Although it was a crime in the South to educate Negroes, there had always been a “secret” educated class—usually the illegitimate children of slave owners and house slaves. Many attended Oberlin College, in Ohio, the earliest officially integrated college in North America. Oberlin was founded in 1833 in Lorain County in the Western Reserve. Oberlin’s first president, Professor Asa Mahan, who had studied under Harriet Beecher Stowe’s father at Cincinnati’s Lane Theological Seminary, refused to accept the position unless Negroes and women were admitted. In the 1850s the town of Oberlin, known as “the most-abolitionist place in the most abolitionist county in America,” was famous for the integrated rescue of a runaway slave from a bounty hunter.
The institutions of learning established between 1865 and 1870 by the bureau and the AMA were tributes to American liberalism. Former abolitionist Brigadier General Clinton Bowen Fisk, a wealthy St. Louis businessman in banking and insurance before the war, became the Freedmen’s Bureau leader in Tennessee, where he established the first free schools in the South for both black and white children. In 1867, with an endowment of $30,000, he made an abandoned Nashville barracks available to the AMA and established Fisk University—home to the magnificent Fisk Jubilee Singers, glorious archivists of spirituals, most notably adored by Mark Twain.
Brigadier Samuel Chapman Armstrong, aged twenty-six in 1865, was the blond son of American missionaries in Hawaii. After attending the Punahou School in Honolulu, he graduated from Williams College in 1862 and a year later found himself at Gettysburg. In late 1863 he led black troops as lieutenant colonel of the Eighth U.S. Colored Troops (USCT) at the notorious Siege of Petersburg, where blacks were cannon fodder. “USCT” was the official designation of black troops who were not organized into state units. Armstrong was given their leadership surely because, in army-think, he was from Hawaii and used to dealing with dark-skinned people. In tribute to his heroic troops, Armstrong joined the Freedmen’s Bureau after the war. And with the help of the AMA, in 1868 he established Hampton Institute in Virginia for future teachers. Brigadier Armstrong belonged to the “hand” rather than the “head” school of black education; his students would learn real skills. The theory of educating Southern blacks now fell into two categories (later most notably expressed by W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington): to educate the “head” for intellectual learning (Du Bois), or to educate the “hand” for skilled manual labor (Washington).
General Carl Schurz, who had been asked by President Andrew Johnson to study the condition of Southern blacks in the immediate postwar period, had discovered not only the extent of the horrific conditions that led to Reconstruction, but another aspect of the Southern attitude toward blacks: “Aside from a small number of honorable exceptions, the popular prejudice is almost as bitterly set against the Negro’s having the advantage of education as it was when the Negro was a slave.”
In 1865, twenty-eight-year-old Edmund Asa Ware (known as Asa), two years out of Yale, never in war, and hiding his youthful features behind a very imposing blond beard, was an American Missionary Association agent assigned to a white public school in Tennessee. His ability to bring order out of chaos so impressed General Clinton Fisk that Fisk recommended Ware for the big job in Atlanta—as superintendent of two new Missionary schools: the Storrs School and Atlanta University. The Storrs School, for younger children, was named for the Reverend Henry Martin Storrs, a white Congregational minister from Cincinnati, who contributed $1,000 toward new buildings. While professing to be nonsectarian, the AMA was heavily Congregational.
Asa Ware belonged to the “head” school of black education. Seemingly diffident, Ware combined soaring idealism with a steely sense of command and a talent for organization and administration. Ware confessed without embarrassment that Harriet Beecher Stowe made him an abolitionist. Born on a Massachusetts farm in 1837, he moved to Connecticut with his family in 1852. He was a fifteen-year-old student at Norwich Free Academy when he first read Uncle Tom’s Cabin and attended antislavery lectures by Wendell Phillips and the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, Stowe’s brother. (Following the abolitionist pattern, he also listened to temperance speakers.) He graduated as “firstboy of the school” in 1859. Asa Ware was the kind of young man whom older men noticed and approved of. It happened at Yale, and it happened again when he went to work for the AMA. At Yale, class of 1863, he held a scholarship provided by a group of four older male benefactors. Known for “modesty, simplicity, a keen sense of humor, a repugnance for pretense and sham, and a dedicated and deeply religious concern for his fellow man,” Ware was popular with eminent university professors. After Yale, he taught for two years at Norwich Free Academy and repaid his benefactors.
Atlanta University and the Storrs School, two of the jewels in the AMA crown, had both been founded in November 1865. That autumn, many of Atlanta’s people, black and white, were still living in makeshift tents on the edges of the city, and thousands of former slaves were still being fed by the army. By the end of 1865, luckier than most ex-slaves, Moses and Siny shared a house on Atlanta’s Fraser Street with their mother, Nellie; their respective spouses; their two small babies; and Moses’ mother-in-law. Moses had a grocery store, Nellie was a laundress, Siny was a hairdresser, and Siny’s husband, Preston Webb, was a horse trainer. Much of Atlanta’s population, black and white, had to start over with nothing. Although the city had been consumed by fire and mostly destroyed, its people were resilient. Moses stood in the ash and rubble of Atlanta like a character out of Gone with the Wind, determined to succeed. Aged thirty-five when he was emancipated, Moses was too old to tolerate a boss. He knew that he was going to be a man of business and property, not a wage earner. And he knew how to do it without raising white ire. He opened a grocery store on the lot next to his house and later bought a lot nearby and opened a restaurant. He began to make money to support his family. He may well have received financial assistance from Dr. Calhoun, with whom he presumably remained on affable and respectful terms. In 1867, as a new citizen of the United States of America, Moses registered to vote.
When Asa Ware arrived in Atlanta in September 1866, he had not been surprised to find that his classrooms were an old boxcar and a former Confederate commissary. This was his second posting in the war-ravaged South, so he was well aware of the conditions. Ware’s role was to make the Atlanta Missionary schools the models for the education of future teachers and members of what would become the new Negro middle class. Storrs very quickly became more than a school; it became a center for social services, education, and worship for ex-slaves, who had petitioned for a church of their own. On May 22, 1867, a school committee voted to organize a Congregational church. The first church service was held a week later in the Storrs School chapel, conducted by Reverend Erastus M. Cravath, who was the white secretary of the AMA, a founder of Atlanta University, and the first president of Fisk University. The new church was a block away from the Storrs School, and the parsonage was built by students in the Atlanta University trade department. Atlanta’s First Congregational Church was actually the second black Congregational church in the United States. For seventeen years, the church’s interracial congregation was served by white pastors recommended by the AMA.
In private, the slender Ware had a laconic Connecticut Yankee manner of speaking, but in speeches and lectures, he was brisk and no-nonsense. He was not robust, but he had charisma. His eyes and his voice, people said, had power. “I could not but feel that I had met a man of strong personality, a man with force of character enough to impress himself upon others,” wrote William H. Crogman, the future president of Clark University, as a student in the early 1870s.
Devoted to academic excellence, Ware rejected the Southern concept of educating the “hand,” not the “head.” He dreamed of establishing a centrally located university to train talented black youth and educate teachers. He also rejected all notions of racial inferiority. As principal of the Storrs School, Ware made an enormous impression on the students. It wa
s a new and strange thing to see a white man carrying wood and making fires for them. When a white Atlantan asked Ware how he was able to live among Negroes, he replied: “Oh, I can easily explain that; I’m simply color blind.”
The beginning was shaky. It had been necessary to find a substantial house, a “Teachers’ Home,” where all the teachers could live together for safety—because no one in Atlanta would rent a room to Yankee teachers, who were known locally as “NT,” for “nigger teachers.” A large house had been purchased at the corner of Houston and Calhoun streets, where the principal and his wife would live, and where Asa Ware lived as a bachelor. More teachers were needed, and places to house them. The school was seriously overcrowded. Children attended in the mornings and afternoons. And those aged fifteen to sixty who were unable to read listened to teachers from seven to nine in the evenings. There was also a Sunday school. The AMA believed that black advancement lay in “the religious element in their character.” Piety and utter sincerity were the hallmarks of the Missionary teachers. Most of the teachers were New England or Midwestern Congregationalists, and they clung together in the Teachers’ Home–Storrs School–Atlanta University-First Congregational Church neighborhood with other Northerners, AMA workers, and occupying Union officers in the face of hostile natives—white this time.
Among the dedicated young volunteers arriving in Atlanta in the fall of 1868 to teach at Storrs was twenty-four-year-old Sarah Jane Twichell, known as Jane. Like Ware, she was a New Englander, descending from a prominent family in Connecticut. A graduate of the Hartford Female Seminary, Jane joined the AMA in 1865 and was said to have a “strong, attractive and commanding personality.” In other words, she was an opinionated New England woman and no shrinking Southern belle. Atlanta was actually her third Southern post, after Norfolk and Charleston. Asa Ware’s courtship of Jane Twichell was practically instantaneous. They were married in Connecticut in the summer of 1869.
Moses began to buy more property in 1869, when his second daughter, Lena, was born. In August 1869 Nellie went to Chicago to the deathbed of her mother, Sinai, and wrote a beautiful letter to Moses. “She diede [sic] happy in the Lord,” wrote Nellie. In the autumn of 1870, at the start of the school year, Moses drove his daughter Cora and his niece, Katie Webb, to the Storrs School in his grocery delivery wagon. The 1870 census listed Moses as a “Retail Grocer,” with “Real Estate” valued at $830 and a “Personal Estate” of $700. Under “Color,” Moses is listed as “B” for black; all other family members are “M” for mulatto. Meanwhile, Moses, Atlanta, Cora, Lena, Nellie, Siny, and Katie all lived together in the house on Fraser Street—although Siny, whose husband had died, would soon remarry, and she and Katie would move away. Thanks to Reconstruction, and his own well-educated intelligence, Moses would give his daughters the education and sense of family that slavery had denied him.
CHAPTER TWO
South/Reconstruction
NOON 1870s
IN 1870 Moses owned a café, a boardinghouse, and a grocery store and was becoming a pillar of Atlanta’s black community. He was able to make it into the American middle class precisely because, as usual, his timing was excellent. He was at the right time and place to take advantage of everything the earliest days of Reconstruction had to offer himself and his children. Later, it would become more difficult. In 1870 blacks voted for the first time in new elections in which all adult males, regardless of color, could vote. Moses Calhoun had registered and presumably voted Republican—like the vast majority of black men throughout the South. That year was both the high-water mark and the beginning of the end for black Republicans, whose downfall began being plotted the moment the ballots were counted. Blacks were not just voting—they were winning elections. Between 1870 and 1901, twenty-two Negroes from Southern states served in the U.S. Congress: two senators and twenty representatives. Unlike Mississippi and Alabama, though, Georgia always had a white majority. But while no black from Georgia went to the Reconstruction Congress, in 1870 Coweta County elected a black man named Sam Smith to the Georgia legislature. The black Calhouns were lucky because Atlanta, whose business community courted Yankee investment, demonstrated less overt violence against black Republicans.
Georgia was in the “vanguard” of the New South—commercial rather than agricultural. The state had gone through a leadership transition, from the planter class (not as old as Virginia’s or South Carolina’s) to a new business class. By 1870 its cotton crop surpassed the largest crop under slavery, and business and industrial prosperity was equally impressive. Georgia had safely returned to the status quo, with a small difference: now some Negroes were allowed to prosper.
In January 1870, Dr. Calhoun, whose relations with Moses’s sister Siny were somewhat ambiguous (daughter or mistress?), deeded a house and lot to her in Newnan. There was no information beyond the deed to “a woman of color, Catherine Sinai”:
… for and in consideration of good will … and an interest in her welfare which he has by reason of her fidelity as a servant … does grant and convey unto the said Siny Webb for and during her natural life and after her death … to the daughter of the said Siny Webb namely Catherine Webb … one lot in the city of Newnan … on the land of said Andrew B. Calhoun.
By 1874 Georgia Negroes owned more than 350,000 acres of land. Moses had found a niche and would become a wealthy man. Besides equal American citizenship, Reconstruction for blacks also meant equal opportunity to succeed or fail. This is exactly what Southern whites wanted to take away. They did not want blacks to have choices. As Southern blacks claimed more and more to be American citizens with “certain unalienable rights,” the old Southern power structure flexed its considerable muscle and its new terrorist arm, the KKK, to refute those claims. The KKK was founded in Tennessee in 1865 as a response to the Thirteenth Amendment by ex-Confederate officers, among them Nathan Bedford Forrest, perpetrator of a massacre at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, against surrendering black soldiers and black civilians, including women and children. The KKK was a secret organization whose masked, night-riding members’ basic activity was committing acts of terror against rural blacks and intimidating or murdering white Republicans. When it was not committing murder and arson and other evils, it was working to stifle the education, economic achievement, voting rights, and right to keep and bear arms of blacks. In April 1868 in Columbia County, Georgia, there were 1,222 votes for the Republican candidate. By the November presidential election, Columbia County reported one vote for Ulysses S. Grant. Republican voters had been either driven out or wiped out. In 1870 a federal grand jury declared the Ku Klux Klan to be a terrorist organization.
October 25, 1870, was a day of mixed blessings for Atlanta University. The good news was that the Georgia legislature had made an appropriation to the university of $8,000. The bad news: Atlanta University was now under the same regulations and restrictions as the University of Georgia, whose rules required a governor-appointed board of visitors and examinations on behalf of the state. Asa Ware knew that the examinations were about not just Atlanta University, but the whole question of higher education for Negroes. Because he had a point to prove, he asked the governor to appoint most of the board from the old slaveholding class. “I know these Negroes,” said Joseph E. Brown, who had been governor during the war. “Some of these pupils were probably my slaves. I know that they can acquire the rudiments of an education, but they cannot go beyond. They are an inferior race, and for that reason, we had a right to hold them as slaves, and I mean to attend these examinations to prove we are right.”
The examination lasted three days, June 26 to June 28, 1871. The youngest children, surely including Cora Calhoun and Katie Webb, performed only satisfactorily. “This is just as I expected,” said ex-governor Brown, “and confirms my belief.” The next day, however, the examiners were stunned when the teachers of Latin and Greek asked the examiners themselves to select the passages and choose the pupils to be tested. To the amazement of the examiners, the students performed b
rilliantly. In the rhetorical exercises the examiners were especially impressed by the students’ ability to answer questions in their own words, not just parroting the text. The examination in geometry was equally stunning. Ware asked a young girl why she had seemed nervous during the geometry exam. “Oh, Mr. Ware,” she said, “I was not on examination, nor our class, nor our school; my race was on examination before these Visitors … to God be the praise for my examination that day.”
“The exercises of the two preceding days has dispelled the opinion, heretofore entertained, that the members of the African race were incapable of a high degree of mental culture,” said Brown. “I was all wrong. I am converted.” The board even praised the “missionary spirit with which the teachers entered upon their self-assigned task, and have performed their duties while receiving salaries barely sufficient to sustain the necessaries of life.” The performance of the Atlanta students was reported in the press, North and South. “We are not prepared to believe what we witnessed,” wrote the Atlanta Constitution:
The Black Calhouns Page 3