On the 150th anniversary of the 15th Amendment and the voting rights it made possible for African-American men, it is important to recognize the grassroots activism that emerged in the former rebellious South during Reconstruction.
Sparked by the Military Reconstruction Acts of 1867 and building on decades of underground organization by enslaved men and women, this activism in a world where slavemasters once ruled energized democratic currents in a nation moving through the experience of war and emancipation.
One of the most effective organizational vehicles for the freedpeople was the Union League, initially formed in the urban North during the war but soon mobilizing formerly enslaved people in the rural South.
Excerpt: "A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration"
Most important, the unit of local league organization comfortably meshed with the perimeters of reconstituted kinship groups that could span a number of plantations and farms. In the black belt, the proliferation of league councils may indeed have been defined more by the geography of black kinship clans than by the official boundaries of state and county politics. Consider the Leasburg league in tobacco-growing Caswell County, North Carolina, where blacks made up about 70 percent of the population. Sometime in 1868, the league had twenty-nine members, all of whom were former slaves and all but four of whom lived in Leasburg township. At the center of activity was the Yancey family. Frank Yancey, a blacksmith in his mid- to late forties, served as the president and Felix Yancey, a house servant about twenty years of age, served as the marshal. Felix, in turn, lived in the household of yet another league member, Daniel Yancey, a blacksmith around eighty years of age (who may well have been Frank’s father), as did William Yancey, a twenty-year-old farm laborer, who also belonged to the league. Frank’s household included league member Watt Johnson, a sixty-odd-year-old blacksmith who probably worked with Fran and was likely related to two other league members: David Johnson, the assistant secretary, and Armistead Johnson — ages thirty-six and fifty-four, respectively, and both employed in a tobacco factory. Two Cunninghams, two Numans, two Curries, and three Leas filled out most of the remaining membership. In Limestone County, Texas, where fewer than one inhabitant in five was black, at lease three league councils could be found operating. One was the bailiwick of David Medlock and his clan; a second was located in the black Methodist community of Springfield; and the third, based in the small county seat of Groesbeck, appears to have been dominated by the Trammels, another large and influential black family in the county.
League councils served as crucial political schools, educating newly enfranchised blacks in the ways of the official political culture. New members not only were instructed in the league’s history, in the “duties of American citizenship,” and in the role of the Republican party in advancing their freedom, but also learned about “parliamentary law and debating,” about courts, juries, and militia service, about the conduct of elections and of various political offices, and about important events near and far. With meetings often devoted, in part, to the reading aloud of newspapers, pamphlets, and government degrees, freedmen gained a growing political literacy even if most could neither read nor write. One federal official in southside Virginia, impressed at the rapid progress of local blacks, found that “instead of obtaining information from public speakers” they preferred to “secur[e] for their own use all kinds of public documents and in small squads are advising themselves through some of the more intelligent colored people who read and explain to them the subject matters of such papers &c. as they may have.” But the league was by no means simply pedantic and hierarchical in its function and culture. Rural blacks could easily appreciate the organization’s secrecy, acquainted as some already were with “secret societies” and as all undoubtedly were with the temper of their former owners. They surely did not have to be reminded about the importance of solidarity and mutual loyalty. “No earthly motive will ever induce them to betray one another,” the northern planter Charles Stearns observed of the Georgia freedpeople he had come to know, comparing them to “free-masons.” “They dare not tell of each other, even if so disposed.” The league’s initiation ritual, in which inductees took a sacred pledge while forming a circle “with clasped and uplifted hands,” in fact bore resemblance to the ring shout and other forms of spiritual communion in their religious worship. (37)Even the most didactic of league exercises might be assimilated to the cultural and spiritual styles of rural black audiences. The “dialogue” was thus regarded as a central educational device for league and party organizers alike, and it was said to have been in the “hands of every Radical who could read.” Presented as a conversation between “a white Republican and a colored citizen,” it was a series of pat questions and answers designed to acquaint the new voter with his political duties and cement his allegiance to the Republican party: exalting the party’s role in protecting freedpeople and advancing their rights while identifying the Democrats with slavery and the rebellion. Critics decisively referred to it as the “League Catechism” because blacks apparently “were drilled in its principles” and subjected to an almost religious indoctrination. But blacks themselves infused it with a different sort of community and spiritual vibrancy, reminiscent instead of the call-and-response rhythms that traditionally went into the making of spirituals, sermons, prayer, and the general celebration of religious faith. When the Reverend Henry McNeal Turner prepared local black leaders for their work, he and Tunis G. Campbell faced each other across the room and “read over the dialogues,” Turner acting “as the freedman and Mr. Campbell as the true Republican, I asking and he answering in a suitable voice.” The effect was electric. “When Campbell would read some of those pointed replies,” Turner marveled, “the whole house would ring with shouts, and shake with spasmodic motions and peculiar gestures of the audience.” A white South Carolinian, commenting on the “disorder” that could prevail at league meetings, noted a similar phenomenon: “At their gatherings all have something to say, and all are up at once. They have a free flow of language, and their older men exhibit a practical, get-at-the-facts disposition… While they are speaking, their orators are subjected to all kinds of interruptions—questions, impertinences, points of order, etc.”
League councils sought in other ways to tie their own official objectives to the political practices and concerns of rural black communities. Reflecting the provisions of the elective franchise and the gender conventions of mainstream political culture, formal membership in the Union League was restricted to males, twenty-one years of age and older, and the available records and minutes of local councils reveal no exceptions. To this extent, the league seems to have been in tune with the social division of politics detected among rural African Americans. But the record also suggests that “membership” did not fully define the range of participation, and that the league depended on a much wider level of mobilization and involvement. In many locales, women and children, as well as men, took part in league processions, in organizing assemblages, in league-sponsored public meetings and speakings, and even in the business of the councils. There is scattered evidence of black women engaged in the selection of officers, the drafting of bylaws, and the give-and-take of council discussion and debate; in some cases they may have formed auxiliaries. At all events, they had a genuine visibility designed to symbolize the nature and depth of league support and to bring sanction against those who resisted the call, violated the pledge, or strayed from the fold.
Indeed, league councils quickly constituted themselves as vehicles not only of Republican electoral mobilization, but also of community development, defense, and self-determination. In Harnett County, North Carolina, they formed a procession “with fife and drum and flag and banner” and demanded the return of “any colored children in the county bound to white men.” In Oktibbeha County, Mississippi, they organized a cooperative store, accepting” corn and other products … in lieu of money,” and, when a local black man suffered arrest, “the whole League” armed and marched to the county seat. In Randolph County, Alabama, and San Jacinto County, Texas, they worked to establish local schools so that, as one activist put it, “every colored man [now] beleaves in the Leage.” In the Fairfield District of South Carolina, they gathered on land some freedmen had leased, established their own court, and advised freedpeople to carry their complaints there rather than to the district court. And, in the neighborhood of Perote, in Bullock County, Alabama, they similarly “resisted the processes of civil law,” and instead formed a code of laws, opened a court, and selected a sheriff and deputy to govern their community, provoking complaints of “insurrection” and the eventual arrest of their leader.
The league may well have had its widest early influence on labor relations, building as it often did on previous struggles and less formal associations. “[T]he is a grate menny Womens and Childrens and boys going about working for people and dont know how to make a Bargain and they is not theyr Rights by a grate dail,” a council leader in Lincoln County, North Carolina, told Governor William Holden, “and we want to know if Some of the Best men of our Ligue Could Stand as garddeans for all such people in our Reach not let them make a Bargain them selfs but some of us go and make it for them and see that they git the money &c.” Here and elsewhere in the plantation South, league councils enabled and encouraged freedpeople to negotiate better contracts, contest the abuses of their employers, engage in strikes and boycotts, claim their just wages and shares of the crop, and generally alter the balances of power on the land. Small wonder that league organizers were commonly accused of “promising the freedmen a division of stock land & money of the country” and of promoting agrarian rebellion.
The mass recruitment of rural freedmen into the Union League beginning in 1867 thus simultaneously enlarged the organization and changed its character. Most Unionist whiles from nonplantation districts, who initially composed the social base and who were far more interested in punishing ex-Confederates than in empowering ex-slaves, reeled at the prospect of joining hands in membership with African Americans. Large numbers, it appears, quickly withdrew from the league entirely, while many others chose to maintain virtually segregated councils. And if willingness to work with freedmen seemed relatively limited among native southern whites in regions where whiles predominated, it was almost nonexistent in regions where blacks predominated. League councils in the plantation districts generally counted few whites among their members, and these tended to fit the label of “carpetbaggers”: northerners who had come South during and immediately after the Civil War (in the Union army, in the Freedmen’s Bureau, as teachers and missionaries, or as planters) — and who, for a variety of reasons, saw the league as a means to satisfy political sympathies and personal ambitions. Not surprisingly, they often emerged as early leaders, offering a host of useful services for still inexperienced and largely illiterate black folk and, in return, received some deference and gratitude in the form of council officerships and political loyalty. The deference and gratitude usually proved short-lived, but to the extent that the rank-and-file of the councils in the plantation districts was heavily black, the league helped to encourage social and political aspirations and forms of collective struggle that national and local white leaders neither envisioned nor approved. The days of reckoning would be painful and politically disastrous.
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