were prosper- ous and did turn to politics like Robert Howard and Richard E. Dereef generally limited their involvement to the local level and showed no inclina- tion to extend their political careers into Columbia or Washington. Con- ceivably, they were unwilling or unable to leave their businesses for ex- tended periods. It is also likely that many black businessmen were not so classified but were instead categorized as skilled laborers in the censuses and city directories. Surely some of the tailors, carpenters, blacksmiths, and oth- er craftsmen were prosperous, self-employed entrepreneurs and not merely skilled laborers.

Charleston’s wealthiest black men did not assume a significant role in post-war politics. Though seven of those who had been among the city’s fifteen wealthiest black men in 1859 were subsequently elected as aldermen during Reconstruction, only one—William McKinlay—played an active and continuous role in politics. He was the sole political leader of substan- tial financial means who was elected to the state legislature from the city. Each of the other six served one term as an alderman, and none were deeply involved in day-to-day political developments in Charleston.21

Available tax records for the Reconstruction years suggest that many of the black politicians were men of modest means (Table 8). And the absence of tax records for the postwar years for 152 (64.9 percent) of the men may be an indication that they had little or no taxable real estate or personal property. On the other hand, there were some politicians like Richard Cain who owned land outside of the city, and such information did not appear in local records.

Black Politicians in Reconstruction Charleston, South Carolina 43

Many of these politicians not only joined political parties but were active in a variety of other social and service organizations where some of them achieved positions of leadership. At least twenty-one of Charleston’s Recon- struction politicians were members of the Brown Fellowship Society. This was an elitist social and benevolent organization that had been founded in 1790 to provide insurance, education, and a cemetery for members and their families.22 Among its prominent politicians and members were Robert De Large, William McKinlay, Whitefield J. McKinlay, (who became its president in 1876), Robert Howard and Malcolm Brown (who was treasurer in 1869). The society broke precedent and admitted a non-Charlestonian when Benjamin Boseman, a native of New York, joined the organization. The organization took no active role in politics, and its rules prohibited the discussion of political affairs.23 If politics had been discussed, it might have caused some lively exchanges because some of its members, including Richard Dereef, George A. Glover, and Benjamin Kinloch, held decidedly Democratic and conservative views.

The Humane and Friendly Society, founded in 1802, was similar in purpose and membership to the Brown Fellowship Society. As a benevolent and elitist group it likewise provided mutual aid and operated a burial ground. Among its politician members were John W. Gordon, William T. Oliver, and Edward P. and Lafayette F. Wall. A number of members of the Brown Fellowship Society also belonged to the Humane and Friendly Soci- ety, including Richard Dereef and Robert Houston.24

In the years after the Civil War blacks in Charleston formed dozens of social, service, and religious organizations. The Freedman’s Bank, where many of these groups deposited their funds, contained financial records of these organizations and the names of their officers.25 Among the many

TABLE 8

Total Taxable Wealth for 1870, 1871–1872, and 1874 of Black Politicians in Charleston during Reconstruction

(N = 234)

Wealth Number Percentage

11 19 29

9 8 5 1

152

4.7 8.1

12.4 3.8 3.4 2.1 0.4

65.0

$1—500 501—1,000

1,001—2,500 2,501—5,000

5,001—10,000 10,001—25,000 25,001—50,000

Unknown

william c. hine44

politicians participating in these associations was Isaac Reed, who was secre- tary of the Veterans Republican Brotherhood.26 Peter Miller was a captain in the Comet Light Infantry, a state militia unit.27 William Dart was the presi- dent of the Baptist Teachers Association.28 Some politicians rose to promi- nence in organizations that did not maintain Freedman’s Bank accounts. William H. Mishaw was the president of the Union Star Fire Engine Com- pany. Julius W. Lloyd was the president of the Sons and Daughters of Zion. Richard Birnie was the vice-president of the Brotherly Association. John B. Wright served as president of the Colored Young Men’s Christian Associa- tion. Alonzo J. Ransier and Benjamin Boseman were president and vice- president respectively of the Amateur Literary and Fraternal Association. Most of the black politicians appear to have belonged to several black organizations. Such participation gave them the advantage of circulating with other members of the community, thereby permitting them to main- tain contacts with their constituents and supporters.

A fascinating but tangential facet of black politics in Reconstruction Charleston was the seemingly incipient development of black political dy- nasties. A number of black families committed father and son to political involvement. Their participation was in keeping with a tradition long estab- lished by such prominent white families as the Pinckneys, the Middletons, and the Hayneses. The two most notable black families to plunge into politics were the McKinlays and the Walls. In each instance, father and son embarked upon political careers. The McKinlays were tailors. Both served in the constitutional convention, and both were elected to the state legisla- ture in 1868 with the father, William, representing Charleston and the son, Whitefield J., serving Orangeburg County. Edward P. Wall and his son Lafayette F. were also tailors. Both were elected as Republican aldermen in November 1868. Both were later appointed to service with the United States Customhouse. There was also a case of a father-and-son team of freedmen, Primus Green, Sr., and Primus Green, Jr., but their political activity was confined to serving as delegates to Republican county conventions, limiting any higher political aspirations they might have had.

Surely the least recognized Reconstruction politician has been the black Democrat. But such political figures most certainly existed in Charleston (Tables 1–7). The thirty-nine men who were so identified defy simple ex- planation or categorization. They were neither conservative, elite, white- obsessed mulattoes nor poor, deluded, former slaves. They were both and more. Analyzed collectively, the black Democrats, like the black Republi- cans, represented a cross section of Charleston’s diverse black community. Most had been free. Most were black, and the largest number were skilled workers. George A. Glover was a saddler who had been free. Thomas Brown had also been free and was a barber. Joseph A. Gaillard was a free mulatto carpenter, but Augustus Carroll, who was also a carpenter, had been a slave. A few were very rich, former slaveowners like Richard Dereef, a wood factor, and Elias Garden, a butcher. They had owned twelve and two slaves respec-

Black Politicians in Reconstruction Charleston, South Carolina 45

tively in 1859. Some were apparently poor like Henry Holmes and Robert Madora, who were merely listed in the 1870 census as laborers. One of the unusual black Democrats was Sidney Eckhard. He had been arrested in the spring of 1867 as one of the leaders in the effort to desegregate Charleston’s horsedrawn streetcars. But by 1874 Eckhard was the president of the Ward 5 Honest Government League, one of several Democratic “front” organiza- tions formed for blacks during Reconstruction.29 There were other black Democrats who switched political affiliations. L. J. Taylor was secretary of the South Carolina Democratic Conservative Club in 1868, but in 1872 he was a Republican delegate to the county convention.

Explaining motivation is perhaps the most important and yet the most elusive factor concerning black Reconstruction politicians. Why did these 234 men gravitate to politics? What pulled or pushed them into the political arena? There is understandably no simple, clear-cut answer. There were as many reasons for taking part in politics as there were men in politics, and unraveling those reasons is nearly impossible. But some men were almost certainly drawn to politics because it represented a fascinating segment of society previously closed to the black man. Others may have been captivated by the prestige and public admiration associated with political leadership. Still others sought political power, deriving gratification from making deci- sions and manipulating people and issues. Then there were those black men who sincerely believed that governmental service was the most effective way they could contribute to the progress of their race and community. They were guided by a commitment to public service and were political mission- aries devoted, along with ministers and educators, to uplifting a race and a nation. However, another important factor—often overlooked—that may explain the attraction of political life was the desire to acquire a measure of economic security.

Many black men who had achieved modest economic standing as crafts- men and laborers before the war were staring at the harsh reality of depriva- tion and destitution in the ruins of postbellum Charleston. Politics may have meant hope for the race and advancement of the society, but is was also a new profession marked by economic opportunity. A political career may have appeared as a potentially rewarding opportunity for the middle-class black man who possessed little formal education but was self-confident and wise to the ways of his society and community.

There is some evidence to suggest that the quest for economic advance- ment was the most significant factor that impelled black men (and white men) to pursue politics in Reconstruction Charleston (Table 9). For ex- ample, there was a strong desire on the part of many politicians to hold more than one political or governmental position simultaneously. William McKinlay was a state legislator, alderman, register of mesne conveyances, and school commissioner in 1869 and 1870. Benjamin Boseman was a member of the state House of Representatives and physician to the Charles- ton jail prior to his appointment as postmaster of Charleston. Thomas Small

william c. hine46

was an alderman and school commissioner. Edward P. Wall was an alder- man, county commissioner, and a customhouse inspector from 1868 to 1870. In 1869 Robert De Large was a state legislator, head of the state census in Charleston, a magistrate, and later land commissioner for South Caro- lina. These were the men who achieved the greatest success in politics; dozens of others were never able to win even one election or gain an ap- pointive office.

Those politicians, out of office or in danger of losing an office and the economic benefits that it provided, showed an overwhelming desire to get or keep that political position. After the Democrats swept the municipal elec- tions in 1871 Republicans faced a patronage crisis. Joseph P. Howard, a minor Republican functionary who was black and a bricklayer, wrote Gov- ernor Robert Kingston Scott in the summer of 1872 to explain his predica- ment and appeal for an appointment as a trial justice. “There is but very little business going on in our city, and what little is doing, the patronage are extended to those of different politic[s] from myself: this fact renders it com-

Increase or

Name 1859 1860 1862 1867 1870 1871 1872 1874 Decrease

Malcolm Brown James Carroll Richard E. Dereef Paul B. Drayton William Henry Francis Elias Garden George A. Glover John W. Gordon R.H. Harney Richard Holloway Samuel Holloway Robert Howard Benjamin Kinloch Charles C. Leslie William McKinlay Paul Poinsett Alonzo J. Ransier W.G. Rout Jacob Royall Thomas Small Philip Thorn Edward P. Wall

*Purchases or sales of real estate as well as losses in slave property would skew these figures.

SOURCE: 1859: List of Tax Payers of the City of Charleston for 1859 (Charleston, 1860); 1860: Manuscript, Eighth U. S. Census: 1862: Tax Ledgers, Free Persons of Color, City of Charleston; 1867: Tax Ledgers, City of Charleston; 1870: Manuscript, Ninth U. S. Census; 1871: (Letters A to K) Charleston County Auditor’s Tax Duplicates; 1872: (Letters M to Z) Charleston County Auditor’s Tax Duplicates; 1874: Charleston County Auditor’s Duplicates.

$9,100 6,200

25,400

1,500 14,000

1,200

6,650 7,900 2,950

33,900

23,820 1,200

18,500

7,800 2,000 1,800

2,000

37,100 3,500

24,000

7,600

27,000 500

12,500 1,000

9,000 9,200 3,300

31,300

1,200

7,300

1,500

3,000 5,000

11,500 500

13,500 1,000 1,800 4,800

14,200 4,635

31,500

25,000 1,000

300 8,200 1,500 1,500

1,500

1,800

2,650 9,590 1,400

650 11,365

1,380 1,080 1,600 8,208

26,255

400 22,800

1,700 7,857

10,150 2,640 6,590 1,600 2,785

1,800

6,920

1,420 1,230

8,270

16,035

1,300 19,935

3,200

3,237 6,090

5,115

Decrease Decrease Decrease Increase Decrease Decrease Increase Decrease Decrease Decrease Increase Decrease Decrease Increase Decrease Increase Decrease Decrease Increase Decrease Decrease Increase

TABLE 9

Prewar and Postwar Records Indicating Assessed Value of Real Estate of Black Politicians in Charleston During Reconstruction*

Black Politicians in Reconstruction Charleston, South Carolina 47

pulsory on my part—always to ask favors from those only of the Republican Party.”30 Scott did not appoint Howard, and the bricklayer wrote a more heartrending letter seven months later to the new governor, Franklin James Moses, Jr. “I am forced through actual necessity again to respectfully ask your excellancy’s [sic] attention to myself and family viz: (a dear, affectionate wife and five little ones) present a lamentable condition, having no business for some length of time, makes me feel despondent and almost broken- hearted. The prominent part I had always manifested together with my activity and energy towards the success of the Republican party has placed me in such a manner as to become obligated solely to that party for suste- nance and support.”31 Not long afterward he was appointed a trial justice in Charleston.32

In 1876 former Lieutenant-Governor Alonzo Jacob Ransier though that he was about to be removed as the collector of internal revenue for the Second Congressional District. He wrote Governor Daniel Henry Cham- berlain and begged the governor for aid in securing a nomination on the state Republican ticket in the upcoming Republican convention: “I have a large family and no means for their support and would be greatly obliged if my friends will take me into consideration in connection with such a position on the state ticket as they may think me qualified for.”33 Ransier’s plea for patronage was not untypical of the Reconstruction politician, al- though it was a bit unusual that such a prominent leader was constrained to ask for support. Generally, it was the marginal political figures such as Joseph Howard who deluged the governor and other major officeholders with pleas for political appointments.

There is further evidence, though it should be emphasized that it is strictly tentative, that indicates that many black men were suffering eco- nomic reversals in the postwar years. Incomplete tax records in Table 9 show that a number of prosperous black men, including Richard Dereef, Elias Garden, William McKinlay, George Glover, and Edward P. Wall, had experienced financial losses in the aftermath of the war. But the table also shows that seven of the twenty-two politicians listed evidently gained wealth during the Reconstruction years. Though the evidence is anything but certain, it could be concluded that if wealthy blacks had suffered losses then blacks of modest means who had been free before the war also confronted serious economic difficulties in 1865, 1866 and after. Thus, it was middle- class carpenters, tailors, and butchers who were most inclined to get in- volved in politics. It may have been that those were the particular trades caught hardest in the economic squeeze in the immediate postwar years, while others, such as bakers and blacksmiths, were not as severely affected.

In any event, and in conclusion, the evidence does indicate that the black men who were involved in politics at the grass-roots level in Charleston’s eight wards during Reconstruction were mainly skilled laborers who had grown up free in the city. Most seem to have been at least able to read. A

william c. hine48

sizable number of these men participated in social, service, and religious groups in the community in addition to their involvement in politics. As a whole, the group tended toward middle age, and nearly two-thirds were blacks, not mulattoes.

appendix

The information on the origins and backgrounds of Charleston’s black politicians was compiled from a variety of sources. The newspapers provided the names of the politicians by periodically listing (although frequently misspelling) the delegates to various party conventions and identifying mem- bers of different political factions that appeared and disappeared during Reconstruction. By then taking the compiled list of more than five hun- dred men active in politics and carefully examining demographic data on Charleston, it was possible to create a composite picture of 234 local black politicians. The main sources included the Eighth and Ninth Manuscript Federal Censuses for the City of Charleston. However, the 1870 census is notoriously unreliable. Also utilized were two censuses undertaken by the city of Charleston in 1848 and 1861 because city authorities were convinced the city had been underenumerated in the federal censuses. Charleston also maintained an annual register of free Negroes, the main purpose of which was to make certain blacks paid a capitation tax. The registers for 1824, 1827, 1832, 1833, 1834, 1838, 1840, 1842, 1843, 1844, 1845, 1846, 1848, 1849, 1850, 1851, 1855, and 1857 were examined. City directories for 1855, 1859, 1860, 1867 and 1876–1877 were used. The List of Tax Payers of the City of Charleston for 1859 (Charleston, 1860) and the “City Tax Ledgers for Free Persons of Color for 1862” aided in the identification of free Negroes. The registers of signatures of depositors in the Freedman’s Bank in Charles- ton also contain some biographical data as do the Service Records of Union Soldiers who served with the United States Colored Troops. Also providing occasional bits of personal information were the Charleston newspapers. Secondary sources of information were Lawrence C. Bryant, Negro Law- makers in South Carolina Legislature, 1868–1902 (Orangeburg, S. C. 1968); Emily B. Reynolds and Joan R. Faunt, comps., Biographical Directory of the Senate of South Carolina (Columbia, 1969); and the Biographical Directory of Congress, 1774–1971 (Washington, 1971).

It should be pointed out that Charleston did not keep a register of births or deaths in the nineteenth century. And the Reconstruction government’s 1869 census of the state has been either lost or destroyed.

In spite of the weighty volume of information, there were gaps and contra- dictions in the data. In many cases it was impossible to document prewar status as a slave. In a few instances newspaper reports and records of deposi- tors in the Freedman’s Bank identified former slaves. For the most part, however, there was no consistent means of determining conclusively those

Black Politicians in Reconstruction Charleston, South Carolina 49

individuals who had been slaves. There were, fortunately, enough sources in most cases to confirm the status of free blacks. Where there were contradic- tions among the data regarding color, literacy, or other vital information local sources were usually given precedence over the federal census.

Democrats in the list are indicated by [D] following the name.

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C h

ar le

st on

N om

in ee

fo r

th e

H ou

se , 1

87 2

38 .J

am es

W . C

oc h

ra n

B S

ou th

C ar

ol in

a L

ab or

er ye

s W

ar d

5 R

ep . C

ou n

ty C

on v.

, 1 86

7 39

.M ar

lo w

C oc

h ra

n [

D ]

B V

ic e-

P re

s. , C

ol or

ed C

on se

rv at

iv es

40 .W

il li

am C

ol li

n s

[D ]

B F

is h

er m

an ye

s V

ic e-

P re

s. , W

ar d

4 D

em . C

lu b

41 .S

am u

el R

. C ox

F M

C h

ar le

st on

B u

tc h

er ye

s W

ar d

8 R

ep . N

om in

ee , S

ch oo

l C om

m .,

18 73

42 .G

eo rg

e H

. D an

tz m

an M

S ou

th C

ar ol

in a

ye s

W ar

d 6

de le

ga te

R ep

. C ou

n ty

C on

v. , 1

87 2

43 .W

il li

am D

ar t

F M

C h

ar le

st on

Pa in

te r

ye s

C h

ai re

d R

ep . M

as s

M ee

ti n

g, 1

86 8

44 .T

h om

as A

. D av

is B

ye s

H ou

se , 1

87 0–

72 , 1

87 4–

76 45

.A . A

. D ea

s [D

] F

B C

h ar

le st

on T

ea ch

er 1s

t V ic

e- P

re s.

, C ol

or ed

C on

se rv

at iv

e C

lu b,

1 86

9 46

.J oh

n M

. D ea

s M

F lo

ri da

L ab

or er

W ar

d 5

de le

ga te

, R ep

. C ou

n ty

C on

v. , 1

87 2

47 .M

ar ti

n R

ob is

on D

el an

y F

B O

h io

E du

ca to

r ye

s N

om in

ee li

eu te

n an

t g ov

er n

or R

ef or

m T

ic ke

t, 18

74 48

.R ob

er t C

. D e

L ar

ge F

M C

h ar

le st

on T

ai lo

r ye

s U

. S . H

ou se

, 1 87

0– 72

49 .R

ic h

ar d

E . D

er ef

f [ D

] F

M C

h ar

le st

on W

oo d

fa ct

or ye

s W

ar d

5 al

de rm

an , 1

86 8

50 .J

. M . D

ev ee

s B

W ar

d 8

de le

ga te

R ep

. C ou

n ty

C on

v. , 1

86 7

51 .R

ic h

ar d

D ic

ke rs

on B

S ou

th C

ar ol

in a

B u

tc h

er ye

s W

ar d

6 de

le ga

te R

ep . C

ou n

ty C

on v.

, 1 87

5 52

.S am

u el

D ic

ke rs

on B

S ou

th C

ar ol

in a

W h

it ew

as h

er ye

s R

ac on

te u

r/ S

po ke

sm an

/G ad

fl y

53 .M

os es

H . D

in gl

e F

M C

h ar

le st

on C

ar pe

n te

r ye

s W

ar d

2 de

le ga

te R

ep . C

ou n

ty C

on v.

, 1 87

54 .P

au l B

. D ra

yt on

F B

C h

ar le

st on

C ar

pe n

te r

n o

D el

eg at

e, R

ep . S

ta te

C on

v. , 1

87 4

55 .S

id n

ey E

ck h

ar d

[D ]

F M

C h

ar le

st on

C ig

ar m

ak er

ye s

W ar

d 5

P re

s. , H

on es

t G ov

er n

m en

t L ea

gu e

18 74

56 .S

am u

el E

ll io

tt F

B C

h ar

le st

on F

is h

er m

an ye

s D

el eg

at e,

R ep

C ou

n ty

C on

v. , 1

87 2

57 .W

. E . E

ll io

tt S

B C

h ar

le st

on F

is h

er m

an ye

s N

om in

ee , H

ou se

, 1 87

0 58

.W . E

. E va

n s

M ye

s D

el eg

at e,

R ep

S ta

te C

on v.

, 1 86

8 59

.A . F

. F ar

ra r

B S

ec re

ta ry

, C it

y C

en tr

al C

om m

it te

e, 1

87 1

60 .C

yr u

s Fe

n w

ic k

F B

L ab

or er

n o

N om

in ee

, H ou

se , 1

87 0

61 .W

il li

am G

. F ie

ld s

F M

C h

ar le

st on

C ar

pe n

te r

ye s

W ar

d 4

R ep

. n om

in ee

a ld

er m

an 1

87 3

62 .A

da m

F in

le y

S B

C h

ar le

st on

L ab

or er

se m

i W

ar d

7 R

ep . C

it y

C on

v. , 1

87 3

63 .A

da m

P ya

tt F

or d

S B

C h

ar le

st on

Pa st

or ye

s H

ou se

, 1 87

0– 74

, 1 87

6– 77

64 .R

ic h

ar d

Fo rr

es t

F M

C h

ar le

st on

S h

oe m

ak er

W ar

d 6

de le

ga te

, R ep

. C ou

n ty

C on

v. , 1

86 7

65 .B

os to

n F

ow le

r F

M C

h ar

le st

on D

ra ym

an W

ar d

3 de

le ga

te , R

ep . C

ou n

ty C

on v.

, 1 87

2 66

.W il

li am

H en

ry F

ra n

ci s

[D ]

F M

C h

ar le

st on

B el

lh an

ge r

se m

i W

ar d

6 n

om in

ee , H

ou se

, 1 87

0 67

.P au

l F ra

se r

B S

ou th

C ar

ol in

a L

ab or

er n

o W

ar d

2 de

le ga

te , R

ep . C

ou n

ty C

on v.

, 1 87

2 68

.J oh

n M

. F

re em

an , J

r. [

D ]

F M

C h

ar le

st on

M ec

h an

ic ye

s H

ou se

, 1 87

4– 76

69 .P

et er

B . F

ro st

F M

C h

ar le

st on

C ar

pe n

te r/

pa in

te r

ye s

W ar

d 5

de le

ga te

, R ep

. C ou

n ty

C on

v. , 1

87 2

70 .W

as h

in gt

on G

ad sd

en M

S ou

th C

ar ol

in a

L ab

or er

ye s

W ar

d 3

de le

ga te

, R ep

. C ou

n ty

C on

v. , 1

87 2

71 .J

os ep

h A

. G ai

ll ar

d [D

] F

M C

h ar

le st

on C

ar pe

n te

r P

re si

de n

t, W

ar d

3 C

ol or

ed D

em . C

lu b

72 .S

am u

el E

. G ai

ll ar

d F

B S

ou th

C ar

ol in

a M

il lw

ri gh

t ye

s S

ta te

S en

at e,

1 87

1– 77

73 .S

. F . G

an et

t [ D

] B

N om

in ee

a ld

er m

an , C

it iz

en s’

P ar

ty , 1

87 1

74 .E

li as

G ar

de n

[ D

] F

M C

h ar

le st

on B

u tc

h er

ye s

W ar

d 6

al de

rm an

, 1 87

1– 73

75 .S

am u

el B

. G ar

re tt

B M

in is

te r

ye s

W ar

d 3

al de

rm an

, 1 87

1– 77

76 .J

on at

h an

C . G

ib bs

F M

P h

il ad

el ph

ia , P

a. M

in is

te r

ye s

D el

eg at

e, R

ep . S

ta te

C on

v. , 1

86 7

re w

L eg

re w

M os

t A

dv an

ce d

N am

S ta

tu s

ol or

es id

en ce

cc up

at io

L it

er at

e P

ol it

ic al

P os

it io

77 .R

ob er

t G iv

en B

W ar

d 6

de le

ga te

, R ep

. C ou

n ty

C on

v. , 1

86 7

78 .G

eo rg

e A

. G lo

ve r

[D ]

F M

C h

ar le

st on

S ad

dl er

ye s

W ar

d 4

al de

rm an

, 1 87

1– 73

79 .S

am u

el G

lo ve

r B

S ou

th C

ar ol

in a

T ai

lo r

ye s

W ar

d 2

de le

ga te

, R ep

. C ou

n ty

C on

v. , 1

87 2

80 .J

oh n

A . G

od fr

ey F

M C

h ar

le st

on B

u tc

h er

ye s

W ar

d 5

n om

in ee

a ld

er m

an , 1

87 3

81 .J

oh n

W . G

or do

n F

M C

h ar

le st

on B

u tc

h er

ye s

W ar

d 7

n om

in ee

a ld

er m

an , 1

87 3

82 .R

ob er

t G or

do n

F M

C h

ar le

st on

S h

oe m

ak er

ye s

V ic

e- P

re s.

, I n

de pe

n de

n t R

ep s.

, 1 87

4 83

.W . L

. G ou

rd in

[ D

] B

P re

si de

n t,

W ar

d 4

C ol

or ed

D em

. C lu

b, 1

86 8

84 .J

os ep

h J

. G ra

n t

F B

C h

ar le

st on

D ra

ym an

/ ye

s H

ou se

, 1 87

2– 76

ca rp

en te

r 85

.J os

ia h

G ra

n t

F B

C h

ar le

st on

S h

ip c

ar pe

n te

r W

ar d

3 de

le ga

te , R

ep . C

ou n

ty C

on v.

, 1 87

2 86

.W il

li am

A . G

ra n

t F

M C

h ar

le st

on B

u tc

h er

ye s

H ou

se , 1

87 2–

74 87

.W il

li am

H . G

ra n

t B

B oo

kk ee

pe r

H ou

se , 1

86 8–

70 88

.J os

ep h

G re

en [

D ]

B S

ou th

C ar

ol in

a n

o D

el eg

at e,

S ta

te R

ep . C

on v.

, 1 87

2 89

.P ri

m u

s G

re en

, J r.

S B

S ou

th C

ar ol

in a

W ar

d 2

de le

ga te

R ep

. C ou

n ty

C on

v. , 1

87 2

90 .P

ri m

u s

G re

en , S

r. S

B S

ou th

C ar

ol in

a W

ar d

2 de

le ga

te R

ep . C

ou n

ty C

on v.

, 1 87

2 91

.A . F

. G re

go ri

e F

B C

h ar

le st

on W

ar d

5 de

le ga

te R

ep . C

ou n

ty C

on v.

, 1 87

2 92

.P et

er M

. G re

go ry

F M

C h

ar le

st on

C ar

pe n

te r/

fa rm

er W

ar d

8 n

om in

ee a

ld er

m an

, 1 87

3 93

.W . R

. H . H

am pt

on F

B C

h ar

le st

on W

ar d

4 al

de rm

an , 1

86 9–

71 94

.J am

es J

. H ar

dy M

S ou

th C

ar ol

in a

B ri

ck m

as on

H ou

se , 1

87 0–

72 95

.S . H

. H ar

e F

B C

h ar

le st

on T

ai lo

r W

ar d

6 de

le ga

te , R

ep . C

ou n

ty C

on v.

, 1 86

7 96

.R . H

. H ar

n ey

F B

C h

ar le

st on

L ab

or er

W ar

d 6

de le

ga te

, R ep

. C ou

n ty

C on

v. , 1

86 7

97 .J

u ly

H as

el B

S ou

th C

ar ol

in a

n o

W ar

d 7

de le

ga te

, R ep

. C ou

n ty

C on

v. , 1

87 2

98 .J

am es

N . H

ay n

e M

S ou

th C

ar ol

in a

T ai

lo r

ye s

W ar

d 8

de le

ga te

, R ep

. C ou

n ty

C on

v. , 1

86 7

99 .R

ic h

ar d

H ol

lo w

ay F

M C

h ar

le st

on C

ar pe

n te

r ye

s W

ar d

4 al

de rm

an , 1

86 8

10 0.

S am

u el

H ol

lo w

ay F

M C

h ar

le st

on L

iv er

y ye

s N

om in

at ed

C ou

n ty

C om

m .,

18 70

10 1.

H en

ry H

ol m

es [

D ]

F B

C h

ar le

st on

L ab

or er

n o

1s t V

ic e-

P re

s. , W

ar d

1 C

ol or

ed D

em o.

A ss

n . 1

86 8

10 2.

T h

om as

M . H

ol m

es F

M C

h ar

le st

on S

ex to

n ye

s R

ep u

bl ic

an S

ta te

E xe

c. C

om m

., 18

68 10

3. W

il li

am R

. H ol

m es

F M

C h

ar le

st on

T ai

lo r

D el

eg at

e, R

ep . C

it y

C on

v. , 1

86 8

10 4.

R ob

er t H

ou st

on F

B C

h ar

le st

on T

ai lo

r ye

s S

ec re

ta ry

, R ep

. S ta

te E

xe c.

C om

m it

te e,

1 86

10 5.

Ja co

b H

ow ar

d F

B C

h ar

le st

on Fa

ct or

W ar

d 3

de le

ga te

, R ep

. C ou

n ty

C on

v. , 1

86 7

10 6.

Jo se

ph P

. H ow

ar d

F B

C h

ar le

st on

B ri

ck la

ye r

W ar

d 3

de le

ga te

, R ep

. C ou

n ty

C on

v. , 1

87 2

10 7.

R ob

er t H

ow ar

d F

M C

h ar

le st

on W

oo d

fa ct

or ye

s W

ar d

3 al

de rm

an , 1

86 8

10 8.

H ez

ek ia

h H

. H u

n te

r F

M B

ro ok

ly n

, N . Y

. M

in is

te r/

te ac

h er

ye s

H ou

se , 1

87 0–

72 10

9. W

il li

am R

. J er

va y

S M

B er

ke le

y, S

. C .

Fa rm

er ye

s S

en at

e, 1

87 2–

76 11

0. Is

aa c

Jo h

n so

n S

M S

ou th

C ar

ol in

a ye

s W

ar d

5 de

le ga

te , R

ep . C

ou n

ty C

on v.

, 1 87

2 11

1. S

am u

el J

oh n

so n

F M

C h

ar le

st on

B u

tc h

er /c

ar pe

n te

r n

o H

ou se

, 1 86

8– 70

m in

is te

r 11

2. T

. H . J

on es

S B

C h

ar le

st on

ye s

H ou

se n

om in

ee , 1

87 2

11 3.

B en

ja m

in K

in lo

ch [

D ]

F B

C h

ar le

st on

M il

lw ri

gh t

ye s

W ar

d 4

de le

ga te

, D em

. C ou

n ty

C on

v. , 1

87 2

11 4.

R al

ph K

ni gh

t [ D

] B

2n d

V ic

e- P

re s.

, W ar

d 1

C ol

or ed

D em

. A ss

n .,

18 68

11 5.

H en

ry L

ar co

m b

B W

ar d

3 de

le ga

te , R

ep . C

ou n

ty C

on v.

, 1 86

7 11

6. Jo

se ph

S . L

az ar

u s

[D ]

F B

C h

ar le

st on

C ar

pe n

te r

ye s

P re

si de

n t,

W ar

d 7

D em

. C lu

b, 1

86 8

11 7.

E dw

ar d

L ee

F M

C h

ar le

st on

S ex

to n

ye s

W ar

d 4

de le

ga te

R ep

. C ou

n ty

C on

v. , 1

87 2

11 8.

F. S

. L ee

B C

h ar

le st

on B

u tc

h er

N om

in ee

, H ou

se , 1

87 2

11 9.

G eo

rg e

H . L

ee F

B S

al em

, M as

s H

ou se

, 1 86

8– 70

12 0.

Jo se

ph L

es es

n e

B C

h ar

le st

on L

ab or

er n

o H

ou se

, 1 87

6– 77

12 1.

C h

ar le

s C

. L es

li e

[D ]

F M

C h

ar le

st on

F is

h fa

ct or

ye s

C on

se rv

. n om

in ee

fo r

al de

rm an

, W ar

d 5,

1 87

3 12

2. S

. J . L

is to

n [

D ]

B 1s

t V ic

e- P

re s.

, W ar

d 3

D em

. C lu

b, 1

86 8

12 3.

Ju li

u s

W . L

lo yd

S B

S ou

th C

ar ol

in a

L ab

or er

se m

i H

ou se

, 1 87

0– 72

12 4.

A ar

on L

og an

B C

h ar

le st

on ye

s V

ic e-

P re

s. , U

ni on

L ea

gu e,

1 86

9 12

5. R

. T . L

op ez

S B

S ou

th C

ar ol

in a

B ri

ck la

ye r

D el

eg at

e, R

ep . S

ta te

C on

v. , 1

87 4

12 6.

A ar

on M

cC oy

B S

ou th

C ar

ol in

a L

ab or

er n

o W

ar d

1 de

le ga

te , R

ep . C

ou n

ty C

on v.

, 1 87

3 12

7. W

h it

efi el

d J.

M cK

in la

y F

M C

h ar

le st

on T

ai lo

r ye

s W

ar d

2 de

le ga

te , R

ep . C

ou n

ty C

on v.

, 1 87

2 12

8. W

il li

am M

cK in

la y

F M

C h

ar le

st on

T ai

lo r

ye s

H ou

se , 1

86 8–

re w

L eg

re w

M os

t A

dv an

ce d

N am

S ta

tu s

ol or

es id

en ce

cc up

at io

L it

er at

e P

ol it

ic al

P os

it io

12 9.

T h

om as

M cP

h er

so n

[ D

]S B

C h

ar le

st on

Po rt

er se

m i

3r d

V ic

e- P

re s.

, C ol

or ed

D em

. C lu

b, 1

86 8

13 0.

R ob

er t M

ad or

a [D

] F

B S

ou th

C ar

ol in

a L

ab or

er T

re as

u re

r, 7

th W

ar d

C ol

or ed

D em

. C lu

b, 1

86 8

13 1.

E dw

ar d

P. L

. M ar

ti n

F B

S ou

th C

ar ol

in a

L ab

or er

ye s

W ar

d 4

de le

ga te

, R ep

. C ou

n ty

C on

v. , 1

87 4

13 2.

G eo

rg e

M ar

ti n

S B

S ou

th C

ar ol

in a

B la

ck sm

it h

n o

W ar

d 8

de le

ga te

, R ep

. C ou

n ty

C on

v. , 1

86 7

13 3.

Jo se

ph N

. M ar

ti n

[ D

] F

B C

h ar

le st

on R

ic em

il l w

or ke

r n

o T

re as

u re

r, 3

rd W

ar d

C ol

or ed

D em

. C lu

b, 1

86 8

13 4.

D av

id B

. M at

h ew

s S

B S

ou th

C ar

ol in

a ye

s W

ar d

6 de

le ga

te , R

ep . C

ou n

ty C

on v.

, 1 87

2 13

5. E

dw ar

d M

at h

ew s

S B

C h

ar le

st on

L ab

or er

n o

W ar

d 2

de le

ga te

, R ep

. C ou

n ty

C on

v. , 1

87 2

13 6.

S te

ph en

M ax

w el

l S

M C

h ar

le st

on B

ri ck

la ye

r/ ye

s V

ic e-

P re

s. , M

as s

M ee

ti n

g, 1

86 8

m ec

h an

ic 13

7. R

ob er

t J . M

ea re

s M

C h

ar le

st on

ye s

N om

in ee

, H ou

se , 1

87 2

13 8.

S . M

. M ea

rs [

D ]

B C

h ar

le st

on R

ec or

di n

g se

cy .,

W ar

d 3

C ol

or ed

D em

. C lu

b, 1

86 8

13 9.

C h

ar le

s M

ic h

ae ls

[ D

] B

C h

ar le

st on

C on

fe ct

io n

er /f

ru it

er W

ar d

1 al

de rm

an , 1

87 1–

73 14

0. E

dw ar

d C

. M ic

ke y

F B

C h

ar le

st on

T ai

lo r/

m in

is te

r ye

s H

ou se

, 1 86

8– 72

14 1.

Pe te

r M

il le

r F

B C

h ar

le st

on W

h ar

f h an

d ye

s W

ar d

4 de

le ga

te , R

ep . C

ou n

ty C

on v.

, 1 87

2 14

2. W

il li

am M

il le

r F

M C

h ar

le st

on ye

s W

ar d

5 de

le ga

te , R

ep . C

ou n

ty C

on v.

, 1 86

7 14

3. A

le xa

n de

r F.

M il

ls [

D ]

F M

C h

ar le

st on

C ar

pe n

te r/

pa in

te r

se m

i S

ec re

ta ry

, W ar

d 1

C ol

or ed

D em

. A ss

n .

14 4.

Ja co

b M

il ls

S B

S ou

th C

ar ol

in a

B u

tc h

er /m

in is

te r

n o

W ar

d 8

n om

in ee

a ld

er m

an , C

on se

rv at

iv e,

1 87

3 14

5. H

. C . M

in ot

t M

N om

in ee

, H ou

se , 1

87 2

14 6.

W il

li am

H . M

is h

aw F

M C

h ar

le st

on B

ar be

r ye

s N

om in

ee , s

ta te

s en

at or

, 1 87

0 14

7. A

rt h

u r

B . M

it ch

el l

F B

C h

ar le

st on

C oo

pe r

ye s

W ar

d 3

n om

in ee

a ld

er m

an , 1

87 3

14 8.

W il

li am

J . M

it ch

el l

F B

C h

ar le

st on

B ri

ck la

ye r/

ye s

V ic

e- P

re s.

, M as

s M

ee ti

n g,

1 86

8 bu

tc h

er 14

9. B

en ja

m in

M on

cr ee

f F

B C

h ar

le st

on C

ar pe

n te

r se

m i

W ar

d 5

n om

in ee

a ld

er m

an , 1

87 3

15 0.

N or

m an

M on

tg om

er y

S M

S ou

th C

ar ol

in a

ye s

T re

as u

re r,

C en

tr al

E xe

c. C

om m

., 18

71 15

1. J.

D . M

oo re

B S

ou th

C ar

ol in

a W

ar d

5 de

le ga

te , R

ep . C

ou n

ty C

on v.

, 1 86

7 15

2. Jo

h n

B . M

or ri

s F

B C

h ar

le st

on W

h ee

lw ri

gh t

ye s

W ar

d 8

de le

ga te

, R ep

. C ou

n ty

C on

v. , 1

86 7

15 3.

J. M

or ri

so n

B S

ou th

C ar

ol in

a L

ab or

er W

ar d

2 de

le ga

te , R

ep . C

ou n

ty C

on v.

, 1 87

2 15

4. W

il li

am M

or ti

m or

e F

M C

h ar

le st

on F

is h

er m

an /c

ar te

r se

m i

W ar

d 3

de le

ga te

, R ep

. C ou

n ty

C on

v. , 1

87 4

15 5.

W . J

. M ou

lt ri

e B

S ou

th C

ar ol

in a

B oa

tm an

n o

W ar

d 7

de le

ga te

, R ep

. C ou

n ty

C on

v. , 1

87 2

15 6.

W . F

. M u

rr ay

M S

ou th

C ar

ol in

a C

ar pe

n te

r ye

s W

ar d

4 de

le ga

te , R

ep . C

ou n

ty C

on v.

, 1 86

8 15

7. Jo

h n

A . M

u sh

in gt

on F

M S

ou th

C ar

ol in

a ye

s S

ec re

ta ry

, U ni

on L

ea gu

e, 1

87 5

15 8.

J. B

. M u

sh in

gt on

F M

N om

in at

ed , C

ou n

ty C

om m

., 18

68 15

9. Jo

h n

N es

bi t

B C

h ar

le st

on M

ec h

an ic

n o

W ar

d 1

de le

ga te

, R ep

. C it

y C

on v.

, 1 87

4 16

0. R

eb it

N es

bi t

B Fa

rm er

n o

D el

eg at

e, R

ep S

ta te

C on

v. , 1

87 4

16 1.

S am

u el

N oi

se tt

e S

B S

ou th

C ar

ol in

a B

ri ck

la ye

r ye

s W

ar d

7 de

le ga

te , R

ep . C

ou n

ty C

on v.

, 1 87

2 16

2. F

ra n

k O

li ve

r [D

] B

C h

ar le

st on

Fa rm

er 3r

d V

ic e-

P re

s. , W

ar d

1, C

ol or

ed D

em . A

ss n

. 16

3. W

il li

am T

. O li

ve r

F M

C h

ar le

st on

S h

oe m

ak er

ye s

W ar

d 5

de le

ga te

, R ep

., C

ou n

ty C

on v.

, 1 87

2 16

4. A

lb er

t O ’N

ea l

S M

S ou

th C

ar ol

in a

T ai

lo r

ye s

W ar

d 3

de le

ga te

, R ep

. C ou

n ty

C on

v. , 1

86 7

16 5.

T h

om as

O sb

or n

e M

S ou

th C

ar ol

in a

W ar

d 4

de le

ga te

, R ep

. C ou

n ty

C on

v. , 1

87 4

16 6.

Jo se

ph P

ar ke

r [D

] B

W ai

te r

W ar

d 8

de le

ga te

, T ax

U ni

on , 1

87 4

16 7.

Ja m

es P

aw le

y B

W ar

d 3

de le

ga te

, R ep

. C ou

n ty

C on

v. , 1

86 7

16 8.

S am

u el

P er

on n

ea u

F M

S ou

th C

ar ol

in a

B u

tc h

er W

ar d

7 de

le ga

te , R

ep . C

ou n

ty C

on v.

, 1 87

2 16

9. Jo

h n

P er

ri n

ea u

F M

C h

ar le

st on

C ar

pe n

te r

W ar

d 5

de le

ga te

, R ep

. C ou

n ty

C on

v. , 1

87 2

17 0.

E dw

ar d

Pe tt

y B

L ab

or er

ye s

H ou

se , 1

87 2–

74 17

1. H

. B . P

ic ke

n pa

ck F

B C

h ar

le st

on B

u tc

h er

W ar

d 8

de le

ga te

, R ep

. C ou

n ty

C on

v. , 1

86 7

17 2.

J. P

in ck

n ey

B W

ar d

5 de

le ga

te , R

ep . C

ou n

ty C

on v.

, 1 86

7 17

3. W

il li

am G

. P ic

kn ey

S B

S ou

th C

ar ol

in a

L ab

or er

ye s

H ou

se , 1

87 4–

77 17

4. E

. M . P

it ra

y M

W ar

d 3

de le

ga te

, R ep

. C ou

n ty

C on

v. , 1

87 2

17 5.

Pa u

l M cC

al l P

oi n

se tt

F M

C h

ar le

st on

B ar

be r

W ar

d 6

de le

ga te

, R ep

. C ou

n ty

C on

v. , 1

86 7

17 6.

Ja m

es P

ri ce

F M

S ou

th C

ar ol

in a

S ad

dl er

W ar

d 6

de le

ga te

, R ep

. C ou

n ty

C on

v. , 1

86 7

17 7.

Is aa

c P

ri ol

ea u

B C

h ar

le st

on L

ab or

er ye

s H

ou se

, 1 87

2– 74

, 1 87

6– 77

17 8.

B en

ja m

in F

. R an

do lp

h F

M O

h io

M in

is te

r ye

s D

el eg

at e,

R ep

. S ta

te C

on v.

, 1 86

8 17

9. A

lo n

zo J

. R an

si er

F M

C h

ar le

st on

S h

ip pi

n g

cl er

k ye

s L

ie u

te n

an t g

ov er

n or

, 1 87

0– 72

18 0.

Is aa

c R

ee d

F B

C h

ar le

st on

C ar

pe n

te r

se m

i W

ar d

5 de

le ga

te , R

ep . C

it y

C on

v. , 1

86 8

re w

L eg

re w

M os

t A

dv an

ce d

N am

S ta

tu s

ol or

es id

en ce

cc up

at io

L it

er at

e P

ol it

ic al

P os

it io

18 1.

Ju li

u s

R ee

d B

S ou

th C

ar ol

in a

n o

W ar

d 1

de le

ga te

R ep

. C ou

n ty

C on

v. , 1

87 2

18 2.

W il

li am

R ee

d F

M C

h ar

le st

on n

o W

ar d

1 de

le ga

te R

ep . C

ou n

ty C

on v.

, 1 87

2 18

3. R

. L . R

ic h

ar ds

on S

B S

ou th

C ar

ol in

a L

ab or

er P

re si

de n

t, M

as s

M ee

ti n

g, W

ar d

8, 1

87 2

18 4.

E li

as W

. R il

ey F

B P

h el

ps to

n , N

. Y .

Fa rm

er W

ar d

5 de

le ga

te , R

ep . C

ou n

ty C

on v.

, 1 87

2 18

5. S

te ph

en y

R il

ey F

B S

ou th

C ar

ol in

a S

ta bl

ek ee

pe r

N om

in ee

, W ar

d 4

al de

rm an

, 1 87

5 18

6. Is

aa c

B . R

iv er

s B

S ou

th C

ar ol

in a

L ab

or er

n o

C h

ai re

d, R

ep . M

ee ti

n g,

1 87

4 18

7. P.

R ob

in so

n B

S ou

th C

ar ol

in a

n o

W ar

d 2

de le

ga te

, R ep

. C ou

n ty

C on

v. , 1

87 2

18 8.

W . G

. R ou

t B

W ar

d 5

de le

ga te

, R ef

or m

C ou

n ty

C on

v. , 1

87 1

18 9.

Ja co

b R

oy al

l [ D

] B

D em

oc ra

ti c

n om

in ee

, H ou

se 1

87 2

19 0.

Ja m

es R

u ss

el l

B S

ou th

C ar

ol in

a n

o V

ic e-

P re

s. , U

ni on

L ea

gu e

C on

v. , 1

86 9

19 1.

P. S

au lt

er s,

J r.

M S

ou th

C ar

ol in

a ye

s W

ar d

5 de

le ga

te , R

ep . C

ou n

ty C

on v.

, 1 87

2 19

2. R

ob er

t S av

ag e

B S

ou th

C ar

ol in

a n

o W

ar d

5 de

le ga

te , R

ep . C

on v.

, 1 87

2 19

3. T

ob ia

s S

co tt

F B

C h

ar le

st on

Po rt

er D

el eg

at e,

I n

de pe

n de

n t R

ep . S

ta te

C on

v. , 1

87 4

19 4.

G eo

rg e

S h

re w

sb er

ry F

M C

h ar

le st

on B

u tc

h er

ye s

N om

in ee

, W ar

d 6

al de

rm an

, 1 87

3 19

5. T

h om

as S

m al

l F

B C

h ar

le st

on C

ar pe

n te

r W

ar d

8 sc

h oo

l c om

m .,

18 70

19 6.

C h

ri st

op h

er S

m al

ls B

T ea

ch er

ye s

N om

in ee

, W ar

d 5

sc h

oo l c

om m

., 18

73 19

7. A

br ah

am S

m it

h S

B S

ou th

C ar

ol in

a S

ex to

n ye

s H

ou se

, 1 86

8– 72

19 8.

A da

m S

m it

h B

S ou

th C

ar ol

in a

B ri

ck m

as on

n o

N om

in ee

, H ou

se , 1

87 0

19 9.

B . F

. S m

it h

B W

ar d

5 de

le ga

te , R

ep . C

ou n

ty C

on v.

, 1 87

4 20

0. S

. L . S

m it

h [

D ]

B C

or re

sp on

di n

g S

ec y.

, W ar

d 7

C ol

or ed

D em

C lu

b, 1

86 8

20 1.

N at

h an

ie l T

. S pe

n ce

r S

M C

h ar

le st

on T

ai lo

r ye

s H

ou se

, 1 87

2– 74

20 2.

R . S

te ve

n s

B S

ou th

C ar

ol in

a L

ab or

er n

o W

ar d

5 de

le ga

te , R

ep . C

ou n

ty C

on v.

, 1 86

7 20

3. Ja

m es

S to

ck er

F B

C h

ar le

st on

L ab

or er

W ar

d 7

de le

ga te

, R ep

. C ou

n ty

C on

v. , 1

87 4

20 4.

A br

am T

ay lo

r F

B C

h ar

le st

on W

ar d

7 de

le ga

te , R

ep . C

ou n

ty C

on v.

, 1 87

2 20

5. L

. J . T

ay lo

r [D

] B

S ou

th C

ar ol

in a

L ab

or er

se m

i S

ec re

ta ry

, C ol

or ed

C on

se rv

at iv

e C

lu b,

1 86

9 20

6. H

. G . T

h om

as M

S ou

th C

ar ol

in a

ye s

C re

de n

ti al

s C

om m

., R

ep . C

it y

C on

v. , 1

87 3

20 7.

Jo h

n T

h om

as [

D ]

B 2n

d V

ic e-

P re

s. , C

ol or

ed C

on se

rv at

iv e

C lu

b, 1

86 9

20 8.

P h

il li

p T

h or

n F

M C

h ar

le st

on C

ar pe

n te

r/ W

ar d

5 al

de rm

an , 1

86 9–

71 u

n de

rt ak

william c. hine58

20 9.

Ju li

u s

C . T

in gm

an B

C h

ar le

st on

Fa rm

er ye

s H

ou se

, 1 87

2– 74

, 1 87

6– 77

21 0.

R ob

er t W

. T u

rn er

M V

ir gi

ni a

ye s

H ou

se , 1

87 2–

74 21

1. C

. H . V

an de

rh or

st , J

r. B

N om

in ee

, H ou

se , 1

87 2

21 2.

R . H

. V an

de rh

or st

F B

C h

ar le

st on

Pa in

te r/

ca rp

en te

r ye

s W

ar d

8 de

le ga

te , R

ep . C

ou n

ty C

on v.

, 1 86

7 21

3. Jo

h n

V an

de rp

oo l

S B

F ie

ld h

an d

ye s

H ou

se , 1

87 2–

74 21

4. W

il li

am V

in ey

F M

O h

io ye

s R

ep . d

el eg

at e,

C ou

n ty

C on

., 18

74 21

5. A

lb el

B . W

al ke

r [D

] F

B N

or th

C ar

ol in

a L

ab or

er 2n

d V

ic e-

P re

s. , W

ar d

3, C

ol or

ed D

em . C

lu b,

1 86

8 21

6. Ja

m es

L . W

al ke

r S

B C

h ar

le st

on C

ar pe

n te

r n

o W

ar d

4 de

le ga

te , R

ep . C

ou n

ty C

on v.

, 1 87

2 21

7. E

dw ar

d P.

W al

l F

M C

h ar

le st

on T

ai lo

r ye

s S

ec y.

-T re

as .,

R ep

. S ta

te E

xe cu

ti ve

C om

m .,

18 68

21 8.

L af

ay et

te F

. W al

l F

B C

h ar

le st

on T

ai lo

r ye

s W

ar d

3 al

de rm

an , 1

86 8,

1 86

9– 71

21 9.

R . M

. W al

la ce

B S

ou th

C ar

ol in

a W

ar d

2 de

le ga

te , R

ep . C

ou n

ty C

on v.

, 1 87

2 22

0. A

pr il

W as

h in

gt on

M S

ou th

C ar

ol in

a W

ar d

3 de

le ga

te , R

ep . C

ou n

ty C

on v.

, 1 86

7 22

1. S

. L . W

as h

in gt

on [

D ]

F M

C h

ar le

st on

ye s

R ec

or di

n g

S ec

y. , W

ar d

7 C

ol or

ed D

em . C

lu b,

1 86

8 22

2. H

. L . W

ay n

e F

B C

h ar

le st

on C

ar pe

n te

r W

ar d

5 de

le ga

te , R

ep . C

ou n

ty C

on v.

, 1 86

7 22

3. G

eo rg

e W

eb b

B S

ou th

C ar

ol in

a S

te ve

do re

n o

W ar

d 5

de le

ga te

, R ep

. C it

y C

on v.

, 1 87

3 22

4. W

il li

am W

es to

n F

B C

h ar

le st

on T

ai lo

r W

ar d

4 al

de rm

an , 1

86 8

22 5.

E dw

ar d

W et

h er

s B

S ou

th C

ar ol

in a

n o

W ar

d 2

de le

ga te

, R ep

. C ou

n ty

C on

v. , 1

87 2

22 6.

A . B

. W il

li am

s F

B S

ou th

C ar

ol in

a W

at er

ca rt

d ri

ve r

W ar

d 8

de le

ga te

, R ep

. C ou

n ty

C on

v. , 1

86 7

22 7.

A le

xa n

de r

W il

li am

s F

B C

h ar

le st

on U

ph ol

st er

er ye

s W

ar d

4 de

le ga

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Black Politicians in Reconstruction Charleston, South Carolina 59

notes

1. Serving as benchmarks among traditional accounts of Reconstruction are John W. Burgess, Reconstruction and the Constitution, 1866–1876 (New York, 1902); Will- iam A. Dunning, Reconstruction, Political and Economic, 1865–1877 (New York, 1907); Claude G. Bowers, The Tragic Era: The Revolution After Lincoln (Cambridge, Mass., 1929); and E. Merton Coulter, The South During Reconstruction, 1876–1877 ([Baton Rouge], 1947). Though more moderate on race, Francis B. Simkins and Robert H. Woody’s South Carolina During Reconstruction (Chapel Hill, 1932) still belongs among the traditional studies.

2. The revisionist accounts begin with two black historians in the 1920s and 1930s. See Alrutheus A. Taylor, The Negro in South Carolina During the Reconstruction (Washington, 1924); and William E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction . . . in America, 1860–1880 (New York, 1935). For more recent studies see Kenneth M. Stampp, The Era of Reconstruction, 1865–1877 (New York, 1965); John Hope Franklin, Reconstruction: After the Civil War (Chicago and London, 1961); Allen W. Trelease, Reconstruction: The Great Experiment (New York, 1971); and Joel Williamson, After Slavery: The Negro in South Carolina During Reconstruction, 1861–1877 (Chapel Hill, 1965). Furthermore, the histographical pendulum has not swung back to the point that black leaders are now merely viewed sympathetically as heroes and/or tragic victims caught up in a confusing and stormy era. For critical revisionist accounts see Thomas Holt, Black over White: Negro Political Leadership in South Carolina During Reconstruction, (Urbana, Chi- cago, and London, 1977); Euline W. Brock, “Thomas W. Cardozo: Fallible Black Reconstruction Leader,” Journal of Southern History, XLVII (May 1981), 183–206; Armstead L. Robinson, “Beyond the Realm of Social Consensus: New Meanings of Reconstruction for American History,” Journal of American History, LXVIII (September 1981), 276–97; and Howard N. Rabinowitz, ed., Southern Black Leaders of the Recon- struction Era (Urbana, Chicago, and London, 1982).

3. Rankin, “The Origins of Black Leadership in New Orleans During Reconstruc- tion,” Journal of Southern History, XL (August 1974), 417–40. There also have been several full-length biographies of black men who held office during Reconstruction. See Okon Edet Uya, From Slavery to Public Service: Robert Smalls, 1839–1915 (New York, London, and Toronto, 1972); James Haskins, Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback (New York, 1973); Peggy Lamson, The Glorious Failure: Black Congressman Robert Brown Elliott and the Reconstruction in South Carolina (New York, 1973); Peter D. Klingman, Josiah Walls: Florida’s Black Congressman of Reconstruction (Gainesville, 1976); and Loren Schweninger, James T. Rapier and Reconstruction (Chicago and London, 1978).

4. Charleston’s economic role in the nation declined fairly rapidly after the panic of 1819 as cotton prices fluctuated and competition from the Southwest increased. Exports from Charleston failed to keep pace with those of other southern ports, so that even Mobile exceeded Charleston in exports by 1840. Charleston’s rank in population fell from sixth in the nation in 1820 to twelfth in 1850. Yet, in the minds of many northerners and southerners Charleston remained thoroughly identified with the southern way of life. By 1860 more than one-fifth of South Carolina’s wealthiest planters maintained residence in the city. Julian J. Petty, The Growth and Distribution of Population in South Carolina (Columbia, S. C., 1943), 65, Table Six, 85–86; Charles S. Sydnor, The Devel- opment of Southern Sectionalism, 1819–1848 ([Baton Rouge], 1948), 23, 251–52; Chal- mers G. Davidson, The Last Foray: The South Carolina Planters of 1860: A Sociological Study (Columbia, S. C., 1971), 3, 170–267; John Radford, “The Charleston Planters in 1860,” South Carolina Historical Magazine, LXXVII (October 1976), 228–29; George C. Rogers, Jr., Charleston in the Age of the Pinckneys (Norman, 1969), 52–53.

5. For more on antebellum black life in Charleston see Marina Wikramanayake, A World in Shadow: The Free Negro in Antebellum South Carolina (Columbia, S. C., 1973), 21–22, 52, 73–74, 77–92, 110–12, 116–17, 120, 124–31, 133–53, 175–81; Ira

william c. hine60

Berlin, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York, 1974), 36, 54, 65, 73–74, 214, 221, 230, 234, 236–38, 254–56, 344; Richard C. Wade, Slavery in the Cities: The South, 1820–1860 (New York, 1964), passim; E. Horace Fitchett, “The Traditions of the Free Negro in Charleston, South Carolina,” Journal of Negro History, XXV (April 1940), 139–52; and Fitchett, “The Origins and Growth of the Free Negro Population of Charleston, South Carolina,” ibid., XXVI (October 1941), 421–37.

6. The most useful newspapers were the Charleston Mercury, 1865–1868; the Charleston Daily Courier, 1865–1873; the Charleston Daily News, 1865–1873; the News and Courier merged in 1873 and formed the Charleston News and Courier, 1873– 1875; the Charleston Advocate, 1867–1868; and the Charleston Daily Republican, 1869–1871.

7. See appendix for the list of politicians and a discussion of the sources. 8. Determining the color of Reconstruction politicians—white, black, or mulatto—

proved to be especially difficult. There were seventy-nine men who were impossible to identify as either black or white, and thus they were not included in this study.

9. Consequently, a number of politicians whose nativity was listed in South Carolina were probably born and raised in Charleston.

10. Southern communities like Charleston attracted free blacks and runaway slaves alike during the antebellum period. Urban areas furnished opportunities for social intercourse, for economic improvement, and for acquiring some semblance of educa- tion. Though conditions could be desperately harsh and difficult in the cities, blacks continued to migrate to them both before and after the Civil War. For more information on urban life among slaves and free blacks, see Berlin, Slaves Without Masters, 159, 219; Wade, Slavery in the Cities, 50–54, 84–87, 114–15, 143–46, 214–20, 252–58; and Wikramanayake, A World in Shadow, 21–22, 100, 102–103.

11. The 1860 U. S. Census listed 17,146 blacks in Charleston, of whom 3,237 (18.8 percent) were free, and 13,909 (81.1 percent) were slaves. Blacks constituted 42.3 percent of the total population of 40,522, while 23,376 whites accounted for 57.7 percent. The 1861 city census listed 21,140 blacks, of whom 3,785 (17.7 percent) were free. In 1870 blacks numbered 26,173 (53.5 percent of the total population of 48,922), an increase of 52.6 percent over 1860. Whites numbered 22,749 (46.5 percent of the total), a decline of 2.7 percent. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population of the United States in 1860 . . . Eighth Census (Washington, 1864), 452; Frederick A. Ford, comp., Census of the City of Charleston, South Carolina, for the Year 1861 (Charleston, 1861); U. S. Bureau of the Census, Ninth Census; Volume I: The Statistics of the Population of the United States . . . (Washington, 1872), 258.

12. Simkins and Woody, South Carolina During Reconstruction, 116, and Wikra- manayake, A World in Shadow, 15–16, incorrectly state that Francis L. Cardozo’s father was Jacob Newton Cardozo, who was Isaac’s older brother. See John F. Farley, “Francis L. Cardozo” (Senior thesis, Princeton University, 1949), 5–6.

13. Wikramanayake, A World in Shadow, 16. 14. In many instances census takers indicated the ability to read but not write.

However, the definition of literacy involves the ability to read and write. “Persons of that age [10 years and over] who, as reported by the enumerators, were able to write, whether in English or in some foreign language, were classed as literate, while those who could not write, even though they could read, were classed as illiterate.” Negro Population, 1790–1915 (Washington, 1918), 403.

15. Charleston Daily Republican, September 21, 1869; Mary H. Hughes, Special Collections Librarian, Bowdoin College, letter to author, April 19, 1979.

16. Farley, “Francis L. Cardozo,” 5–11. 17. Emily B. Reynolds and Joan R. Faunt, comps., Biographical Directory of the

Senate of the State of South Carolina (Columbia, S. C., 1964), 191. 18. Victor Ullman, Martin R. Delany: The Beginnings of Black Nationalism (Boston,

1971), 115–17; Floyd J. Miller, The Search for Black Nationality: Black Emigration and Colonization, 1787–1863 (Urbana, Chicago, and London, 1975), 124.

Black Politicians in Reconstruction Charleston, South Carolina 61

19. Biographical Directory of Congress, 1774–1971 (Washington, 1971), 845. The location of Wood High School is unknown. De Large may have been exaggerating his educational accomplishments.

20. Charleston News, February 20, 1872. 21. Those six were Malcolm Brown, Richard Holloway, Elias Garden (a Democrat),

Thomas Small, Robert Howard, and George Shrewsberry. Additionally, six wealthy blacks were appointed in 1868 by military authorities to serve as aldermen. They were Richard E. Dereef, Richard Holloway, Robert Howard, William McKinlay, and Will- iam Weston. They served for nearly a year. The published 1859 list of taxpayers provided information on and the taxable wealth of Charleston’s black and white residents. List of Tax Payers of the City of Charleston for 1859 (Charleston, 1860).

22. Compiled from the membership rolls, Brown Fellowship Society Minutes, Janu- ary 8, 1869, to July 6, 1911, Xerox copy in Charleston County Public Library. The original minute books are in the rare book room of the Robert K. Smalls Library of the College of Charleston.

23. The rules were evidently adhered to because society minutes reveal no political discussions. Most meetings were brief and concerned such routine matters as care of the society’s cemetery, election of new members, and the election of officers. Ibid. See also Robert L. Harris, Jr., “Charleston’s Free Afro-American Elite: The Brown Fellowship Society and the Humane Brotherhood,” South Carolina Historical Magazine, LXXXII (October 1981), 294.

24. Charleston News and Courier, January 15, 1874. 25. Registers of Signatures of Depositors in Branches of the Freedman’s Savings Bank

and Trust Co., 1865–1874. Records of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Record Group 101 (National Archives, Washington, D. C.).

26. Ibid., July 7, 1870. 27. Ibid., June 8, 1870. 28. Ibid., June 15, 1871. 29. For more on the streetcar episode see William C. Hine, “The 1867 Charleston

Streetcar Sit-ins: A Case of Successful Black Protest,” South Carolina Historical Maga- zine, LXXVII (April 1976), 110–14.

30. Howard to Scott, June 12, 1872, Box 21, Folder 5, Governor’s Papers (South Carolina Department of Archives and History, Columbia, S. C.). See also Lawrence N. Powell, “The Politics of Livelihood: Carpetbaggers in the Deep South,” in J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson, eds., Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward (New York and Oxford, 1982), 315–47.

31. Howard to Moses, January 6, 1873, Box 1, Folder 30, ibid. 32. “Appointments,” January 10, 1873, Box 1, Folder 34, ibid. 33. Ransier to Chamberlain, September 8, 1876, Box 14, Folder 27, ibid. Ransier’s

fear of losing the Internal Revenue collectorship was unfounded. He retained the position through the Hayes administration.

richard lowe62

Three The Freedmen’s Bureau and Local

Black Leadership

lk richard lowe

The Bureau of Refugees, and Abandoned Lands, a branch of the United States War Department commonly known as the Freedmen’s Bureau, was designed to help former slaves make the transition from slavery to freedom after the Civil War. It was the federal agency most directly involved with the black folk of the old Confederacy; as such it has received close scrutiny from scholars, and it has been the object of considerable pulling and tugging by various historical schools of thought in the last several decades. Since the mid-1950s, the agency has been interpreted by many revisionist scholars as a kind-hearted and generally successful attempt to provide needed assis- tance to black Americans and to introduce them to the American political process; in the 1970s, postrevisionist writers began to reassess the bureau as reactionary, paternalistic, and too concerned with establishing and main- taining close ties to the white southern establishment to make a substantial difference in the lives of the freedmen.1

Many facets of the bureau’s operations have been studied in the last four decades. Its dealings with the emerging class of black political leaders in the countryside and towns of the South, however, have not been examined as fully as some other aspects of its history, primarily because relatively little scholarly research has been devoted to group studies of African-American leaders on the local and county levels.2 Among the mountains of Freedmen’s Bureau records, one set of documents does provide a glimpse of the bureau’s relationship with local- and county-level black leadership and shed further light on the Bureau’s attitude toward the rise of an entirely new political class.3

The Freedmen’s Bureau and Local Black Leadership 63

Early in the spring of 1867 the bureau’s assistant commissioner for the former Confederate state of Virginia, Brevet Brig. Gen. Orlando Brown, ordered bureau officers in the forty-one subdistricts of the state to provide headquarters with “the names of six of the most intelligent of the freedmen belonging to each county, in whom both races have confidence and who have the most influence over their own people.”4 The order was issued only six days after Congress passed the radical first Reconstruction Act, which called for a biracial martial-law regime. Within two weeks he ordered a bureau officer stationed in Lunenburg County in south-central Virginia to provide “the names of two citizens of Lunenburg County, of the first respect- ability, who are competent and willing to act on a Court to be organized under the authority of the Military bill” (the first Reconstruction Act). One day later he ordered bureau officials scattered around the state to send headquarters “a list of the Magisterial Districts in each County of your District, together with the boundaries of each Magisterial District as they were in 1860 . . . also a list of the voting precincts in each County as they were in 1860. . . . The information is required immediately.” Whether Brown intended to provide the names to the military governor of the state for appointment to voter registration boards or to Freedman’s Bureau courts or to various local offices—or to all of those—is not specified; the timing and the wording of the orders, however, make it clear that Brown was preparing lists of black Virginians who would be qualified to hold local and county office under the new military government of the Old Dominion.5

The lists of names began arriving at bureau headquarters in Richmond in spring 1867. Bureau officers had spent considerable time and effort iden- tifying the men they considered to be the black leaders of the state’s counties and towns; many supplied more than six names, and they supplied names for at least 93 of Virginia’s 102 counties and cities. Of the 9 counties with- out surviving lists in the bureau records, 7 were located on the far western and southwestern fringes of the state, where the black population was very small.6

An examination of the 621 individuals named in the reports reveals the type of black man considered officeholding material by the bureau. Indeed, the list of men compiled by the white, northern-born federal officials reveals at least as much about the identifiers as it does about the identified.

In addition to the names, bureau officials sometimes provided other identifying information about black men—their occupations, their levels of literacy, and the locations of their homes. For example, the reports indicated that Ossian Johnson of Albemarle County in the central Piedmont region had “purchased own freedom.” Nelson H. Clark of Amelia County was a “soldier in 1812.” In the eastern Tidewater, Levi Henderson of New Kent County and William Geary of Princess Anne County were identified as Union army veterans, while Logan Waller of New Kent had “worked for QM [the Union army quartermaster] at Yorktown during the war.” John Mautley of Matthews County on the western shore of Chesapeake Bay had estab-

richard lowe64

lished such a solid reputation that he “could get $100 credit at any store in the county before the war.” At least some bureau officers consulted the black communities in their districts to ascertain the names of men considered to be leaders. In short, many of the Freedmen’s Bureau agents took their responsibilities seriously, and they painstakingly identified those black men who, in their opinion, had demonstrated some ability and capacity for leadership in the two years since the end of slavery.7

Nearly half (49 percent) of the 621 men listed in the reports can be identified in the 1870 manuscript census.8 A quantitative profile of those African Americans shows some characteristics considered important by the Freedmen’s Bureau officials. The African Americans chosen were mature men in the prime of their adult lives (mean and median ages of 42.6 and 42.0); only about one in eight (12.4 percent) was younger than thirty. Virtually all of them (97.5 percent) had been born in Virginia. Compared to the average Virginia black adult male, they were considerably more likely to be literate (62.2 percent compared to 9.1 percent), a startlingly high figure, especially for a statewide selection of men at the grass-roots level who generally were not among the most elite leaders of the state. A man’s ability to read and write was clearly an important consideration for bureau agents.9

About one-seventh (14.1 percent) of the total “colored” population of Virginia was of mixed black and white ancestry; roughly six-sevenths was entirely “black” in 1870. Among the men named by the bureau, however, more than one-third (34.6 percent) were of mixed percentage. Mulattoes, quadroons, and others of mixed heritage were greatly overrepresented on the bureau list. Furthermore, on the eve of the Civil War, only about one of every ten black Virginians (10.5 percent) was free. More than one in three (35.4 percent) of the men on the bureau list, however, had been born free or had secured their freedom before the Civil War.10

A comparison of the men selected as potential officeholders by the Vir- ginia Freedmen’s Bureau with the established black leaders in New Orleans and with elected black delegates to Reconstruction conventions in various states shows that the characteristics of literacy, mixed racial heritage, and prewar freedom were even more pronounced in the latter two groups. (See table 1.) The men identified by the bureau were much more likely to be literate than the average Virginia black adult male, but they were less likely to be literate than were those identified as black leaders in New Orleans, where there was a long tradition of a strong black urban elite (62.2 percent to 98.1 percent). Among the black delegates to the various state constitu- tional conventions, the literacy figure was 84.0 percent. Similarly, black convention delegates and black leaders in New Orleans were more likely to be of mixed blood (52.1 percent and 91.2 percent, respectively) than the men on the Virginia bureau list (34.6 percent). The same pattern emerges with respect to prewar legal status. In New Orleans nearly all African- American leaders (97.1 percent of all those identified) had been free prior to 1861. Among the black delegates to the Reconstruction constitutional con-

The Freedmen’s Bureau and Local Black Leadership 65

ventions, nearly three-fifths (58.9 percent) had been free. The figure for local leaders identified by the Freedman’s Bureau in Virginia was consider- ably lower: 35.4 percent.11

The men named by the bureau agents were considerably wealthier than the typical Virginia black male. Considering only those who held any real or personal property at all, the mean wealthholding for Virginia black adult males was $413.80; the figure for those with property on the bureau list, however, was nearly three times as large, $1,189.14. The property holdings of the latter group, on the other hand, were significantly lower than those for either black or white members of the 1867–1868 constitutional convention in Virginia. When all possible property holders are considered, those who owned real or personal property as well as those who owned none at all, the mean wealthholding for white delegates to the constitutional convention was $14,843.79; for black delegates, $786.87; for men on the bureau list, only $402.55. The median figures for these three groups ($7,000, $397, and $0, respectively) display the same pattern.12

TABLE 1

Comparisons of Black Men Identified by the Virginia Freedmen’s Bureau as Local Leaders with Other Groups of African-American

Adult Males during Reconstruction

Percent Percent with Mixed Literate Racial Heritage before 1861 Holdingsa

Local Leaders in Virginia

All Adult black males in Virginia

Black members of southern constitutional conventions

Black leaders in New Orleans

SOURCES: The figures in lines 3 and 4 of the table are from Richard L. Hume, “Negro Delegates to the State Constitutional Conventions of 1867-1869,” in Southern Black Leaders of the Recon- struction Era, ed. Howard N. Rabinowitz (Urbana, 1982), 137-38; and David C. Rankin, “The Origins of Black Leadership in New Orleans during Reconstruction,” Journal of Southern History, 40 (August, 1974), 421, 427, 432. a Among those who owned any property, real or personal. b Not available.

62.2

9.1

84.0

98.1

34.6

14.1

52.1

91.2

35.4

10.5

58.9

97.1

$1,189.14

413.80

Percent Free Mean Property

richard lowe66

Assistant Commissioner Brown’s original order to provide the names included the stipulation that his subordinates identify men “in whom both races have confidence and who have the most influence over their people.” This difficult combination may well have led some local bureau officers to exclude from the lists outspoken black men who had already established a reputation for alienating the native white community. For example, the bureau list named only 11 of the 87 African Americans who would serve in the Virginia General Assembly in the last third of the century. Similarly, only 3 of the 24 black delegates to the 1867–1868 constitutional conven- tion—men who were elected by overwhelmingly black votes—had been identified as potential leaders by the bureau. Among the 21 black conven- tion members not on the list were several who would emerge as the most outspoken and radical leaders of black Virginia: Thomas Bayne of Norfolk, a literate escaped slave whose demands for reform in the Underwood con- vention (the 1867–1868 state constitutional convention) earned him the ridicule of conservative white newspapers; Lewis Lindsay of Richmond, also a former slave and as outspoken as Bayne; Willis Augustus Hodges of Prin- cess Anne County, a freeborn native Virginian, friend of abolitionists John Brown and Gerrit Smith, and a man who had lived in New York for several years before the war and edited his own newspaper in New York City; Daniel Norton of York County, the most prominent black leader of the lower Peninsula; and J. B. Baldwin, a freedman of Prince William County, who proposed in the Underwood convention the confiscation of large landed estates for sale to poor loyal men.13

It is possible that some bureau officials simply knew too little about the black community to come up with the names of men like Bayne and Lindsay, individuals who were obviously considered leaders by black Virgin- ians in the election of delegates to the constitutional convention only a few months later. On the other hand, given Assistant Commissioner Brown’s directive to include the names of those “in whom both races have confi- dence” and given the care obviously bestowed on the lists, it is likely that some bureau agents consciously excluded men most likely to alienate local whites. In either case, it is clear that the bureau’s official vision of local black leadership did not correspond perfectly with that of black voters in the hinterlands.

Nevertheless, some African Americans who were or would become iden- tified in conservative minds as dangerous radicals were included in the lists. For example, Robert Norton of York County worked closely in the politics of the lower Peninsula with his radical brother, Daniel Norton. George Seat- on of Alexandria County and Cornelius Harris of Richmond had served on radical judge John C. Underwood’s federal grand jury to indict Jeffer- son Davis. Harris and other prominent black men, according to historian Alrutheus Ambush Taylor, would become the objects of ridicule and deri- sion in conservative Virginia newspapers. Joseph Gregory was one of the leading black men of Southampton County; his strong stands in favor of

The Freedmen’s Bureau and Local Black Leadership 67

black rights would soon make him the target of white abuse and legal harassment.14 It is not clear whether some bureau agents simply misunder- stood the political stance of these men or ignored the guidelines set down by Assistant Commissioner Brown, but the names of some radical blacks who clearly would not “have the confidence” of white Virginians did appear on the bureau list. Thus, while the bureau’s vision of the ideal black leader was not altogether congruent with that of local black voters, the two views did overlap to some extent. Conversely, despite Brown’s guidelines, most white Virginians would have found none of the bureau’s suggestions acceptable.

Did the African-American men identified by the bureau in fact hold office at the local and county levels, once the Reconstruction Acts allowed them to enter the political life of Virginia? Unfortunately, no centralized, systematic record of local and county officers during the Reconstruction period was compiled by Virginia’s state or county governments. Most of what historians know about the identity of black local and county officials has been based on painstaking searches of some town and county archives. Recently discovered documents in the state archives, however, include the names of all men appointed by the military governors of Virginia from 1867 to 1869 to the county offices of sheriff, commissioner of revenue, and clerk of court.15

A comparison of these sources with the Freedmen’s Bureau lists of poten- tial officeholders indicates that very few of the men identified by bureau agents ever held public office. Three of the twenty-four members of the 1867–1868 constitutional convention, one overseer of the poor, one mem- ber of a county board of supervisors, one superintendent of the poor, two city council members, one customs inspector, and eleven of the eighty-seven black members of the General Assembly in the last third of the century came from the ranks of the bureau nominees. To the delight of most white Virgin- ians, not a single freedman was among the 376 men appointed by the military governors of Virginia to the offices of sheriff, county commissioner of revenue, or clerk of court during the years of congressional Reconstruc- tion. Thus, only 20 of the 621 men named by the bureau were among the 350 or so black Virginians known to have held some type of public office during and after Reconstruction.

This figure may be somewhat misleading, however, given the lack of a complete and systematic record of all local and county officers in postbellum Virginia. It is quite possible that many more than twenty held some type of public office. It is also certain that some of the men listed by the bureau provided leadership for the black community in ways other than holding office. Alexander Dunlop of James City County and William Thornton (or Thorton) of Elizabeth City County, both prominent in the political affairs of the lower Peninsula, had been among the seven African Americans who testified before the Joint Committee on Reconstruction. Robert P. Vickers, an unsuccessful candidate for the Underwood constitutional convention from Russell County, would win the votes of all but one of the black voters

richard lowe68

in his county. R. D. Beckley of Alexandria was an active political figure in his area even though he never held public office. Cornelius Harris of Rich- mond played a prominent role in the politics of the capital from the end of the war well into the 1880s. Tazewell Branch of Prince Edward County led the struggle for his county’s public school system in the early 1870s. In addition, at least six, and possibly more, men on the bureau list participated in one or more of the numerous “colored conventions” held in various locations after the Civil War.16 Finally, the generals who served as military governors of the Old Dominion apparently ignored the lists so carefully constructed by the bureau when they made appointments to the most im- portant county offices. In summary, while bureau officials did identify more political leaders than raw numbers of officeholders alone would imply, it is also clear that the overwhelming majority of the men the bureau suggested were passed over by Union generals and black voters alike in favor of other leaders.

Freedman’s Bureau agents in Virginia, ordered to identify potential local and county officeholders, selected from among the men in their counties those African Americans who were well into their mature years, who were wealthier, and who were more likely to be literate, lighter in skin, and free before the war than the average Virginia adult black male. The bureau officers did not provide complete satisfaction to either of the groups pulling at them from opposite directions. Most white Virginians, with the frequent cooperation of their military rulers, resisted the elevation of any black men to political office at any level. And newly enfranchised African Americans in many cases had their own ideas about who should lead them. Nonetheless, the bureau did identify some black men who were or would soon become prominent radical leaders; some of the men they named were certainly political leaders in their communities even if they held no elected offices; and incomplete records raise the possibility that many more of the bureau nominees may have held office than can be documented 130 years later. In addition, the refusal of generals John M. Schofield and George Stoneman to appoint blacks to important county offices hamstrung the bureau’s efforts to indicate that the bureau was considerably more sympathetic to black politi- cal participation than were the state’s military governors. Thus, the bureau fits neatly into neither the revisionist nor the postrevisionist model. It was neither as sensitive to the black community as some revisionist accounts imply nor as reactionary as postrevisionists insist.

notes

1. The first general, sympathetic account of the bureau was George R. Bentley, A History of the Freedmen’s Bureau (Philadelphia, 1955). For postrevisionist critiques of that agency, see Louis S. Gerteis, From Contraband to Freedmen: Federal Policy toward Southern Blacks, 1861–1865 (Westport, 1973); Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So

The Freedmen’s Bureau and Local Black Leadership 69

Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York, 1979); and William S. McFeely, Yankee Stepfather: General O. O. Howard and the Freedmen (New Haven, 1968).

2. The best treatment of the general subject is Howard N. Rabinowitz, ed., Southern Black Leaders of the Reconstruction Era (Urbana, 1982). Only two of the sixteen essays in the book (those by David C. Rankin and Michael B. Chesson) provide collective portraits of local leaders, and both deal with large cities (New Orleans and Richmond) rather than with the towns and counties of the hinterlands. Moreover, the scores of books and articles cited in the notes to the various essays in the book deal primarily with black leadership on the national and state levels.

3. Reports on Prominent Whites and Freedmen, March-May 1867, Miscellaneous Records, Records of the Assistant Commissioner for the State of Virginia, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, 1865–1869, RG 105 (National Archives, Washington, D.C.).

4. O. Brown to G. R. Chandler et al., March 8, 1867, Letters and Telegrams Sent, ibid.

5. O. Brown to D. J. Connolly, March 22, 1867, ibid.; O. Brown to J. H. Remington, March 23, 1867, ibid. The requested reports on magisterial districts are in Reports on the Boundaries of Magisterial and Voting Precincts, March-April 1867, Miscellaneous Records, ibid.

6. See the reports (not separately titled, but arranged by county) in Reports on Prominent Whites and Freedmen, March-May 1867, Miscellaneous Records, ibid. The nine counties for which lists do not appear in the Freedmen’s Bureau records are Bland, Buchanan, Carroll, Craig, Fluvanna, Gloucester, Highland, Lee, and Wise. Seven of the nine (all except Fluvanna and Gloucester) were in the western and southwestern mountainous region and had very small black populations in 1870 (ranging from 1.2 percent to 8.4 percent of the total county population). The African-American popula- tions in Fluvanna (in central Virginia), Gloucester (bordering Chesapeake Bay), and the state as a whole were 51.6 percent, 53.2 percent, and 41.9 percent, respectively: United States, Bureau of the Census, The Statistics of the Population of the United States; Complied from the Original Returns of the Ninth Census (June 1, 1870) (Wash- ington, 1872), 68–70.

7. See the reports of Albemarle, Amelia, New Kent, Princess Anne, and Matthews counties in Reports on Prominent Whites and Freedmen, March-May 1867, Miscella- neous Records, Records of the Assistant Commissioner for the State of Virginia, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, 1865–1869. The report for Montgom- ery County is a good example of the fuller, more detailed reports.

8. Given the obscure status of many of the men listed by the Freedmen’s Bureau, the geographic mobility of many freedmen after the war, and the imperfect compilation of the 1870 federal census, it is not surprising that about half (318 of 621, or 51 percent) of the local figures named by the bureau could not be located in the manuscript census. Thus, composite figures and percentages given below do not include all local individu- als identified as potential officeholders. For the manuscript records of the 1870 federal census in Virginia, see Ninth Census of the United States, 1870, Schedule 1 (Inhabit- ants), Records of the Bureau Census, RG 29 (National Archives). For other census- based studies of the Civil War era that have located about 50 percent of their target individuals, see Maris A. Vinovskis, “Have Social Historians Lost the Civil War? Some Preliminary Demographic Speculations,” in Toward a Social History of the Civil War: Exploratory Essays, ed. Maris A. Vinovskis (New York, 1990), 1–30, esp. 14; Thomas R. Kemp, “Community and War: The Civil War Experience of Two New Hampshire Towns,” ibid., 31–77, esp. 59–60, n75; and W. J. Rorabaugh, “Who Fought for the North in the Civil War? Concord, Massachusetts, Enlistments,” Journal of American History, 73 (Dec. 1986), 695–701. Vinovskis located 55 percent; Kemp 47 percent; and Rora- baugh, 48 percent.

9. Literacy figures are in Bureau of the Census, Statistics of the Population of the United States . . . Ninth Census (June 1, 1870), 432–33, 618–19. Literacy status (anyone able to read or write or both was considered literate) for the men named by the Freed-

richard lowe70

men’s Bureau was determined by consulting the bureau reports and the 1870 manu- script federal census. In the few cases in which these two sources conflicted, the literacy status noted in the bureau report was accepted, since bureau officers were likely to learn more about the backgrounds of the men in question than census marshals normally knew. For the manuscript records of the 1870 federal census in Virginia, see Ninth Census of the United States, 1870, Schedule 1 (Inhabitants), Records of the Bureau of the Census.

10. Bureau of the Census, Statistics of the Population of the United States . . . Ninth Census (June 1, 1870), 68–70, 608–9; United States, Bureau of the Census, Population of the United States in 1860; Compiled from the Original Returns of the Eighth Census (Washington, 1864), 516–18. The racial ancestry of individuals named by the Freed- men’s Bureau was taken from the manuscript records of the 1870 United States census: Ninth Census of the United States, 1870, Schedule 1 (Inhabitants), Records of the Bureau of the Census. For individuals who could not be located in the 1870 census, racial type was taken from the bureau lists when such information was available.

11. David C. Rankin, “The Origins of Black Leadership in New Orleans during Reconstruction.” Journal of Southern History, 40 (Aug. 1974), 421, 427, 432; Richard L. Hume, “Negro Delegates to the State Constitutional Conventions of 1867–1869,” in Southern Black Leaders of the Reconstruction Era, ed. Rabinowitz, 137–38. All figures on literacy, racial heritage, and prewar legal status in these two articles are for men who could be reliably identified, not for the entire sets of leaders.

12. Loren Schweninger, Black Property Owners in the South, 1790–1915 (Chicago, 1990), 292–94; Richard L. Hume, “The Membership of the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1867–1868: A Study of the Beginnings of Congressional Reconstruction in the Upper South,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 86 (Oct. 1978), 472, 477.

13. For Thomas Bayne, Lewis Lindsay, Daniel Norton, and J. B. Baldwin, see Richard Lowe, Republicans and Reconstruction in Virginia, 1856–70 (Charlottesville, 1991), 51, 78–81; for Willis Augustus Hodges, see Willis Augustus Hodges, Free Man of Color: The Autobiography of Willis Augustus Hodges, ed., Willard B. Gatewood, Jr. (Knoxville, 1982).

14. Lowe, Republicans and Reconstruction in Virginia, 51, 118, 174, 180; Alrutheus Ambush Taylor, The Negro in the Reconstruction of Virginia (Washington, 1926), 214, 286; Daniel W. Crofts, Old Southampton: Politics and Society in a Virginia County, 1834–1869 (Charlottesville, 1992), 246, 270–76.

15. Luther P. Jackson, Negro Office-Holders in Virginia, 1865–1895 (Norfolk, 1945), and various other sources include the names and sometimes descriptions of roughly 350 local, county, and state African-American officeholders. List of Local Officials Ap- pointed by Authority of Brevet Major General George Stoneman, 1867–69, Registers and Lists, no. 72, Papers of the Auditor of Public Accounts, RG 48 (Virginia State Library and Archives, Richmond, Va.). This document also includes appointments by Stoneman’s predecessor, Brevet Major General John M. Schofield.

16. Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, in The Reports of the Committees of the House of Representatives, 39 Cong., 1 sess., vol. 2, pt. 1, pp. 52–53, 57–58; Robert Francis Engs, Freedom’s First Generation: Black Hampton, Virginia 1861–1890 (Phila- delphia, 1979), 16, 52, 89, 92; Election Records, 1776–1946, Russell County, no. 427, box 108, Papers of the Secretary of the Commonwealth, RG 13 (Virginia State Library and Archives); Taylor, Negro in the Reconstruction of Virginia, 211; Lowe, Republicans and Reconstruction in Virginia, 86; Peter J. Rachleff, Black Labor in the South: Rich- mond, Virginia, 1865–1890 (Philadelphia, 1984), 87, 93, 99, 103; Richmond Dispatch, Jan. 20, 1871, p. 3; Philip S. Foner and George E. Walker, eds., Proceedings of the Black State Conventions, 1840–1865 (2 vols.; Philadelphia, 1979–1980), II, 256, 259, 264, 265–66; Philip S. Foner and George E. Walker, eds., Proceedings of the Black National and State Conventions, 1865–1900 (Philadelphia, 1986), 210, 213, 338, 350, 352.

Where Honor Is Due 453

New York Review of Books, May 16, 1991, pp. 12–15. Delany told his biographer of a meeting with Abraham Lincoln. See Frank A. Rollin, Life and Public Services of Martin R. Delany (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1868). Victor Ullman, in support of Delany’s claim that he obtained an interview, cites a note to Secretary of War Stanton, in Lincoln’s handwriting, but Ullman’s idiosyncratic avoidance of footnotes makes the claim difficult to trace, and in any case the note simply reads: “Do not fail to have an interview with this most extraordinary and intelligent black man. A. Lincoln.” See Victor Ullman, Martin A. Delany The Beginnings of Black Nationalism (Boston: Bea- con, 1971), p. 294.

17. William Cheek and Aimee Lee Cheek, John Mercer Langston and the Fight for Black Freedom, 1929–65 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press), pp. 154, 159.

18. Douglass, Life and Writings, vol. 4, p. 87. 19. Douglass, Life and Writings, vol. 2, p. 361. 20. The profound importance of Alexander Dumas’s novel, Georges, or the Planter of

the Isle of France, was brought to my attention by Prof. John Wright, who conducted a seminar at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute on the subject of Dumas’s racial consciousness during March, 1991.

21. Frederick Douglass, “African Civilization Society,” Douglass Monthly (February, 1859): 19–20, is a response to the challenge of Henry Highland Garnet to defend himself with respect to African interest.

22. Douglass, Life and Times. This is a reprint of the revised edition of 1892 with a new introduction by Rayford W. Logan, pp. 14–24. For Douglass’s defense of his marriage, see p. 534.

23. Frederick Douglass to Oliver Johnson, Life and Writings, vol.4, p. 427. 24. Frederick Douglass, “The Future of the Colored Race,” North American Review,

reprinted in Howard Brotz, ed., Negro Social and Political Thought, 1850–1920: Repre- sentative Texts (New York: Basic, 1966), pp. 316–17.

25. Frederick Douglass, “The Nation’s Problem,” a speech delivered before the Bethel Literary and Historical Society in Washington, D.C., April 16, 1889; this was originally published as a pamphlet (Washington, D.C., 1889). It is reprinted in Brotz, Negro Social and Political Thought, pp. 316–17.

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Howard, Vicki. “The Courtship Letters of an African American Couple: Race, Gender, Class, and the Cult of True Womanhood.” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 100.1 (1996): 64–80.

Howland, Jacob. “Black Boy: A Story of Soul-Making and a Quest for the Real.” Phylon 47.2 (1986): 117–127.

Hunter, Andrea, and James Davis. “Constructing Gender: An Exploration of Afro- American Men’s Conceptions of Manhood.” Gender and Society 6.3 (1992): 464– 479.

Hyatt, Marshall. “‘The Political Ned Negro’: Neval Thomas, Civil Rights Ideologue.” Western Journal of Black Studies 13.2 (1989): 92–102.

Inscoe, John. “Generation and Gender as Reflected in Carolina Slave Naming Prac- tices: A Challenge to the Gutman Thesis.” South Carolina Historical Magazine 94.4 (1993): 252–263.

Jackson, Kathryn. “LeRoi Jones and the New Black Writers of the Sixties.” Freedomways 9.3 (1969): 232–247.

Jackson, Walter. “Between Socialism and Nationalism: The Young E. Franklin Frazier.” Reconstruction 1.3 (1991): 124–134.

selected bibliography462

James, Portia. “Hubert H. Harrison and the New Negro Movement.” Western Journal of Black Studies 13.2 (1989): 82–91.

Janken, Kenneth. “African-American Intellectuals Confront the ‘Silent South’: The What the Negro Wants Controversy.” North Carolina Historical Review 70.2 (1993): 153–179.

JanMohamed, Abdul R. “Negating the Negation as a Form of Affirmation in Minority Discourse: The Construction of Richard Wright as Subject.” Cultural Critique: The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse 2.7 (1987): 245–267.

Japtok, Martin. “Between ‘Race’ as Construct and ‘Race’ as Essence: The Autobiogra- phy of an Ex-Coloured Man.” Southern Literary Journal 28.2 (1996): 33–47.

Jezierski, John. “Photographing the Lumber Boom: The Goodridge Brothers of Sagi- naw, Michigan (1863–1922).” Michigan History 64.6 (1980): 28–33.

Johnson, Charles. “The Army, the Negro and the Civilian Conservation Corps, 1933– 1942.” Military Affairs 36.3 (1972): 82–88.

Johnson, Victoria. “Polyphony and Cultural Expression: Interpreting Musical Tradi- tions in Do the Right Thing.” Film Quarterly 47.2 (1993–94): 18–29.

Jones, George. “The Black Hessians: Negroes Recruited by the Hessians in South Carolina and Other Colonies.” South Carolina Historical Magazine 83.4 (1982): 287–302.

Jordan, William. “‘The Damnable Dilemma’: African-American Accommodation and Protest during World War I.” Journal of American History 81.4 (1995): 1562– 1590.

Judy, R. A. T. “On the Question of Nigga Authenticity.” Boundary 2 21.3 (1994): 211– 230.

Kahn, Robert M. “The Political Ideology of Martin Delany.” Journal of Black Studies 14.4 (1984): 415–440.

Kelley, Robin. “‘Comrades, Praise Gawd for Lenin and Them!’: Ideology and Culture among Black Communists in Alabama, 1930–1935.” Science and Society 52.1 (1988): 58–82.

King, Samantha. “The Politics of the Body and the Body Politic: Magic Johnson and the Ideology of Aids.” Sociology of Sport Journal 10.3 (1993): 270–285.

Kremer, Gary R. “For Justice and a Fee: James Milton Turner and the Cherokee Freedmen.” Chronicles of Oklahoma 58.41 (1980–81): 376–391.

Kuyk, Betty M. “The African Derivation of Black Fraternal Orders in the United States.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 25.4 (1943): 559–592.

Lacey, Barbara E. “Visual Images of Blacks in Early American Imprints.” William and Mary Quarterly 53.1 (1996): 137–180.

Lanning, Michael Lee. “Reconstruction and the Indian Wars.” In Lanning, The African- American Soldier: From Crispus Attucks to Colin Powell, 62–81, 295–296. New Jersey: Carol publishing Group. 1997.

Larson, Tom. “The Effect of Discrimination and Segregation on Black Male Migra- tion.” Review of Black Political Economy 20.3 (1992): 53–74.

Lehman, Cynthia. “The Social and Political Views of Charles Chesnutt: Reflections on His Major Works.” Journal of Black Studies 26.3 (1996): 275–286.

Levesque, George A. “Boston’s Black Brahmin: Dr. John S. Rock.” Civil War History 26.4 (1980): 326–346.

Lewis, Ronald. “Race and the United Mine Workers’ Union in Tennessee: Selected Letters of William R. Riley, 1842–1845.” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 36.4 (1977): 524–536.

Lichtenstein, Alex. “‘A Constant Struggle between Interest and Humanity’: Convict Labor in the Coal Mines of the New South.” Labor’s Heritage 7.2 (1995): 64–77.

Lindfors, Bernth. “‘Nothing extenuate, nor set down aught in malice’: New Biograph- ical Information on Ira Aldridge.” African American Review 28.3 (1994): 457– 472.

Lindroth, Colette. “Spike Lee and the American Tradition.” Literature/Film Quarterly 24.1 (1996): 26–30.

selected bibliography 463

Littlefield, Daniel F., and Patricia Washington McGraw. “The Arkansas Freeman, 1869–1870–: Birth of the Black Press in Arkansas.” Phylon 40.1 (1979): 75–85.

Lively, Adam. “Continuity and Radicalism in American Black Nationalist Thought, 1914–1929.” Journal of American Studies 18.2 (1984): 207–236.

Logan, Frenise. “Black and Republican: Vicissitudes of a Minority Twice Over in the North Carolina House Of Representatives, 1876–1877.” North Carolina Historical Review 61.3 (1984): 310–346.

MacMaster, Richard. “Henry Highland Garnet and the African Civilization Society.” Journal of Presbyterian History 48.1 (1970): 95–112.

Mahiri, Jabari. “African American Males and Learning: What Discourse in Sports Offers Schooling.” Anthropology and Education 25.3 (1994): 364–375.

Maloney, Thomas. “Degrees of Inequality: The Advance of Black Male Workers in the Northern Meat Packing and Steel Industries before World War II.” Social Science History 19.1 (1995): 30–62.

Marable, Manning. “The Politics of Black Land Tenure.” Agricultural History 53.1 (1979): 142–152.

Massood, Paula. “Mapping the Hood: The Genealogy of City Space in Boyz N the Hood and Menace II Society.” Cinema Journal 35.2 (1996): 85–97.

Matthews, John M. “Jefferson Franklin Long: The Public Career of Georgia’s First Black Congressman.” Phylon 42.2 (1981): 145–156.

Mayberry, B. D. “The Tuskegee Movable School: A Unique Contribution to National and International Agriculture and Rural Development.” Agricultural History 65.2 (1991): 85–104.

McCallum,Brenda. “Songs of Work and Songs of Worship: Sanctifying Black Unionism in the Southern City of Steel.” New York Folklore 14.1–2 (1988): 9–33.

McGuire, Philip. “Judge William H. Hastie and Army Recruitment, 1940–1942.” Mili- tary Affairs 42.2 (1978): 75–79.

McLean-Meyinese, Patricia, and Adell Brown, Jr. “Survival Strategies of Successful Black Farmers.” Review of Black Political Economy 22.4 (1994): 73–82.

McMillen, Neil. “Perry W. Howard, Boss of Black-and-Tan Republicanism in Missis- sippi, 1924–1960.” Journal of Southern History 48.2 (1982): 205–224.

McTighe, Michael. “Jesse Jackson and the Dilemmas of a Prophet in Politics.” Journal of Church and State 32.3 (1989): 585–607.

Meier, August. “Benjamin Quarles and the Historiography of Black America.” Civil War History 26.2 (1980): 101–116.

Miller, Ivor. “Night Train: The Power That Man Made.” New York Folklore 17.1–2 (1991): 21–43.

Miller, Laura, and Charles Moskos. “Humanitarians or Warriors? Race, Gender, and Combat Status in Operation Restore Hope.” Armed Forces and Society 21.4 (1995): 615–637.

Moore, Moses N. “Righteousness Exalts a Nation: Black Clergymen, Reform, and New School Presbyterianism.” American Presbyterians 70.4 (1992): 222–238.

Mootry, Maria K. “J. Saunders Redding: A Case Study of the Black Intellectual.” Western Journal of Black Studies 7.2 (1983): 62–67.

Mormino, Gary. “GI Joe Meets Jim Crow: Racial Violence and Reform in World War II Florida.” Florida Historical Quarterly 73.1 (1994): 23–42.

Moses, Wilson. “Where Honor Is Due: Frederick Douglass as Representative Black Man.” Prospects 17 (1993): 177–189.

Moses, Yolanda T. “Laurence Foster, a Black Anthropologist: His Life and Work.” Western Journal of Black Studies 7.1 (1983): 36–42.

Nadell, James. “Boyz n the Hood: A Colonial Analysis.” Journal of Black Studies 25.4 (1995): 447–463.

Naison, Mark. “Black Agrarian Radicalism in the Great Depression: The Threads of a Lost Tradition.” Journal of Ethnic Studies (1973): 47–65.

Nelson, Bruce. “Organized Labor and the Struggle for Black Equality in Mobile during World War II.” Journal of American History 80.3 (1993): 952–988.

selected bibliography464

Newton, Merlin Owen. “Rosco Jones and the Alabama Judicial Establishment.” Ala- bama Review 48.2 (1995): 83–95.

Oja, Carol J. “‘New Music’ and the ‘New Negro’: The Background of William Grant Still’s Afro-American Symphony.” Black Music Research Journal 12.2 (1992): 145– 170.

Oldfield, J. R. “A High and Honorable Calling: Black Lawyers in South Carolina,1868– 1915.” Journal of American Studies 23.3 (1989): 395–406.

Outland, Robert. “Slavery, Work, and the Geography of the North Carolina Naval Stores Industry,1835–1860.” Journal of Southern History 62.1 (1996): 27–56.

Palmer, Annette. “The Politics of Race and War: Black American Soldiers in the Caribbean Theatre during the Second World War.” Military Affairs 47.2 (1983): 59–62.

Park, Marlene. “Lynching and Antilynching: Art and Politics in the 1930’s.” Prospects 18 (1993): 311–365.

Patrick-Stamp, Leslie. “Numbers That Are Not New: African Americans in the Coun- try’s First Prison.” Pennsylvania Magazine 119.1/2 (1995): 95–128.

Philips, Paul. “The Interracial Impact of Marshall Keeble, Black Evangelist, 1878– 1968.” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 36.1 (1977): 62–74.

Piliawsky, Monte. “The Impact of Black Mayors on the Black Community: The Case of New Orleans’ Earnest Morial.” Review of Black Political Economy 13.4 (1985): 5–24.

Pitre, Mergione. “The Economic Philosophy of Martin L. King, Jr.” Review of Black Political Economy 9.2 (1979): 191–198.

Poe, William. “Lott Cary: Man of Purchased Freedom.” Church History 39.1 (1970): 49–61.

Porter, Kenneth W. “Negro Labor in the Western Cattle Industry, 1866–1900.” Labor History 10.3 (1969): 345–374.

Price, Hollis F., Jr. “The Cost of Male Subemployment in the Black Community.” Review of Black Political Economy 6.2 (1976): 213–224.

Raboteau, Albert J. “Fire in the Bones: African-American Christianity and Autobio- graphical Reflection.” America 170.18 (1994): 4–9.

Rachleff, Marshall, ed. “Economic Self Interest versus Racial Control: Mobile’s Protest against the Jailing of Black Seamen.” Civil War History 25.1 (1979): 84–88.

Ransby, Barbara, and Tracye Matthews. “Black Popular Culture and the Transcendence of Patriarchal Illusions.” Race and Class 35.1 (1993): 57–68.

Redkey, Edwin S. “Black Chaplains in the Union Army.” Civil War History 33.4 (1987): 331–350.

Reed, Merl. “The FEPC, the Black Worker, and the Southern Shipyards.” South Atlantic Quarterly 74.4 (1975): 446–467.

Reich, Steven. “Soldiers of Democracy: Black Texans and the Fight for Citizenship, 1917–1921.” Journal of American History 82.4 (1996): 1478–1385.

Richardson, Joe M. “‘Labor Is Rest to Me Here in This the Lord’s Vineyard’: Hardy Mobley, Black Missionary during Reconstruction.” Southern Studies 22.1 (1983): 5–20.

Riggs, Gayle D., and Lynn Dwyer. “Salary Discrimination by Black Males? Evidence from an Historically Black University.” American Journal of Economics and Sociol- ogy 54.2 (1995): 231–238.

Riis, Thomas L. “Bob Cole: His Life and Legacy to Black Musical Theatre.” Black Perspective in Music 13.2 (1985): 135–150.

Riss, Arthur. “Racial Essentialism and Family Values in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” American Quarterly 46.4 (1994): 513–544.

Roberts, Randy. “Galveston’s Jack Johnson: Flourishing in the Dark.” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 87.1 (1983): 36–56.

Roberts, Rita. “Patriotism and Political Criticism: The Evolution of Political Conscious- ness in the Mind of a Black Revolutionary Soldier.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 27.4 (1994): 569–614.

selected bibliography 465

Rousey, Dennis C. “Black Policemen in New Orleans during Reconstruction.” Histo- rian 49.2 (1987): 223–243.

———. “Yellow Fever and Black Policemen in Memphis: A Post-Reconstruction Anom- aly.” Journal of Southern History 51.3 (1985): 357–374.

Rout, Leslie. “Some Post-war Developments in Jazz.” Midcontinent American Studies Journal 9.2 (1968): 27–50.

Rubin Sarah, Ann. “Reflections on the Death of Emmett Till.” Southern Cultures 2.1 (1996): 45–66

Rushdy, Ashraf. “The Properties of Desire: Forms of Slave Identity in Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage.” Arizona Quarterly 50.2 (1994): 72–108

Saillant, John. “The Black Body Erotic and the Republican Body Politic, 1790–1820.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 5.3 (1995): 403–428.

Savitt, Todd L. “Entering a White Profession: Black Physicians in the New South, 1880– 1920.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 61.4 (1987): 507–540.

Schubert, Frank. “The Suggs Affray: The Black Cavalry in the Johnson County War.” Western Historical Quarterly 4.1 (1973): 57–68.

Schweninger, Loren. “James Rapier and the Negro Labor Movement, 1869–1872.” Alabama Review 28.3 (1975): 185–201.

———. “John Carruthers Stanly and the Anomaly of Black Slaveholding.” North Caro- lina Historical Review 67.2 (1990): 159–192.

———. “A Vanishing Breed: Black Farm Owners in the South,1651–1982.” Agricultural History 63.3 (1989): 41–61.

Shelden, Randall. “From Slave to Caste Society: Penal Changes in Tennessee,1830– 1915.” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 38.4 (1979): 463–478.

Shepperson, George. “The Afro-American Contribution to African Studies.” Journal of American Studies 8.3 (December 1974): 281–301.

Sherer, Robert G., Jr. “John William Beverly: Alabama’s First Negro Historian.” Ala- bama Review 26.3 (July 1973): 194–208.

Sitkoff, Harvard. “Racial Militancy and Interracial Violence in the Second World War.” Journal of American History 58.3 (1971): 661–681.

Skinner, Robert. “The Black Man in the Literature of Labor.” Labor’s Heritage 1.3 (1989): 51–66.

Skotnes, Andor. “‘Buy Where You Can Work’: Boycotting for Jobs in African-American Baltimore, 1933–1934.” Journal of Social History 27.4 (1994): 734–761.

Slotkin, Richard. “Narratives of Negro Crime in New England, 1675–1800.” American Quarterly 25.1 (1973): 3–31.

Slovenz, Madeline. “‘Rock the House’: The Aesthetic Dimensions of Rap Music in New York City.” New York Folklore 14.3–4 (1988): 151–163.

Smith, David. “Amiri Baraka and the Black Arts of Black Art.” Boundary 2 15.1–2 (1986– 87): 235–254.

Smith, Eric. “‘Asking for Justice and Fair Play’: African American State Legislators and Civil Rights in Early Twentieth-Century Pennsylvania.” Pennsylvania History 63.2 (1996): 169–203.

Smith, Ronald. “The Paul Robeson–Jackie Robinson Saga and a Political Collision.” Journal of Sport History 6.2 (1979): 5–27.

Smith, Thomas G. “Outside the Pale: The Exclusion of Blacks from the National Football League, 1934–1946.” Journal of Sport History 15.3 (1988): 255–281.

Smith, Timothy. “Slavery and Theology: The Emergence of Black Christian Con- sciousness in Nineteenth-Century America.” Church History 41.4 (December 1972): 497–512.

Sommers, Richard J. “The Dutch Gap Affair: Military Atrocities and Rights of Negro Soldiers.” Civil War History 21.1 (1975): 51–64.

Southern, Eileen. “In Retrospect: Letters from W. C. Handy to William Grant Still.” Black Perspective in Music 7.2 (1979): 197–235.

———. “In Retrospect: Letters from W. C. Handy to William Grant Still. Part 2.” Black Perspective in Music 8.1 (1980): 63–119.

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Spillers, Hortense. “The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual.” Boundary 2 21.3 (1994): 64– 116.

Staples, Robert. “Black Manhood in the 1970’s: A Critical Look Back.” Black Scholar 12.3 (1981): 2–9.

Stone, Albert E. “After Black Boy and Dusk of Dawn: Patterns in Recent Black Autobi- ography.” Phylon 39.1 (1978): 18–34.

———. “The Return of Nat Turner in Sixties America.” Prospects 12 (1987): 223–253. Storhoff, Gary. “Reflections of Identity in A Soldier’s Story.” Literature/Film Quarterly

19.1 (1991): 21–26. Swift, David E. “Black Presbyterian Attacks on Racism: Samuel Cornish, Theodore

Wright and Their Contemporaries.” Presbyterian History 51.4 (1973): 433–470. Tausky, Curt, and William J. Wilson. “Work Attachment among Black Men.” Phylon

32.1 (1971): 23–30. TeSelle, Eugene. “The Nashville Institute and Roger Williams University: Benevo-

lence, Paternalism, and Black Consciousness,1867–1910.” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 41.4 (1982): 360–379.

Thorp, Daniel. “Chattel with a Soul: The Autobiography of a Moravian Slave.” Pennsyl- vania Magazine 112.3 (1988): 433–451.

Trotman, C. James. “Matthew Anderson: Black Pastor, Churchman, and Social Re- former.” American Presbyterians 66.1 (1988): 11–21.

Tyler, Bruce. “Black Jive and White Repression.” Journal of Ethnic Studies 16.4 (1989): 31–66.

“‘A Very Stern Discipline’: An Interview with Ralph Ellison.” Harper’s (March 1967): 76–95.

Wade-Lewis, Margaret. “Lorenzo Dow Turner: Pioneer African-American Linguist.” Black Scholar 21.4 (1991): 10–24.

Watson, Charles. “Portrayals of the Black and the Idea of Progress: Simms and Doug- lass.” Southern Studies 20.4 (1981): 339–350.

Weeks, Louis. “Racism, World War I and the Christian Life: Francis J. Grimke in the Nation’s Capital.” Journal of Presbyterian History 51.4 (1973): 471–488.

Westwood, Howard C. “Captive Black Union Soldiers in Charleston--What to Do?” Civil War History 28.1 (1982): 28–44.

———. “The Cause and Consequence of a Union Black Soldier’s Mutiny and Execu- tion.” Civil War History 31.3 (1985): 222–236.

———. “Mr. Smalls: A Slave No More.” Times 25.3 (1986): 20–23, 28–31. Whatley, Warren. “African-American Strikebreaking from the Civil War to the New

Deal.” Social Science History 17.4 (1993). White, Frances. “Africa on My Mind: Gender, Counter Discourse and African-Ameri-

can Nationalism.” Journal of Women’s History 2.1 (1990): 73–97. Whitman, Stephen. “Industrial Slavery at the Margin: The Maryland Chemical Works.”

Journal of Southern History 59.1 (1993): 31–62. Wiegman, Robyn. “The Anatomy of Lynching.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 3.3

(1993): 445–467. Wiggins, David K. “‘The Future of College Athletics Is at Stake’: Black Athletes and

Racial Turmoil on Three Predominantly White University Campuses, 1968–1972.” Journal of Sport History 15.3 (1988): 204–333.

———. “‘Great Speed but Little Stamina’: The Historical Debate over Black Athletic Superiority.” Journal of Sport History 16.2 (1989): 158–185.

———. “Peter Jackson and the Elusive Heavyweight Championship: A Black Athlete’s Struggle against the Late Nineteenth Century Color-Line.” Journal of Sport History 12.2 (1985): 143–168.

———. “Wendell Smith, the Pittsburgh Courier-Journal and the Campaign to Include Blacks in Organized Baseball,1933–1945.” Journal of Sport History 10.2 (1983): 5–29.

Williams, Brett. “The Heroic Appeal of John Henry.” In John Henry: A Bibliography, 110–126. Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1983.

selected bibliography 467

Williams, Donald R. “Job Characteristics and the Labor Force Participation Behavior of Black and White Male Youth.” Review of Black Political Economy 18.2 (1989): 5–24.

Williams, Nudie. “The African Lion: George Napier Perkins, Lawyer, Politician, Edi- tor.” Chronicles of Oklahoma 70.4 (1992–93): 450–465.

———. “Black Men Who Wore the Star.” Chronicles of Oklahoma 59.1 (1981): 83–90. ———. “The Black Press in Oklahoma: The Formative Years, 1889–1907.” Chronicles of

Oklahoma 61.3 (1983): 308–319. ———. “United States vs. Bass Reeves: Black Lawman on Trial.” Chronicles of Oklahoma

68.2 (1990): 154–167. Wilson, Dale. “Recipe for Failure: Major General Edward M. Almond and Preparation

of the U.S. 2d Infantry Division for Combat in World War II.” Journal of Military History 56.3 (1992): 473–479.

Wright, Beverly. “Ideological Change and Black Identity during Civil Rights Move- ments.” Western Journal of Black Studies 5.3 (1981): 186–198.

Wright, George C. “The Billy Club and the Ballot: Police Intimidation of Blacks in Louisville, Kentucky, 1880–1930.” Southern Studies 23.1 (1984): 20–41.

Wright, W. D. “The Thought and Leadership of Kelly Miller.” Phylon 39.2 (1978): 180– 191.

Wyatt-Brown, Bertram. “The Mask of Obedience: Male Slave Psychology in the Old South.” American Historical Review 93 (1988): 1228–1252.

Wynes, Charles. “William Henry Heard: Politician, Diplomat, A.M.E. Churchman.” Southern Studies 20.4 (1981): 384–393.

Abbott, E. C., 122 Abercrombie, William R., 310 Adams, Andy, 109 Africa: fraternal organizations in (see African

societies); movement back to, 447–449; rootwork transplanted from, 210; slave export from, 251–252; social structures in, 274–276; trade systems in, 271–273

African men, gender roles of, 6–7, 262 African nationalism, 447–449 African peoples in Virginia, 251–252 African societies, 6–7, 249–280; belonging

and status functions of, 267–270; death and burial rituals in, 264–267, 272; military customs in, 270; organization of, 252–258; overlapping functions of, 258– 259; religious functions in, 262–267; title associations and, 250–251

African trading systems, 271–273 Agbalanze, 252, 254t; color symbolism in,

255–256; god emblems in, 252, 255; initiation rituals in, 255–258, 262–263; leadership in, 262; organization of, 252, 254–258; religious functions in, 262–263; symbols of, 252, 254–255

Agricultural and Mechanical College for Negroes, 131–132

Akan (African people), 270 Alabama: banks in, 131, 134; black police in,

93; convict labor in, 174–175, 178, 180– 182; cotton plantations in, 128; lynchings in, 136; population migrations in, 130; voting rights in, 135

Alabama Penny Savings Bank, 131 Ali, Muhammad, 8 Allegre, Charles, 87 Allen, Macon B., 37, 190, 192 Allen University, 191 Allyn, A. W., 26–28

Amateur Literary and Fraternal Association, 44

American Bandstand, 411 American Federation of Labor (AFL), 147–

148, 157 Andrews, W. T., 192, 197 Anti-heroes, 376, 412 Antoine, C. C., 94 “Archibald” (b. Leon T. Gross), 410–411 Arkansas, state militias in, 270 Armour, Harriet, 30 Arnim, Frank, 193 Asaba, 265 Asante, Molefi K., 451 Ashburn, J. Edward, 220 Asians, as railroad workers, 144, 148 Assing, Ottilla, 445 Association of Colored Railway Trainmen and

Locomotive Firemen, 163 Athens, Ga., black physicians in, 209 Atkins, J. D. C., 76 Atkins, William E., 207 Atlanta University, 191 Aubry, Pierre, 87 Augusta, Alexander T., 215 Awka (African people), 263–266 Ayers, Edward L., 322

Baker, Fraser, murder of, 323 Baker, Mickey, 410 Baldwin, J. B., 66 Ball, G. A., 161 Ballads, 372, 375–376, 382, 410 Baltimore, free black population in, 86 Bankhead, John H., 134 Banks, black-owned: and agricultural

development, 4, 131, 134; established by fraternal organizations, 273–274

Banks, Charles, 133

index

index470

Baptist Teachers Association, 44 Barnum, Phineas T., 441 Barry, Phillips, 372 Bartholomew, Dave, 410 Baseball, black vs. white teams, xi Battle of New Orleans, 87, 98 Bayne, Thomas, 66 Beaufort, S.C., 192, 194 Bechet, Sidney, 410 Beckley, R. D., 68 Beecher, P. D., 21 Beneficial societies. See Fraternal organiza-

tions Beneficial Society of Free Men of Color of

the City of Petersburg and the State of Virginia, 251

Berlent, Lauren, 356 Berlin, Ira, 88 Bernard, James, 413 Biafra, 251–252 Biblical heroes, 377 Bicycles, military uses of, 309–319 Big Sam (cowboy-cook), 113 Biggs, Thornton, 114 Birnie, Richard, 44 Birth of a Nation, The, 368n27 Bishop, C. Orrick, 398–400, 405 Black and Tan Republicans, 135 Black behavior, whites’ subordination of:

lynchings and, 322, 353–356; in railroad industry, 152–154; reestablishment of slave demeanor and, 16–17, 26, 30–31

Black Belt South: definition of, 137n1; land tenure in, 129–138

Black business owners, 133 Black cattle industry workers: as cooks, 110–

114, 121; as cowboys, 107–108; as foremen/trail bosses, 114–115; as riders/ ropers, 108–110; as “right hand men,” 115–116; as singers, 110–111, 113; wages of, 111, 114, 116–119; working conditions of, 119–120; as wranglers, 107. See also Cattle industry

Black church, 207–208, 270 Black education: agricultural, 131–132; legal,

5, 190–191, 195; medical, 5, 201, 204– 205, 214–215, 225–226; and racial betterment, 6; of women, 6, 241–244. See also specific institutions

Black farmers, 4, 129–138; agricultural education of, 131–132; boll weevils’ destructiveness for, 135; sharecropping by, 3–4, 130, 134; World War I impact on, 129, 134–135

Black lawyers, 5, 189–199; ancestry of, 190; clients of, 192, 196; economic status of,

196–197; education of, 5, 190–191, 195; property ownership by, 197

Black longshoremen, union membership of, 157

Black manhood/masculinity: feminization of, 351–353, 364; and Niagara Movement, xii–xiii; stereotyping of, xvi–xvii; and struggle against victimization, xii; symbolic constructions of, 10–11, 352

Black men: ambiguity in, 451–452; education of (see Black education); as iconic heroes, 8–10, 290, 293 (see also Douglass, Frederick; John Henry; Stack Lee); men’s studies research on, xvi–xvii; as mythic rapists, 10, 355–366; relationships with white women, 10, 95; worlds of, xi–xii

Black music, 378–381, 408–409 Black physicians, 5, 200–233; black patients

and, 209–211; churches’ importance to, 207–208; as community leaders, 40, 42, 201, 206, 208–209; and competition with white doctors, 212–213, 216–218; economic status of, 206–207, 219–220; education of, 5, 201, 204–205, 214–215, 225–226; isolation of, 212–216, 223–228; and racial betterment, 201, 205, 207, 221; recruitment of, 205–206; and treatment of venereal diseases, 218–219

Black police: age of, 95, 98; ancestry of, 87, 96; arrest power of, 93–94; economic status of, 96; firearms, carrying of, 94; interracial households of, 94–95; leadership positions of, 93–94; in New Orleans, 3, 85–104; prior occupations of, 96; property ownership by, 96; propor- tional hiring rate of, 91–92, 98; in southern cities, 87, 92–93, 104n48; as war veterans, 87, 97–98; white resistance to, 89–90, 93

Black politicians: age of, 39–40, 64; ancestry of, 38t, 39, 64, 65t; in Charleston, 2, 36– 61, 50t–58t, 190; Democratic Party mem- bership of, 44–45; economic status of, 42, 43t, 45–47, 65; literacy of, 40–41, 64, 65t; motivations of, 45–47; in New Orleans, 64, 86; occupations of, 41–42; organiza- tional memberships of, 43–44; in St. Louis, 403–404, 409; in Virginia, 62–70

Black railroad workers, 4, 139–173; advance- ment for, 147, 159, 161; blamed for low wages, 154; jobs available to, 144–145; stereotyping of, 147, 151–152; as strikebreakers, 151, 155; value to management of, 154–155. See also Railroad industry; Trade unions, railroad industry

index 471

Black Sam (cowboy-cook), 112–113, 121 Black social gatherings/mass meetings:

celebrating emancipation, 17; regulation of, 24–26

Black troops: in Battle of New Orleans, 87, 98; as community leaders, 1–2, 16–17; families of, 19–20; killed for “effrontery,” xi; in Memphis race riots, 1–2, 15–35; numbers of, 324, 341n38; in Philippines annexation, 337–338; as protection from white aggression, 2, 19, 28; in Spanish- American War, 9, 325–328, 331, 344n119. See also Military clothing; Military service; specific regiments

Black women: education of, 6, 241–244; fraternal organizations and, 265; lynchings and, 366n1; pressuring men into militia service by, 270; punishment for associat- ing with newly mustered out black troops, xi; and racial betterment, 242–243; rape of, 10, 29–30; relationships with white men, 95, 124; and romantic love, 246n42

Blassingame, John, 95, 103n36 Blesh, Rudi, 388 Bliss, T. E., 22 Blues music, 379–381, 391 Blyden, Edward Wilmot, 449 Bogle, Donald, 368n27 Bolen, August, 87 Boling, M. J., 146, 152 Boll weevils, 135 Boré, Etienne, 87 Boschert, Thomas N., 233n120 Boseman, Benjamin A., 39–40, 43–45 Boudinot, Elias C., 73, 79 Bowen, William J., 190, 194, 196–197 Bowron, James, 178 Boxing, 283–308; as metaphor for black/white

conflict, 7–9, 301, 306n18 Boyd, Frank, 390, 393 Boyd, Robert F., 208–209, 220 Bradford, Roark, 376 Branch, Tazewell, 68 Brandt, Lilian, 217 Bridgewater, Henry: community standing of,

394–395; involvement with Stack Lee’s trial, 399, 406; and petitions for Lee’s release from prison, 402, 404; as source of ballad, 409

Broad Ax, 321, 326, 343n.88 Bromwell, Andrew J., 399, 402 Brooke, John R., 314, 316 Brothels, 124 Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, 145 Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and

Enginemen: racial beliefs and practices

in, 140; racial quota agreements in, 139; whites only membership in, 145

Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen: racial beliefs and practices in, 140; whites only membership in, 145

Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, 163, 386n14

Brotherly Association, 44 Broussard, Robert F., 317 Brown, Frank, 38 Brown, Harry, 26 Brown, Joe (Memphis soldier), 26 Brown, Joseph (Cherokee freedman), 75 Brown, Joseph E., 175, 179 Brown, Julius, 179–180 Brown, Malcolm, 39, 42–43 Brown, Orlando, 63, 66 Brown, Thomas, 44 Brown, William Alexander, 396 Brown, William Wells, 446–447 Brown Fellowship Society, 43 Browne, Robert C., 190, 193–194, 196, 197 Browne, W. W., 273 Brownsville, 1906 raid on, 318n15 Buehler, Richard E., 411 Buffalo Soldiers, 9 Buffum, James, 446 Burbridge, Luther, 214–215, 217 Bureau of Refugees and Abandoned Lands.

See Freedmen’s Bureau Burke, Jack, 286–287 Burnett, Addison, 396 Burruss, George S., 224 Burruss Sanitarium, 224–225 Burt, Andrew S., 314, 317 Burt, Robert C., 225 Bush, George H. W., 365–366 Bushyhead (Cherokee chief), 73 Butcher, James, 390, 402 Butler, Ed, 403

Cabaniss, George W., 227 Cain, Richard H., 39–40, 42 California Athletic Club (CAC), 287 Callahan, Clay, 284 Calloway, Cab, 410 Candler, Asa G., 134 Cardiff, Patsy, 291 Cardozo, Francis Louis, 39–40, 42 Carlson, Shirley, 241 Carr, Edgar M., 399 Carroll, Augustus, 44 Carson, Fiddlin’ John, 383 Carter, Rubin “Hurricane,” 8 Carter, W. S., 154 Castle Club, 408–409

index472

Castration, symbolic nature of, 350–352, 363 Cattle industry, 3–4, 105–128; in Black Belt

South, 136; labor strikes in, 117–119; racial discrimination in, 116–117, 119– 120, 122; segregation in, 116, 120, 122– 124. See also Black cattle industry workers

Chain gangs, 5, 182, 322, 372 Charleston: black hospitals in, 224; black

lawyers in, 189, 192–193, 195–196; black police in, 92–93; black politicians in, 2, 36–61, 50t–58t, 190; economic conditions in, 36

Chaumette, Ernest, 94 Cherokee freedmen, 71–82; rights within

Cherokee Nation, 2–3, 72–73; Senate bill supporting claims of, 76–79

Cherokee Nation, 71–82; elections in, 77–78; Reconstruction treaties with, 72–73, 75

Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad, 371, 374 Church, R. R., 133 Civil rights: black lawyers and, 196; of

Cherokee freedmen, 2–3, 72–73; Democratic Party and, 320; in New Orleans, 86; Republican Party and, 320, 396. See also Disenfranchisement

Claiborne, James R., 402 Clark, Nelson H., 63 Clarke, James C., 154 Clash, The, 411 Clatterbaugh, Kenneth, xvi Clawson, Mary Ann, 158 Clayton, Paul, 410 Cleveland, Grover, 76, 78 Clyde, George C., 190, 193 Cohen, Norm, 372, 375, 382, 384 Collins, John P., 403 Color symbolism, 255–256 Colored 400 Club, 389, 395, 402–403 Colored American, 321, 339; on army

integration, 325; on black American loyalty, 324; on hopes for McKinley presidency, 334, 338–339; on Philippines annexation, 336–338

Colored Immigration Aid Association, 71 Colored troops. See Black troops Colored Young Men’s Christian Association,

44 Columbia, S.C., black lawyers in, 192, 195 Colyar, Arthur S., 177, 179 Colyer, Ken, 410 Comet Light Infantry, 44 Commercial Appeal, 325 Conjurers, 210 Conners, Babe, 408–409 Convict labor, 4–5, 174–185, 322; benefits to

mine owners of, 175–178; costs of, 175–

176, 178–179; as deterrent to unioniza- tion, 177–178; production capacity of, 177, 180–181; recent uses of, 182; resis- tance of, 5, 180; state control of, 174–175, 179, 181; whipping bosses and punish- ment of, 177, 180–181

Cooke, Sam, 5 Cooks, black cowhands as, 110–114, 121 Cooper, Anna Julia, 242 Corbett, James J.: hatred of blacks, 294, 297;

Jackson fight, 294–296; refusal to cross the color-line, 284; rematch negotiations with Jackson, 298–301

Cotton: boll weevils’ destructiveness of, 135; rise and fall of prices, 133–134; as single crop economy, 130–131

Cotton, Austin, 31 Cotton States and International Exposition,

226 Courcelle, Charles J., 89, 94 Court of General Sessions (S.C.), 194 Courtships, 5–6, 234–248 Covington, J. C., 396 Covington, Jeff, 402 Cowboys, 107–108 Cowden, Robert, 19–20 Credit, 130. See also Banks, black-owned Creighton, J. C., 27–28 Creoles, 3 Crop rotation, 130 Crummell, Alexander, 448–449 Crump, Henry, 389–390, 399–400, 403 Cuba. See Spanish-American War Cult of true womanhood, 6, 235, 241–244 Cuney, Henry, 76, 78–79 Curtis, Bill, 389, 394, 403–404 Custer, George A., 311, 325 Cutler, James E., 355

Daddy Joe (sleeping car porter), 375 Dade Coal Company, 175–176, 179–181 Daily Record, 9–10, 332 Dances, 24–25, 93, 123 Daniel, C. S., 152 Daniels, Josephus, 330 Daniels, Lewis, 74 Dart, Isam (a.k.a. Isom or Isham), 109 Dart, William, 44 David, John Russell, 391 Davies, Charles “Parson,” 292, 299 Davis, Allison, 446 Davis, Angela, 368n34 Davis, Francis, 391 Davis, Gordon, 113 Dawes, Henry, 75, 81n25 Dawson, James L., 404

index 473

de Fuentes, H. E., 94 De Large, Robert C., 39–40, 43, 46 de Lauretis, Teresa, 351 Death and burial rituals, 259, 264–267, 272 DeBardeleben, Henry F., 178 Degrees in fraternal organizations, 249–250,

252 Delany, Martin Robison, 37, 39–40, 447–448,

451 Democratic Party: and black electorate, 135,

321, 396; black politicians in, 44–45; as opponent of black civil rights, 320; and Stack Lee, 396, 403–404

Dent, H. G., 26 Dereef, Joseph, 42 Dereef, Richard E., 42–44, 47 Dickerson, Fayette, 28–29 Dickerson, Samuel, 37 Dickson, J. Benton, 221 Dilts, Ellen, 27 Disenfranchisement, 135, 321–323, 331, 396 Dobie, Frank, 112, 116 Doctors. See Black physicians Dogon (African people), 271 Doherty, W. S., 285 Dooley, Bill, 408 Dorsey, Bruce, xv Douglass, Anna Murray, 444 Douglass, Frederick, 10–11, 441–467; and

African nationalism, 447–449; call to arms by, xii–xiii; father of, 446; and language of manhood, 441; and racial amalgamation, 450; relationships with black men, 447– 449; relationships with women, 443–446; self-celebration of, 441–443, 451; and women’s movement, 443, 445

Douglass, Helen Pitts, 445 Dowdy, M. E., 151 Downing, Lewis, 73 Doyle, George, 98 Drabelle, John W., 403 Dryden, Nathaniel C., 397–399, 407 Du Bois, W. E. B.: on college-bred Negroes,

221; on fraternal organizations, 249–250; and Niagara Movement, xiii; on study of the African American condition, xi; on women and work, 242

duCille, Anne, 235 Dudley, Nathan A. M., 21–22 Dukakis, Michael, 365 Duke, David, 366 Dumas, Albert W., 216 Dumas, Alexander, 449 Duneier, Mitchell, xvii Dunlop, Alexander, 67 Dunn, Oscar J., 94

Dupard, Delille, 87 Dylan, Bob, 410

Eckhard, Sidney, 45 Economic competition, 16, 212–213, 216–

218, 354–355 Education. See Black education Edwards, Cliff, 410, 414 Edwards, John B., 193, 195–197 Effrontery, as cause for killing black troops, xi Efik (African people), 250–252, 258–259, 272 Eike, Joseph, 399 Ekpe (African society): death and burial

rituals of, 264; economic functions of, 258–259, 272–273; organization of, 252; psychological functions of, 267, 269

Ekwe (African society), 265 Elliott, Robert Brown, 190, 192 Ellison, Ralph, 349–353, 366 Ely, Richard T., 133 Emancipation, 20–24, 354 Emancipation Proclamation, 18 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 441, 443 Erickson, Francis, 28 Ethnic pride, 450 European immigrants, as railroad workers,

148 Evans, Don, 413 Evans, Matilda, 224 Evening Star, 327

Falls City (Louisville) Medical Association, 223

Families: of black troops, 19–20; patriarchal- ization of, 357–358; as political dynasties, 44; research in history of, 234–235

Fanon, Frantz, 361 Farrar, Emile, 88 Faulkner, William, 352 Field, William H., 404–405 Fields, Barbara, 142 Fifteenth Amendment, 323 Filene, Peter, xvi Findley, John, 311 Firearms: black cowboys and, 121; black

police and, 88, 94; black troops and, 17, 328–329; in New Orleans, 89; as pretext in Memphis race riots, 28

Fite, Gilbert C., 135 Fitzpatrick, Sam, 291 Fitzsimmons, Bob, 284–285 Fleischer, Nat, 293 Flint Medical College, 205 Florida, race riots in, 329–330 Foley, John, 19–20 Foley, Larry, 284–285, 296

index474

Foner, Eric, 355 Fourteenth Amendment, 333 Frank, Dana, 143 Frank (roper), 109 Fraternal organizations, 6–7, 249–280;

economic functions of, 270–273; of free blacks, 251; governmental functions of, 259–261; military customs in, 269–270; organization of, 252–258; psychological functions of, 267–270; religious functions of, 261–267; similarity of railroad unions to, 158; social structure of, 274–276; symbols in, 252–253, 255–256, 268–269. See also specific organizations

Frederick, Nathaniel, 195–196 Free blacks: community leadership of, 86;

fraternal organizations of, 251; as lawyers, 190; in New Orleans, 86, 88; as police, 87, 96; as politicians, 2, 38–39, 64, 65t

Free People of Color of the City of Rich- mond, 251

Freedman’s Bank, 43, 442 Freedmen’s Bureau: and black leadership, 2,

62–70; labor supply and, 21, 23–24; paternalism of, 62, 357; as protection from white aggression, 19; rape myth and, 357

Freeman, 321, 323 Freemasonry, 158, 249 Frost, Peter, 42 Fugitive slaves, 18, 20–21 Fuller, Jesse, 410–411

Gaillard, John, 193, 195 Gaillard, Joseph A., 44 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 134 Garden, Elias, 44, 47 Garnet, Henry Highland, 448 Garrison, William Lloyd, 446 Gatewood, Willard, 235, 321 Gaudette, J. B., 94 Gazette (Cleveland), 321, 329, 334–335 Geary, William, 63 Gender roles: of African men, 6–7, 262; of

black women, 241–244, 357–358; of white women, 351

George, Charles B, 146–147 Georgia: banks in, 131; black physicians in,

209; cattle industry in, 136; convict labor in, 174–175, 178–179, 181–182; cotton plantations in, 129; lynchings in, 136, 335–336; police in, 92; population migrations in, 130

Georgia State Industrial College, 132 Germans: and military uses of bicycles, 309;

as railroad workers, 144 Gibbs, Jonathan C., 37

Gideons, 274 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 244 Gist, Noel, 249 Glickman, Lawrence, 150 Glover, George A., 43–44, 47 “Goat” (cowboy-cook), 113 God emblems, 252, 255 Goddard, Joe, 294 Godfrey, George, 288–289 Goehner, Oscar J., 399 Gordon, John W., 43 Gospel music, 377 Grand United Order of Galilean Fishermen,

274 Grand United Order of True Reformers, 273 Grange, 374 Grant, Joseph J., 42 Grateful Dead, 411 Gray, William, 21 Great Britain, military uses of bicycles in, 309 Green, Archie, 371–372 Green, Primus, Jr., 44 Green, Primus, Sr., 44 Greener, Richard T., 190 Greenlaw, W. B., 30 Gregory, Joseph, 66–67 Griffin, G. D., 207 Griffiths, Albert “Young Griffo,” 285 Griffiths, Julia, 445 Grimké, Archibald, 446 Grimké, Francis J., 446 Grove, John H., 21, 23 Guthrie, Woody, 410

Hadley, Herbert S., 405–406 Haines Normal and Industrial School, 132 Haiti, 442 Haley, Ora, 114 Hall, George Cleveland, 225 Hall, Jacqueline Dowd, 140 Hall, Jim, 285 Hammer songs, 370–372, 375–376 Hardy, John, 378 Harris, Cornelius, 66, 68 Harris, Trudier, 354, 355, 360–361, 363 Harrison, Shelby, 176 Harvey, Thomas B., 398, 407 Hatem, Mervat, 366 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 350–353 Hayne, Eugene, 195 Haystead, Ladd, 135 Health care: and racial betterment, 201, 205,

207, 221; traditional methods of, 209–210 Heath, Edward, 88–89 Henderson, David B., 79 Henderson, Levi, 63

index 475

Hendrix, John M., 119–120 Henry, John, 110–111 Henry, John (legendary character). See John

Henry Hill, Herbert, 140 Hill, Joe, 372 Hill, Rowland G., 310 Hinnaut, John Battavia “Old Bat,” 113–116 Historically black colleges. See Black

education Hoch, Paul, 361–362 Hodges, Willis Augustus, 66 Holmes, Henry, 45 Holmes, Neptune, 116 Holtzclaw, William H., 132 Home Infirmary, 225 Homoeroticism, 364–365 Hooks, Matthew “Bones,” 109 Horton, Robin, 275 Horton, Willie, 365–366 Hose, Sam, lynching of, 335–336 Hospital Gazette, 227 Hospitals, 216, 224–225 Hotels, segregation in, 123–124, 302 Houston, Charles Hamilton, 140, 161 Houston, Robert, 43 Howard, Joseph P., 46–47 Howard, Robert, 42–43 Howard University, 191 Hubbard, George W., 221 Hulser, Neal W., 399 Humane and Friendly Society, 43 Hunt, Taylor, 29 Hunter, H. H., 42 Huntsville Republican, 135 Hurlbut, Stephen A., 17, 20–21 Hurt, Mississippi John, 410–411 Hutchinson, Frank, 410

Igbo (African people), 250–252, 264–265, 267, 271–272

Ikard, Bose, 115, 125 Illinois Central Railroad: black workers on,

145, 154; white terrorism and, 160 Immigrant groups: exclusion from railroad

unions, 145, 147–149. See also specific groups

Independent Order of St. Luke, 250, 253t; color symbolism in, 255–256; death and burial rituals in, 259, 264–267; economic functions of, 273–274; functions of, 259– 261; god emblems in, 252, 255; initiation rituals in, 255–258, 260–261, 263; leadership in, 259, 262; moral standards in, 260–261; organization of, 252–253, 255–258; religious functions in, 262–267;

symbols of, 252–253, 255; as women’s organization, 265

Industrial Workers of the World, 157 Industrialization, southern, 133, 174, 383–

384 Initiation rituals, 255–258, 260–261, 263 International Longshoremen’s Association,

157 Interracial households, 94–95 Irish: animosity toward blacks, 15–16, 26; as

police, 15–16, 25, 95; as railroad workers, 144

Isabelle, Thomas, 94 Isch, Alexander J., 399, 402

Jackson, Deal, 133 Jackson, Green, 195–196 Jackson, James A., 271 Jackson, Peter, xi, 283–308; character traits of,

290–291, 294, 303; English tours, 292– 293, 296–298, 302; major fights of, 288– 289, 292, 294–298, 302–303; move to America, 287–289; public reaction to, 289–290, 293–294, 298; return to Australia, 303–304; Sullivan and, 7, 283– 284, 287, 292–294; theatrical perfor- mances of, 299–300

Jake (cowboy-cook), 113 James, Jesse, 376 Janis, Harriet, 388 Jefferson Club, 396 Jeffries, Jim, 8, 302–303 John Henry (legendary character), 10, 370–

386; as black hero, 377–378, 382; con- tinuing memory of, 381; coopted by white audience, 381–383; as embarrassment, 380–381; as railroad hero, 372–373, 376

Johnson, Andrew, 89, 355 Johnson, Charles P. “Governor,” 399–400,

402 Johnson, Jack, 8, 378 Johnson, James Weldon, 274 Johnson, Joseph, 98 Johnson, Ossian, 63 Johnson, Samuel, 42 Johnson, William, 267–268 Jones, Al, 115 Jones, George B., 404 Jones, Mary “Mother,” 372 Jordan, Dock J., 192 Joseph, Peter, 94 Journal of the National Medical Association

(JNMA), 227

Kansas, black migrations to, 1–2, 71 Kappner, Ignatz, 24

index476

Kauffman, Harry A., 399, 402 Kelley, William “Pig Iron,” 174 Kelly, A. P., 147 Kelly, Nigger Jim: as bodyguard, 116; as

gunman, 121–122; as musician, 109–110; as wrangler, 107

Kelly, Robin D. G., 140–141 Kimmel, Michael, xvi King, Edward, 193 King, Rodney, 368n21 Kinloch, Benjamin, 39, 43 Kinloch, Richmond, 42 Kipling, Rudyard, 336 Kirsch, William, 399 Knights of Labor, 157 Knights of Pythias, 249, 268, 274 Knotts, Lucia J., 6, 234–248 Knox Academy, 132 Ku Klux Klan, 353

Labor. See Convict labor Labor history, 3–5, 140–141; music in (see

John Henry) Labor strikes: in cattle industry, 117–119; in

mining industry, 177–178; and “race strikes,” 160–161; in railroad industry, 146, 155–156, 160–161, 374

Labor supply, 20–24 Land tenure, 129–138 Lane, Primus, 29 Laney, Lucy Craft, 243 Langford, Sam, 288 Langston, John Mercer, 446, 448, 451 Lawton, Edward P., 310 le Rensian, James, 240, 246n14 Leadership, community: of black physicians,

40, 42, 201, 206, 208–209; of black police, 93–94; of black troops, 1–2, 16–17; of free blacks, 86; Freedmen’s Bureau search for, 2, 62–70. See also Black politicians

Lee, George H., 40–41 Lee, Gus, 118 Lee, James, Jr., 392 Lee, Robert, 402 Lee, Samuel J., 190, 193–196 Lee, Samuel Stacker, 391–392, 394 Lee, Stack. See Stack Lee Lees, Tom, 286, 291–292 Legal education. See Black education, legal Leisure time, 237, 246n14 Leonard, Thomas, 28 Leonard Medical School, 205 Letterwriting, 245n11 Levine, Lawrence, 377–378, 412 Lewis, James, 94 Lewis, Z. D., 262

Lily White Republicans, 135 Lincoln, Abraham, 441, 448 Lindsay, Lewis, 66 Literacy: of black politicians, 40–41, 64, 65t;

increase in black, 131; used to control black electorate, 322

Little, “Doc,” 113 Litwack, Leon, 31 Lloyd, Jeremiah M., 220 Lloyd, Julius W., 44 Logan, Harold, 411, 439 Lomax, Alan, 391, 394, 406 Lomax, John, 391, 406 Louis, Joe, 378 Louisiana: black physicians in, 217; black

police in, 3, 85–104; disenfranchisement in, 323

Louisville & Nashville Railroad: black workers on, 145; strikes against, 155; white terrorism and, 160

Love, romantic, 239–240 Lynchings, 10, 321, 349–369; black women

and, 366n1; castration symbolism in, 350– 353, 363–364; development of, 355; disciplinary function of, 322, 353–356; in Georgia, 136, 335–336; homoerotic symbolism of, 364–365; number of, 124– 125, 136, 353, 368n30; in South Carolina, 343n93

Lynk, Miles Vandahurst, 226 Lyons, William “Billy,” 10, 387, 389–390,

394–395 Lystra, Karen, 234, 238–239, 246n42

Madison, Warner, 22 Madora, Robert, 45 Malcolm X, 339, 368n24 Mammy Lou, 409 Manhood rights, xiii Manley, A. L., 9–10 Mann, Charley, 390–391 Manne, Henry G., 399 Marable, Morris, 134–135 Marcus, Greil, 387, 413 Marriages, interracial, 94–95, 450–451 Marsh, Dave, 413 Martin, James W., 209, 213, 218–219, 224–

225 Martin, Waldo, 445 Marx, Leo, 373 Mautley, John, 63 May, Will T., 310–311 McAuliffe, Joe, 288–289 McClennan, Alonzo, 224, 227 McCoy, Arthur, 390 McFaro, George G., 390

index 477

McFeely, James, 443, 445, 450 McGowan, Samuel, 193 McIlwaine, Shields, 392 McKane, Alice Woodby, 224 McKane, Cornelius, 224 McKane Hospital, 224 McKinlay, Whitefield J., 43–44 McKinlay, William, 39, 42–45, 47 McKinley, William: black press on reelection

of, 338–339; black voters’ support for, 322; and government’s refusal to appoint black military officers, 327; Peace Jubilee trip of, 334–335; silence of, on violence against blacks, 334

McKinney, Edward A., 391, 394 Medical and Surgical Observer, 226–227 Medical education. See Black education,

medical Medical societies, 215–216, 222t, 223, 226 Melton, John R., 332 Memphis: black police in, 104n48; race riots

in, 1–2, 15–35 Men’s studies: historical analysis in, xv–xvi;

research on black men, xvi–xvii Mental capabilities, stereotyping of, 147,

151–152, 213 Merryman, Robert H., 402 Meserve, Charles F., 205, 212, 220–221 Mexicans: as cattle industry workers, 3, 106–

108, 112, 117; as railroad workers, 144, 148

Michel, Constant, 87 Midwifery, 210 Migrations, black: to cities, 17–19, 60n10,

379; to communities with land for sale, 133; out of Deep South, 129–130, 136; to Kansas/Oklahoma, 1–2, 71

Miles, Nelson A., 310, 314, 317 Military clothing: in Memphis race riots, 16,

20, 28–29; Spanish-American War and, 9, 328–329

Military service, 9–10; and black bicycle corps, 317–318; blacks in Spanish- American War, 9, 325–329, 344n119; integration in, 325. See also Black troops

Militias, state, 19, 44, 87, 89, 270 Miller, Peter, 44 Miller, Wilbur, 99 Mining industry: black union membership in,

157; convict labor in, 4–5, 174–185; hammer songs in, 371; labor strikes in, 151, 177–178; wages in, 176

Mink, Gwendolyn, 149 Mishaw, William H., 44 Mississippi: banks in, 131; black fraternal or-

ganizations in, 268; cattle industry in, 136;

cotton plantations in, 129; literacy as vot- ing requirement in, 322; lynchings in, 136

Mississippi Medical and Surgical Association, 226

Missouri: black colonization schemes in, 77; black physicians in, 208, 212, 217; black politicians in, 403–404, 409; murders in, 387–406; ragtime music in, 408

Missouri State Penitentiary, 401 Mitchell, Charlie, 299 Mmuo (African burial society), 258–259 Molineaux, Tom, 7, 293 Montgomery, Ala., black police in, 93 Moore, John Hammond, 198n8 Morton, Robert R., 134 Moss, James A., 309–319 Mother Jones, 372 Mulago, Vincent, 271 Mulattoes: Douglass on, 450; as lawyers, 190;

as police, 96; as politicians, 2, 38t, 64 Mulcahy, Mary Lou, 383 Muldoon, William, 293 Mulvey, Laura, 351 Murder rates, 89–90 Murphy, David, 397, 407 Murphy, Isaac, xi, 301 Musicians, 110–111, 113, 123. See also John

Henry; Stack Lee Myrdal, Gunnar, 130

Naming, significance of, 354 Nance, Butler W., 195–196 Nash, Roderick, 372 National Association for the Advancement of

Colored People, 163 National Medical Association, 226 National Party, 77–78 National Sporting Club, 297 Nationalism, African, 447–449 Nativism, in railroad unions, 149–150 Naughton, W. W. “Bill,” 283, 287, 292, 295,

300 Ndichie (African society), 258, 270 “Negro Andy” (cowboy-cook), 112 Negro Jefferson Club, 403 Negro regulator, 5, 177 “New Negro,” xiii New Orleans: antipolice riots in, 90; black

police in, 3, 85–104; black politicians in, 64, 86; medical education in, 205; murder rates in, 89–90; race relations in, 85–86; weapons carried in, 89

New Orleans & Texas Pacific Railroad, strikes against, 155–156

New Orleans University, Medical Department of, 205

index478

New York Times, 331–334 Newport Folk Music Festivals, 410–411 News and Observer, 330–331, 335 Newspapers, black, 135, 320–321, 326–328,

343n88, 345n144 Niagara Declaration, xiii Niagara Movement, xii–xiii Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, 411 “Nigger Add” (rider/roper), 109–110, 115 “Nigger Bob” (cowhand), 119 “Nigger Frank” (wrangler), 107 “Nigger,” use of, 17, 94 Ninth Cavalry, 9, 311 Ninth Ohio (Colored) Volunteer Regiment,

326 Noble, Jordan B., 97 Norfolk, Va., black police in, 93 North Carolina: black electorate in, 322, 326,

330; congressional election riots in, 330– 334; railroad industry in, 152

Northrup, Herbert, 156, 158 Norton, Daniel, 66 Norton, Robert, 66

Obon (African burial society), 264 Odd Fellows, 249 Odum, Howard, 268, 406 Offodile, E. P. Oyeoka, 273 Ohio, convict labor in, 182 Oklahoma: black migrations to, 1–2, 71; black

physicians in, 220 “Old Lee” (cowboy-cook), 113 Old Testament heroes, 377 Oliver, Paul, 380 Oliver, William T., 43 Olympic Club of New Orleans, 301 O’Neill, John J., 76 Order of Railway Conductors of America,

145 Orwell, George, xi Ozo (African society), 252; death and burial

rituals of, 263–266; organization of, 258– 259; psychological functions of, 267, 269

Paderewski, Ignace, 409 Painter, Nell Irvin, 140 Parker, Henry, 26 Parsons Weekly Blade, 321, 333 Patronage, political, 46–47 Peanuts, cultivation of, 136 Pelican Club, 292 Peonage, 322 People’s Relief Association, 274 Percentage agreements, 139–140, 156, 161 Perkins, Linda, 247n69 Perry, Jim, 109, 112–114

Perry, John Edward, 206–208, 211–212, 215, 223–224

Personal relationships, 5–6 Petersburg, Va., black police in, 93 Pettiford, W. R., 131 Philippines, 321, 336–338 Picayune, 326, 330 Pickett, Jess, 109 Picou, Dusseau, 88 Plantations: in Black Belt South, 128–129;

freedmen and women coerced to work on, 21–23; purchased for resale to black farm- ers, 132; survival of, after Civil War, 130

Pleck, Elizabeth, xvi Pleck, Joseph, xvi Police: antipolice riots in New Orleans, 90;

killed in line of duty, rate of, 90; in Memphis race riots, 2, 15–16, 25–28. See also Black police

Polite, James W., 194 Politicization: and Niagara Movement, xii–

xiii; of policing, 99–100 Populist Party, 322, 374 Poro (African society), 272–273 Portsmouth, Va., black police in, 93 Prairie View A&M College, 236 Premier, Phyllis, 29 Preston, Dickson J., 452n3 Price, Lloyd, 411, 439 Prohibition, 237 Property ownership, 4; by black farmers, 129–

138; by black lawyers, 197; by black police, 96; by black politicians, 42–43, 46t, 65

Prostitutes, 124

Quadroons, 39, 64, 450 Quarles, Benjamin, 442 Quimby, S. J., 28–29 Quinn, J. W., 94 Quotas, racial. See Racial quotas

Rabinowitz, Howard, 93 Race relations: black civil rights and (see Civil

rights); black lawyers and, 196; black physicians and, 201, 212–216, 220–221, 223; boxing as metaphor of, 7–9, 301, 306n18; in New Orleans, 85–86; Spanish- American War and, 9–10, 328–330, 344n119; white acceptance of black authority figures, 4, 89–90, 93, 114; between white and black cowboys, 120– 122; white subordination of blacks and, 16–17, 26, 30–31, 152–154, 353–356; white terrorism in, 10, 133, 160, 332–333 (see also Lynchings)

index 479

Racial amalgamation, 450 Racial betterment: education’s importance in,

6; health care as goal of, 201, 205, 207, 221; women’s role in, 242–243

Racial discrimination: beliefs and practices in, 142–144, 146–151, 159, 162; in cattle industry, 116–117, 119–120, 122; in the military, 325; in railroad industry, 4, 139– 173; in sports, 7–9, 283–308

Racial privilege, xii Racial quotas, in railroad industry, 139–140,

156, 161 Ragtime music, 408 Railroad Administration, U.S., 139, 154, 161 Railroad Bill (black outlaw), 376, 378 Railroad industry, 4, 139–173; advancement

in, 147; attitudes toward, 373–374, 376; hammer songs in, 370–371; job categories in, 144–145; labor strikes in, 146, 155– 156, 160–161, 374; racial quotas in, 139– 140, 156, 161; songs about, 372–375; white terrorism in, 160. See also Black railroad workers; Trade unions, railroad industry

Randolph, Benjamin F., 42 Randolph, J. M., 30 Rankin, C. C., 402, 404 Rankin, David C., 36 Rankin, Horatio N., 28 Ransier, Alonzo J., 44, 47 Ransom, R. C., 147 Ransom, Roger, 131 Rape, in Memphis race riots, 29–30 Rape myth, 10, 355–366 Rapp, Eugene, 94 Raymond, R. J., 405 Reconstruction Acts, 63 Reconstruction Treaties, 72–73, 75 Redd, Thomas, 161 Reed, Isaac, 44 Reedy, William Marion, 408 Reeve, Arthur T., 23 Reformers’ Mercantile and Industrial

Association, 273 Religious organizations, 43–44 Remington, Frederic, 314 Remond, Charles Lennox, 446 Republican Party: Black and Tans, 135; Lily

Whites, 135; as supporter of black civil rights, 94, 320, 396

Restaurants, segregation in, 123 Rey, Barthelemy, 97 Rey, Octave, 94, 97 Rhone, Calvin Lindsey, xii, 6, 234–248 Rhone, Urissa Brown, 236 Richmond, Bill, 7, 293

Richmond, Va., black police in, 93 Richmond Planet, 321, 328, 335, 343n88 Riordan, Con, 288 Riots, racial: in Memphis, 1–2, 15–35; in

Tampa, 9–10, 329–330; in Wilmington, 9–10, 332–333

Ripley, William Z., 155 Roberts, Brigham H., 333 Roberts, John, 413 Roberts, Randy, 301, 306n18 Robinson, Peter, 26 Rogers, Ike, 74 Rogers, Will, 107 Roosevelt, Theodore, 109, 318n15 Rootwork, 210 Ross, John, 73 Rothman, Ellen, 234, 238, 246n19, 247n45 Runaway slaves, 18, 20–21 Runkle, Benjamin P., 16, 25 Russell, Daniel L., 322 Rust, William G., 399

Saettele, Frederick E., 399 St. Louis: Bicycle Corps’s arrival in, 316; black

physicians in, 217; black politicians in, 403–404, 409; murders in, 387–406; rag- time music in, 408; Third District of, 388

St. Louis Globe, 326 St. Luke Association, 274 St. Luke Emporium, 274 St. Luke Penny Savings Bank, 274 Saloons, 123 Sam (cowboy-cook), 112 “Sambo” stereotype, 313, 326 San Francisco earthquake, 405 Sanders, Mingo, 318n15 Sargent, F. P., 159 Sasportas, Thaddeus St. Mark, 190, 193, 195–

196 Saunders, George W., 106 Savannah, Ga., police in, 92 Saxon, Thomas A., 191 Saxton, Alexander, 141–142 Schoenbach, William J., 403 Schofield, John M., 68 Schoolteachers, 245n9, 247nn45,69 Scott, Robert Kingston, 46–47 Scott, Thomas Edward, 390, 393 Scruggs, Lawton A., 205 Seaboard Air Line, black workers on, 145 Seaton, George, 66 Second Confiscation Act, 18 Secret societies. See African societies;

Fraternal organizations Sectional divisions, North/South, 329, 334–

335

index480

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 363, 365 Seeger, Pete, 410 Segregation: and black physicians, 223–228;

in cattle industry, 116, 120, 122–124; codification of, 322; in hotels, 123–124, 302; in restaurants, 123

Separatist colonies, 77, 273, 447–449 Service organizations, 43–44 Sessoms, Frederick Douglass, 207, 213–214 Seventh Cavalry, 325 Seventh Louisiana Colored Infantry, 97 Sex, attitudes toward, 238–239 Sexual difference, 350–353, 366 Seymour, R. W., 194 Shaffner, J. S., 404 Sharecropping, 3–4, 130, 134 Shelton, Lee. See Stack Lee Shelton, Nat, 393, 403 Sheridan, Philip Henry, 88 Sherman, William T., 18 Shine (black hero), 378 Siebke, John, 399 Simpson, Jim, 109, 112–113 Singers, black cowhands as, 110–111, 113 Siringo, Charles, 108 Sixth Louisiana Colored Infantry, 97 Sixty-first U. S. Colored Infantry, 19 Skin color: Douglass on, 450; of lawyers, 190;

of police, 96; of politicians, 2, 38t, 39, 64 Slave codes, enforcement of, 18 Slaveowners, black politicians as, 44–45 Slaves: African exportation of, 251–252; cult

of true womanhood and, 244; death and burial rituals among, 264; fraternal organizations among, 251, 267; health care practices of, 209–210; heroes of, 377; music of, 377–378; as railroad workers, 144–145; runaway or fugitive, 18, 20–21

Slaves, former: of Cherokee Nation (see Cher- okee freedmen); health care practices of, 210; heroes of, 377–378; as police, 96; as politicians, 2, 38–39; as railroad workers, 144; work ethic stereotype of, 21–22

Slavin, Frank, 285–286, 296–298 Sloss, J. W., 176 Sloss Iron and Steel Company, 175 Small, Thomas, 45–46 Smith, Edward F., 195–197 Smith, Jem, 292 Smith, John E., 25 Smith, Lucy, 29–30 Smith, Valerie, 443 Social history, impact on men’s studies, xvi–

xvii Social organizations, 43–44. See also

Fraternal organizations

Songs: ballads, 372, 375–376, 382, 410; hammer, 370–372, 375–376; railroad, 372–375; work, 378–379

Sons and Daughters of Peace, 274 Sons and Daughters of Zion, 44 Sons of Ham, 24 Soul music, 379 South Carolina: African peoples in, 252;

black lawyers in, 5, 189–199; black physicians in, 212; black police in, 92–93; black politicians in, 2, 36–61, 50t–58t, 190; literacy as voting requirement in, 322; lynchings in, 343n93; militias in, 44, 270; murders in, 323

South Carolina Bar Association, 196 South Carolina Court of General Sessions,

194 Southern Railway: black workers on, 145; and

racial quota agreements, 139 Spanish-American War, 317; black political

opinion of, 320–346; black troops in, 9, 325–328; race relations and, 9–10, 328– 330, 344n119; race riots during, 329–330; treaty ending, 335

Spelman College, women’s education in, 242 Spirituals, 377 Sports, 7–9; baseball, xi; boxing, 283–308 Stack Lee (a.k.a. Stackolee, Stacker Lee,

Stagger Lee, Stagolee), 10, 378, 387–440; as antihero, 411–414; biography and family history of, 392–394; death of, 405– 406; Democratic Party and, 396, 403–404; details of fight with Lyons, 389–391; discography of, 421–436; music surround- ing, 406–411; politics and, 396; prison life of, 401–405; song lyrics about, 437–440; trials of, 397–401

Stacker Lee (packet boat), 392 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 445 Starnes, Green J., 220 State Ledger (Topeka), 321 State militias, 19, 44, 87, 89, 270 State Normal School, 132 Stearns, Peter, xv–xvi Steele, Bester William, 163 Stein, Judith, 142 Stereotypes, racial, 382; of black manhood/

masculinity, xvi–xvii; of black men’s fitness for railroad work, 147, 151–152; of black mental capability, 147, 151–152, 213; of black work ethic, 3, 21–22, 111, 176; “Sambo,” 313, 326; Uncle Tom, 358– 359. See also Rape myth

Stevenson, Leslie, 390 Stewart, T. McCants, 192 Stockley, Obadiah, 29

index 481

Stoneman, George, 68 Stover, W. H., 139, 163 Stowe, Steven M., 245n2 Straight University, 86 Straker, Daniel A., 190–192, 195 Strikebreakers, 151, 155, 178 Strikes. See Labor strikes Suffrage, 135, 443. See also Disenfranchise-

ment Sullivan, John L.: Corbett fight, 299; Godfrey

fight, 288–289; hatred of blacks, 297; Jackson and, 7, 283–284, 287, 292–294

Sutch, Richard, 131 Swails, Stephen A., 190 Sweezy, Paul, 137 Symbols, 252–253, 255–256, 268–269

Tade, Ewing O., 16 Taj Mahal (musician), 410 Talbird, Whipper v., 194 Tampa, Fla., race riots in, 329–330 Tampa Morning Tribune, 329 Taylor, Alrutheus Ambush, 66 Taylor, C. F., 200, 212 Taylor, L. J., 45 Taylor, Marshall “Major,” xi, 301 “Teddy Blue” (cowhand), 110, 117 Ten Broeck, Garrett H., 79 Tennessee: black hospitals in, 225; black

physicians in, 209, 213, 218–219, 224; black police in, 93; convict labor in, 174– 175, 177–178, 180, 182; Emancipation Proclamation in, 18; race riots in, 1–2, 15–35; railroad strikes in, 155–156; slaves’ status in, 17–18

Tennessee Coal and Iron Company (TCI), 175, 178–180

Tenth Cavalry, 9, 311 Texas: Brownsville raid, 318n15; cattle

industry in, 118–119; militias in, 270; segregation in, 123

Texas Trail Drivers Association, 3, 106 Third United States Colored Heavy Artillery,

15, 27 Thompson, Albert L., 220 Thompson, Ben, 123 Thompson, Francis, 29 Thornton, William, 67 Tibbs, Lucy, 30 Tillman, Ben, 359–360 Tillson, Davis, 23 Timber industry, black union membership in,

157 Times (New Orleans), 325 Times (Washington, D.C.), 327, 330, 335 Tindall, George B., 133

Title associations. See African societies Tompkins, John H., 208, 217 Trade unions, railroad industry: blacks ex-

cluded from, 145, 156–158; class identity and conflict in, 146–151, 159, 162; devel- opment of, 145–146, 152, 374–375; immi- grants excluded from, 145, 147–149; nativ- ism in, 149–150; similarity to fraternal organizations, 158. See also specific unions

Trading systems, African, 271–273 Trail bosses, 114–115 Trent, W. J., Jr., 277n4 Tricksters, 377–378 Truth, Sojourner, 444 Tunstall, Tom, 163 Turner, Dorothy, 262 Turner, Henry, 337 Turner, James Milton, xii, 2–3, 71–82;

freedmen’s bill and, 76–79; involvement in Cherokee Nation elections, 77–78; power of attorney granted to, 74–75; separatist plans of, 77

Turner, Joseph S., 181 Turner, Victor, 255 Turpin, Charles H., 409 Turpin, Thomas, 402, 409 Tuskegee Institute: agricultural development

and, 132; savings department of, 131, 134; women’s education at, 242

Twenty-fifth Infantry, 9, 329 Twenty-fifth Infantry, Bicycle Corps, 9, 309–

319 Twenty-fourth Infantry, 9, 311

Ukulele Ike, 410, 414 Uncle Tom stereotype, 358–359 Underwood, Edward Ellsworth, 207 Union Star Fire Engine Company, 44 United Mine Workers of America, 157, 175–

176, 178 University of South Carolina: black faculty of,

190; Law School of, 191

Vansina, Jan, 277n4 Vashon, George B., 78, 402 Vashon, John B., 402 Venereal diseases, 218–219 Vestal, Stanley, 117–118 Veterans Republican Brotherhood, 44 Vickers, Robert P., 67 Victimization, black men’s struggle against, xii Virginia: African peoples in, 251–252; black

fraternal organizations in, 249–280; black police in, 93; Freedmen’s Bureau search for leadership in, 2, 62–70

Von Schrader, A., 20

index482

Wade, Richard, 86, 98 Walker, Armistead, Jr., 262 Walker, John W., 216 Walker, Joseph E., 206, 212 Walker, Maggie, 273–274 Walker, Moses “Fleetwood,” 301 Walker, Thaddeus A., 209, 220 Walker, Thomas A., 19 Wall, Edward P., 39, 43–44, 46–47 Wall, Lafayette F., 43–44 Wallace, “80 John,” 121 Waller, Logan, 63 Ward, Samuel Ringgold, 446–447 Washington, Booker T.: as agricultural

development advocate, 132–133; banking activities of, 131; at Cotton States and International Exposition, 226; on need for black doctors, 205; and racial betterment, 242

Washington, D.C.: black newspapers in, 321; black population of, 86; John Henry legacy in, 380–381

Washington, Mary Helen, 443–444 Washington Bee, 321, 339; on black American

loyalty, 324; on hopes for McKinley presidency, 327, 338–339; on Philippines annexation, 336–338

Washington Post, 325, 327–328, 330, 331–332 Watie, Stand, 73 Watson, Doc, 410 Weapons, 89. See also Firearms Wehrwein, George S., 133 Wells, Ida B., 10, 322, 444 West Virginia, railroad industry in, 371, 374 Westham Farm (black separatist community),

273 Wheeler, Mary, 392 Whipper, William, 190, 192, 194 Whipper v. Talbird, 194 Whipping bosses, 177, 180–181 White, George Henry, 323–324 White, Walter F., 211, 213–214, 216, 219 White men: rape myth and, 355–366;

relationships with black women, 95, 124 White music, southern, 382–383 White northerners/southerners, reunion of,

329, 334–335

White supremacy, 331; national decline and, 366; in railroad industry, 152–154; symbolic constructions of, 353

White terrorism, 10, 133, 160, 332–333. See also Lynchings

White women: education of, 242; gender roles of, 351; presence of, affects black treatment/behavior, 120, 123; rape myth and, 10, 355–366; relationships with black men, 95

Whitman, Walt, 441 Will, George, 450–451 Williams, Daniel Hale, 225 Williams, John H. G., 207 Williams, Mark A., 195 Williams, Martin A., 193 Williams (horse-trainer), 109 Wilmington, N.C., race riots in, 10, 332–333 Wilson, Charles, 396 Winsey, Whitfield, 215 Withrow, James E., 399–400, 403 Wolfe, Daniel, 5 Womanhood, cult of true, 6, 235, 241–244 Women’s studies, gender analysis in, xv Wood, Ike, 109 Woodson, Carter G., 136, 249, 277n4 Woodward, C. Vann, 128n72, 130 Woofter, Thomas Jackson, Jr., 209 Work, Monroe, 225 Work ethic, stereotypes of black, 3, 21–22,

111, 176 Work songs, 378–379 World War I and decline of black agriculture,

129, 134–135 Wranglers, 107 Wright, John, 453n20 Wright, John B., 44 Wright, Jonathan J., 190, 192, 197 Wright, Richard, 357–364 Wright, Silas P., 332 Wyoming, cattle industry in, 118

Young, Charles, 324–326 Young, Nathan, 408, 413

Zachritz, William, 400 Zeke (cowboy bodyguard), 116

EARNESTINE JENKINS is Assistant Professor of Art History in the Department of Art at the University of Memphis. She has published articles that have appeared in numerous books and journals, including Milestones in Black American History and Aspects of Ethiopian Art.

DARLENE CLARK HINE is John A. Hannah Professor of History at Michigan State University. She is co-editor of Crossing Boundaries: Comparative His- tory of Black People in Diaspora and More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas, co-author of A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America, and author of Hine Sight: Black Women and the Reconstruction of American History.

Contents
Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART ONE: CONSTRUCTING CITIZENSHIP: THE EVOLUTION OF BLACK MALE LEADERSHIP

ONE. “Your Old Father Abe Lincoln Is Dead and Damned”: Black Soldiers and the Memphis Race Riot of 1866
TWO. Black Politicians in Reconstruction Charleston, South Carolina: A Collective Study
THREE. The Freedmen’s Bureau and Local Black Leadership
FOUR. For Justice and a Fee: James Milton Turner and the Cherokee Freedmen

PART TWO: “TO OWN OUR OWN LABOR”: BLACK MEN, ECONOMIC SELF-SUFFICIENCY, AND WORKING-CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS

FIVE. Black Policemen in New Orleans During Reconstruction
SIX. Negro Labor in the Western Cattle Industry, 1866–1900
SEVEN. The Politics of Black Land Tenure, 1877–1915
EIGHT. “Like Banquo’s Ghost, It Will Not Down”: The Race Question and the American Railroad Brotherhoods, 1880– 1920
NINE. “A Constant Struggle Between Interest and Humanity”: Convict Labor in the Coal Mines of the New South

PART THREE: BLACK MEN, THE PROFESSIONS, AND FRATERNAL ORGANIZATIONS

TEN. A High and Honorable Calling: Black Lawyers in South Carolina, 1868–1915
ELEVEN. Entering a White Profession: Black Physicians in the New South, 1880–1920
TWELVE. The Courtship Letters of an African American Couple: Race, Gender, Class, and the Cult of True Womanhood
THIRTEEN. The African Derivation of Black Fraternal Orders in the United States

PART FOUR: PROVING BLACK MANHOOD: THE ALLURE OF SPORT AND THE MILITARY IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY

FOURTEEN. Peter Jackson and the Elusive Heavyweight Championship: A Black Athlete’s Struggle Against the Late Nineteenth Cent
FIFTEEN. The Black Bicycle Corps
SIXTEEN. African Americans and the War Against Spain

PART FIVE: END-OF-THE-CENTURY ARCHETYPES: SYMBOLIC CONSTRUCTIONS IN BLACK MANHOOD AND MASCULINITY

SEVENTEEN. The Anatomy of Lynching
EIGHTEEN. The Heroic Appeal of John Henry
NINETEEN. Stack Lee: The Man, the Music, and the Myth
TWENTY. Where Honor Is Due: Frederick Douglass as Representative Black Man

Sources
Selected Bibliography
Index
About the Authors