wished a few dozen Trinidad planters would come to that city on the same business and on a much larger scale.[24] N.W. Pollard, agent of the Government of Trinidad, came to Baltimore in 1851 to make his appeal for emigrants, offering to pay all expenses.[25] At a meeting held in Baltimore, in 1852, the parents of Mr. Stanbury Boyce, now a retired merchant in Washington, District of Columbia, were also induced to go. They found there opportunities which they had never had before and well established themselves in their new home. The account which Mr. Boyce gives in a letter to the writer corroborates the newspaper reports as to the success of the enterprise.[26]
The _New York Journal of Commerce_ reported in 1841 that, according to advices received at New Orleans from Jamaica, there had arrived in that island fourteen Negro emigrants from the United States, being the first fruits of Mr. Barclay’s mission to this country. A much larger number of Negroes were expected and various applications for their services had been received from respectable parties.[27] The products of soil were reported as much reduced from former years and to meet its demand for labor some freedmen from Sierra Leone were induced to emigrate to that island in 1842.[28] One Mr. Anderson, an agent of the government of Jamaica, contemplated visiting New York in 1851 to secure a number of laborers, tradesmen and agricultural settlers.[29]
In the course of time, emigration to foreign lands interested a larger number of representative Negroes. At a national council called in 1853 to promote more effectively the amelioration of the colored people, the question of emigration and that only was taken up for serious consideration. But those who desired to introduce the question of Liberian colonization or who were especially interested in that scheme were not invited. Among the persons who promoted the calling of this council were William Webb, Martin R. Delaney, J. Gould Bias, Franklin Turner, Augustus Greene, James M. Whitfield, William Lambert, Henry Bibb, James T. Holly and Henry M. Collins.
There developed in this assembly three groups, one believing with Martin R. Delaney that it was best to go to the Niger Valley in Africa, another following the counsel of James M. Whitfield then interested in emigration to Central America, and a third supporting James T. Holly who insisted that Hayti offered the best opportunities for free persons of color desiring to leave the United States. Delaney was commissioned to proceed to Africa, where he succeeded in concluding treaties with eight African kings who offered American Negroes inducements to settle in their respective countries. James Redpath, already interested in the scheme of colonization in Hayti, had preceded Holly there and with the latter as his coworker succeeded in sending to that country as many as two thousand emigrants, the first of whom sailed from this country in 1861.[30] Owing to the lack of equipment adequate to the establishment of the settlement and the unfavorable climate, not more than one third of the emigrants remained. Some attention was directed to California and Central America just as in the case of Africa but nothing in that direction took tangible form immediately, and the Civil War following soon thereafter did not give some of these schemes a chance to materialize.
[Footnote 1: _The African Repository_, XVI, p. 22.]
[Footnote 2: _The African Repository_, XVI, p. 23; Alexander, _A History of Colonization_, p. 347.]
[Footnote 3: _Ibid_., XVI, p. 113.]
[Footnote 4: Jay, _An Inquiry_, pp. 25, 29; Hodgkin, _An Inquiry_, p. 31.]
[Footnote 5: _The African Repository_, IV, p. 276; Griffin, _A Plea for Africa_, p. 65.]
[Footnote 6: Jay, _An Inquiry_, passim; _The Journal of Negro History_, I, pp. 276-301; and Stebbins, _Facts and Opinions_, pp. 200-201.]
[Footnote 7: Hart, _Slavery and Abolition_, p. 237.]
[Footnote 8: _The Journal of Negro History_, I, pp. 284-296; Garrison, _Thoughts on Colonization_, p. 204.]
[Footnote 9: _The African Repository_, XXXIII, p. 117.]
[Footnote 10: _The African Repository_, XXIII, p. 117.]
[Footnote 11: _The African Repository_, IX, pp. 86-88.]
[Footnote 12: _Ibid._, IX, p. 88.]
[Footnote 13: “If something is not done, and soon done,” said he, “we shall be the murderers of our own children. The ‘_murmura venturos nautis prudentia ventos_’ has already reached us (from Santo Domingo); the revolutionary storm, now sweeping the globe will be upon us, and happy if we make timely provision to give it an easy passage over our land. From the present state of things in Europe and America, the day which begins our combustion must be near at hand; and only a single spark is wanting to make that day to-morrow. If we had begun sooner, we might probably have been allowed a lengthier operation to clear ourselves, but every day’s delay lessens the time we may take for emancipation.”
As to the mode of emancipation, he was satisfied that that must be a matter of compromise between the passions, the prejudices, and the real difficulties which would each have its weight in that operation. He believed that the first chapter of this history, which was begun in St. Domingo, and the next succeeding ones, would recount how all the whites were driven from all the other islands. This, he thought, would prepare their minds for a peaceable accommodation between justice and policy; and furnish an answer to the difficult question, as to where the colored emigrants should go. He urged that the country put some plan under way, and the sooner it did so the greater would be the hope that it might be permitted to proceed peaceably toward consummation.–See Ford edition of _Jefferson’s Writings_, VI, p. 349, VII, pp. 167, 168.]
[Footnote 14: _Letter of Mr. Stanbury Boyce;_ and _The African Repository._]
[Footnote 15: _Philadelphia Gazette,_ Aug. 2, 3, 4, 8, 1842; _United States Gazette,_ Aug. 2-5, 1842; and the _Pennsylvanian,_ Aug. 2, 3, 4, 8, 1842.]
[Footnote 16: _The African Repository_, XVI, pp. 113-115.]
[Footnote 17: _The African Repository,_ XXI, p. 114.]
[Footnote 18: _The African Repository,_ XVI, p. 116.]
[Footnote 19: _The African Repository,_ XVI, p. 115.]
[Footnote 20: _Ibid.,_ XVI, p. 116.]
[Footnote 21: Speaking of this colony Kingsley said: “About eighteen months ago, I carried my son George Kingsley, a healthy colored man of uncorrupted morals, about thirty years of age, tolerably well educated, of very industrious habits, and a native of Florida, together with six prime African men, my own slaves, liberated for that express purpose, to the northeast side of the Island of Hayti, near Porte Plate, where we arrived in the month of October, 1836, and after application to the local authorities, from whom I rented some good land near the sea, and thickly timbered with lofty woods, I set them to work cutting down trees, about the middle of November, and returned to my home in Florida. My son wrote to us frequently, giving an account of his progress. Some of the fallen timber was dry enough to burn in January, 1837, when it was cleared up, and eight acres of corn planted, and as soon as circumstances would allow, sweet potatoes, yams, cassava, rice, beans, peas, plantains, oranges, and all sorts of fruit trees, were planted in succession. In the month of October, 1837, I again set off for Hayti, in a coppered brig of 150 tons, bought for the purpose and in five days and a half, from St. Mary’s in Georgia, landed my son’s wife and children, at Porte Plate, together with the wives and children of his servants, now working for him under an indenture of nine years; also two additional families of my slaves, all liberated for the express purpose of transportation to Hayti, where they were all to have as much good land in fee, as they could cultivate, say ten acres for each family, and all its proceeds, together with one-fourth part of the net proceeds of their labor, on my son’s farm, for themselves; also victuals, clothes, medical attendance, etc., gratis, besides Saturdays and Sundays, as days of labor for themselves, or of rest, just at their option.”
“On my arrival at my son’s place, called Cabaret (twenty-seven miles east of Porte Plate) in November, 1837, as before stated, I found everything in the most flattering and prosperous condition. They had all enjoyed good health, were overflowing with the most delicious variety and abundance of fruits and provisions, and were overjoyed at again meeting their wives and children; whom they could introduce into good comfortable log houses, all nicely whitewashed, and in the midst of a profuse abundance of good provisions, as they had generally cleared five or six acres of their land each, which being very rich, and planted with every variety to eat or to sell on their own account, and had already laid up thirty or forty dollars apiece. My son’s farm was upon a larger scale, and furnished with more commodious dwelling houses, also with store and out houses. In nine months he had made and housed three crops of corn, of twenty-five bushels to the acre, each, or one crop every three months. His highland rice, which was equal to any in Carolina, so ripe and heavy as some of it to be couched or leaned down, and no bird had ever troubled it, nor had any of his fields ever been hoed, or required hoeing, there being as yet no appearance of grass. His cotton was of an excellent staple. In seven months it had attained the height of thirteen feet; the stalks were ten inches in circumference, and had upwards of five hundred large boles on each stalk (not a worm nor red bug as yet to be seen). His yams, cassava, and sweet potatoes, were incredibly large, and plentifully thick in the ground; one kind of sweet potato, lately introduced from Taheita (formerly Otaheita) Island in the Pacific, was of peculiar excellence; tasted like new flour and grew to an ordinary size in one month. Those I ate at my son’s place had been planted five weeks, and were as big as our full grown Florida potatoes. His sweet orange trees budded upon wild stalks cut off (which every where abound), about six months before had large tops, and the buds were swelling as if preparing to flower. My son reported that his people had all enjoyed good health and had labored just as steadily as they formerly did in Florida and were well satisfied with their situation and the advantageous exchange of circumstances they had made. They all enjoyed the friendship of the neighboring inhabitants and the entire confidence of the Haytian Government.”
“I remained with my son all January, 1838 and assisted him in making improvements of different kinds, amongst which was a new two-story house, and then left him to go to Port au Prince, where I obtained a favorable answer from the President of Hayti, to his petition, asking for leave to hold in fee simple, the same tract of land upon which he then lived as a tenant, paying rent to the Haytian Government, containing about thirty-five thousand acres, which was ordered to be surveyed to him, and valued, and not expected to exceed the sum of three thousand dollars, or about ten cents an acre. After obtaining this land in fee for my son, I returned to Florida in February, in 1838.”–See _The African Repository_, XIV, pp. 215-216.]
[Footnote 22: _Niles Register_, LXVI, pp. 165, 386.]
[Footnote 23: _Niles Register_, LXVII, p. 180.]
[Footnote 24: _The African Repository_, XVI, p. 28.]
[Footnote 25: _Ibid._, p. 29.]
[Footnote 26: _Letter of Mr. Stanbury Boyce._]
[Footnote 27: St. Lucia and Trinidad were then considered unfavorable to the working of the new system.–See _The African Repository_, XXVII, p. 196.]
[Footnote 28: _Niles Register_, LXIII, p. 65.]
[Footnote 29: _Ibid._, LXIII, p. 65.]
[Footnote 30: Cromwell, _The Negro in American History_, pp. 43-44.]
CHAPTER V
THE SUCCESSFUL MIGRANT
The reader will naturally be interested in learning exactly what these thousands of Negroes did on free soil. To estimate these achievements the casual reader of contemporary testimony would now, as such persons did then, find it decidedly easy. He would say that in spite of the unfailing aid which philanthropists gave the blacks, they seldom kept themselves above want and, therefore, became a public charge, afflicting their communities with so much poverty, disease and crime that they were considered the lepers of society. The student of history, however, must look beyond these comments for the whole truth. One must take into consideration the fact that in most cases these Negroes escaped as fugitives without sufficient food and clothing to comfort them until they could reach free soil, lacking the small fund with which the pioneer usually provided himself in going to establish a home in the wilderness, and lacking, above all, initiative of which slavery had deprived them. Furthermore, these refugees with few exceptions had to go to places where they were not wanted and in some cases to points from which they were driven as undesirables, although preparation for their coming had sometimes gone to the extent of purchasing homes and making provision for employment upon arrival.[1] Several well-established Negro settlements in the North, moreover, were broken up by the slave hunters after the passing of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850.[2]
The increasing intensity of the hatred of the Negroes must be understood too both as a cause and result of their intolerable condition. Prior to 1800 the Negroes of the North were in fair circumstances. Until that time it was generally believed that the whites and the blacks would soon reach the advanced stage of living together on a basis of absolute equality.[3] The Negroes had not at that time exceeded the number that could be assimilated by the sympathizing communities in that section. The intolerable legislation of the South, however, forced so many free Negroes in the rough to crowd northern cities during the first four decades of the nineteenth century that they could not be easily readjusted. The number seeking employment far exceeded the demand for labor and thus multiplied the number of vagrants and paupers, many of whom had already been forced to this condition by the Irish and Germans then immigrating into northern cities. At one time, as in the case of Philadelphia, the Negroes constituting a small fraction of the population furnished one half of the criminals.[4] A radical opposition to the Negro followed, therefore, arousing first the laboring classes and finally alienating the support of the well-to-do people and the press. This condition obtained until 1840 in most northern communities and until 1850 in some places where the Negro population was considerable.
We must also take into account the critical labor situation during these years. The northern people were divided as to the way the Negroes should be encouraged. The mechanics of the North raised no objection to having the Negroes freed and enlightened but did not welcome them to that section as competitors in the struggle of life. When, therefore, the blacks, converted to the doctrine of training the hand to work with skill, began to appear in northern industrial centers there arose a formidable prejudice against them.[5] Negro and white mechanics had once worked together but during the second quarter of the nineteenth century, when labor became more dignified and a larger number of white persons devoted themselves to skilled labor, they adopted the policy of eliminating the blacks. This opposition, to be sure, was not a mere harmless sentiment. It tended to give rise to the organization of labor groups and finally to that of trades unions, the beginnings of those controlling this country today. Carrying the fight against the Negro still further, these laboring classes used their influence to obtain legislation against the employment of Negroes in certain pursuits. Maryland and Georgia passed laws restricting the privileges of Negro mechanics, and Pennsylvania followed their example.[6]
Even in those cases when the Negroes were not disturbed in their new homes on free soil, it was, with the exception of the Quaker and a few other communities, merely an act of toleration.[7] It must not be concluded, however, that the Negroes then migrating to the North did not receive considerable aid. The fact to be noted here is that because they were not well received sometimes by the people of their new environment, the help which they obtained from friends afar off did not suffice to make up for the deficiency of community cooperation. This, of course, was an unusual handicap to the Negro, as his life as a slave tended to make him a dependent rather than a pioneer.
It is evident, however, from accessible statistics that wherever the Negro was adequately encouraged he succeeded. When the urban Negroes in northern communities had emerged from their crude state they easily learned from the white men their method of solving the problems of life. This tendency was apparent after 1840 and striking results of their efforts were noted long before the Civil War. They showed an inclination to work when positions could be found, purchased homes, acquired other property, built churches and established schools. Going even further than this, some of them, taking advantage of their opportunities in the business world, accumulated considerable fortunes, just as had been done in certain centers in the South where Negroes had been given a chance.[8]
In cities far north like Boston not so much difference as to the result of this migration was noted. Some economic progress among the Negroes had early been observed there as a result of the long residence of Negroes in that city as in the case of Lewis Hayden who established a successful clothing business.[9] In New York such evidences were more apparent. There were in that city not so many Negroes as frequented some other northern communities of this time but enough to make for that city a decidedly perplexing problem. It was the usual situation of ignorant, helpless fugitives and free Negroes going, they knew not where, to find a better country. The situation at times became so grave that it not only caused prejudice but gave rise to intense opposition against those who defended the cause of the blacks as in the case of the abolition riots which occurred at several places in the State in 1834.[10]
To relieve this situation, Gerrit Smith, an unusually philanthropic gentleman, came forward with an interesting plan. Having large tracts of land in the southeastern counties of New York, he proposed to settle on small farms a large number of those Negroes huddled together in the congested districts of New York City. Desiring to obtain only the best class, he requested that the Negroes to be thus colonized be recommended by Reverend Charles B. Ray, Reverend Theodore S. Wright and Dr. J. McCune Smith, three Negroes of New York City, known to be representative of the best of the race. Upon their recommendations he deeded unconditionally to black men in 1846 three hundred small farms in Franklin, Essex, Hamilton, Fulton, Oneida, Delaware, Madison and Ulster counties, giving to each settler beside $10.00 to enable him to visit his farm.[11] With these holdings the blacks would not only have a basis for economic independence but would have sufficient property to meet the special qualifications which New York by the law of 1823 required of Negroes offering to vote.
This experiment, however, was a failure. It was not successful because of the intractability of the land, the harshness of the climate, and, in a great measure, the inefficiency of the settlers. They had none of the qualities of farmers. Furthermore, having been disabled by infirmities and vices they could not as beneficiaries answer the call of the benefactor. Peterboro, the town opened to Negroes in this section, did maintain a school and served as a station of the Underground Railroad but the agricultural results expected of the enterprise never materialized. The main difficulty in this case was the impossibility of substituting something foreign for individual enterprise.[12]
Progressive Negroes did appear, however, in other parts of the State. In Penyan, Western New York, William Platt and Joseph C. Cassey were successful lumber merchants.[13] Mr. W.H. Topp of Albany was for several years one of the leading merchant tailors of that city.[14] Henry Scott, of New York City, developed a successful pickling business, supplying most of the vessels entering that port.[15] Thomas Downing for thirty years ran a creditable restaurant in the midst of the Wall Street banks, where he made a fortune.[16] Edward V. Clark conducted a thriving business, handling jewelry and silverware.[17] The Negroes as a whole, moreover, had shown progress. Aided by the Government and philanthropic white people, they had before the Civil War a school system with primary, intermediate and grammar schools and a normal department. They then had considerable property, several churches and some benevolent institutions.
In Southern Pennsylvania, nearer to the border between the slave and free States, the effects of the achievements of these Negroes were more apparent for the reason that in these urban centers there were sufficient Negroes for one to be helpful to the other. Philadelphia presented then the most striking example of the remaking of these people. Here the handicap of the foreign element was greatest, especially after 1830. The Philadelphia Negro, moreover, was further impeded in his progress by the presence of southerners who made Philadelphia their home, and still more by the prejudice of those Philadelphia merchants who, sustaining such close relations to the South, hated the Negro and the abolitionists who antagonized their customers.
In spite of these untoward circumstances, however, the Negroes of Philadelphia achieved success. Negroes who had formerly been able to toil upward were still restricted but they had learned to make opportunities. In 1832 the Philadelphia blacks had $350,000 of taxable property, $359,626 in 1837 and $400,000 in 1847. These Negroes had 16 churches and 100 benevolent societies in 1837 and 19 churches and 106 benevolent societies in 1847. Philadelphia then had more successful Negro schools than any other city in the country. There were also about 500 Negro mechanics in spite of the opposition of organized labor.[18] Some of these Negroes, of course, were natives of that city.
Chief among those who had accumulated considerable property was Mr. James Forten, the proprietor of one of the leading sail manufactories, constantly employing a large number of men, black and white. Joseph Casey, a broker of considerable acumen, also accumulated desirable property, worth probably $75,000.[19] Crowded out of the higher pursuits of labor, certain other enterprising business men of this group organized the Guild of Caterers. This was composed of such men as Bogle, Prosser, Dorsey, Jones and Minton. The aim was to elevate the Negro waiter and cook from the plane of menials to that of progressive business men. Then came Stephen Smith who amassed a large fortune as a lumber merchant and with him Whipper, Vidal and Purnell. Still and Bowers were reliable coal merchants, Adger a success in handling furniture, Bowser a well-known painter, and William H. Riley the intelligent boot-maker.[20]
There were a few such successful Negroes in other communities in the State. Mr. William Goodrich, of York, acquired considerable interest in the branch of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad extending to Lancaster.[21] Benjamin Richards, of Pittsburgh, amassed a large fortune running a butchering business, buying by contract droves of cattle to supply the various military posts of the United States.[22] Mr. Henry M. Collins, who started life as a boatman, left this position for speculation in real estate in Pittsburgh where he established himself as an asset of the community and accumulated considerable wealth.[23] Owen A. Barrett, of the same city, made his way by discovering the remedy known as _B.A. Fahnestock’s Celebrated Vermifuge_, for which he was retained in the employ of the proprietor, who exploited the remedy.[24] Mr. John Julius made himself indispensable to Pittsburgh by running the Concert Hall Cafe where he served President William Henry Harrison in 1840.[25]
The field of greatest achievement, however, was not in the conservative East where the people had well established their going toward an enlightened and sympathetic aristocracy of talent and wealth. It was in the West where men were in position to establish themselves anew and make of life what they would. These crude communities, to be sure, often objected to the presence of the Negroes and sometimes drove them out. But, on the other hand, not a few of those centers in the making were in the hands of the Quakers and other philanthropic persons who gave the Negroes a chance to grow up with the community, when they exhibited a capacity which justified philanthropic efforts in their behalf.
These favorable conditions obtained especially in the towns along the Ohio river, where so many fugitives and free persons of color stopped on their way from slavery to freedom. In Steubenville a number of Negroes had by their industry and good deportment made themselves helpful to the community. Stephen Mulber who had been in that town for thirty years was in 1835 the leader of a group of thrifty free persons of color. He had a brick dwelling, in which he lived, and other property in the city. He made his living as a master mechanic employing a force of workmen to meet the increasing demand for his labor.[26] In Gallipolis, there was another group of this class of Negroes, who had permanently attached themselves to the town by the acquisition of property. They were then able not only to provide for their families but were maintaining also a school and a church.[27] In Portsmouth, Ohio, despite the “Black Friday” upheaval of 1831, the Negroes settled down to the solution of the problems of their new environment and later showed in the accumulation of property evidences of actual progress. Among the successful Negroes in Columbus was David Jenkins who acquired considerable property as a painter, glazier and paper hanger.[28] One Mr. Hill, of Chillicothe, was for several years its leading tanner and currier.[29]
It was in Cincinnati, however, that the Negroes made most progress in the West. The migratory blacks came there at times in such large numbers, as we have observed, that they provoked the hostile classes of whites to employ rash measures to exterminate them. But the Negroes, accustomed to adversity, struggled on, endeavoring through schools and churches to embrace every opportunity to rise. By 1840 there were 2,255 Negroes in that city. They had, exclusive of personal effects and $19,000 worth of church property, accumulated $209,000 worth of real estate. A number of their progressive men had established a real estate firm known as the “Iron Chest” company which built houses for Negroes. One man, who had once thought it unwise to accumulate wealth from which he might be driven, had, by 1840, changed his mind and purchased $6,000 worth of real estate.
Another Negro paid $5,000 for himself and family and bought a home worth $800 or $1,000. A freedman, who was a slave until he was twenty-four years of age, then had two lots worth $10,000, paid a tax of $40 and had 320 acres of land in Mercer County. Another, who was worth only $3,000 in 1836, had seven houses in 1840, 400 acres of land in Indiana, and another tract in Mercer County, Ohio. He was worth altogether about $12,000 or $15,000. A woman who was a slave until she was thirty was then worth $2,000. She had also come into potential possession of two houses on which a white lawyer had given her a mortgage to secure the payment of $2,000 borrowed from this thrifty woman. Another Negro, who was on the auction block in 1832, had spent $2,600 purchasing himself and family and had bought two brick houses worth $6,000 and 560 acres of land in Mercer County, Ohio, said to be worth $2,500.[30]
The Negroes of Cincinnati had as early as 1820 established schools which developed during the forties into something like a modern system with Gilmore’s High School as a capstone. By that time they had also not only several churches but had given time and means to the organization and promotion of such as the _Sabbath School Youth’s Society_, the _Total Abstinence Temperance Society_ and the _Anti-Slavery Society_. The worthy example set by the Negroes of this city was a stimulus to noble endeavor and significant achievements of Negroes throughout the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys. Disarming their enemies of the weapon that they would continue a public charge, they secured the cooperation of a larger number of white people who at first had treated them with contempt.[31]
This unusual progress in the Ohio valley had been promoted by two forces, the development of the steamboat as a factor in transportation and the rise of the Negro mechanic. Negroes employed on vessels as servants to the travelling public amassed large sums received in the form of tips. Furthermore, the fortunate few, constituting the stewards of these vessels, could by placing contracts for supplies and using business methods realize handsome incomes. Many Negroes thus enriched purchased real estate and went into business in towns along the Ohio.
The other force, the rise of the Negro mechanic, was made possible by overcoming much of the prejudice which had at first been encountered. A great change in this respect had taken place in Cincinnati by 1840.[32] Many Negroes who had been forced to work as menial laborers then had the opportunity to show their usefulness to their families and to the community. Negro mechanics were then getting as much skilled labor as they could do. It was not uncommon for white artisans to solicit employment of colored men because they had the reputation of being better paymasters than master workmen of the favored race. White mechanics not only worked with the blacks but often associated with them, patronized the same barber shop, and went to the same places of amusement.[33]
Out of this group came some very useful Negroes, among whom may be mentioned Robert Harlan, the horseman; A.V. Thompson, the tailor; J. Presley and Thomas Ball, contractors, and Samuel T. Wilcox, the merchant, who was worth $60,000 in 1859.[34] There were among them two other successful Negroes, Henry Boyd and Robert Gordon. Boyd was a Kentucky freedman who helped to overcome the prejudice in Cincinnati against Negro mechanics by inventing and exploiting a corded bed, the demand for which was extensive throughout the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. He had a creditable manufacturing business in which he employed twenty-five men.[35]
Robert Gordon was a much more interesting man. He was born a slave in Richmond, Virginia. He ingratiated himself into the favor of his master who placed him in charge of a large coal yard with the privilege of selling the slake for his own benefit. In the course of time, he accumulated in this position thousands of dollars with which he finally purchased himself and moved away to free soil. After observing the situation in several of the northern centers, he finally decided to settle in Cincinnati, where he arrived with $15,000. Knowing the coal business, he well established himself there after some discouragement and opposition. He accumulated much wealth which he invested in United States bonds during the Civil War and in real estate on Walnut Hills when the bonds were later redeemed.[36]
The ultimately favorable attitude of the people of Detroit toward immigrating Negroes had been reflected by the position the people of that section had taken from the time of the earliest settlements. Generally speaking, Detroit adhered to this position.[37] In this congenial community prospered many a Negro family. There were the Williams’ most of whom confined themselves to their trade of bricklaying and amassed considerable wealth. Then there were the Cooks, descending from Lomax B. Cook, a broker of no little business ability. Will Marion Cook, the musician, belongs to this family. The De Baptistes, too, were among the first to succeed in this new home, as they prospered materially from their experience and knowledge previously acquired in Fredericksburg, Virginia, as contractors. From this group came Richard De Baptiste, who in his day was the most useful Negro Baptist preacher in the Northwest.[38] The Pelhams were no less successful in establishing themselves in the economic world. Having an excellent reputation in the community, they easily secured the cooperation of the influential white people in the city. Out of this family came Robert A. Pelham, for years editor of a weekly in Detroit, and from 1901 to the present time an employee of the Federal Government in Washington.
The children of the Richards, another old family, were in no sense inferior to the descendants of the others. The most prominent and the most useful to emerge from this group was the daughter, Fannie M. Richards. She was born in Fredericksburg, Virginia, October 1, 1841. Having left that State with her parents when she was quite young, she did not see so much of the antebellum conditions obtaining there. Desiring to have better training than what was then given to persons of color in Detroit, she went to Toronto where she studied English, history, drawing and needlework. In later years she attended the Teachers’ Training School in Detroit. She became a public-school teacher there in 1863 and after fifty years of creditable service in this work she was retired on a pension in 1913.[39]
The Negroes in the North had not only shown their ability to rise in the economic world when properly encouraged but had begun to exhibit power of all kinds. There were Negro inventors, a few lawyers, a number of physicians and dentists, many teachers, a score of intelligent preachers, some scholars of note, and even successful blacks in the finer arts. Some of these, with Frederick Douglass as the most influential, were also doing creditable work in journalism with about thirty newspapers which had developed among the Negroes as weapons of defense.[40]
This progress of the Negroes in the North was much more marked after the middle of the nineteenth century. The migration of Negroes to northern communities was at first checked by the reaction in those places during the thirties and forties. Thus relieved of the large influx which once constituted a menace, those communities gave the Negroes already on hand better economic opportunities. It was fortunate too that prior to the check in the infiltration of the blacks they had come into certain districts in sufficiently large numbers to become a more potential factor.[41] They were strong enough in some cases to make common cause against foes and could by cooperation solve many problems with which the blacks in dispersed condition could not think of grappling.
Their endeavors along these lines proceeded in many cases from well-organized efforts like those culminating in the numerous national conventions which began meeting first in Philadelphia in 1830 and after some years of deliberation in this city extended to others in the North.[42] These bodies aimed not only to promote education, religion and morals, but, taking up the work which the Quakers began, they put forth efforts to secure to the free blacks opportunities to be trained in the mechanic arts to equip themselves for participation in the industries then springing up throughout the North. This movement, however, did not succeed in the proportion to the efforts put forth because of the increasing power of the trades unions.
After the middle of the nineteenth century too the Negroes found conditions a little more favorable to their progress than the generation before. The aggressive South had by that time so shaped the policy of the nation as not only to force the free States to cease aiding the escape of fugitives but to undertake to impress the northerner into the service of assisting in their recapture as provided in the Fugitive Slave Law. This repressive measure set a larger number of the people thinking of the Negro as a national problem rather than a local one. The attitude of the North was then reflected in the personal liberty laws as an answer to this measure and in the increasing sympathy for the Negroes. During this decade, therefore, more was done in the North to secure to the Negroes better treatment and to give them opportunities for improvement.
[Footnote 1: _Cincinnati Morning Herald_, July 17, 1846.]
[Footnote 2: Woodson, _The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861_, p. 242.]
[Footnote 3: Turner, _The Negro in Pennsylvania_, p. 143; _Correspondence of Dr. Benjamin Bush_, XXXIX, p. 41.]
[Footnote 4: DuBois, _The Philadelphia Negro_, pp. 26-27.]
[Footnote 5: _The Journal of Negro History_, I, p. 5; and _Proceedings of the American Convention of Abolition Societies_.]
[Footnote 6: DuBois and Dill, _The Negro American Artisan_, p. 36.]
[Footnote 7: Jay, _An Inquiry_, pp. 34, 108, 109, 114.]
[Footnote 8: _The Journal of Negro History_, I, pp. 20-22.]
[Footnote 9: Delany, _Condition of the Colored People_, p. 106.]
[Footnote 10: _The Liberator_, July 9, 1835.]
[Footnote 11: Hammond, _Gerrit Smith_, pp. 26-27.]
[Footnote 12: Frothingham, _Gerrit Smith_, p. 73.]
[Footnote 13: Delany, _Condition of the Colored People_, pp. 107-108.]
[Footnote 14: _Ibid._, p. 102.]
[Footnote 15: _Ibid._, p. 102.]
[Footnote 16: _Ibid._, pp. 103-104.]
[Footnote 17: Delany, _Condition of the Colored People_, pp. 106-107.]
[Footnote 18: DuBois, _The Philadelphia Negro_, p. 31; _Report of the Condition of the Free People of Color_, 1838; _ibid._, 1849; and Bacon, _Statistics of the Colored People of Philadelphia_, 1859.]
[Footnote 19: Delany, _Condition of the Colored People_, p. 95.]
[Footnote 20: DuBois, _The Philadelphia Negro_, pp. 31-36.]
[Footnote 21: Delany, _Condition of the Colored People_, p. 109.]
[Footnote 22: _Ibid._, p. 101.]
[Footnote 23: _Ibid._, p. 104.]
[Footnote 24: _Ibid._, p. 105.]
[Footnote 25: _Ibid._, p. 107.]
[Footnote 26: _The Journal of Negro History_, I, p. 22.]
[Footnote 27: Hickok, _The Negro in Ohio_, p. 88.]
[Footnote 28: Delany, _Condition of the Colored People_, p. 99.]
[Footnote 29: _Ibid._, p. 101.]
[Footnote 30: _The Philanthropist_, July 21, 1840, gives these statistics in detail.]
[Footnote 31: _The Philanthropist_, July 21, 1840.]
[Footnote 32: _The Cincinnati Daily Gazette_, Sept. 14, 1841.]
[Footnote 33: Barber’s _Report on Colored People in Ohio_.]
[Footnote 34: Delany, _Condition of the Colored People_, pp. 97, 98.]
[Footnote 35: Delany, _Condition of the Colored People_, p. 98.]
[Footnote 36: These facts were obtained from his children and from Cincinnati city directories.]
[Footnote 37: _Niles Register_, LXIX, p. 357.]
[Footnote 38: Letters received from Miss Fannie M. Richards of Detroit.]
[Footnote 39: These facts were obtained from clippings taken from Detroit newspapers and from letters bearing on Miss Richard’s career.]
[Footnote 40: _The A.M.E. Church Review_, IV, p. 309; and XX, p. 137.]
[Footnote 41: _Censuses of the United States_; and Clark, _Present Condition of Colored People_.]
[Footnote 42: _Minutes and Proceedings_ of the Annual Convention of the People of Color.]
CHAPTER VI
CONFUSING MOVEMENTS
The Civil War waged largely in the South started the most exciting movement of the Negroes hitherto known. The invading Union forces drove the masters before them, leaving the slaves and sometimes poor whites to escape where they would or to remain in helpless condition to constitute a problem for the northern army.[1] Many poor whites of the border States went with the Confederacy, not always because they wanted to enter the war, but to choose what they considered the lesser of two evils. The slaves soon realized a community of interests with the Union forces sent, as they thought, to deliver them from thralldom. At first, it was difficult to determine a fixed policy for dealing with these fugitives. To drive them away was an easy matter, but this did not solve the problem. General Butler’s action at Fortress Monroe in 1861, however, anticipated the policy finally adopted by the Union forces.[2] Hearing that three fugitive slaves who were received into his lines were to have been employed in building fortifications for the Confederate army, he declared them seized as contraband of war rather than declare them actually free as did General Fremont[3] and General Hunter.[4] He then gave them employment for wages and rations and appropriated to the support of the unemployed a portion of the earnings of the laborers. This policy was followed by General Wood, Butler’s successor, and by General Banks in New Orleans.
An elaborate plan for handling such fugitives was carried out by E.S. Pierce and General Rufus Saxton at Port Royal, South Carolina. Seeing the situation in another light, however, General Halleck in charge in the West excluded slaves from the Union lines, at first, as did General Dix in Virginia. But Halleck, in his instructions to General McCullum, February, 1862, ordered him to put contrabands to work to pay for food and clothing.[5] Other commanders, like General McCook and General Johnson, permitted the slave hunters to enter their lines and take their slaves upon identification,[6] ignoring the confiscation act of August, 1861, which was construed by some as justifying the retention of such refugees. Officers of a different attitude, however, soon began to protest against the returning of fugitive slaves. General Grant, also, while admitting the binding force of General Halleck’s order, refused to grant permits to those in search of fugitives seeking asylum within his lines and at the capture of Fort Donelson ordered the retention of all blacks who had been used by the Confederates in building fortifications.[7]
Lincoln finally urged the necessity for withholding fugitive slaves from the enemy, believing that there could be in it no danger of servile insurrection and that the Confederacy would thereby be weakened.[8] As this opinion soon developed into a conviction that official action was necessary, Congress, by Act of March 13, 1862, provided that slaves be protected against the claims of their pursuers. Continuing further in this direction, the Federal Government gradually reached the position of withdrawing Negro labor from the Confederate territory. Finally the United States Government adopted the policy of withholding from the Confederates, slaves received with the understanding that their masters were in rebellion against the United States. With this as a settled policy then, the United States Government had to work out some scheme for the remaking of these fugitives coming into its camps.
In some of these cases the fugitives found themselves among men more hostile to them than their masters were, for many of the Union soldiers of the border States were slaveholders themselves and northern soldiers did not understand that they were fighting to free Negroes. The condition in which they were on arriving, moreover, was a new problem for the army. Some came naked, some in decrepitude, some afflicted with disease, and some wounded in their efforts to escape.[9] There were “women in travail, the helplessness of childhood and of old age, the horrors of sickness and of frequent deaths.”[10] In their crude state few of them had any conception of the significance of liberty, thinking that it meant idleness and freedom from restraint. In consequence of this ignorance there developed such undesirable habits as deceit, theft and licentiousness to aggravate the afflictions of nakedness, famine and disease.[11]
In the East large numbers of these refugees were concentrated at Washington, Alexandria, Fortress Monroe, Hampton, Craney Island and Fort Norfolk. There were smaller groups of them at Yorktown, Suffolk and Portsmouth.[12]
[Illustration: MAP SHOWING THE PER CENT OF NEGROES IN TOTAL POPULATION, BY STATES: 1910.
(Map 2, Bulletin 129, The United States Bureau of the Census.)]
Some of them were conducted from these camps into York, Columbia, Harrisburg, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, and by water to New York and Boston, from which they went to various parts seeking labor. Some collected in groups as in the case of those at Five Points in New York.[13] Large numbers of them from Virginia assembled in Washington in 1862 in Duff Green’s Row on Capitol Hill where they were organized as a camp, out of which came a contraband school, after being moved to the McClellan Barracks.[14] Then there was in the District of Columbia another group known as Freedmen’s village on Arlington Heights. It was said that, in 1864, 30,000 to 40,000 Negroes had come from the plantations to the District of Columbia.[15] It happened here too as in most cases of this migration that the Negroes were on hand before the officials grappling with many other problems could determine exactly what could or should be done with them. The camps near Washington fortunately became centers for the employment of contrabands in the city. Those repairing to Fortress Monroe were distributed as laborers among the farmers of that vicinity.[16]
[Illustration: DIAGRAM SHOWING THE NEGRO POPULATION OF NORTHERN AND WESTERN CITIES IN 1900 AND THE EXTENT TO WHICH IT INCREASED BY 1910.
COUNTIES IN THE SOUTHERN STATES HAVING AT LEAST 50 PER CENT OF THEIR POPULATION NEGRO.
(Maps 3 and 4, Bulletin 129, U.S. Bureau of the Census.)
(Maps 5 and 6, Bulletin 129, U.S. Bureau of the Census.)]
In some of these camps, and especially in those of the West, the refugees were finally sent out to other sections in need of labor, as in the cases of the contrabands assembled with the Union army at first at Grand Junction and later at Memphis.[17]
There were three types of these camp communities which attracted attention as places for free labor experimentation. These were at Port Royal, on the Mississippi in the neighborhood of Vicksburg, and in Lower Louisiana and Virginia. The first trial of free labor of blacks on a large scale in a slave State was made in Port Royal.[18] The experiment was generally successful. By industry, thrift and orderly conduct the Negroes showed their appreciation for their new opportunities. In the Mississippi section invaded by the northern army, General Thomas opened what he called _Infirmary Farms_ which he leased to Negroes on certain terms which they usually met successfully. The same plan, however, was not so successful in the Lower Mississippi section.[19] The failure in this section was doubtless due to the inferior type of blacks in the lower cotton belt where Negroes had been more brutalized by slavery.
In some cases, these refugees experienced many hardships. It was charged that they were worked hard, badly treated and deprived of all their wages except what was given them for rations and a scanty pittance, wholly insufficient to purchase necessary clothing and provide for their families.[20] Not a few of the refugees for these reasons applied for permission to return to their masters and sometimes such permission was granted; for, although under military authority, they were by order of Congress to be considered as freemen. These voluntary slaves, of course, were few and the authorities were not thereby impressed with the thought that Negroes would prefer to be slaves, should they be treated as freemen rather than as brutes.[21]
It became increasingly difficult, however, to handle this problem. In the first place, it was not an easy matter to find soldiers well disposed to serve the Negroes in any manner whatever and the officers of the army had no desire to force them to render such services since those thus engaged suffered a sort of social ostracism. The same condition obtained in the case of caring for those afflicted with disease, until there was issued a specific regulation placing the contraband sick in charge of the army surgeons.[22] What the situation in the Mississippi Valley was during these months has been well described by an observer, saying: “I hope I may never be called on again to witness the horrible scenes I saw in those first days of history of the freedmen in the Mississippi Valley. Assistants were hard to find, especially the kind that would do any good in the camps. A detailed soldier in each camp of a thousand people was the best that could be done and his duties were so onerous that he ended by doing nothing. In reviewing the condition of the people at that time, I am not surprised at the marvelous stories told by visitors who caught an occasional glimpse of the misery and wretchedness in these camps. Our efforts to do anything for these people, as they herded together in masses, when founded on any expectation that they would help themselves, often failed; they had become so completely broken down in spirit, through suffering, that it was almost impossible to arouse them.”[23]
A few sympathetic officers and especially the chaplains undertook to relieve the urgent cases of distress. They could do little, however, to handle all the problems of the unusual situation until they engaged the attention of the higher officers of the army and the federal functionaries in Washington. After some delay this was finally done and special officers were detailed to take charge of the contrabands. The Negroes were assembled in camps and employed according to instructions from the Secretary of War as teamsters, laborers and the like on forts and railroads. Some were put to picking, ginning, baling and removing cotton on plantations abandoned by their masters. General Grant, as early as 1862, was making further use of them as fatigue men in the department of the surgeon-general, the quartermaster and the commissary. He believed then that such Negroes as did well in these more humble positions should be made citizens and soldiers.[24] As a matter of fact out of this very suggestion came the policy of arming the Negroes, the first regiment of whom was recruited under orders issued by General Hunter at Port Royal, South Carolina in 1862. As the arming of the slave to participate in this war did not generally please the white people who considered the struggle a war between civilized groups, this policy could not offer general relief to the congested contraband camps.[25]
A better system of handling the fugitives was finally worked out, however, with a general superintendent at the head of each department, supported by a number of competent assistants. More explicit instructions were given as to the manner of dealing with the situation. It was to be the duty of the superintendent of contrabands, says the order, to organize them into working parties in saving the cotton, as pioneers on railroads and steamboats, and in any way where their services could be made available. Where labor was performed for private individuals they were charged in accordance with the orders of the commander of the department. In case they were directed to save abandoned crops of cotton for the benefit of the United States Government, the officer selling such crops would turn over to the superintendent of contrabands the proceeds of the sale, which together with other earnings were used for clothing and feeding the Negroes. Clothing sent by philanthropic persons to these camps was received and distributed by the superintendent. In no case, however, were Negroes to be forced into the service of the United States Government or to be enticed away from their homes except when it became a military necessity.[26]
Some order out of the chaos eventually developed, for as John Eaton, one of the workers in the West, reported: “There was no promiscuous intermingling. Families were established by themselves. Every man took care of his own wife and children.” “One of the most touching features of our Work,” says he, “was the eagerness with which colored men and women availed themselves of the opportunities offered them to legalize unions already formed, some of which had been in existence for a long time.”[27] “Chaplain A.S. Fiske on one occasion married in about an hour one hundred and nineteen couples at one service, chiefly those who had long lived together.” Letters from the Virginia camps and from those of Port Royal indicate that this favorable condition generally obtained.[28]
This unusual problem in spite of additional effort, however, would not readily admit of solution. Benevolent workers of the North, therefore, began to minister to the needs of these unfortunate blacks. They sent considerable sums of money, increasing quantities of clothing and even some of their most devoted men and women to toil among them as social workers and teachers.[29] These efforts also took organized form in various parts of the North under the direction of _The Pennsylvania Freedmen’s Relief Association, The Tract Society, The American Missionary Association, Pennsylvania Friends Freedmen’s Relief Association, Old School Presbyterian Mission, The Reformed Presbyterian Mission, The New England Freedmen’s Aid Committee, The New England Freedmen’s Aid Society, The New England Freedmen’s Mission, The Washington Christian Union, The Universalists of Maine, The New York Freedmen’s Relief Association, The Hartford Relief Society, The National Freedmen’s Relief Association of the District of Columbia_, and finally the _Freedmen’s Bureau_.[30]
As an outlet to the congested grouping of Negroes and poor whites in the war camps it was arranged to send a number of them to the loyal States as fast as there presented themselves opportunities for finding homes and employment. Cairo, Illinois, in the West, became the center of such activities extending its ramifications into all parts of the invaded southern territory. Some of the refugees permanently settled in the North, taking up the work abandoned by the northern soldiers who went to war.[31] It was soon found necessary to appoint a superintendent of such affairs at Cairo, for there were those who, desiring to lead a straggling life, had to be restrained from crime by military surveillance and regulations requiring labor for self-support. Exactly how many whites and blacks were thus aided to reach northern communities cannot be determined but in view of the frequent mention of their movements by travellers the number must have been considerable. In some cases, as in Lawrence, Kansas, there were assembled enough freedmen to constitute a distinct group.[32] Speaking of this settlement the editor of the _Alton Telegraph_ said in 1862 that although they amounted to many hundreds not one, that he could learn of, had been a public charge. They readily found employment at fair wages, and soon made themselves comfortable.[33]
There was a little apprehension that the North would be overrun by such blacks. Some had no such fear, however, for the reason that the census did not indicate such a movement. Many slaves were freed in the North prior to 1860, yet with all the emigration from the slave States to the North there were then in all the Northern States but 226,152 free blacks, while there were in the slave States 261,918, an excess of 35,766 in the slave States. Frederick Starr believed that during the Civil War there might be an influx for a few months but it would not continue.[34] They would return when sure that they would be free. Starr thought that, if necessary, these refugees might be used in building the much desired Pacific Railroad to divert them from the North.
There was little ground for this apprehension, in fact, if their readjustment and development in the contraband camps could be considered an indication of what the Negroes would eventually do. Taking all things into consideration, most unbiased observers felt that blacks in the camps deserved well of their benefactors.[36] According to Levi Coffin, these contrabands were, in 1864, disposed of as follows: “In military services as soldiers, laundresses, cooks, officers’ servants and laborers in the various staff departments, 41,150; in cities, on plantations and in freedmen’s villages and cared for, 72,500. Of these 62,300 were entirely self-supporting, just as any industrial class anywhere else, as planters, mechanics, barbers, hackmen and draymen, conducting enterprises on their own responsibility or working as hired laborers.” The remaining 10,200 received subsistence from the government. 3,000 of these were members of families whose heads were carrying on plantations, and had undertaken cultivation of 4,000 acres of cotton, pledging themselves to pay the government for their subsistence from the first income of the crop. The other 7,200 included the paupers, that is, all Negroes over and under the self-supporting age, the crippled and sick in hospitals. This class, however, instead of being unproductive, had then under cultivation 500 acres of corn, 790 acres of vegetables, and 1,500 acres of cotton, besides working at wood chopping and other industries. There were reported in the aggregate over 100,000 acres of cotton under cultivation, 7,000 acres of which were leased and cultivated by blacks. Some Negroes were managing as many as 300 or 400 acres each.[37] Statistics showing exactly how much the numbers of contrabands in the various branches of the service increased are wanting, but in view of the fact that the few thousand soldiers here given increased to about 200,000 before the close of the Civil War, the other numbers must have been considerable, if they all grew the least proportionately.
Much industry was shown among these refugees. Under this new system they acquired the idea of ownership, and of the security of wages and learned to see the fundamental difference between freedom and slavery. Some Yankees, however, seeing that they did less work than did laborers in the North, considered them lazy, but the lack of industry was customary in the South and a river should not be expected to rise higher than its source. One of their superintendents said that they worked well without being urged, that there was among them a public opinion against idleness, which answered for discipline, and that those put to work with soldiers labored longer and did the nicer parts. “In natural tact and the faculty of getting a livelihood,” says the same writer, “the contrabands are inferior to the Yankees, but quite equal to the mass of southern population.”[38] The Negroes also showed capacity to organize labor and use capital in the promotion of enterprises. Many of them purchased land and cultivated it to great profit both to the community and to themselves. Others entered the service of the government as mechanics and contractors, from the employment of which some of them realized handsome incomes.
The more important development, however, was that of manhood. This was best observed in their growing consciousness of rights, and their readiness to defend them, even when encroached upon by members of the white race. They quickly learned to appreciate freedom and exhibited evidences of manhood in their desire for the comforts and conveniences of life. They readily purchased articles of furniture within their means, bringing their home equipment up to the standard of that of persons similarly circumstanced. The indisposition to labor was overcome “in a healthy nature by instinct and motives of superior forces, such as love of life, the desire to be clothed and fed, the sense of security derived from provision for the future, the feeling of self-respect, the love of family and children and the convictions of duty.”[39]
These enterprises, begun in doubt, soon ceased to be a bare hope or possibility. They became during the war a fruition and a consummation, in that they produced Negroes “who would work for a living and fight for freedom.” They were, therefore, considered “adapted to civil society.” They had “shown capacity for knowledge, for free industry, for subordination to law and discipline, for soldierly fortitude, for social and family relations, for religious culture and aspiration. These qualities,” said the observer, “when stirred, and sustained by the incitements and rewards of a just society, and combining with the currents of our continental civilization, will, under the guidance of a benevolent Providence which forgets neither them nor us, make them a constantly progressive race; and secure them ever after from the calamity of another enslavement, and ourselves from the worst calamity of being their oppressors.”[40]
It is clear that these smaller numbers of Negroes under favorable conditions could be easily adjusted to a new environment. When, however, all Negroes were declared free there set in a confused migration which was much more of a problem. The first thing the Negro did after realizing that he was free was to roam over the country to put his freedom to a test. To do this, according to many writers, he frequently changed his name, residence, employment and wife, sometimes carrying with him from the plantation the fruits of his own labor. Many of them easily acquired a dog and a gun and were disposed to devote their time to the chase until the assistance in the form of mules and land expected from the government materialized. Their emancipation, therefore, was interpreted not only as freedom from slavery but from responsibility.[41] Where they were going they did not know but the towns and cities became very attractive to them.
Speaking of this upheaval in Virginia, Eckenrode says that many of them roamed over the country without restraint.[42] “Released from their accustomed bonds,” says Hall, “and filled with a pleasing, if not vague, sense of uncontrolled freedom, they flocked to the cities with little hope of obtaining remunerative work. Wagon loads of them were brought in from the country by the soldiers and dumped down to shift for themselves.”[43] Referring to the proclamation of freedom, in Georgia, Thompson asserts that their most general and universal response was to pick up and leave the home place to go somewhere else, preferably to a town. “The lure of the city was strong to the blacks, appealing to their social natures, to their inherent love for a crowd.”[44] Davis maintains that thousands of the 70,000 Negroes in Florida crowded into the Federal military camps and into towns upon realizing that they were free.[45] According to Ficklen, the exodus of the slaves from the neighboring plantations of Louisiana into Baton Rouge, Carrollton and New Orleans was so great as to strain the resources of the Federal authorities to support them. Ten thousand poured into New Orleans alone.[46] Fleming records that upon leaving their homes the blacks collected in gangs at the cross roads, in the villages and towns, especially near the military posts. The towns were filled with crowds of blacks who left their homes with absolutely nothing, “thinking that the government would care for them, or more probably, not thinking at all.”[47]
The portrayal of these writers of this phase of Reconstruction history contains a general truth, but in some cases the picture is overdrawn. The student of history must bear in mind that practically all of our histories of that period are based altogether on the testimony of prejudiced whites and are written from their point of view. Some of these writers have aimed to exaggerate the vagrancy of the blacks to justify the radical procedure of the whites in dealing with it. The Negroes did wander about thoughtlessly, believing that this was the most effective way to enjoy their freedom. But nothing else could be expected from a class who had never felt anything but the heel of oppression. History shows that such vagrancy has always followed the immediate emancipation of a large number of slaves. Many Negroes who flocked to the towns and army camps, moreover, had like their masters and poor whites seen their homes broken up or destroyed by the invading Union armies. Whites who had never learned to work were also roaming and in some cases constituted marauding bands.[48]
There was, moreover, an actual drain of laborers to the lower and more productive lands in Mississippi and Louisiana.[49] This developed later into a more considerable movement toward the Southwest just after the Civil War, the exodus being from South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi to Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas. Here was the pioneering spirit, a going to the land of more economic opportunities. This slow movement continued from about 1865 to 1875, when the development of the numerous railway systems gave rise to land speculators who induced whites and blacks to go west and southwest. It was a migration of individuals, but it was reported that as many as 35,000 Negroes were then persuaded to leave South Carolina and Georgia for Arkansas and Texas.[50]
The usual charge that the Negro is naturally migratory is not true. This impression is often received by persons who hear of the thousands of Negroes who move from one place to another from year to year because of the desire to improve their unhappy condition. In this there is no tendency to migrate but an urgent need to escape undesirable conditions. In fact, one of the American Negroes’ greatest shortcomings is that they are not sufficiently pioneering. Statistics show that the whites have more inclination to move from State to State than the Negro. To prove this assertion,[51] Professor William O. Scroggs has shown that, in 1910, 16.6 per cent of the Negroes had moved to some other State than that in which they were born, while during the same period 22.4 per cent of the whites had done the same.[52]
The South, however, was not disposed to look at the vagrancy of the ex-slaves so philosophically. That section had been devastated by war and to rebuild these waste places reliable labor was necessary. Legislatures of the slave States, therefore, immediately after the close of the war, granted the Negro nominal freedom but enacted measures of vagrancy and labor so as to reduce the Negro again almost to the status of a slave. White magistrates were given wide discretion in adjudging Negroes vagrants.[53] Negroes had to sign contracts to work. If without what was considered a just cause the Negro left the employ of a planter, the former could be arrested and forced to work and in some sections with ball and chain. If the employer did not care to take him back he could be hired out by the county or confined in jail. Mississippi, Louisiana and South Carolina had further drastic features. By local ordinance in Louisiana every Negro had to be in the service of some white person, and by special laws of South Carolina and Mississippi the Negro became subject to a master almost in the same sense in which he was prior to emancipation.[54] These laws, of course, convinced the government of the United States that the South had not yet decided to let slavery go and for that reason military rule and Congressional Reconstruction followed. In this respect the South did itself a great injury, for many of the provisions of the black codes, especially the vagrancy laws, were unnecessary. Most Negroes soon realized that freedom did not mean relief from responsibility and they quickly settled down to work after a rather protracted and exciting holiday.[55]
During the last year of and immediately after the Civil War there set in another movement, not of a large number of Negroes but of the intelligent class who had during years of residence in the North enjoyed such advantages of contact and education as to make them desirable and useful as leaders in the Reconstruction of the South and the remaking of the race. In their tirades against the Carpet-bag politicians who handled the Reconstruction situation so much to the dissatisfaction of the southern whites, historians often forget to mention also that a large number of the Negro leaders who participated in that drama were also natives or residents of Northern States.
Three motives impelled these blacks to go South. Some had found northern communities so hostile as to impede their progress, many wanted to rejoin relatives from whom they had been separated by their flight from the land of slavery, and others were moved by the spirit of adventure to enter a new field ripe with all sorts of opportunities. This movement, together with that of migration to large urban communities, largely accounts for the depopulation and the consequent decline of certain colored communities in the North after 1865.
Some of the Negroes who returned to the South became men of national prominence. William J. Simmons, who prior to the Civil War was carried from South Carolina to Pennsylvania, returned to do religious and educational work in Kentucky. Bishop James W. Hood, of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, went from Connecticut to North Carolina to engage in similar work. Honorable R.T. Greener, the first Negro graduate of Harvard, went from Philadelphia to teach in the District of Columbia and later to be a professor in the University of South Carolina. F.L. Cardoza, educated at the University of Edinburgh, returned to South Carolina and became State Treasurer. R.B. Elliot, born in Boston and educated in England, settled in South Carolina from which he was sent to Congress.
John M. Langston was taken to Ohio and educated but came back to Virginia his native State from which he was elected to Congress. J.T. White left Indiana to enter politics in Arkansas, becoming State Senator and later commissioner of public works and internal improvements. Judge Mifflin Wister Gibbs, a native of Philadelphia, purposely settled in Arkansas where he served as city judge and Register of United States Land Office. T. Morris Chester, of Pittsburgh, finally made his way to Louisiana where he served with distinction as a lawyer and held the position of Brigadier-General in charge of the Louisiana State Guards under the Kellogg government. Joseph Carter Corbin, who was taken from Virginia to be educated at Chillicothe, Ohio, went later to Arkansas where he served as chief clerk in the post office at Little Rock and later as State Superintendent of Schools. Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback, who moved north for education and opportunity, returned to enter politics in Louisiana, which honored him with several important positions among which was that of Acting Governor.
[Footnote 1: This is well treated in John Eaton’s _Grant, Lincoln and the Freedmen_. See also Coffin’s _Boys of ’61_.]
[Footnote 2: Williams, _History of the Negro Troops in the War of the Rebellion_, p. 70.]
[Footnote 3: Greely, _American Conflict_, I, p. 585.]
[Footnote 4: _Ibid_., II, p. 246.]
[Footnote 5: _Official Records of the Rebellion_, VIII, p. 628.]
[Footnote 6: Williams, _Negro Troops_, p. 66 et seq.]
[Footnote 7: _Official Records of the Rebellion_, VIII, p. 370; Williams, _Negro Troops_, p. 75.]
[Footnote 8: Eaton, _Grant, Lincoln and the Freedmen_, pp. 87, 92.]
[Footnote 9: Pierce, _Freedmen of Port Royal, South Carolina_, passim; Botume, _First Days Among the Contrabands_, pp. 10-22; and Pearson, _Letters from Port Royal_, passim.]
[Footnote 10: Eaton, _Grant, Lincoln and the Freedmen_, p. 92.]
[Footnote 11: _Ibid._, pp. 2, 3.]
[Footnote 12: Report of the _Committee of Representatives of the New York Yearly Meeting of Friends_ upon the _Condition and Wants of the Colored Refugees_, 1862, p. 1 et seq.]
[Footnote 13: _Report of the Committee of Representatives, etc_., p. 3.]
[Footnote 14: At an entertainment of this school, Senator Pomeroy of Kansas, voicing the sentiment of Lincoln, spoke in favor of a scheme to colonize Negroes in Central America.]
[Footnote 15: _Special Report_ of the United States Commission of Education on the Schools of the District of Columbia, p. 215.]
[Footnote 16: _Christian Examiner_, LXXVI, p. 349.]
[Footnote 17: Eaton, _Lincoln, Grant and the Freedmen_, pp. 18, 30.]
[Footnote 18: Pierce, _The Freedmen of Port Royal, South Carolina, Official Reports_; and Pearson, _Letters from Port Royal written at the Time of the Civil War_.]
[Footnote 19: _Christian Examiner_, LXXVI, p. 354.]
[Footnote 20: _Continental Monthly_, II, p. 193.]
[Footnote 21: _Report_ of the Committee of Representatives of the New York Yearly Meeting of Friends, p. 12.]
[Footnote 23: Eaton, _Lincoln, Grant and the Freedmen_, p. 2.]
[Footnote 23: Eaton, _Lincoln, Grant and the Freedmen_, p. 19. See also Botume’s _First Days Amongst the Contrabands_. This work vividly portrays conditions among the refugees assembled at points in South Carolina.]
[Footnote 24: Eaton, _Grant, Lincoln and the Freedmen_, p. 15.]
[Footnote 25: Williams, _Negro in the Rebellion_, pp. 90-98.]
[Footnote 26: _Official Records of the War of the Rebellion_, VII, pp. 503, 510, 560, 595, 628, 668, 698, 699, 711, 723, 739, 741, 757, 769, 787, 801, 802, 811, 818, 842, 923, 934; VIII, pp. 444, 445, 451, 464, 555, 556, 564, 584, 637, 642, 686, 690, 693, 825.]
[Footnote 27: Eaton, _Grant, Lincoln and the Freedmen_, pp. 34-35.]
[Footnote 28: Ames, _From a New England Woman’s Diary_, passim; and Pearson, _Letters from Port Royal_, passim.]
[Footnote 29: Ames, _From a New England Woman’s Diary in 1865_, passim.]
[Footnote 30: _Special Report_ of the United States Commissioner of Education on the Schools of the District of Columbia, p. 217.]
[Footnote 31: Eaton, _Grant, Lincoln and the Freedmen_, p. 37.]
[Footnote 32: Eaton, _Grant, Lincoln and the Freedmen_, p. 38.]
[Footnote 33: _Ibid._, p. 39.]
[Footnote 34: Starr, _What shall be done with the People of Color in the United States_, p. 25; Ward, _Contrabands_, pp. 3, 4.]
[Footnote 35: It is said that Lincoln suggested colonizing the contrabands in South America.]
[Footnote 36: _Atlantic Monthly_, XII, p. 308.]
[Footnote 37: Levi Coffin, _Reminiscences_, p. 671.]
[Footnote 38: _Atlantic Monthly_, XII, p. 309.]
[Footnote 39: _Ibid._, XII, pp. 310-311.]
[Footnote 40: _Ibid_., p. 311.]
[Footnote 41: Hamilton, _Reconstruction in North Carolina_, pp. 156, 157.]
[Footnote 42: Eckenrode, _Political History of Virginia during the Reconstruction_, p. 43.]
[Footnote 43: Hall, _Andrew Johnson_, p. 258.]
[Footnote 44: Thompson, _Reconstruction in Georgia_, p. 44.]
[Footnote 45: Davis, _Reconstruction in Florida_, p. 341.]
[Footnote 46: Ficklen, _History of Reconstruction in Louisiana_, p. 118.]
[Footnote 47: Fleming, _The Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama_, p. 271.]
[Footnote 48: Thompson, _Reconstruction in Georgia_, p. 69.]
[Footnote 49: _Ibid._, p. 69.]
[Footnote 50: This exodus became considerable again in 1888 and 1889 and the Negro population has continued in this direction of plentitude of land including not only Arkansas and Texas but Louisiana and Oklahoma, all which received in this way by 1900 about 200,000 Negroes.]
[Footnote 51: _American Journal of Political Economy_, XXII, pp. 10, 40.]
[Footnote 52: _Ibid._, XXV, p. 1038.]
[Footnote 53: Mecklin, _Black Codes_.]
[Footnote 54: Dunning, _Reconstruction_, pp. 54, 59, 110.]
[Footnote 55: DuBois, _Freedmen’s Bureau_.]
CHAPTER VII
THE EXODUS TO THE WEST
Having come through the halcyon days of the Reconstruction only to find themselves reduced almost to the status of slaves, many Negroes deserted the South for the promising west to grow up with the country. The immediate causes were doubtless political. _Bulldozing_, a rather vague term, covering all such crimes as political injustice and persecution, was the source of most complaint. The abridgment of the Negroes’ rights had affected them as a great calamity. They had learned that voting is one of the highest privileges to be obtained in this life and they wanted to go where they might still exercise that privilege. That persecution was the main cause was disputed, however, as there were cases of Negroes migrating from parts where no such conditions obtained. Yet some of the whites giving their version of the situation admitted that violent methods had been used so to intimidate the Negroes as to compel them to vote according to the dictation of the whites. It was also learned that the _bulldozers_ concerned in dethroning the non-taxpaying blacks were an impecunious and irresponsible group themselves, led by men of the wealthy class.[1]
Coming to the defense of the whites, some said that much of the persecution with which the blacks were afflicted was due to the fear of Negro uprisings, the terror of the days of slavery. The whites, however, did practically nothing to remove the underlying causes. They did not encourage education and made no efforts to cure the Negroes of faults for which slavery itself was to be blamed and consequently could not get the confidence of the blacks. The races tended rather to drift apart. The Negroes lived in fear of reenslavement while the whites believed that the war between the North and South would soon be renewed. Some Negroes thinking likewise sought to go to the North to be among friends. The blacks, of course, had come so to regard southern whites as their enemies as to render impossible a voluntary division in politics.
Among the worst of all faults of the whites was their unwillingness to labor and their tendency to do mischief.[2] As there were so many to live on the labor of the Negroes they were reduced to a state a little better than that of bondage. The master class was generally unfair to the blacks. No longer responsible for them as slaves, the planters endeavored after the war to get their labor for nothing. The Negroes themselves had no land, no mules, no presses nor cotton gins, and they could not acquire sufficient capital to obtain these things. They were made victims of fraud in signing contracts which they could not understand and had to suffer the consequent privations and want aggravated by robbery and murder by the Ku Klux Klan.[3]
The murder of Negroes was common throughout the South and especially in Louisiana. In 1875, General Sheridan said that as many as 3,500 persons had been killed and wounded in that State, the great majority of whom being Negroes; that 1,884 were killed and wounded in 1868, and probably 1,200 between 1868 and 1875. Frightful massacres occurred in the parishes of Bossier, Catahoula, Saint Bernard, Grant and Orleans. As most of these murders were for political reasons, the offenders were regarded by their communities as heroes rather than as criminals. A massacre of Negroes began in the parish of St. Landry on the 28th of September and continued for three days, resulting in the death of from 300 to 400. Thirteen captives were taken from the jail and shot and as many as twenty-five dead bodies were found burned in the woods. There broke out in the parish of Bossier another three-day riot during which two hundred Negroes were massacred. More than forty blacks were killed in the parish of Caddo during the following month. In fact, the number of murders, maimings and whippings during these months aggregated over one thousand.[4] The result was that the intelligent Negroes were either intimidated or killed so that the illiterate masses of Negro voters might be ordered to refrain from voting the Republican ticket to strengthen the Democrats or be subjected to starvation through the operation of the mischievous land tenure and credit system. What was not done in 1868 to overthrow the Republican regime was accomplished by a renewed and extended use of such drastic measures throughout the South in 1876.
Certain whites maintained, however, that the unrest was due to the work of radical politicians at the North, who had sent their emissaries south to delude the Negroes into a fever of migration. Some said it was a scheme to force the nomination of a certain Republican candidate for President in 1880. Others laid it to the charge of the defeated white and black Republicans who had been thrown from power by the whites upon regaining control of the reconstructed States.[5] A few insisted that a speech delivered by Senator Windom in 1879 had given stimulus to the migration.[6] Many southerners said that speculators in Kansas had adopted this plan to increase the value of their land. Then there were other theories as to the fundamental causes, each consisting of a charge of one political faction that some other had given rise to the movement, varying according as they were Bourbons, conservatives, native white Republicans, carpet-bag Republicans, or black Republicans.
Impartial observers, however, were satisfied that the movement was spontaneous to the extent that the blacks were ready and willing to go. Probably no more inducement was offered them than to other citizens among whom land companies sent agents to distribute literature. But the fundamental causes of the unrest were economic, for since the Civil War race troubles have never been sufficient to set in motion a large number of Negroes. The discontent resulted from the land-tenure and credit systems, which had restored slavery in a modified form.[7]
After the Civil War a few Negroes in those parts, where such opportunities were possible, invested in real estate offered for sale by the impoverished and ruined planters of the conquered commonwealths. When, however, the Negroes lost their political power, their property was seized on the plea for delinquent taxes and they were forced into the ghetto of towns and cities, as it became a crime punishable by social proscription to sell Negroes desirable residences. The aim was to debase all Negroes to the status of menial labor in conformity with the usual contention of the South that slavery is the normal condition of the blacks.[8]
Most of the land of the South, however, always remained as large tracts held by the planters of cotton, who never thought of alienating it to the Negroes to make them a race of small farmers. In fact, they had not the means to make extensive purchases of land, even if the planters had been disposed to transfer it. Still subject to the experimentation of white men, the Negroes accepted the plan of paying them wages; but this failed in all parts except in the sugar district, where the blacks remained contented save when disturbed by political movements. They then tried all systems of working on shares in the cotton districts; but this was finally abandoned because the planters in some cases were not able to advance the Negro tenant supplies, pending the growth of the crop, and some found the Negro too indifferent and lazy to make the partnership desirable. Then came the renting system which during the Reconstruction period was general in the cotton districts. This system threw the tenant on his own responsibility and frequently made him the victim of his own ignorance and the rapacity of the white man. As exorbitant prices were charged for rent, usually six to ten dollars an acre for land worth fifteen to thirty dollars an acre, the Negro tenant not only did not accumulate anything but had reason to rejoice at the end of the year, if he found himself out of debt.[9]
Along with this went the credit system which furnished the capstone of the economic structure so harmful to the Negro tenant. This system made the Negroes dependent for their living on an advance of supplies of food, clothing or tools during the year, secured by a lien on the crop when harvested. As the Negroes had no chance to learn business methods during the days of slavery, they fell a prey to a class of loan sharks, harpies and vampires, who established stores everywhere to extort from these ignorant tenants by the mischievous credit system their whole income before their crops could be gathered.[10] Some planters who sympathized with the Negroes brought forward the scheme of protecting them by advancing certain necessities at more reasonable prices. As the planter himself, however, was subject to usury, the scheme did not give much relief. The Negroes’ crop, therefore, when gathered went either to the merchant or to the planter to pay the rent; for the merchant’s supplies were secured by a mortgage on the tenant’s personal property and a pledge of the growing crop. This often prevented Negro laborers in the employ of black tenants from getting their wages at the end of the year, for, although the laborer had also a lien on the growing crop, the merchant and the planter usually had theirs recorded first and secured thereby the support of the law to force the payment of their claims. The Negro tenant then began the year with three mortgages, covering all he owned, his labor for the coming year and all he expected to acquire during that twelvemonth. He paid “one-third of his product for the use of the land, he paid an exorbitant fee for recording the contract by which he paid his pound of flesh; he was charged two or three times as much as he ought to pay for ginning his cotton; and, finally, he turned over his crop to be eaten up in commissions, if any was still left to him.”[11]
The worst of all results from this iniquitous system was its effect on the Negroes themselves. It made the Negroes extravagant and unscrupulous. Convinced that no share of their crop would come to them when harvested, they did not exert themselves to produce what they could. They often abandoned their crops before harvest, knowing that they had already spent them. In cases, however, where the Negro tenants had acquired mules, horses or tools upon which the speculator had a mortgage, the blacks were actually bound to their landlords to secure the property. It was soon evident that in the end the white man himself was the loser by this evil system. There appeared waste places in the country. Improvements were wanting, land lay idle for lack of sufficient labor, and that which was cultivated yielded a diminishing return on account of the ignorance and improvidence of those tilling it. These Negroes as a rule had lost the ambition to become landowners, preferring to invest their surplus money in personal effects; and in the few cases where the Negroes were induced to undertake the buying of land, they often tired of the responsibility and gave it up.[12]
There began in the spring of 1879, therefore, an emigration of the Negroes from Louisiana and Mississippi to Kansas. For some time there was a stampede from several river parishes in Louisiana and from counties just opposite them in Mississippi. It was estimated that from five to ten thousand left their homes before the movement could be checked. Persons of influence soon busied themselves in showing the blacks the necessity for remaining in the South and those who had not then gone or prepared to go were persuaded to return to the plantations. This lull in the excitement, however, was merely temporary, for many Negroes had merely returned home to make more extensive preparations for leaving the following spring. The movement was accelerated by the work of two Negro leaders of some note, Moses Singleton, of Tennessee, the self-styled Moses of the Exodus; and Henry Adams, of Louisiana, who credited himself with having organized for this purpose as many as 98,000 blacks.
Taking this movement seriously a convention of the leading whites and blacks was held at Vicksburg, Mississippi, on the sixth of May, 1879. This body was controlled mainly by unsympathetic but diplomatic whites. General N.R. Miles, of Yazoo County, Mississippi, was elected president and A.W. Crandall, of Louisiana, secretary. After making some meaningless but eloquent speeches the convention appointed a committee on credentials and adjourned until the following day. On reassembling Colonel W.L. Nugent, chairman of the committee, presented a certain preamble and resolutions citing causes of the exodus and suggesting remedies. Among the causes, thought he, were: “the low price of cotton and the partial failure of the crop, the irrational system of planting adopted in some sections whereby labor was deprived of intelligence to direct it and the presence of economy to make it profitable, the vicious system of credit fostered by laws permitting laborers and tenants to mortgage crops before they were grown or even planted; the apprehension on the part of many colored people produced by insidious reports circulated among them that their civil and political rights were endangered or were likely to be; the hurtful and false rumors diligently disseminated, that by emigrating to Kansas the Negroes would obtain lands, mules and money from the government without cost to themselves, and become independent forever.”[13]
Referring to the grievances and proposing a redress, the committee admitted that errors had been committed by the whites and blacks alike, as each in turn had controlled the government of the States there represented. The committee believed that the interests of planters and laborers, landlords and tenants were identical; that they must prosper or suffer together; and that it was the duty of the planters and landlords of the State there represented to devise and adopt some contract by which both parties would receive the full benefit of labor governed by intelligence and economy. The convention affirmed that the Negro race had been placed by the constitution of the United States and the States there represented, and the laws thereof, on a plane of absolute equality with the white race; and declared that the Negro race should be accorded the practical enjoyment of all civil and political rights guaranteed by the said constitutions and laws. The convention pledged itself to use whatever of power and influence it possessed to protect the Negro race against all dangers in respect to the fair expression of their wills at the polls, which they apprehended might result from fraud, intimidation or _bulldozing_ on the part of the whites. And as there could be no liberty of action without freedom of thought, they demanded that all elections should be fair and free and that no repressive measures should be employed by the Negroes “to deprive their own race in part of the fullest freedom in the exercise of the highest right of citizenship.”[14]
The committee then recommended the abolition of the mischievous credit system, called upon the Negroes to contradict false reports as to crimes of the whites against them and, after considering the Negroes’ right to emigrate, urged that they proceed about it with reason. Ex-Governor Foote, of Mississippi, submitted a plan to establish in every county a committee, composed of men who had the confidence of both whites and blacks, to be auxiliary to the public authorities, to listen to complaints and arbitrate, advise, conciliate or prosecute, as each case should demand. But unwilling to do more than make temporary concessions, the majority rejected Foote’s plan.[15]
The whites thought also to stop the exodus by inducing the steamboat lines not to furnish the emigrants’ transportation. Negroes were also detained by writs obtained by preferring against them false charges. Some, who were willing to let the Negroes go, thought of importing white and Chinese labor to take their places. Hearing of the movement and thinking that he could offer a remedy, Senator D.W. Voorhees, of Indiana, introduced a resolution in the United States Senate authorizing an inquiry into the causes of the exodus.[16] The movement, however, could not be stopped and it became so widespread that the people in general were forced to give it serious thought. Men in favor of it declared their views, organized migration societies and appointed agents to promote the enterprise of removing the freedmen from the South.
Becoming a national measure, therefore, the migration evoked expressions from Frederick Douglass and Richard T. Greener, two of the most prominent Negroes in the United States. Douglass believed that the exodus was ill-timed. He saw in it the abandonment of the great principle of protection to persons and property in every State of the Union. He felt that if the Negroes could not be protected in every State, the Federal Government was shorn of its rightful dignity and power, the late rebellion had triumphed, the sovereign of the nation was an empty vessel, and the power and authority in individual States were supreme. He thought, therefore, that it was better for the Negroes to stay in the South than to go North, as the South was a better market for the black man’s labor. Douglass believed that the Negroes should be warned against a nomadic life. He did not see any more benefit in the migration to Kansas than he had years before in the emigration to Africa. The Negroes had a monopoly of labor at the South and they would be too insignificant in numbers to have such an advantage in the North. The blacks were then potentially able to elect members of Congress in the South but could not hope to exercise such power in other parts. Douglass believed, moreover, that this exodus did not conform to the “laws of civilizing migration,” as the carrying of a language, literature and the like of a superior race to an inferior; and it did not conform to the geographic laws assuring healthy migration from east to west in the same latitude, as this was from south to north, far away from the climate in which the migrants were born.[17]
The exodus of the Negroes, however, was heartily endorsed by Richard T. Greener. He did not consider it the best remedy for the lawlessness of the South but felt that it was a salutary one. He did not expect the United States to give the oppressed blacks in the South the protection they needed, as there is no abstract limit to the right of a State to do anything. He would not encourage the Negro to lead a wandering life but in that instance such advice was gratuitous. Greener failed to find any analogy between African colonization and migration to the West as the former was promoted by slaveholders to remove the free Negro from the country and the other sprang spontaneously from the class considering itself aggrieved. “One led out of the country to a comparative wilderness; the other directed to a better land and larger opportunities.” He did not see how the migration to the North would diminish the potentiality of the Negro in politics, for Massachusetts first elected Negroes to her General Court, Ohio had nominated a Negro representative and Illinois another. He showed also that Mr. Douglass’s objection on the grounds of migrating from south to north rather than from east to west was not historical. He thought little of the advice to the Negroes to stick and fight it out, for he had evidence that the return of the unreconstructed Confederates to power in the South would for generations doom the blacks to political oppression unknown in the annals of a free country.
Greener showed foresight here in urging the Negroes to take up desirable western land before it would be preempted by foreigners. As the Swedes, Norwegians, Irish, Hebrews and others were organizing societies and raising funds to promote the migration of their needy to these lands, why should the Negroes be debarred? Greener had no apprehension as to the treatment the Negroes would receive in the West. He connected the movement too with the general welfare of the blacks, considering it a promising sign that they had learned to run from persecution. Having passed their first stage, that of appealing to philanthropists, the Negroes were then appealing to themselves.[18]
Feeling very much as Greener did, these Negroes rushed into Kansas and neighboring States in 1879. So many came that some systematic relief had to be offered. Mrs. Comstock, a Quaker lady, organized for this purpose the Kansas Freedmen’s Relief Association, to raise funds and secure for them food and clothing. In this work she had the support of Governor J.P. Saint John. There was much suffering upon arriving in Kansas but relief came from various sources. During this year $40,000 and 500,000 pounds of clothing, bedding and the like were used. England contributed 50,000 pounds of goods and $8,000. In 1879, the refugees took up 20,000 acres of land and brought 3,000 under cultivation. The Relief Association at first furnished them with supplies, teams and seed, which they profitably used in the production of large crops. Desiring to establish homes, they built 300 cabins and saved $30,000 the first year. In April, 1,300 refugees had gathered around Wyandotte alone. Up to that date 60,000 had come to Kansas, nearly 40,000 of whom arrived in destitute condition. About 30,000 settled in the country, some on rented lands and others on farms as laborers, leaving about 25,000 in cities, where on account of crowded conditions and the hard weather many greatly suffered. Upon finding employment, however, they all did well, most of them becoming self-supporting within one year after their arrival, and few of them coming back to the Relief Association for aid the second time.[19] This was especially true of those in Topeka, Parsons and Kansas City.
The people of Kansas did not encourage the blacks to come. They even sent messengers to the South to advise the Negroes not to migrate and, if they did come anyway, to provide themselves with equipment. When they did arrive, however, they welcomed and assisted them as human beings. Under such conditions the blacks established five or six important colonies in Kansas alone between 1879 and 1880. Chief among these were Baxter Springs, Nicodemus, Morton City and Singleton. Governor Saint John, of Kansas, reported that they seemed to be honest and of good habits, were certainly industrious and anxious to work, and so far as they had been tried had proved to be faithful and excellent laborers. Giving his observations there, Sir George Campbell bore testimony to the same report.[20] Out of these communities have come some most progressive black citizens. In consideration of their desirability their white neighbors have given them their cooperation, secured to them the advantages of democratic education, and honored a few of them with some of the most important positions in the State.
Although the greater number of these blacks went to Kansas, about 5,000 of them sought refuge in other Western States. During these years, Negroes gradually invaded Indian Territory and increased the number already infiltrated into and assimilated by the Indian nations. When assured of their friendly attitude toward the Indians, the Negroes were accepted by them as equals, even during the days of slavery when the blacks on account of the cruelties of their masters escaped to the wilderness.[21] Here we are at sea as to the extent to which this invasion and subsequent miscegenation of the black and red races extended for the reason that neither the Indians nor these migrating Negroes kept records and the United States Government has been disposed to classify all mixed breeds in tribes as Indians. Having equal opportunity among the red men, the Negroes easily succeeded. A traveler in Indian Territory in 1880 found their condition unusually favorable. The cosy homes and promising fields of these freedmen attracted his attention as striking evidences of their thrift. He saw new fences, additions to cabins, new barns, churches and school-houses indicating prosperity. Given every privilege which the Indians themselves enjoyed, the Negroes could not be other than contented.[22]
It was very unfortunate, however, that in 1889, when by proclamation of President Harrison the Oklahoma Territory was thrown open, the intense race prejudice of the white immigrants and the rule of the mob prevented a larger number of Negroes from settling in that promising commonwealth. Long since extensively advertised as valuable, the land of Oklahoma had become a coveted prize for the adventurous squatters invading the territory in defiance of the law before it was declared open for settlement. The rush came with all the excitement of pioneer days redoubled. Stakes were set, parcels of land were claimed, cabins were constructed in an hour and towns grew up in a day.[23] Then came conflicting claims as to titles and rights of preemption culminating in fighting and bloodshed. And worst of all, with this disorderly group there developed the fixed policy of eliminating the Negroes entirely.
The Negro, however, was not entirely excluded. Some had already come into the territory and others in spite of the barriers set up continued to come.[24] With the cooperation of the Indians, with whom they easily amalgamated they readjusted themselves and acquired sufficient wealth to rise in the economic world. Although not generally fortunate, a number of them have coal and oil lands from which they obtain handsome incomes and a few, like Sara Rector, have actually become rich. Dishonest white men with the assistance of unprincipled officials have defrauded and are still endeavoring to defraud these Negroes of their property, lending them money secured by mortgages and obtaining for themselves through the courts appointments as the Negroes’ guardians. They turn out to be the robbers of the Negroes, in case they do not live in a community where an enlightened public opinion frowns down upon this crime.
During the later eighties and the early nineties there were some other interstate movements worthy of notice here. The mineral wealth of the Appalachian mountains was being exploited. Foreigners, at first, were coming into this country in sufficiently large numbers to meet the demand; but when this supply became inadequate, labor agents appealed to the blacks in the South. Negroes then flocked to the mining districts of Birmingham, Alabama, and to East Tennessee. A large number also migrated from North Carolina and Virginia to West Virginia and some few of the same group to Southern Ohio to take the places of those unreasonable strikers who often demanded larger increases in wages than the income of their employers could permit. Many of these Negroes came to West Virginia as is evidenced by the increase in Negro population of that State. West Virginia had a Negro population of 17,980 in 1870; 25,886 in 1880; 32,690 in 1890; 43,499 in 1900; and 64,173 in 1910.[25]
[Footnote 1: _Atlantic Monthly_, LXIV, p. 222; _Nation_, XXVIII, pp. 242, 386.]
[Footnote 2: Thompson, _Reconstruction in Georgia_, p. 69.]
[Footnote 3: Williams, _History of the Negro Race_, II, p. 375.]
[Footnote 4: Williams, _History of the Negro Race_, II, p. 374.]
[Footnote 5: American _Journal of Social Science_, XI, p. 34.]
[Footnote 6: _Ibid._, XI, p. 33.]
[Footnote 7: _Nation_, XXVIII, pp. 242, 386.]
[Footnote 8: Williams, _History of the Negro Race_, II, p. 378.]
[Footnote 9: _Atlantic Monthly_, LXIV, p. 225.]
[Footnote 10: _Ibid._, LXIV, p. 226.]
[Footnote 11: _Atlantic Monthly_, LXIV, p. 224.]
[Footnote 12: _The Atlantic Monthly_, XLIV, p. 223.]
[Footnote 13: _The Vicksburg Daily Commercial_, May 6, 1879.]
[Footnote 14: _The Vicksburg Daily Commercial_, May 6, 1879.]
[Footnote 15: _Ibid._, May 6, 1879.]
[Footnote 16: _Congressional Record_, 46th Congress, 2d Session, Vol. X, p. 104.]
[Footnote 17: For a detailed statement of Douglass’s views, see the _American Journal of Social Science_, XI, pp. 1-21.]
[Footnote 18: _American Journal of Social Science_, XI, pp. 22-35.]
[Footnote 19: Williams, _History of the Negro_, II, p. 379.]
[Footnote 20: “In Kansas City,” said Sir George Campbell, “and still more in the suburbs of Kansas proper the Negroes are much more numerous than I have yet seen. On the Kansas side they form quite a large proportion of the population. They are certainly subject to no indignity or ill usage. There the Negroes seem to have quite taken to work at trades.” He saw them doing building work, both alone and assisting white men, and also painting and other tradesmen’s work. On the Kansas side, he found a Negro blacksmith, with an establishment of his own. He had come from Tennessee after emancipation. He had not been back there and did not want to go. He also saw black women keeping apple stalls and engaged in other such occupations so as to leave him under the impression that in the States, which he called intermediate between black and white countries the blacks evidently had no difficulty.–See _American Journal of Social Science_, XI, pp. 32, 33.]
[Footnote 21: _American Journal of Social Science_, XI, p. 33.]
[Footnote 22: _Ibid._, XI, p. 33.]
[Footnote 23: _Spectator_, LXVII, p. 571; _Dublin Review_, CV, p. 187; _Cosmopolitan_, VII, p. 460; _Nation_, LXVIII, p. 279.]
[Footnote 24: According to the _United States Census, of 1910_, there are 137,612 Negroes in Oklahoma.]
[Footnote 25: See _Censuses_ of the United States.]
CHAPTER VIII
THE MIGRATION OF THE TALENTED TENTH
In spite of these interstate movements, the Negro still continued as a perplexing problem, for the country was unprepared to grant the race political and civil rights. Nominal equality was forced on the South at the point of the sword and the North reluctantly removed most of its barriers against the blacks. Some, still thinking, however, that the two races could not live together as equals, advocated ceding the blacks the region on the Gulf of Mexico.[1] This was branded as chimerical on the ground that, deprived of the guidance of the whites, these States would soon sink to African level and the end of the experiment would be a reconquest and a military regime fatal to the true development of American institutions.[2] Another plan proposed was the revival of the old colonization idea of sending Negroes to Africa, but this exhibited still less wisdom than the first in that it was based on the hypothesis of deporting a nation, an expense which no government would be willing to incur. There were then no physical means of transporting six or seven millions of people, moreover, as there would be a new born for every one the agents of colonization could deport.[3]
With the deportation scheme still kept before the people by the American Colonization Society, the idea of emigration to Africa did not easily die. Some Negroes continued to emigrate to Liberia from year to year. This policy was also favored by radicals like Senator Morgan, of Alabama, who, after movements like the Ku Klux Klan had done their work of intimidating Negroes into submission to the domination of the whites, concluded that most of the race believed that there was no future for the blacks in the United States and that they were willing to emigrate. These radicals advocated the deportation of the blacks to prevent the recurrence of “Negro domination.” This plan was acceptable to the whites in general also, for, unlike the consensus of opinion of today, it was then thought that the South could get along without the Negro.[4] Even newspapers like the _Charleston News and Courier_, which denounced the persecution of the Negroes, urged them to emigrate to Africa as they could not be permitted to rule over the white people. The _Minneapolis Times_ wished the scheme success and Godspeed and believed that the sooner it was carried out the better it would be for the Negroes.
Most of the influential newspapers of the country, however, urged the contrary. Citing the progress of the Negroes since emancipation to show that the blacks were doing their full share toward developing the wealth of the South, the _Indianapolis Journal_ characterized as barbarism the suggestion that the government should furnish them transportation to Africa. “The ancestors of most of the Negroes now in this country,” said the editor, “have doubtless been here as long as those of Senator Morgan, and their descendants are as thoroughly acclimated and have as good a right here as the Senator himself.”[5] This was the opinion of all useful Negroes except Bishop H.M. Turner, who endorsed Morgan’s plan by advocating the emigration of one fourth of the blacks to Africa. The editor of the _Chicago Record-Herald_ entreated Turner to temper his enthusiasm with discretion before he involved in unspeakable disaster any more of his trustful compatriots.
Speaking more plainly to the point, the editor of the _Philadelphia North American_ said that the true interest of the South was to accommodate itself to changed conditions and that the duty of the freedmen lies in making themselves worth more in the development of the South than they were as chattels. Although recognizing the disabilities and hardships of the South both to the whites and the blacks, he could not believe that the elimination of the Negroes would, if practicable, give relief.[6] The _Boston Herald_ inquired whether it was worth while to send away a laboring population in the absence of whites to take its place and referred to the misfortunes of Spain which undertook to carry out such a scheme. Speaking the real truth, _The Milwaukee Journal_ said that no one needed to expect any appreciable decrease in the black population through any possible emigration, no matter how successful it might be. “The Negro,” said the editor, “is here to stay and our institutions must be adapted to comprehend him and develop his possibilities.” _The Colored American_, then the leading Negro organ of thought in the United States, believed that the Negroes should be thankful to Senator Morgan for his attitude on emigration, because he might succeed in deporting to Africa those Negroes who affect to believe that this is not their home and the more quickly we get rid of such foolhardy people the better it will be for the stalwart of the race.[7]
A number of Negroes, however, under the inspiration of leaders[8] like Bishop H.M. Turner, did not feel that the race had a fair chance in the United States. A few of them emigrated to Wapimo, Mexico; but, becoming dissatisfied with the situation there, they returned to their homes in Georgia and Alabama in 1895. The coming of the Negroes into Mexico caused suspicion and excitement. A newspaper, _El Tiempo_, which had been denouncing lynching in the United States, changed front when these Negroes arrived in that country.
Going in quest of new opportunities and desiring to reenforce the civilization of Liberia, 197 other Negroes sailed from Savannah, Georgia, for Liberia, March 19, 1895. Commending this step, the _Macon Telegraph_ referred to their action as a rebellion against the social laws which govern all people of this country. This organ further said that it was the outcome of a feeling which has grown stronger and stronger year by year among the Negroes of the Southern States and which will continue to grow with the increase of education and intelligence among them. The editor conceded that they had an opportunity to better their material condition and acquire wealth here but contended that they had no chance to rise out of the peasant class. The _Memphis Commercial Appeal_ urged the building of a large Negro nation in Africa as practicable and desirable, for it was “more and more apparent that the Negro in this country must remain an alien and a disturber,” because there was “not and can never be a future for him in this country.” The _Florida Times Union_ felt that this colonization scheme, like all others, was a fraud. It referred to the Negro’s being carried to the land of plenty only to find out that there, as everywhere else in the world, an existence must be earned by toil and that his own old sunny southern home is vastly the better place.[9]
Only a few intelligent Negroes, however, had reached the position of being contented in the South. The Negroes eliminated from politics could not easily bring themselves around to thinking that they should remain there in a state of recognized inferiority, especially when during the eighties and nineties there were many evidences that economic as well as political conditions would become worse. The exodus treated in the previous chapter was productive of better treatment for the Negroes and an increase in their wages in certain parts of the South but the migration, contrary to the expectations of many, did not become general. Actual prosperity was impossible even if the whites had been willing to give the Negro peasants a fair chance. The South had passed through a disastrous war, the effects of which so blighted the hopes of its citizens in the economic world that their land seemed to pass, so to speak, through a dark age. There was then little to give the man far down when the one to whom he of necessity looked for employment was in his turn bled by the merchant or the banker of the larger cities, to whom he had to go for extensive credits.[10]
Southern planters as a class, however, had not much sympathy for the blacks who had once been their property and the tendency to cheat them continued, despite the fact that many farmers in the course of time extricated themselves from the clutches of the loan sharks. There were a few Negroes who, thanks to the honesty of certain southern gentlemen, succeeded in acquiring considerable property in spite of their handicaps.[11] They yielded to the white man’s control in politics, when it seemed that it meant either to abandon that field or die, and devoted themselves to the accumulation of wealth and the acquisition of education.
This concession, however, did not satisfy the radical whites, as they thought that the Negro might some day return to power. Unfortunately, therefore, after the restoration of the control of the State governments to the master class, there swept over these commonwealths a wave of hostile legislation demanded by the poor white uplanders determined to debase the blacks to the status of the free Negroes prior to the Civil War.[12] The Negroes have, therefore, been disfranchised in most reconstructed States, deprived of the privilege of serving in the State militia, segregated in public conveyances, and excluded from public places of entertainment. They have, moreover, been branded by public opinion as pariahs of society to be used for exploitation but not to be encouraged to expect that their status can ever be changed so as to destroy the barriers between the races in their social and political relations.
This period has been marked also by an effort to establish in the South a system of peonage not unlike that of Mexico, a sort of involuntary servitude in that one is considered legally bound to serve his master until a debt contracted is paid. Such laws have been enacted in Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina and South Carolina. No such distinction in law has been able to stand the constitutional test of the United States courts as was evidenced by the decision of the Supreme Court in 1911 declaring the Alabama law unconstitutional.[13] But the planters of the South, still a law unto themselves, have maintained actual slavery in sequestered; districts where public opinion against peonage is too weak to support federal authorities in exterminating it.[14] The Negroes themselves dare not protest under penalty of persecution and the peon concerned usually accepts his lot like that of a slave. Some years ago it