Demanding Absolute Legal Equality

In post–Civil War America, the struggle for freedom went on much as it always had among people of African descent. Chattel slavery was gone, but its trappings remained in the form of black codes, convict labor, tenancy, segregation, political suppression, and violence. Black resistance had helped bring on the Civil War and had made it a war against slavery. Now, largely by their own efforts, blacks were at least nominally free. But freedom was not simply the absence of slavery, as northern blacks had known for years. The freedom war would continue long after the Union war was won.

Seizing what momentum they could, black folk quickly took the offensive. The Reverend Henry Highland Garnet, himself born in slavery, helped set the tone. In celebration of the House of Representatives passing the Thirteenth Amendment and sending it to the states for ratification, the House chaplain invited Garnet to deliver a commemorative sermon. He would be the first African American to speak in the halls of Congress.

On Sunday morning, February 12, 1865, in the House chamber, Garnet quoted scripture, saying “Whoso stealeth a man, and selleth him … he shall surely be put to death.” Garnet gave the nation’s leaders credit for having “bowed with reverence to the Devine edict.” He stressed, however, that ending slavery was not enough. “It is often asked when and where will the demands of the reformers of this and coming ages end?” Garnet answered, “When emancipation shall be followed by enfranchisement, and all men holding allegiance to the government shall enjoy every right

Figure 5.1. On Sunday, February 12, 1865, Henry Highland Garnet – former slave, long time freedom activist, and pastor of Washington’s Liberty (Fifteenth) Street Presbyterian Church – delivered the first address ever given by an African American in the halls of Congress. Although few congressmen attended Garnet’s sermon, he made it plain that the freedom struggle would not end until blacks enjoyed “every right of American citizenship.” Image from Henry Highland Garnet, A Memorial Discourse (1865).

of American citizenship. … When there shall be no more class-legislation, and no more trouble concerning the black man and his rights.”¹

Although few congressmen attended the sermon, it was a bold statement to make before a chamber that had passed the Thirteenth Amendment with only two votes to spare. Ratification was hardly certain. Enfranchisement was out of the question. Only seven of twenty-five Union states recognized black voting rights to any degree. Fear of a future civil war did push enough of those states to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, but efforts to extend the franchise that year failed miserably. Supporters succeeded only in placing the issue before voters in Minnesota, Connecticut, and Wisconsin. Reminding Connecticut that until 1818 it had allowed them to vote, black men assembled in New London and called on their fellow citizens “for your aid in restoring us to a long lost right.” Similar appeals were issued in Wisconsin and Minnesota. Although blacks made up only a tiny percentage of their populations, voters soundly rejected universal male suffrage in all three states.²

Blacks were disappointed but not dissuaded. In the fall of 1865, John Mercer Langston, president of the National Equal Rights League, delivered a rousing speech at the Indiana state convention. “The colored man is not content when given simple emancipation,” Langston told the crowd. “That is certainly his due, at once and without condition, but he demands much more than that: he demands absolute legal equality. … the free and untrammeled use of the ballot.” At a Davenport meeting attended by 700 soldiers of Iowa’s Sixtieth Regiment, USCT, a resolution passed proclaiming that “He who is worthy to be trusted with the musket can and ought to be trusted with the ballot.” In December, Washington blacks petitioned Congress for voting rights in the District of Columbia. The document bore 2,500 signatures.³

Southern blacks were pressing for their rights as well. On May 9, 1865, black leaders in Richmond, Virginia, organized the Colored Men’s Equal Rights League, resolving to fight for “recognition of the rights of the colored people of the Nation as American citizens.” Blacks in Petersburg and Norfolk followed suit with resolutions demanding the franchise and full equality.⁴

Similar meetings took place all across the South in the summer and fall of 1865. Blacks in Vicksburg called on Congress to act since Mississippi refused to “enfranchise her loyal colored citizens.” At the Tennessee freedmen’s convention in Nashville, Reverend James Lynch spoke of the gathering’s intent “to impress upon the white men of Tennessee, of the United States, and of the world that we are part and parcel of the American Republic.” At a meeting in Edgecomb County, North Carolina, to select state convention delegates, freedmen insisted that “representation and taxation should go hand in hand.” They resented being taxed “for the support and expense of the Government” while being refused the right of representation.⁵

Southern blacks insisted on religious liberty too. Avoiding the slavery-supporting churches that so many had been forced to attend in earlier days, they formed their own congregations. For Jermain Wesley Loguen, the effort was especially poignant. An African Methodist Episcopal Zion minister from Syracuse, New York, who had been active on the Underground Railroad, Loguen headed for Tennessee in the late spring of 1865. He located the plantation from which he had escaped thirty-two years earlier, found his mother, and set about organizing dozens of area churches. On a return visit to Syracuse, where he encouraged others to follow his lead, Loguen rejoiced that “God in His goodness has opened wide the door for the school-teacher and missionary.” He appealed for a sense of urgency lest the opportunity for progress be lost. “We must work while it is day. If the military is withdrawn ere the colored man has his God-given rights granted and guaranteed to him, it will be a dark day for the friends of freedom all over the land. The black man must have equal rights before the law, or I fear this is a ruined Nation after all that has been done.” By “the military” Loguen meant “colored soldiers. … Wherever they are, there is safety for the colored people.”⁶

Loguen was hardly alone in connecting the work of ministers and teachers to the cause of equality. Former slaves saw education as a necessary springboard for social and economic advancement, and the church was central to the effort. Most black schools were established at black folk’s expense, with local preachers taking a leading role. Soon after slavery was abolished in Washington in 1862, the city’s black churches turned their basements into free schools. Within weeks of Sherman taking Savannah in December 1864, there were 500 black children attending schools supported by blacks. In Tallahassee, black ministers established five schools and served as the first teachers. Soon after the war, there were nearly 2,000 black Texas students enrolled in self-sustaining schools. In Missouri, Madison Frederick Ross, a literate freedman and former Union soldier, set up a rural school near Commerce. His students included “grown folks … some of them fifty and sixty year old.” Little Rock blacks established the Freedmen’s School Society. It set up the first free schools for Arkansas’s children, black and white. Most poor whites being functionally illiterate, it was efforts such as these that spurred the move toward free public education in the South.⁷

Northern blacks, along with white allies, also aided the education movement. The New England Freedmen’s Aid Society and the National Freedmen’s Relief Association were among the dozens of organizations that raised money for schools and sent volunteer teachers south. In March 1865, the federal government finally joined the effort with its creation of the Freedmen’s Bureau. By year’s end, the Bureau had constructed 740 buildings for 1,314 teachers and 90,589 students. Together, the Freedmen’s Bureau, northern abolitionists, and southern blacks established a system of public education that was unparalleled, even in the North. Daily attendance at New York state’s public schools averaged 43 percent in 1865. At black schools in Alabama, the attendance rate was 79 percent. It was 82 percent in Virginia. One Freedmen’s Bureau inspector wrote that no people on earth had ever displayed “such a passion for education” as southern blacks.⁸

It would be hard to overstate the importance of education to people who had for so long been forbidden by law to read or write. Some wanted to read the Bible for themselves. For others, their children’s future was a driving force. “I don’t care how hard I has to work,” said one North Carolina mother, “if I can only send Sallie and the boys to school looking respectable.”⁹ All these motives wrapped into blacks’ view of literacy as a hallmark of freedom and a personal repudiation of their former status as slaves. Sidney Andrews, a northern journalist, saw that clearly as he traveled through the South just after the war.

Many of the negroes … common plantation negroes, and day laborers in the towns and villages, were supporting little schools themselves. Everywhere, I found among them a disposition to get their children into schools if possible. I had occasion very frequently to notice that porters in stores and laboring men about cotton warehouses, and cart drivers on the streets, had spelling books with them, and were studying them during the time they were not occupied with their work. Go into the outskirts of any large town, and walk among the negro habitations, and you will see children, and in many instances grown negroes, sitting in the sun alongside their cabins studying.¹⁰

Decades after the war, Georgia freedwoman Hannah Austin proudly spoke of her old blue-back speller, which she still possessed as a treasured token of freedom.¹¹

The Old Slave Laws Remain Unrepealed

Through education, political action, and missionary work, blacks moved quickly to secure their hard-won freedom. But everywhere they faced stubborn resistance from former slaveholders who hardly seemed willing to acknowledge that the war and slavery were over. Not long after he passed through the Deep South in the late spring of 1865, Union General Benjamin Grierson recorded this impression of attitudes among southern whites.

The poor people, including the returned Confederate private soldiers, are, as a general thing, now loyal; but the far greater portion of the wealthy classes are still very bitter in their sentiments against the Government, and clutch on to slavery with a lingering hope to save at least a relic of their favorite yet barbarous institution for the future.¹²

During a tour through southwest Georgia, one federal officer frequently heard members of the old slaveocracy comment that “if we cannot whip the Negro, they and I cannot live in the same country.” In Chattahoochee County, Freedmen’s Bureau agent James McNeil ordered J. H. Wilkinson to release a young girl named Hannah. McNeil warned Wilkinson that soldiers would be arriving shortly to enforce all such orders if necessary. A white woman in Opelika, Alabama, demanded that occupying Federals return a young girl who had fled to their camp. When told that the girl was now free and could work for wages if she wished, the enraged woman replied, “I will not pay her a cent. I will work my hands to the bone first. She belongs to me.”¹³

Some slaveholders were more fearful of having to do physical labor themselves. “I’m no book-keeper,” said one planter just after the war. “I never learned a trade; I have no profession. I own these lands, and, if the niggers can be made to work, they’ll support me; but there’s nothing else I know anything about, except managing a plantation.” A woman of Alabama’s old slaveholding class said she could not bear the thought of her daughters working in the fields like common folk. Ann Browder of Eufaula, Alabama, wrote in her diary, “I begin to realize poverty now – last week our cook left.” John Horry Dent confided to his journal in the summer of 1865, “Had an ominous dream last night – pulling fodder.”¹⁴

Underlying planters’ lack of a work ethic was the social stigma that labor represented. The prevailing attitude among them was, as a northern visitor recalled, “Work is for ‘niggers’ – not for white men,” at least not for white men of the old slaveocracy.¹⁵ The slaveocracy’s white women were just as determined to maintain their social standing in relation to blacks. The Reverend Henry McNeal Turner, a black chaplain with the First Regiment, USCT, bore witness to that in Smithville, North Carolina, when his regiment occupied the town.¹⁶ During a visit to one of Smithville’s leading black women, Turner saw a party of white females enter the yard and try to take some wood. Turner’s hostess stepped to the door and asked what they were doing with her wood. The intruders promptly accused her of having stolen it. When she protested that she had gotten it from Federal troops, the whites called her a liar. “I am no more a liar than you are,” the woman replied. Turner recalled what happened next.

This expression, from a negro wench, as they called her, was so intolerable, that the white women grabbed up several clubs, and leaped in the door, using the most filthy language in the vocabulary of indecency. They had not yet observed me as being on the premises. But at this juncture, I rose up, met them at the door and cried out, “Halt!” Said they, “Who are you?” “A United States Officer,” was my reply. “Well, are you going to allow that negro to give us impudence?” “You gave her impudence first,” was my reply. “What, we give a negro impudence! We want you to know we are white, and are your superiors. You are our inferior, much less she.” “Well,” said I, “All of you put together would not make the equal of my wife, and I have yet to hear her claim superiority over me.” After that, I don’t know what was said, for that remark was received as such an aggravated insult, that I can only compare the noise that followed, to a gang of fice dogs, holding at bay a large cur dog, with a bow-wow-wow-wow.

Turner shortly became “tired of their annoying music” and threatened to arrest the whole gang if they did not leave. The women marched to regimental headquarters and insisted that Turner be arrested. The colonel refused and dismissed the women. “I afterwards learned,” Turner wrote, “that they were some of the Southern aristocracy.”¹⁷

Slaveholders who held to their old attitudes had a firm friend in the White House. Andrew Johnson, who ascended to the presidency in April 1865 after Lincoln’s assassination, was a former slaveholder from Tennessee who was no more committed to civil rights for former slaves than Lincoln had been. Adhering to Lincoln’s Ten Percent Plan, Johnson’s only condition for a Confederate state’s readmission to the Union was a loyalty oath from 10 percent of adult white males and ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment. Aside from that, Johnson was content to leave southern state governments in the hands of ex-Confederates. They took full advantage of the opportunity. Delegates to the 1865 Georgia constitutional convention reluctantly ratified the Thirteenth Amendment but defended slavery as “consistent with the dictates of humanity and the strictest principles of morality and religion.” And their new constitution, like its 1861 predecessor, gave control of the General Assembly largely to Black Belt planters.¹⁸

Alabama also ratified the Thirteenth Amendment but added that in no way did the action “confer upon Congress the power to legislate upon the political status of freedmen in this State.” All the former slave states reserved that power for themselves. Said Alabama politician Henry Clayton of the black man, “We are the only people in the world who understand his character, and hence, the only people in the world capable of managing him.” And there was only one way to manage blacks, according to Clayton. “Teach them their places, and how to keep them.”¹⁹

One of the first steps in teaching blacks their place came with a series of state laws called black codes. Under these laws, many of which mirrored the old slave codes, freedom for former slaves was almost nonexistent. Blacks could not serve on juries, hold public office, or leave employment without their employer’s permission. In some states, they could not own firearms. Nor could they testify against whites in court. Responding to the threat, South Carolina blacks from all over the state met at Charleston’s Zion Church in November 1865. This “Colored People’s Convention” called on the state legislature to reject its black codes and asked Congress to outlaw them if the state would not. The freedmen also demanded that “the same laws which govern white men shall direct black men.” They wanted unfettered access to the courts, schools for their children, homesteads for themselves, and “equality and justice.”²⁰ Despite the convention’s protest, and many others like it, the black codes remained in place.

William Wells Brown, a former slave who authored the first history of African Americans during Civil War era, observed bitterly that, backed by President Johnson, former slaveholders were “determined to reduce the blacks to a state of serfdom if they cannot have them as slaves.” Samuel Childress wrote to the Anglo-African that under Johnson, it seemed “a greater crime to be black than to be a rebel.” Tennessee blacks complained to a Freedmen’s Bureau agent of “the old slave laws of the State remaining unrepealed.” Richmond blacks lamented in a public declaration, “all that is needed to restore slavery in full is the auction block.”²¹

The auction block was in fact restored under what were perhaps the most oppressive of the black codes, the vagrancy laws. These acts mandated that officials arrest blacks found “wandering or strolling about in idleness, who are able to work, and who have no property to support them.” Authorities then auctioned them off, usually to large landholders, for the price of their fine. “Vagrants” were supposed to do forced labor only until their fines were worked out. But with the costs of food, clothing, and shelter added to their debt, blacks convicted of vagrancy could remain in bondage for years. Since few blacks owned real estate of any kind, most were in grave danger of being reenslaved under the vagrancy laws. Freedmen in Claiborne County, Mississippi, wrote to their governor insisting that such laws were entirely unnecessary. “We are willing to worke for our former masters or eny Stranger that will treate us well and pay us what we earn all we ask is justice and to be treated like humane beings.”²²

To be paid what they earned was often difficult for former slaves. From Columbus, Georgia, a Freedmen’s Bureau agent reported that employers commonly swindled former slaves out of their wages and crop shares. Fifty miles farther south, an agent in Cuthbert complained that most of his time was spent trying to secure wages due to black folk. Recalling a typical occurrence that played out all over the postwar South, Emma Knight of Missouri told an interviewer in the 1930s, “The master told mother not to go away, that if she stayed a while he would give her a couple hundred dollars. We stayed a while but she never got no money.”²³

That Knight was able to leave when her mother did made her more fortunate than many. Even before the war ended, former slave states began passing apprentice laws allowing whites to hold black children. Maryland ended slavery in 1864, but kept blacks under twenty-one years of age enslaved with its apprentice law. The act was supposed to apply only to children whose parents could not support them, but that provision was generally ignored. One witness in New Town reported that whites were “laying hold, by violence, of Coloured peoples Children … and having them bound to themselves in Spite of all remonstrance upon the part of Parents.” A Tennessee slaveholder continued to hold one couple’s four children despite written testimony from the father’s white employer that he and their mother were “fully competent to properly care for them.” One anguished mother wrote to a federal officer, “God help us, our condition is bettered but little; free ourselves, but deprived of our children. … It was on their account we desired to be free.”²⁴

Blacks often took matters into their own hands. Jane Kamper secreted her children out of Talbot County, Maryland, and headed for Baltimore. Susan Rhodes of Missouri, a girl who was being held with a younger sibling, had an older sister who “stole us away.” After a series of whippings, Carter Holmes stole himself away from a Maryland plantation and fled to Washington in search of his parents. He was only twelve years old.²⁵

Others turned to the Federals for help, and sometimes got it. Harriet Clemens, with assistance from a provost marshal, got her children released from a Mississippi plantation. As often as not, however, blacks could expect little if any government support. In Savannah, the provost marshal refused to aid former slaves in obtaining their children. The local post commander was no help either. He was, according to Savannah minister J. M. Simms, actually “in Sympathy with those who have lately Been Masters over us.” Looking for relief, Simms wrote to a Washington friend in May 1865 asking if and when the Freedmen’s Bureau would be coming to Georgia.²⁶

It came soon after but provided little relief, staffed as it was by local whites whose main purpose, according to one account, was to impose “crouching servility.” J. C. DeGraffenried, the Bureau agent in Miller County, forced blacks into the fields to grow cotton. Joseph Taylor did the same in Randolph County, where his large-landholding relatives especially benefitted. In Memphis, Tennessee, Bureau agents detained black men, causing them to lose whatever jobs they had, then used their unemployment as a pretext to arrest them for vagrancy and sell them as laborers to area planters. The agents pocketed the proceeds.²⁷

Such corruption came as no surprise to William Wells Brown, who predicted as much just after the war’s end when he wrote, “But little aid can be expected for the freedmen from the Freedmen’s Bureau; for its officers, if not Southern men, will soon become upon intimate terms with the former slave-holders, and the Bureau will be converted into a power of oppression, instead of a protection.”²⁸

Brown’s prediction was based on sound evidence. In June 1865, blacks in Charleston, South Carolina, informed Secretary of War Stanton, under whose authority the Freedmen’s Bureau fell, that its administration was characterized by “unfairness and imposition.” They begged Stanton not to use whites as agents. The Bureau would never be any help to blacks, they insisted, “without the appointment of competent colored men to aid in directing the Freedmen’s Affairs.” Stanton ignored the request. He did not take criticism well. Nor did the Freedmen’s Bureau. Aaron Bradley, a former South Carolina slave, discovered that first-hand. Bradley had escaped to Boston in the 1830s, where he studied and practiced law. He returned in early 1865 and became a leading advocate for black suffrage and land distribution along the Georgia–South Carolina coast. When Bradley encouraged blacks not to vacate lands being reclaimed by long-absent planters, the Bureau had him arrested. When Bradley made a speech criticizing Lincoln and Stanton, the Bureau had him expelled.²⁹

Bradley might have suffered much worse, as so many southern blacks did. Tennessee’s Clinton Hamilton received 200 blows to his back with a white oak stick for being too sick to work. When Willis Crump of North Carolina had the nerve to ask for wages, he was tied up by the thumbs and whipped. John White recalled that his former Texas owner just laughed when his slaves claimed their freedom. After being threatened with a whipping, White escaped to Arkansas.³⁰

That blacks were no longer slaves induced a murderous fury in some former slaveholders. Blacks in Lafayette County, Missouri, were threatened by their former owners “with the merciless vengeance of the Bushwhacker, if they should presume to leave them or exercise the simplest rights of freemen.” Many blacks were “killed after freedom,” recalled Texas freedwoman Susan Merritt. “Their owners had them bushwhacked,” shot down while they were trying to leave. “They [would] catch them swimming across Sabine River and shoot them.” The murderers hung bodies from trees lining the river as a warning to other blacks. Such killings were rarely prosecuted. “Nigger life’s cheap now,” said one white Tennessean. “Nobody likes ‘em enough to have any affair of the sort investigated; and when a white man feels aggrieved at anything a nigger’s done, he just shoots him and puts an end to it.” It was a clear message to blacks that the war had not changed their place in the social order. It was also clear that the Federals would not intervene.³¹

The Johnson administration’s policy of allowing ex-Confederates political free rein also jeopardized the lives and livelihoods of white southern Unionists. As a measure of self-protection, they formed Union Leagues, which in some places evolved out of the old antiwar, anti-Confederate peace societies. But the war’s end brought little peace for these men. Attacks against them became so frequent and violent in north Alabama that the war hardly seemed to have ended. One Union League activist in the region wrote that they “could no longer do without troops unless you allow the loyal men to kill the traitors out.”³²

To strengthen their position, many Union Leaguers became strong Republicans and allied themselves with blacks in the cause of universal male suffrage. In Tennessee, the state government under its new Republican governor, long time Unionist William Brownlow, enacted black male suffrage and became the first ex-Confederate state readmitted to the Union. The effort, however, was not without bloodshed. One of the most violent outbreaks, the Memphis riot of May 1866, saw nearly fifty blacks murdered. The killers looted and burned dozens of homes, schools, and churches.³³

In July, when Louisiana’s staunchly Unionist Republican Governor James Madison Wells called a constitutional convention in New Orleans to enfranchise blacks, a white mob attacked the assembly. Before federal troops could stop the massacre, three white delegates and thirty-four blacks were dead. More than a hundred were injured. Local police, most of them ex-Confederates, had joined in the killing. President Johnson had been warned of the impending attack but did nothing to stop it. On the contrary, Johnson bypassed Governor Wells and sent word to the ex-Confederate mayor of New Orleans that a request to prevent the convention from meeting was approved. It was a license to kill.³⁴

If Johnson cared nothing for Republican voting rights, Congress’s Republican majority certainly did. Some, such as Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, often called “Radicals” for their unwavering support of black voting rights, railed against the “brutality and cruelty” suffered by the South’s “Unionists … and the poor freedmen.” Sumner called the government’s obligation to protect them a “sacred duty.”³⁵ Others feared that the violence might signal a second civil war. After refusing to seat ex-Confederates, congressional Republicans took steps to shore up their base in the South with a series of Reconstruction Acts. Beginning in 1867, over Johnson’s veto, Congress divided most of the former Confederacy into five military districts, put military governors in place, and charged them with guaranteeing Republican voting rights, black and white. The next year saw ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment granting citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States” and promising them “equal protection of the laws.” Finally, with the Fifteenth Amendment, the Constitution guaranteed voting rights to all citizens regardless “of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

Despite all appearances, the Reconstruction Acts and their accompanying amendments were nearly worthless. They reflected more political posturing than any commitment to the principles they proclaimed. At the time of the Fifteenth Amendment’s ratification in 1870, half the states that had remained loyal during the Civil War still denied blacks the vote. Several Radical congressmen, such as Charles Sumner, committed as they were to black enfranchisement, refused to support the amendment because they knew it lacked teeth. It failed to ban explicitly state laws that could restrict or even eliminate black suffrage.³⁶ Sumner’s fears and those of his few like-minded colleagues proved to be prophetic.

Every Man Who Voted Was Watched

The Reconstruction Acts did succeed for a time in extending the franchise, mainly through the efforts of blacks who took Congressional Reconstruction far more seriously than Congress did. By the fall of 1867, voter registration drives had signed up more than 90 percent of the eligible black men in every state except Mississippi, where the rate was 83 percent. Although denied the vote themselves, women were crucial to the voting campaign’s success. Preachers exhorted the women in their flock to encourage their men to vote. At election time, women accompanied men to the polls, providing additional protection from threats of ambush. So serious were such threats that few blacks dared to vote alone. In 1868, 100 blacks in Columbia County, Georgia, armed themselves and assembled twelve miles from the county seat before setting out to vote. Black legislator Abram Colby of Greene County organized local blacks into armed companies, marched them to the polls, and carried local elections for the Republicans.³⁷

Figure 5.2. Leading up to the 1868 elections, black voter registration drives signed up more than 90 percent of eligible black men in every state except Mississippi, where the rate was 83 percent. Threats of ambush by white vigilantes were so serious that few blacks dared vote alone. Many formed militias for self-protection. In this scene, armed Georgia freedmen wade a creek on their way to vote in Appling, the seat of Columbia County. Image from Charles Stearns, The Black Man of the South, and the Rebels (1872).

Before the end of Reconstruction, about 2,000 blacks would hold public office at the federal, state, and local levels. Two of them, Hiram Revels and Blanche Bruce of Mississippi, won seats in the United States Senate. Fourteen others sat in the House of Representatives. On the whole, black officeholders were not the illiterate field hands that popular misconception long held them to be. Eighty-three percent could read and write. Sixty-four had attended institutions of higher learning. There were 237 ministers and 172 teachers. Nearly 40 percent held real estate and personal property worth up to $1,000. Another 40 percent had more than $1,000 in property, which was quite a sum considering that most urban laborers averaged less than $500 annually, and southern farm workers earned between $10 and $15 a month.³⁸

Despite widespread political activism among blacks, Reconstruction was hardly an era of black political dominance in the South. In no state did blacks control government operations, and nowhere were they represented in proportion to their numbers. Ironically, this was by design of white Republicans who actively courted the white vote at the expense of blacks. So eager were Republican leaders to attract white support that they drew up state constitutions with legislative apportionment favoring white-majority counties. Republican rule, they promised, would be no threat to white supremacy.

A black South Carolinian wrote bitterly of white Republicans who made “loud and big promises to the freedmen till they got elected to office, then did not one single thing. … Those men have meanly deceived and cheated our race.” Matthew Gaines, a black Republican state senator in Texas, accused white party leaders of playing “BIG GODS of the negroes. … They treat us as bad as we could ever expect the worst Democrats, and yet they call themselves our friends. … these leaders will soon kill the Republican party.”³⁹

As Gaines predicted, white Republicans’ betrayal of southern blacks was a self-defeating prospect. They could not hope to remain competitive without the firm support of black allies, especially where Democrats held the reins of economic power. In plantation districts, it was often difficult for black men to make a living if they voted Republican. In South Carolina, those who voted for Democrats were issued “certificates of democracy.” Without these certificates, blacks could not find employment, rent houses or lands, and were subject to losing what livelihood they had. One Clarendon County planter wrote to a friend, “I have given those on my places to understand if they vote the Radical ticket again that [I] will not keep them on my places.” It was no idle threat. A landholder expelled tenants from his plantation in Greene County, Georgia, after they refused to support his bid for a seat in the legislature. Such intimidation led one Mississippi planter to boast that his tenants would “vote side by side with me always. … They are dependent upon me for every morsel they eat.”⁴⁰

It was not difficult to know who voted for whom in an era before the secret ballot was in common use. Tickets were normally deposited in separate boxes for each party, and anyone present could see which box a voter selected. In some areas, the “oral ballot” was standard. Democrats easily targeted voters, black or white, who supported Republican candidates. John Cobb of Sumter County, Georgia, a planter and Democratic legislator, wrote in 1868 that “every man who voted the Radical ticket in this county was watched & his ticket marked & all are now known & they will never cease to regret it as long as they live.” Various terrorist organizations, nearly all eventually falling under the umbrella of the Ku Klux Klan, would see to that.⁴¹

Operating as paramilitary arms of the Democratic Party, bands of robed and hooded night riders terrorized both blacks and whites who openly supported Republicans. They broke up prayer meetings; burned homes, churches, and schools; and beat or killed their unfortunate victims. One particularly vicious Klansman, John Lyons of Lee County, Alabama, was widely known for his habit of cutting off body parts. The Reverend Wade Owens, a former Lee County slave, recalled that Lyons would not hesitate to “cut off a woman’s breast and a man’s ear or thumb.” No one can know how many southern blacks were murdered during the Reconstruction era, but estimates range as high as 40,000, roughly 1 percent of the South’s black population.⁴²

Klan riders were often driven by motives beyond politics, including contempt and simple theft. They plundered homes, stole livestock, and robbed blacks of whatever cash they had. “Where we lived,” said Georgia freedman Charlie Hudson, “Ku Kluxers was called ‘night thiefs.’” They took $50 in gold that Hudson’s deceased parents had left for him and his brother. Said former Texas slave Pierce Harper, if the occasional freedman “made good money and had a good farm, the Klu Klux would come and murder ‘em.” Two Alabama brothers were shot and killed for no other reason than local Klansmen “didn’t want ‘em to have anything.”⁴³

Although politics was not the only motive for violence, it was the main justification. Republicans posed little threat to white supremacy, but Democrats effectively painted them as such for supporting even limited black suffrage. In contrast, Democrats presented themselves, and by extension the Klan, as guardians of white men’s honor and white women’s virtue. They repeatedly warned of “nigger rapists” and the need to keep them subdued. They called blacks at the polls an affront to white honor and promised to keep them away. Before election day, Democrats posted signs reading “No niggers to come out to the polls tomorrow.” Blacks who tried to vote took a death-defying risk. As Texas freedman Tom Holland recalled, “If a Negro wanted to vote, the Klu Kluxes was right there. … They’d ride up by a Negro and shoot him just like a wild hog and never a word said or done about it.”⁴⁴

Black office holders became special Klan targets. Nearly three dozen died violently during Reconstruction. Dozens more were attacked and injured. Forty Klansmen broke into the home of Alfred Richardson, a black member of the Georgia legislature, and shot him nearly to death. Another black Georgia legislator, Abram Colby, was given 1,000 lashes after turning down a bribe to cease his political activity. Klansmen assassinated Benjamin Randolph, black chairman of South Carolina’s Republican executive committee, for his party-organizing efforts.⁴⁵

White Republicans died as well. In Camilla, Georgia, blacks and some of their white allies were massacred during a Republican rally in September 1868. The next month in New Orleans, Democratic vigilantes murdered dozens of Republicans, whites as well as blacks. George Ashburn, a white Georgian and Republican politician, was killed during a visit to Columbus. Between one and two o’clock in the morning, roughly a dozen Klansmen broke into Ashburn’s boarding house room and shot him dead. Despite eyewitness testimony, civil authorities concluded that persons unknown killed Ashburn. The local military commander intervened and arrested several suspects, some of them leading Columbus Democrats. But when Congress readmitted Georgia to the Union, the accused men were handed over to city officials who let the matter drop.⁴⁶

On the rare occasion that violence against Republicans resulted in a trial, and even more rarely a conviction, the sentence was usually light. After a former South Carolina slaveholder plead guilty to beating “a Radical nigger,” the judge sentenced him to “hard labor for a period of ten years … or pay a fine of one dollar!” Whites in the courtroom cheered the judge as he rose to take a bow.⁴⁷

Without effective protection from either the legal system or Reconstruction governments, blacks were most often left to defend themselves. As early as 1865, they formed armed militias for self-protection. That year black activist Tunis Campbell organized local governments and unofficial militias along the Georgia coast. These black militias, sometimes connected with local Union Leagues, made no secret of their military preparedness. Freedmen in southwest Georgia drilled nightly on the outskirts of Bainbridge and Albany in full view of whites. In Stewart County, they fought off night riders, killing three, and forced the release of a prisoner in the Lumpkin jail by threatening to set the town on fire.⁴⁸

After one battle in North Carolina, blacks learned the identity of a number of local Klansmen “‘cause a lot of ‘em was kilt.” When the Klan tried to burn a black church in South Carolina, armed freedmen killed the would-be arsonists, carried their bodies to the nearby white Pilgrim’s Church, and set the place alight. “It burnt everything up to the very bones of the white folks,” recalled one freedman. “Ever since then, that spot has been known as ‘Burnt Pilgrim.’” In Hancock County, Georgia, blacks ambushed Klan riders as they crossed a bridge. Firing from both ends, they forced the Klansmen to jump into the river. For the time being at least, that ended Klan activity in Hancock County.⁴⁹

Although temporarily effective, black militias had no backing from Reconstruction governments. Nor did they hold any force in law. That placed them on legal ground every bit as shaky as that of the Klan but without the accompanying political protection. It meant open season on blacks whenever whites were inclined to engage in the hunt. A clear example of that came on Easter Sunday 1873 when rampaging whites slaughtered a black militia company at Colfax, Louisiana. Between sixty and a hundred or more blacks lost their lives. Dozens were killed after they surrendered. It was the bloodiest single killing spree of the Reconstruction era. The Colfax Massacre sent shockwaves of terror across the black South. So gruesome were the murders that James Beckwith, U. S. Attorney in New Orleans, tried to bring at least a few of the killers to justice. Despite his tireless efforts and the testimony of 300 witnesses, the Supreme Court overturned a lower court’s conviction of eight conspirators.⁵⁰

The Court’s decision reflected a rapidly waning commitment among northern Republicans to securing the vote for southern Republicans, especially blacks. Congress itself allowed nearly all ex-Confederates to vote and hold elective office again with the 1872 Amnesty Act. Black allies could provide votes, but southern landholders could provide northern elites with something much more important – the very thing they had gone to war for in the first place – access to cheap southern resources, especially cotton. All northerners had to do was give their former adversaries a free hand in dealing with southern blacks, and easy riches in the form of lumber, oil, tobacco, and cotton would flow north. This economic alliance with the South’s landed gentry was much more valuable to northern industrialists than any political alliance they could ever have with southern blacks. As historian James McPherson notes, the North’s conversion to “emancipation and equal rights” had been “primarily a conversion of expediency rather than one of conviction.” By the early 1870s, it had become “expedient for northern political and business interests to conciliate southern whites, and an end to federal enforcement of Negro equality in the South was the price of that conciliation.” W. E. B. Du Bois put it even more bluntly. “The North was not Abolitionist. It was overwhelmingly in favor of Negro slavery so long as this did not interfere with Northern moneymaking.”⁵¹

Figure 5.3. Whites, North and South, trample a black veteran underfoot, the ballot box just beyond his reach. In the background, a black school and orphanage burn while lynch victims hang from a lamp post and tree. This illustration came to symbolize how northern capital, the Lost Cause, and white supremacy all combined to betray Reconstruction’s promise. Never enthusiastic about a freedom war, much less the prospect of black equality, northern whites had little difficulty abandoning commitments to southern blacks, even those commitments enshrined in the Constitution. Image from Harper’s Weekly, September 5, 1868.

Never enthusiastic about a war for emancipation, much less civil rights for blacks, white northerners found the new arrangement comfortable. Throughout the early to mid-1870s, they disbanded their largely noncommittal Reconstruction governments and left blacks to fend for themselves.

Rebel Rule Is Now Nearly Complete

With planters back in control politically and economically, they moved to shore up the old order. Southern state governments passed a series of segregation laws, patterned after those of the North, firmly establishing the “Jim Crow” system that would last for generations.⁵² Blacks were barred from mingling with whites in restaurants, theaters, hotels, and other businesses. They had separate schools, public transportation, and even drinking fountains.

In the North, although most segregation statutes were off the books by the turn of the century, local ordinances and social norms kept blacks at a distance. Some school administrators assigned blacks and whites to separate classrooms. Others consigned black children to an annex, excluding them from the whites-only main building. Still others ignored the law altogether and maintained a system of entirely separate schools.⁵³

That segregation of all kinds continued in the North is hardly surprising when even those considered to be among blacks’ warmest friends openly expressed their white supremacist convictions. Ben Butler – former Union general, postwar Republican congressmen, and supporter of universal male suffrage – said of the black man at an 1865 Massachusetts Republican convention, “my ‘pride of race’ teaches me that my race is superior to his.” Abolitionist congressman Schuyler Colfax, who as Speaker of the House had shepherded the Thirteenth Amendment through that chamber, spoke of white supremacy as divinely ordained. “I never believed in negro equality,” Colfax told a white audience in 1866. “God made us, for his own wise purposes, a superior race.”⁵⁴

Despite “equal protection of the laws” promised by the Fourteenth Amendment and a Civil Rights Act to back it up, federal courts, including the Supreme Court, consistently refused to declare segregation unconstitutional. It was most disheartening to people like Frederick Douglass as they watched the promise of freedom evaporate. “He is a wiser man than I am,” Douglass wrote in 1894, “who can tell how low the moral sentiment of this republic may yet fall. … The Supreme Court has surrendered. State sovereignty has been restored. It has destroyed the civil rights Bill, and converted the Republican party into a party of money rather than a party of morals.” Douglass summed up, with obvious despair:

The pit of hell is said to bottomless. Principles which we all thought to have been firmly and permanently settled by the late war, have been boldly assaulted and overturned by the defeated party. Rebel rule is now nearly complete in many States and it is gradually capturing the nation’s Congress. The cause lost in the war, is the cause regained in peace, and the cause gained in war, is the cause lost in peace.⁵⁵

As early as 1866, Douglass had allowed himself to wonder whether the Civil War might “pass into history a miserable failure, barren of permanent results … a strife for empire … of no value to liberty or civilization.”⁵⁶ He hardly lived to see the worst of it, in a judicial sense at least.

In 1896, a year after Douglass died, the Supreme Court constitutionally canonized Jim Crow by establishing the “separate but equal” doctrine with its Plessy v. Ferguson decision. Segregation was entirely constitutional so long as facilities provided for blacks were equal to those of whites. The justices well knew that “separate but equal” was a fiction, but only one had the integrity to say it. Justice John Marshall Harlan, ironically a former slaveholder, admitted that facilities for blacks were and never would be equal to those of whites if segregation were constitutionally sanctioned. The very act of legislated separation, he argued, imposed state-sanctioned inequality, an inequality made unconstitutional by the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause. It would be another fifty-eight years before blacks, constantly pushing and prodding for judicial justice, would see the “separate but equal” doctrine overturned in 1954 with Brown v. Board of Education. Even that case would have been impotent without blacks pressing for enforcement.⁵⁷

The intervening decades were a horrific time for African Americans. They suffered through segregation, discrimination, and the threat of arbitrary arrest in ongoing white efforts to keep blacks “in their place.” For many whites, that place was still slavery, and they developed a convict lease system to help reinstate it. Blacks could be arrested on any trumped-up charge, then leased to plantations, lumber yards, coal mines, or nearly any other business concern requiring hard labor. The system depressed wages for whites and ensured that many blacks received no wages at all. Although sentences under convict lease necessarily stopped short of the death penalty, convicts frequently died all the same from neglect, abuse, or outright murder. Besides, they were cheap, plentiful, and easily replaced. The common labor management practice in firms using convict labor was summed up with the phrase “one dies, get another.”⁵⁸

Murder was just as arbitrary as arrest and used to instill the same message of fear. It hardly mattered who the victim was. “When there is a row, we feel like killing a nigger whether he has done anything or not,” admitted a young white southerner. He was not exaggerating. In 1890, a black man in Augusta, Georgia, was shot repeatedly and left to die in the street. A city resident questioned one of the men whom he suspected of being involved. “Pat, who killed that nigger?” “Oh, some of the boys,” replied Pat with a grin. “What did they do it for?” he asked. Pat said simply, “Because he was a nigger.” To stress how casual the killing had been, Pat added, “And he was the best nigger in town. Why, he would even take his hat off to me.”⁵⁹

Blacks sometimes succeeded in warding off white vigilantes and saving lives. In 1899, armed blacks in Darien, Georgia, surrounded the jail to turn back vigilantes trying to lynch a black man accused of raping a white woman. A jury later found the man not guilty. But such success was by far the exception. White mobs shot, burned, and lynched blacks with impunity, certain that the law would not touch them. In many cases, the terrorists themselves were law officers and law makers. Lynchings were often organized by the Ku Klux Klan, which counted sheriffs, state legislators, and congressmen among its members. Between 1882 and 1968, there were close to 5,000 recorded lynchings, almost one a week. Many more blacks, untold thousands, were the victims of sham trials, legal lynchings, and “nigger hunts.” Some blacks simply disappeared – carried off and disposed of by “persons unknown.”⁶⁰

Few white clergymen ever criticized lynching for fear of losing church members. When the Reverend Whitely Langston of Bulloch County, Georgia, expelled several of his flock for participating in a lynch mob, two dozen more resigned. White ministers with Langston’s integrity were few and far between. Some ministers themselves were members of the Klan. “Our American Christians,” observed black editor and antilynching activist Ida B. Wells, “are too busy saving the souls of white Christians from burning in hell-fire to save the lives of black ones from present burning in fires kindled by white Christians.”⁶¹

Mary Turner was the victim of one especially gruesome burning. She was twenty-one years old and eight months pregnant when her husband was caught up in a Georgia lynching rampage that spanned Brooks and Lowndes Counties. After Mary threatened to bring charges against the killers, a mob lynched her. They bound her ankles, hoisted her upside down, doused her with gasoline, and set her on fire. With the flames dying down and Mary still clinging to life, someone sliced her belly open. Her baby fell to the ground and cried for a moment before having its head crushed under a vigilante’s heel. The mob then riddled Mary’s mutilated body with hundreds of bullets, nearly tearing it to pieces.⁶²

At the turn of the century, Susie King Taylor, a Georgia woman who had survived slavery and its aftermath, read that the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) had petitioned theaters to ban stage performances of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Its portrayal of the slaves’ ill treatment, they claimed, was exaggerated, and it “would have a very bad effect on the children who might see the drama.” Taylor wondered why the UDC never circulated petitions to “prohibit the atrocious lynchings and wholesale murdering and torture of the negro? Do you ever hear of them fearing this would have a bad effect on the children?”

Taylor had seen the Civil War as a fugitive from slavery and in camp with black soldiers. For years she had seen men struggle and die, and she had struggled herself, to make freedom real. Now, as a new century dawned, it seemed to promise little better than the old.

I sometimes ask, “Was the war in vain? Has it brought freedom, in the full sense of the word? … In this “land of the free” we are burned, tortured, and denied a fair

Figure 5.4. With blacks disenfranchised, forcibly segregated, held in tenancy, and lynched with impunity, Susie King Taylor asked, “Was the war in vain? Has it brought freedom?” Taylor had experienced the war first as a slave, then a fugitive, and finally as a nurse and teacher among black soldiers. She had seen them struggle and die, and she had struggled herself, to make freedom real. It was clear to Taylor, and black folk generally, that the postwar era would be one of continuing self-emancipation. Photo from Taylor, Reminiscences of My Life in Camp (1902).

trial, murdered for any imaginary wrong conceived in the brain of the negro-hating white man. There is no redress for us from a government which promised to protect all under its flag. It seems a mystery to me.⁶³

African Americans of Taylor’s day could see little reason to hope for much better. They could hardly fight back politically, barred as they were by various state laws from voting. As Charles Sumner had foreseen, state laws made a mockery of the Fifteenth Amendment. Poll taxes deprived poor blacks of the franchise. Those who paid the tax often faced the barrier of a literacy test, although by the turn of the century many southern blacks were functionally literate. Even so, they were usually judged to have failed the test regardless of their ability to read. If they passed, they might still be disenfranchised by a grandfather clause under which one’s grandfather must have been eligible to vote in order for an applicant to register. As late as the 1950s, blacks trying to register to vote were sometimes presented with foreign-language newspapers as a test of literacy. When a black Savannah school teacher tried to register, the clerk handed him a Chinese newspaper and asked him if he knew what it said. The teacher replied that he knew perfectly well what it said – that no black man would be registering to vote in Savannah that day.⁶⁴

There were constant challenges from blacks who tried to get the Fifteenth Amendment enforced. The Supreme Court finally weighed in with Giles v. Harris in 1903. Jackson W. Giles, president of the Colored Men’s Suffrage Association of Alabama, petitioned the Court to force Montgomery’s Board of Registrars to register black voters. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, a former Union army officer, spoke for the Court’s majority in denying the request. As in the Plessy case, John Marshall Harlan refused to join the majority. Also dissenting were David Brewer and Henry Brown. Ironically, Brown had authored the majority opinion in Plessy.⁶⁵

Blacks across the country were bitterly disappointed. The Guardian, a black-owned newspaper in Boston, ran a front page headline calling Holmes a “Second Roger Taney.” Under the Holmes Court, it was clear that blacks still had no rights that whites were bound to respect. If they did, wrote the editor of The Colored American Magazine, then Holmes and most of his colleagues were “afraid to make [whites] respect them.” It seemed to the editor that the Court had “not progressed in humanity, and certainly not in courage” since the days of Dred Scott.⁶⁶

Less than two years before his death, in a speech at the Chicago World’s Fair, Frederick Douglass had angrily dismissed talk of what white America called “the Negro problem.” “There is no Negro problem,” he insisted. “The problem is whether the American people have honesty enough, loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough to live up to their own Constitution.”⁶⁷ Clearly, taking the Supreme Court as a measure, they did not.

But I Kept On

Despite setbacks such as Plessy and Giles, blacks continued pushing forward on all fronts. Some stressed the need for ongoing political and judicial efforts. Others focused on education and self-reliance. Still others attacked Jim Crow through the press, publicizing violent atrocities as widely as they could. These men and women sometimes argued over approach, but what united them was the realization that black self-agency was essential to progress. Ida B. Wells was tireless in her efforts to combat lynching with her speeches and writings. W. E. B. Du Bois was instrumental in founding the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which fought Jim Crow through the courts for decades. Booker T. Washington was a leading advocate of vocational and agricultural education, establishing east Alabama’s Tuskeegee Institute to serve as an example.⁶⁸

A major difficulty with Washington’s approach was that agricultural education did little good without land to work. Continued ownership of the South’s prime farm land was a key element in planters’ ability to regain and maintain control. At the war’s end, many slaves had been promised forty acres and a mule. It would have been little enough compensation for people who had labored to enrich others all their lives with no pay for themselves. But the promise was a hollow one. Mississippi freedman Isaac Stier recalled that “the Yankees … made big promises, but they was poor reliance. … They promised us a mule and forty acres of land. Us aint seen no mule yet.” Louis Hill of Missouri insisted that the government should have “compelled slave-holders to give slaves a little trac[t] of land,” pointing out that “the slave had made what the white man had.”⁶⁹

The forty-acre promise originated with General William T. Sherman’s Special Field Orders Number 15, issued in Savannah on January 16, 1865, reserving tidewater areas between Hilton Head, South Carolina, and Jacksonville, Florida, for black settlement. Planters had largely abandoned the region in the war’s early years, leaving it in the hands of former slaves. In May, upholding Lincoln’s earlier amnesty decree, President Andrew Johnson’s own Amnesty Proclamation restored those lands to the planters.⁷⁰ A committee representing freedmen on South Carolina’s Edisto Island wrote the president that they had learned of his decision “with deep sorrow and Painful hearts.”

Here is w[h]ere we have toiled nearly all Our lives as slaves and were treated like dumb Driven cattle, This is our home, we have made These lands what they are. we were the only true and Loyal people that were found in posession of these Lands. … are not our rights as A free people and good citizens of these United States To be considered before the rights of those who were Found in rebellion against this good and just Government. … if government Does not make some provision by which we as Freedmen can obtain A Homestead, we have Not bettered our condition. … and now after What has been done will the good and just government take from us all this right and make us Subject to the will of those who have cheated and Oppressed us for many years God Forbid! … without some provision is Made our future is sad to look upon.⁷¹

Decades after the war, former slave Jacob Thomas remarked that he “always thought a lot of Lincoln” for having so much faith in black folk as to think that they “could live on nothin’ at all.”⁷²

Planters were backed in their repossession efforts not only by the presidency but also by northern elites who came to their defense whenever anyone raised the prospect of carving up plantations and redistributing land. It mattered little that planters had made war on the Union. Nor did it matter that without the aid of blacks, the Union might not have survived. Blacks were of no more use in that respect to their former allies. “As the war for the Union recedes into the misty shadows of the past,” wrote Frederick Douglass, “and the Negro is no longer needed to assault forts and stop rebel bullets, he is in some sense, of less importance. Peace with the old master class has been war to the Negro.”⁷³

Northern financiers and industrialists helped prosecute that war with their fierce opposition to land redistribution. Such a thing would not only upset business relations with their planter partners but would also set a dangerous precedent. An editorial in the New York Times summed up northern elite fears. “Is it not manifest that the same philosophy which seeks to recompense the Southern laborer by confiscating a portion of employer’s property, will also seek to recompense the Northern laborer in a similar manner?”⁷⁴ A threat to men of wealth anywhere was a threat to men of wealth everywhere. The government they controlled would protect their property rights.⁷⁵

Men of little wealth, black or white, enjoyed no such protection. Holding land became increasingly difficult for poor whites as well throughout the late nineteenth century. Many Confederate soldiers lost their farms to wealthier neighbors during the war as their families bartered away land for food.⁷⁶ Others lost land after the war, driven into poverty by exorbitant interest rates. With few skills other than farming and no land of their own to farm, most blacks and many whites became locked in sharecropping and tenancy.

Ironically, planters as a class lost little with Confederate defeat. They retained the labor of blacks and added many thousands of whites to their work force. Nor did they lose much in terms of wealth. Wealth in the South had long been tied to land ownership, and that remained true in the postwar era. Historian Robert McKenzie points out that land ownership actually became more concentrated during the 1860s. In western Tennessee, for example, the top 5 percent of white land owners increased their share of real and personal property by nearly one-fourth. By 1870, Tennessee’s agricultural elites controlled up to half the state’s farm land “while the bottom half of farm households were still virtually landless.” In Alabama, Dallas County’s wealthiest 10 percent of landowners held 57 percent of the real estate. In Marengo County, they owned 63 percent by 1870, an 8 percent increase from ten years earlier. Professor Gavin Wright reinforces the point in The Political Economy of the Cotton South, noting that “despite the decline in average farm size reported in the 1870 census, there was no basic change in the concentration of land ownership. Antebellum holdings were not really broken up in favor of either blacks or white nonslaveholders, and most of the new small farms were tenancies of one kind or another.”⁷⁷

Although usually associated with the post–Civil War era, tenant farming and sharecropping were not new at all. In the late 1850s, roughly one in four white southern farmers worked land owned by someone else. In parts of the Old South, landless tenants made up nearly half the rural white population. But tenancy did see a phenomenal growth after the war. By the early twentieth century, two-thirds of farmers, black and white, in vast swaths of the Deep South were tenants. In Alabama’s Barbour County alone, the tenancy rate was more than 75 percent.⁷⁸

Old or new, tenant farming was for many a kind of slavery. Farmers worked for a share of the crop and borrowed against expected earnings. With local landholders and merchants (who were often the same people) keeping the books, tenants’ annual incomes almost never covered their previous year’s debt. They were tied to the land until they could pay off what they owed, which was nearly impossible under a system of revolving, ever-increasing indebtedness. Once caught in the cycle of debt, tenants were usually tied to the land and trapped for life unless, as in slavery times, they managed to slip away.

“We all light in and work like old horses, thinking now we making money and going to get some of it.” That was how Ann Evans remembered her postwar expectations. “But we never did get a cent. We never did get out of debt.” It was not from lack of trying, and she knew where the fault lay. “We always get through with fine big crops and owed the white man more than we did when we started the crop, and got to stay to pay the debt. It was awful. All over was like that.” With no land of their own coming out of slavery, most blacks had little choice but to endure debt slavery. Roberta Mason recalled that “there was nothing else we could do but stay on with some of the white folks ‘cause we had nothing to farm with and nothing to eat and wear.” It was the only way they had “to keep from perishing.”⁷⁹

Some blacks did manage to purchase land, although usually marginal land that no one else wanted. In Georgia, within ten years of the Civil War’s end, blacks held 338,769 acres. By 1900, that figure had reached more than a million acres. In the interior North Carolina counties of Halifax, Warren, and Granville, between 20 and 29 percent of black farmers owned all or part of the lands they worked. Yet even for these farmers, it was tough to make ends meet. Much like their landless neighbors, small landowners were subject to a kind of debt slavery under the oppressive crop lien system. Because they could get credit nowhere else, farmers were forced to put up their next year’s crop as collateral with local merchants in exchange for seed, tools, and other supplies. But interest rates were so high, ranging as high as 50 to 100 percent, that small farmers often ended up deeper in debt than they had been the year before. One North Carolina farmer complained that “we are obliged to buy on time and pay 50 or more percent.” Said another, “We are sometimes forced to pay one and a half to two bushels of corn in fall for one borrowed in summer.” Frequently unable to keep up with debt payments under such oppressive rates, farmers often had their land dispossessed and were forced into tenancy. As embittered freedman Morris Sheppard put it, “I lost my land trying to live honest and pay my debts.”⁸⁰

A major problem was that creditors usually required cotton planting as a condition of the crop lien contract, ensuring overproduction and low income.⁸¹ Yet even under such circumstances, surviving records show that blacks made repeated attempts to pay down balances. Sometimes they paid off part of their accounts before “settling-up” time at harvest season. These accounts also show another side of black folk’s economy, one that gave them a degree of independence even under tenancy and debt slavery.

Sharecropping and crop lien were imposed systems that blacks had to endure for access to tools, seed, housing, and credit. But they also developed a parallel system, almost a shadow economy, upon which they depended for much more. At nights, on Sundays, and during off-seasons – almost any time that they were not in the fields – they chopped wood, raised chickens and hogs, gathered eggs, picked berries, baked pies, hunted and fished, made butter, and produced garden crops. They bartered or sold much of it for whatever they could get. They worked seasonally and part-time in turpentining and railroading. They hired themselves out as day laborers, carpenters, cooks, maids, midwives, nurses, and teachers.⁸² Their work never ended. In the post–Civil War years, black folk demonstrated a far greater work ethic than any former slaveholder who had lived, and continued to live, off the labor of others.

Blacks used some of their hard-earned funds to pay down debt. Knowing, however, that no matter how much they paid, creditors could simply hike prices and interest rates to keep them in debt, they held back what little they could to support community churches and schools and to pay for their children’s education when possible. Urban blacks did much the same. Decades of hard work and dogged frugality gave rise to a class of black professionals – doctors, dentists, journalists, lawyers, educators, and ministers – that served black communities and institutions all over the country. Many became the public voice of black folk, continually pushing the nation toward its promise of freedom.

Such people stood on the shoulders of men like Duncan Winslow – former slave, Union veteran, wounded survivor of the Ft. Pillow Massacre – who worked out his life as a farmer in Illinois and never learned to sign his name. But his grandsons Rollins and Henry, although they went to segregated schools in the 1920s and were denied access to the local public library, grew up with a chest full of books and encouragement to read. Both eventually earned graduate degrees. Rollins entered the ministry. Henry went into teaching. For their opportunities, they always credited their grandfather Duncan “and the blood offering he yielded to the end that generations of his progeny might have access to the blessings of learning and liberty.”⁸³

Later generations also owed much to women like Mattie Curtis of North Carolina. Born in slavery, she recalled at age ninety-eight that “freedom ain’t give us nothin’ but pickled horse meat and dirty crackers, and not half enough of that.” Despite her initial excitement at slavery’s downfall, what the whites called emancipation was a bitter disappointment to Mattie. Well into her twenties at war’s end, a Union officer had “come to our place and told us that the land was goin’ to be cut up and divided among the slaves, they would also have a mule and a house apiece.” She “always had craved a home” and land on which to make a living, “but the slaves ain’t got none of it that I ever hear about.” Although she had worked for others all her life with little but misery in return, now she would have to start from nothing.

She was able to buy a tract of fifteen throw-away acres on credit. It was heavily wooded, not much use for farming at first, so “I cut down the big trees that was all over these fields and I mauled out the wood and sold it, then I plowed up the fields and planted them.” She did “a heap of work at night too, all of my sewin’ and such.” The small garden plot near her house “never got no work ‘cept at night.”

The first cotton bale she ever sold, the first she could call her own, was an especially gratifying memory. “I was some proud of that bale of cotton, and after I had it ginned I set out with it on my steer cart for Raleigh.” She did not know where the cotton market was and did not dare ask whites because they “hated” blacks, especially those “what was making something.”

I thought that I could find the place by myself, but I rid all day and had to take my cotton home with me that night ‘cause I can’t find no place to sell it at. But that night I think it over and the next day I goes and asks a policeman about the market. Lo and behold child, I found it on Blount Street, and I had pass by it several times the day before.

Mattie and her husband Josh had nineteen children, some of them “borned in the field.” Fifteen died before they were grown. Josh died too, said Mattie, “but I kept on.”⁸⁴

Like so many others, simple survival was for Mattie the most enduring form of resistance. It was a matter of never giving up, making what they could of an incomplete freedom. They kept freeing themselves by degrees and teaching their children to do the same, just as they had done all their lives.

¹ Henry Highland Garnet, A Memorial Discourse; Delivered in the Hall of the House of Representatives, Washington City, D.C., on Sabbath, February 12, 1865 (Philadelphia: Joseph M. Wilson, 1865), 65, 82, 85–86.

² Congressional Globe, Thirty-Eighth Congress, Second Session (1865), 531; Forrest G. Wood, Black Scare: The Racist Response to Emancipation and Reconstruction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 85; Escott, What Shall We Do with the Negro?, 228–38.

³ John Mercer Langston, Freedom and Citizenship: Selected Lectures and Addresses (Washington, D.C.: Rufus H. Darby, 1883), 99–100; Muscatine (Iowa) Journal in Christian Recorder, November 18, 1865; John Francis Cook et al. to Honorable Senators and Members of the House of Representatives in Congress Assembled, December 1865, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 817–18.

⁴ Anglo-African, June 24, 1865; Petersburg (Va.) News in New York Tribune, June 15, 1865; Equal Suffrage. Address from the Colored Citizens of Norfolk, Va., to the People of the United States. Also an Account of the Agitation among the Colored People of Virginia for Equal Rights (New Bedford, Mass.: E. Anthony and Sons, 1865).

⁵ New York Tribune, July 11, 1865; Nashville Daily Press and Times, August 8, 1865; Raleigh (N.C.) Journal of Freedom, October 28, 1865.

⁶ Anglo-African, August 5, 1865. In contrast with “colored soldiers,” Loguen wrote that “many of the white soldiers were drunken, and loafing about abusing colored people. … Quite different with the black soldiers; they all acted, as well as looked like men.”

⁷ Mary Jane Wilson, Virginia Narratives, 55; Madison Frederick Ross, Missouri Narratives, 300; Quarles, Negro in the Civil War, 293–94.

⁸ Williams, Self-Taught, 42, 90–91, 105, 129; Quarles, Negro in the Civil War, 294. See also Henry Lee Swint, The Northern Teacher in the South, 1862–1870 (New York: Octagon Books, 1967); Robert C. Morris, Reading, ‘Riting, and Reconstruction: The Education of Freedmen in the South, 1861–1870 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); Jacqueline Jones, Soldiers of Light and Love: Northern Teachers and Georgia Blacks, 1865–1873 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980); Ronald E. Butchart, Schooling the Freed People: Teaching, Learning, and the Struggle for Black Freedom, 1861–1876 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).

⁹ The American Freedman 3 (April 1869): 8.

¹⁰ U.S. Congress, Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, Thirty-Ninth Congress, First Session (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1866), part 3, 174.

¹¹ Hannah Austin, Georgia Narratives, part 1, 21.

¹² Grierson [commanding cavalry forces] to Lt. Col. C. T. Christensen [assistant adjutant-general, Headquarters, Cavalry Forces, Military Division of West Mississippi], June 4, 1865, Official Records, series 1, vol. 49, part 1, 301.

¹³ Col. Horace N. Howard [commanding a cavalry detachment] to Capt. Inhoff [acting assistant adjutant-general, Second Division, Cavalry Corps, Military Division of the Mississippi], Official Records, series 1, vol. 49, part 2, 1041–42; McNeil to Wilkinson, n.d., folder 3, Wilkinson Family Papers, Georgia Department of Archives and History; Alexander Nunn, ed., Lee County and Her Forebears (Montgomery, Ala.: Herff Jones, 1983), 255.

¹⁴ Whitelaw Reid, After the War: A Southern Tour (New York: Moore, Wilstach, and Baldwin, 1866), 151; Mary Love Edwards Fleming, “Dale County and Its People during the Civil War,” Alabama Historical Quarterly 19 (1957): 80; Dorothy Stugis Pruett, ed., Diary of Ann Browder (Macon, Ga.: Pruett, 1984), 51; Ray Mathis, John Horry Dent: South Carolina Aristocrat on the Alabama Frontier (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1979), 213.

¹⁵ Reid, After the War, 151.

¹⁶ Smithville, located in Brunswick County at the mouth of the Cape Fear River, changed its name to Southport in 1886.

¹⁷ Christian Recorder, February 25, 1865.

¹⁸ Journal of the Proceedings of the Convention of the People of Georgia (Milledgeville: R. M. Orme and Son, 1865), 191.

¹⁹ The American Annual Cyclopedia and Register of Important Events of the Year 1865 (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1869), 5: 19; Victoria V. Clayton, White and Black under the Old Regime (Milwaukee, Wisc.: Young Churchman Co., 1899), 162.

²⁰ Proceedings of the Colored People’s Convention of the State of South Carolina, Held in Zion Church, Charleston, November 1865 (Charleston: South Carolina Leader Office, 1865), 25; American Annual Cyclopedia, 1865, 5: 766.

²¹ Brown, Negro in the American Rebellion, 345; Anglo-African, December 16, 1865; Rev. Lewis Bright et al. to Gen. Clinton B. Fisk [Freedmen’s Bureau assistant commissioner for Kentucky, Tennessee, and northern Alabama], July 27, 1865, in Steven Hahn et al., eds., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, series 3, vol. 1: Land and Labor, 1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 262–63 (hereafter cited as Land and Labor); Alexandria (Va.) Gazette, June 13, 1865.

²² Henry Jackson, comp., Reports of Cases in Law and Equity, Argued and Determined in the Supreme Court of Georgia (Macon, Ga.: J. W. Burke and Co., 1875), 51: 267; We the Colorede [sic] people to the governor of Mississippi, December 3, 1865, in Hahn et al., Land and Labor, 856–57.

²³ Maj. John Leonard [Freedmen’s Bureau agent] to Col. J. R. Lewis, August 26, 1868, in LaWanda Cox and John H. Cox, eds., Reconstruction, the Negro, and the New South (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1973), 266–67; George R. Ballou [Freedmen’s Bureau agent] to Maj. O. H. Howard, September 1, 1868, in ibid., 274–75; G. Ballou to Maj. O. H. Howard, October 31, 1868, in ibid., 276; Emma Knight, Missouri Narratives, 220.

²⁴ Capt. Andrew Stafford [provost marshal, First District of Maryland] to Brig. Gen. Henry H. Lockwood [commanding, Third Separate Brigade, Eighth Army Corps], November 4, 1864, in Berlin et al., Upper South, 510; Brig. Gen. Henry. H. Lockwood to Lt. Col. S. B. Lawrence [Headquarters, Middle Department and Eighth Corps], December 15, 1864, in ibid., 532; James Murray [postmaster, New Town, Maryland] to Maj. Gen. Lew Wallace, [commanding, Middle Department and Eighth Army Corps], December 5, 1864, in ibid., 524; Urbain Ozanne [Tennessee brewer] to Gov. William G. Brownlow, April 10, 1865, in ibid., 462–63; Lucy Lee to Lt. Col. W. E. W. Ross [Freedmen’s Bureau officer], January 10, 1865, in ibid., 498 n. 36.

²⁵ Statement of Jane Kamper, November 14, 1864, in Berlin et al., Upper South, 519; Susan Rhodes, Missouri Narratives, 285; Holmes to Lt. Col. William M. Beebe [Freedmen’s Bureau, Washington, D.C.], April 22, 1867, in Berlin et al., Upper South, 346–47.

²⁶ Anna Baker, Mississippi Narratives, 15; Simms to John McC. Perkins, May 25, 1865, in Hahn et al., Land and Labor, 199–200. Perkins forwarded Simms’s letter, along with a positive endorsement, to the Freedmen’s Bureau.

²⁷ Susan Eva O’Donovan, Becoming Free in the Cotton South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 221–22; Warner Madison [black resident of Memphis] to General C. B. Fisk [Freedmen’s Bureau assistant commissioner for Kentucky, Tennessee, and northern Alabama], September 13, 1865, in Hahn et al., Land and Labor, 269–70.

²⁸ Brown, Negro in the American Rebellion, 359. Ways in which the Freedmen’s Bureau often hampered as much as helped the formerly enslaved are explored in Claude F. Oubre, Forty Acres and a Mule: The Freedmen’s Bureau and Black Land Ownership, with a new foreword by Katherine C. Mooney (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012).

²⁹ Samuel Bing and William G. Pinkney [president and secretary respectively of an organization representing the freedmen of Charleston] to Edwin M. Stanton, June 15, 1865, in Hahn et al., Land and Labor, 222–23; Paul A. Cimbala, Under the Guardianship of the Nation: The Freedmen’s Bureau and the Reconstruction of Georgia, 1865–1870 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), 174; Foner, Reconstruction, 163–64; Eric Foner, ‘“The Tocsin of Freedom’: The Black Leadership of Radical Reconstruction,” in Boritt and Hancock, Slavery, Resistance, Freedom, 125. See also Joseph P. Reidy, “Aaron A. Bradley: Voice of Black Labor in the Georgia Lowcountry,” in Howard N. Rabinowitz, ed., Southern Black Leaders of the Reconstruction Era (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 281–308. Bradley later returned to Georgia and served as a delegate to the state constitutional convention of 1867–68 and as a state senator.

³⁰ Affidavit of Clinton Hamilton, Memphis, Tennessee, July 31, 1865, in Berlin et al., Lower South, 819; Elias Thomas, North Carolina Narratives, part 2, 345–46; John White, Oklahoma Narratives, 327–28.

³¹ General Orders No. 7, Headquarters, Fourth Subdistrict, District of Central Missouri, April 25, 1865, in Berlin et al., Upper South, 622; Susan Merritt, Texas Narratives, part 3, 78; Reid, After the War, 352.

³² William C. Garrison to John B. Callis [subassistant commissioner, Freedmen’s Bureau, Huntsville, Alabama], April 18, 1866, in Michael W. Fitzgerald, The Union League Movement in the Deep South: Politics and Agricultural Change during Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 21.

³³ See James G. Ryan, “The Memphis Riot of 1866: Terror in a Black Community During Reconstruction,” Journal of Negro History 62 (1977): 243–57; Bobby L. Lovett, “Memphis Riots: White Reaction to Blacks in Memphis, May 1865-July 1866,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 38 (1979): 9–33.

³⁴ Ted Tunnell, Crucible of Reconstruction: War, Radicalism, and Race in Louisiana, 1862–1877 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984), 103–107. See also James G. Hollandsworth, An Absolute Massacre: The New Orleans Race Riot of July 30, 1866 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004); Gilles Vandal, The New Orleans Riot of 1866: Anatomy of a Tragedy (Lafayette, La.: Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Southwest Louisiana, 1983).

³⁵ Charles Sumner to John Bright, November 5, 1865, in Beverly Wilson Palmer, ed., The Selected Letters of Charles Sumner (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990), 2: 341–42.

³⁶ Wood, Black Scare, 85–86; William Gillette, The Right to Vote: Politics and the Passage of the Fifteenth Amendment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), 75–76.

³⁷ Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet, 198; Julie Saville, The Work of Reconstruction: From Slave to Wage Labor in South Carolina, 1860–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 169–170; Tera Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 32; Mack Taylor, South Carolina Narratives, part 4, 159; Charles Stearns, The Black Man of the South, and the Rebels; or, The Characteristics of the Former and the Recent Outrages of the Latter (New York: American News Co., 1872), 208; Jonathan M. Bryant, How Curious a Land: Conflict and Change in Greene County, Georgia, 1850–1885 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 127.

³⁸ Foner, “Tocsin of Freedom,” 131, 132, 128–29. For a complete listing see Eric Foner, Freedom’s Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders during Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996).

³⁹ Kush, The Political Battle Axe for the Use of the Colored Men of the State of South Carolina in the Year 1872. With Constitution of the Progressive Association (Charleston, S.C.: n.p., 1872), 3–4; Austin (Tex.) Reformer, October 14, 1871.

⁴⁰ Saville, Work of Reconstruction, 180; Isiah Green, Georgia Narratives, part 2, 55–56; U.S. Congress, Report of the Select Committee to Inquire into the Mississippi Election of 1875 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1876), 1: 210.

⁴¹ John A. Cobb to wife, April 26, 1868, Howell Cobb Papers, in Edmund L. Drago, Black Politicians and Reconstruction in Georgia: A Splendid Failure (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 148. Various local and regional terrorists went by such names as Black Horse Cavalry, Pale Faces, White Brotherhood, Invisible Empire, Knights of the Black Cross, Knights of the Rising Sun, Ku Klux Rangers, and Knights of the White Camellia. See Cimbala, Under the Guardianship of the Nation, 210; Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet, 267; Kwando Mbiassi Kinshasa, Black Resistance to the Ku Klux Klan in the Wake of the Civil War (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2006), 64–65.

⁴² Wade Owens, Alabama Narratives, 308; Page Smith, Trial by Fire: A People’s History of the Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982), 855.

⁴³ Charlie Hudson, Georgia Narratives, part 2, 231; Pierce Harper, Texas Narratives, part 2, 112; Oliver Bell, Alabama Narratives, 29. For other examples see Charlie Hudson, Georgia Narratives, part 2, 226; James D. Johnson, Texas Narratives, part 2, 217; Anderson Bates, South Carolina Narratives, part 1, 44; Frank Wise, Arkansas Narratives, part 7, 220.

⁴⁴ Samuel S. Taylor, Arkansas Narratives, part 1, 277; Tom Holland, Texas Narratives, part 2, 147.

⁴⁵ Foner, “Tocsin of Freedom,” 137; Drago, Black Politicians and Reconstruction in Georgia, 146–47; Foner, Reconstruction, 351, 548.

⁴⁶ Lee W. Formwalt, “The Camilla Massacre of 1868: Racial Violence as Political Propaganda,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 71 (1987): 399–426; Melinda Meek Hennessey, “Race and Violence in Reconstruction New Orleans: The 1868 Riot,” in Donald G. Nieman, ed., Black Freedom/White Violence, 1865–1900 (New York: Garland, 1994), 171–85; Elizabeth Otto Daniell, “The Ashburn Murder Case in Georgia Reconstruction, 1868,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 59 (1975): 296–312.

⁴⁷ Jesse Williams, South Carolina Narratives, part 4, 204.

⁴⁸ Russell Duncan, Freedom’s Shore: Tunis Campbell and the Georgia Freedmen (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), 25, 30; O’Donovan, Becoming Free in the Cotton South, 230, 223–24; Cimbala, Under the Guardianship of the Nation, 210; Bryant Huff, Georgia Narratives, part 2, 242.

⁴⁹ Pierce Harper, Texas Narratives, part 2, 112; Unnamed former slave, South Carolina Narratives, part 2, 121; Claiborne Moss, Arkansas Narratives, part 5, 164.

⁵⁰ The actual number of blacks killed remains unclear. Estimates range from the low sixties to more than 150, although authors LeeAnna Keith and Charles Lane, the best authorities on Colfax, view the higher figures as probable exaggerations. See LeeAnna Keith, The Colfax Massacre: The Untold Story of Black Power, White Terror, and the Death of Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Charles Lane, The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2008).

⁵¹ McPherson, Struggle for Equality, 430–31; Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 83. McPherson added that “the mass of northern people had never loved the Negro, were tired of the ‘everlasting negro question,’ and were glad to see the end of it” (431). Some Republicans continued to call for black voting rights, although with little success. Their efforts are explored in Xi Wang, Trial of Democracy: Black Suffrage and Northern Republicans, 1860–1910 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997).

⁵² The phrase came from an antebellum minstrel song-and-dance routine in which a white performer named Thomas “Daddy” Rice blackened his face and mocked African Americans as the fictional “Jim Crow.” Abolitionists in Massachusetts first applied the phrase to the state’s segregated railroad cars. Over time, segregation laws generally came to be referred to as Jim Crow. An excellent essay on early resistance to segregation, North and South, is Mary Block, “African American Responses to Early Jim Crow,” in Haggard, African Americans in the Nineteenth Century,” 111–32.

⁵³ Davison M. Douglas, Jim Crow Moves North: The Battle over Northern School Segregation, 1865–1954 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 2–3. See also Hugh Davis, “We Will Be Satisfied with Nothing Less”: The African American Struggle for Equal Rights in the North during Reconstruction (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2011).

⁵⁴ State Central Committee, Democratic Party of Pennsylvania, The Issues of the Hour: Negro Suffrage and Negro Equality (Philadelphia: n.p., 1865), 9; Boston Daily Evening Transcript, November 8, 1866. See also Leslie H. Fishel Jr., “Northern Prejudice and Negro Suffrage, 1865–1870,” Journal of Negro History 39 (1954): 8–26.

⁵⁵ Frederick Douglass, Lessons of the Hour (Baltimore: Thomas and Evans, 1894), 23–24.

⁵⁶ Frederick Douglass, “Reconstruction,” Atlantic Monthly 18 (December 1866): 761.

⁵⁷ Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U. S. 520 (1896). See also Charles A. Lofgren, The Plessy Case: A Legal-Historical Interpretation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). Justice David Brewer, who later dissented in Giles v. Harris, was absent due to his daughter’s illness during the Plessy argument and did not render an opinion in the case.

⁵⁸ Among the best works on the convict lease system are Matthew J. Mancini, One Dies, Get Another: Convict Leasing in the American South, 1866–1928 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996); Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York: Doubleday, 2008); David M. Oshinski, Worse than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (New York: Free Press, 1996).

⁵⁹ Albert Bushnell Hart, “Outcome of the Southern Race Question,” North American Review 188 (July 1908): 56; Frederick Alexander Durham, The Lone-Star of Liberia: Being the Outcome of Reflections on Our Own People (London: Elliot Stock, 1892), 5. Amy Louis Wood explores the meaning and impact of racial violence in Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

⁶⁰ W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 133–35; Leon F. Litwack, “Hellhounds,” in James Allen et al., Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Sante Fe, N.M.: Twin Palms Publishers, 2000), 21. For more on the Darien incident see W. Fitzhugh Brundage, “The Darien ‘Insurrection’ of 1899: Black Protest during the Nadir of Race Relations,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 74 (1990): 234–53.

⁶¹ Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Knopf, 1998), 297; Ida B. Wells, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, ed. Alfreda M. Duster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 154–55. For an overview of Klan activities in the early twentieth century see Nancy MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).

⁶² Walter F. White, “The Work of a Mob,” The Crisis 16 (1918): 222. See also Christopher C. Meyers, “‘Killing Them by the Wholesale’: A Lynching Rampage in South Georgia,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 90 (2006): 214–35; Julie Buckner Armstrong, Mary Turner and the Memory of Lynching (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011). At the urging of Valdosta State University’s Mary Turner Project, in 2010, the Georgia Historical Society dedicated a marker where Mary died at Folsom Bridge on the Brooks/Lowndes County line. Relatives of Mary Turner attended the ceremony.

⁶³ Taylor, Reminiscences, 61–62, 65–66.

⁶⁴ By 1900, literacy among blacks in North Carolina reached 53 percent. In early twentieth-century Georgia, the rate was 70 percent. See Sharon Ann Holt, Making Freedom Pay: North Carolina Freedpeople Working for Themselves, 1865–1900 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000), 132; Cimbala, Under the Guardianship of the Nation, 220. The Savannah incident was related to me many years ago by the school teacher who tried to register. I wish I could recall his first name. I knew the old gentleman only as Mister Boyd.

⁶⁵ Giles v. Harris, 189 U. S. 475 (1903); Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U. S. 520 (1896).

⁶⁶ Boston Guardian, May 2, 1903; “The Alabama Decision,” Colored American Magazine 6 (July 1903): 539.

⁶⁷ Chicago Tribune, August 26, 1893.

⁶⁸ See Wells, Crusade for Justice; Paula Giddings, Ida: A Sword among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign against Lynching (New York: HarperCollins, 2008); W. E. B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century (New York: International Publishers, 1968); David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, 1868–1919: Biography of a Race (New York: Henry Holt, 1993); David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, 1919–1963: The Fight for Equality and the American Century (New York: Henry Holt, 2000); Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery: An Autobiography (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Co., 1901); Robert J. Norrell, Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009). See also R. Volney Riser, Defying Disfranchisement: Black Voting Rights Activism in the Jim Crow South, 1890–1908 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010).

⁶⁹ Isaac Stier, Mississippi Narratives, 147; Louis Hill, Missouri Narratives, 189. See also Patsy Hyde, Tennessee Narratives, 35; John Crawford, Texas Narratives, part 1, 258; John Davenport, South Carolina Narratives, part 1, 243; Hilliard Yellerday, North Carolina Narratives, part 2, 436.

⁷⁰ Special Field Orders No. 15, Headquarters, Military Division of the Mississippi, January 16, 1865, in Berlin et al., Lower South, 338–40; Statutes at Large, 13: 737–39, 758–60.

⁷¹ Henry Bram et al. to the President of these United States, October 28, 1865, in Hahn et al., Land and Labor, 442–44.

⁷² Jacob Thomas, North Carolina Narratives, part 2, 351.

⁷³ Address by Hon. Frederick Douglass, delivered in the Congregational Church, Washington, D.C., April 16, 1883, in Foner, Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, 4: 355.

⁷⁴ New York Times, July 9, 1867.

⁷⁵ The economic impetus for waning commitment to Reconstruction in the North is explored in Heather Cox Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865–1901 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).

⁷⁶ For a discussion of the South’s food shortage and its impact see Williams, Bitterly Divided: The South’s Inner Civil War, 61–107. See also Andrew F. Smith, Starving the South: How the North Won the Civil War (New York: St. Martin’s, 2011).

⁷⁷ Robert Tracy McKenzie, One South or Many?: Plantation Belt and Upcountry in Civil War-Era Tennessee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 98, 100; Roger L. Ransom and Richard Sutch, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 78; Gavin Wright, The Political Economy of the Cotton South: Households, Markets, and Wealth in the Nineteenth Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 160–64. For excellent studies making many of the same points regarding survival of the planter class see Roger Wallace Shugg, “Survival of the Plantation System in Louisiana,” Journal of Southern History 3 (1937): 311–25; Jonathan M. Wiener, “Planter Persistence and Social Change: Alabama, 1850–1870,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 7 (1976): 235–60; Lee W. Formwalt, “Planter Persistence in Southwest Georgia, 1850–1870,” Journal of Southwest Georgia History 2 (1984): 40–58. See also Lewis Nicholas Wynne, The Continuity of Cotton: Planter Politics in Georgia, 1865–1892 (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1986); Roger W. Shugg, Origins of Class Struggle in Louisiana (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1939).

⁷⁸ Christopher C. Meyers and David Williams, Georgia: A Brief History (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2012), 146; Louis Vandiver Loveman, Historical Atlas of Alabama, 1519–1900 (Gadsden, Ala.: Loveman, 1976), 58. See also Jeremy Atack, “Tenants and Yeomen in the Nineteenth Century,” Agricultural History 62 (1988): 6, 21.

⁷⁹ Ann Ulrich Evans, Missouri Narratives, 117; Roberta Mason, North Carolina Narratives, part 2, 104.

⁸⁰ Cimbala, Under the Guardianship of the Nation, 221–22; Holt, Making Freedom Pay, 133; First Annual Report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the State of North Carolina for the Year 1887 (Raleigh: Joseph Daniels, State Printer, 1887), 129; Morris Sheppard, Oklahoma Narratives, 292.

⁸¹ See Roger L. Ransom and Richard Sutch, “The ‘Lock-In’ Mechanism and Overproduction of Cotton in the Postbellum South,” Agricultural History 49 (1975): 405–25.

⁸² Postwar black economies are perhaps most fully explored in Ransom and Sutch, One Kind of Freedom, and Holt, Making Freedom Pay. For an overview of primarily tenant economies see Mark D. Hersey, “‘Their Plows Singing Beneath the Sandy Loam’: African American Agriculture in the Late-Nineteenth-Century South,” in Haggard, African Americans in the Nineteenth Century, 133–47.

⁸³ Henry Winslow to brother Rollins Winslow, August 28, 1986. Photocopy of letter in author’s collection, courtesy of Rollins’s son, Leonard L. Winslow.

⁸⁴ Mattie Curtis, North Carolina Narratives, part 1, 217–22