The Invisible Line (32 page)

 

 

 

 

 

O
.S.B. WALL'S FOOTSTEPS ECHOED in the hallways of the Capitol. The slap of leather on marble magnified his presence, announcing his arrival. But the echoes diminished him too, heralding his insignificance in a building of grand proportions. If being summoned to testify before Congress was a tribute to his prominence as a politician and a Race Man, the hearing would also provide yet another public occasion to be badgered, vilified, and humiliated.

The hearing was not in one of the Senate's great committee chambers—gilded, frescoed, with a sweeping view of the Mall. Tucked away in the basement, Wall's hearing looked as if it were taking place in the card room of an exclusive club. Bookcases lined the walls. Along the edges sat an assortment of committee clerks and reporters for the newspapers and wire services; some of the clerks were writing articles themselves to supplement their salaries. A large oak table in the middle took up most of the room. Wall knew where to sit. He had testified many times over the past eight years. He walked to one end of the table and faced his inquisitors.
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“State your name, age, and residence,” said the bearishly whiskered man on the other end of the table. It was Daniel Voorhees, the Indiana Copperhead chairing the newly formed Select Committee to Investigate the Causes of the Removal of the Negroes from the Southern States to the Northern States—a mass migration of Southern blacks in 1879 that was known as the Negro Exodus. Flanking him were four other senators. The committee—three Democrats, two Republicans—reflected the composition and preoccupations of the new congressional majority. Over the past year several thousand blacks from North Carolina had moved to Indiana. Senator Voorhees was convinced that the influx was a Republican plot to tip his closely divided state in the 1880 presidential election. His fellow committee member, North Carolina's senator and former governor Zebulon Vance, viewed the mass migration as a colossal threat to his state's supply of cheap labor. Senator Voorhees vowed to “find out who these infernal damned political scoundrels are, who are trying to flood our State with a lot of worthless negroes.” O.S.B. Wall, president of the National Emigrant Aid Society, was infernal damned political scoundrel number one.
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LESS THAN A DECADE before, Wall had been a respected politician, elected to two terms in Washington's legislative assembly by a majority white district. After three years of territorial government, Washington's avenues were layered with bituminous coal tar, and Boss Shepherd and his ring of “street paving jobbers” were millions of dollars richer. The whole country was engaged in frenzied speculation on railroads and real estate, betting that extending modern infrastructure to the wild corners of the West would make everyone rich. Wall too was aggressively upgrading. At the end of 1871 he bought a large lot steps away from Howard University and the Freedmen's Hospital and built a two-story wood-frame house. Next door John Mercer Langston was constructing his Swiss-inspired Hillside Cottage, which for the next five decades would be a social center for the District's aristocrats of color. Wall's house was on the same scale as Langston's, which cost the princely sum of $6,300 to build.
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With his savings swallowed up by the house, Wall had to support his family on a salary of less than one hundred dollars a month. His wife, Amanda, tried without success to get a charitable association to pay her for the classes she was conducting with freedpeople. In early 1872 she resolved to take music and French classes at Howard University so that she could qualify for a teaching credential. With “no possible way of defraying expense,” she appealed directly to Oliver Otis Howard to use his influence to get her hired as the seamstress at the Freedmen's Hospital, replacing the “Jewess of wealthy connections + Southern sympathizer” who currently had the job. But at the end of 1872 Amanda was pregnant. Laura Gertrude Wall was born the next year, and her father now had a family of seven to feed.
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When the baby was six months old, the nation's economy, floating on bad loans, foundered. The massive Panic of 1873—or Great Depression, as it was then known—claimed as its victims entire industries and millions of workers. Heavily invested in risky land and railroad schemes, the Freedmen's Bank collapsed in the middle of 1874. Tens of thousands of blacks lost tens of millions of dollars in savings. Wall had made his first deposit in the bank when he moved to Washington, and over the years his wife and children had opened their own accounts. Howard University almost failed.
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Across the country voters punished the Republicans, who had held power since the war. The party's 110-seat majority in the House of Representatives became a 60-seat deficit in the 1874 election. Although the lame-duck Republican Congress pushed through the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which guaranteed the “full and equal enjoyment” of “inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters, and other places of public amusement” as well as the rights of blacks to serve on juries, the new Democratic majority foretold dark days ahead for the nation's blacks. Northern sympathy for civil rights curdled into apathy or outright racism, and Southern whites were openly engaging in coordinated, violent campaigns to suppress black votes and retake power. Within two years there were no federal troops to defend against white attacks, and the Supreme Court had ruled that the federal government could not prosecute individuals who massacred fifty blacks in an election dispute.
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The District faced the Panic of 1873 drowning in debt from Boss Shepherd's binge on street paving and other infrastructure projects. Residents and congressmen committed to “good government” joined forces with Democrats to overhaul the District's political structure. The rampant corruption had been driven by some of Washington's richest and most powerful men, men who were at best lukewarm about civil rights. But the problems of territorial government were conflated with the alleged inability of blacks to participate in a democracy. Although blacks had shown independence in their political preferences, providing crucial votes to oust the Radical Republican mayor Sayles Bowen in 1869, whites assumed without discussion that blacks constituted an undifferentiated voting bloc that could be bought off and manipulated. In June 1874 Congress dissolved the territorial legislature and created a three-man commission appointed by the president to run the District. Residents would not cast ballots in local elections for another century. The first jurisdiction during Reconstruction to grant full voting rights for black men became the first jurisdiction to take those rights away.
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The tragedy befalling Negro suffrage was played as farce. Newspapers breathlessly reported that upon the dissolution of the legislature, members of the House of Delegates looted the assembly building. Never mind that there were only a couple of blacks in the legislature. The District's experiment with equal voting rights was dismissed as an inevitable failure because blacks were unfit to govern. The dailies developed a derisive shorthand for this failure after one delegate was reportedly caught on his way out of the assembly building with a cleaning implement stuffed in his sock. O.S.B. Wall was no longer a pioneer, leader, or public servant. All black politicians, according to the press and much of its readership, were mere “Feather Dusters.”
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As the District turned away from civil rights, day-to-day life became markedly more hostile for everyone from freedpeople to colored aristocrats. Blacks and whites stopped socializing. Restaurants routinely refused blacks service despite the local law that guaranteed equal access to public accommodations.
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As a justice of the peace and former delegate, Wall remained prominent in the colored community. He agitated for restoring voting rights to the District and led efforts to urge the president to appoint the former mayor Sayles Bowen as one of the new commissioners. When another citizens' group voted to propose a different man to be commissioner, Wall was respected enough to be brought in to inspect and count the ballots. He petitioned Congress for federal land “for the purpose of endowing a home for the indigent poor of the District of Columbia” and helped arrange events celebrating the unveiling of a “Freedmen's monument” in Lincoln Park on Capitol Hill.
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Outside his community, however, Wall's stature was fading. Newspapers started ridiculing him. In 1873 he was castigated for a conflict of interest when as justice of the peace he issued an arrest warrant for an accused lumber thief, only to defend the man in his hearing at the police court. The next year the
National Republican
printed a letter full of misspellings that Wall supposedly wrote to the District of Columbia Supreme Court, asking for a copy of his law license because he “lost the fust one.” Wall sued the paper's editor for $10,000 for suggesting that he was “an illiterate ignorant and stupid man and a shallow pretender in his profession.” A few years later Wall was blasted for issuing an arrest warrant for a three-year-old child. In a letter to the editor of one paper, Wall explained that “justices who issue warrants for the arrest of parties . . . are obliged to depend entirely upon the
exparte
statement of the complainant as to the facts,” but for many, the incident confirmed his reputation as a bumbler. “Wall knows as much about
law
as he does about
conic sections
,” wrote one man to
The Washington Post
. The
Daily Critic
called him “Oh! S. B. Wall.”
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Wall's reputation suffered its most serious blow during the 1878 congressional hearings into the conditions and administration of the Freedmen's Hospital. Witness after witness accused Wall of sparking the investigation with baseless charges of corruption and patient mistreatment, all because the hospital's chief, Gideon S. Palmer, refused to buy food from a grocery store that Wall had started. For two years, Dr. Palmer said, he had been “constantly beset” by Wall, “directly and indirectly, to induce me to purchase supplies from him, and to purchase supplies from persons recommended by him.” The owner of a clothing concern said that in exchange for the discharge of a forty-dollar debt, Wall promised to use his influence to land him a contract to supply the Freedmen's Hospital with coats, blouses, stockings, and cotton ticking. Wall, another witness testified, often said that he was “entitled to patronage” because he had worked to get the old hospital administrator fired and Dr. Palmer hired.
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The testimony revealed a man in financial trouble, alternately begging and bullying for scraps of hospital business. The hearings also showed someone who had learned some fundamental lessons about politics during the Boss Shepherd years. For Wall, power, patronage, and material gain were indistinguishable. He had the confidence to organize alliances and agitate for change, however dubious the cause. He was unafraid to throw his weight around, even with whites. “You will see trouble, I think,” he icily threatened Dr. Palmer. “We are going to look into the crookedness of the Freedmen's Hospital, and when we get through I will shake hands with you.”
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The details only got more damaging for Wall. According to Dr. Palmer, Wall would implore him to “give the patronage to a colored man” and “would often use language like this, ‘You won't give a poor fellow a chance to live; it was intended in these appropriations to give us poor fellows a chance to make something.' ” Wall's own brother Albert, a dairy farmer who supplied the hospital with fresh milk—and perhaps was struggling to keep his contract—testified that Wall said that if “he should accomplish his purpose, which he was positive of doing, if he would put a man in that hospital whom he could control . . . I would have more patronage from the institution; and a great many things I cannot just think of at present.” Wall's old friend Charles Purvis, a doctor at the hospital, called Wall a “rascal” and a “scoundrel.” The hospital's meat supplier testified that Wall promised extra cents per pound in exchange for support in his quest to oust Dr. Palmer. “I told him I was not going to place myself in the hands of any colored man as my owner,” said the meat dealer. “I never owned a colored man in my life, and I would not own one, or suffer one to own me.”
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Buried within the bluster and bad behavior was a deep anger over what life in the District had become for an ambitious black man. Wall reportedly called Dr. Palmer a “Yankee scoundrel” and vowed that the “Yankee scoundrels shall not have the patronage down here to do as they please with.” The city's colored institutions were run by whites. Howard University in 1875 had rejected John Mercer Langston as its first black president, even though he had ably served as acting president.
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Dr. Palmer's predecessor at the hospital—Robert Reyburn, the surgeon who had treated Wall's gunshot wound—was, according to Wall, a member of an all-white medical society and was “indispos[ed] to grant certain privileges . . . to the colored students” studying medicine at Howard. Wall successfully got Reyburn fired but was frustrated in his efforts to get Charles Purvis hired as the new head. “I had my reasons” for “trying and exhausting on Purvis to get him appointed,” Wall said, “and they were simply that he was a colored man.” Amanda Wall and Carrie Langston led a petition drive, also unsuccessful, to get another colored doctor, Alexander T. Augusta, chosen to lead the hospital. Only a few years before, Wall had been one of the “ruling spirits of the Bowen and Public Works
regime
.” Now that his moment of power was over, he and his race were left with very little. Desperate and disillusioned, Wall risked his reputation over groceries—and lost.
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