If we are men—as our friends contend we are—we are able to attend to our own business. There is no man in the world so perfectly identified with our own interest as to understand it better than we do ourselves. We listen respectfully to the addresses of our white friends; but we must deliberate and decide for ourselves.… We need friends, it is true; but we do not need tutors. The age of guardianship is past forever. We now think for ourselves, and we shall act for ourselves.15
Although blacks demonstrated a healthy skepticism about how much reliance they should place on their white friends, they were not always agreed on the amount of confidence they could place in themselves and in their own leaders and movements. With the critical problems they faced, and the need to project an image of harmony and responsibility to a skeptical white America, blacks could ill afford the factional struggles, acrimonious debates, and conflicts of personal ambition that pitted the dark-skinned against the light-skinned, the ex-slave against the freeborn, the native against the northern-born. No matter how often black leaders, newspapers, and meetings called for unity, the advent of freedom had a way of exacerbating old differences and introducing new divisions. During the Convention of the Freedmen of North Carolina, for example, one delegate could not restrain himself after a light-skinned Negro had criticized him for daring to oppose the northern-born black they had chosen for chairman. “I didn’t come here,” he shouted, “and no other man of this convention didn’t come here, sir, to have the whip of slavery cracked over us by no slaveholder’s son.” With similar disdain, some blacks who had been free before the war resented being called “freedmen” and tried in every way to dissociate themselves from the former slaves.16
The sources of such divisiveness were familiar enough, reflecting as they did deeply rooted distinctions not only of color but of class, education, income, occupation, and acculturation to white society. Aside from being more literate and affluent than the ex-slaves, the mulattoes and free Negroes who made up the colored elites in cities like New Orleans, Charleston, and Washington, D.C., tended to lead a separate social life, married within their group, attended different churches, and preferred to send their children to private schools rather than to the newly established freedmen’s schools. The Brown Fellowship Society of Charleston, which admitted only well-to-do mulattoes, and the Lotus Club of Washington, D.C., which excluded freedmen, exemplified the more extreme manifestations of this caste consciousness. Even the haughtiest house servants of Charleston and Washington, D.C., while thinking themselves superior to the “country niggers” who flocked to their cities after the war, might have been barred from “colored society” unless they possessed the necessary ancestral credentials.17
Having experienced the hostility of freeborn blacks, a newly freed slave found difficulty in making any sense out of it. “The free fellows felt themselves better than the slave, because of the fact, I suppose, that they were called free, while in reality they were no more free than the slave, until the war set both classes free.” The problem he described became particularly acute in Washington, D.C., where upwards of 40,000 emancipated slaves from Virginia and Maryland confirmed the worst fears of inundation. Many of those who made up the old free Negro class, which had numbered less than 10,000 in 1860, reacted by withdrawing into their own social orbit, as if to draw a boundary between themselves and the “contrabands.” John E. Bruce, an ex-slave who migrated to Washington with his mother during the war, would some years later pen a caustic commentary on the “fust families” that composed the colored elite of the nation’s capital. The older citizens, he noted, manifested an exclusiveness that often bordered on the ludicrous. With an insatiable “love of display” and a frequently proclaimed pride in their ancestry (“forever and ever informing the uninitiated what a narrow escape they had from being born white”), they tried to assume the airs and manners of colored aristocrats “and wouldn’t be caught dead with an ordinary Negro.” If they lacked the means to live as aristocrats, they made up for it by their recollections of previous service to white dignitaries. “He has seen Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, Ben Wade and Joshua R. Giddings. He used to shave these great luminaries, which is the only consolation that the memories of departed days can now give him.”18
Whether based on color or previous status, the distinctions separating blacks seldom assumed such importance outside of the few large urban centers. To make too much of the pretentiousness exhibited by members of these small elites would be to overlook the degree to which most mulattoes, free Negroes, and former slaves had always worked and lived together, sharing a common condition and plight and generally too preoccupied with survival and a hostile white society to cultivate any caste pretensions. When imposing restrictions and reinforcing racial segregation, moreover, whites would pay no attention to gradations of color or to the previous status of blacks. What a northern-born black leader observed of white attitudes in 1876 was no less true ten years earlier: “They call everybody a negro that is as black as the ace of spades or as white as snow, if they think he is a negro or know that he has negro blood in his veins.”19
The sources of divisiveness persisted among blacks, and internal strife would occasionally surface and weaken their movements. But the common hostility they confronted usually forced the various groups that made up the black community to minimize and surmount their differences. Even in the large cities, the colored elites came to understand the futility of divorcing their cause from that of the mass of freedmen. “They must stand or fall together,” the New Orleans Tribune proclaimed, and this mulatto organ consistently urged unity between the freemen and the freedmen.20 Not simply the experience of a common oppression united them but the conviction that they could overcome it together. The black convention movement, as a vehicle for this unity, would play a major role in defining a common future.
3
WITH THE END OF THE WAR, black hopes and expectations seemed almost boundless. “Never was there a brighter prospect before any people,” Richard H. Cain wrote from South Carolina, “than that presented to the colored people of the Southern states.”21 To take a conciliatory approach toward the former ruling class, now reeling under its wartime losses but still possessing considerable economic power, appeared to make sound political sense. If they could only share the future with whites, as equal participants in the body politic, black spokesmen vowed they would keep the peace, harbor no ill feelings or recriminations about the past, and no longer feel the need to look to the North for protection and sympathy. That hope (and implied threat if it were not realized) underlay much of the moderation that characterized the early postwar political activity of southern blacks.
Exulting in their freedom, but perceiving at the same time their powerlessness and vulnerability, the black conventions framed their addresses and manifestos for consideration by the state constitutional conventions and legislatures. Invariably, they appealed to the “wisdom, sense of justice, and magnanimous generosity” they expected from those bodies and which they professed to find in the hearts and minds of the white South. The pose they struck of a long-suffering but patient people seemed best calculated to win the approval of their white countrymen, many of whom had only recently come to know the true meaning of suffering, the separation of families, and defeat. The Convention of Colored People that gathered in Charleston in late 1865 grounded its appeal to “the White Inhabitants of South Carolina” in precisely that spirit:
We have not come together in battle array to assume a boastful attitude and to talk loudly of high-sounding principles, or of unmeaning platitudes; nor do we pretend to any great boldness; for we remember your former wealth and greatness, and we know our poverty and weakness; and although we feel keenly our wrongs, still we come together, we trust, in a spirit of meekness and of patriotic good-will toward all the people of the State.22
To emphasize the mutuality of interest upon which a new South would rise, blacks attending the freedmen’s conventions dwelled upon their own southern roots and how th
eir lives, experiences, and destinies were interwoven with those of white Southerners. That kind of appeal would hopefully not only allay white apprehensions but lay to rest any new speculation about blacks expatriating themselves to some distant land. The South was their homeland, not Africa, not Central America, not even the northern United States, and they fully intended to make their homes in the regions they knew intimately and in which they had been born and reared along with their fellow whites.
The dust of our fathers mingle with yours in the same grave yards; you have transmitted into our veins much of the rich blood which course through yours; we talk the same language, and worship the same God; our mothers have nursed you, and satisfied your hunger with our pap; our association with you have taught us to revere you. This is your country, but it is ours too; you were born here, so were we; your fathers fought for it, but our fathers fed them.23
To underscore their regional roots and loyalties, black spokesmen also thought this an appropriate time to remind white Southerners of how the slaves had remained peaceful and faithful “while your greatest trials were upon you” and when any rebellious behavior might have plunged the South into an even more costly bloodbath. Nearly every black convention repeated some variant of this theme, as if to suggest that their wartime conduct provided ample evidence not only of their essentially peaceful nature but of their ability to function responsibly under the most trying conditions.
No race ever served a people more faithfully than we have served them who were our masters. When they were carrying on a war, the object of which was, to rivet our bonds still more firmly, and to make slavery perpetual, we at home conducted ourselves peaceably. We not only protected their wives and children, but tilled their fields and fed their armies. Did we, at any time rise against their helpless families, did we ever offer them insult of any kind?24
Actually, as both whites and blacks knew, the answers to those questions depended on individual experiences. The wartime record of slave behavior had been far more varied and complex, and the fidelity of blacks had often been fragile and fragmented. But for altogether different reasons, blacks and whites in the postwar years chose to ignore the wartime black Judases, the runaways, and the looters in favor of those who had stood by the side of their “white folks.” Even as blacks recited their wartime loyalty, however, they claimed not to have been “indifferent spectators” to a war involving their very freedom and that their faithfulness suggested forbearance and Providential guidance rather than contentment with their condition. Seeking to explain their “docility and obedience,” and their failure to avenge themselves on their oppressors during the Civil War, a statewide convention of Virginia blacks professed to see “the hand of an all-wise God, who has seen fit to hold the passions of His African children until He saw fit to stir the passions of the two sections of the country—that both North and South should suffer for the sin of slavery.”25
Even the most effusive promises of continued loyalty and faithfulness were conditioned on whites responding in kind—that is, with good works that were commensurate with black expressions of good faith. While Alabama blacks acknowledged the affections they felt for those “among whom our lot is cast,” they cautioned whites not to misinterpret those feelings as a willingness to forfeit or postpone “the rights of our common manhood.” Similarly, the freedmen of Robeson County, North Carolina, were not necessarily averse to the conciliatory spirit that characterized the Freedmen’s Convention of 1865, but they expected local whites to reciprocate by ceasing to beat them, drive them from their homes, and cheat them of their wages. Pending such developments, they promised to retain their skepticism about those native whites who were suddenly posing as their best friends. “We are ignorant, illiterate and all that, but we are not altogether so simple as to allow any person to impose himself on us as a friend when he has been our enemy and oppressor, until the arms of the United States struck the fetters from off our race.” Recitals of wartime faithfulness, then, were apt to be accompanied by a clear statement of postwar expectations and aspirations, with black petitioners basing their case on the need for mutual respect and a common humanity. “It is contrary to nature,” Georgia freedmen warned the state legislature, “to love that which is not lovely.”26
While proudly proclaiming their love of the South, black spokesmen and nearly every black convention indicated a still higher loyalty. The allegiance they professed to the nation, the Federal government, and the Constitution took precedence over any regional identification. “We are part and parcel of the great American body politic,” Kentucky blacks declared. “We love our country and her institutions. We are proud of her greatness, her glory and her might. We are intensely American.” And being “intensely American,” they had naturally sympathized with the Union cause in the Civil War. While blacks recited their wartime faithfulness, then, they might wish to make clear at the very same time the indispensable role many of them had played in crushing “the Slaveholder’s Rebellion.” How they chose to phrase their wartime services often depended on the audience they were addressing. In the Appeal they adopted for local consumption, Virginia blacks acknowledged their previous “docility and obedience.” But in the Address they drew up for the United States Congress, the same convention delegates described the conduct of a people who had been neither “docile” nor “obedient.”
We, with scarce an exception, in our inmost souls espoused your cause, and watched, and prayed, and waited, and labored for your success. In spite of repeated discouragements we continued to flock to your lines, giving invaluable information, guiding your scouting parties and your minor expeditions, digging in your trenches, driving your teams, and in every way lightening the labors of your soldiers; concealing and aiding your soldiers who were escaping from the prison pens of a barbarous foe, and when reluctantly permitted, we rallied by myriads under your banner, and by the heroism illustrated at Fort Wagner, Port Hudson, Milliken’s Bend and before Petersburg and Richmond, we demonstrated our capacity to understand the ideas of the contest, and our worthiness to stand side by side with the bravest in fighting it out.
No less explicit, William H. Grey, the leading force of the Arkansas freedmen’s convention, excoriated the “bastard republic” which had been established in the South, with slavery as its cornerstone, and revealed how his people had “thrown off the mask” and had provided the necessary force to break the back of the rebellion and save the Union. At first, he conceded, the mighty and educated northern Saxon had evinced little sympathy for the slave. But the American people suddenly awoke in 1862 to find him less of a fool than they had imagined. Beneath an exterior and “seeming respect” made up of endless chants of “yes, sir, massa” and “no, sir, massa,” they discovered “a human soul, with a will and a purpose of its own.” And Grey suggested that this discovery would have profound meaning for the nation. “We have now thrown off the mask, hereafter to do our own talking, and to use all legitimate means to get and to enjoy our political privileges. We don’t want anybody to swear for us or to vote for us; we want to exercise those privileges for ourselves.” The “peace and quiet” of Arkansas, he warned, depended on it.27
No matter how warmly they dwelled on the mutual affections and shared experiences of blacks and whites, no matter how genuine the professions of loyalty and the recitals of wartime faithfulness, none of the many postwar black meetings and conventions expressed the slightest tinge of nostalgia for the old days of slavery. That experience, as they viewed it, had been brutalizing and degrading. Although they might sympathize with the plight of former masters and mistresses and with the losses their “white folks” had sustained on the battlefield, such solicitude did not embrace the Confederate war effort or the “peculiar institution.” In their overly conciliatory Address to the Constitutional Convention, North Carolina freedmen acknowledged an intimacy with whites “unknown to any other state of society” and “attachments for the white race which must be as enduring as life.” But that same Address talked
of having emerged from a bondage under which their race had “groaned” for 250 years and suffered indescribable “degradation.” Even as the Kentucky Colored People’s Convention acknowledged some former slaveholders as their “best friends,” the view of bondage they incorporated in their Declaration of Sentiment was uncompromising: “that cursed system under which we so long groaned, which crushed every aspiration; debased us to the level with the beasts of the field; robbed us of every attribute of humanity, and prostituted our wives, our sisters, and daughters.” Nor did the Virginia convention, although denying any ill will toward their former owners, hesitate to write into the Declaration of Rights and Wrongs an assessment of the “peculiar institution” as scathing as any prewar abolitionist might have conceived:
We have been compelled, under pain of death, to submit to injuries deeper and darker than the earth ever witnessed in the case of any other people. We have been forced to silence and inaction; to look on the infernal spectacle of our sons groaning under the lash; our daughters ravished; our wives violated, and our firesides desolated, while we ourselves have been led to the shambles, and sold like beasts of the field.
When that same convention debated the wording of its Appeal to the American People, a delegate moved that the phrase “we feel no ill-will or prejudice towards our former masters” be amended by striking out “our former masters” and inserting “our former oppressors.” The convention agreed to the change.28
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