Capitol Men (52 page)

Of course, the world of presidential disclaimers and senators' resolutions was far removed from the disorder and uncertainty of the exodus itself, where black families of three and four generations, "fluttering in rags and wretchedness," their bundles and boxes stacked upon wagons,
sat waiting for a steamboat to carry them north to St. Louis. "It is computed that up to date about 5,000 colored persons have left this region," a Northern reporter based in New Orleans wrote in early April 1879, "and the Anchor Line of steamboats, which plies between Vicksburg and St. Louis, takes them to the latter place at half price, where they are met by the Kansas Immigration Committee. They sell out their little stock, such as mules, etc., at great sacrifices." One emigrant from Mississippi said he had sold his home, valued at $400, for $6. A Missouri resident who aided a boatload of emigrants determined to reach Kansas recalled, "There was an offer of $80 a month for 500 of them to work on a railroad in Iowa, but they didn't know where Iowa was. They were afraid it was down South somewhere."

Most observers who saw the hundreds of souls camped for days on the shores of the river, or huddled in tents or makeshift charity housing in Missouri or Kansas, would doubtless have considered them refugees rather than emigrants. But despite the hardships, few considered turning around.

Elected black officials and other prominent men were made uncomfortable by a mass movement that negated their significance and whose homespun leaders publicly mocked them as superfluous. Senator Blanche Bruce was among the first national figures to discern and sympathize with the westward exodus, yet the impulsiveness of so vast a relocation ran counter to his own sense of what constituted progress for black Americans. "It is a matter of sincere regret," he said of the Kansas fever in the pseudonymous column he wrote under the name VINDEX for Pinchback's
Louisianian
, "that hundreds of our people, listening to the wild quixotic stories of railroad and steamboat agents, have been induced to abandon their homes at the South, and, without preparation or a definite idea of the geography, climate or productions of the new Eldorado to which their hopes point, have started on what may be called 'a wild goose chase.'"

What troubled Bruce about the exodus was both the chaotic scenes of mass flight along the Mississippi shore and the celebrity of men like Pap Singleton, who insisted on seeing the movement in biblical terms.

I feel that I do not overstate the case if I say that this criminal mismanagement ... is due largely to the influence of an illiterate and un-guided clergy ... The truth is ... that the negro has too much religion, rather than not enough, of the kind now in vogue. If less
attention was paid to sensational prayer meetings, class meetings, festivals, bazaars, lotteries, societies of all sort ... and a thousand and one other fooleries, upon which the clergy of today live and luxuriate ... the colored people would be in far better condition than we now find them.

A stampede of frightened people led by strange black men claiming divine appointment represented everything that Blanche Bruce was not. He suggested that a halt be called "until this matter is at least better understood and better organized."

Bruce was concerned that the exodus would "jeopardize the industrial interests of at least eleven states," endangering the livelihoods of the sharecroppers, laborers, and their families who remained, and that the abrupt departure from the South would for many blacks prove unsuitable, even unnatural. "The colored people are the most unmigratory class of people in the world," he wrote. "Their love of home, the places rendered sacred by old associations, the buried places of their dead, and numerous other charms which fill their imagination, render them the most immovable of any of the races." Bruce's Mississippi congressional colleague James R. Chalmers believed that blacks possessed a "climatic fitness" for the South that worked to their advantage, since the intense sun and heat inhibited the ability of other races to work there. "The sun is the colored man's friend," Chalmers told his constituents. "Stay where your friend, the sun, aids you in the contest."

The black congressman Joseph Rainey of South Carolina differed sharply from Bruce; he saw not chaos in the exodus but the refreshing sign of the freedmen's determination to enjoy the citizenship rights won by the war. Theirs was a positive act of free will. As he told the
New York Herald
, "The freedman may lack education, but I'll assure you he is not quite the fool imagined ... Humanity forbids that this patient people should longer remain in the midst of their persecutors."

It was Frederick Douglass who voiced perhaps the most significant disapproval of the exodus. Despite his basic admiration for the emigrants' initiative, he felt their movement constituted a retreat from the principle that all citizens deserved fair and equal treatment anywhere in the United States. Fleeing the South, he said, only postponed the inevitable struggle that must occur to ensure civil rights. He viewed that battle as one the blacks could ultimately win, given their concentrated political power in the region, but he feared that very power would be dissipated by the exodus. "Bad as it is," he wrote of the conditions in
the South, "it is temporary. It will soon be seen that the South cannot suppress a half million of voters without great damage to itself ... The resentments and passions of the war must wear away." He also thought it prudent that blacks learn to stand their ground. "It is sometimes better to bear the ills we have than fly to
others we know not of ... When I you part with your pig, your pony I and your little lot to go a thousand miles to look for a pig and a pony, your money will be gone, and your pig and your pony will not easily be replaced. Life is too short, time is too precious to be wasted in such experiments."

FREDERICK DOUGLASS

Douglass's views on the subject were so unpopular, his name was booed at Southern Exoduster gatherings. "Some say 'stay and fight it out, contend for your rights, don't let the old rebels drive you away, the country is as much yours as theirs,'" remarked the novelist William Wells Brown, referring to the great abolitionist. "That kind of talk will do very well for men who have comfortable homes out of the South, and law to protect them [Douglass resided in Washington]. But for the negro, with no home, no food, no work, the land-owner offering him conditions whereby he can do little better than starve, such talk is nonsense." At a meeting in New Orleans, someone raised the question as to how Douglass, who had himself escaped from the South to the North as a runaway slave, could now object to those who also sought to depart. Douglass replied in the pages of the
New York Herald
, "I doubt very much if I had found in the Constitution a Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendment, if I had seen a powerful political party pledged to the maintenance of my liberty, I would have run away. I think I would have stayed there ... I have full faith in the ultimate establishment of justice and liberty in the Southern states, and would have the colored man stand in his place and bide his time."

Senator Windom's request for congressional involvement in, or at least scrutiny of, the westward migration, received backing from an unexpected source in December 1879, when the Democrat Daniel W.
Voorhees of Indiana, concerned about a stream of black immigrants from North Carolina entering his state, joined the call for an inquiry. This was a step Windom had requested eleven months earlier, and he welcomed it even as he questioned Voorhees's motives, for he knew the Indianan viewed the exodus negatively and suspected him of setting up a Democratic whitewash. Windom demanded that any investigation not look at the movement solely as a problem but also search for possible remedies, a suggestion Voorhees accepted so long as the inquiry would examine closely whether malignant forces were involved.

The "Exodus Committee," as it was dubbed by the press, made up of five senators including Voorhees and Windom, interviewed 159 witnesses between January and April 1880. Democrats held the majority on the committee, and it proceeded to do as Windom feared, denying that blacks had any reason to be upset with conditions in the South and ascribing the migration to baleful Northern influences. So-called relief societies, stated the committee's official conclusions, were in fact operatives for the Republican Party, seeking to tip the balance of political might in the North and the West. The committee used the pejorative term "outside agitators" to describe those fanning the flames of discontent from afar (likely one of the first times this infamous phrase appeared in discourse on Southern race relations) and overall painted a rosy picture of life for blacks in the Southern states. Reports of racial violence, claimed the study, tended to be retold years after their occurrence "by zealous witnesses," and most were "all hearsay, and nothing but hearsay, with rare exceptions." The committee noted that "many of the witnesses before us were colored politicians, men who make their living by politics, and whose business it was to stir up feeling between whites and blacks, [to] keep alive the embers of political hatred." These leaders' "inflammatory appeals," combined with the "misdirected philanthropy" of some fawning whites, had led Southern blacks to abandon their homes.

Windom protested the findings. It was apparent that Voorhees and the other Democrats had reached their "conclusions" long before any actual testimony had been heard; indeed, most of the testimony made it clear that the exodus was no act of conspiracy but the more or less spontaneous result of pent-up frustrations among blacks. Windom dismissed as "an utter absurdity" the notion that the movement was an effort "on the part of Northern leaders of the Republican Party to colonize [Kansas] with Negroes for political purposes" and scolded Voorhees and his brethren for wasting the taxpayers' money. Congress
had refused to aid the migrants themselves but had spent $30,000 to fund Democratic propaganda, or, as it struck the black educator Booker T. Washington, "thousands of dollars to find out what was already known to every intelligent person, and almost every schoolboy in the country ... thousands of dollars to ascertain the cause of the poor Negroes' distress, but not one cent to relieve it."

It was, however, in the end Voorhees who had most accurately gauged the public mood. The lack of interest in Washington and elsewhere for black political rights generally defeated the possibility of federal involvement in the exodus. Windom's efforts were made to appear quixotic at best, and, as the committee report had implied, evidence of unworthy political manipulations at worst. In any case, the westward flow of emigrants soon slowed; the frenzied activity of 1879 and early 1880 seemed to substantially exhaust the number of Southern blacks willing to act on the migration urge. Reports that steamboats plying the Mississippi had ceased picking up black migrants under threats from planters and intimidation from white vigilantes no doubt also helped curtail the movement.

Probably somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 blacks departed the South altogether for western lands during the late 1870s. For 25,000 or so who made the journey to Kansas(during 1870–80 the black population of Kansas more than doubled, from 17,108 to 43,107) their new life was hardly without difficulty. Black farmers experienced at working the rich alluvial lands of the Deep South were challenged by clearing and cultivating less cooperative ground, and white immigrants to the state brought unanticipated competition and sometimes outright hostility.

But although Kansas was not the agricultural paradise its boosters had claimed, the exodus was in numerous ways a success. Many blacks did thrive there, often by throwing themselves with superhuman effort into their labors, mindful that they had come too far to countenance failure. The Tennessean Henry Carter and his wife walked the sixty-five miles from Topeka to the town of Dunlap, Kansas; within a year they had cleared forty acres, built a small stone cottage, and purchased a horse and two cows. In Graham County, a determined black farmer was said to have turned five acres of "raw prairie" with a hand spade. One emigrant wrote to his family in Louisiana, "They do not kill negroes here for voting. I am living here as a lark. You can buy land at from a dollar and a half to two dollars an acre." Fortunately for the new arrivals, many of whom lacked necessary supplies, the winter of 1879–80 was one
of the mildest in the state's history. "God seed dat de darkies had thin clo's," according to one grateful witness, "an' he done kep'd de cole off."

In retrospect, the western migration of black Americans from the South at Reconstruction's end appears more a deliberative—and decidedly prescient—act of collective survival than an impulse borne of momentary uncertainty. The Exodusters had, in fact, read accurately the drift of history and of recent events: a long night of national disregard for their rights and humanity was indeed at hand, and the Deep South was to prove an ever more unfortunate habitat. "The exodus presented proof that Afro-Americans did not quietly resign themselves to the political or economic order of the Redeemed South," concludes Nell Painter. "Exodusters on their way to Free Kansas said no, we do not acquiesce in Redemption; we do not believe that this is the way of American democracy."