However, emigrationism as a political solution did not die. Segregation, lynching, poverty, and disfranchisement kept the idea alive among African Americans. In the late 1880s and thereafter, despite Booker T. Washington’s opposition, the idea gathered steam. Washington thought blacks should stay in the South and accommodate themselves to conditions there. However, letters to the American Colonization Society came from blacks in Nashville and almost every other sizable city and the surrounding areas, inquiring about going to Liberia.42
In the 1890s, A.M.E. bishop Henry McNeal Turner, a former Union soldier and Georgia legislator, was the chief supporter of the back-to-Africa idea. Although Turner had no viable organizational base or economic means for sending blacks to Africa, some whites supported him. In 1894, with the backing of Alabama senator John Morgan, Turner formed the International Migration Society, and by 1896 he sent two boatloads of emigrants to Liberia.43
African-American ministers were divided on the subject of emigration because they could lose congregations. Further, politicians who had combined with Democrats to maintain some power, by pretending they had voting constituencies, would lose their posts. Therefore, although people met in churches and schools and made plans to leave, they often met with hostility from their leaders.
Some African Americans in House’s community emigrated to Kansas, and others discussed the possibility of going there or to Africa. She remained in Rutherford County raising her children after the death of her husband, William. She became a washerwoman, taking in laundry like her mother and other women in similar circumstances. Soon a new idea for political action surfaced in Rutherford County and other communities all over the South and Midwest where ex-slaves lived. Agents came to the community selling a pamphlet entitled “Freed-men’s Pension Bill: A Plea for American Freedmen.” Ten thousand copies of the pamphlet, at one dollar each, were sold in 1891, and several editions were produced thereafter. Poor African Americans bought such publications, usually jointly, and passed copies around and read them to one another since they often could not afford the purchase price. Just as they had done with newspapers and other literature in their churches and community organizations since slavery, those who could read the pamphlet read it to the others. This idea of pensions for ex-slaves captured House’s imagination.44
From reading his pamphlet, she learned that the author Walter Vaughan, a former editor of the Omaha, Nebraska, Daily Democrat, a native of Selma, Alabama, and a white Democrat, had used political contacts to have an ex-slave pension bill patterned after the idea of the very popular Union veterans’ pensions introduced in the Congress. Callie and other African Americans had Union veterans in their families, and they knew pensions were available, although widows and children had difficulty obtaining them because they lacked documentation of their marriages and births.
Vaughan had persuaded his Nebraska congressman, the Republican William J. Connell, to introduce the legislation in 1890, establishing a formula later used by the Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association. The measure called for providing for a pension of $15 per month and a bounty of $500 for each ex-slave seventy years old or older. Those under seventy would receive $300 as a bounty and $12 per month until they reached the age of seventy, when it would increase to $15. Those under sixty years old would receive a $100 bounty and $8 a month until they reached age sixty. Those less than fifty years of age would receive $4 per month and then, at age fifty, $8 per month. Ex-slaves and such persons as “may be charged by laws of consanguinity with the maintenance and support of freedmen who are unable by reason of age or disease to maintain themselves” were eligible. Relatives who cared for a freed-man could, upon providing satisfactory proof to the secretary of the interior, receive the pension. Ex-slaves under the bill included only those freed by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, by state constitutional amendment, or “by any law, proclamation, decree or device.” The plan appeared uncomplicated, requiring only that a claimant had been enslaved. Under the law, any black person alive before 1861 was presumed to have been a slave in the South unless proof to the contrary was presented.45
Walter R. Vaughan, former editor of the Omaha, Nebraska, Daily Democrat, native of Selma, Alabama, and white Democrat who first proposed the idea of ex-slave pensions. Wanting to indirectly increase the financial resources of whites in the South, he created a proposal that was patterned after the idea of the popular Union veterans’ pensions of the period.
Cover of the book Freedmen’s Pension Bill: A Plea for American Freedmen. The cover of Vaughan’s book shows his interest in remedying the harm done to the South and not necessarily the harm done to slaves. Vaughan hired agents and sold his pamphlet at one dollar each in 1891; several editions were produced.
Vaughan’s explanation for his involvement in the issue did not impress House. He mixed concern for the freedpeople with disdain and economic opportunism. As he explained it, seeing groups of freedpeople in a “tattered condition” while on a trip through Mississippi in 1870, he had decided that the government should pension the ex-slaves, who, he asserted, had been well cared for until Emancipation had left them poverty-stricken. But he wanted to help blacks primarily in order to revive the southern economy. The ex-slaves would, through spending the pensions they received, pass along the financial benefit to whites. By adding to the region’s meager resources for business and industrial development, the money provided to ex-slaves would relieve the devastation of the South caused by the Civil War. Vaughan’s regrets that he had been too young to serve in the Confederacy, his sadness over the Confederate defeat, and his nostalgia for antebellum days were rejected by House. Like other Reunionists, Vaughan saw slavery as a benign institution that had benefited African Americans. His pro-slavery sentiments may have been in accord with the reigning pro-Confederate ethos among whites North and South, but it devalued blacks. At the time whites in both the North and the South were engaged in a great reconciliation movement in which they emphasized brotherhood. They also redefined the causes of the Civil War as totally about saving the Union. They lamented the unfortunate destruction of the southern way of life and left no place for a discussion of the war as focused on freedom and equality for African Americans.46
Despite her misgivings about Vaughan’s motives, House paid careful attention to Vaughan’s detailed description of how he had gained support for ex-slave pension legislation. Until then, she had had no idea how the lobbying process worked. Vaughan explained in detail how he wrote to luminaries asking for “testimonial” letters that he could publish in his newspaper to aid in organizing and lobbying. Those he solicited included Frederick Douglass, the most important African-American human rights leader of his day, who had become increasingly disgusted with the public’s fading memory of slavery and its impact on African Americans.
Frederick Douglass—an integrationist and the most important African-American leader until his death in 1895. He supported reparations even though most elite African Americans opposed the idea.
Initially, Douglass responded that he found the reparations idea impractical, but finally decided that the nation owed retribution to African Americans, for the nation had “robbed him of the rewards of his labor during more than 200 years.” Furthermore, Douglass continued, the promise of land had been broken: “The Egyptian bondsmen went out with the spoils of his master, and the Russian serf was provided with farming tools and three acres of land with which to begin life, —but the Negro has neither spoils, implements nor lands, and today, he is practically a slave on the very plantation where formerly he was driven to toil under the lash.” Douglass asserted that if land had been given as promised during the Civil War, “The [N]egro would not today be on his knees, as he is supplicating the old master class to give him leave to toil.” In the absence of land, if a measure like the one proposed by Vaughan had been adopted earlier, “untold misery might have been prevented.”47
Callie House and other African Americans had heard of how the African Americans i
n Congress were trying to obtain federal aid for education as compensation for slavery. They also knew that the same leaders demanded greater protection for the right to vote as a priority. House and other blacks understood, even though Vaughan did not, why black newspapers and the three African-American representatives still in Congress after Reconstruction refused to support the pension bill.48
Those leaders, instead, focused on education and voting rights. The congressmen were Republicans Henry P. Cheatham of North Carolina, Thomas E. Miller of South Carolina, and John Mercer Langston of Virginia. Representative Cheatham, born in 1857, had lived in the Big House, where his mother had worked as a house servant. He attended school and college and became a school principal and later recorder of deeds in Vance County. Described as a “distinguished looking mulatto,” he read law, ran successfully for Congress in 1888, and was reelected in 1890. While in Congress, he introduced a number of bills designed to help African Americans, including one to reimburse the depositors of the bankrupt freedmen’s bank, but his major emphasis was on aid to black public schools.49
John Mercer Langston, one of three African-American congressmen when ex-slave pensions were first proposed. He opposed the idea and worked instead, unsuccessfully, for the passage of bills to support education and protect the right to vote.
Miller, born in Ferrebeeville in 1849 to free Negro parents, “could have passed for white but refused to do so.” His parents paid for his education, and he attended college and law school. Admitted to practice in Beaufort, he became active in the Republican Party and won local offices. Elected to Congress in a dispute decided by the House of Representatives in 1888, he lost the election in 1890. He returned home, where he worked to establish South Carolina State College for Negroes and became its president. He, too, thought education and voting rights were the only routes to empowerment for African Americans.50
(Left) Thomas E. Miller, African-American representative in Congress from South Carolina. Miller, like Langston, opposed ex-slave pensions. Right: H. P. Cheatham, African-American representative in Congress from North Carolina. Cheatham joined Miller and Langston in opposing ex-slave pensions.
Langston, born in Louisa County, Virginia, in 1829, was the son of Captain Ralph Quarles, a white plantation owner, and Lucy Langston, of both “Indian and Negro descent.” His white father educated and supported his African-American children and arranged for a friend to take care of them after his death. Educated at Oberlin in Ohio, he became a lawyer, theologian, and active participant in antislavery societies. During the Civil War, he helped recruit soldiers and worked for the Freedmen’s Bureau. He also ran the law department and became acting president of Howard University. He held two diplomatic posts to which the Republican administration appointed African Americans at the time, minister to Haiti and chargé d’affaires to the Dominican Republic. In 1890, he won a contested election to the House of Representatives but left the Congress in 1891. Langston, too, insisted that instead of pensions and bounties for ex-slaves, “what we want is the means of obtaining knowledge and useful information, which will fit the rising generation for honorable and useful employment.” Education and political rights were his priorities.51
These legislators also shared House’s distrust of Vaughan’s motives. They suspected that he and his cronies wanted to give a few dollars to blacks to spend quickly, consequently enriching southern business but not uplifting the African-American community. They also did not believe the pension bill would pass and that it, instead, distracted from the education and voting rights initiatives they had urged on the Republican Party to help African Americans. In 1890, the Republicans made two unsuccessful legislative efforts to gain their objectives. Senator Henry Blair of New Hampshire pushed an aid to public education bill that would indirectly help blacks to gain an education. First introduced in 1884, the bill provided federal assistance to public schools with the amount based on the number of illiterate persons in each state. States with segregated school systems would have to apportion the money to black and white schools based on the proportion of illiterates in each race between the ages of ten and twenty-one. The bill would have given a shot in the arm to the inadequate black public school systems and provided a form of reparations not seen since the Freedmen’s Bureau efforts. The bill passed in the Senate in 1884,1886, and 1888 but failed each time in the House of Representatives. In 1890, the Senate refused to pass it again. Opponents argued that it would weaken private schools or that taking funds out of the federal Treasury would support demands for a higher tariff. The other bill, introduced by Representative Henry Lodge, provided for federal supervision of elections. Supporters noted that each Congress spent thirty to sixty working days on contested elections and questions related to the black vote in the South as Republicans tried to overturn the election of Democrats. Sponsors of the Lodge bill thought they could pass it with President William Henry Harrison’s support.52
The president, more worried about cracking the solid South to obtain votes for the high-tariff McKinley bill of 1890, gave only lukewarm support to the Lodge bill. In his first annual message, on December 3, 1889, Harrison praised “the Negro race” generally, and especially soldiers, veterans, and other African Americans who had remained in the South despite deprivation of their rights. The Lodge bill passed the House on a strict party-line vote but lost in the Senate after being held over until the next session to make way for a vote on the McKinley Tariff of 1890, which became law. The Blair education bill and the Lodge elections bill, although advocated by African-American leaders, had also been rejected. Nevertheless, House was not dissuaded from her interest in reparations.53
House understood the opposition to ex-slave pensions by African Americans in business and the professions, and congressional representatives. However, more bothersome was the opposition of influential white reformers, such as Albion Tourgee, who usually joined social justice causes. Tourgee, a Massachusetts lawyer who had gone South to serve as a judge after the war, repeatedly expressed disgust with the national abandonment of the cause of justice for the freedpeople since Reconstruction. However, he thought the idea of pensions would draw even more attention away from the effort to protect the civil rights of blacks. In 1892, he published a pamphlet in which he argued, “The Colored Race does not demand reparation—thank Heaven for that—only justice, equality of civil privilege, political right and economic opportunity, properly guaranteed and secured for the future.”54
Isaiah Dickerson, a Rutherford County African-American teacher and minister, had worked as a traveling agent for Vaughan. He left when they had a disagreement over management and the direction of Vaughan’s organization. Dickerson, who prided himself on his appearance, was always “nattily but plainly dressed, in dark suit and cravat.” Dickerson told audiences he had been drawn to the reparations movement when he saw “one morning in Memphis an old colored man being ordered by a policeman to leave a piece of meat he had taken from a swill barrel back of a hotel.”55
Dickerson then “decided that the best way to help the old ex-slaves is to get some money in their pockets.” For Union military veterans and their survivors, he said, “the pensions have increased so much since the War that anyone who’s been anyplace near the army can get one for a lifetime.” From where he stood, “there is no reason why the old ex-slaves who worked unpaid all their lives and then helped the Union digging ditches at the forts, washing the soldiers’ clothes, cooking for them and nursing the injured” deserved less. This was especially true, Dickerson felt, given the government’s generosity to white veterans.56
Dickerson told House that he thought the pension legislation could succeed. By April 1897, Vaughan had moved to Kentucky, where he described himself as engaged in the business of building electric street railways and other enterprises. Vaughan’s involvement in ex-slave pension organizing languished, aside from supporting the introduction of legislation in connection with selling his pamphlet. He continued to express the view that caring for the ex-slave
s had been a “burden” for southern white people too long, especially since they had been “deprived of their property without recompense.” Not just Congressmen Cheatham, Miller, and Langston, but House and other African Americans who heard Vaughan speak, had been suspicious of his motivation and leadership. Vaughan’s talk of the wonderful days of “moonlight and magnolias” during slavery and his autocratic style of operation repelled them.
Isaiah Dickerson. As a schoolteacher, minister, and former agent for Vaughan, he reinforced Callie House’s belief that African Americans could successfully organize a movement for ex-slave pensions and mutual assistance.
In consultation with the federal Pension Bureau, Vaughan decided to denounce anyone as a scam artist who promoted the idea if they did not work for him. In September 1897, he distributed a letter to newspapers explaining that he was the “sole author” of the congressional legislation. Vaughan also selected a black Nashville man, P. F. Hill, “a reliable, educated gentleman, a 53rd degree mason” and head of several fraternal orders, to act as chief of the Vaughan ex-slave movement. Only Hill had Vaughan’s “approval and authority in the work.”57
Meanwhile, Vaughan continued to schedule lectures and to use his contacts to ask legislators to introduce or support the bill, in order to sell his pamphlet. The local newspaper reported his visit to Nashville, in the summer of 1897, at a meeting organized by Hill, his anointed successor. The Nashville American reported that about fifty people had paid the admission fee of twenty-five cents each at St. Paul’s African Methodist Episcopal Church, after some people who refused to pay the fee had left.58
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