Capitol Men (49 page)

President Lincoln, like many of his contemporaries, assumed that America would function best as a racially homogeneous nation. In 1852 he concurred with Henry Clay that there was "a moral fitness in the idea of returning to Africa her children, whose ancestors have been torn from her by the ruthless hand of fraud and violence." During a debate with Stephen Douglas in 1854 he conceded that while his "first impulse would be to free all the slaves and send them to Liberia ... a moment's reflection would convince me that, whatever high hope there may be in this, in the long run its sudden execution is impossible." Three years later, however, in a speech in Springfield, he suggested that although "the enterprise is a difficult one ... where there is a will there is a way, and what colonization needs most is a hearty will."

Once in office, Lincoln continued to examine various emigration schemes, pondering which foreign countries might be the recipients of American blacks and whether emigration would be voluntary or compulsory. Treaties would have to be struck, and perhaps generous aid provided, in order to convince other nations to accept America's outcasts. One area considered was the so-called Chiriqui Tract, a swath of land on the Central American isthmus in present-day Panama and Costa Rica. In spring 1862, when Congress passed an act abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia, the law also offered funds to colonize former
slaves outside the United States; additional legislation enacted that July allowed the president to "make provision for the transportation, colonization, and settlement in some tropical country ... of such persons of the African race, made free by the provisions of this Act, and [who] may be willing to emigrate." In August, Lincoln followed up by asking five leaders of Washington's "colored community" to the White House to discuss emigration, the first time in American history that a president met formally with a delegation of black Americans. Lincoln carefully outlined the advantages he perceived in emigration, saying, "There is an unwillingness on the part of our people ... for you colored people to remain among us ... It is better for us both to be separated." Looking hopefully around the room at his visitors, he mentioned that he would need able spokesmen to help stimulate wider interest in his proposal. His guests, however, were largely unsympathetic to the idea and offered no assistance, while Frederick Douglass and other abolitionists lost no time in denouncing it outright. Garrison's
Liberator
compared the notion of a massive out-migration to an "attempt to roll back Niagara to its source, or to cast the Allegheny Mountains into the sea." Black Americans, the magazine insisted, "are as much the natives of the country as any of their oppressors. Here they were born; here, by every consideration of justice and humanity, they are entitled to live."

Such opposition, however robust, could not in itself quiet the talk of settling the freedmen elsewhere; it took an actual emigration experiment ending in disaster to still the impulse. On December 31, 1862, the federal government contracted with a man named Bernard Kock to colonize 5,000 black Americans on Cow Island off the coast of Haiti at a cost of fifty dollars apiece. Kock agreed to transport the emigrants and furnish them with homes, schools, churches, and acreage, and assured the Lincoln government of Haiti's cooperation. When the administration learned that Kock was also soliciting support for the plan from private investors, its officials grew concerned and tried to withdraw, but Kock moved forward, sending an initial "shipment" of 435 blacks to the island. Sickness broke out among the arrivals, few of the promised facilities were ready, and Kock soon declared himself "governor" of the black colony, a hint of tin-pot despotism that further unnerved the White House. Lincoln dispatched an investigator, who promptly reported that sanitary conditions in Kock's kingdom were dismal and that the émigrés wanted badly to come home. The president ordered a vessel sent at once for that purpose, and the federal government never again ventured down the path of emigration planning.

When the impulse reasserted itself in the late 1870s, it came chiefly from the freedmen themselves. With Reconstruction on the wane, tens of thousands of letters seeking information about Liberia were received by the ACS and other colonization groups. "Fifty families in Granville County desire to obtain tickets for passage to Liberia next autumn, numbering from two to ten in my family," wrote A. G. Rogers of North Carolina. "Ages from six months to fifty years; occupation: mechanics of different kinds, farmers, school teachers, tobacconists, two ex-members of the N.C. Legislature. They are willing to pay $25 on a family ... We wish to know of you if the ship could be sent to Norfolk, Va. to meet us provided we can get passage ... We would be pleased to have a package of circulars, hundreds are demanded of us." Emigration organizations like the ACS, however, were capable of sending at most two sailings per year to Africa, each carrying no more than one hundred passengers. And though the interested parties were mostly indigent residents of the rural South, the colonization societies were based in the Northeast and sailed generally from New York; therefore the plans of many applicants died when they were confronted with the cost of getting themselves and their families to the East Coast.

South Carolina saw a powerful surge of black interest in a Liberian exodus following the "dual house" confrontation of spring 1877. On July 4 an emigration rally was held at Charleston's Morris Brown A.M.E. Church; a few weeks later, on July 26, at a mass meeting convened to honor the thirtieth year of Liberian nationhood, four thousand blacks heard a stirring reading of the Liberian Declaration of Independence. The Liberian Exodus Joint Stock Steamship Company was founded, and a local black news-sheet bannered the words "Ho for Africa! One million men wanted for Africa!" across its front page. The promotional pitch to would-be emigrants was uncomplicated and required no elaboration: with the advent of a Straightout Democracy in the state, conditions would become increasingly unbearable for blacks and would not improve any time soon.

The state's Republicans were in a poor position to be of much help, since their powers had declined precipitously in the wake of Governor Chamberlain's abdication. Those who had been part of Chamberlain's clique managed to hang on to their offices for weeks at most. The Democrats, not content merely to chase their enemies from authority, established its massive fraud investigation to pore over the alleged misdeeds
of the previous dozen years and to tar individual Republicans for good as thieves and manipulators of the public trust. After wide-ranging indictments of numerous persons including Francis Cardozo, Richard Gleaves, Franklin Moses Jr., Robert Smalls, and Daniel Chamberlain, exhaustive show hearings were held. Prosecutors alluded to patterns of "monstrous corruption" and labored to show the existence of an intricate web of deceit and wrongdoing, but in the end only three men were convicted of fraud—Cardozo, Smalls, and a white man, L. Cass Carpenter. All were pardoned in a deal whereby Wade Hampton got federal and state charges dropped against whites accused of election fraud and Ku Kluxing.

Governor Hampton, true to his campaign vows, went through the motions of proffering paternalistic concern for the state's blacks, even appointing some black Democrats to minor posts, but this magnanimity was soon quashed by the Negrophobe wing of his own party, led by Martin Gary, Matthew Butler, and Ben Tillman, and by the renewed effort to permanently disenfranchise black voters.

Butler, whose brutality at Hamburg had helped inspire the determined Straightouts, took advantage of the changing political tides to ascend to the U.S. Senate, where in a contested election he edged aside the Republican David L. Corbin. Known to Democrats as "Ku Klux Korbin" for his zealous prosecution of upcountry Klansmen in the Amos Akerman era, Corbin had been a Union major in the Civil War and then stayed on in South Carolina, where he served the Freedmen's Bureau and became a state senator and district attorney. Since the U.S. Senate was Republican and Corbin's credentials were impeccable, it was assumed the infamous Butler could not emerge the victor in this contested election. But in an unmistakable sign that the carpetbagger era had closed, South Carolina's other sitting senator, the Republican "Honest John" Patterson, dramatically announced that he would cast his vote for Butler. Witnesses long remembered Patterson's speech on November 26, 1877, as one of the most pathetic spectacles in Senate history. "Honest John" tried to explain his abrupt change of heart, mopping his brow ineffectually with a large handkerchief and offering feeble justifications for abandoning his own party; derisive laughter from the floor and from the gallery nearly drowned his remarks.

One of Butler's initial efforts in the Senate was to request federal funds to carry any of his willing black neighbors back to Africa. He saw the prospect of large numbers of blacks departing South Carolina as a
pleasing one, for it would diminish the state's colored electorate. But more clear-headed whites saw the risk of allowing the state's cheap labor to disappear. As an editor in Laurens noted, "It will not do to shut our eyes to the fact that if the present emigration fever ... is not abated ... the agricultural interests of the country must suffer. It will not do to treat the matter lightly, and say, 'Let the "nigger" slide.' We need his services and it is too late now to look elsewhere for a substitute." State officials had indeed tried to "look elsewhere," but their efforts to attract white immigrant laborers to South Carolina had been unsuccessful. In contrast to Northern states, with their large urban populations, South Carolina did not have established settlements of European immigrants to lure newly arrived kin; the chief nonagricultural industry was limited to low-paying work in textile mills; and the state's history of intolerance and racial violence was no secret, even to those just setting foot on America's shores.

Some whites, determined to frighten black workers into staying put, revived the hoary myths of the 1862 Yankee invasion of the Sea Islands, suggesting to blacks that emigration was in reality a secret plan to carry blacks to Cuba and reenslavement. The
Columbia Daily Register
denounced "the Liberian Fraud" as a scheme "gotten up by a few sharpers of your own race and a lot of white rascals, who would delude you by first robbing you of your little hard earnings and then leave you to die in the jungles." The Liberian relocation project did have a millenarian aspect: its boosters described a "promised land" of deliverance where potatoes grew so large that one sufficed to feed a family, syrup flowed from trees as if from a spigot, and the sunlight shone so intensely that there was never a need to build a fire.

As black South Carolinians waited throughout the autumn of 1877 for the Liberian Exodus Joint Stock Steamship Company to produce a ship, Senator Blanche K. Bruce submitted in Washington a petition from more than four hundred black Mississippians asking for $100,000 to move to Liberia. Bruce explained that he had begun to see "mischievous consequences not only to my race, but to the section generally in which they live," from the prospect of an exodus, but he felt that he could not in fairness disregard a request from so large a number of his constituents. In a letter to the
Cincinnati Commercial
he worried that the back-to-Africa movement was dangerously out of date, for "the motives that inspired and prompted the creation of [the American Colonization Society] were derived from a historic period of the Negro utterly unlike
the present." The ACS, Bruce reminded readers, had indeed acted to put the free blacks somewhere where they could enjoy freedom, but the organization also "looked to the protection and perpetuity of the institution of domestic slavery, as it then existed in the Southern states, by removing from all contact with the subordinated Negro communities of the South the freemen of color, whose example was supposed to breed discontent among his subject brethren."

Recent history had dislodged these presumptions, Bruce asserted. Now black Americans had participated in a "great revolution" that had made them citizens; they had earned a stake in the agricultural South, a region whose economy would collapse, were the blacks to disappear. Furthermore, Bruce suggested, the black American of the late 1870s would surely find Liberia an alien experience—"a land without roads and without vehicles of transportation; a community without a system of public schools, and a Republic without a press." With native Africans "he would find no common bond of union except simply in the color of the skin." After all, "the Negro of America is not African, but American—in his physical qualities and aptitudes, in his mental development and biases, in his religious beliefs and hopes, and in his political conception and convictions ... He is not a parasite, but a branch, drawing its life from the great American vine, taking on the type of American civilization and adapting himself to the genius of her institutions, as readily and unreservedly as his Caucasian brother."

In Congress, Bruce was consistently humane; he fought against efforts to restrict Chinese immigration and suggested civilizing the Plains Indians rather than exterminating them; he was also pragmatic, one of the first national figures to call for badly needed federal coordination of navigation and flood control improvements along the lower Mississippi River. But his vision of a coming racial enlightenment in the South—that blacks would someday "entertain independent political opinions without prejudice, and ... assert and exercise all rights without hindrance and without danger"—no doubt felt very remote and unreal to those who remained there, dwelling in fear of white violence, mourning their loss of the vote, and harnessed in the traces of the crop-lien system. With recent "reforms" in that institution increasing the size of the lien and hence the economic power of landowner over tenant, black farmers had to fight even harder for their family's sustenance and scrap of land, and more than a few, understandably, had come to see the struggle as futile.

At Charleston, meanwhile, the Liberian Exodus Joint Stock Steamship Company, with inexperienced management and only $6,000 in hand, was under siege from those who had put down money for their trip to Africa. Hundreds of emigrants had arrived in Charleston in anticipation of a spring sailing. Finally, a battered but sturdy old sea-wagon, the
Azov,
was purchased and lashed to a Charleston wharf; the boat, despite its dilapidated condition, became an object of fascination to all who rushed to gaze upon her. The ship was so overbooked when it finally departed for Liberia in late April 1878 that some 175 would-be pioneers were left standing with their luggage on the dock, watching their dream of emigration sail away over the horizon.