Capitol Men (8 page)

The Reconstruction Act provided for potentially momentous changes in the lives of African Americans—the opportunity to vote as free men as well as the ability to serve as publicly elected officials. As scholars such as Steven Hahn have stressed, blacks, even as they emerged from slavery, tended to recognize the economic and political issues affecting their situation. But to better know their new rights, the use of the ballot box, and the functioning of a parliamentary democracy, many freedmen turned to the Union League. Begun in New York and Philadelphia during the war, league chapters in the postwar South worked to educate freedmen on the duties of citizenship, provided aid related to labor and land issues, and were strongly allied with Republican sentiments. Naturally, white Southerners distrusted the organization (they derided the chapters as "Loyal Leagues"), based on what the historian Thomas Holt has termed the "new massa" syndrome—the conviction among whites that black people were incapable of independent thought, and that, in the absence of slavery, white Northerners were serving as "thought police" to the ignorant ex-slaves, using the singing of patriotic songs and the teaching of the Declaration of Independence to shape their political attitudes and even direct their actions. It was true that the Union League
did not allow those opposed to their work to take part in their meetings, but they were generally open to everyone (many attendees brought their wives and children), and in the final analysis the gatherings probably had significant social and political influence but less than Southerners imagined: the former slaves, after all, needed little convincing that their best interests lay with the Party of Lincoln.

There was probably little that Republicans or Union Leaguers could have done, in any case, to assuage Southern fears of the vast changes taking place. In addition to tens of thousands of new black citizens in every Southern state, legions of Northerners—former soldiers, railroad men, missionaries, teachers, judges, investors, novice cotton planters—had moved south after the war. Whether their business was private enterprise or political work with the Union League or the state conventions, Northerners of either race who entered or remained in the South were categorized uniformly by the derogatory appellation "carpetbagger." While the precise origin of the term is unclear, its negative implication was never in doubt; it referred to persons so scheming, untrustworthy, and "lightweight" that their belongings fit into a cheap piece of luggage, one made of an old carpet remnant with two wooden handles and convenient for sudden departures. The image perfectly captured Southerners' distaste for outside interference in their business. Coupled with other popular mid-nineteenth-century slurs, such as "puppy" (one who is "owned" by others, such as a teacher dispatched by a Northern missionary society), "bummer" (a vagrant who sponges off others, often applied to the members of Sherman's army who decimated Georgia and South Carolina), or the more serious "poltroon" (a duplicitous coward), the effect was utterly and always degrading.

One of the best-known caricatures of Reconstruction is the Thomas Nast cartoon of the 1870s, showing a Southern "black and tan" legislature, a belittling term frequently used for these unprecedented biracial conclaves. Black men in ill-fitting suits gnaw on fried chicken, sip from flasks, and hector one another with all the civility of the barnyard, while at the podium Columbia, Nast's flag-draped female representation of America, gavels in vain for order. Behind her on the wall, ignored by all, is a tattered banner bearing President Grant's famous postwar admonition to his countrymen,
LET US HAVE PEACE.
As it became known that, by edict of the Reconstruction Acts, black men would sit in elected bodies such as state constitutional conventions, Southern newspapers anticipated Nast's crude depiction. "Can you change a carrot into a melon?" demanded Parson W. G. Brownlow, in a much-reprinted letter.
"Can you grow an oak from a peanut? Will a donkey produce an Arabian horse?...Most certainly not! You cannot undo what God has intended shall never be undone. It is, therefore, simply impossible for you to change an African into an Anglo-Saxon."

A DEPICTION OF "COLORED RULE
"

Most of the state constitutional conventions, however, despite the infamy assigned them by resentful whites "on account of the usurped and
polluted source from whence it springs" (the Radical Congress) and the appearance of "delegates in every stage of nigritude," would largely demonstrate that such disparagement was unearned. The new constitutions that emerged after weeks of deliberation were often so reasonable that even the white supremacists who, years later, set out to undo them were moved, by practical considerations, to leave many of their tenets intact. "Representing a constituency that previously had been ignored," notes James Underwood of the convention held in South Carolina, the convention's seventy-six black and forty-eight white delegates "crafted a document with a deeper insight into the meaning of freedom, an insight possessed only by the freedmen who had known slavery and the freeborn who knew how precarious freedom could be without constitutional protection."

New England's Gilbert Haven, visiting the South on behalf of the
Atlantic Monthly,
was convinced he was seeing one of the most impressive spectacles of the age: in South Carolina, the very seat of secessionist fervor, the delegates to the convention were black, their aides were black, as were the pages, doormen, and carriage drivers. Haven reminded his readers that in Massachusetts all the considerable effort of the great Senator Charles Sumner had failed to secure a black man a job as chaplain in the state legislature; South Carolina, he concluded, was acting with more ardor than any other part of the country to expand the boundaries of true democracy.

As Haven's observations suggest, the state constitutional conventions held across the South as mandated by Congress were extraordinary events—the nation's first biracial experiment in governance and in most instances the first time blacks had participated in decision-making forums involving whites. Would the freedmen grasp the workings of democratic government? Would they know how to behave, how to listen, how to vote? What attitude would they take toward those who had so recently held them in bondage? There were many Northern men, white and black, involved in these conventions, hoping to see the Southern states adopt "Northern style" or even "New England-like" constitutions. The Northerners were hundreds of miles from their homes, but it was the Southern black participants, many former slaves, who had in fact traveled the most remarkable distance. As convention delegates, they had little time to grow accustomed to this new realm or the responsibilities they'd consented to bear. The gaze of a weary but hopeful nation was upon them.

O
NE OF THE MOST NOTABLE
state constitutional conventions held in response to the Reconstruction Acts took place in South Carolina, the war's birthplace and long a seedbed of antigovern-ment sentiment. It was one of three former Confederate states—along with Louisiana and Mississippi—in which blacks formed a majority of the population and the state that would ultimately send the most black representatives (six) to Congress during Reconstruction. The convention, which opened in Charleston in January 1868, would also be the setting for an emotional and protracted argument over Reconstruction's most divisive issue—land for the freedmen.

The debate's instigator was Richard Cain, an African Methodist Episcopal minister who would eventually become the first black clergyman to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives. He had been dispatched to Charleston by the leadership of the denomination at war's end to help revive Emmanuel Church, shuttered by the city since 1822 because it was thought Denmark Vesey had used its sanctuary to plot his failed slave insurrection. A freeborn native of Greenbrier County, Virginia, Cain had grown up in Ohio, where he was educated and worked as a steamboat deck hand before attending Wilberforce University and spending the war years behind a pulpit in Brooklyn, New York. Reopened, the Emmanuel slowly gained a substantial congregation, with Cain guiding the membership drive as well as the physical restoration of the building.

Contemporary accounts suggest that Cain was an extremely charismatic man, short in stature but with a compact physique, a booming voice, and a strong, expressive face. His followers bestowed upon him the honorific "Daddy," a term that local whites, who disliked Cain and considered him a Northern interloper, at times used to denigrate him.
Their own preferred nickname for him was "the Missing Link," an allusion to his thick lips and heavy muttonchop whiskers, which, they claimed, made him resemble an ape. Cain, always willing to give as good as he got, was known to consider most white people "rattlesnakes."

RICHARD "DADDY" CAIN

Encouraged by his success at the Emmanuel, he went on to help organize A.M.E. congregations in several outlying South Carolina towns; he was at first disinclined, and probably had little time, to get involved in local politics. The large number of white carpetbaggers flooding into the state troubled him, and he hesitated to affiliate with either political party, leading the
Charleston Mercury
to accuse him of occupying "a position of betwixity." But, devoted to his flock, he came to recognize that their most urgent needs, such as land ownership, were political in nature; and the injustice of South Carolina's Black Codes brought him eventually to side with local Radicals. Along with a partner, the lawyer Robert Brown Elliott, Cain began publishing the
Leader,
later renamed the
Missionary Record,
the first black newspaper in South Carolina during Reconstruction.

"The possession of lands and homesteads is one of the best means by which a people is made industrious, honest and advantageous to the State," Cain believed, contrasting the potential of land ownership to the hardships of the sharecropping, or crop-lien, system. "As long as people are working on shares and contracts, and at the end of every year are in debt, so long will they and the country suffer." He asked that the freedmen receive the chance to "take the hoe and the axe, cut down the forest, and make the whole land blossom as the Garden of Eden."

Despite his initial reluctance, Cain took naturally to the political sphere, first as a city alderman, then as a delegate to the 1868 constitutional convention. His church constituency and his newspaper made him a formidable power broker and spokesman for the dispossessed, and even whites who held him in contempt often had no choice but to respect his authority.

In Cain's Charleston, as elsewhere in the state, blacks experienced a
profound upwelling of emotion as they voted, on November 19 and 20, 1867, in the referendum for a new constitutional convention. In the Sea Islands the balloting was held in a building in coastal Beaufort formerly used as a "hall of justice," a place where slaves were sentenced to punishment. This structure was adjacent to the arsenal and the local prison; it had long been the site of slave auctions, whippings, and hangings, the very place where Robert Smalls's mother had taken him to rub his nose in the brutality of chattel slavery. The poignancy of the location was not lost on the former slaves who cast their ballots there that day; it was said some became so overwhelmed, they shed tears.

That the state's freedmen would seize the opportunity to vote should have come as no surprise: black South Carolinians, even before the Civil War had ended, had shown their political fervor. When Union forces marched into Charleston in March 1865, thousands of men, women, and children had swarmed the troops, cheering and hoisting banners that read
EQUAL RIGHTS
and
WE KNOW NO CASTE OR COLOR!
while pushing along a float fringed in black—the "hearse" transporting the now quite dead "Body of Slavery." Within two years, they demanded the integration of the city's new streetcar line. At a rally in Citadel Square in March 1867, Daddy Cain was joined by two newly minted black leaders—his publishing partner, the lawyer Robert Brown Elliott, and the former shipping-house clerk Alonzo Ransier—in exhorting the crowd to force the streetcar company to amend its policy. A local white newspaper urged blacks to remember that "the people of Charleston have not, as yet, become accustomed to the presence of colored persons as citizens," but after a black woman was manhandled by white streetcar conductors, officers of the Freedmen's Bureau intervened, convincing the streetcar company to allow equal access on a trial basis. As it turned out, whites seemed to enjoy the novelty and convenience of the new streetcar service too much to care about who sat near them, and, though some feared it, a white boycott of the line did not materialize.