by Philip Dray
The Tillmanites got pretty much all they wanted from their convention, which approved the new constitution by a vote of 116 to 7. Ironically, for all their fulminations against the Reconstruction constitution of 1868, the Tillman convention had little choice but to retain many of its structural reforms. There was a moral in this. As Smalls had attempted to assert, establishing a new state constitution based on essentially undemocratic ideas flew in the face of basic good government. The fixation on race above all else, "the subject of subjects," unified regional law and politics but also rendered them perverse, hypocritical, and self-defeating. An example was the South's rejection of potentially beneficial federal assistance in education, for fear that it would arouse national concern about segregated schools. As the white politician Ellery Brayton, a witness to the Tillman revolution, observed with considerable foresight, strict discipline on the issue that mattered most tended to create closed societies in which debate and the airing of differences on other matters became inhibited; this corrupted the region intellectually, and probably morally as well.
When Smalls refused to sign the finished constitution, another delegate informed him that his travel expenses would not be paid if he did not affix his signature. "Then I'll walk home," he said. "I'd rather walk than put my name to a constitution with such an article on suffrage." Ever the Lincolnesque optimist, Robert Smalls walked out of the convention and did not stop. Almost immediately he embarked on a speaking tour in support of William McKinley, who would become the successful Republican candidate for president in 1896; Smalls used every stop on a tour that took him as far west as Kansas to describe the horrors of Tillmanism in South Carolina and to castigate the entire South for efforts to nullify black participation in politics and the democracy at large.
Senator Shelby M. Collom of Illinois made a proposal that appealed to Robert Smalls. Completely legal, its goal was to reduce the South's proportional representation in Congress because so many of its citizens had been disenfranchised. This idea had been floated before, unsuccessfully, but Smalls loved its simple logic and thought it an ideal way of bringing the Southern states to task. In 1898, the Republican congressman Edgar D. Crumpacker of Indiana suggested that a 40 percent reduction in the Southern representation in Congress would adequately reflect the extensive disenfranchisement of Southern black citizens. During the South Carolina convention, the Tillman forces had actually agreed that they would willingly reduce the state's representation in the electoral college and in Congress, if necessary, because from their perspective, the ability to dominate state politics along racial lines meant far more than having a slightly larger voice in Washington.
So sweeping an initiative, however, so utterly sectional and punitive in character, was likely to go nowhere, given the prevailing mood of regional reconciliation. Americans were by now paying far more attention to foreign troublemakers than to homegrown ones like Pitchfork Ben Tillman, and the crises of the nation's cities, its powerful corporate trusts, and its restive masses of ethnic laborers had largely supplanted concern for the most vulnerable residents of the Southern Black Belt.
Even in the face of the post-Reconstruction hostility to black suffrage, Southern black voters continued to send black men to Congress, often from formidable black redoubts such as the Sea Islands and North Carolina's Second Congressional District, known as "the Black Second." Although North Carolina had been redeemed in 1870, the state sent four blacks to Congress from 1875 to 1900. Still, the overall trend was disheartening. The Forty-fourth Congress (1875–77) included eight black members, the maximum for the nineteenth century. After that, black participation fell off precipitously; no more than two at a time served in Congress during the 1880s, three were present for the Fifty-first Congress (1889–91), and from 1891 to 1901, no more than one participated.
The liveliest black North Carolinian to make it to Washington was probably James O'Hara, the son of a black mother and an Irish sea captain, who came to the Tarheel State in 1868 and ascended rapidly through state Republican ranks, serving two terms in Congress in the 1880s. His quick wit and sound legal mind won him the admiration of his constituents but disparagement from many whites, who considered him "a mulatto with cheek a plenty." O'Hara lived up to his reputation in 1875, celebrating the passage of the Civil Rights Act by personally integrating the saloon of a famous steamboat, the Cotton Planter. Another strong-willed presence in Congress was the minister Jeremiah Haralson, elected from Alabama in 1874. An unlettered, straight-talking man who had once been auctioned as a slave, Haralson was described by the Mobile Register as "a burly Negro ... black as the ace of spades and with the brogue of the cornfield." He fell out of favor with voters in 1879–80 over his opposition to the Exoduster movement, although Haralson himself ultimately migrated west to Colorado, where he tried his hand at mining, among other schemes, and in 1916 met a grisly death, devoured by wild animals.
Probably the most distinguished black member of Congress in the latter half of the century was John Mercer Langston, great-uncle of the poet Langston Hughes. An Oberlin graduate, Langston became in 1854 the first black person to practice law in Ohio, and soon after, one of the first black Americans ever elected to public office, serving as the town clerk of Brownhelm, Ohio. He went on to have a superlative career, helping to raise black fighting units during the war and working for the Freedmen's Bureau, then serving as dean of the law school at Howard University, as minister to Haiti, and, in the 1880s, as president of the Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute. Since high elective office was the one prize Langston had not attained, in 1888 he sought a congressional seat from Virginia's Fourth District. The campaign splintered black and white Republicans in the state; Langston's candidacy was opposed not only by Virginia's white Republican leader, Senator William Mahone, but by the influential spokesman Frederick Douglass. Langston and Douglass shared an enduring animosity. Douglass may have resented the life of relative privilege that Langston had enjoyed, while Langston was known to have sniped at Douglass over his handling of the Freedman's Bank debacle. In any case, this ill will motivated Douglass to write an open letter to voters in Langston's district, suggesting that the candidate sought status and influence without being truly devoted to the cause of racial progress. Langston was livid, although Douglass's missive, widely perceived as mean-spirited, galvanized support for Langston. He managed, however, to hold his seat in Congress for only one term.
George H. White of North Carolina was to have the honor of being the last black Southerner of his century to serve in Congress (another, Andrew Young of Georgia, along with Barbara Jordan of Texas, would not return until 1973). From 1897 to 1901 White was the body's sole black representative, and this isolation, as well as his own obstinacy, made his a most contentious posting. His performance in Congress was noteworthy also because, with the passing of Frederick Douglass in 1895, John Mercer Langston in 1897, and Blanche K. Bruce in 1898, White became by default one of the nation's leading African Americans. Booker T. Washington and his message of quiet assimilation were far better known and respected, but unlike the Wizard of Tuskegee, White had remained true to the emancipationist vision of Douglass and the postwar black Republicans, and in Congress he did not hesitate to assail racial injustice and inequality head-on. Among other initiatives, he revived the idea that Southern states deserved a diminished representation in Congress because of their broad disenfranchisement of blacks, he urged that the federal government reimburse depositors who had lost money in the Freedman's Bank, and he demanded that his white colleagues stop telling "darkey stories" and using "dialect and old plantation language" when trying to represent blacks' views and beliefs (a habit to which even Booker T. Washington often succumbed).
White was also the first member of Congress to propose federal legislation to quell the epidemic of lynching then ravaging the nation. Violence had always been, to some extent, the real story of Reconstruction, and possibly of American race relations in general. The riots at Memphis and New Orleans had conv
inced the North of the South's intransigence; Ku Kluxing had worn down the resolve of the Northern public even as it brought forth tough federal laws to punish the practice; then came the Red Shirts, the White Liners, and the White League, more sophisticated than their Klan forbears but still using armed might and intimidation to control the black vote and determine political outcomes. In the postbellum South, violence, or the threat of it, had replaced slavery as the key mechanism by which whites controlled African Americans; it wasn't the sole means of oppression, of course, but the most immediately effective at terrorizing the black populace, breeding apathy and disillusionment in the North, and ultimately enabling the Southern redemption.
Lynching, the punishment of a person accused of a crime or other transgression without due process of law, had long been viewed as a necessary means of "people's justice" in places beyond the reach of ordinary courts. Before the Civil War the term could still denote nonlethal retribution, such as tarring and feathering; later it came to refer exclu sively to extralegal execution, usually by rope or gun. By the 1880s, fewer lynchings were occurring on the western frontier as settlement there increased; at the same time their frequency grew sharply in the South, with black men the primary victims. South Carolina's Daniel Chamberlain had been one of the first to criticize the trend when, in 1876, six black men were arrested in Edgefield for killing John L. Harmon and his wife, Catherine, and were taken from the sheriff and shot to death without benefit of trial. As Chamberlain pointed out, Edgefield was not a
new or imperfectly organized community in which concerted violence must sometimes supplement or supersede the laws ... The courts are everywhere accessible and frequent ... Nor were there special circumstances attending this affair which could give occasion or excuse for this defiance and overthrow of the law and its officers. The persons charged with the crime were in the custody of the officers of the law. Escape was impossible ... No ground whatever existed for fearing executive clemency after due conviction. And yet ... six citizens covered by the aegis of our laws ... have been summarily, deliberately, openly, and ruthlessly slain, without legal trial, without proper legal scrutiny of the evidences of their guilt, and without the smallest chance of legal defense.
After rising steadily through the 1880s, such race-related lynchings by 1892 were occurring at a rate of almost two hundred per year— more than one every other day.
Like other historical examples of community-sanctioned terror, the upsurge of lynching in the 1890s resists easy explanation. Perhaps it was, to a degree, a result of the collision between whites' dread fear of black people and their perceived loss of control over the South itself. A generation of black people who had never known slavery had now come of age. Compared to their forbears, their independence of thought and action as, increasingly mobile, they left farms and headed for work in the cities, inevitably struck whites as troublesome, if not "insolent." Such freedom triggered many anxieties, the most surprising of which was sexual in nature. The exploitation of black women by white men had long been custom; to rationalize such behavior, white men had elevated their own women to a kind of sexless, virginal sainthood; but now that black men were potentially free to mingle with white women, the only recourse was to reimagine the black man as a sexual monster. As economics drove white women off their pedestal—out of the old family homestead and into the wider world of textile mills and cities—protecting their sanctity became conflated with defending white dominion in the South. At stake was a crusade far too sacred to brook interference from courts or ordinary laws. As Ben Tillman infamously declared, "Whenever the Constitution comes between me and the virtue of the white women of the South, I say to hell with the Constitution!"
Also, the region's traditional impatience with legal remedies and due process, the "mistrials and acquittals" won "through the instrumentality of ingenious lawyers or ignorant juries," according to the Charleston News & Courier, played a role. When a black was the alleged perpetrator of a crime, the heritage of slavery made it seem logical to disregard legal formalities; after all, in that context all blacks were suspected to be criminals and all white men were entitled to act as police. Blacks were, for ample reasons of their own, alienated from the justice system because Southern courts were traditionally used by whites to deny blacks their earnings, their property, and sometimes their freedom. Lynchings often could be attributed to misunderstandings that, in other settings, mutual trust in local justice might have resolved—the sharecropper or farm worker disputing wages or work conditions with an employer; a black man's panicked flight when confronted by the law; and of course, alleged crimes or transgressions involving interracial sex.
Lynching in the 1890s became so accepted a brake on black "criminality," and the activities of lynch mobs were viewed so commonly as heroic, that some killings took the form of macabre, picnic-like spectacles. These events—egged on by the press, at times serviced by special excursion trains from nearby towns—attracted thousands of men, women, and children, and ended usually in the torture and immolation of the accused before a frenzied crowd. In such well-publicized "entertainments," the victim's demise seemed both an expiation of white people's shame at their loss of status and an affirmation of racial solidarity. It was, perhaps needless to say, also an effective means of keeping the black populace for miles around terrorized and utterly cowed.
Two disquieting events in North Carolina in 1898 drew Congressman White's attention to the issue of lynching and mob violence. In one, local Red Shirts, emulating the South Carolina Red Shirts of a generation before and seeking to expunge blacks from elected and appointed office, rioted in coastal Wilmington. Vigilantes rampaged through the streets, killing and wounding dozens of blacks, setting fires, and driving most local black leaders from town and hundreds of ordinary citizens into the woods. In the other incident, the black postmaster of Lake City, North Carolina, Frazier B. Baker, was mobbed and killed, along with his infant daughter; his house was set afire and his wife and three other children were wounded by gunfire as they escaped the flames.
White brought the Lake City attack to Congress's attention and submitted a resolution asking for funds so the surviving members of Baker's family could attain medical care, since Baker had been a federal employee. In remarks to Congress he then tackled the Southern rationale for lynching—that it was necessary to curb blacks from committing sex crimes against white women. "I have examined the question and I am prepared to state that not more than fifteen percent of the lynchings are traceable to that crime," he reported, adding, "there are many more outrages against colored women by white men than there are by colored men against white women."
For such candor White was widely denounced; he had lifted the veil on a form of licentiousness that had underlaid Southern society for many decades. The seeking of relationships in the slave quarters both dishonored white men's wives and families and created a mulatto race, while inhibiting the maintenance of familial relations among the slaves. Emancipation had thwarted this pattern but hardly obliterated it. Of course, the shrouded truth about many accusations made against blacks was that liaisons between black men and white women were often consensual. Such relations were so taboo, most Southern courts refused to acknowledge their existence until well into the twentieth century.
White was not the first black person to challenge the lynching ethos. For printing almost identical thoughts, the journalist Ida B. Wells had been run out of Memphis in 1892; a similar fate befell Alex Manly, editor of the Daily Record, a black newspaper in Wilmington, in 1898; his remarks had helped inflame the deadly riot there.
"It is bad enough that North Carolina should have the only nigger Congressman," the Raleigh News and Observer complained of White—let alone one who would foster such foolish ideas for federal legislation. It was particularly annoying that an official representative of the state of North Carolina had dared utter, in Congress, secret truths about the white South's sexual peccadilloes and, furthermore, that black people in the gallery had applauded h
is words. "As the blatant mouthing of a mere negro, White's utterances are not worth notice," said the News and Observer.
As a fresh manifestation of negroism, of what the negro's attitude is toward the white man ... its significance should not be allowed to escape us. If there were no other reason, this utterance of White's is sufficient to show the absolute necessity of permanent white rule in this state ... The "inoffensive negro official" is largely a myth. The negro may be inoffensive as a private citizen, but with his induction into office he becomes a new individual. White is typical ... venomous, forward, slanderous of the whites, appealing to the worst passions of his own race, he emphasizes anew the need of making an end of him and his kind.
Undaunted, White reiterated his statement in Congress and this time defied anyone to disprove it. He backed up his claim that sexual outrage was exaggerated by producing statistics that showed the diverse "reasons" for lynchings. Of sixty-three people lynched between April 24, 1899, and October 20, 1899, he explained, only sixteen were accused of sexual assault; nine had been accused of murder; three of sheltering a murderer; one of trespass; one of barn burning; one had "put hand on white woman"; two had "talked too much"; two "spoke against lynching"; and one had "entered a lady's room drunk." White did not fail to condemn actual cases of rape and sexual assault, but he insisted that conviction and punishment for such heinous crimes were the business of a court, not a mob.