Four Hundred Souls

by Four Hundred Souls (retail) (epub)

  Service to the nation gave Black Americans a claim on freedom and citizenship. Lincoln recognized this, too, in an 1863 letter. “If they stake their lives for us they must be prompted by the strongest motive—even the promise of freedom. And the promise being made, must be kept.”

  And then there were the soldiers. In fighting for the freedom of themselves and their families, many of the men of the U.S. Colored Troops came to understand themselves as political actors, committed to the Union cause, to republican government, and to the values of American democracy.

  You could see this on the ground when African American soldiers interacted with freed people. As part of the federal occupying force in the South, notes the historian Eric Foner, Black soldiers emerged as “apostles of black equality,” spreading “ideas of land ownership and political equality” among the former slaves.

  Indeed, the first years of Reconstruction saw intense struggle and rapid social change across the South. But the most dramatic transformations were in those towns and cities and villages where Black troops and Black veterans inspired local confidence and sparked political mobilization. Historian Steven Hahn notes how, in one district of Charleston, South Carolina, in 1867, hundreds of Black laborers had assembled as a military company, wearing “old army uniforms,” marching and drilling, for the sake of protecting themselves and negotiating better prices with landowning planters.

  It’s too much to say that Black soldiers and veterans were the driving force behind the political organization of freed people. Black men, women, and children of all ages played important and critical roles in shaping and sustaining communities as they embarked on new paths forged by freedom. But Black soldiers and veterans had an important role in particular forms of mobilization. By 1868, most Union-occupied areas of the former Confederate South had vibrant Union Leagues, formed to “protect, strengthen, and defend all loyal men without regard to sect, condition, or race” as well as to sponsor political events and provide forums for discussion among freed people.

  Black veterans of the Civil War were among the key organizers for Union Leagues, traveling throughout the South to help mobilize rural Blacks into organizations that quickly became tools for collective empowerment and defense. Working through Union Leagues, freed people established schools, opened cooperative stores, and mobilized to challenge white political power at a local level.

  Black soldiers and veterans were also at the forefront of the monumental effort in 1867 and 1868 to craft new constitutions for the former Confederate states. A substantial number of delegates to these constitutional conventions had been enslaved themselves. And many had come to prominence and leadership through their activities in the Union Army, their participation in the Union Leagues, and their efforts to organize their communities for mutual benefit. The importance of these new constitutions cannot be overstated. They were the foundation for a new kind of democracy, one rooted in equal citizenship and full civil standing, one with new opportunities, and new possibilities, for freed people throughout the South.

  The 1868 election was the first one where African Americans had a say in the nation’s next president. Not surprisingly, prospective Black voters in the South faced vigilante violence from whites who wanted to reestablish the hierarchies and relations of the antebellum past. It was against this violence that Black soldiers and veterans, again, stepped into the fray. In New Orleans, for example, “several republican clubs of colored men, in uniform, with torches and a drum corps, paraded through the streets” to the county courthouse to cast their ballot.

  The second half of the 1860s, from the late years of the Civil War to the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson and the start of Radical Reconstruction, was one of the most tumultuous periods in American history, a time of rapid, unprecedented change across the entire society. African Americans, free and freed, played a critical, world-historical part in driving that change.

  It’s in that fulcrum of transformation that Black soldiers were a revolutionary force. By joining the conflict, they turned a war for union into a war for emancipation. In the wake of the fighting, as millions worked to build a new society in the South, they helped guide, organize, and defend. In doing so, they established a tradition: not just of military service, but of using the fruits of that service to help secure rights for the community at large. It’s why, when Black Americans mobilized themselves to challenge racism and race hierarchy in the twentieth century, Black soldiers would again be at the forefront of the struggle, urging “double victory,” against tyranny both abroad and at home.

  1869–1874

  RECONSTRUCTION

  Michael Harriot

  What you are about to read is the story of the first war on terror.

  No…wait.

  This is actually the origin story of second-wave white supremacy known as “Jim Crow laws.”

  This is a war narrative. This is a horror story, but it’s also a suspense thriller that ends in triumph. It also ends in tragedy. It’s a true story about a fantastic myth. This is a narrative, nonfiction account of the all-American fairy tale of liberty and justice for all.

  Behold, the untold story of the Great American Race War.

  Before we begin, we shall introduce our hero.

  The hero of this drama is Black people. All Black people. The free Blacks; the uncloaked maroons; the Black elite; the preachers and reverends; the doormen and doctors; the sharecroppers and soldiers—they are all protagonists in our epic adventure.

  Spoiler alert: the hero of this story does not die.

  Ever.

  This hero is long-suffering but unkillable. Bloody and unbowed. In this story—and in all the subsequent sequels, now and forever—this hero almost never wins. But we still get to be the heroes of all true American stories simply because we are indestructible. Try as they might, we will never be extinguished.

  Ever.

  Our story begins at the end of the War for White Supremacy. Also known as the “War for Slaveholders’ Rights”; the “War of White Tears”; or more recently, “Conflict for Future Racist Monuments.” Demographic historian David J. Hacker contends that this war’s death toll could possibly outweigh the combined total of all the casualties of the nation’s other wars. (Whatever one chooses to call it, just remember: no war is civil.)

  By 1869, the worst fears of the Confederate white supremacists had all come true.

  The Thirteenth and Fourteenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution had been ratified, abolishing slavery, guaranteeing citizenship, and promising equal protection under the law. The treasonous states that previously decided they didn’t want to be a part of the United States if they couldn’t own Black people were now occupied by Union troops, some led by Black freedmen. Then came the last straw:

  On February 26, 1869, the U.S. Congress passed the proposal that would become the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, proclaiming that the right to vote “shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” According to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, the legislation resulted in more than 700,000 Black people registered as voters, slightly outnumbering the number of white voters in the South. In some states, the Black population equaled or surpassed the white population. But for the first time in decades, white Democrats—the original racists—were a minority in the South.

  Something had to be done, so they started a war.

  While many historians describe Reconstruction as a period of “racial unrest” marked by lynchings and “race riots,” it was undoubtedly a war. The network of terror cells that sprang up during Reconstruction was no different from the organized militias of the American Revolution or the ragtag Confederate squads. Although they went by many names, including the White League, the White Knights, the Knights of the White Camellia, and—the most famous of all—the “Circle of Brothers�
� known as the Ku Klux Klan, the loose confederation of historically white fraternities had one common goal: to overthrow the government and create their own white supremacist state.

  Ku Klux Klan members in North Carolina lynched so many Black voters in 1870 that Governor William Woods Holden declared an insurrection and suspended habeas corpus (the right against unlawful detention), imposing martial law in two counties. After Klansmen assassinated Republican state senator John W. Stephens—along with Wyatt Outlaw, a Black town commissioner—Holden had no choice but to hire Union colonel George Washington Kirk to quell the violence. Kirk and three hundred soldiers traveled to North Carolina, arresting some of the most prominent men in the state for conspiring with the Klan—including ex-congressman John Kerr—for fueling what would become known as the Kirk-Holden War.

  But the Klan’s rampage worked.

  Battered by rampant murder and intimidation, the Tarheel State’s Black voters were successfully suppressed in the 1870 statewide elections. When Democrats won control of the state legislature, their first order of business was to impeach Holden for treating Klansmen too harshly. None of the more than one hundred terror leaders arrested in the Kirk-Holden War were ever charged with a crime. But on December 4, 1870, William Woods Holden became the first governor in American history to be removed from office.

  North Carolina’s Klansmen had successfully overthrown their state’s government.

  It was not the first time, and it would not be the last.

  In June 1869, thirty-three Georgia legislators were officially removed from office when the state’s supreme court ruled 2–1 that “there is no existing law of this State which confers the right upon the colored citizens thereof to hold office.” The decision, however, was largely ceremonial. By the time the court handed down the decision, the Klan had already driven the “Original 33” from office, slaughtered at least a dozen antiexpulsion protesters in the Camilla Massacre, and forced Republican governor Rufus Bullock to ask for military intervention. One-quarter of the Original 33 would be killed by white supremacist violence, and Governor Bullock would be “obliged” by the Klan to resign the governorship and flee the state in 1871.

  In Eutaw, Alabama, Black voters so outnumbered their white counterparts that in the 1868 presidential election, Republican Ulysses S. Grant easily won Greene County by more than two thousand votes. But on October 25, 1870, two weeks before the gubernatorial election, white radicals opened fire on thousands of Black citizens at a political rally. Because of the Eutaw Massacre, Black voters were bullied into staying home on election day, allowing Robert Lindsay, the Democratic candidate for governor, to win the county by forty-three votes.

  In Laurens, South Carolina, “ten or twelve persons” were slaughtered the day after the 1870 state elections. A congressional committee investigating Klan violence heard accounts of white and Black ballot-casters being “waited upon” after voting, which sounds biblically scary. Being attacked by dingy-robed horseback riders is one thing, but being “waited upon” sounds like Stephen King–novelesque, next-level racism.

  In an attempt to vanquish the Klan’s reign of fear, Congress passed a series of three increasingly restrictive laws aimed at curbing the terror groups’ power. The Enforcement Act of 1870 prohibited groups from banding together, using force, or even wearing disguises to violate the constitutional rights of other citizens—namely the right to vote.

  It did not work.

  The Second Enforcement Act was similar but imposed harsher fines and allowed federal oversight of local and federal elections. It was cute but, of course, it didn’t work, either. It wasn’t necessarily the elections that concerned Black voters, it was the fireworks at the Klan afterparties that caused so much consternation. It’s almost like Congress didn’t hear that whole “waited upon” part. Still, they gave it one more try.

  The Third Enforcement Act gave the president the right to suspend habeas corpus, an extraordinarily controversial power to hand to the commander in chief. Outside wartime, the United Sates has never invoked the authority to suspend this constitutionally guaranteed right, but Congress thought it was the only way to win this rapidly escalating race war. They didn’t even try to pretend why they passed the legislation by calling it something like the “Patriot Act” or the “Please Be Nice to Black People Law of 1870.”

  They called it the Ku Klux Klan Act.

  It did not work.

  In 1871 the Klan continued its Klannish ways by slaughtering thirty people in Meridian, Mississippi. No one knows how many people a white militia mob murdered on Easter Sunday in Colfax, Louisiana, in 1873. A military report lists eighty-one Black men; another fifteen to twenty bodies were fished out of the Red River, and another eighteen were secretly buried, according to historian Charles Lane. In August 1874, the White League killed at least a dozen freedmen in Couschatta, Louisiana. One month after the Couschatta Massacre, five thousand members of the Crescent City White League successfully overthrew the state government and installed the Democrat John McEnery as governor. Although their victory was quickly erased by federal troops, the White League later erected a monument to their cause, containing the following inscription:

  McEnery and Penn having been elected governor and lieutenant-governor by the white people, were duly installed by this overthrow of carpetbag government, ousting the usurpers, Governor Kellogg (white) and Lieutenant-Governor Antoine (colored).

  United States troops took over the state government and reinstated the usurpers but the national election of November 1876 recognized white supremacy in the South and gave us our state.

  By now, you may be wondering, where is our hero?

  Well, perhaps the most inconceivable thing about this story is neither the details of the horrific massacres nor the fact that—for the most part—Black people haven’t even succumbed to the primal seduction of vengeance. (Remember, the ones who were “waited upon” outnumbered the waiters.) There were more of us than them, yet we did not reciprocate the terror. Still, that is not the magnificent part.

  The most marvelous, unbelievable thing about Black people in America is that they exist. Every imaginable monstrosity that evil can conjure has been inflicted on this population, yet they have not been extinguished.

  The hero remains.

  Still.

  And that is the most wondrous part of all.

  1874–1879

  ATLANTA

  Tera W. Hunter

  In late 1879, Ernest Ingersoll, a Michigan-born naturalist and explorer, visited Atlanta. He was writing an article for Harper’s Magazine trumpeting the rise of the New South city since the Civil War.

  Ingersoll was most impressed by the railroad industry, the ancillary businesses it stimulated, and the cushy lifestyles of the emergent industrial elites who profited from the city’s explosion. But he did not ignore the sights and sounds of the downtrodden elements, which struck contrasting poses alongside the prosperity.

  “A feature of the city to which no well-ordered resident will be likely to direct a stranger’s attention is Shermantown,” he wrote. The place was so named because during the Civil War it had been occupied by U.S. general William T. Sherman, when he carried out his famous raid against the Confederates heading to the coast. Shermantown is a “random collection of huts forming a dense negro settlement in the heart of an otherwise attractive portion of the place,” Ingersoll noted. “The women ‘take in washing’ and the males as far as our observation taught us, devote their time to the lordly occupation of sunning themselves.”

  An ink drawing of Shermantown accompanied the article, which complements Ingersoll’s commentary overly determined by his admittedly tutored “observations,” but it also offers readers additional information that insiders of Black urban life in the late 1870s might have seen differently. Ingersoll inferred disorder where one could have seen a consciously arranged village, poverty aside. Houses were d
rawn as dilapidated dwellings and looked fragile as though they were temporary shelter, built out of found wood and scraps of material.

  Housing in the city was scarce as the population exploded after the Civil War and recovery from the war’s destruction was slow, which meant makeshift units were the norm for the influx of poor residents. The shacks, arranged in a semicircle, appear to have been built close enough together that little space passed between them. Some have rickety stairs leading up to doorways pitched off the ground, which allowed individuals to perch themselves and look out into the communal space in the center. Chickens and pigs wander about the yards, signs that rural people brought their survival skills with them to the city. The houses surround a well and a canopy that covers the implements of the washing trade, such as buckets and scrub boards. Women are shown walking with a basket of dirty laundry and doing the wash.

  Men are shown, by contrast, hanging out but not engaged in work. Though Ingersoll noted Black men’s presence in other parts of the city, however insidious he found their occupations, as “brush fiends,” chair vendors, street musicians, and blackface minstrels, he leaned on the stereotypes of lazy Black men “sunning themselves” in Shermantown. Progress in the form of physical construction of the city in Ingersoll’s mind popped up like magic, without the human ingenuity of (Black and white) manual labor behind it. He did not connect the dots between Atlanta’s fast growth and economic development and the contributions of Black men as draymen, painters, brick masons, carpenters, brakemen, and factory workers.

  Jim Crow had not yet settled in rigidly in 1879, which meant Blacks and whites lived in proximity in the still relatively new postwar city. But the signs of racial and economic inequalities were already being written into the physical landscape. Shermantown, just east of downtown, was the site of one of the largest Black settlements, though it otherwise mirrored the rest of the city’s demographics. Black residents were located in all the city’s wards. They dominated none of them but made up sizable clusters in several areas. They lived in low-lying areas where water and sewer systems were exclusively enjoyed by downtown businesses and wealthy white residents. Light sketches of houses perched on a hill at the top of the drawing depict the typical arrangement of good housing lording over poor stock in the bottoms.