The Black Calhouns

by Gail Lumet Buckley

  Southern cruelty in the form of “Black Codes” brought Reconstruction to the South. Black Codes—laws regulating black life and employment that sprang up all over the South right after Appomattox—were worse than slavery, because black life now had no value at all. During slavery, blacks could be abused or killed with impunity by their owners; under Black Codes they could be abused or killed with impunity by any white. Annual work “contracts,” with pay at the end of the year, were Black Code staples. In reality, because of deductions for “rent” and “provisions,” pay was never seen. The “company store” principle created far more hungry children than the plantation ever did. And ad hoc Black Code enforcers, like the Ku Klux Klan, born in 1865, terrorized the Southern countryside. But from 1865 to 1872, the old Confederacy was occupied by troops of the U.S. Army—sent specifically to protect the rights of former slaves, now citizens and Republican voters, from vengeful whites.

  The black Calhouns of Coweta County, Georgia, a small, wealthy community outside Atlanta, were fortunate to have escaped both the Black Codes and the KKK. The black Calhouns came from the small portion of the Southern black population that was both literate and urban. Atlanta was a slave-owning society, but it was also a city whose white business leaders, even in 1865, were almost as interested in Yankee investments as in upholding the “sacred” cause of white supremacy. Run by businessmen, not planters, Atlanta, unlike the rest of Georgia, was concerned with its image outside the South. Georgia was no more and no less viciously racist than Mississippi or Alabama, but Atlanta always wore the smiling face of moderation. Hating confrontations and bad publicity, Atlanta was one of the safest cities in the South for middle-class blacks. And certain middle-class men—doctors, lawyers, businessmen, and entrepreneurs—were as independent of white oversight as any black men in the South could be. Unlike the rest of the South, Atlanta rewarded black ambition—as long as it was not political.

  “Calhoun” was an important name in Georgia. There was a town called “Calhoun” in the northwestern part of the state near the Alabama border and a street named “Calhoun” in Atlanta. There was a Governor Calhoun and a Mayor Calhoun of Atlanta. The black Calhouns had been owned by Dr. Andrew Bonaparte Calhoun (A. B. Calhoun), a relative of the former senator and vice president John C. Calhoun, slavery’s greatest apologist. A physician and sometime politician, Dr. Calhoun, one of the richest and most powerful men in the state, was a Coweta County delegate to Georgia’s Secession Convention—and proudly displayed the pen he had used to sign Georgia’s Ordinance of Secession. A. B. Calhoun, born in 1809 in South Carolina, entered medical school in Charleston in 1829. After his 1831 graduation, he moved to Decatur, Georgia, and became a circuit-riding doctor. A year later he settled in Coweta County, in the town of Newnan. Serious about his profession, in 1837 Calhoun spent a year abroad, attending lectures and clinics in the great hospitals of London and Paris. When he returned to Georgia, his friends pushed him to serve a term in the state legislature. Before 1865 Coweta County’s population was almost evenly divided between black and white. The blacks were all slaves, of course. Besides homes in Newnan and Atlanta, Dr. Calhoun had a large cotton plantation, the Calhoun Quarter, in the southwest part of Coweta County under the charge of an overseer. But his main family home was the stately mansion, set in a grove of forest oaks on Greenville Street in Newnan, that he built from 1839 to 1840. Newnan, Georgia, was known as the “City of Homes,” thanks in great part to A. B. Calhoun’s mansion.

  Moses Calhoun; his sister, Catherine Sinai, known as “Siny”; and his mother, Nellie, were Coweta County natives. Moses was named for A. B. Calhoun’s uncle, Moses Waddel, and Catherine Sinai was partly named for his wife, Catherine Calhoun Waddel. The 1850 Slave Schedule (slave census) for A. B. Calhoun listed Moses as a twenty-year-old male—and “M” for mulatto. A. B. Calhoun may well have been a father figure to Moses. Like many Southern slave families, the black Calhouns were intertwined with the white Calhouns: Moses was the butler, Nellie was the cook, and Siny was the nursemaid. With her perfect oval face and large, lustrous eyes, Siny Calhoun looked like a beautiful Black Madonna. Her father was generally believed to have been a white man: Judge William Ezzard, a three-time mayor of Atlanta and a good friend of A.B.’s. Moses’ father may well have been Ezzard also. Moses was born in 1829 in Creek Indian territory, before “Atlanta” existed. He was considered a “fortunate” slave. While house slaves were under constant scrutiny, they usually led a more comfortable life than other human property. And butlers were the most important house slaves of all. The coachman, blacksmith, and carpenter were important outdoor slaves. Moses had grown from a solemn, intelligent boy, surrounded by women, to an imposingly dignified man—the ideal butler. In 1860 only about 5,000 of the 462,000 slaves in Georgia could read and write, and Moses Calhoun was one of them, as the doctor wanted a literate butler. This education was permitted because of his owner’s importance. But when Moses secretly taught his mother and sister, it was a criminal act. An ironclad rule throughout the South: no black, slave or free, was permitted to learn to read or write. In the special circumstances in which he found himself—as a favored slave of one of the richest men in Georgia—Moses received more than a boyhood education in letters and numbers; he also learned self-confidence and the ways of the white world.

  A forebear of the black Calhouns, Moses’ maternal grandmother Sinai, was something of a “liberated” woman. In 1839 Sinai had been discovered by Coweta County authorities living on her own with her husband, Henry, and earning a living by selling baked goods and homemade persimmon beer on a corner of Newnan’s Court Square. The authorities mandated that the couple be placed under “the immediate control and management of some white person.” Sinai and Henry had been owned by two Newnan residents, Silas Reynolds and William Nimmons. In 1832 Reynolds broke up Sinai’s family by, first, selling her youngest child, Felix, to Nimmons and then, in 1834, selling Sinai herself:

  Know all men by these present that I Silas Reynolds of the County Coweta and State aforesaid for and in consideration of the sum of two hundred dollars … doth bargain sell and deliver unto William Nimmons of the County and State aforesaid one negro boy slave by the name of Felix about Eight years of age which negro boy slave Felix the said Silas Reynolds warrants to be sound and healthy … 5th June 1832.

  And two years later:

  Received of William Nimmons three hundred dollars in full payment of a negro woman by the name of Sina about Sixty years of age … I have here unto set my hand and seal this 4th day of April 1834.

  Sinai somehow convinced Nimmons, her new owner, to let her continue to sell her wares. By 1857 she had saved enough money to buy freedom for herself, her husband, and her four youngest children and move them all to Chicago, where at the time there were fewer than one thousand Negroes. It was extremely rare that North American slave owners allowed slaves to buy their freedom. In fact, it was almost unheard-of, but Sinai was an amazing woman and Nimmons was certainly a “liberal” slave owner—or maybe he just had money troubles. When Sinai relocated to Chicago, she left behind her oldest daughter, Nellie, and Nellie’s children, Moses and Siny. She did not feel guilty about leaving these family members. As slavery went, they had a relatively cushy berth as house slaves of a rich man, and because it was the way of “good” slave owners, they would be taken care of in old age. In 1857 Siny married Preston Webb, a free black horse trainer. Although Webb was free, Siny remained a slave and their daughter, Catherine, called Katie, was born in slavery on July 30, 1859. Slavery was for life—and it was matrilineal.

  On January 19, 1861, the Georgia Secession Convention was held in the two-story brick courthouse on Newnan’s Court Square. A. B. Calhoun, the delegate from Newnan, was the first to sign. During the war, Dr. Calhoun was a member of the surgeon conscript board. When Newnan was chosen as the site for a hospital for the sick and wounded, he had to convince his fellow citizens, who were hostile to the idea of hospitals or refugees in their town. He was so convincing
that every public building, including all the churches except the Presbyterian, became a hospital, and sheds were built along Court Square for the wounded. Very soon, soldiers from Tennessee, the Battle of Chickamauga, and the Atlanta Campaign were streaming into Newnan station.

  Catherine (Katie) Graves, cousin of Cora and Lena Calhoun

  Newnan, now a hospital hub, seemed out of immediate danger, but Atlanta could not escape its fate. “I propose to demonstrate the vulnerability of the South, and make its inhabitants feel that war and individual ruin are synonymous terms,” wrote Sherman to Grant. In another letter he proclaimed, “I can make this march, and make Georgia howl!”

  By April 1864 Atlanta was entrenched and under siege, with federal forces moving inexorably toward the most vital supply, manufacturing, and communications center of the Confederacy. Sherman’s orders from Grant were “to get into the interior of the enemy’s country as far as you can, inflicting all the damage you can against their war resources.” Slave prices rose that spring. Slaves were desperately needed to build roads, bridges, and fortifications. By May slaves were being requisitioned at a dollar a day to owners to fortify the city, but on May 4, according to Kate Cumming’s Kate: The Journal of a Confederate Nurse, Newnan was nonetheless the scene of a celebration—the wedding of Dr. Calhoun’s daughter. Cumming, who had a critical eye, described the 11 A.M. candlelit ceremony in the Presbyterian church by saying that sunlight would have been “in much better taste.” She commented on the cost of the nine bridesmaids’ dresses (“new Swiss muslin” at fifty dollars a yard) and she noticed one or two “married surgeons” among the nine groomsmen. Nitpicking aside, she confessed that “the whole scene at the wedding was quite pretty and impressive.”

  Two months later the first Union shells fell on Atlanta. By early August, Sherman’s “Big Guns” had reduced much of the city to rubble and collapsed walls. On September 1, after burning or dynamiting everything of military value, Confederate general John Bell Hood ordered Atlanta’s evacuation. Andrew Bonaparte Calhoun had already made a lucky escape to the Calhoun Quarter. Dr. Calhoun had the presence of mind, in the fall of 1864, to move his “stock and negroes further south and was absent from home until the close of the war.” If Moses ever thought of freedom, it would have been with mixed emotions. Moses was “somebody” in slavery. He was privileged property. It was a clear, hot day on September 2, 1864, when Sherman’s triumphant army changed Moses Calhoun’s life forever. At the age of thirty-five, Moses became a full person instead of property. Sherman’s famous wire to Lincoln read, “Atlanta is ours, and fairly won.” Mathew Brady photographed industrial Atlanta in ruins: hulks of brick chimneys among ruined factories, foundries, and railroad yards where, it was said, Sherman’s army twisted the ties into the letters “U” and “S.” The fall of Atlanta stunned the South; the news ensured both the Confederates’ defeat and Lincoln’s reelection. “Since Atlanta I have felt as if all were dead within me, forever,” wrote the Charleston diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut. “We are going to be wiped off the earth.”

  After occupying Atlanta for two months, on November 11, just before he began his march to the sea, General Sherman gave orders to burn the city—finally agreeing to spare churches and hospitals after a plea from a Roman Catholic priest. (Sherman had actually been raised in a Roman Catholic family.) Everything the Confederates did not burn themselves, Union soldiers torched. Atlanta was destroyed. In 1864 generals still rode into battle under fire. By the Battle of Atlanta, the thirty-three-year-old Confederate general John Bell Hood had already lost his right leg at Chickamauga and the use of his left arm at Gettysburg. Thirty-four-year-old Union general Oliver Otis Howard, who lost his right arm at Fair Oaks, led Sherman’s right flank on his march to the sea. Wherever he went, Sherman liberated slaves. Thousands of former slaves followed his army through Georgia and the Carolinas. They were known as “Contrabands.” In 1862 Union general Benjamin Franklin Butler refused to return runaway Louisiana slaves to their owners, calling them “contraband of war.” In response to critics who accused him of neglecting the newly freed, Sherman met in Savannah with Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton and twenty local black leaders. They were reassured by Sherman. A few days after the meeting, Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15, providing for the settlement of forty thousand freed slaves on land taken from white owners in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. Each settler was given a forty-acre parcel and an old army mule, but alas, within a year, the orders were revoked by the new administration of President Andrew Johnson.

  Four months after Sherman’s army freed the slaves of Georgia, the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, enacted on December 18, 1865, freed all the slaves of the United States and its territories. Lincoln had made another crucial decision affecting black Americans. The emancipation document of January 1863 was only a proclamation—it could be rescinded. Lincoln believed that blacks had suffered “the greatest wrong inflicted on any people.” Fearing that the next president might reestablish slavery, he had pushed through the Thirteenth Amendment. Frederick Douglass was ill during the passage of the amendment, but his son Charles Douglass, who had survived the 1863 annihilation of the all-black Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Regiment in South Carolina, wrote to him from Washington:

  I wish you could have been here the day that the constitutional amendment was passed forever abolishing slavery in the United States, such rejoicing never before witnessed, cannons firing, people hugging and shaking hands, white people I mean …

  At the end of the Civil War, the former Calhoun house slaves from Coweta County all lived together in Atlanta. Here, Moses Calhoun, ex-slave butler, had his eye on property and prosperity. The Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, freeing the slaves of states in rebellion, had been barely a rumor to the black Calhouns. But 1865 was different. Early in 1865 Moses Calhoun, now free throughout the world, not just Coweta County, chose a beautiful bride who had always been free. Atlanta Mary Fernando was fifteen years younger than Moses and looked white. Ivory-skinned Atlanta, whose mother came from New Orleans, was born in 1845, the year that the city of Terminus was renamed Atlanta, for the Western and Atlantic Railroad. Atlanta and Moses would have two daughters: Cora, born in 1865, when the city was still ash and rubble; and Lena, born in 1869, when Moses first began to climb the ladder of success. Moses always knew that he had to live in Atlanta. And if he was going to become a man of property, he had no time to waste and no time to learn anything new. As a very good butler, he knew about food and drink and how to present them. He had a plan. It involved doing what he knew he did well—and with help from his former owner it could succeed. He opened a combination grocery and catering establishment. He knew these were enterprises in which blacks would be allowed to succeed. Moses had been lucky in slavery—he believed he would be even luckier in freedom.

  As far as Moses and Atlanta Calhoun were concerned, probably the most important aspect of Reconstruction was that their children could be excellently, and legally, educated. Frederick Douglass disagreed. He placed education second to the ballot. There was no disputing the Negro’s “ignorance and degradation,” Douglass wrote. It was “the policy of the system to keep him both ignorant and degraded, the better and more safely to defraud him of his hard earnings.” Suffrage was the way out of ignorance. “The only way to guarantee true black freedom is to give blacks the vote,” Douglass insisted. He regarded the elective franchise “as the one great power by which all civil rights are obtained.” Without the right to vote, to be on a jury, and to serve in the military, there was no citizenship. Douglass believed that the liberties of the American people were “dependent upon the ballot-box, the jurybox, and the cartridge-box, that without these no class of people could live and flourish in this country.” Having turned Frederick Augustus Bailey, a slave, into Frederick Douglass, international notable, he did not believe in “special efforts” for blacks. Douglass was a self-made man—he believed others could do the same. Like Lincoln, Douglass had no idea that
he was sui generis. Early in 1865 Douglass had two great fears: one, Lincoln would lose the election and the Emancipation Proclamation would be rescinded—and two, Lincoln would win the election and pretend he had never heard of the word “suffrage.”

  Suffrage aside, the education of former slaves, known as “freedmen” (not free men), was now a matter for the combined efforts of the federal government and private philanthropy. The Freedmen’s Bureau Bill had been enacted in March 1865 to provide care and relief for the newly liberated. The Freedmen’s Bureau, the U.S. Army, and the American Missionary Association (AMA) began to open schools and colleges all over the South. Eager, predominantly white Northern volunteers, mostly from churches and universities, poured into the South to teach former slaves. The Freedmen’s Bureau represented everything that white Southerners hated—black soldiers, black voters, black students, black wage earners, and whites extending civil courtesies to blacks. Perhaps the least dishonest and least self-interested bureaucracy in U.S. history, the bureau became a liberal bastion, with leaders who were mostly younger Union officers and Protestant religious activists. Under General Oliver Otis Howard, a hero of Sherman’s march through Georgia, the bureau was the model of pragmatic idealism. The death rate of freedmen in 1865 was 38 percent; by 1869 it was 2.03 percent.

  One-armed General Howard, the thirty-five-year-old head of the Freedmen’s Bureau, known as a “friend of the Negro,” made enemies North and South for his support of land redistribution as well as suffrage for blacks. Dark-haired and handsome, with the poignant empty sleeve, Howard was also known as the “Christian general” for making his troops attend prayer and temperance meetings. Born in Maine in 1830, he graduated from Bowdoin College before entering West Point, where he was fourth in his class. After graduation in 1854, he became a West Point math instructor; but in 1857, during the Second Seminole War in Florida, he experienced a religious conversion. He was on the verge of quitting the army and going into the ministry when the Civil War broke out. As colonel of the Third Maine Infantry Regiment, he was at First Bull Run and Fair Oaks, where his right arm was amputated. He returned to battle at Second Bull Run, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg. In 1861 he became a brigadier, and in 1862 a major general. He commanded Sherman’s right flank on his march through Georgia. At home, he and his wife worked to desegregate their Washington church. He was well aware of the dangers facing teachers in the South. School buildings and churches used as schools were burned down. Teachers were driven away, beaten, or murdered. Howard led the Freedmen’s Bureau its entire life, from 1865 to 1874. In 1867 Howard University, in Washington, D.C., was chartered by act of Congress and named for General Howard, who later became its president.