Postmasters assumed powers that were virtually unreviewable by the courts to deny the use of the mails when they determined that an enterprise was using the mails to defraud. The Congress funded postal inspectors, who zealously enforced the law, and the courts upheld the postmasters’ actions. By the end of the century, lotteries practically disappeared. The Post Office Department, however, tried to end practices targeted by Congress. The ex-slave pension movement’s exercise of the right to petition the government became a target of the Post Office Department’s expanded power. The postmaster’s unconstrained power became abusive, and it unnecessarily interfered with civil liberties.11
When Barrett sent House the fraud order notice, he had no evidence of illegal activity. And federal officials knew they didn’t because Pension Bureau officials in President William McKinley’s administration had watched the growth of the ExSlave Association across the South. The inspectors had collected no evidence of fraud. Furthermore, the association’s growth was unimpeded by pension inspectors’ surveillance and also what they reported as efforts by authorities to “run” organizers out of town. Barrett’s “evidence” of “frequent complaints” to the Post Office Department consisted of letters complaining that whites believed the movement was crooked and how it excited the old “negroes.” The files also contain a much larger number of letters from ex-slaves and their family members. These letters express curiosity about the legislation and ask if anything had passed and, if so, how to apply. One ex-slave asked, “Is there anything to it?” and “When can I get a payment?” Others described their poverty and ill health since slavery and asked, “Is it true the government might help us?” Instead of recommending an analysis of the feasibility of exslave pensions, Barrett attacked with a fraud order prohibiting officers of the Ex-Slave Association from sending or receiving correspondence of any kind.12
When Callie House received Barrett’s letter, her shock quickly turned to anger. Although her official title was only assistant secretary, House indicated in a long handwritten reply that the association acted on behalf of “four & half million slave[s] who was [were] turn[ed] loose ignorant bare footed and naked without a dollar in their pockets without a shelter to go under out of the falling rain but was force[d] to look the man in the face for something to eat who once had the power to whip them to death but now have the power to starve them to death. We the ex-slave [sic] feel that if the government had a right to free us she had a right to make some provision for us as she did not make it soon after our Emancipation she ought to make it now.”
House insisted that a pension would remedy “wrongs this Government allowed to be suffered by us without redress.” During slavery masters worked blacks as chattels, “in violation of the Declaration of Independence.” Officials, under the auspices of the government, denied slaves liberty and equal rights.13
House’s defiant response offered a sharp contrast to the nonthreatening demeanor whites expected from blacks, no matter what their economic circumstances. As Benjamin Mays, longtime president of Morehouse College in Atlanta, later reflected: “the more a Negro owned the more humble he had to act in order to keep, in the good graces of the white people.” A Mississippi farm owner explained that he had made it through “hard work, slow saving, and staying in our place, acting humble, that’s how I did it.” African-American men who avoided trouble were required to be “always respectful, never disposed to fudge on the rights of the white people.” African-American women were to behave as “simple and silly-minded” and as generally lacking any semblance of serious thought.14
Naturally, House’s impassioned, thoughtful, unapologetic defense did not deter the Post Office from attacking the association. With the approval of Postmaster General Charles Emory Smith and Assistant Attorney General James Tyner, his supervisor and uncle, Barrett distributed the promised fraud order to local post offices and the press. The order instructed all post offices to deny payment on money orders made out to the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association or to any of its officers in their official capacity. It also excluded from the mails any literature of the organization or letters addressed to the association or any of its officers. The basis of the order was noted as “It having been made to appear to the Postmaster General, upon evidence satisfactory to him” that they were receiving money through the mails through fraudulent activity.15
The order was accompanied by Barrett’s letter including the usual boilerplate that the post office did not interfere with citizens’ constitutional right to petition the government. Instead, the department dishonestly claimed a paternalistic responsibility to protect “ex-slaves from the rapacity principally of unscrupulous members of their own race, who in the benevolent garb of ministers of religion or other (often assumed) Professors, endeavor to and do prey upon the credulity and inexperience of their unfortunate brethren.” According to Barrett, the National Ex-Slave Movement existed only to provide “salaries, expenses, etc. for their personal use.” These are “flagrant frauds” and can be of “no possible benefit to the colored race.” Therefore, any mail for the association or its officers would be returned to a sender marked “Fraudulent.”16
To Mrs. House’s consternation, black newspapers published the post office’s fraud order as the government requested, usually without comment. For the most part, they ignored the pension issue advanced by a poor people’s movement with no notable leaders, and focused on the priorities advanced by well-known African-American leaders. For example, Calvin Chase’s Washington Bee, perhaps the most important African-American newspaper, ignored House, the association, and their legislative efforts, even refusing to publish notices of meetings or information they were sent. Black newspapers used most of their space to cover social engagements and local religious services. They also focused on the need for vocational education and occasionally discussed the rapidly accelerating disenfranchisement of black voters.17
White newspapers denounced the members of the association, House, and other leaders as misguided. The papers blamed Vaughan because as a white man he should have known that his idea would excite the “negroes” unnecessarily and make them less tractable. The Washington Evening Star, on September 21,1899, reported that Vaughan had offered to help the post office to suppress the other organizations. They noted that he had long since given up his own efforts to gain a pension as a fruitless cause. However, the paper laid the blame for the continuation of the movement not on African Americans but on “base white men.” As the Washington edition of the Nashville Banner put it, some white members of Congress “might be brought to support it to bring money to their own districts.” These men bought Vaughan’s political argument of local benefit to the depressed southern economy or to northern locales to which blacks had migrated from the South, such as the “Exodusters” who had gone to Kansas. The Star concluded that these white men knew that pensions would never pass. It was “sickening and ludicrous” to stir up the “negroes” by supporting the cause.18
Certainly, real swindlers who used the pension idea bilked some unsuspecting ex-slaves. Rainey Badger of Blythe DeSoto County, Mississippi, sixty-five years old and a midwife, complained that a white man calling himself Woodruff had swindled her. He had come to her house in October 1899 and identified himself as a pension agent working for the government, telling her that she would receive $600 on October 28 and $12 a month thereafter. He had charged her $5 to “pay the men in Washington who handled the papers.” She had only $4.50 saved for her house rent and store account. She gave it to him, and he said he would collect the additional fifty cents when she received her pension. She remembered that he mentioned President McKinley, but he “talked like a mocking-bird in the morning,” so fast that she could “only recollect what he said in spots.” She reported that he “staid there one night and got one meal but never paid her. Word got out that he was there and during the next day before he left several people came by and paid him.” That day he left with “a good handful of silver.” L
ocal officials caught some swindlers; others remained free, while the federal government focused on House and the association.19
The government’s priorities showed in the stark contrast between the hands-off attitude toward Vaughan and the pursuit of House and the Ex-Slave Association. It demonstrated the selective use of governmental power. Barrett charged that the ex-slave pension movement organizers enriched themselves and their families from the movement but offered nothing to support his assertion. At the same time the Pension Bureau and Post Office Department tracked funds Vaughan received and concluded that he had pocketed substantial profits. In 1899, the commissioner of pensions estimated that Vaughan had collected at least $100,000, although he reported spending no more than a total of $20,000 on lobbying and publications.20
Whatever Vaughan’s motives, unlike Callie House, he had profited from the cause before abandoning it. However, the government began an almost twenty-year campaign to end the pension movement, and it targeted House, a thirty-three-year-old seamstress and laundress with no right to vote but the capacity to become the de facto leader of a movement strong enough to pose a threat to powerful national officials. Despite the government’s threats, she was determined to organize the ex-slaves.21
CHAPTER 4
Voices of the Ex-Slaves
To render assistance to its members in good standing and to devise ways and means for the caring and establishment of decrepit ex-slaves, their widows and orphans, and to unite all friends in securing pension legislation in favor of the ex-slaves.
CHARTER OF NEW ORLEANS CHAPTER
(JUNE 1899)
THE LOCAL COLUMBIA, Boone County, Missouri, National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association Lodge Number 4 convened its monthly meeting in the basement of Wheeler Chapel Church one evening in the fall of 1899. Luvenia Fields, the secretary for “the insuing year,” carefully took the minutes, and she also read aloud materials sent by the association headquarters to her husband, Reuben, and other members, some of whom could not read or write. The oldest member present was 101 years old; the youngest, thirty-nine.1
It was a sadly impoverished group that the federal government had declared war on: small sects like those at the Boone County meeting. But the power of the idea of reparations and the growing number of supporters scared government officials, even though they had the groups under surveillance and knew that they were nothing more than ex-slaves and their families meeting to commiserate and work peaceably to achieve economic justice.
The Boone County, Columbia, Missouri, Lodge was one of many branches and very typical of the groups Mrs. House and Dickerson had organized. The Association had continued to grow like wildfire after the 1898 convention. Mrs. House and Dickerson had enrolled at least 34,000 members by the middle of 1899 and thousands thereafter. Local association affiliates were organized in Atlanta, New Orleans, Vicksburg, Kansas City, and small rural and urban communities all across the South and Midwest. Like the veterans’ pension lobbyists and land agents and Vaughan’s example, they started a newspaper, the National Industrial Advocate. The paper’s name reflected the ex-slaves’ workers’ consciousness in a period when attempts by blacks in some communities to demand pay for their work had led to violence.2
As they recruited members, Mrs. House and Dickerson distributed literature, arranged annual national meetings, collected petitions from ex-slaves, and supported lobbyists in Washington for the passage of pension bills. Along the way they also strongly emphasized the need for local mutual benefit activities as the linchpin of their solidarity. Membership, open to all ex-slaves and anyone who wanted to support the cause, required the payment of an initial fee of twenty-five cents and then ten cents’ monthly dues. Local organizations paid $2.50 for a charter. The association’s rules also permitted the possibility of “extraordinary” collections of five cents per member to defray unusual expenses. House traveled extensively even after they had identified agents among the preachers in communities to mobilize for the association. She spoke at public meetings constantly “to both white and black” people about the cause. Besides local ministers, Mrs. House and Dickerson recruited other leaders as agents of the national organization in the field to collect petitions and keep the membership informed.3
House’s travels took her to all of the ex-slave states, including those on the border. She went to Kansas, to which ex-slaves had migrated as part of the 1879 exodus and to Oklahoma, where African Americans had developed black towns. Statewide chapters incorporated, and branches and lodges grew everywhere she went. At meetings like the one on that September evening in Columbia, Boone County, Missouri, where Luvenia and Reuben Fields and others met in a church basement, members told sad stories that were so much like Mrs. House’s own personal history. In the telling and retelling of their slavery, hard work, poverty, and the condition of their relatives, neighbors, and friends, association members reinforced the commitment that kept the organization together and growing.
Everywhere Mrs. House went, the story was familiar. Boone County’s ex-slaves lived among a population about the size of Callie House’s birthplace in Rutherford County, Tennessee. The county lay in the middle of the state of Missouri, at the confluence of the nation’s mightiest rivers, the Missouri, the Ohio, and the Mississippi. Its topography includes gentle prairies, water-fed plains, and Ozark uplands. Boone County farmers raised livestock and corn, oats, wheat, rye, barley, tobacco, and fruit. The county had few large slave owners; only 13 percent of slaveholders owned more than ten slaves and only 1 percent had more than twenty. On even the large plantations, the staple crop for-profit system of the South remained largely unknown. Slaves did general farmwork for farmers who raised diversified crops. Many of the male ex-slaves who joined the association continued as farm laborers, and the women worked as laundresses and domestic servants. Most of them were dark-skinned, heavyset, and of medium height, and Callie House resembled most of the other women at this meeting and others. She often visited local councils like this one during what she described as her travels “among strangers,” organizing for the cause.4
Ex-slaves at the lodge meetings talked of how far they had come since slavery and yet in recent years they had a sense of skidding backward to destitution. Some had stories of harsh masters and slave patrols. They talked of how their actions were controlled by their masters and limited by the slave codes, and the risks they were willing to take to exercise some freedom. Almost everyone at the meetings had been part of trying to develop community with other slaves and had been whipped for their trouble. They had slipped away to dance with slaves at another plantation or chatted among themselves on market days or during trips to town or gathered to have prayer meetings despite the ban against having a religious meeting without a white person present.5
The ex-slaves had almost uniform recollections of constant deprivation. They talked of wearing clothes until they were worn out and going barefoot even in winter. Food consisted of an unvarying routine of water and cornmeal either fried into hoecake or boiled into grits. Even for slaves owned by wealthy whites who had smokehouses bulging with meat, meals did not vary much. Some ate buttermilk with cornbread crumbled into it. Less stingy owners permitted slaves to have biscuits made from “shorts” on Sundays, the “stuff dat they feed cows,” and sorghum, a syrup made from grass. At Christmas, which “meant no more to us dan any other day,” some were given sorghum and shorts to make gingersnaps.6
Beyond the poverty and persistent entrapment, the deepest wounds persisted from seeing other slaves sold away and families torn asunder. Done for whatever purpose, the separation of families was a painful memory for every ex-slave. They talked of mothers taken from their babies and being whipped for crying out in their pain. Some remembered being separated from their parents even when they had forgotten almost everything else about the slave experience. There was H. Wheeler, a local slave owner, who had sold his slaves so he could go to join the California gold rush. He had sold thirty-year-old Milly and her child
ren and three other youngsters, all under ten years of age. At the sale of H. B. Hulett’s estate in 1858, one buyer bought Henry, Caroline, and her two-year-old daughter. Three years later to settle business debts the family was sold again. John Bruton’s widow inherited three men and two women. The remaining heirs divided up the ten children among his slaves, ranging in ages from two to ten years. Sometimes one member of the family would be manumitted but not others. William Jewell provided for the emancipation of a mother but not her children. John Tuttle freed George and left his wife the right to emancipate any slave. When she died, she freed George’s wife, Eliza, but none of their children.7
The ex-slaves told of constantly praying and of hearing secret prayers for freedom all of their lives in bondage. They saw the coming of the Civil War as answering their prayers. Missouri was the state where the Compromise of 1820 had been a catalyst for fights over slavery along geographical divisions and the Dred Scott case, which reinforced slavery. The state’s people, economy, and political interests had long been divided along sectional lines. Antislavery and foreign-born immigrants in St. Louis had defeated attempts to secede from the Union. But in the border states like Delaware, Maryland, and Kentucky slavery remained even though they did not join the Confederacy. In 1860, there were 5,034 slaves, 53 free Negroes, and 14,399 white citizens in Boone County, Missouri.8
Some owners took their slaves farther south, hoping to keep them in servitude. Some blacks ran away to free territory; others followed the Union troops that passed through; and some joined the Union Army. Those who stayed behind heard about what happened to some who left. Seven men who ran away in 1863 enlisted in a regiment of Massachusetts troops and were sent to Morris Island, South Carolina; within six months only one survived. In Boone County so many slaves ran away that their flight became an exodus. In the whole state there were 114,931 slaves in 1860 but only 73,811 in 1863. In Boone County the numbers of slaves decreased from 5,034 to 2,265 between 1860 and 1864. Lincoln’s Civil War policy included the payment of compensation to owners who freed their slaves for service in the border slave states, including Missouri. Slavery was abolished by the state legislature in January 1865.9
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