Negroes and the Gun (16 page)

Some of the inputs on decisions to keep and bear arms are demonstrated in the records of the United States Senate Committee on Southern Reconstruction. A letter from a teacher at a freedmen's school in Maryland demonstrates one set of concerns. The letter contains the standard complaints about racist attacks on the school and then describes one strand of the local response. “Both the Mayor and the sheriff have warned the colored people to go armed to school, (which they do) [and] the superintendent of schools came down and brought me a revolver.”

In other testimony, a music teacher from Virginia described attacks on Union men who “drew their revolvers and held their assailants at bay.” This affiant then volunteered that he also was constantly armed.
48
A Freedman's Bureau commissioner from Richmond, Virginia, described how common folk were widely armed and resisted the various efforts to take their guns. To the committee's question, “Are there many arms among the blacks,” he responded “Yes sir; attempts have been made in many instances to disarm them; it has not been allowed; they [citizens patrols] would disarm the Negroes at once if they could.”

Fig. 3.4. Depiction of Negro Soldiers and the Klan. (Still taken from
The Birth of a Nation
, directed by D. W. Griffith, 1915.)

A reporter from Texas noted that communities of freedmen had successfully resisted attempts to take their guns and celebrated their victories with ostentatious displays. “Negroes are seldom molested now in carrying the firearms of which they make such a vain display. In one way or another, they have procured great numbers of old army muskets and revolvers, particularly in Texas, and I have in a few instances, been amused at the vigor and audacity with which they have employed them to protect themselves against the robbers and murderers that infest that state.”
49

Although we cannot track it through the kind of empirical assessments that are common today, black firearms ownership also generated plenty of intragroup violence in the postwar era. This included a component of domestic violence of the type illustrated in the 1866 prosecution in Mississippi of W. D. Chase. Chase lived in the Negro quarters of Vicksburg, with his wife, Phyllis. Neighbors reported that
they quarreled about money, about his drinking, and about apparent visits of a white soldier to the home when Chase was gone. Witnesses heard the couple fighting about a pistol, and one neighbor reports Chase yelling, “I will shoot any woman who will take a white man and leave me.” That oath was followed by a gunshot, and neighbors gathered to find a despondent Chase crying, “Oh ma if you die I want to die too.”

Even during the war, there were indications that the contraband camps that grew up behind Union lines suffered from prosaic black criminality involving firearms. Reporting on the camp towns around Vicksburg, Mississippi, describes frequent gunfire, theft, and other crime. One editorial, from an admittedly unsympathetic white newspaper, chided that there was money to be made by anyone who could fashion a bulletproof covering for the meager structures of the Vicksburg camp.
50

For the immediate postwar period, we are left to surmise from surrogate evidence that a significant part of the violence that affected blacks was intraracial. An unusual postslavery experiment is instructive. The venue was the imagined slave utopia of Mississippi planter Joseph Davis, brother of Confederate president Jefferson Davis. Spurred by the theories of English social reformers, Joseph Davis sought to establish a model slave community. He built sturdy cottages with plaster walls and fireplaces to quarter his 350 slaves and established a court where slave juries decided complaints about misbehavior and whether a slave should be punished. Before whipping a slave, overseers were required to get a conviction against the culprit by a jury of his peers. In April 1862, Joseph Davis fled his plantation, leaving his slaves behind as Union forces advanced.
51

Sometime around the end of the war, Davis transferred ownership of the plantation to one of his favored slaves, Benjamin Montgomery, who appropriated Davis's vision and reconfigured the place as the town of Davis Bend. Montgomery sat as judge in a variety of disputes between the free blacks of Davis Bend. Perhaps reflecting the broader trend, roughly one third of the cases involved crimes of violence.

A broader assessment in Warren County, Mississippi, between 1865 and 1867 confirms the hazards that blacks faced during that period from both whites and other blacks, and it helps us understand why they might seek out guns for self-defense. While court records do not always specify race, one observer claimed that not a day passed without news of some robbery or murder of a black victim.
52

The program of congressional Reconstruction initiated by radical Republicans, over the objections and vetoes of President Andrew Johnson, exacerbated simmering fears about rising black political power and looming retribution. Rumors spread
of armed blacks drilling in nightly conclaves, waiting for some signal to unleash a massacre. Those fears often centered on black rifle companies that were common in the postwar era.
53

The fears and rumors provoked by the black rifle companies are easy to understand. And it is also worth pausing to consider just the existence of these groups. One longs for some detailed record of the membership, activities, sources of guns, and agenda of such groups. But, like many chapters in the black experience, the details here are thin. Still, there is enough evidence to demonstrate that many blacks during this period owned guns, knew how to use them, and saw firearms as important personal-security tools.

Black veterans played a significant role in rifle companies like David Cooper's group in Cape Fear, North Carolina, and John Eagles's Wilmington Rifle Guard. The Wilmington Rifle Guard drilled every week and was a central feature in the annual Emancipation Day parade. This and other celebrations by black Wilmington were often followed by Creedmoor-style target-shooting competitions that drew hundreds of participants and spectators.
54

In the fall of 1867, two independent black militias drilled publicly in Washington, DC, displaying arms that they had purchased from the federal government. President Andrew Johnson's order to disband sparked controversy, and the military commander of the district responded that absent a declaration of martial law, he had no authority to enforce the president's order. The mayor of the district confirmed that the black militia had not broken any local laws. The Negroes finally did stop parading, but they kept their arms and did not disband.
55

The activities of the rifle clubs and militias were not the exclusive province of veterans. Organized practice and competition with firearms drew participation from the broader community at open public events. In 1866, for example, roughly four hundred blacks gathered at a Pitt County, North Carolina, plantation for a Fourth of July celebration that included “target practice with Springfield rifles.”
56

George Washington Albright of Mississippi further demonstrates that black rifle companies were not dependent on leadership from veterans. Albright was a carpenter and a teacher, who organized a black volunteer militia aimed “to keep the common people on top and fight off the attacks of the landlords and former slave owners.”
57

Much of the public practice of arms by Negroes in the postwar era was connected to the burgeoning political development of the freedmen. Channeling this political ambition, black chapters of the Union League formed throughout the South. Their secrecy, ritual, late-night meetings, and posting of armed sentinels fueled rumors of armed black men intent on mayhem. Despite the often-innocuous content and consequence of Union League meetings, they were, in fact, a venue where Negroes with guns assembled. And sometimes this was more than just for show.

Fig. 3.5. “The Colored Creedmoor,” a comic depiction of postwar black gun culture. (“The Colored Creedmoor,” wood engraving by Thomas Nast,
Harper's Weekly
magazine, New York, August 28, 1875.)

In Harnett County, North Carolina, a league chapter threatened violence to secure release of colored orphans bound out to white planters. A league chapter in Brazos, Texas, under the leadership of Reverend George Brooks, battled a party of the hooded night riders in 1868, and the episode spurred blacks to acquire more guns and step up public military-style drills
.
Demonstrating again that arms are no guarantee of safety, league leader George Brooks was subsequently murdered.

In Morgan County, Georgia, George Flemister reorganized a league chapter that had dissolved under Klan pressure. The reconstituted Morgan County League was instrumental in Republican electoral gains and then attempted to expand its influence to community protection. When a black man named Charles Clark was arrested on a specious rape charge, a squad of armed Union League members rallied to guard him from lynching. Believing the threat had passed, they dispersed. Later, a group of white men in “long gowns . . . and some great sharp things upon their heads” broke into the jail and killed Clark. They then ransacked Flemister's little shoe-repair business and ran him out of town.

In Grant, North Carolina, Union League leader Wyatt Outlaw, son of a slave mother and a white Unionist, organized league members to establish a school, a church, and a vigilance committee that patrolled the community. He actually urged blacks to rely on his patrols and avoid individual violence. Ultimately,
Outlaw was unable to keep a lid on the violence. Incensed by his political activism, members of the White Brotherhood seized Wyatt Outlaw and hanged him in the town square.

In Maury County, Tennessee, league members stood by their promise of mutual defense when night riders threatened their leader, Pleasant Hill. They rushed to the scene with “muskets and revolvers [and] in this way kept them off and defended ourselves . . . until daylight.” In Darlington County, South Carolina, a league chapter redoubled its preparations on the rumor of an impending Klan attack, and with weapons displayed, they took control of the town.

Similar episodes were recorded in Macon, Mississippi, and Granville County, North Carolina. The show of force by the Granville County League was enough to prompt a democratic leader to offer terms. He proposed that if the blacks would stand down, “he would stop the Ku Klux.” In Oktibbeha County, Mississippi, an entire league chapter marched with arms to the county seat, spurred by lynch rumors following the arrest of one of their members.
58

In South Carolina and Alabama, league chapters rejected the authority of the state and county courts, setting up their own judicial system and selecting a community sheriff. This led to charges of insurrection, and the Alabama movement leader was arrested.

An 1867 conflict involving Union League activists in Hale County, Alabama, triggered an escalating cycle of violence. It started with a fight in the town of Greensboro, between a white merchant and Alex Webb, a black Union League activist who served as registrar of voters. The merchant ended up shooting Webb, who died a short while later. Suspecting some larger plot, and fearing that the murderer had been aided by townsfolk, armed Negroes flooded into town. Then they scoured the countryside in search of suspected conspirators and dragged one half-naked man back into town as evidence of their effort.