IJAS Special Issue: New work in 19th-Century Historical and Literary studies
In the aftermath of civil war, the former Confederate states became the setting for one of the most tumultuous confrontations in American history. The sharp descent from “jubilee” among formerly enslaved Black laborers at the new dawn of emancipation to deep despair just over a decade later – leading, by the end of the nineteenth century, to what Leon Litwack called the ‘most brutal and repressive period in the history of race relations’ – is a reversal without parallel in US history. Even on a global scale it is difficult to find instances where the arc of history bent so abruptly from buoyant hope at slavery’s demise to dejection and, in many places, fully justified panic at the resurrection of white supremacy after the overthrow of Reconstruction in 1876. The article below explores this sharp reversal as a turning point in post-emancipation African American politics, concentrating on the dramatic shift in attitudes toward emigration among freedpeople – the four million former slaves emancipated during the Civil War – in the late Reconstruction South. [1]
Scholarly discussion about the appeal of emigrationist sentiment among African Americans has often been bound up with longstanding debates on the relative strength of nationalist and separatist tendencies over the urge toward assimilation as American citizens—a tension acknowledged in W. E. B. DuBois’s conception of ‘double-consciousness’ as an enduring, fundamental feature in the African American experience. Focusing on the lives of two prominent grassroots organizers in the late Reconstruction South, the narrative trajectory detailed below suggests that historians obscure a critical aspect of freedpeople’s experience when we portray either nationalism or assimilation as inherent, naturally ascendant elements in grassroots Black politics after emancipation. [2]
Responding to Steven Hahn’s erudite, forceful assertion of nationalist continuity in rural Black politics before and after the demise of slavery, Thomas Holt has written, perceptively, that it makes little sense to ‘[pit] urban against rural and advocates of a “liberal integrationist framework” against nationalists’ when, in practice, freedpeople (and generations after them) ‘so freely trampled across’ these boundaries. Here Holt builds upon an older historical literature that emphasized the dynamic quality of African American politics as freedpeople navigated the narrow ground between aspiration and deep structural barriers. The evidence below affirms the judiciousness in understanding these abrupt shifts as flexible, adaptive and pragmatic responses to changing conditions rather than emanating out of fixed or fully-formed ideological commitments. Here John W. Cell’s fluid framing of Black politics at the nadir, acknowledging the three most prominent responses to African Americans’ predicament (accommodation, militant confrontation and separatism) as ‘all implicit in the situation’, provides a useful model for grasping the relationship between external pressures and dynamic, ever-shifting intra-racial deliberation. [3]
There is a considerable body of scholarship pointing to what we might call the dialectic between white hostility and Black separatism: both before and after emancipation, the relative hold of separatism and assimilation over Black popular consciousness tended to ‘ebb and flow’ depending on changes in the wider context. One early study noted that while ‘nationalist sentiment ‘was ever-present’, it ‘tends to be most pronounced when the Negroes’ status has declined, or when they have experienced intense disillusionment following a period of heightened but unfulfilled expectations.’ Significantly, the authors pointed to a ‘dramatic drop in interest in colonization interest among the black elite during the Civil War and Reconstruction’, at a time when assimilation under conditions of full and equal citizenship seemed within reach. The study that follows excavates the sharp reversal in circumstances that drove a powerful revival of ‘exodus fever’ among freedpeople as Reconstruction began to collapse around them: in it we can see clearly the turning point at which the optimism that had attended emancipation gave way to despair. [4]
To begin with jubilee: while the celebratory tone in recent scholarship has underestimated the degree of circumspection that freedpeople in remote and isolated sections of the plantation South were compelled to observe in the months after Confederate surrender, on the whole there can be little doubt that former slaves were euphoric over the end of slavery and hopeful about their future prospects.[5] After a period of deep vexation and uncertainty under President Andrew Johnson’s administration in the critical period following the war’s end[6]—a tenure marked by his rehabilitation of the very forces in Southern society that had initiated a war for slavery in the first place—freedpeople’s hopes were renewed by the ascent of Republican Radicals to power in Washington in 1867, and underpinned by the passing of the Reconstruction Acts and the granting of suffrage to Black men. The shift at Washington corresponded with a remarkable grassroots mobilization among the formerly enslaved. When Black Union League organizers toured South Carolina in 1867, they reported that everywhere they went the ‘colored men’ were ‘wide awake’. Organizers held meetings in about two-thirds of the state’s thirty counties, organizing Leagues in ten of them. ‘When any person known to be in sympathy with the Republican Party . . . goes into any neighborhood to speak, the freedmen flock in crowds to hear him,’ they reported. [7]
The reaction among their former masters confirms the transformation: planters complained that freedpeople had become ‘the most irrepressible democrats it is possible to conceive’; their ‘heads are full of politics,’ one lowcountry planter observed, ‘and they have no idea of work until starvation forces them.’ [8] Turning out the vote at election time was an important aspect of the Leagues’ work, and as David Montgomery has observed, ‘Ballots and bullets were never mutually exclusive in the Reconstruction South’. Indeed claiming their collective right to vote often required local Leagues to organize armed escorts for Republican voters. [9] But the scope of their activity was much broader: Leagues functioned as quasi-revolutionary grassroots militias, and often as labor unions – organizing strikes and enforcing contracts, punishing masters who persisted in resorting to the whip or abusing women and children. Michael Fitzgerald documents a fairly typical confrontation between League members in Alabama and a Bullock County planter who resorted to the whip in disciplining a freedwomen under his employ in the summer of 1867:
The next evening, hands from surrounding farms massed on his estate. They broke into Wiggins’ house and seized him “without any authority save their radical ideas.” What they intended is not clear, but white neighbors claimed that the freedmen were going to lynch him. Armed whites reached the scene. The deadlock was resolved the following morning by the arrival of black reinforcements summoned from miles around. The blacks conveyed their prisoner to the nearest magistrate, who, doubtless intimidated, placed him under arrest. [10]
Freed men obviously exercised the vote directly, but in important ways – as Elsa Barkley Brown, Steven Hahn and others have observed – the freed community wielded “collective possession” of the ballot during the early years of Reconstruction, a phenomenon that affirms Thulani Davis’s point about the ‘capacious sense of the political’ that former slaves brought in to confrontations with white social and economic power during Reconstruction. [11] One of the striking features of this mobilization was the prominent role assumed by freedwomen, an ‘unladylike’ posturing that struck more than a few of their northern ‘allies’ as scandalous. As the former fire-eating Charleston Mercury observed contemptuously in November 1868, Black working women ‘seemed vastly interested in the political conflict . . . as though the millennium had dawned for their special benefit.’ [12]
In this early period, it seems clear, the appeal of emigration seems barely perceptible among Black laborers conscious of their new and substantial power to dictate terms around wages and conditions, and who were busy reconstituting themselves as free communities under the shelter of federal authority. There were, of course, longstanding tensions between Black abolitionists and white advocates of repatriation to Africa going back to the early antebellum period – tensions that resurfaced during wartime in a tense meeting between Lincoln and a delegation of prominent African American leaders, in which Frederick Douglass angrily dismissed Lincoln’s suggestions about colonization. [13] These dissipated, briefly, in a new post-emancipation context that seemed to hold out the possibility for laying claim to equality in a reborn American nation. Eric Foner observes that after some early departures to Liberia just after the war’s end, ‘the optimism kindled by black suffrage brought the movement to an abrupt halt.’ And it was not merely the ballot that former slaves believed was on offer in the early period of Radical ascendancy: freedpeople looked expectantly to the federal government to undertake land redistribution. Foner writes that the ‘transformation of the former slave South– or the hope that this was imminent – ‘deal[t] a death blow, at least for this generation, to ideas of emigration.’ [14]
This indifference to the emigrationist appeal within the Black community developed – in the context of fiercely contested elections from 1868 onward – into outright hostility. In a situation where white conservatives organized in the Democratic Party were doing everything in their power to cut away at Black suffrage– including the widespread resort to organized paramilitary terror by armed clandestine groups like the Ku Klux Klan, the White Leagues and the Knights of the White Camelia– the assertive grassroots among former slaves was determined to uphold the Republican vote, viewing attempts to persuade freedpeople to emigrate out of the South as a form of Democratic “dirty tricks” – in essence, as a conservative plot. Before the collapse of radicalism under the weight of organized violence, freedpeople across the plantation South were engaged in raucous internal debate over strategy and ultimate aims. In this context many of the most active Radicals regarded flight as a form of abstention on the critical issue of whether Reconstruction would succeed or fail. [15]
Ground-level activists were united and adamant in their opposition to emigration at a time when their most bitter adversaries were doing their utmost to whittle down the Black vote. Supporters of the American Colonization Society (ACS) across the region reported violent opposition from the Republican grassroots, a hostility that seemed to become particularly acute at election time. From North Carolina, a Black organizer wrote in 1868 that the Union League was ‘opposed to my leaving this country with a party of coloured people’, and that it had gone so far as intercepting his correspondence with the ACS from the local post office to prevent an exodus. Similar frustrations marked efforts in Aiken, South Carolina, where an organizer reported that a ‘Grate dele of [prospective emigrants]’ now ‘Declined Gowing to Liberia’ after ‘some body turned there Mind’. [16] At Sumter, amid tight elections four years later, one correspondent reported that it was
Impossible to do much towards interesting the negroes in [the Liberia] cause on account of the great political excitement… Every negro is made to believe, that on his vote [and] influence the whole welfare of the US Government depends [and] they feel their importance in a wonderful degree. [17]
It was in this early period of assertive freedpeople’s mobilization and Radical Republican ascendancy at Washington that the Rev. Elias Hill came into prominence as the leader of the Republican grassroots in upcountry South Carolina. Hill’s backstory is a remarkable one: born into slavery in 1819, he was struck with a debilitating neurological disease that left him severely disabled from a young age. One journalist described him as having ‘the arms, legs and feet of a small child, the body of a boy, and the head…of a full-grown man.’ [18] Relieved from physical labor at a young age, Hill acquired literacy by listening in on the lessons of white children on the plantation his mother worked at Clay Hill, just south of the North Carolina border in York County. By his teen years he was well versed in the bible, and by the war’s end was a licensed Baptist minister with a wide following in the upcountry; by 1867 Hill was teaching school across the region, and freedpeople reportedly came from a radius of ten or fifteen miles around to hear his fluent mix of millennial Republican politics and the Christian gospel. One federal official described him as ‘the chief spiritual, social and political adviser for all the Negroes in this section’. With ‘all his hideous deformity of body,’ journalists reported, ‘Hill had ‘a massive intellectual head, a clear, sonorous voice, and an intelligent, eagle-like expression’. It was this juxtaposition between Elias Hill’s ‘singular physical helplessness’ and his impressive ‘mental attainments’ that elicited, among freedpeople, ‘a reverence and awe’ that, according to one account, ‘amounted to idolatry’. [19]
The trajectory of Hill’s remarkable activist life bears witness to the dramatic changes in a period that, fleetingly, saw the ‘bottom rail’ in southern society rise to the ‘top’. [20] Hill became deeply engaged in grassroots Republican politics, rising quickly to prominence in local party organization. By 1867 he was listed as the president of the York County Union League, heading the upcountry campaign to see Ulysses S. Grant elected president in 1868, and was offered a position as Trial Justice by the state’s Republican governor a year later, declining only because (as he put it) he was then consumed with devising a strategy to help freedpeople acquire land. Hill was throughout this early period a determined opponent of emigration, viewing the Republicans as an earthly embodiment of sacred work: he insisted that the Party ‘came closer to God’s will and universal love and friendship than any other’. [21]
Henry Adams came into grassroots politics by a different trajectory, and was perhaps more skeptical of the Republican Party’s capacity for (and commitment to) delivering Black equality than Elias Hill. The son of a preacher, physically he was described as a large and broad-shouldered man. He came by his rudimentary literacy in the ranks of the US military, which he joined only at the war’s end, in 1866, with the explicit aim of defending freedpeople from the outrages then being perpetrated against them. Upon his discharge in 1869, Adams organized a ‘committee’ of 150 black veterans to spread out through the plantation South and report on the ‘true condition of our race’ across the region. Although he’d accumulated some property by this time, Adams made it a point to ‘[take] the part of the laboring classes’. The committee, which according to Adams grew to 500 members, worked their way ‘from place to place’, laboring alongside freedpeople on the plantations and submitting detailed reports to their center in Shreveport to determine ‘whether it was possible we could stay under a people who held us in bondage or not’. [22]
By the time Adams’s “committee” began to operate the early optimism that had marked the Radical ascent was rapidly dissipating, and between 1870 and 1874 (when its work concluded), tensions had exploded in the form of a powerful terrorist campaign that engulfed much of the plantation South. Adams noted that ‘heaps of [his] friends’ in Louisiana had been murdered by the White League and other paramilitaries. The ‘Democrats would say to us,’ he testified before a Senate committee, that ‘just as long as you try to follow [local Republican leaders] we are going just to kill you as we did them. They told us so to our teeth,’ Adams recalled. ‘They told me so many a time.’ [23]
By 1874 the Louisiana committee had shifted from its careful work surveying conditions to actively considering emigration out of the region, and by 1877 when – as Adams himself put it – they ‘lost all hopes in the world’, the ‘committee’ dissolved into a larger ‘council’ whose main purpose was to organize a mass exodus to Liberia. [24] By this time they had enlisted 98,000 members across the southwestern states, driven overwhelmingly by white violence:
[I]t is because the largest majority of the [white] people…that held us as slaves treats our people so bad in many respects that it is impossible for them to stand it. [I]n a great many parts of that country there our people most as well [sic] be slaves as to be free; because, in the first place, I will state this: that in some times, in times of politics, if they have any idea that the Republicans will carry a parish or ward, or something of that kind, they would do anything on God’s earth. There ain’t nothing too mean for them to do to prevent it; nothing I can make mention of is too mean for them to do. If I am working on his place, and he has been laughing and talking with me, and I do everything he tells me to, yet in times of election he will crush me down, and even kill me[:] If he can’t carry his point without killing me, he will kill me[.] [25]
Despite his more forthright commitment to the Republican Party and his early opposition to emigration, Elias Hill had arrived at a similar conclusion even earlier than Henry Adams and the Louisiana organizers. By the early 1870s, Hill and many of his neighbors had given up on the possibility of attaining any meaningful semblance of freedom within the borders of the United States. York County was by then the site of perhaps the most intensive and sustained campaign of white paramilitary violence anywhere in the South. There the Ku Klux Klan ‘reigned more completely and supremely [than] in any other southern county’. [26] Witnesses testified that nearly all Black men, and many freedwomen as well, were unable to sleep in their homes at night, and had taken to sleeping out in the woods to avoid Klan attacks. One freedman reported that a mere three years after Black men had won the franchise, the Republican Party in South Carolina upcountry was ‘just like scattered sheep…beaten and run out.’ [27]
By the early 1870s, the staunch Republican Elias Hill and many of his neighbors had given up on the possibility of attaining freedom within the borders of the United States. A white collaborator reported that Hill had immersed himself in studying reports from the American West to determine whether migration there was feasible: his conclusion, Hill would testify, was that conditions in the West were ‘as bad, or possibly worse’ than in the South. Taken together, his testimony before Congressional hearings on Ku Klux violence (1871) and his letters to the American Colonization Society illuminate Hill’s motives in turning towards an option he would have ruled out just a few years earlier. By May 1870, he revealed, freedpeople in York County ‘had become so alarmed [by Klan night-riding] that they did not sleep in their houses at night’. He pointed to the example of his brother-in-law, June Moore, whose wife ‘went out with their babe and slept every night in the rain, until late in the spring’. [28] In correspondence to the ACS three months before he appeared in public to testify before the visiting Congressional Committee at Columbia, Hill explained that ‘very many, yea all in york county union chester and laurens counties they all…is seeking a refuge any or every where…such being the case hundreds [and] thousands would under the present circumstances Embrace the 1st opportunity to leave out of fear’. [29] Alongside nearly 200 of his upcountry neighbors, Hill severed the deep ties to his upcountry roots later that autumn, trekked a couple hundred miles to the Atlantic coast and boarded a ship to Liberia. He died there, as many did, within a few short years.
One short but illuminating aside before concluding: although Adams and his collaborators seem to have set their eyes on Liberian emigration from the mid-1870s, there were two twists in the plot that would complicate their plans. First, the specific plans for Liberia were overtaken by the powerful campaign from 1874 onward to head instead for Kansas. This reinforces the argument that exodus was primarily about escaping the hellhole of the Redeemer’s South, even if at times the campaign was laced with appeals to Black Southerners’ roots in Africa.
The second twist, also revealing, was Adams’s insistence before deserting the region on one last attempt at rallying the Republican vote. Adams seems, on the surface at least, to have adopted a more circumspect – even cynical – attitude toward the Republican Party from early on in Reconstruction, though there is every possibility that this features in his testimony as a retrospective projection. But in 1876, in the runup to the critical election which saw the final collapse of Reconstruction, Adams had urged his supporters to ‘go home and try to carry the [election]’: ‘[I]f we find [afterward] the country no better for us we must then go to work and try and get our race to leave the Southern states where we have been slaves’. Organizers spread out across Mississippi, Texas and Arkansas but found that ‘many working people…had already lost hope’. ‘Rural people were more anxious to leave the South,’ Nell Painter observes, even ‘than were Adams and his men’. [30]
What are we to conclude about the trajectory revealed in the stories of these two prominent, remarkable grassroots leaders in the Reconstruction South? It is far from coincidental that ‘exodus fever’ intensified across the plantation South at the precise moment Reconstruction fell prey to elite-led white counterrevolution. To the north in Arkansas, Kenneth C. Barnes demonstrates, exodus ‘swelled as Reconstruction came to a halt’: in the ’same areas where Reconstruction’s end brought sudden change to their political status, a Black migration movement took root quickly and sprouted in the last three years of the 1870s’. There should be no mystery as to the timing of the fervor for emigration: Barnes cites correspondence that came into the ACS office on ‘the day after President Hayes withdrew federal troops’ from South Carolina. Reporting from Edgefield county, a Black lawyer named John Mardenborough ‘begged’ the Society to come to the aid of seventy-five local residents: ‘While I write,’ Mardenborough lamented, ‘a colored woman comes and tells me her husband was killed last night in her presence [and] her children burned to death in the house.’ She had been sexually assaulted and then whipped by the nightriders. ‘In the name of God,’ he pleaded, ‘can not the Society send us to Africa or some where else where we can live without ill treatment?’ [31]
This desperate exodus continued through the 1880s, Painter has written, at a time when African Americans found themselves increasingly in ‘a state of siege’, and would remain a common feature of Black Southern life until the dam burst during the First World War. Relief from the kind of violence that had attended the overthrow of Reconstruction was elusive in the years that followed. Instead, Armstead Robinson insists, ‘the conflicts relating to agrarian, labor, and racial unrest…assumed even greater significance in the period after 1877’. In the wake of Reconstruction’s defeat, Foner notes, Black politics ‘turned inward’: the ‘remarkable “thickening” of African American civic and associational life’ noted by Hahn and others coincided with a historic retreat, consummated in Booker T. Washington’s conciliatory speech at Atlanta in 1895. [32]
It is in this precarious context that we should understand the resurgence of emigrationist sentiment between the collapse of Reconstruction and the First World War. ‘One index of the narrow possibilities for change [in the South],’ Foner writes, ‘was the revival of interest, all but moribund during Reconstruction, in emigration to Africa or the West.’ The revival ‘reflected less an upsurge of nationalist consciousness than the collapse of hopes invested in Reconstruction and the arousal of deep fears for the future by the restoration of white supremacy’. [33] Operating at the vortex of white Southerners’ aggressive campaign to reverse the emancipatory potential seized upon by freedpeople at the war’s end, the organizing trajectories of Henry Adams and Elias Hill illuminate the dissolution of African Americans’ confidence that slavery’s painful legacy might be uprooted in a restored Union.
Notes
[1] Leon Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Vintage, 1999), xiv. Rayford W. Logan famously characterised ‘the last decade of the nineteenth century and the opening of the twentieth century’ as the ‘nadir of the Negro’s status in American society’, tracing its ‘descent’ from the collapse of Reconstruction in 1877. Bess Beatty tracks the same trajectory in A Revolution Gone Backward: The Black Response to National Politics, 1876-1896 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1987). Significantly, Wilson J. Moses argues that these years overlapped with the ‘Golden Age of Black Nationalism’, framed by the Compromise of 1850 on one end and the death of Marcus Garvey (1925) at the other. Louis R. Harlan explored the ‘new direction’ outlined in Booker T. Washington’s 1895 Atlanta speech and the subsequent retreat in Black politics between then and 1915. August Meier read the Atlanta speech as an expression of ‘accommodation to the social conditions implicit in [the] Compromise of 1877’. See Logan, The Negro in American life and thought: the nadir, 1877-1901 (New York, Dial Press, 1954), 52, 159; Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850-1925 (Hamden, CT: Archon Press, 1978); Harlan, Booker T. Washington: the making of a Black leader, 1856-1901 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 223; Meier, Negro thought in America, 1880-1915: racial ideologies in the age of Booker T. Washington (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1988), 25.
[2] W. E. B. Du Bois, “Strivings of the Negro People,” Atlantic 80 (August 1897): 194; Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; rpt., New York: Penguin, 1989), 5.
[3] Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Politics in the Rural South between Slavery and the Great Migration (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2003); Thomas C. Holt, ‘Review of A Nation under Our Feet’, Journal of American History, Vol. 91, No. 3 (Dec., 2004), 981-2; John W. Cell, The highest stage of white supremacy: the origins of segregation in South Africa and the American South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 257.
[4] John H. Bracey, Jr., August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, eds. Black Nationalism in America (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), lv, xxvi, lvi.
[5] Elsewhere I have written that the emphasis on ‘agency’ in much of the (formerly) new social history grew out of ‘an understandable reaction to an earlier consensus that relegated Black historical initiative to the margins of a national fable cleansed of sharp social conflict, but it can also be problematic’. See Kelly, ‘No Easy Way Through: Race Leadership and Black Workers at the Nadir,’ Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas Vol. 7, No. 3 (2010), 79.
[6] Here I am referring especially to the period between Johnson’s ascension to the White House after President Lincoln’s assassination (April 1865) and the Congressional Republicans’ overwhelming victory in the November 1866 mid-term elections.
[7] “Names of Speakers & Organizers Employed or Aided by the URCC,” Robert C. Schenck Papers, Box 4.1, Folder 38f; “Report from Charleston,” Schenck Papers, Box 4.1, Folder 11k.
[8] Belton O’Neall Townsend, ‘Political Condition of South Carolina,’ Atlantic Monthly XXXIX (Feb. 1877), 193; Ralph I. Middleton to Henry A. Middleton, 7 July 1869, Henry A. Middleton Papers, South Carolina Historical Society.
[9] David Montgomery, ‘Review of A Nation Under Our Feet,’ International Labor and Working Class History No. 70 (Fall, 2006), 179.
[10] On the range of League activity in Alabama and Mississippi, see Michael W. Fitzgerald, The Union League Movement in the Deep South: Politics and Agricultural Change during Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1989), 136-76. Wiggins incident recounted at pps. 154-5.
[11] On freedwomen and the ballot, see Elsa Barkley Brown, “Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom,” Public Culture, 7 (1994): 107-146. “[O]nce the franchise was obtained,” Steven Hahn writes, “its conduct and purpose could not be separated from the institutions, customs, and relations of black life, and from the participation of women, who never held the franchise during [Reconstruction], as well as men[.]” Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet, 3-4. Quote from Thulani Davis, The Emancipation Circuit: Black Activism Forging a Culture of Freedom, 3.
[12] Edward Hogan, “South Carolina To-day,” International Review, February 1880; Charleston Mercury, 12 November 1868.
[13] On longstanding tensions between antebellum African American leadership and the American Colonization Society, see Ousmane K. Power-Greene, Against Wind and Tide: The African American Struggle against the Colonization Movement (New York: NYU Press, 2014). On Douglass’s lifelong opposition to colonization, see David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020), 238-9; 369-80. One of the attendees at the White House meeting, Martin W. Delany, had earlier been a bitter opponent of the ACS but advocated Black-led colonisation—a position he dropped during the war and throughout early Reconstruction, but which he returned to in the late 1870s. See Ethan Kytle, Romantic Reformers and the Antislavery Struggle in the Civil War Era (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 159-205.
[14] Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution,1863-1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 289, 27.
[15] Frederick Douglass vehemently opposed the exodus throughout Reconstruction and into its aftermath. His objections rested not on the electoral calculations that consumed the Republican grassroots, however, but on a wildly optimistic reading of national prospects. ‘We stand today at the beginning of a grand and beneficent reaction,’ he told a New York audience in September 1879. It was ‘unfortunate’, he lamented, that such a ‘cry of despair should be raised in behalf of the colored people of the South’ at a ‘time of such great hope and courage’. See Douglass, ‘The Negro Exodus From the Gulf States: A Paper Read in Saratoga, New York, on September 12, 1879,’ in Frederick Douglass Papers Project [https://frederickdouglasspapersproject.com/s/digitaledition/item/18306: accessed 6 Jan. 2025).
[16] Unknown correspondent (Halifax, NC) to William Coppinger, 20 July1868; CS Hayne (Aiken, SC) to William Coppinger, 12 April 1868, in American Colonization Society Records [hereafter ACS Records], Incoming Correspondence, 1819-1917.
[17] J. S. Bartelle (Sumter, SC) to William Coppinger, 5 August 1873; in ACS Records, Incoming Correspondence, 1819-1917.
[18] ‘Rev. E. Hill’s report of abuse, to Major Merrill’, included in Colonel Lewis Merrill Testimony, 26 July 1871, in US Congress Joint Select Committee, Ku Klux Conspiracy: testimony taken by the Joint Select Committee to inquire into the condition of affairs in the late insurrectionary states [hereafter Ku Klux Klan Hearings], Vol. 5: South Carolina, Pt. 3 (Washington, DC, 1872), p. 1477.
[19] The quoted text and the composite sketch of Hill’s early life draws on his own in ‘Elias Hill Testimony’, Ku Klux Klan Hearings, op. cit. (25 July 1871), p. 1406; several newspaper articles, including “A Black Man with a History,” New York Evangelist, 17 Aug. 1871; “The Ku Klux Klan in South Carolina,” Little Rock Morning Republican, 15 Sept. 1871; “Elias Hill: To Celebrate a Hero,” Amsterdam News, 24 Feb.-1 March, 2000, and ‘Testimony of Ervin E. Smith’, in U. S. Slave Narratives (Arkansas), Vol. II, Pt. 6, 187-191.
[20] Foner (Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 9) recalls an oft-cited postwar encounter between a formerly enslaved Union soldier and his ex-master, then held as a prisoner of war: ’Hello, massa; bottom rail top dis time!’. Foner and others have used the anecdote to illustrate the reversal in social status brought on by Confederate defeat and emancipation.
[21] ‘Elias Hill Testimony’, in Ku Klux Klan Hearings, 1412.
[22] ‘Henry Adams Testimony’, cited in Report and Testimony of the Select Committee of the U. S. Senate to Investigate the Causes of the Removal of the Negros frm the Southern States to the Northern States [hereafter Exodus Hearings], Pt. 1 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1880), x-xiii.
[23] ‘Henry Adams Testimony’, Exodus Hearings, Pt. 2, 107.
[24] Ibid., 108
[25] Ibid., 111.
[26] Jerry L. West, The Reconstruction Ku Klux Klan in York County, South Carolina, 1865-1877 (Jefferson, North Carolina, 2002), 5.
[27] ‘Sam Nuckles Testimony,’ Ku Klux Klan Hearings, Vol. 4, 1161.
[28] ‘Elias Hill Testimony’, Ku Klux Klan Hearings, Vol. 3, 1412, 1409.
[29] Elias Hill (Rock Hill, SC) to Rev. William Coppinger, 14 April 1871, American Colonization Society Papers.
[30] Nell Irvin Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1986), 84-86.
[31] Barnes, Journey of Hope: The Back-to-Africa Movement in Arkansas in the Late 1800s (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2004), 19, 9-10.
[32] Painter, Exodusters, 39; Armstead L. Robinson, ‘Beyond the Realm of Social Consensus: New Meanings of Reconstruction for American History,’ Journal of American History, Vol. 68, No. 2 (Sep., 1981): 276; Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet, 3.
[33] Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 598-9.
