The world has changed for master and slave. “Old Master and Old Man, a New Year’s Talk over Old Years Gone,” Harper’s Weekly, January 11, 1890.
The ex-slaves lamented that because of their poverty, after the lodge was founded, dues payments were often hard to come by. Their carefully kept ledgers showed that some members paid in installments of five cents until they reached the requirement of twenty-five cents and ten cents for local dues. Most of the members were elderly. Henry Clay, born in Kentucky, had been the slave of Jefferson Garth, a prominent Boone County slave owner. Clay was seventy-nine and his wife, July, was sixty-eight. Auderine Wills, age seventy-four, had been born into slavery in Winchester, Kentucky, while Joseph Gosling had been the slave of local slaveholder Sylvester Gosling in Columbia. Squire Smith, who was sixty, worked on a farm. His wife was fifty-four; they had four children, three of whom were grown and the youngest of whom was sixteen. His two sons also worked on the farm. Allen Woods, who was fifty-nine, also did farmwork. His wife was fifty and his four children—three girls and a boy—were all grown; the youngest, a boy, was seventeen. Edward Lawson did farmwork. He was fifty-four, his wife was thirty, and four of his children—two boys and two girls—were grown; his youngest son was seventeen. Sandy Turner was a farmer. He was seventy-two; his wife, Harriet, was fifty-six and his five children, two boys and three girls, were grown. The youngest, Phoebe, was eighteen. Scott Brashears and his wife, Amanda, both in their sixties, lived with their grandson Oliver Woods, born in 1892, and granddaughter Lil-lie Eaton, born in 1896.20
Squire Smith, Boone County ex-slave. Squire Smith was a member of the Ex-Slave Association.
Unidentified Boone County ex-slave. African Americans like this man joined the Ex-Slave Association.
Missouri ex-slaves Richard and Drucilla Martin. Many of the ex-slaves who joined the movement were poor, and many tried to work although they were old and frail.
The ex-slaves were so poor that many of the old and infirm continued to work. Creasy Mack, who was about eighty and widowed, still did live-in household work for her employer, Jake Straun, a merchant. Despite their hardships, the local branch of the association was very important to the members. At the May 3, 1897, meeting, they planned to host a state convention on April 20 and set aside $5 to pay for the rent of Wheeler Chapel, “above and [below] the basement for 5.00 day and night.”21
At one meeting only five people showed up, but by the end of 1899, the association was on its way with 125 members and enough funds to pay the fifty cents’ rent for each meeting in the church basement. It could also begin amassing a “treasure” for the local mutual benefit, medical care, and burial assistance for the members. It had also collected dozens of petitions and sent them off to headquarters. This was at a time when the entire black population of Boone County consisted of just about 4,500 people in the rural areas and surrounding towns, including Columbia. At this point only about 21 percent of the black population nationally had been born into slavery. In Boone County, only 676 persons were thirty-one years old or above and therefore could have been born in slavery and eligible for a pension. The membership of the lodge consisted of at least 20 percent of those African Americans who were eligible for a pension. With Callie House’s encouragement, the Boone County lodge continued to send in petitions to the national office and to provide what relief they could to impoverished members.22
“Rent Day,” Harper’s Weekly, April 28, 1888. Many ex-slaves had miserable housing and few resources to pay for it. When they could work, the wages were too low. This old couple mull over whether they have enough to pay the rent collector.
Although blacks’ struggles were similar across the country and House encountered similar concerns everywhere she went, each community had its unique qualities and situations. The ex-slaves in New Orleans, for instance, lived in a community that had long had a sizable free Negro population and where Reconstruction had come early, but their post-Emancipation poverty differed little from that of the freedpeople in Boone County. When Mrs. House traveled to New Orleans in September 1899 to visit the local association council, she touched base with and provided inspiration to the members. She stayed in the home of a member, Lillie Brown, on Basin Street. While in the city, she spent hours with the local members collecting petitions and listening to their stories of slavery and the days since emancipation. They told her of their problems making ends meet, exacerbated by economic depression against the backdrop of the worsening inequality in that city and state. Racial turmoil erupted repeatedly among workingmen on the docks. In 1890, Louisiana legislators enacted bills to forbid equal accommodations on railroads and other conveyances. New Orleans’ African Americans persistently agitated against segregation in the 1890s, although they repeatedly lost. In 1895, the Catholic Church announced the segregation of all services. Plessy v. Ferguson, in 1896, closed the final curtain. In 1898, the state took away African Americans’ right to vote. At a state constitutional convention, delegates laid down the legal blueprint for white supremacy. The chair of the Judiciary Committee declared, “Our mission was to establish the supremacy of the white race.” More than 120,000 African-American men were disenfranchised, and the Louisiana Democratic Party declared itself a whites-only organization.23
None of the ex-slave council charter members’ relatives had joined local African-American men who had gone to Cuba, serving in one of four African-American “immune” regiments, as a result of the Spanish-American War. However, they described how the entire African-American community was upset at the insult, embarrassment, and unequal treatment the black soldiers suffered in the service. The troops were organized because, during the war, Washington officials from President McKinley on down had an almost superstitious dread of Cuba’s yellow fever and malaria. Secretary of War Russel Alger advanced the idea that those who had come from semitropical or tropical climates had probably had the disease and were immune to it. Many of the soldiers became ill and some died, but the remainder spent their time as an occupying force engaged in guard and patrol duty.24
Many of the New Orleans council members, like those in Boone County and elsewhere, were old and experiencing great difficulties doing the manual labor that had always been their only occupation. Further adding to their problems, the economy remained depressed, which reduced employment opportunity for the younger generation. The members told House that the harsh conditions they faced made them anxious to join the association. Their chapter was incorporated on June 22, 1899, just a few days after the local African-American soldiers returned from Cuba. There were already a number of mutual aid societies still existing in the city. New Orleans’ African Americans, like those elsewhere, had long organized mutual aid societies. Between 1880 and 1900, nineteen operated in the city, although not at the same time. A quite common way for the poor in a church or other organization to join together for mutual aid in time of illness or death, they developed because of habit and poverty. The local Ex-Slave Association’s chapter had a somewhat different focus: “to devise ways and means for the caring and establishment of decrepit ex-slaves, their widows and orphans” and “to unite the efforts of all friends in securing pension legislation in favor of the ex-slaves, particularly by petitioning Congress” to pass the pension legislation reintroduced by Senator Mason. In working to gain pensions, they would “work under the advice and guidance of and cooperate with the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association of the United States of America.”25
They engaged pension notary Louis Martinet to prepare and record their charter. He had been a major player in the progress of and reaction against people of color that had taken place in the city. He was a member of the class of the more educated African Americans who had executed the anti-Jim Crow litigation. A widely respected Afro-Creole lawyer, Martinet and other African-American graduates of Straight University Law School became organizers of a citizens’ committee to attack the law that segregated transportation in the city. They organized one test case in whic
h the local court defeated their efforts by releasing Daniel Desdunes after local police arrested him for violating the law on a city streetcar. They chose Homer Plessy next and succeeded in having him arrested and charged for refusing to vacate his seat on a passenger train. Martinet decided to ask Albion Tourgee to represent the cause. He explained that local black lawyers mainly practiced in police court. He also wanted an experienced appellate lawyer to take the case all the way to the Supreme Court. Martinet, who organized the effort, developed the litigation strategy, and picked the lawyers, remained a hero to the African-American community despite the eventual loss of Plessy v. Ferguson in the Supreme Court.26
The eight incorporators of the New Orleans Ex-Slave Association chapter included six men and two women. The participation of one of the women, Lottie L. Boyd, wife of Henry Boyd, as a married woman, required his personal authorization. The other woman, Lillie J. Bell, was single. They named as original officers Frederick S. Diamond, president; “Mistress” Lea Cavender, vice president; James T. Jones, manager; George A. Green, secretary; Lillie J. Bell, assistant secretary; William D. Brown, chaplain; Phillip S. Burton, lecturer; and Ervard (Edward) Barnes, inspector. Samuel A. Jackson was the other charter member. George A. Green served on the executive committee of the national organization. The founders set a convention of delegates to elect officers on the second Monday of August 1902. In the interim the board would manage the affairs and the founding officers would represent the association. Lottie L. Boyd, Henry Boyd, and Marcellin Zephilin, because of their illiteracy, signed with an X.27
Marcellin Zephilin’s story, so similar to many House had heard, explained why even Civil War veterans eagerly joined the pension movement. Born a slave of Alexandre Mouton, of French origin but Arcadian “Cajun, not Creole,” on the Ile Copal Plantation in Vermillionville, Lafayette, a prairie and bayou sugarcane region, he said he did not know why his master had named him Marcellin Zephilin. Mouton held Zephilin’s father, Tom, and mother, Jennie, among the slaves on his plantation. Mouton, a Jacksonian Democrat, served in the legislature as a U.S. senator and as governor of Louisiana after his election to a term beginning in January 1843. He retired to life as a sugar planter and railroad promoter and then led a delegation to the Democratic National Convention in 1860 and chaired the Louisiana secession convention. During the war, when Union troops captured his plantation and used it as a headquarters, he had to flee. They burned the sugar mill and other works buildings and freed his 120 slaves, including Marcellin Zephilin.28
General Nathaniel Banks’s Corps d’Afrique swept him up, along with thousands of other freedmen, into the Union Army, recording his enlistment at five feet, seven inches, black hair, black complexion, and brown eyes, at the Touro Building in New Orleans in May 1863. He served in the 97th Infantry Regiment of the U.S. Colored Troops until the end of the war. Wounded by a gunshot in the left leg below the knee at Fort Blakeley and hospitalized at Mobile, he also suffered a partial hearing loss. After his discharge he took the name of his slave father, Tom Jones, instead of Zephilin. He became a Primitive Baptist minister under the name Tom Jones, but when he applied for a pension the Bureau denied his claim. They found no Tom Jones on the rolls of the 97th U.S. Colored Troops.
Mrs. House knew from her own experience, and from what she heard everywhere she traveled, that many African-American soldiers and their widows had similar difficulties because they lacked documents to prove their names or dates of birth. He then filed as Zephilin and was at first rebuffed. After his continued complaints and a long investigation, he finally received a pension. However, the bureau agent told him he must call himself Zephilin and not Jones. He continued to identify himself as Jones except when dealing with the government and answered to both names. Sometimes others hearing his name spelled it Dephilin or Zephirin. By the time he responded to House’s plea to organize and helped to charter the Ex-Slave Association, Jones had developed rheumatism, asthma, and shortness of breath and could no longer preach or perform manual labor. He had come to rely on his pension and friends and family for his livelihood.29
But his anger was reinforced when he applied for an increase in his pension under a provision covering veterans who reached age seventy-five and the bureau rejected him again. He could not prove his age. The bureau first asked why he did not simply submit his birth certificate or family Bible entry, which he, of course, had never had. When he obtained an affidavit from a grandson of his former owner, bureau officials refused to accept its validity since it reflected only his recollection. Widows and veterans who experienced such harassment from the Pension Bureau were naturally inclined to seek relief by joining the ex-slave pension movement.30
During House’s travels, what she saw and heard from the old ex-slaves strengthened her commitment to the movement. However, the growth of the association had attracted the attention of the Pension Bureau. While she was still reveling in the progress of the chapters, the government was accelerating its attack on the association. She was successfully doing the work the members had elected her to do. But her resolve would be sorely tested.
CHAPTER 5
The Movement
Fights Back
My face is black is true but its not my fault but I love my name and my honesty in dealing with my fellow man.
CALLIE HOUSE
(1899)
CALLIE HOUSE had a major problem after the Post Office Department denied the Association the use of the mails. The pension movement workers were left with Wells Fargo, Adams, or American Express to distribute materials. However, having to use commercial delivery services and to travel more often to keep in touch took time and the Association’s scarce resources. Mrs. House needed to provide the inspiration that would keep agents organizing and collecting petitions, and local chapters providing mutual assistance to their members. She had to do this in the wake of ongoing federal harassment, and avoid permitting the harassment from becoming a major distraction from the Association’s real work. Mrs. House remained optimistic and the work continued so successfully that soon their press critics complained that the association had branches “in almost every little hamlet and village throughout the south.”1
When Mrs. House received the September 1899 notice of the fraud order from Barrett, she had no idea how committed the federal officials were to stopping her and the movement. Responding as if she had some citizenship rights the federal government was required to respect, Mrs. House made no apologies for her work. She provided a detailed explanation of the movement’s mission and actions. This, she thought, would allay Barrett’s concerns. She explained, “1st we are organizing ourselves together as a race of people who feels that they have been wronged.” She rejected his charge that they had misled members. On the contrary,
We tell them we don’t know whether they will ever get anything or not but there is something due them and if they are willing to risk their money in defraying the expenses of getting up the petition to Congress they are at liberty to do so.2
Her explanation, in keeping with her education in civics in Rutherford County’s primary schools, insisted that “the Constitution of the United States grants to citizens the privilege of peaceably assembling themselves together and petition their grievance.” Objecting to the government’s disrespect of the movement, she continued that African Americans had
a perfect right as ex-slaves to gather and organize ourselves and elect men and women to organize our race together to petition the government for a compensation to alleviate our old decrepit men and women who are bent up with rheumatism from the exposure they undergone [underwent] in the dark days of slavery.
Furthermore, Callie House told Barrett:
Common horse sence [sic] will teach anybody that the officers of this organization are powerless to get a pension from the government for each ex-slave for 25 cts when ever there is no law on the statute books to pension them.
Proudly, she told him “My whole soul and body are for this-slave movement and are [am] willing to
sacrifices [sacrifice] for it.”3
Callie House’s forceful and coherent response to Barrett angered federal officials. They also began to understand that she was the de facto head of the Association. From that day on, intent on breaking the ex-slave movement, postal officials focused on throttling her to silence. Nashville postmaster A. Wills explained to Acting Assistant Attorney General Barrett, “She is defiant in her actions, and seems to think that the negroes have the right to do what they please in this country.”4
After the post office issued the fraud order on October 2, 1899, Postmaster Wills told headquarters that he had delivered the letters to Reverend H. Smith, the national secretary in Bransford, Tennessee, in addition to Callie House in New Orleans, through that city’s postmaster. He also quickly disseminated it to newspapers all over the South, asking that they publish it immediately. He stopped twenty-two money orders amounting in total to $53.84 sent to the Association and had them returned to the senders.5
House and the Association continued to organize while attending to the federal surveillance. She traveled more than ever, “lecturing to both white and colored people on this movement.” This was a distinct hardship. Her brother and his wife, who lived next door, helped to care for her children; the oldest, Thomas, was fifteen and the youngest, Annie, was six. Mrs. House had worked all of her life but as a washerwoman and seamstress; this was the work that most black women with children did. But widowed and now working outside the home, Mrs. House had departed from the usual role.
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