by Philip Dray
The meticulous protocol with which so epochal a transition had come to pass may have helped render it anticlimatic; the rest of the day was reportedly quiet in the South Carolina capital. When in the afternoon the deposed governor Daniel Chamberlain left his office for the last time, his carriage was surrounded by a throng of citizens—but neither to cheer nor harass him: they were on their way to attend a circus recently arrived in town, and most, in their excitement, barely noticed the passing coach with its solitary occupant sitting behind curtains half-drawn.
Chapter 13
EXODUSTING
THE FREEDOM TO PICK UP and seek better prospects elsewhere is in many ways the story of America, and for its citizens something of a national birthright. It was, however, a privilege largely denied African Americans. Thus, when Reconstruction ended in the late 1870s, the nation could only look on with surprise and no small amount of concern as substantial numbers of Southern blacks began acting on the impulse to emigrate. Reports came from the Carolinas, Louisiana, and Texas of families hoarding their pennies, even canceling long-held plans to purchase small plots of land, in order to travel and begin life anew in distant Liberia or the American West.
This development and the collapse of the Freedman's Bank had a common origin—the loss of economic stability that had helped make Reconstruction viable. In the bank's case, poor management and a lack of oversight had exacerbated the effects of the crisis related to the Panic of 1873; in the rural South, regional financial strains related to the economic depression had lowered the price of cotton, placing greater pressure on the always precarious crop-lien, or sharecropping, system, in which the black sharecropper's profits were marginal even in the best of circumstances. Hard times weren't the only impetus, of course; the advent of home rule and the corresponding decline of civil and political rights, most notably the vote, accompanied by diabolical new forms of white-on-black violence, such as lynching, also led many to the point of despair.
The prospect of large numbers of blacks, particularly laborers, exiting their usual locales naturally created apprehension among whites. From the standpoint of history, the exodus movements of the late 1870s have a fairly distinct beginning and end, but at the time, the contours of the situation were unknowable. No one—not Congress, nor black leaders such as P.B.S. Pinchback and Blanche K. Bruce, nor the white planters who watched with mounting alarm as their work force decamped—could predict with certainty how vast the movement would prove to be, or where it would end: at times, it appeared the entire black population of the former Confederacy might empty out.
What was most startling about the exodus was the determination of ordinary black citizens to take their fate into their own hands. No longer willing to be supplicants who demanded that things be done for them, they decided, with what meager means were available, to do for themselves. "The Negro," wrote Frederick Douglass, "long deemed to be too indolent and stupid to discover and adopt any rational measure to secure and defend his rights as a man, may now be congratulated...[on] the quiet withdrawal of his valuable bones and muscles from a condition of things which he considers no longer tolerable." By acting on their own initiative, the emigrants defied the myth that they possessed none; and with their newfound confidence they ultimately challenged even those very black spokesmen, including the wise Douglass, who had long presumed to know their interests.
Although the exodus fever of 1878–80 caught the nation largely unawares, the idea of an out-migration of blacks from the South was in fact almost as old as the United States. Robert Finley, the Presbyterian minister from New Jersey who in 1816 founded the American Colonization Society (ACS), envisioned it as a benevolent means of returning free American blacks to their native Africa, and in the process helping to Christianize "the Dark Continent." His associates included Francis Scott Key, the composer of "The Star-Spangled Banner"; the Kentucky senator Henry Clay; and the former president James Monroe of Virginia, an ardent supporter of repatriation who was instrumental in urging Congress to donate $100,000 to the cause. The ACS, in collaboration with the federal government, established in 1822 the Republic of Liberia on the western coast of Africa; the capital of the new nation was named Monrovia in honor of its leading benefactor.
Finley's original objectives for the organization unfortunately became diluted when slaveholders embraced the society as a means of ridding the country of free blacks, who were deemed a threat to slavery after the insurrections led by Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey and the advent of the abolition movement in the 1830s. "Of all classes of our population, the most vicious is that of the free colored," declared Clay at an ACS meeting in 1827. "Contaminated themselves, they extend their vices to all around them, to the slaves and to the whites."
Not surprisingly, abolitionists and blacks themselves came to distrust the ACS as a front for slaveholders' interests. "The fostering agency of Liberian colonization was rotten in moral sentiment and hypocritical in its professions," Frederick Douglass later wrote. "With more than Jesuitical deceit and unscrupulousness, it enlisted on its side negro-haters and negro aspirations for freedom." Douglass, like William Lloyd Garrison and others, had faith that slavery would ultimately be abolished in America and that racial prejudice could be conquered over time; slaves, after all, were Americans, not Africans, and they too would someday become citizens. "We live here—have lived here—have a right to live here, and mean to live here," Douglass vowed. This faith, as well as the logistical and financial difficulty of transporting large numbers of people across the sea and situating them in a foreign land, hindered massive relocation. In its first half-century of existence, the ACS was estimated to have dispatched no more than 12,000 Americans to their new Liberian home, an average of 240 per year. Black interest in emigration increased after 1847, when Liberia became an independent nation, but waned when America began edging toward a decisive civil war that blacks, no less than whites, understood would likely determine the future of slavery.
The shifting and sometimes contradictory beliefs on this subject can be charted in the career of the abolitionist and physician Martin Delany, who after initially opposing emigration was converted by his travels in Africa in the 1850s; he later attempted to found a colony in Niger for black Americans. At a meeting of the National Negro Convention in 1854, he spoke favorably of "establishing the rights and power of the colored race" where such things were attainable (in Africa), rather than continuing to struggle against impossible odds in the United States. The Civil War, however, revived his confidence that blacks might yet attain equality in a reconstructed South, and as one of the few men of color to attain an officer's rank he served the Union cause with distinction. By the mid-1870s, however, he had become a critic of Reconstruction and a black nationalist, so disgusted with the Republican program that he backed the Democrats in the election of 1876 and returned to his earlier emigrationist views.
It seems astonishing, in retrospect, that anyone ever seriously considered the likelihood that America's enormous black population—four million at war's end—could actually be put aboard a steamship and sent away. On the other hand, few, if any, models of bi- or multiracial democratic societies existed anywhere in the world, and in the early nineteenth century hardly any Americans, with the possible exception of abolitionists, genuinely envisioned a republic in which citizens would accept coexistence as equals with nonwhites. "Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites," Thomas Jefferson had warned, "ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race." This imagined tableau of racial apocalypse brewed in the national imagination. "Do you intend to turn the three millions of slaves you may emancipate ... loose among the free whites of the Southern states where they are now held in bondage?" the Democratic congressman Robert Mallory of Kentucky demanded of his coll
eagues in 1862. "Do you intend, by a course like this, to inaugurate scenes like those which occurred in Haiti some years ago, a war of extermination between the white and black races? I hope not, for the sake of humanity."
President Lincoln, like many of his contemporaries, assumed that America would function best as a racially homogeneous nation. In 1852 he concurred with Henry Clay that there was "a moral fitness in the idea of returning to Africa her children, whose ancestors have been torn from her by the ruthless hand of fraud and violence." During a debate with Stephen Douglas in 1854 he conceded that while his "first impulse would be to free all the slaves and send them to Liberia ... a moment's reflection would convince me that, whatever high hope there may be in this, in the long run its sudden execution is impossible." Three years later, however, in a speech in Springfield, he suggested that although "the enterprise is a difficult one ... where there is a will there is a way, and what colonization needs most is a hearty will."
Once in office, Lincoln continued to examine various emigration schemes, pondering which foreign countries might be the recipients of American blacks and whether emigration would be voluntary or compulsory. Treaties would have to be struck, and perhaps generous aid provided, in order to convince other nations to accept America's outcasts. One area considered was the so-called Chiriqui Tract, a swath of land on the Central American isthmus in present-day Panama and Costa Rica. In spring 1862, when Congress passed an act abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia, the law also offered funds to colonize former slaves outside the United States; additional legislation enacted that July allowed the president to "make provision for the transportation, colonization, and settlement in some tropical country ... of such persons of the African race, made free by the provisions of this Act, and [who] may be willing to emigrate." In August, Lincoln followed up by asking five leaders of Washington's "colored community" to the White House to discuss emigration, the first time in American history that a president met formally with a delegation of black Americans. Lincoln carefully outlined the advantages he perceived in emigration, saying, "There is an unwillingness on the part of our people ... for you colored people to remain among us ... It is better for us both to be separated." Looking hopefully around the room at his visitors, he mentioned that he would need able spokesmen to help stimulate wider interest in his proposal. His guests, however, were largely unsympathetic to the idea and offered no assistance, while Frederick Douglass and other abolitionists lost no time in denouncing it outright. Garrison's Liberator compared the notion of a massive out-migration to an "attempt to roll back Niagara to its source, or to cast the Allegheny Mountains into the sea." Black Americans, the magazine insisted, "are as much the natives of the country as any of their oppressors. Here they were born; here, by every consideration of justice and humanity, they are entitled to live."
Such opposition, however robust, could not in itself quiet the talk of settling the freedmen elsewhere; it took an actual emigration experiment ending in disaster to still the impulse. On December 31, 1862, the federal government contracted with a man named Bernard Kock to colonize 5,000 black Americans on Cow Island off the coast of Haiti at a cost of fifty dollars apiece. Kock agreed to transport the emigrants and furnish them with homes, schools, churches, and acreage, and assured the Lincoln government of Haiti's cooperation. When the administration learned that Kock was also soliciting support for the plan from private investors, its officials grew concerned and tried to withdraw, but Kock moved forward, sending an initial "shipment" of 435 blacks to the island. Sickness broke out among the arrivals, few of the promised facilities were ready, and Kock soon declared himself "governor" of the black colony, a hint of tin-pot despotism that further unnerved the White House. Lincoln dispatched an investigator, who promptly reported that sanitary conditions in Kock's kingdom were dismal and that the émigrés wanted badly to come home. The president ordered a vessel sent at once for that purpose, and the federal government never again ventured down the path of emigration planning.
When the impulse reasserted itself in the late 1870s, it came chiefly from the freedmen themselves. With Reconstruction on the wane, tens of thousands of letters seeking information about Liberia were received by the ACS and other colonization groups. "Fifty families in Granville County desire to obtain tickets for passage to Liberia next autumn, numbering from two to ten in my family," wrote A. G. Rogers of North Carolina. "Ages from six months to fifty years; occupation: mechanics of different kinds, farmers, school teachers, tobacconists, two ex-members of the N.C. Legislature. They are willing to pay $25 on a family ... We wish to know of you if the ship could be sent to Norfolk, Va. to meet us provided we can get passage ... We would be pleased to have a package of circulars, hundreds are demanded of us." Emigration organizations like the ACS, however, were capable of sending at most two sailings per year to Africa, each carrying no more than one hundred passengers. And though the interested parties were mostly indigent residents of the rural South, the colonization societies were based in the Northeast and sailed generally from New York; therefore the plans of many applicants died when they were confronted with the cost of getting themselves and their families to the East Coast.
South Carolina saw a powerful surge of black interest in a Liberian exodus following the "dual house" confrontation of spring 1877. On July 4 an emigration rally was held at Charleston's Morris Brown A.M.E. Church; a few weeks later, on July 26, at a mass meeting convened to honor the thirtieth year of Liberian nationhood, four thousand blacks heard a stirring reading of the Liberian Declaration of Independence. The Liberian Exodus Joint Stock Steamship Company was founded, and a local black news-sheet bannered the words "Ho for Africa! One million men wanted for Africa!" across its front page. The promotional pitch to would-be emigrants was uncomplicated and required no elaboration: with the advent of a Straightout Democracy in the state, conditions would become increasingly unbearable for blacks and would not improve any time soon.
The state's Republicans were in a poor position to be of much help, since their powers had declined precipitously in the wake of Governor Chamberlain's abdication. Those who had been part of Chamberlain's clique managed to hang on to their offices for weeks at most. The Democrats, not content merely to chase their enemies from authority, established its massive fraud investigation to pore over the alleged misdeeds of the previous dozen years and to tar individual Republicans for good as thieves and manipulators of the public trust. After wide-ranging indictments of numerous persons including Francis Cardozo, Richard Gleaves, Franklin Moses Jr., Robert Smalls, and Daniel Chamberlain, exhaustive show hearings were held. Prosecutors alluded to patterns of "monstrous corruption" and labored to show the existence of an intricate web of deceit and wrongdoing, but in the end only three men were convicted of fraud—Cardozo, Smalls, and a white man, L. Cass Carpenter. All were pardoned in a deal whereby Wade Hampton got federal and state charges dropped against whites accused of election fraud and Ku Kluxing.
Governor Hampton, true to his campaign vows, went through the motions of proffering paternalistic concern for the state's blacks, even appointing some black Democrats to minor posts, but this magnanimity was soon quashed by the Negrophobe wing of his own party, led by Martin Gary, Matthew Butler, and Ben Tillman, and by the renewed effort to permanently disenfranchise black voters.
Butler, whose brutality at Hamburg had helped inspire the determined Straightouts, took advantage of the changing political tides to ascend to the U.S. Senate, where in a contested election he edged aside the Republican David L. Corbin. Known to Democrats as "Ku Klux Korbin" for his zealous prosecution of upcountry Klansmen in the Amos Akerman era, Corbin had been a Union major in the Civil War and then stayed on in South Carolina, where he served the Freedmen's Bureau and became a state senator and district attorney. Since the U.S. Senate was Republican and Corbin's credentials were impeccable, it was assumed the infamous Butler could not emerge the victor in this contested election. But in an unmistakable sign that the carpetbag
ger era had closed, South Carolina's other sitting senator, the Republican "Honest John" Patterson, dramatically announced that he would cast his vote for Butler. Witnesses long remembered Patterson's speech on November 26, 1877, as one of the most pathetic spectacles in Senate history. "Honest John" tried to explain his abrupt change of heart, mopping his brow ineffectually with a large handkerchief and offering feeble justifications for abandoning his own party; derisive laughter from the floor and from the gallery nearly drowned his remarks.
One of Butler's initial efforts in the Senate was to request federal funds to carry any of his willing black neighbors back to Africa. He saw the prospect of large numbers of blacks departing South Carolina as a pleasing one, for it would diminish the state's colored electorate. But more clear-headed whites saw the risk of allowing the state's cheap labor to disappear. As an editor in Laurens noted, "It will not do to shut our eyes to the fact that if the present emigration fever ... is not abated ... the agricultural interests of the country must suffer. It will not do to treat the matter lightly, and say, 'Let the "nigger" slide.' We need his services and it is too late now to look elsewhere for a substitute." State officials had indeed tried to "look elsewhere," but their efforts to attract white immigrant laborers to South Carolina had been unsuccessful. In contrast to Northern states, with their large urban populations, South Carolina did not have established settlements of European immigrants to lure newly arrived kin; the chief nonagricultural industry was limited to low-paying work in textile mills; and the state's history of intolerance and racial violence was no secret, even to those just setting foot on America's shores.