The ex-slaves in the association had vivid memories of the joy of emancipation and the confusion in its aftermath. Missouri was in chaos throughout the war and calm was not easily restored. Although the Union maintained political control, it had to endure several skirmishes and battles between U.S. soldiers and troops organized by the governor, Claiborne Fox Jackson, a secessionist, and Sterling Price, whom the governor appointed as commander of the pro-Southern militia. The state became a no-man’s-land of hit-and-run raids, arson, ambushes, and murder. Confederate guerrillas became notorious “bushwhackers.” Their followers after the war were people like the outlaws Jesse and Frank James and Cole and Jim Younger. The guerrillas tended to be sons of farmers or planters of Southern heritage, three times more likely to own slaves, and with twice as much wealth as the average Missourian. On the Union side, “jayhawker” counterinsurgency forces from Kansas matched the bushwhackers with similar tactics. In addition, Price, who retreated to the southwest corner of the state, continued to harass soldiers while claiming and losing territory during the war.10
“Negroes Driven South by the Rebel Officers,” Harper’s Weekly, November 8,1862. Slaves were driven to the deep South in the hope of keeping them in bondage. Some slaves ran away to free territory, others followed the Union troops who passed through, and some joined the Union Army.
The ex-slaves in the association told of the danger and constant uncertainty of the guerrilla warfare and the risks run by those who had run away. Some masters tried to avoid trouble by treating any soldiers or guerrillas who showed up, whether rebels or “blue jakets,” with equal hospitality.11
The ex-slaves remembered how soldiers and guerrillas would suddenly appear, looking for food. They would pick apples from the orchards, raid smokehouses and granaries, and make the slaves kill and cook chickens for them. The owners would warn the slave children not to go off with the soldiers because marauders would sell them south, never to return again.12
The ex-slaves recalled that the bushwhackers had shot and killed two Boone County blacks working near the village of Stonesport. They also had to be wary of guerrillas who pretended to be Union soldiers, whom the slaves saw as bringing freedom. For example, a woman who had fled her slave master and established herself near Sturgeon went back to bring another woman and four children to live with her. Bushwhackers disguised in federal uniforms shot and killed all of them except two small children. Slaves and masters were caught between a rock and a hard place. If they helped bushwhackers, the Union Army would harass them and if they helped the “blue jakets,” the bushwhackers would terrorize them.13
Even after January 1865, when slavery officially ended, the danger persisted. Ex-slaves told of the confusion and violence. The Jim Jackson gang of bushwhackers, several of whom were Boone County residents, terrorized the area’s blacks. In February 1865, the gang posted a notice saying that freedpeople must leave the county by February 15 or be killed. They also warned that any farmers who hired the freedpeople would be killed. When the deadline passed, the bushwhackers murdered a freedman working for his former master. They also hanged two blacks and threatened the white man who had hired them. Such terrorism continued in the county until bushwhackers were suppressed by the Union military in June 1865.14
The ex-slaves bitterly described how their poverty and deprivation worsened immediately after emancipation. Within two months of the Missouri legislature’s antislavery ordinance of January 1865, more than thirty men, women, and children died. On some days as many as three burials took place. The ex-slaves lacked food, fuel, and homes. They recalled that when they had been told they were free, it was hard to figure out what to do. Some owners asked them to stay but would not pay them. Some hired themselves out for food and clothing. Others left to try to find their mothers and fathers, searching the faces of any African Americans they met to see if they saw a resemblance. Others whose fathers and mothers were on the same farm told of how the families lived practically out of doors until they could build a log cabin. Others traveled around doing whatever work they could find. Some remembered being disappointed because they thought the slave owners’ farms would be divided and land given to them. Some ex-slaves recalled how their masters had “turned them out of doors,” to walk down the road in January 1865 in the snow. They were so angry at them for being free that they got rid of them as quickly as possible. Others had tried to keep the slaves in bondage, claiming their children as apprentices. Some exslaves had to leave secretly in the night because their masters were watching and would not let them leave in the daylight hours.15
The ex-slaves rejoiced when brighter days seemed to appear on the horizon. Whatever anger they had about emancipation, whites needed workers and signed labor contracts with the freedpeople. Freedpeople could work and get paid. George Jacob, following the usual local pattern, hired two women for $5 a week to do general housework and yard work. He also hired a black man to work his plantation for $12.50 per month. Businesses that had hired slaves from their masters now hired and paid the slaves. Christian College paid men $15 to $20 per month and women $8 to $10 to work as cooks, janitors, or fire lighters or to run the laundry. Those African Americans who had trades worked as blacksmiths or painters. Most of the men in the Boone County chapter took jobs as farm laborers; the women worked as laundresses and domestics.16
The Boone County ex-slaves’ lives improved in the next few years after Emancipation, when the community quickly regrouped, as African Americans did throughout the slave states. They sought to pool their resources and work together. The free Negroes who had managed to gain their freedom before the Civil War provided the only economic base in Boone County afterward. There were fifty-three free blacks in the county in 1860, only twelve of whom owned property. Their total personal estate was worth $5,220, including the property of Cinthia Boyce, a washerwoman who had $100. Gilbert Akers, the largest landowner, bought his freedom, then purchased some town lots, which he resold. By 1864, he had enough money to buy his fourteen children and grandchildren. By 1880, the Census identified blacks as making up 18.4 percent of the county population; their occupation was farming, as owners, renters, or sharecroppers. The largest landowners were persons who had been free before the war. However, some of the ex-slaves had been able to make a living as farmers since emancipation.
The Boone County ex-slaves recalled with pride the glorious day when they had achieved a major goal: to have their own churches where they could worship freely and listen to their own preachers. Another sign of their progress in freedom could be seen in marriage data. After slavery the Missouri legislature made marriage mandatory for former slaves living as husband and wife. Three hundred marriages took place in Boone County between 1865 and 1866, most of which were performed by white ministers. There were only two black preachers in the county at first, the former slaves Henry Warfield and Armstead Estes, an African Methodist Episcopal Church minister, who began to perform marriages. By 1890, almost all marriages among blacks were conducted by African-American ministers, one sign of the growth of the black church and clergy.
These impoverished freedpeople’s diet consists of cooked corn cake crumbled in soured “clabbered” milk. “Hoecake and Clabber,” Harper’s Weekly, November 10, 1885.
Boone County African Americans made churches their most important community political, religious, and social institutions, and many of Mrs. House’s meetings were held on church property. Most of the ex-slaves who attended church were either Baptists or Methodists. At first black churches met in homes until they were able to afford houses of worship. St. Paul’s African Methodist Episcopal Church in Columbia, which had 206 members in 1900, had become the largest black Methodist church in the county. Second Baptist Church, founded in July 1866, had sixteen original members, with James Hudson, licensed by the local white Columbia Baptist Church, as the minister. With a $3,000 loan in 1894 from the pianist and successful entertainer “Blind Boone,” the congregation completed a new brick church. John William “Blind” B
oone became the most famous local black of the period. Boone, along with his manager, John Lang, Jr., traveled throughout the country exhibiting his extraordinary talent as a pianist; he could make the piano simulate violins, guitars, banjos, and tambourines. Boone was a great resource for the community and occasionally gave concerts specifically to help the poor. By the time the association was founded, about 23 percent of the 4,500 local blacks belonged to churches. The Baptists were the largest denomination, followed closely by the Methodists. Black churchgoers raised funds from cakewalks and picnics and even solicited contributions from white coreligionists.
When interested blacks organized in the Boone County Lodge of the Ex-Slave Association, they already had experiences with fraternal and benevolent societies in the county. These organizations fulfilled a need for social activity, provided relief for members in need, and acted as burial associations and insurance companies for members. In 1867, blacks established the First African Benevolent Society of Columbia to aid the infirm, destitute, and aged. Membership cost a $2 initiation fee and monthly dues of fifty cents. By June 1867, there were fifty-seven members. By 1869, the Masons organized a lodge, and in 1879, the United Brothers of Friendship was organized. Both provided burial benefits for members and some monetary assistance for families when a member died. The members of both fraternal groups were generally under fifty and in their prime working years. Sanford Estes, a laborer and preacher who joined the Ex-Slave Association lodge, was a member of both the United Brothers of Friendship and the Masonic Lodge.
The children of Ex-Slave Association members had some literacy, primarily because African Americans in the county founded schools. In the summer of 1865, a committee of African-American church members held a mass meeting to raise funds for a church and school dual-purpose building. They raised $149 and bought a lot for $20; the Baptists then pulled out and started their own school. In 1867, St. Paul’s A.M.E. Church asked the state legislature for funds to support their school, but, instead, the legislature gave funds to the Baptist church and school. Consequently, by 1867 there were two schools in churches led by black men. The Baptist school, conducted by Charles Cummings, continued to receive state funding and was named the public school for blacks in 1868. Funds from the state, the community dinners, picnics, festivals, and the Freedmen’s Bureau made it possible to erect a building, known as Cummings School until 1898, when, upon a petition by African Americans, the Columbia School Board renamed it Frederick Douglass Academy. By 1898, the school had begun a high school program.
Between 1875 and 1900, education was not ideal for either African Americans or whites; however, blacks’ schools had worse conditions. The black schools were overcrowded, and the teachers were paid less than the white teachers. Missouri’s schools were segregated by law in 1889, but segregated education had always existed in Boone County. In 1900, only 14 percent of the black population over age sixty was literate, as were 19 percent of those fifty-one to sixty, 34.6 percent of those forty-one to fifty, and 50.8 percent of those thirty-one to forty. However, 71 percent of those between twenty-one and thirty were literate. Most of the ex-slaves in the local branch of the association were illiterate, but most of their children and grandchildren could read and write.17
Gains notwithstanding, the old ex-slaves at the lodge meeting talked about their despair in recent years as the meager gains they had made since Emancipation had stagnated or evaporated in the 1890s. They not only suffered from the same poverty and discrimination experienced by blacks elsewhere, but they endured the same class divisions within the community. Their circumstances made them good candidates for Cal-lie House’s organizing efforts.
From the members, she heard how the county’s always-present racial tension seemed to worsen. Ex-slaves recalled how a group of white men had shot into the African Methodist Episcopal Church during a festival in 1868. In 1878, a white man had shot a black cook for not preparing his breakfast quickly enough. In 1894, when a Boone County black woman ignored the vulgar remarks of a white man, he shot her. He was jailed, but not before he shot a black man. At least two riots occurred, one in 1878 in Ashland and another in 1882 in Rocheport, both with overly liquored participants, black and white, involved. In the second riot, six black men were jailed for two to seven years for shooting into a crowd of white men, injuring some after an intoxicated black man insulted a white man who drew his pistol and knocked him down. In 1895, Willie Eaton, the sister of one of the rioters, shot and killed Thomas J. White, the marshal responsible for arresting the black men. Convicted of manslaughter, she received a two-year sentence after a change of venue to Jefferson City. Clearly, African Americans in the county were prepared to try to protect themselves.18
After the enactment of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, male ex-slaves could legally vote. However, not all of the exslaves understood how voting would improve their lives since elected officials ignored their black people’s pleas. In 1896, the year they organized the association lodge, Columbia blacks protested a legal decision directing four black women arrested as prostitutes to work on the city streets and a rock pile. Black citizens, led by Reverend R. L. Beal of the A.M.E. Church, opposed prostitution but thought this was an extreme punishment. They publicly asked the city council to eliminate the practice, but the council refused, replying that it needed to rid the city of disreputable women.
In the ex-slaves view, the relatively small amount of progress freedpeople had made by the late 1890s had come to a halt. The depressed agriculture of the country took a toll. Many blacks who owned land lost it. By the 1900 Census, only 69 percent of blacks who farmed in 1880 were still doing so. African-American property ownership and taxpaying declined. Whites controlled blacks through segregation, lynchings, and a vagrancy law that provided for “selling away” anyone adjudged a vagrant by the local court for four years to an employer to work out his term. The law made no distinction based on race but targeted blacks.
For Boone County ex-slaves, their troubles had made it difficult to gather the resources to function after they organized the lodge. The national agricultural depression affected all Missourians but hit African Americans especially hard. They had become poorer in recent years, when in the 1880s they had thought they were just beginning to prosper. Increasingly after the Civil War black wives had to work, though, emulating the pattern of whites, the freedmen wanted to have their wives remain at home. Between 1870 and 1900, the number of households with only one worker decreased and the number of families with two or three workers grew. Also, relatives moved in together, so that nonnuclear households grew by 1900. In 1870, most wives did not work and only three women in the county worked as laundresses and one as a seamstress. In 1880, 129 worked as washerwomen and 3 as seamstresses. In 1900, 187 women washed clothes and 13 made a living sewing.
In 1900, Boone County had 39 African-American professionals: 13 ministers, 22 teachers, 2 physicians, 1 lawyer, and 1 musician. In Columbia, blacks owned one blacksmith shop, one barbershop, one grocery store, and a lunchroom. However, most African-American men worked as unskilled laborers earning seventy-five cents to a dollar a day. The women worked mostly as washerwomen, earning a weekly income of two to three dollars. Their economic status was only slightly improved since 1870, five years after Emancipation. In 1900, 186 black farmers operated 178 of the county’s farms, only 5 percent of the total. The farms were mostly small landholdings of which blacks owned 52.8 percent. The largest African-American taxpayers, except for “Blind Boone,” had lived in the county and had been free before the war. Even when blacks owned their homes, they were mostly mortgaged; but most owned no property at all. The city council enacted a poll tax of one dollar for every male citizen between twenty-one and fifty in 1895. These taxpayers numbered 812, and 31.2 percent of them paid no other tax. Among those assessed, 30.7 percent were black; of these, 225 paid no other tax or were delinquent in payment of their real and personal taxes. They were 88.5 percent of those paying a poll tax and were delinquent in other city tax paym
ents. Less than 50 percent of those assessed paid the tax, and it was repealed two years later. The poor obviously had no resources with which to pay.19
Occasionally some African-American veteran or widow succeeded in obtaining a military pension, which became big news. Peter Hadan, a blacksmith, received a pension of $6 a month beginning in October 1885 for his injuries during the war. In 1880, Dorcas Williams, a fifty-year-old woman, received $2,074 in past due benefits. Her slave husband had been killed in the war in 1864. She was owed $8 a month since that date and $2 per month since 1866 for each of her four children. She would receive the pension until her children came of age or until her death. Insurance benefits payable at death also relieved pressure for some.
The economic distress in Columbia at the time the Ex-Slave Association was founded stemmed from many causes. Columbia failed to obtain a mainline railroad, which lowered land prices already depressed by agricultural depression. The steamboat declined as a result of competition with the railroads, and the river towns of Boone County lost their importance. Population losses abounded in the county. Everyone suffered, but African Americans suffered worse. The university, where some blacks worked as janitors and maids, remained a stable employer, but for only a small number of workers. Ironically, as literacy increased among blacks, the number and percentage of laborers and domestic servants increased. By 1897, most African Americans were either servants and laborers for white citizens or professionals serving their own community.
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