Reconstructing Democracy

Grassroots Black Politics in the Deep South after the Civil War

Justin Behrend

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780820351421, 9780820340333
• eBook ISBN: 9780820347851
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Former slaves, with no prior experience in electoral politics and with few economic resources or little significant social standing, created a sweeping political movement that transformed the South after the Civil War. Within a few short years after emancipation, not only were black men voting but they had elected thousands of ex-slaves to political offices. Historians have long noted the role of African American slaves in the fight for their emancipation and their many efforts to secure their freedom and citizenship, yet they have given surprisingly little attention to the system of governance that freedpeople helped to fashion. Justin Behrend argues that freedpeople created a new democracy in the Reconstruction era, replacing the oligarchic rule of slaveholders and Confederates with a grassroots democracy.

Reconstructing Democracy tells this story through the experiences of ordinary people who lived in the Natchez District, a region of the Deep South where black political mobilization was very successful. Behrend shows how freedpeople set up a political system rooted in egalitarian values wherein local communities rather than powerful individuals held power and ordinary people exercised unprecedented influence in governance. In so doing, he invites us to reconsider not only our understanding of Reconstruction but also the nature and origins of democracy more broadly.

PART ONE

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Constructing Democracy

ONE

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Into the Arms of Strangers

On a warm summer day in 1863, a passing Union gunboat attracted the attention of a group of slaves working on a road along the Mississippi River in Concordia Parish, Louisiana. When the sailors called out and asked the slaves “to come on board,” four young men dropped their tools and immediately “went off with the Yankees.” Fanny E. Conner, in reporting the incident to her husband, seemed shaken by the audacity of their slaves and the casual manner in which they walked away from bondage. Those four young men, John, William, Bill, and the son of Tom Gaillaird, chose a propitious moment to make their escape. One week earlier, Vicksburg had fallen to General Ulysses S. Grant’s forces, opening up the Mississippi River to federal control and severing the backbone of the Confederacy. Three days after the slaves ran off, a Union occupying force landed at the city of Natchez, opposite Concordia Parish. Recognizing the changes that were about to upend the social order of the Natchez District, Fanny Conner ruefully noted, “This is the first of ours who have left us.” But they were not the last. Over the coming weeks and months, thousands of slaves ran away from bondage in a stream of humanity that effectively destroyed the institution of slavery in the lower Mississippi River valley.¹

The timing of the four slaves’ escape, as well as the seeming ease with which they discarded the bonds of slavery, raises questions about slaves’ understanding of the Civil War, the federal government, and freedom. Was their escape spontaneous, or did they wait until Union victory had been assured at Vicksburg? Did they know that boarding that gunboat would effectively free them? What did they think freedom would mean? In all likelihood, John, William, Bill, and Tom Gaillaird’s son did not know the Union sailors on the boat, they had not seen armies marching through their neighborhood, and although they probably had heard stories of distant battles and had seen Yankee gunboats pass by, they took a big risk in putting their trust in unknown persons and an unfamiliar entity (the Union military). In other words, they left a world of bondage where face-to-face contact governed power relationships and jumped into the arms of strangers.²

To understand the intellectual leap that the four enslaved men made when they boarded the Union gunboats, we need first to examine the scope of slave life. Slaves forged numerous relationships with locals and other enslaved people that militated against the dehumanization inherent in the institution of slavery, but meaningful connections rarely extended beyond a small geographic area or beyond networks of face-to-face contact. To be sure, in certain spaces, such as cities and black-dominated plantation districts, slave communities extended beyond neighborhoods and neighboring plantations, and yet even in those regions slaves lived in severely circumscribed worlds. Slaves often viewed power as residing within individuals and the exercise of power as subject to impulsive and fickle personalities, which left little space for collective organizing or for participation in broader communities.³

The Civil War gave slaves an opportunity to expand their relationships beyond the local. Taking advantage of the opportunities unleashed by war, they leveraged their family and kin networks, encounters in the market, and religious congregations to shed the burdens of slavery and begin to establish new relationships with family, neighbors, employers, and governmental authorities. In uprisings, rebellions, and other forms of resistance, African Americans contributed to their own emancipation and the construction of a new nation. During the Civil War, former slaves drew on their experience under bondage to force government officials to confront emancipation and to define the slaves’ new freedom. And yet in looking to the slave past, historians have tended to focus on physical acts of resistance instead of the intellectual work of developing a political consciousness.⁴

In ways that we have yet to fully recognize, the war politicized life for slaves and free blacks. The introduction of outside entities (nation-states) and new peoples (northern soldiers and missionaries) permanently altered the neighborhoods of slaves and free people of color. The creation of the Confederacy ushered in a new form of power that at once demonstrated that slaveholder authority was not total and that local events could have national repercussions. Under Confederate rule, survival depended on public silence and neutrality for slaves, and for local whites, their racial identity and class standing proved to be less influential than they had anticipated. At the same time, Union intervention broadened the world of slaves, in that the actions of the armies in the east and events in Washington and Richmond took on new meaning for their day-today lives. Ordinary freedpeople joined the struggle at home, transforming everyday acts—from running away from a master to offering a meal to a Yankee solider—into a diffuse yet collective project to defeat the Confederate nation and the slavocracy that undergirded its power. Whether they chose to enlist in the army, work for wages on a distant plantation, or just stay at home in the quarters, freedpeople redrew the lines that had once bounded their world, and they laid the foundation for a grassroots democracy.⁵

Subterranean Communications Networks

At first it seemed that the Confederate nation would not have much impact on the day-to-day lives of slaves and free blacks. Slaveholders and local authorities worked vigilantly to restrict black access to the outside world by investing near-complete authority for a slave’s life in the owner’s hands and by prohibiting slave access to education and printed materials. An enslaved person’s survival depended primarily on the whims and prerogatives of the owner, and so official political events diminished in importance, be they at the county, state, or national level. Free blacks could travel and receive an education, but their relative independence was curtailed by discriminatory legislation and white suspicion. During the presidential campaign of 1860, however, slaves and free blacks sensed that something was different about Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans. When the southern states seceded and formed the Confederate nation—expressly designed to protect the right to slave property—slaves’ position in society changed dramatically. No longer were they merely a laboring class; now they were the reason for the Confederacy’s existence. With this shift, slaves and free blacks struggled to break out of their confined world and make sense of the distant conflict between two massive armies.⁶

On the eve of the Civil War, locally based social networks provided a foundation from which slaves could engage the outside world. In Natchez, it was a community of draymen that spread news and gossip across the city as they carried out their trade. Draymen (also referred to as hackmen and carriage drivers) hauled cotton bales to the docks, moved imported goods from the riverboats up the bluff to merchant stores, and transported people and goods within the city and to the countryside and back. Many were slaves who hired themselves out, but some were free blacks. As an integral component of a regional transportation infrastructure, they were uniquely positioned to acquire and spread information throughout the city and to the countryside and back, placing them at the center of an undetected communication network.⁷

Eager to learn any information about the progress of the Union army, draymen passed along war news gleaned from newspapers and from overheard conversations among white people. “I used to read the papers,” recalled George Carter about life during the Civil War. Freeborn and educated, Carter worked for his father, a prominent drayman, and alongside many other draymen. According to testimony before the Southern Claims Commission (SCC), Carter testified that whenever he got hold of newspapers, he would seek out Richard Dorsey, “a man to be trusted in respect to keeping silent about what I would say to him.” Dorsey, a slave drayman, in turn, talked with James K. Hyman (“I often talked to him during the war about the fighting”), Randall Pollard, Lydia Gaines, and at least four other black people. Hyman discussed the war with four additional draymen, besides Dorsey and Carter, and three other black residents. Pollard, an enslaved Baptist minister, spoke with four others who eventually filed claims before the SCC. All told, at least 260 individuals were connected—through political conversations about the war and freedom—to each other in an extensive network.⁸

In Claiborne County, at least fifty-one black people were similarly connected in a web of relations that extended from the streets of Port Gibson to farms in the countryside. At the center of this network was James Page, a leader with an uncommon flair for enterprise and ambition. Although enslaved, he purchased his own freedom for $3,000 by outbidding the slave owners at a public auction at the door of the county courthouse in 1857. Trained as a blacksmith, he prospered rapidly, even before the war. He employed four or five workers at his shop, which he claimed grossed $4,000 annually. In addition, he operated a hack business, owned a six-mule team and a six-horse team, and during the war, rented a two-hundred-acre farm. Page discussed the Civil War with at least sixteen business associates and friends, including John Byrd, a friend for twenty-five years. Byrd, born free, owned a sizeable farm, which was plundered by Gen. U. S. Grant’s forces in 1863 as they made their way to the state capital in Jackson. Given James Page’s friendships, contacts, and business acumen, it is not surprising that he would later become the leading black political figure in Claiborne County, holding, at different times, positions on the board of police and board of selectmen, as well as serving as sheriff and county treasurer.⁹

Port Gibson and Natchez were primary hubs in an extensive black communication network that extended out to the hinterlands through conduits such as carriage drivers and house slaves. Thomas Turner, a mail and messenger slave for Francis Surget, an elite Adams County planter, “used to come over to our place often,” recalled George Braxton, himself a drayman and a slave of Gabriel Shields. Braxton relied on his friend to supply him with information, gleaned from stray comments and private conversations among white people. “He told me once during the war that the Union soldiers were going to gain the day[,] that he heard his mistress say as much, and that if they did we would be free,” testified Braxton. William Smoot, owned by the same slaveholder as Turner, disclosed that he would tell his friend Abner Pierce and others of “the news that I heard the white people talking about” when he made deliveries to Pierce’s master, Alfred V. Davis. Smoot’s access to the conversations of elite planters led him to deduce “that we would not be slaves very long” and then to spread that news among his fellow slaves.¹⁰ Collectively, the masters of these enslaved draymen owned 1,551 slaves on plantations in Adams County, Wilkinson County, Concordia Parish, and Madison Parish. Coupled with the fact that Smoot and Turner traveled to more than one plantation in the course of their labors, it is not difficult to imagine how word of war and freedom could spread to thousands of slaves across hundreds of miles in the densely populated plantation districts along the Mississippi River.¹¹

As sectional tensions came to a head and political leaders began to mobilize for war, national politics began to have more of a day-to-day impact on life in the Natchez District. Richard Stamps, a free man of color who had purchased his and his wife’s freedom before the war, was probably like many when he admitted, “At the beginning of the war or rebellion I knew but little about the Union cause, or the cause of the Confederates.” Concerned about events and ideas that were swirling around his neighborhood in Port Gibson, Stamps made inquiries “among my friends” and “found out which was which.” “From that time,” he told the SCC investigators, “my whole sympathy was with the Cause of the Union.”¹²

The political implications of the subterranean communications network did not go unnoticed by the region’s slaveholders and governmental authorities. Word of the war and the implications of the struggle seeped into the Natchez District despite the best efforts of masters to keep their slaves ignorant. But with the Mississippi River—the most important transportation artery in the nation—running through the middle of the district, it was nearly impossible to suppress news of the 1860 election, President Lincoln, and the Union army. Draymen and free blacks, in particular, came under intense scrutiny during Confederate rule, forcing black residents to be even more mindful of their everyday interactions.¹³

Just before the war began, Isaac Hughes, a free black hackman, recalled discussing the growing tensions with David Singleton, also a former slave. Singleton may have been the wealthiest black man in the district, and he had unusual knowledge of the North. As a personal body servant to Alfred V. Davis, one of the largest slaveholders in the South, Singleton earned significant sums of money “by waiting on” the Natchez nabobs and other wealthy whites at “balls and part[ies].” When he became free in 1854, he estimated that he had saved “seventeen to eighteen thousand dollars,” an astounding (and improbable) sum for a black man in that era. Most important, he had enough money to purchase himself, his wife, and his children from bondage, as well as buy a new home in the North. He retained his business as a livestock dealer in Natchez, but Singleton moved his family to a village just outside of Cincinnati, “so that my children could be educated” in a free state. (In the late 1850s Cincinnati had three free schools for colored children, and black men could vote for the colored Board of Education.)¹⁴

Based on his experience in Ohio, Singleton explained to Isaac Hughes and other friends that the Union would be better for black people, even for free black men. He told Alex Carter, a black farmer, “that the colored men up North were treated right and that the people respected them up there.” In conversation with Hughes, Singleton predicted that the South would start a war with the North, and “if the South did begin the war, it was for the purpose of keeping us slaves and to build a rich man[‘]s government to do as they pleased.” Fearing such a prospect and taking into account comments from white folks that “if there would be a war they would force all free negroes to help them by making them cook for the army and doing other service for the army,” Singleton left Natchez for Ohio a few days after the attack on Fort Sumter. His escape to the North demonstrates the growing concern among black people (slave and free) that distant events might soon have profound local implications.¹⁵

Confederate officials did not impress many free blacks into service as cooks, although they did impress some to build military fortifications. Confederate authorities impressed Adams County slaves to build fortifications at Port Hudson, Louisiana. More important, Confederate leaders did not allow black people to go on living as they had before the war. Just as runaways could not expect unquestioned assistance from people of similar race or class, slaves and free blacks had to be mindful during the war of what they said around other black people. Living under a cloud of suspicion prompted many to take stock of their friends and consider who could be trusted. “In these times a man had to be mighty shy as to who he trusted,” explained one slave drayman. To emphasize the point, he repeated that there were only “some black people whom I could trust.” Another slave said that he and his longtime friend would discuss the war only “in the presence of other colored men who were true.” Plantation slaves had even more reason to be cautious with what they said and in whose company they said it because some slaves acted as surreptitious informants for their masters “in order to make it easy on themselves.” In an environment of personal domination, where the master’s word was treated as law, obstacles to racial, class, and community solidarity abounded.¹⁶

Personal friendships and close-knit neighborhoods, however, helped slaves and free blacks to make sense of the war. Richard Dorsey and James Hyman’s friendship dated to the early 1850s, growing closer over time as they rode the streets of Natchez in their carts. When they talked about the war and the Union, they made sure that they were “always alone.” Likewise, Hyman and Israel Jones, a hired slave carpenter, conversed only in private and in “whisper[s]” about how the Union army was “getting ahead.” Hyman also “talked together very often” with William Jones, his neighbor and fellow drayman, “about the war.” Richard Dorsey lived only four hundred yards from Jones, whom he considered “the best of friends,” and they “talked frequently about the War.” Similarly, in Claiborne County Richard Stamps, a free drayman, lived down the road from Henderson Moore, a free drayman and farmer and a friend for thirty years. “If I heard of a battle or he did, wherein the Union troops had been successful we were always seen to get together and have our own little rejoicing over it,” recollected Stamps. He undoubtedly passed on this information to James Page, a friend since 1840, with whom Stamps met “3 or 4 times a week” to discuss “the war[,] its causes and progress.” In spite of Confederate prohibitions restricting the gathering of black people i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. “Wise in Time”
• Part One. Constructing Democracy
• Part Two. Maintaining Democracy
• Part Three. Constricting Democracy
• Notes
• Index