The Risen Phoenix

Black Politics in the Post–Civil War South

Luis-Alejandro Dinnella-Borrego

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780813938738
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Afroamerikanische Studien

The Risen Phoenix charts the changing landscape of black politics and political culture in the postwar South by focusing on the careers of six black congressmen who served between the Civil War and the turn of the nineteenth century: John Mercer Langston of Virginia, James Thomas Rapier of Alabama, Robert Smalls of South Carolina, John Roy Lynch of Mississippi, Josiah Thomas Walls of Florida, and George Henry White of North Carolina. Drawing on a rich combination of traditional political history, gender and black history, and the history of U.S. foreign relations, the book argues that African American congressmen effectively served their constituents' interests while also navigating their way through a tumultuous post–Civil War Southern political environment.

Black congressmen represented their constituents by advancing a policy agenda encompassing strong civil rights protections, economic modernization, and expanded access to education. Local developments such as antiblack aggression and violent electoral contests shaped the policies supported by newly elected black congressmen, including the tactical decision to support amnesty for ex-Confederates. Yet black congressmen ultimately embraced their role as national leaders and as spokesmen not only for their congressional districts and states but for all African Americans throughout the South. As these black leaders searched for effective ways to respond to white supremacy, disenfranchisement, segregation, and lynching, they challenged the barriers of prejudice, paving the way for future black struggles for equality in the twentieth century.

PART I

The Crucible of War and Emancipation

1

Democracy of the Dead

The Roots of Black Politics in the Aftermath of the Civil War

THE COMING OF THE Civil War brought the hope of liberation to thousands of African Americans enslaved across the South. However, for a daring young slave named Robert Smalls, it became much more: it was his pathway to heroism and to prominence as a black leader.

Smalls was born in Beaufort, South Carolina, on April 5, 1839, the son of Lydia (a slave) and an unknown white man, quite possibly his mother’s master, John K. McKee. He grew up in a region where 83 percent of the population consisted of slaves, and he witnessed the atrocities of the system personally. When John McKee died, his son Henry inherited Smalls and his mother, subsequently hiring out the twelve-year-old Smalls to his sister-in-law in 1851. Smalls worked many different jobs, ranging from hotel waiter to lamplighter. He met and fell in love with another slave, Hannah Jones, a hotel maid, and the two married on December 24, 1858, when Smalls was seventeen years old.

The young Smalls earned money on the side in hope of eventually purchasing his family’s freedom. He did this in spite of the South Carolina law, passed in 1820, that flatly banned private manumission and self-purchase. Smalls made a contract with his wife’s owner to purchase his wife and child for $800.¹ When the Civil War began, one of his jobs was as a pilot on a Confederate transport, the Planter. After hostilities broke out, Smalls saw an opportunity for freedom. Increasingly, federal forces had begun to see the untapped potential in attacking the institution of slavery directly and creating black regiments. On May 9, 1862, Union general David Hunter declared as free all slaves throughout Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina to encourage black enlistments. This pronouncement moved Smalls to act decisively. On the morning of May 13, 1862, Smalls, along with other enslaved deckhands, boldly navigated the Planter into the Union naval blockade outside the port of Charleston and handed the boat over to Union forces.²

In addition to delivering him from slavery, Smalls’s heroic act made him famous in the Northern press and in the black community. Indeed, members of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Colored Regiment were well aware of Smalls’s pluck and courage and were concerned about his welfare. Writing from Morris Island, South Carolina, on November 28, 1863, Corporal James Henry Gooding of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Colored Regiment recounted rumors of the capture of a former Confederate warship and its crew: “It is reported that the steamer Planter, the same [Confederate ship] which was run out of Charleston harbor by Robert Smalls and turned over to the blockade fleet [the Union navy], has been captured by the rebels. The pecuniary loss will not be very great, as the vessel was an old cotton dragger; but the fate of her crew may be a rather serious matter, for all except the captain and engineers are contrabands [former slaves], and some of them formed a part of the crew who ran away with her. It is believed that Smalls was piloting her on the occasion.” The rumors of the capture of the Planter proved to be false. Nevertheless, it is notable that Gooding and his counterparts were aware of Smalls’s heroism and particularly concerned about his fate.³

Less than a week after Gooding wrote his letter, on December 1, 1863, Smalls was still piloting the Planter (now part of the Union navy) under the command of Captain James Nickerson. Their assigned task was to traverse the Light House Inlet, near Secessionville, South Carolina, to take rations from Folly Island and resupply troops stationed in Morris Island. But when the Confederate batteries at Secessionville recognized their former ship, they began to shell the Planter, attempting to prevent its escape. The fierce shelling left the upper decks of the Planter badly damaged, but the ship remained stable.

Out of fear, Nickerson ordered Smalls to beach the ship and surrender to the Confederates. Smalls would have none of that order. He shouted back at Nickerson: “If we surrender, you — a white man and an officer — will be treated as such. But the rest of the crew are all runaway slaves. If the Confederates catch us, they will give us no quarter!” After stressing his own confidence in piloting the ship to safety, Smalls shouted again, “Not by a damn sight will I beach this boat.”

Nickerson became so frightened by the intensity of the shelling that he fled to the ship’s coal bunker to hide from the noise of the Confederate assault. Smalls wasted no time in taking command. Calling another crew-man to take the wheel briefly, he raced to the coal bunker to latch the door shut so that Nickerson could not get out. He then returned to the wheel and guided the ship safely back to Morris Island, where he explained to his superiors all that had occurred. Nickerson was immediately dismissed by Admiral Samuel DuPont, and Smalls was promoted to the rank of captain.⁴

Smalls’s fame opened the door for him to embark, after the Civil War, on a political career that would take him all the way to the U.S. Congress. Nor was he the only future black congressman to demonstrate wartime valor in South Carolina. When the Third Infantry Regiment, United States Colored Troops (USCT), participated in the capture of Fort Wagner and Fort Gregg in August and September 1863, among them was a twenty-year-old ex-slave named Josiah Thomas Walls. He was born on December 30, 1842, near Winchester, Virginia; his prewar status remains a mystery, but much of the evidence suggests that he was born in slavery.⁵ He may have been impressed into Confederate military service for a time, but there is no doubt that he was a private in the USCT’s Third Infantry Regiment by July 1863. His unit was poorly trained and did not see much action; nevertheless, he participated in the assaults that ultimately captured Fort Wagner. By 1864, Walls was transferred to the Thirty-Fifth USCT, positioned in Picolata near St. Augustine, Florida. When the war concluded in 1865 he was still stationed in Florida, where he would settle and launch his political career.

Smalls and Walls represented one segment of an emerging group of black leaders who seized the opportunities afforded to them during the Civil War. As they rose to prominence in the postwar years, they would be joined by others who came from different walks of life, had attained a high level of education, and had participated in the abolitionist movement — men like John Mercer Langston of Virginia.

Langston was a peculiar representative of black Americans. Born free on December 14, 1829, in Louisa County, Virginia, he was the youngest son of Captain Ralph Quarles, a Virginia planter, and Lucy Jane Langston, Quarles’s half-Indian and half-black former slave mistress. Langston went to great lengths to emphasize that the views of his white father, “with regard to slavery and the management of slaves upon a plantation by overseers, were peculiar and unusual.”⁶ In fact, Quarles freed Lucy Langston, and the former master and the former bondswoman had a genuine love for each other. When Lucy died she “was borne thence to her grave by his side.”⁷ Though Langston’s parents died when he was a young boy, their legacy to him was immense. Indeed, his inheritance from Ralph Quarles eventually aided him in his efforts to secure a seat in Congress.

Langston was well educated and accomplished. Leaving Virginia at an early age, he settled in Ohio, graduating from Oberlin College in 1849 and receiving a master’s degree in theology there in 1853. In 1854, following the completion of his schooling, Langston was admitted to the bar. While in Ohio he became one of the first African Americans to hold elected office, winning an 1855 election to serve as a township clerk. He married Caroline Matilda Wall on October 25, 1854, and the couple had five children.⁸

Langston quickly became a major black figure in the abolitionist movement and in Ohio’s nascent Republican Party. His speeches encapsulated “his own hard earned definition of liberty and the responsibilities his guardians and teachers on both sides of the color line had taught him to associate with it.” Self-reliance formed a crucial part of his ideological framework. Oberlin inculcated several crucial traditions into Langston, among them evangelical Christianity, republicanism, abolitionism, and self-restraint — all of which permeate his later political rhetoric. Within the larger abolitionist movement, Langston worked without the help of white abolitionists with whom he little contact and less communication. This was due in part to the racism of some of his white abolitionist counterparts. Having a long-standing commitment to the abolitionist movement, Langston worked diligently to help the Union free the slaves, recruiting men for the Fifty-Fourth and Fifty-Fifth Massachusetts Colored Regiments and the Fifth Ohio Colored Regiment.⁹

In November 1864, Langston, along with other black activists, traveled to the Brooklyn Navy Yard to tour a recently commandeered Confederate vessel. When they arrived, Captain Robert Smalls welcomed them aboard and personally gave them a tour of the Planter, which he had delivered to Union forces two years earlier. Langston was so taken by Smalls that he formally congratulated him, “in behalf of the Colored of the United States,” for his services to the cause of black freedom and equality. Two days later, Langston accepted an invitation by Smalls to join him and thirteen other black activists for Sunday dinner.¹⁰

This interaction between an uneducated ex-slave and a cultured free black abolitionist on board a stolen Confederate steamship illustrates the two strains of black leadership that would emerge during and after the Civil War. Ex-slaves of modest means and polished, college-educated black leaders could join together in the struggle against racism and for political equality. In so doing, leaders like Smalls and Langston could not help but look back to their own particular experiences, and to those of their forebears, for guidance in the struggle for interracial democracy and black equality.

Manhood and Citizenship Rights

Once the Civil War began, a shared discourse of black citizenship rights that emphasized martial valor and manhood quickly took shape. This under standing of black masculinity had to contend with the dominant white discourse on blacks. As the historian Kirk Savage asserts, for American men, “to be a soldier in battle was the ultimate test of manhood, because men battled men and battled to the death,” but the test endured by the male slave “was even more profound since his masculinity has been denied from the outset. To become a Union soldier, then, was not only to acquire the conventional trappings of masculinity, but to resist the very institution that suppressed [the slaves’] masculinity in the first place.”¹¹

This emphasis on black manhood is clearly visible in the careers of major political leaders like Smalls and Walls. Considering Smalls’s valiant service in the Union navy and Walls’s participation in subsequent assaults on Fort Wagner and Fort Gregg in South Carolina, it is not surprising that these former veterans would describe blacks’ wartime exploits as evidence of their masculinity. Their focus on black manhood as displayed in battle was consistent with a tradition that dated back to the American Revolution and that would flourish again in the late 1890s as African Americans moved to join the military during the Spanish-American War. This tradition, in the version espoused by Smalls and Walls, reflected blacks’ deep sense that they had proven themselves worthy of civil rights through their sacrifices on the battlefields of the Civil War.¹²

Prominent black leaders such as Douglass and Langston, along with black veterans like Smalls and Walls, regularly emphasized an emancipationist discourse of manhood. Whether connected with freeing oneself from the chains of bondage or with destroying slavery through military service, this discourse served as a powerful rallying cry for the black community. One well-known example appears in Douglass’s 1845 autobiography, in which he noted that his battle with the slave driver Edward Covey “re kindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and revived within me a sense of my own manhood.”¹³ Indeed, two of Douglass’s sons went on to serve in the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Regiment (one of them transferred to the Fifth Cavalry). Many other activists had sons and sons-in-law who served in the army, and they endlessly emphasized the connections between emancipation and manhood.

Langston’s antebellum experiences also highlight the close ties between black manhood and citizenship rights; in fact, his use of physical force in opposition to prejudice and racism began well before the Civil War. Langston’s legal practice initially consisted primarily of representing white Democrats, but he also had black clients. While defending a black man whose daughter had been removed from his custody, Langston got wind of a comment made by a white attorney who asked the black man “whether he had really employed the ‘nigger lawyer’ to attend to his case and warned, ‘If you have, he will sell you out’; meaning thereby that the colored lawyer would prove treacherous.” Langston, unwilling to have his honor slighted by this white attorney, confronted him and, “deeply moved by indignation and anger, administered to him not only a sound slapping of the face, but a round and thorough kicking as he ran crying for help.” In another instance, a white attorney insulted Langston during a trial by affirming that he was “talking to a white man”; in response, Langston “immediately struck him with his fist, felling him to the floor.”¹⁴

As black leaders entered public office, they continued to emphasize their manhood as part of their wider political rhetoric. This discourse embodied the grounding of African American equality and dignity in their physical prowess, whether displayed on the battlefield or in their willingness to physically challenge their oppressors. For the bulk of emerging black leaders, then, manhood and citizenship were two intertwined claims that undergirded their policy agendas.

Emancipatory Democracy:
Slavery and War in Emergent Black Political Culture

The wartime careers of Smalls and Langston, different as they might be, illuminate the formative experiences that were central to the emergence of black politics in the wake of the Civil War and emancipation. African Americans developed a particular kind of political culture — a “democracy of the dead” that recalled and glorified two stages of black suffering, as slaves and as warriors.¹⁵ In this way, then, African Americans embraced the martial ideal of manhood and incorporated it into their politics as they made their way in the postemancipation American nation.

For most white Northerners, the Civil War was fought primarily to save and preserve the Union.¹⁶ For them, emancipation was largely a military necessity, secondary to the overriding aim of preserving the United States. By contrast, African Americans across the nation understood, from the beginning, that any war waged between the North and the South would in evitably have to confront the thorny issue of institutionalized slavery. Thus the outbreak of hostilities that followed the firing on Fort Sumter in 1861 served as a powerful political catalyst fo...