In the House debate on the bill, Congressman Ernest Roberts, Republican from Maine, stated, “There is no question that the aged and colored people who once were slaves are more subject to destitution and require charitable aid more than any other class of people in the United States.” Since the government did not establish charitable institutions, it should assist those who would. He asserted that in the District of Columbia, the only available public facility, in the basement of the Children’s Asylum on Eighth Street, could accommodate only ten persons at a time. Therefore, it made sense to help blacks care for the “needy and aged of their own race,” using funds that belonged to African-American soldiers.35
Even though the convention liked the idea of the home, which to them seemed as unlikely to pass as the pension bill, it was opposed, according to Callie House’s report to the members, because the small size of the proposed facility was grossly insufficient. In addition, members believed it would “block the passage” of reparations “for all time to come.” Convention participants decided, instead, to continue their efforts to pass the Mason Ex-Slave Pension Bill.36
The tone of the congressional debate supported the exslave delegates’ conclusion that the Home for Ex-Slaves Bill would not pass. Representative Joseph Cannon, Republican representative from Illinois and chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, explained that in reality no surplus funds existed from unclaimed pay and bounty for white or black soldiers because the Congress made appropriations only when needed. The bill therefore consisted of “mere leather and Brunella…mere deception, mere sticking in the bark-buncombe, so to speak. This bill would do the manly and honest thing if it said, there is hereby appropriated $100,000 to build this home.” Also, he saw no reason to cut off the possibility of claims by black soldiers’ relatives in 1903 unless claims were also ended for the relatives of white soldiers. They might make claims later. He pointed out that “claims agents are writing all over the country.” They are “hunting up everybody to whom we owe anything and three times as many bodies to whom we do not owe anything. They are lively ducks.” They might still identify claimants.37
Reverend Dudley McNairy from Nashville, one of the charter incorporators, was elected president of the Ex-Slave Association at the 1898 convention. The convention instructed him to go to Washington to lobby for the Mason Bill.
Democratic representative John Gaines from Tennessee objected. He predicted that the home would attract the poor from different states to the District of Columbia and become a burden, making the U.S. government “a poor house.” Georgia Democratic representative Charles Bartlett pointed out that the funds “did not come altogether—possibly in very small part—from colored soldiers of the District of Columbia.” They came from “various parts of the union.” But now the advocates wanted to use it “for the benefit exclusively of persons residing in or near the city of Washington.” Roberts answered that it would be located there but for the “people of the whole United States.” Committees in both houses of Congress reported out the Home Bill, but it did not pass.38
Most of the convention time was spent on deciding how to move the pension legislation forward. In addition to electing Mrs. House assistant secretary, the convention delegates named Reverend Dudley M. McNairy, one of the charter incorporators, president, and Isaiah H. Dickerson general manager, “to whom all communications should be addressed.” At the end of the meeting, the delegates instructed McNairy to go to Washington to lobby for the bill, which they persuaded Senator Edmund Pettus, Democrat of Alabama, to reintroduce. It repeated the provision of earlier bills: a pension of $15 per month and a bounty of $500 for each ex-slave seventy years and older. Those under seventy would receive $300 as a bounty and $12 per month until they reached the age of seventy. Those less than 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 those legally obligated to take care of those who could not care for themselves were eligible for the pensions. McNairy expressed the hope that the “many ex-slave organizations striving to secure the enactment of the Vaughan Bill [Mason Bill]” would affiliate with the association so as to “consolidate under one head.”39
This early certificate of the Ex-Slave Association does not mention mutual assistance.
The constitution and by-laws and the report of the convention included photographs of the officers, including Callie House. The membership certificates boasted a picture of Senator Mason of Illinois and, in one corner, the words “$500.00 bounty,” the amount immediately payable, in addition to $15 per month, to those seventy or older if the bill passed. The certificate did not explicitly reiterate the language in the charter concerning the mutual benefit mission but spoke only of efforts to aid “the ex-slave movement and raise funds to promote the passage of the bill.”40
The 1898 national convention approved the issuance of these formal legal documents of the Association, including photographs of House and the other officers.
House’s first letter to the membership, printed in the convention proceedings after her election as assistant secretary.
National African-American newspapers and leading politicians and activists did not change their views concerning pensions just because the effort became black-led and successful. While the white press derided the movement as ridiculous and fraudulent, these leading African Americans either ignored it or criticized it as a distraction from the struggle for political rights and a hopeless cause. House often expressed outrage at their refusal to provide publicity that would help to organize the movement. These leaders’ efforts to gain land and education aid and even election protection in the Congress had failed miserably. Yet they would not even try another avenue for relief for poor black people. From her perspective, “The most learned negroes have less interest in their race than any other negro as many of them are fighting against the welfare of their race.”41
Despite these divisions between better-off, better-educated African Americans and the poor freedpeople who supported pensions, the association had organized successfully and was rapidly growing. The fees it collected, House explained, paid “expenses of the movement in printing literature and postage on literature sent out to notify our conventions and meeting for speaking and to pay traveling expences [expenses] and support of men and women who are giving their whole time to the movement.” The association also spent the funds to “send men to Congress as delegates to present our petition when Congress meet[s] the first Monday in December.”
In addition, the local chapters used the ten cents’ monthly dues they collected to pay for “places to meet at and to help old and decrepit members to render mutual assistance any way they see fit.” Callie House expressed pride in the convention’s work as she circulated the minutes to the membership. She was especially honored that she had been “elected by the people as an officer in this organization which belongs to the people and not to the officers.” She was proud that old ex-slaves were helping one another locally. She also was excited that ex-slaves were exercising their citizenship rights to gain a new law at a time when disenfranchisement had closed other avenues for political action. The association was off to a promising start.42
CHAPTER 3
The Association Under Attack
The ex-slave pension movement “is setting the negroes wild,… making anarchists of them.”
PENSION BUREAU INSPECTOR W. L. REID
(1899)
ECSTATIC OVER HER ELECTION as assistant secretary, Cal-lie House left the convention determined to continue the rapid expansion of the ex-slave pension movement. In the midst of her joy she received a letter from Harrison Barrett, acting assistant attorney general of the Post Office Department in Washington, D.C. Reading the letter, House sensed danger to the very existence of the movement. Barrett notified her that he was issuing an order denying the association the use of the mails because it supposedly engaged in fraud. The Associat
ion, like other organizations, was almost absolutely dependent on using the post office to correspond with members and to transact financial affairs. The people’s commitment was the lifeblood of the organization, but the mails were a crucial means of communication and support. House and the other officers traveled constantly, but they could not be everywhere at once. They traveled by train and by horse and carriage, sometimes walking for miles in the country. Besides, travel was costly, arduous, and slow, especially in rural communities where many of the chapters developed. She did not know it at the time, but Barrett had sent the same letter to the other association officers and to Dickerson, the general manager.1
House knew from Dickerson that the Pension Bureau had investigated Vaughan’s clubs at the behest of whites who wrote in to complain about the idea. She also knew that Vaughan had denounced others in the movement and stopped organizing. But she did not know the extent of the interest the Association’s activities had aroused within the federal government. When House and Dickerson began organizing the Association, federal inspectors continued their monitoring of ex-slave pension advocates. Inspectors consistently wrote in their reports that they found nothing illegal in organizing a lobbying group and the government could not prosecute the pension-seeking leaders unless they claimed to be federal officials, and no evidence had been found of that. The Bureau sent Special Examiner William Baird to a local pension meeting in Chattanooga, and he reported seeing nothing misleading. The organizer, to whom he spoke, explained that the membership fee of twenty-five cents paid “expenses of agitation” for the legislation. The ten-cents-a-month dues paid for a hall, lights, maintenance, and publications.2
The Association enrolled at least 34,000 members between July 1897 and April 1899, and thousands thereafter. House had no idea that Bureau officials had stepped up their surveillance because of the Association’s rapid growth. The Bureau sent letters to ministers and others who acted as association agents warning them of complaints of fraud. The letters told of individuals who collected small amounts of money from the exslave “dupes” to put their names on a pension list. The letters asked that they report anyone who traveled “throughout the southern states representing that the [pension] bill had become law, that various sums had been appropriated to pay the pensions thereunder, and that they were officers of the Government of the United States fully authorized and empowered to cause the names of these ex-slaves to be inscribed upon the pension rolls.” The letters heavy-handedly warned that those who engaged in such representations could suffer punishment of a fine of not more than $1,000 and imprisonment for no longer than three years or both. The letters routinely pointed out that the government did not mean to interfere with the right to seek pensions since citizens had an “unquestioned right” to associate to lobby for legislation. But this disclaimer did not lessen the intentionally chilling effect the notices had on the organizers.3
After the Ex-Slave Association’s charter convention in 1898 and the continued development of local chapters, the suspicion of their operations grew. House saw African Americans as victims and the federal government as an accomplice in their subordination and impoverishment. Now, in contrast, Barrett’s letter indicated that government officials defined blacks as ignorant victims of the ex-slave pension movement. Moreover, the “ignorant” were also seen by the government as capable of dangerous rebellion. In May 1899, Pension Bureau Inspector W L. Reid told his superiors that the ex-slave pension movement “is setting the negroes wild, robbing them of their money and making anarchists of them.” If this continues, the government “will have some very serious questions to settle in connection with the control of the race.”4
House was totally oblivious to the possibility that the Post Office Department would interfere with their efforts to gain pensions. If she had known about the evolution of postal authority and enforcement activities, Barrett’s letter would not have been such a surprise. Essentially, Pension Bureau officials had decided to have the postmaster general use his antifraud powers to suppress the association. They assumed that cutting off the mails would strike a death blow to the movement. The federal government targeted the ex-slave pension cause as threatening enough for deployment of law enforcement resources, while at this same time the same federal government remained generally unreceptive to blacks’ complaints of disenfranchisement, racially motivated assault, and even lynching, carried out with the cooperation of local and state authorities. In this general attitude of neglect of black concerns about safety and eroding citizenship rights, political officials in three agencies, the Justice Department and the Post Office Department, at the behest of the Pension Bureau, decided to declare war on the Association. Acting Assistant Attorney General Harrison Barrett rationalized their actions by explaining that House and her colleagues knew that there had “never been the remotest prospect” that Congress would appropriate pensions for African Americans. Of course, pension legislation had repeatedly been introduced in Congress. Further, often in the legislative process, proposals are made for years before public education and circumstances make passage possible. The income tax followed a similar path successfully until legislation, and then a constitutional amendment was enacted. The impoverished ex-slaves might presumably take longer and need more tenacity to achieve an objective than better-endowed groups.5
Barrett and the other officials registered their distaste at the temerity of Callie House and the others in acting, uncontrolled by whites, and asserting their independence and commitment. Federal officials feared the association’s successful membership campaigns. Mobilizing so many freedpeople heightened the danger of rebellion by “wild” African Americans when freedom’s first generation discovered that there would be no pensions or other compensation for slavery. As a result, federal officials kept close surveillance on the association’s rapidly growing membership and put politically appointed local postmasters on the front lines of attack. The commitment of A. W. Wills, the postmaster in Nashville, where the association maintained its headquarters, was key. Arriving in Nashville from Philadelphia after the Civil War, he practiced law and was a claims agent before obtaining a political appointment as postmaster in 1890. A loyal Republican, he served as a delegate to the national convention in 1900 that selected the William McKinley-Theodore Roosevelt ticket. He was eager to implement the harassment policy ordered against the association.6
House and the association had become targets of a law enforcement process that had been developed for reasons totally unrelated to black activism. Fraudulent use of the U.S. mails to promote sin and commercial scams became a matter of great concern in the nation toward the end of the nineteenth century, leading to the exercise of extraordinary power by the postmaster general in controlling the use of the mails. This power had developed only gradually, but eventually the postmaster had the ability to suppress valid freedom of expression such as the lobbying and petitioning exercised by the Ex-Slave Association. The Constitution permits Congress to regulate post offices and the mails. Before the Civil War, Congress excluded from handling only matter that weighed more than three or four pounds. During the Civil War, the postmaster general exercised the power to ban material that might be considered treasonable or might give aid to the enemy. Congress had upheld the postmaster’s actions while recognizing that they had the right to instruct him to declare certain matter unmailable. Extending the principle after the war, Congress established categories of unmailable matter.7
The gradual expansion of the postmaster’s powers continued as Congress first focused on making obscenity unmailable in an 1865 law that excluded from the mails any “obscene book, pamphlet, picture, print, or other publication of a vulgar and indecent character.” Congress repeated this provision in an 1872 codification of the postal laws, and extended it in the 1873 Comstock Law, passed at the behest of the New York Young Men’s Christian Association’s Committee for the Suppression of Vice, which had begun campaigning against obscene literature. The YMCA hired Anthony Comstock to fight the t
raffic in obscene literature. Comstock, an impecunious dry-goods salesman, said that religious fervor and the loss of a friend who had succumbed to sexual excess, supposedly caused by reading erotic publications, stimulated his interest in the issue. The Comstock Law expanded the obscenity category to include birth control information, appliances, and masturbatory materials, and permitted search and seizure. Comstock served until his death in 1915 as both a special agent of the post office and secretary of the Society for the Suppression of Vice in New York. Working under New York state and federal law that the New York YMCA had sponsored, he had the power to arrest violators and seize their materials.8
In addition to the campaign against obscenity, the Post Office Department gained increased powers when “gift enterprises” and lotteries that supposedly gulled citizens became a matter of public concern. Congress responded by enacting provisions against using the mails for fraudulent purposes. They gave the postmaster general the power to issue fraud orders to forbid payment on money orders and to return letters after marking them “Fraudulent” on the outside. However, he was not supposed to open letters but to base their exclusion on whatever appeared on the envelope.9
Lottery companies challenged the law unsuccessfully. By the 1880s, the postmaster general’s enormous powers, including the protection of the public from matter that might impair their morals, including obscene literature, lottery tickets, contraceptive devices, and information about them, had been upheld by the courts. Almost every Congress in the 1890s discussed even greater extension of the postmaster’s powers. The 1895 reenactment of the postal fraud laws made clear the power to exclude letters directed to any person obtaining money through the mails by false pretenses or promises. Having disrupted the dissemination of so-called obscene matter, Congress and the post office spent increasingly less time on obscenity and more time on fraudulent schemes involving counterfeit money and lotteries.10
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