Despite problems and setbacks, the pension idea fascinated House. The information she gleaned from the pamphlet and talking to Dickerson reflected her own experience and that of her family and neighbors. Talk of pensions for ex-slave men and women reminded them of how even the black Civil War soldier, who had become a hero among African Americans, was ignored by whites, who wanted to forget the racial reasons for the war. Paul Laurence Dunbar, who wrote “The Colored Soldier” in 1896, reflected the views of African Americans that military service should guarantee the rights at least of those who had served:
They were good to stop a bullet
And to front the fearful fray.
They were citizens and soldiers,
When rebellion raised its head;
And the traits that made them worthy,—
Ah! those virtues are not dead.
House and other ex-slaves knew of the role black soldiers had played in the war and the difficulties they had in receiving the pension benefits that flowed freely to white veterans. The 1890 pension act had severed the link between pensions and service-related injuries. Any veteran who had honorably served ninety days in the military, even if never injured or a noncombatant, could apply for a pension if he could find a physician to affirm his unfitness for manual labor. In fact, old age became the only legal requirement for a pension. In 1906, Congress changed the law to say so explicitly. After the turn of the century, Congress also raised the benefit levels for veterans and dependents several times. By 1915, 93 percent of surviving veterans, as pensioners, received what had become, essentially, an old-age survivor’s benefit. In addition, many veterans held federal jobs and collected a pension.59
Pension-eligible veterans constituted a privileged group. Mostly northern whites, the group included some 186,017 African Americans who had served in the Union forces, about three fourths of whom came from the southern states. A significantly lower percentage of blacks received veterans’ pensions than white veterans. Racial hostility among Pension Bureau officials blocked blacks’ access to pensions. Northern blacks probably fared better than the southern freedmen or their dependents, who often lacked documentary evidence of their service, their dates of birth, or their surnames. Widows of the men who had served in the ranks in southern black regiments suffered most severely from this problem. Unable to prove their relationships or to obtain service records for the deceased, they went without aid. For example, the widow Félicie Cailloux spent years trying to obtain back pay and a pension for the service of her late husband, André Cailloux. He was a much-publicized Louisiana Native Guard hero who died in 1863 leading a charge at Port Hudson. In 1871, destitute, she finally received a pension of $20 per month, three years before her death on October 19,1874. Harriet Tubman, the “Moses of her people,” who had escaped from slavery herself and ushered others to freedom on the “Underground Railroad,” had served in the Union Army as a cook, nurse, scout, and spy but received no pension despite years of petitioning and the aid of the secretary of war and Union Army officers, who had observed her contributions. In 1888, the government awarded her a widow’s pension upon the death of her second husband, Nelson Davis, who had served in the Union Army during the Civil War. She received $8 a month until 1899 and then $20 a month until her death in 1913. The $20 Harriet Tubman received was less than the $25 provided by law. In 2003, the protests of grade school children who visited her former home in Auburn, New York, led to a $11,750 congressional appropriation to make up the difference. However, Tubman’s family has yet to receive a pension for her service.60
House, and the people she knew, experienced extremely low wages, hard work, illness, and disease in the days after slavery ended. But as the ex-slaves aged, their problems worsened. Families lacked resources for health care and had to scrape together money to pay for funerals. Neither land nor education as reparations for poor freedpeople had been achieved by African-American political leaders. And so, to Callie House, pensions for ex-slave women and men seemed a worthy cause.
CHAPTER 2
Organizing the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association
If the Government had the right to free us she had a right to make some provision for us and since she did not make it soon after Emancipation she ought to make it now.
CALLIE HOUSE
(1899)
CALLIE HOUSE’S LIFE was transformed when she stepped into public view as an activist working for the pension cause. Sociologist Alden Morris has described how the 1950s and 1960s civil rights movement found a base and leadership in the church, the only place where blacks could meet freely with a minimum of white control. This was not new. Throughout the period since Reconstruction, African Americans used the church as the center of community action, and the reparations movement found a home in church, too. House and Dickerson established their headquarters in Nashville, which had become the black church hub of the South, including the publishing operations of the two largest black religious denominations: the National Baptist Publishing Board and the African Methodist Episcopal Church Sunday School Union Publishers, both located there.1
The city of about 76,168 people in 1890,40 percent of whom were African Americans, was just thirty miles from Murfreesboro, the Rutherford County seat. It may not have been the most obvious venue for a poor people’s movement despite its attractiveness as a transportation hub and its history as the place where Pap Singleton’s exodus had started. A sizable African-American middle class grew around Fisk University and two other local black private colleges and at Meharry Medical College and the publishing houses.2
Using the contacts Dickerson had established from his work with Vaughan, House and Isaiah Dickerson traveled throughout the former slaveholding states to enroll members and organize local chapters through the churches. In the years before his death in 1909, Dickerson’s experience was invaluable to House. They went on the road, organizing the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association and receiving immediate and enthusiastic responses from African Americans. At the grassroots level, the ex-slaves, who were at the lowest economic level, embraced what was essentially a poor people’s movement. Old and disabled by so many years of manual work, bad diet, and no medical care, these people understood and supported the association’s demand for pensions to compensate for years of unpaid labor. The effort also was endorsed and supported by local preachers, and the association’s membership grew rapidly. Part of the association’s program included offering medical and burial assistance. It also offered a democratic structure in which local people had control and a voice, at a time when blacks were practically disfranchised or on the verge of becoming so throughout the South.
Soon after House began the Ex-Slave Association work, she and her children and her brother and his family moved to South Nashville, where she made her home for the remainder of her life. Despite organizing work, she still described herself as primarily a washerwoman and seamstress. House’s sister Sarah and her family continued to live in Murfreesboro.3
Her brother, Charles Guy, worked as a porter and first boarded in South Nashville with House at 1003 Vernon Street, near Eighth Avenue between the reservoir and the capitol. Later he would move his family, consisting of his wife, Mandy, or Amanda, and daughter Annie Mary to Nashville. The homes in House’s neighborhood were single or double tenant, with a living room, bedroom, and kitchen adjacent to each other in a row. Because it was possible to stand at either end and look straight through, such homes were named “shotgun” houses.4
In her work as a washwoman, House was like many African-American women of the time, either married or widowed with children, who took laundry-work into their homes. Generally, before she married, a woman would work as a maid or cook in a private home. After she had children she stayed home and took in wash. Washing machines did not appear for home use even for the wealthy until about 1914. Consequently, these women washed bedding, towels, and every item of clothing by hand; they also ironed for an entire family each we
ek. The pay sometimes totaled about $2. At the time rents or mortgage payments in the neighborhood were $5 to $12 a month, thus such women had a difficult time earning enough to maintain even a meager existence. In addition, women who worked at home so they could care for their children did not receive the food scraps to take home that women working as domestics outside the home used to help feed their families.5
African-American women washed their family’s laundry and took in washing from poor and well-off white families. This woman had to boil the clothes and constantly bend to stir the wash kettles and lift soaking wet, heavy bedding.
About the time House moved to Nashville, gasoline washing machines became available, although clothes first had to be soaked in kettles of water heated over a wood fire. However, poor people could not afford the washing machines, and even with the advent of commercial laundries, poor and well-off white women continued sending their clothes to black women’s homes for laundering well into the twentieth century. Race remained a significant issue even in getting clothes washed, and Nashville commercial laundries thought it wise to advertise on streetcars and on the sides of its delivery wagons “No Negro Washing Taken.” Washerwomen purchased soap, if they could afford it, or made lye soap from pork grease saved from cooking. They scrubbed the clothes on washboards, used bluing for whitening, and made starch by boiling flour. They heated irons on the stove and removed excess starch from the clothes’ surface by running the iron back and forth across salt poured on paper covering the ironing board. The women’s hands were reddened from the harshness of the soap, and they worked with constant pain from bending over to stir the wash kettles and from lifting soaked, wet, heavy bedding. This method of doing laundry by hand remained unchanged from House’s day until the 1950s for poor African Americans in Nashville, including my own family. In the 1940s, in Nashville, the mother in the family next door to us took in laundry and washed on a washboard, much as House had done but with the addition of a recently bought hand wringer.6
House and her brother, Charles, like their neighbors, were the first generation of African Americans to reach maturity after the abolition of slavery. Their parents were the first generation to experience old age in freedom, but their work conditions remained harsh. Although the 1890 Nashville City Directory listed four African-American women as managers and owners of boardinghouses, three as dressmakers, and nineteen as sick nurses; fifty-five were listed as laundresses—washerwomen. The 1910 and 1920 Censuses reported most women in the neighborhood as either domestic workers or laundresses. The men worked as live-in or live-out chauffeurs, laborers, porters in department stores and hotels, bootblacks in barbershops, packers in factories, and an occasional plumber in a plumbing store or a carpenter or plasterer working for a contractor. Some of the men, such as House’s brother, Charles, also worked as itinerant Primitive Baptist preachers. They felt called to preach, although they had neither congregation nor church income.7
To a casual observer, Nashville after the Civil War appeared as a provincial, unpretentious southern city. Most of the city’s area lay within a two-mile radius of the capitol. Poor people lived in the streets and lanes around Capitol Hill. The waterfront and the railroad depots dominated their views. Among the dirty houses, trash-filled streets, taverns, and brothels, the Republican Banner cried, “Our city looks like a pig pen, and is profitable to the owners of the city scum, but it speaks badly for our notions of health and cleanliness.”8
House’s neighborhood evolved from Edgehill, one of five camps the Union Army had established for the freedpeople— called “contraband of war” until legal abolition—in Nashville. South and below the capitol on the hill, House’s neighborhood bordered “Black Bottom,” with Lafayette Street, a pathway cut through to give better access to Murfreesboro Pike (Eighth Avenue South), the northern boundary.9
The old city cemetery and Fort Negley, built by contraband to protect the city from the Confederates, the Louisville and Nashville railroad yards, and white residents between the tracks and Ninth Avenue South, served as the eastern boundary of Edgehill. Fort Negley is still standing. Near Eighth Avenue South, another pocket of blacks lived in Rocktown. The entire South Nashville black neighborhood was within walking distance—about a mile—from downtown.10
The freedpeople developed their neighborhoods from the camps, where they at first lived in shacks. Soon they built wooden shotgun houses. Nashville had gaslit streetlights after the Civil War, and electricity, waterworks, and a streetcar system came before 1900. However, working-poor African Americans usually had no plumbing, electricity, or gaslight until well after the turn of the century. As late as the 1940s, in that same South Nashville neighborhood, the utility services still did not come to our part of town. Our poverty and blackness made us easy to ignore. At night, we still depended on light from oil lamps or the burning fireplace that was the only source of heat. Sparks left telltale scars on the legs of anyone who sat or stood too close to the fire, indelibly marking a shared experience of need and deprivation. In this neighborhood, House and her family made their home and eked out a difficult existence.
In South Nashville, where House’s family and other working-class blacks who had started their lives in the contraband camps lived, the new industries created a noxious environment. Their housing subsisted with the noise and pungent smells of four mills, breweries, and chemical processing plants near the rail yards.11
Nashville’s overall cityscape changed fundamentally between the Civil War and the 1890s, when House moved to town, as a result of industrial and business transformations. Annexation, the acquisition of Edgefield in 1880 with a 65 percent white population, and streetcars to outlying regions shifted the population in the city, making it blacker, while the overall population of the legal metropolitan entity became less black. The process of annexation has led to continued dilution of the black population in the metropolitan Nashville area today. By the turn of the century, the city had become a major commercial center and wholesale marketplace in the South for industry, banking, and professional services. The rail, water, and turnpike facilities gave Nashville an advantage over most other southern cities. Once the home of the upper class, the city’s uptown core became a more concentrated commercial district that pushed most residential uses outward as it expanded.12
A contrast between rich and poor in the 1890s. (Top) African-American children playing marbles. (Bottom) William Harding Jackson, Jr., a son of William H. Jackson of Belle Meade Plantation, in his pony carriage in front of the mansion.
The adult freedpeople in House’s community continued to labor at the lowest-paying work as they aged or had to be cared for by their poor, hardworking children. Most rented their homes, though rent and mortgage payments ranged from $5 to $12 a month and absorbed most of their income. Callie House and other washerwomen, with the $2 a week they earned for their labors, struggled to make ends meet and keep a roof over their heads. Poor African Americans could not afford more than a diet of hoecake and greens, often without meat and similar to what they had eaten during slavery. Their diet, along with polluted water, outhouses, poor heating, and minimum medical care, continued to erode the quality of life for poor black Nashvillians. When the smallpox epidemic of 1895 killed large numbers of black children, the city quarantined the African-American neighborhoods. The city’s health officer called repeatedly and unsuccessfully for attention to the acute need for medical services for black citizens. While white health conditions improved, high comparable death rates and infant mortality remained problems in the black community.13
Tennessee’s segregation law of 1881, the first in the South, affirmed the racial subordination that already existed. By the 1890s, in Nashville as in Rutherford County, Callie House and other African Americans felt deeply the effects of Jim Crow. Men could still vote legally, but they faced powerful whites who enacted poll taxes and shifted polling places and registration lists to keep black men from the ballot box. Under Jim Crow, the city provided separate fairgrounds for b
lacks and whites, and the trolley cars and streetcars separated African Americans from whites. Railroad stations had separate waiting rooms, and saloons and brothels were separate or segregated. Amusement parks had separate areas within them for African Americans. Ostracized African Americans developed the habit early of organizing mutual aid when they established burial assistance associations that used the Mt. Ararat and Greenwood cemeteries to bury their dead next to, but segregated from, the white cemetery.14
Ex-slaves in other communities fared no better, which is why they, too, eagerly joined the Association. Mrs. House and her colleagues worked to establish chapters across the former slaveholding states, working separately from Vaughan. House and Dickerson encouraged members to sign petitions to Congress and held conventions culminating in the chartering of the association under the laws of Tennessee in Nashville in 1898. House and Dickerson identified members to apply for charters in each state where they organized. The state chapters recognized local lodges and councils.15
The five incorporators were apparently all Primitive Baptist ministers, although confirmation for one of them, W H. Gosling, has not been found. Reverend Nathan Smith from Bransford, Tennessee, who according to the 1900 Census was a fifty-year-old farmer, lived with his wife and stepson. He owned their farm and worked the property with his stepson. Luke Mason, the fifty-year-old pastor of Lewis Street Baptist Church, who made his living as a painter, and Squire Mason, probably his brother, a sixty-two-year-old shoemaker who had operated a downtown shop catering to whites for almost twenty years, joined the group. Both their wives “kept house,” which meant they stayed at home and did not, insofar as the Census taker could tell, take in laundry, and they each had five grown children.16
Callie House and the founders of the Ex-Slave Association echoed Samuel Cornish and John Russwurm when they published the first African-American newspaper in 1827 announcing “to Long Have other Spoken For us.” House and the other leaders at the first convention, in Nashville in 1898, asserted that they could better advocate their own cause: “Thirty-three years of advantages of schooling has prepared the Negro to look out for the welfare of his race; and he can better foster the cause of his race—he has the brains to do so and race pride and manhood are needed at the front; race loving men and women too.” House, believing that the development of disconnected small pension organizations would weaken the effort to gain legislation, declared unity as a goal of the association. She asserted, “Let us consolidate all ex-slave organizations and bring to bear upon the lawmakers of the country which we labored so long to develop every degree of influence within our power.”17
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