Whether slaves had masters who, as one Tennessee slave put it, “gave them rations and warm clothes to wear” or scraps and rags that did not cover their nakedness, their lives in bondage etched indelible memories of suffering and abuse. A collective consciousness born of brutal experience shaped the reactions of Callie’s family and other slaves when freedom finally came. One Tennessee ex-slave remembered that on the plantation where she lived they could go to church, where they were admonished to obey their masters. She went to services “barefoot with a rag tied around her head and a dress that came up to her knees,” which was all she had to wear. She also was “whipped with a bull whip” and was not ashamed to say, in old age, that she “still had scars on her back put there by the master.” Another Tennessee ex-slave told of being sold away from her husband, whom she had never seen again. At the slave yard they told her to take off her clothes and roll down the hill so the prospective buyers “could see you had no bones broken or sores on you.”5
The coming of the Civil War finally brought freedom but not an immediate response to the suffering. In 1862 and early 1863, when Callie House was a toddler, the Union Army swept through Tennessee, which had joined the Confederacy. In their wake the slaves made a mass move toward freedom. Her family was among the thousands of so-called contraband—slaves who either ran away or whose masters fled at the Union approach— in their wake. When the Union soldiers, whom the children called “the Blue Men,” came, slave men, women, and children followed along behind them. The women did laundry and cooking for the soldiers; the army gathered up the black men to work as laborers, digging ditches and building fortifications. Refugees slept where they could and ate what they could find. Then the Union decided to recruit blacks as soldiers. Callie House’s father, Tom Guy, like many other freedmen, probably joined the Union Army in the 29th U.S. Colored Infantry Regiment. The unit served in the area at the Battle of Stones River at the end of 1862 and the beginning of 1863. In heavy fighting that the Union won, more than a third of the Union and Confederate troops were killed, wounded, or captured. In November and early December 1864, the 29th Regiment also helped repel the Confederate drive into Tennessee, ending at Franklin just south of Nashville. The fighting and the federal occupation devastated farms and communities in much of the surrounding area, including Rutherford County. The numbers of refugees—contraband—fleeing slavery increased to a torrent.6
When the Union soldiers came, slave men, women, and children, called “contraband,” followed along behind them. The women did laundry and cooking for the soldiers; the men worked as laborers, digging ditches and building fortifications. Congress enacted a law in July 1861 endorsing their use. These men began flooding into Fortress Monroe near Hampton, Virginia, when the Union occupied it in May 1861. “Morning Mustering of the ‘Contrabands’ at Fortress Monroe, on Their Way to Their Day’s Work,” Harper’s Weekly, 1861.
House’s family and other African Americans tried to gain and maintain their freedom without being demoralized by the uncertainty all around them. African-American mothers and fathers begged Union officials to help them regain their children and reunite their families. At the same time, some former slave owners tried to regain or retain African-American children as slaves, even after abolition had come, by taking them as apprentices without their parents’ permission, or simply assaulting any parent who came to claim a child. A soldier stationed in Nashville in August 1865 begged his wife from Clarksville to join him. She did not want to leave before rescuing their daughter, who was still claimed by her former owner as a slave. The Freedmen’s Bureau agent gave her an order for the child’s release. The former slave owner complied, but as mother and child started down the road he overtook them and “beat her with a club and left her senseless on the ground after which he returned home with the child.” The former slave owner was arrested by Bureau officials and fined $100 for having “maltreated” her. However, in the meantime her soldier husband thought she had forgotten him, and he “married” another woman. Bureau officials refused to help dissolve the new “marriage” because upon seeing that some of the children of his original wife were “mulattoes” and others were “black,” they did not believe the soldier could have fathered all of them. The beleaguered mother was treated as a loose woman who could not be helped.7
The chaos and confusion, the elation over freedom, the struggle to survive, and the scars of their bondage shaped exslaves’ thinking about the meaning of abolition. Freedom for Callie and other ex-slaves would have been very different if the Union had kept its promises to give them land confiscated from Confederate slaveholders. The reparations question could have been settled at once. For the ex-slaves, the promise of land was real, not just something they imagined or hoped for. General William Tecumseh Sherman made the promise when thousands of freed people followed the troops when he marched his army from Atlanta to the sea in 1864-1865, laying waste the Confederacy. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton heard reports that Sherman had been heartless and shown indifference to the poverty-stricken condition of the newly freed people. Stanton came to Savannah in January to meet with Sherman and talk to African-American leaders about their needs. Twenty blacks selected by Union authorities, deacons, and ministers, three quarters of whom had been slaves, came to the meeting and let national leaders know that land was their major priority. When asked how they could best support their families, their self-selected leader, sixty-seven-year-old Baptist minister Garrison Frazier from Granville, North Carolina, replied, “To have land and turn in and till it by our labor.”8
With Stanton’s support, Sherman approved the request. He issued Order Number 15 of January 16, 1865, designating the rich sea islands and plantation areas from Charleston to Jacksonville, thirty miles inland, for settlement by the freedmen. Each adult male could claim a forty-acre tract. The March 3, 1865, Freedmen’s Bureau Act repeated the promise that each freedman would be assigned “not more than forty acres” of abandoned or confiscated land at rental for three years and an option to purchase at the end of that time with “such title thereto as the United States can convey.” Word of the promise spread quickly among the ex-slaves.9
By June 1865, 40,000 freedmen had been settled on the coastal lands and were growing crops. The promise of forty acres and a mule seemed a reality. However, any hope that this policy would expand to the rest of the South proved to be an illusion. After President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, President Andrew Johnson gutted the policy. He issued an amnesty proclamation on May 29, 1865, pardoning many rebels and restoring their lands to them. Abolitionists tried to stop the policy change, but to no avail. The government dashed the sea island freedmen’s hopes after their hard work tilling land they thought was theirs. General Oliver Howard, who later founded Howard University, was ordered to either persuade or force blacks occupying the land under Sherman’s orders to abandon their claims to their former owners and return to work for them as laborers. Incredulous, the freedmen cried out at the betrayal. The accusation: that the government would “make freedom a curse to us, for we have no home, no land, no oath, no vote, and consequently no country.” Years later Wiley Childress and other aging ex-slaves recalled with still burning anger that “before Freedom the slaves were promised forty acres of land when freed but none ever got it.” He had also never heard of anyone “getting money” for their labor from the government.10
Although the rumors of land distribution continued to spread among the freedpeople, the government failed to keep the promise in the sea islands, middle Tennessee, or anywhere else in the South. House’s family worked and scrimped to help themselves with no government assistance. Members of Callie House’s family and other ex-slaves, such as ex-slave Ellis Ken Hannon, “dun all kinds of jobs. Anything that came along,” to stay alive. By 1866, Reverend John Savary, an abolitionist traveler in the South, reported the beginnings of the sharecropping and crop lien system, which soon gained a stranglehold on the freedpeople. He knew they would have great difficulty improving th
eir status if they had no land and no capital: “They will continue to work on from day to day, and from year to year, without more than enough to keep soul and body together.”11
“Sunday Morning in the Virginia Pines,” Harper’s Weekly, June 5, 1897. Freedpeople saw the ability to worship in their own way as one of the essential differences between slavery and freedom. The church was the meeting place for religious and social activities, including political action and the local ex-slave pension chapters. These worshipers attended a rural church in Virginia.
In the confused, fluid atmosphere of war and Reconstruction, although poor and landless, the freedpeople in Rutherford County and elsewhere in the South worked together and organized their own churches and schools. Before the war, slaves had worshiped separately in white churches or independently in secret when they could escape the eyes of their masters. Free Negroes in the North had established the African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church. After the war, separate black churches proliferated as African Americans sought to exercise autonomy over their religious lives. They wanted to have their own facilities and to hear from their own preachers, who, though God had called them, had been prevented from preaching freely during slavery. Now ex-slaves wanted to worship in their own way. They saw choice in the matter as one of the essential differences between slavery and freedom. Beginning in contraband camps, in Rutherford County and elsewhere in the South, separate African-American denominations soon appeared as southern and northern churches united. In 1867, Baptists organized the Consolidated American Baptist Convention, which was absorbed by the National Baptist Convention in 1880. The representatives of three million members met in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1895 and formed the National Baptist Convention of the United States. Southern Methodists formed a new denomination in 1870, the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church. As new denominations were formed, the African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church spread in the South. Most of the congregations, especially rural ones, were small and could rarely pay ministerial salaries. Consequently, black ministers had to hold full-time nonministerial jobs, as did House’s brother and brother-in-law. Most also usually served two or more churches.12
Despite their financial poverty, Callie and other freed children gained some primary school education. Northerners, moved by the ex-slaves’ plight, used private charitable resources to augment the freedpeople’s own efforts to obtain an education, and philanthropic agencies sent “Yankee schoolmarms” to operate schools in the South. By 1869, seventy-nine northern aid societies supported African-American schools in the South. The Freedmen’s Bureau, established in 1865, had spent more than $5 million on black education by 1871. By 1870, the bureau operated 4,239 schools with 9,300 teachers and almost a quarter-million pupils. By early 1865, there were eight teachers teaching five hundred black children in Murfreesboro, the Rutherford County seat, a pupil-teacher ratio of more than sixty to one.13
African Americans in House’s community, like those elsewhere, so intensely desired education that they immediately began to teach one another. They believed there could be no real freedom without education. One Tennessee ex-slave recalled that “The white folks didn’t want them to learn nothing.” If they saw a slave pick up a piece of paper with writing on it, “they would yell put that down, you want to get into our business.” Freedpeople built their own schools. Out of their meager resources, they purchased lots and raised money by subscription to pay for the materials to erect buildings, most of which had neither water nor lavatories on site. Blacks paid the salaries of northern white teachers, raised money for their board, boarded black teachers in their own homes, and paid tuition and fees at Freedmen’s Bureau schools. The schools used a primer published by the American Tract Society that taught reading, Christian morality, and civic duty. In March 1867, the Tennessee legislature passed a public school law to support schools by a state property tax. The Freedmen’s Bureau schools gradually came under the control of the state. But in 1869, the state repealed the law and left education to the counties.14
The former slaves eagerly sought education. Women helped establish schools and made sure children attended. Other children are already on the way to school while these two are tardy. “Preparing for School,” Harper’s Weekly, November 2, 1872.
Northern white teachers, like this one, took great risks to fill the gap when there were few black teachers to help educate the freed children and adults. By 1869, seventy-nine northern aid societies supported African-American schools in the South. “Primary School for Freedmen, in Charge of Mrs. Green, at Vicksburg, Mississippi,” Harper’s Weekly, June 23, 1866.
Obtaining an education put Callie and other black students at considerable risk. While African Americans passionately desired education, some whites just as adamantly wanted to limit their opportunities. These whites understood that, for blacks, education could lead to empowerment. During the early years of Reconstruction, southern whites burned schools (thirty-seven in Tennessee in 1869) and insulted and abused white teachers of African Americans. Some southern whites feared that educated African Americans would undermine white supremacy and challenge entrenched beliefs about the genetic, physical, and mental superiority of whites over blacks. Education might also enable blacks to keep track of their wages, credits, and debts. In 1869, the Tennessee legislature decided that counties could, but did not have to, levy taxes to provide separate schools for blacks and whites. In 1872, the Freedmen’s Bureau relinquished entire control and responsibility to the states and the counties. Education as a form of compensation for slavery was abandoned.15
Despite the state and county governments’ neglect, until at least the early 1900s, African Americans in Rutherford County provided their own schools. They received little help from government at any level. African-American church congregations built structures to use for both education and religious services. During Callie’s early years, the buildings were generally one room with a potbellied stove for heat. The teachers would sometimes cook a meal of soup or beans. In 1879, the state mandated a course in agriculture along with reading, writing, arithmetic, and civics. The school term was barely six months long. One teacher taught all grades using primers and large cards with simple religious wording. Students were of all ages, including adults who were learning to read and write for the first time.16
Because of the lack of resources and their poverty, African-American students often attended school for only short spurts between their hours of labor during the few months of the school term. The education they received was also problematic because of the skepticism of some northern teachers about the ability of their charges and the cultural differences between teachers and students. Local African-American teachers were always in short supply, if available at all. Many schools lacked room or teachers for the numbers of pupils who tried to attend. Churches established colleges to train African-American teachers, beginning with Fisk University in Nashville in the 1860s. Responding to the immediate need after the war, the Freed-men’s Bureau created a number of short-term institutes to prepare basically trained teachers quickly. However, the state of Tennessee did not fund a college for African Americans until 1909.17
W. E. B. DuBois, born in 1868, taught in a rural Tennessee school in the early 1880s and described the schoolhouse as a log hut used to store corn, with a fireplace instead of a stove and benches made of rough planks without backs, no blackboards, and a great distance for the children to walk. But, he said, “I loved my school, and the fine faith the children had in the wisdom of their teacher was truly marvelous. We read and spelled together, wrote a little, picked flowers, and listened to stories of the world beyond the hill.”18
When House became an advocate for pensions, she told exslaves that their right to ask for a compensation law was guaranteed by the government. She pointed out that “the Constitution of the United States grants to citizens the privilege of peaceably assembling themselves together and petition their grievance[s].” She had learned this lesson despite her very rudimentary scho
oling available in the Rutherford County schools. During Callie House’s youth, African Americans in Tennessee wanted land, schooling, and religious freedom. But they also wanted to participate in electoral politics. Before the Civil War was over, blacks held conventions that pushed for abolition and the right to vote. The organizers were men who had been free before the war or freed in the military, some of whom were Baptist or A.M.E. ministers. In October 1864, 144 blacks from eighteen states, meeting in Syracuse, New York, in a National Convention of Colored Citizens of the United States, issued an address to the people of the United States, written by Frederick Douglass. They asserted, “We want the elective franchise in all the states now in the union, and the same in all such states as may come into the union hereafter. The position of that right is the keystone to the arch of human liberty; and without that the whole may at any moment fall to the ground; while, with it, that liberty may stand forever.” The group also demanded abolition and lamented the abandonment of the promise of land to the freedpeople. They organized a National Equal Rights League to continue the work. Five delegates from Tennessee attended that convention.19
African Americans showed immediate interest in the right to vote and hold political office. In Louisiana, where the Union captured New Orleans in the summer of 1862, freedpeople of color organized early. By November 5, 1863, a meeting of free colored persons at Economy Hall demanded political rights for themselves but did not include the ex-slaves. Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback, a Union Army Louisiana Native Guard veteran, led the speakers.20
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