The Black Calhouns

by Gail Lumet Buckley

  To see colored boys and girls fourteen and eighteen years of age, reading in Greek and Latin, and demonstrating correctly problems in Algebra and Geometry, and seemingly understanding what they demonstrated appears almost wonderful.

  Now prominent businessmen stopped to shake the hands of Atlanta University teachers; there was white community support for building projects; the legislature was inclined to grant more appropriations; and the morale of students and faculty soared. People believed that Asa Ware could convince anyone to do whatever he wanted, especially recalcitrant white Southerners. But for Asa Ware trouble lay ahead. Georgia was now entirely in the hands of white Democrats. In 1871 the Klan murdered seventy-four men in Georgia.

  From 1865 to 1871, Moses Calhoun, aspiring capitalist, had an account in the Atlanta branch of the Negro-owned Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company. In 1871 Freedman’s Bank (as it was also called) had thirty-four branches and deposits of $20 million. When the bank failed in 1874, how much Moses lost is unknown. But Frederick Douglass, who became president of the bank in early 1874, very much tarnished his own reputation. In the mid-nineteenth century, Douglass was a new kind of black leader. Before the Civil War, the evil of slavery gave rise to half-mad leaders of doomed rebellions, men like Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner. But Douglass was not only sane; he was canny. He went from being a moral leader before the war to being a political leader after the war, having the ear of presidents Lincoln, Grant, Hayes, and Garfield.

  Oddly enough, Reconstruction was not a happy period in the life of Douglass, for so long the voice of black aspirations. In 1870 the fifty-one-year-old Douglass was on the wrong side of two important issues: he had supported President Grant’s Santo Domingo annexation fiasco (hoping to build an American “empire,” Grant sought unsuccessfully to annex Santo Domingo), and he had opposed Negro migration to Kansas. Now, as president of Freedman’s Bank at its collapse, he was distanced all the more from the ordinary black people of the South. Douglass seemed to have totally succumbed to a power structure that fed his ego with titles and sinecures. To be fair, Douglass felt old, tired, and useless. His lifework, his religion, had been abolition—once it was achieved, he was having a kind of post-emancipation tristesse. Douglass had a right to his ego; he was a self-made star, a brilliant and generous man, and a sincere proponent of all progressive values—William Lloyd Garrison made him a pacifist (they disagreed on the Civil War) and Lucretia Mott made him a feminist.

  In 1874 Frederick Douglass made a mistake. He agreed to become president of the Freedman’s Bank. The list of the bank’s incorporators and trustees—which included the industrialist Peter Cooper, editor William Cullen Bryant, Treasury comptroller John Jay Knox, Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe (husband of Julia Ward Howe), and Chief Justice Salmon Chase—was stellar; but its board of directors was made up basically of crooks. “No more extraordinary and disreputable venture ever disgraced American business disguised as philanthropy than the Freedmen’s Bank,” wrote Du Bois. Douglass had the grace to admit that one of the reasons he said yes was the thought of the vast gulf between little Fred, the nearly naked slave boy, and being president of a bank.

  “It is not altogether without a feeling of humiliation that I must narrate my connection with ‘The Freedmen’s Savings and Trust Company,’” wrote Douglass, describing it as an institution designed to furnish a place of “security and profit” for the hard-won earnings of black people, especially of the South. There were bank branches throughout the old Confederacy, and “money to the amount of millions flowed into its vaults.” In typical nouveaux riche style, the bank decided to build itself a showplace in order to display its prosperity. “They accordingly erected on one of the most desirable and expensive sites in the national capital one of the most costly and splendid buildings of the time,” wrote Douglass, going on (with not a little irony) about “marble counters” and “elegantly dressed colored clerks with their pens behind their ears and buttonhole bouquets in their coat-fronts.”

  Douglass became a trustee of the bank when he moved to Washington in 1872 to work on his new paper, the New National Era. He deposited $12,000 and loaned the bank $10,000 of his own money, but when it was too late, he learned that the other trustees had nothing deposited in the bank. Some, while assuring Douglass of the bank’s soundness, had withdrawn their deposits. Douglass also discovered a matter of $40,000 that could not be traced. “Not to make too long a story, I was, in six weeks after my election as president of this bank, convinced that it was no longer a safe custodian of the hard earnings of my confiding people.” Douglass contacted the Senate Committee on Finance—while a group of trustees tried to make him the villain. But Douglass insisted that the bank should close, and the Finance Committee soon agreed.

  It was a hollow victory. “[It] brought upon my head an amount of abuse and detraction greater than any encountered in any other part of my life,” wrote Douglass. He was accused of “bringing the Freedman’s Bank into ruin, and squandering in senseless loans on bad security the hardly-earned moneys of my race,” despite the fact that all the loans were made prior to his presidency. “Not a dollar, not a dime of its millions were loaned by me, or with my approval,” he wrote. “The fact is … I was married to a corpse … the life, which was the money, was gone.” Douglass believed that he had been placed in the position with the hope that by “‘some drugs, some charms, some conjuration, or some mighty magic,’ I could bring it back.”

  Despite the demise of Freedman’s Bank, by 1875 black Americans, especially those in the North, had reason to feel optimistic—Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner’s great civil rights bill was law. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 had originally been proposed by Sumner in 1870. It was an equal rights bill for transportation, hotels, theaters, churches, cemeteries, juries, and schools, but when it passed in 1875, equality in schools was deleted. Sumner had died in 1874 in his rooms at Washington’s Wormley House, an exclusive private hotel, with James Wormley, the Negro hotel owner, at his bedside. In the art of the time depicting Sumner’s death, Wormley stands out as the only Negro in the picture. Samuel Cutler Ward, the anti-abolitionist brother of Julia Ward Howe and the most important lobbyist in D.C., famous for saving Andrew Johnson from impeachment, was both a political foe and a beloved friend of Sumner’s. He communicated the details of Sumner’s death to their best friend, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The three had been friends since their Boston boyhood. Ward, a rotund, Pickwickian figure, wrote to “Longo” that he had been “in the bath,” when word came that Sumner was dangerously ill. Dressing hurriedly, he had rushed to Sumner’s bedside to find him in extremis. “A vast crowd of freed men with the gloomiest faces darkened the street before his door,” wrote Ward. “The last audible words he uttered, with the old ring in his voice, were ‘Don’t let the bill die!’ Shortly after, again in a loud voice, ‘I mean the civil rights bill!’”

  Charles Sumner’s bill did not die. It passed in his honor. The passing of the first civil rights bill in America was a momentous event for American blacks—and an event of concern for many whites. In always free Indiana, the white Evansville Journal asked sixteen-year-old Edwin Horn, a young Negro schoolmaster-journalist, to write about the bill from the black point of view. Horn, who called himself “colored” but looked white, warned that the bill gave only equal rights. Hoping to forestall any excuses for racism, Horn spoke directly to young black people, warning them against “impertinence and insolence.” The primary object of the bill, he said, “is to protect you in the enjoyment of your rights as American citizens.” He warned that any indiscretion committed by a black man in asserting his rights under the civil rights bill would “not only bring injury upon its author, but also do a great harm to the colored race as a whole.” Edwin was conveying what whites wanted to hear—but he was also warning young Negro men to watch their step.

  Edwin Horn, an exceptionally handsome young man, worked for two Evansville papers—one white, one black. On his way up in black journalism, Horn was the editor
of a colored weekly, Our Age, and he was also the official “colored correspondent” for the Evansville Journal, a white daily. His real job was teaching in Evansville’s colored school. Edwin first came to the Journal’s attention in January 1875, when he gave the dedication speech at the opening of the new colored school. The Journal quoted the major theme of Edwin’s speech:

  To be the full equal of the white man, there are two particular things we need—education and wealth … See that your children are educated … If they be educated and virtuous, the greatness of our people is assured.

  In March, the Journal noted:

  At the close of the written examination of the Second Intermediate Schools, it was discovered that the pupils of the colored school of that grade, taught by Edwin F. Horn, had the highest general average in the city.

  Edwin was born in 1859 in racially unfriendly Tennessee to a mixed-race couple, a white British-born father and an Indian-black (or entirely Indian) mother. But he grew up in Quaker-influenced Indiana, which came into the Union in 1816 as a free state. Edwin’s hero, Indiana’s Civil War governor, Oliver Morton, had been an ardent abolitionist. In Indiana, the Horn children were classified as “colored,” a slightly more acceptable category than “Indian.” Thanks to the Quakers, Indiana had a relatively peaceful Civil War, except when Morgan’s Raiders used it as a shortcut to Ohio. Edwin grew up in Evansville, a placidly pretty Ohio River town, half Midwestern, half Southern. His father, the captain of a river trading boat, instilled a love of poetry in his four children, three boys and a girl. Edwin had a relatively comfortable time growing up “colored” in Evansville. A true child of Reconstruction, he showed the importance of education in both his speech and his comments. He started a night school for black adults. Whatever his talent, Edwin loved poetry. “Give children the best of poetry,” he wrote in a note to himself as a young teacher. “There is born in every man a poet who dies young.” Later, in 1887, the journalist-editor-teacher would marry Cora Calhoun.

  In 1876 the country was one hundred years old. Edwin Horn played the flute in the Evansville Centennial Concert. It was a great year to be an American—except for Southern Republicans. Although the state of Mississippi did not recognize the Thirteenth Amendment until 1995 and did not ratify it until 2013, the rest of the Confederate states were ratifying the Fourteenth Amendment and pledging allegiance to the United States. But in 1876 the South was once again solidly Democratic. The country was clearly divided, but sectional differences were less important than economic unity. Post–Civil War America was in the business of advancing the machine age; machines made money. What better way to advance America’s vision of machine age leadership than to have a birthday party and invite the world? The Philadelphia Exposition, in the city where it all began, was the site of the great centennial party: a heady mix of patriotism and commerce, a passing recognition of the arts, and the glorification of the machine. It probably reflected the American character. Tycoons and titans of industry clearly revered machinery in all its forms. After Lincoln, who was sui generis, the greatest American men of the age were mechanics, engineers, inventors, and industrialists—not presidents.

  By 1876, however, Reconstruction in the South was politically dead—although its spirit certainly survived everywhere, the letter of Reconstruction had died. It was a terrible turning point. There would be no more Union soldiers in the South to protect former slaves; there would be no more effective Republicans in the South, black or white; and there would be no more black freedom. Moses Calhoun thrived, however, amassing property because his interests were economic, not political. By 1876 Moses was as successful as any black man in Atlanta could hope to be. The postwar migration of Georgia blacks to Kansas and points west and north had caused some alarm among whites. Moses might have felt it was “good riddance.” Like many upper servants, he probably had conservative views. The best people, he might have believed, stayed to rebuild Atlanta, which soon became as brash and money-grasping as it was before the war, with Democrats back in charge. Moses was no political activist. He was a Republican, but he knew how to get along with Democrats. Moses’ particular pursuit of happiness throughout the 1870s meant expanding his business, becoming a pillar of the black community, and organizing parties for his daughters and their friends. There were other black churches in Atlanta, but Moses naturally joined First Congregational—not only a house of God, but a doorway to the future. Asa Ware, a founder of First Congregational, was elected the first clerk and treasurer of the church, which was a block away from Storrs School. By the fall of 1875 Jane and Asa Ware had moved out of their dorm quarters and into an old cabin that they decorated like a New England cottage—and which became a “source of sweetness and light” to hundreds of student guests. The two Ware children illegally attended Storrs School. Georgia law prohibited black and white children from attending the same school.

  Ironically, in 1876 Mississippi became the first state to elect a Negro, forty-one-year-old Blanche Kelso Bruce, to a full term in the U.S. Senate. Educated with his master’s son (possibly his half brother) in Virginia, Bruce was intelligent and articulate, with polished manners. A self-described carpetbagger, he settled in Mississippi in 1870. When Bruce took his seat in the Senate, the white senior senator from Mississippi, James Alcorn, refused to escort the newly elected junior senator down the aisle, contrary to established custom. As Bruce, embarrassed, started to walk down the aisle alone, Senator Roscoe Conkling, the powerful Republican “boss” of New York, instantly stepped in to escort him. Bruce was the only Negro senator—and, for two years, the only Negro in Congress. Befriending Bruce, Conkling saw that he also received appointments to important committees.

  The Republicans had won the war and saved the Union, and they spent sixteen consecutive years in the White House. The party was in disarray—it had been in power too long. There were no strong candidates and too many factions: radicals, moderates, conservatives, and reformers. The Republican Party itself was now commonly perceived to be a sinkhole of graft, corruption, and patronage. It looked like an easy win for the Democrats. Their candidate was the very popular former New York governor Samuel Tilden, aged sixty-two, a barn-burning (antislavery) Democrat known as the “giant killer” because he sent Boss Tweed to jail in 1873. Tilden, a bachelor who later gave $3 million to the people of New York City to establish a free public library, won both the popular and the electoral vote; but disputed returns, and accusations of fraud and violence in several Southern states, caused the election to be decided by Congress. Hayes won by one vote. The election was utterly corrupt, as was the resulting “compromise.” “The Republican Party is the ship,” Frederick Douglass famously often said, and “all else is the sea.” Unfortunately, the ship was dashed on the rocks of the stolen election of 1876. The election was actually decided in a smoke-filled room in the Negro-owned Wormley House hotel. Southern Democrats did not really care about the White House—they cared about “home rule” over Negroes. The secret “compromise” stated that Southern Democrats would acknowledge Republican Rutherford B. Hayes as president only if all federal troops were removed from the former Confederate states. The Wormley Compromise was a double betrayal. The Republican Party betrayed Southern blacks—as well as the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. And the Democratic Party betrayed its own candidate. It was another terrible turning point.

  The Republican candidate Rutherford Birchard Hayes, aged fifty-four, was not just another bearded Union general from Ohio—he was a genuine war hero. Leading a regiment of Ohio volunteers, he was wounded five times and had four horses shot out from beneath him. His wife, the former Lucy Ware Webb, was sometimes known as “Lemonade Lucy” because she was a member of the Temperance League and had banned alcohol in the White House. Hayes took the oath of office in March 1877 in a quasi-secret ceremony in the White House, because outgoing President Grant feared mob violence by Tilden’s supporters. The only happy people were Southern Democrats, who got exactly what they wanted—total cont
rol over their Negroes, without constitutional restraints. It was not a “stolen” election. It was a trade. The South gave the North the White House in exchange for a free hand in erasing all traces of both Reconstruction and the black Republican vote. The end of black freedom in the South officially came in April 1877, when President Hayes withdrew all federal troops.

  The end was in the beginning, of course. The minute blacks began to vote, the white South began to plot their downfall. No longer at war with Yankees, the South was openly at war with blacks. The former Confederacy was determined to reinstate slavery by any means necessary and to organize society as if the Confederacy had won the war. Poor Southern blacks, some having glimpsed a different world, were on their way back to the new bondage of Jim Crow, sharecropping, and lynching—all virtually nonexistent during slavery. By 1876 black life in the South was back to Justice Taney’s comments of 1857; if you were black and lived below the Mason-Dixon Line, you still had no rights “which the white man was bound to respect.” Blacks had discovered that life in freedom, as twentieth-century poet Langston Hughes wrote, was “no crystal stair.”

  Georgia was somewhat different. As soon as the army was withdrawn in 1877, the Georgia legislature ejected its Negro members—three in the senate and twenty-nine in the house—on the grounds that they had not been citizens for the requisite nine years. However, shortly after the ejection, one of Georgia’s congressmen came down to tell the state’s political bosses that some very important people in Washington wanted the Negro members of the legislature reseated—and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments ratified. It seemed that Georgia was wooing Northern business investors. Georgia liked to look good to Yankees—in Atlanta at least. That left plenty of room in the countryside for the KKK to foment terror. The year 1876 was the last when blacks in the South voted for nearly another century.