Common Ground

by J. Anthony Lukas

  So long as the freedman accepted his new lot, his life was bearable, but if he objected, arguing that this wasn’t the emancipation they’d been promised, retribution could be swift and sure. In 1866, flogging “as in slave days” was common in Burke (Jack Bennefield’s back, his grandson recalls, looked like a “washboard” from all the beatings he’d taken). By March 1868 the Ku Klux Klan was active in the county. In a single month that spring, three freedmen were shot to death by whites.

  For the Greshams, Reconstruction was a trying period. It took time to accommodate themselves to the new realities. When John Jones Gresham married one of the county’s belles, his uncle wrote from Macon: “I am sorry that circumstances are such that I cannot give him a Negro, but I must do the next best thing left, that is give him a mule.”

  Of all the Greshams, young Job—a grandson of the original Job Gresham—was the most capable. Mustered out of the Georgia Volunteers at Appomattox, he walked the four hundred miles back to Burke County, where he took over a plantation which had belonged to a distant cousin named William Byne. It was a pleasant spread, with nine hundred acres of cotton land, an orchard, a smokehouse, and an iron foundry—a big place that needed more than Byne’s hands to farm it. After Edmund Gresham died in 1872, his widow sent over four men to help her son—among them, Jack Bennefield.

  Jack and Fanny Bennefield had one child, Cornelia, who married Frederick Walker, one of Edmund Gresham’s slaves. By 1880, Fred had joined Jack on Job Gresham’s place. Each tilled a “plow”—about twenty-five acres of cotton land, a few more for corn and vegetables—for which they paid Job a bale of cotton. They relied heavily on their wives and children to hoe and weed the fields, then pick the cotton in the fall, harvesting about ten bales a year. With prices averaging $50 a bale, they earned about $500 a year. But they didn’t keep much of it. Off the top came the bale each owed Job. Moreover, Job provided them with seed, implements, and food, to be paid for, with substantial interest, after the harvest. Once those debts were paid, the Bennefields and Walkers had just enough to squeak by on until it was planting time again. In 1881, Jack Bennefield had a $50 mule, $25 worth of farm tools, and $10 in household furniture—a net worth of $85.

  Later they got their credit from merchants in nearby Keysville, who had a wider range of goods than Job could provide but who squeezed every cent of interest they could out of the farmers. If a tenant failed to pay his debts, the landlord or merchant would seize his crop, his meager belongings, even his dog or cat. The desperate farmer often tried to hide a few vegetables to feed his family. Once Sol Walker—Fred’s brother—was beaten severely by his landlord for attempting to conceal some corn inside his mattress.

  Job’s Negroes sought solace from the hardships of this world at the Antioch Baptist Church. The Bennefields and Walkers were all members of Antioch, and Sol Walker was long one of its deacons. The Reverend Seaborn Jones, its pastor for fifty years, was a preacher of great passion and greater volume, whose Sunday-morning sermons, it was said, could be heard half a mile away. And everybody up and down the old “Gresham Highway” could hear Jake Mitchell, the church drummer, as he marched by banging the drum to proclaim the death of an Antioch member.

  One morning in 1892, Jake banged his drum for old Jack Bennefield, dead at seventy-two. (Fanny lived nearly half a century longer, dying in 1933 at the age of 108, when she was buried in the Gresham Cemetery a few feet from her first master, Job Gresham.) By the time of Jack’s death, Cornelia and Frederick Walker had nine children of their own with whom they lived in a two-room, tin-roofed shack made of logs with gaping chinks through which the wind whistled.

  Fanny and Jack Bennefield had never learned to read or write—Georgia law before the Civil War prescribed a stiff fine for anyone caught educating a slave—and Cornelia and Frederick had had only a year or two of grade school. The Walker children didn’t do much better. They went to the all-black Spring Hill School, where they received the rudiments of learning, but most of them left well before the eighth grade to join their parents in the fields.

  Soon, however, those fields were ravaged by the boll weevil. As late as 1918, Burke County had produced a record 70,877 bales of cotton; by 1921, production had plummeted to 14,386 bales. White planters, who had once bet a dozen bales on a poker hand, were lucky to harvest that many from their blasted land. And black tenant farmers, with no resources to fall back on, were devastated. In 1922, the Waynesboro Women’s Club, chaired by Mrs. Orrin Gresham, Job’s niece, launched a campaign to assist needy children suffering from the winter cold. Appealing for sweaters, coats, and shoes, she said, “This is not only to supply a need but to let these people realize we mean to see them through.”

  But Burke’s Negroes had little faith in their former masters. In 1922 alone, 5,000 of the county’s 24,775 blacks departed, joining a massive flood of Negroes streaming North. Many who boarded the Dixie Flyer or the Southland in Augusta disembarked in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York, but others stayed aboard until their train reached Boston. Though wages were lower there than in the mid-Atlantic cities, there was something about Boston that drew Southern Negroes. It was from Boston that the abolitionists had issued their calls for a holy war against slavery. It was there that many blacks fled in the underground railway, relying on Bostonians to forward them to Canada. It was to Boston that David Walker, a North Carolina Negro, fled in 1825, and there that he issued his fiery pamphlet Walker’s Appeal (“Brethren, arise, arise! Strike for your lives and liberties!”), which was widely distributed in Georgia.

  The image of Boston as a sanctuary was encouraged by black writers who, over the years, described it as “a city of refuge, a place of light, life, and liberty,” the one place in America “where the black man is given equal justice,” and even, euphorically, “the Paradise of the Negro.”

  In 1923, Fanny Walker—Frederick and Cornelia’s third-oldest daughter—grew weary of wresting cotton from the wasted fields. Arriving in Boston, she sent word back that jobs were plentiful, wages nearly triple what they had been in Burke. That sounded good to her younger brother Thomas Quinnie Walker.

  Quinnie had already done some roving. At the age of seventeen, he had gone to work for the Southern Bell Telephone Company, laying long lines through the Georgia swamps. Three years later, just as the boll weevil hit Burke County, he returned to try his hand at tenant farming. One day, he went to the store seeking some corn and a hoe, but the shopkeepers refused to advance him the supplies, claiming that he owed them forty dollars. That did it. Quinnie gave his mule to his sister Sarah, packed his belongings in a worn cardboard suitcase, and boarded the Dixie Flyer. Years later he would tell his daughter—the future Rachel Twymon—that when the train pulled into Boston’s South Station that morning in 1925, he felt “as if my life were starting all over again.”

  After a year in which they saw each other every Sunday, Quinnie and Helen Jenkins were married. And so a circle was completed. The wedding united two Virginia families who had begun barely seventy miles apart. Once they had been remarkably similar: slaves for hire in the urbane seaport, free blacks in the sophisticated capital. But the tortuous route each family had traveled to Boston opened a chasm between them. One, transported to Nova Scotia, had found themselves the only blacks in a white village, proud of association with their neighbors yet never quite accepted by them. The other, sold into slavery, had lived for ninety years in rural Georgia surrounded by others of their race, fearing and resenting their white overlords. The marriage of an old Bostonian and an illiterate sharecropper proved an uneasy one, reflecting deep fissures in Boston’s black community.

  “Slavery was repugnant to the Puritans and was regarded by them with abhorrence,” wrote William Sumner, a Massachusetts soldier-historian, in 1858. On the eve of the Civil War that was a convenient version of history, lending the North a moral superiority in the coming struggle. But it was bad history, at odds with the ample record of Massachusetts’ dominant role in the slave trade. Boston was never q
uite so distinctive as it liked to pretend. Through the eighteenth century, Boston’s sailing men provided Negroes to the West Indies and the Southern colonies. Slaves, bought in Africa for five pounds sterling, brought from thirty to ninety pounds in the West Indies, a differential which laid the foundation for many New England fortunes.

  In comparison with the Southern colonies, there were never many slaves in Massachusetts, partly because the harsh climate and stony soil did not permit a plantation agriculture requiring numerous field hands. Yet, by the eve of the Revolution, 5,249 Negroes, most of them slaves, were counted in the colony.

  Still, Massachusetts’ brand of slavery was distinctive, probably more benign than in any other colony. Following the Hebraic tradition passed down through the Old Testament, the Puritans regarded slaves as persons divinely committed to their stewardship. Usually referred to as “servants” rather than slaves, they were often treated as members of the family in which they lived. A visitor in 1704 complained that New England masters were “too indulgent … to their slaves; suffering too great familiarity from them, permitting you to sit at table and eat with them (as they say to save time), and into the dish goes the black hoof as freely as the white hand.” Since salvation required a knowledge of the Bible, many masters even taught their slaves to read and write. The legal status of slaves in New England was somewhere between that of Southern plantation slaves and that of indentured servants. They could acquire, hold, and transfer property; they were entitled to a trial by jury. Most important, they could sue whites and could carry their suits on appeal to the highest courts in the colony.

  By the mid-eighteenth century, slaves were taking advantage of that right, bringing civil suits for their freedom, arguing that slavery was “contrary to ye laws of Nature.” Such entreaties eventually reached the Puritan conscience. Like Virginians, many Massachusetts citizens perceived the contradictions between their own struggle against Britain and their enslavement of others. Abigail Adams, in a letter to her husband, John, wrote: “It always appeared a most iniquitous scheme to me to fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have.”

  Once the colonies won their independence, the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention adopted a Declaration of Rights, holding that “all men are born free and equal.” But slavery persisted. Not until 1783 did the state’s chief justice declare it unconstitutional.

  Although conscience played a role in all this, more practical considerations were also involved. As John Adams noted: “The common people would not suffer the labour, by which alone they could obtain a subsistence, to be done by slaves. If the gentlemen had been permitted to hold slaves the common people would have put the Negroes to death, and their masters too, perhaps.”

  Unlike Southern slaves, who were overwhelmingly cultivators of cotton, rice, and tobacco, those in Massachusetts had been employed in a wide variety of crafts: as printers, blacksmiths, tailors, ship’s carpenters, coopers, masons, rope makers, or sailors. But with the end of slavery in the state, white artisans largely reclaimed those jobs, and by the early nineteenth century Negroes were heavily concentrated in service positions.

  At first, most blacks lived along the wharves of the North End, a quarter known as “New Guinea”; later they edged into the West End and onto adjacent Beacon Hill. Since many Negroes were servants to the wealthy whites who lived on the hill’s south side, they settled in the crowded alleys on the reverse slope, which came to be known as “Nigger Hill.”

  It was there—in the African Meeting House, Boston’s first black church—that William Lloyd Garrison and eleven other white men founded the New England Anti-Slavery Society and proclaimed two goals: the eradication of Southern bondage and of Northern discrimination. Although the former struggle took precedence, Garrison and other Boston abolitionists worked to ameliorate the lot of Boston’s blacks side by side with such Negro leaders as Frederick Douglass and Lewis Hayden.

  One of their principal objectives was the integration of Boston’s public schools. The city’s school system had been segregated since 1798. In 1849, a black parent, Benjamin Roberts, brought suit against the city in the name of his daughter Sarah, seeking reintegration of the schools. Arguing Roberts’ case before the Supreme Judicial Court, Charles Sumner said: “[A] school, exclusively devoted to one class, must differ essentially, in its spirit and character, from the public school known to the law, where all classes meet together in equality. It is a mockery to call it an equivalent.” But Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw disagreed, ruling that the segregated schools did not deny Negroes equal protection of the law.

  Justice Shaw’s ruling—the “separate-but-equal doctrine”—was to have a profound effect on the nation’s history. The Roberts case was the chief precedent cited by the Supreme Court when it enshrined that doctrine in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and, thus, the genesis of the legal principle which was to govern the country’s race relations until 1954.

  Not in Boston, however. Spurned by the courts, black parents, supported by abolitionists of both races, carried their fight into the political arena. In 1855, the Massachusetts legislature passed a bill prohibiting segregated schools. It was the first of several notable victories achieved by the same coalition in the decades before the Civil War—among them, lifting the ban on interracial marriages, adding Negroes to the jury rolls, and abandoning segregated seating on the state’s railroad cars.

  By the eve of the Civil War, Massachusetts Negroes had achieved a fair measure of political and civil rights. Although their economic position was precarious and they were excluded from most social circles, they were probably more secure than their counterparts elsewhere in the nation. This progress prompted the New York Herald to lament: “Now the blood of the Winthrops, the Otises, the Lymans, the Endicotts, and the Eliots, is in a fair way to be amalgamated with the Sambos, the Catos, and the Pompeys. The North is to be Africanized. Amalgamation has commenced. New England heads the column. God save the Commonwealth of Massachusetts!”

  The war itself quickened the sympathies of Boston’s whites for their black fellow citizens. On May 28, 1863, thousands of Bostonians gathered to watch Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, a young Yankee aristocrat, lead his Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry—the first Northern black regiment in the Civil War—through the city’s streets to Battery Wharf, where they embarked for South Carolina. Scarcely two months later, Shaw and several hundred of his Negro soldiers died together in an assault on Fort Wagner. Their common martyrdom helped cast a glow of brotherhood over the city’s race relations. When a monument to them was dedicated at the crest of Beacon Hill, the philosopher William James declaimed: “There on foot go the dark outcasts…. There on horseback among them, in his very habit as he lived, sits the blue-eyed child of fortune, upon whose happy youth every divinity has smiled. Onward they moved together, a single resolution kindled in their eyes, and animating their otherwise so different frames….”

  Indeed, for a time, it appeared that Boston’s whites and blacks might march together toward the common goals of a just and equal society. Within months of the surrender at Appomattox, Massachusetts broadened the legal immunities of its black citizens. After Negroes complained about racial discrimination at Boston’s Globe Theater and the Brigham Restaurant, the legislators banned such discrimination in licensed inns, public meetings, and “places of amusement,” a prohibition which was eventually extended to all public accommodations.

  Gradually, blacks played a more prominent role in public life. In 1867, two were elected to the Massachusetts legislature, where they maintained at least one representative until the end of the century. With their concentration in the West End, Boston’s Negroes elected at least one City Councilman in every election between 1876 and 1895.

  But as Boston’s blacks tasted the fruits of this “golden era,” their community was already being transformed by successive waves of freed slaves from the South. The first to arrive were some of General Bu
tler’s “contraband” from Hampton. Massachusetts officers had supervised these Negroes in the refugee camps which sprang up around Fort Monroe. When the Freedmen’s Bureau sought to relocate them after the war, it looked first to New England because there was “no region … more desirable as a home for the Negro.” Back came stacks of applications for “colored girl servants” and, over the next few years, nearly two thousand ex-slaves were sent North as domestics for white families in the Boston area. For the next three decades, Tidewater Virginia remained the principal source of black migrants to Boston. Most of the ex-slaves who settled in Boston in the first years after the war were urban, literate, semi-skilled, light-skinned Negroes or mulattoes—products of the relatively benevolent slave system of the Upper South.

  But even such comparative sophistication didn’t assure these migrants a warm welcome in the black community. For Boston’s Negroes—sheltered by extensive legal protection, succored by a few principled abolitionists, favored by a certain latitude in the city’s public life—were intensely proud of their “special relationship” with whites. They did not take kindly to the influx of recently freed slaves who reminded them of the indelible stamp of servitude which lay on the brow of all black men in America.

  This pride in their heritage of freedom was, for some Boston blacks, a goad to action. Accustomed to dealing with whites on a plane of rough equality, such Northern Negroes were determined to extend Boston’s racial climate to the nation at large. The chief spokesman for this group of “Boston Radicals” was William Monroe Trotter. Born with an unusually light complexion, raised in white Hyde Park, Trotter had graduated magna cum laude from Harvard and inherited a modest fortune of $20,000. He inherited as well the racial militancy his father had developed while fighting for equal pay in one of the two black regiments Massachusetts sent into the Civil War.