Capitol Men (9 page)

Cain, Elliott, and Ransier were among the seventy-six black and forty-eight white delegates who convened at the Charleston Club House on January 14, 1868, for the opening of the state's constitutional convention, or what the local press enjoyed mocking as "the Crow Congress," "the Menagerie," the "Congo Convention," and even "the Great Unlawful." The town's most reactionary newspaper, the
Charleston Mercury,
offered unflattering caricatures of the individual participants. Robert C. De Large, a mulatto who was a leading Republican operative in Charleston, "might have lived and died without having his name in
print, except in an advertisement, if it had not been for the great social revolution which like boiling water has thrown the scum on the surface." Attorney William J. Whipper was "a genuine negro, kinky-headed, who, in the days of slavery, would have been esteemed a likely fellow for a house servant or a coachman." Of Robert Smalls, "the Boat Thief," the
Mercury
noted that although his act of larceny had won "great notoriety for a time, and he was much caressed by his new allies," he "has been gradually subsiding to his proper level, which he has at last attained in the mongrel convention." Cain, in his turn, was described as having "the features of a very ugly white man ... He came here at the close of the war as a preacher ... and has, ever since, been engaged in ... propagating his dusky religion ... Although black, ugly and shabby, or perhaps because of these exceptional qualities, [he] enjoys considerable influence among the darkies." Nor were the white delegates spared. Daniel Chamberlain, a Yale graduate who came south after the war to settle the affairs of a deceased friend, then stayed to open a successful law practice, was one of the "peripatetic buccaneers from Cape Cod ... Hell, and Boston."

So annoyed were some of the delegates by the
Mercury's
barbs that they greeted a resolution to bar the paper's reporters from the convention with loud approval and immediate seconding motions. But Francis J. Cardozo, the college-educated son of a free black woman and a Jewish businessman, spoke against such a rash reaction, as did the lawyer Whipper, who had in preparation for the convention secured copies of the constitutions of numerous Northern states. "To attempt to exclude [the
Mercury's]
reporter from the bar of the Convention," Whipper declared, "would be only to exhibit a smallness, a pettiness of spite, unworthy of our character. Let us pursue our straightforward course, and the world will judge between us." Whipper commanded respect as a war veteran, but he was countered by Landon Langley, who had served with the legendary Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Volunteers. "I do believe [the
Mercury]
to be utterly incapable of a respectable or gentlemanly course," he said, "and I am not willing for that rebel sheet to burlesque this body. I want it excluded." Alonzo Ransier, however, suggested that the
Mercury
actually benefited "republican liberty" by expressing the "sentiments of those opposed to republican principles" in such undiluted form. Whipper reminded his colleagues that they had gathered "for a great purpose...[and] we should not be swerved from it by newspapers, whose chief purpose ... is simply to make five cent pieces."

Franklin J. Moses Jr., a white native South Carolinian, took the floor.
"I do not stand here to vindicate the
Mercury.
It is no friend of mine," he stated. "I have been abused by it since the Convention assembled more than any other man on the floor, and yet I hope the resolution will be voted down." Moses' opinion carried considerable weight, for he was the convention's most well known scalawag, a Southerner who "traitorously" became aligned with the Republican cause. The son of a prominent Jewish family (his father was the state's chief justice), he had once been a "shouting rebel," or rabid secessionist, and was famous in Charleston as the man who had raised the Confederate flag over Fort Sumter when Union defenders surrendered the fort in 1861. Now Moses had become one of the most-hated men in the South for embracing the tenets of Radical Republicanism. Had his transformation been considered sincere, it would still have won him infamy, but most whites viewed him as gutless and self-glorifying—an immoral "gambler and libertine ... [who] seized upon the opportunity to share in the plundering of his own people."

The emotions stirred by the demeaning press portraits were hard to set aside. Immediately after the convention adjourned for the day on January 28, the
Mercury
correspondent Roswell T. Logan was gathering his papers at the reporters' table when he was confronted by the white delegate E.W.M. Mackey. "Are you the writer of the article ... concerning my father?" Mackey demanded. (Mackey's father, Dr. A. G. Mackey, a local customs official, served as the convention's president.) When Logan said that he was, Mackey struck him across the face, exclaiming, "Take that!" Logan attempted to defend himself, and both men were quickly pulled apart by delegates. To protect the journalist, Moses embraced the man in a bear hug and held him against a wall, as blacks watching from a gallery shouted, "Kill the hound! Cut his heart out! Throw him out the window!" Moses refused to relax his grip on Logan, warning that any man who tried to hit the reporter would have to strike him as well. Mackey, in the meantime, hovered about, shouting at Logan for the "mean, contemptible and dirty business" of coming here to "defame the characters of members of the convention."

A police officer arrived, and Logan requested that he escort him back to the
Mercury
's office. Mackey, in a sudden show of magnanimity, then insisted that
he
would escort Logan back safely, and several other delegates of both races spoke up, saying they would accompany the men. In the end, a group of police and delegates of both races provided an "honor guard" for the reporter as he returned to his newspaper's offices. Thus, having freely maligned the delegates and their character, the
Mercury
provided a test case that proved these judgments erroneous. Even Logan later conceded that the men he had slandered had behaved honorably in seeing that he was not harmed.

As the delegates coolly defused the crisis over the
Mercury,
so did they defy South Carolinians' worst fears about the convention. Some white Charlestonians had joked that the convention participants looked "shabby" and that the clothes they wore were gaudy hand-me-downs distributed to war refugees by the Freedmen's Bureau. But the last laugh, and the sartorial coup of the convention, belonged to the black delegate who showed up one morning in the gray overcoat of a Confederate officer. Even the black observers who filled the gallery were, in deference to their surroundings, generally well behaved; the
New York Times
noted that gentlemen and ladies alike had learned to spit in a civilized manner—that is, into a spittoon.

Most of the whites present, including members of the press, were seeing and hearing for the first time the phenomenon of black men speaking their opinions freely. Two qualities struck them—(1) the ability of blacks to talk compellingly of the hardships they had endured and relate these experiences to the black community as a whole and (2) the African-influenced cadence of speech, influenced by the preaching in black churches. That Daddy Cain could shake the rafters and "call down Heaven" with his forceful eloquence was already well known to his black constituents, but many whites were new to such performances. Robert Brown Elliott was an equally gifted orator just finding his voice; returning to the offices of the
Leader
one evening after addressing a voting rights meeting, he had enthused to his colleagues, "I thundered, and by golly they cheered."

"The colored men in the Convention possess by long odds the largest share of mental caliber," noted the
New York Times.

They are the best debaters [and] there is a homely but strong grasp of common sense in what they say, and although the [grammatical] mistakes made are frequent and ludicrous, the South Carolinians are not slow to acknowledge that their destinies really appear to be safer in the hands of these unlettered Ethiopians than they would be if confided to the more unscrupulous care of the white men in the body.

Despite the day's familiar refrain that blacks lacked the education and initiative to be politicians, it began to appear that the reverse might be true; the black participants took readily to their duties, patiently mastering the sessions' procedures and more often than not managing to say their piece. When a visiting correspondent of
The Nation
magazine tried to bait one South Carolina Republican by asking how many of the state's black legislators could read a copy of John Bunyan's
Pilgrim's Progress,
the savvy reply was that they could not only read it but had lived a remarkable "progress" of their own, comparable to Bunyan's, and that they could undoubtedly write better articles about South Carolina than had ever appeared in
The Nation.

The gathering framed a new constitution that vowed the state's allegiance to the Constitution and the government of the United States, and it promised that South Carolina would remain a member of the Union—a significant point, since the state had led the South into secession. The document also called for direct election of several state officials previously appointed by the legislature, and representation in the state house of representatives based on population. This addressed the power balance in the state, which had long allowed the wealthy coastal section, including Charleston, to dominate state politics at the expense of the backwoods upcountry. A basic bill of rights was established, guaranteeing freedom of speech and assembly. The courts were no longer allowed to take a debtor's last thousand dollars' worth of property or five hundred dollars' worth of personal possessions, meaning that poor whites and blacks alike could not be turned out on the street. Prison sentences for debt were abolished. If a woman owned property outright, her assets could no longer be appropriated to pay her husband's debts; nonetheless, Whipper's resolution that women be given the franchise, despite his passionate urging of the issue (which included his view that women were intellectually superior to men), was rejected without a vote. (Whipper spoke from personal experience: his wife was Frances Rollin, one of several well known, opinionated sisters of a light-skinned, aristocratic Charleston family active in state politics.) The South Carolina constitution also authorized the state to seek loans for sorely needed public works projects—bridges, roads, canals, and other types of infrastructure.

Robert Smalls's most notable accomplishment at the convention was to successfully call for state-sponsored, free, compulsory education for rich and poor, black and white, and the creation of state colleges. In South Carolina at the end of the Civil War, only about 5 percent of the freedmen knew how to read and write, and blacks hurried in a veritable stampede to gain some education after the Freedmen's Bureau opened schools in 1865. The arrival of black suffrage linked education and the
all-important ballot, twin priorities among freed people of all ages. Smalls suggested "a system of common schools, of different grades, to be open without charge to all classes of persons" and suggested that it "be required that all parents and guardians send their children between the ages of 7 and 14 to some school, at least 6 months for each year, under penalties for non-compliance." Smalls's keen interest in the subject grew from personal experience. Sensitive about his own lack of education, he had studied diligently since the war to improve his meager reading and writing skills, occasionally working with a tutor.

Some delegates opposed the compulsory aspect of Smalls's plan, deeming it harsh and undemocratic; others thought it placed too great a demand on a people still recovering from the war's devastation or alleged that it was meant to hasten the mixing of the races. But Alonzo Ransier jumped up to defend the point, saying that the success of the republic as a whole relied on the education of its members and that parents should not be allowed to neglect their children's education. Robert Brown Elliott, born in Boston, raised the example of New England, where compulsory education "has made ... her citizens, poor as well as rich, low as well as high, black as well as white, educated and intelligent." He cast education and understanding as integral to the state's future. "Ignorance is the parent of vice and crime, and was the sustainer of the late gigantic slaveholder's rebellion," he reminded his listeners. "I appeal to gentlemen of the convention to know whether they desire to see a state of anarchy, or a state of confusion in South Carolina ... I desire to know whether they wish to see an independent people, engaged in industrious pursuits, living happy and contented." Other delegates suggested that parents should willingly pay taxes to keep their children in school rather than maintain them later in penitentiaries; compulsory attendance might keep the state's children from "running around molasses barrels or stealing cotton." One delegate stated that he'd seen, that very morning, "some eighteen colored children standing before the door of the Guard House ... If those little boys and girls were at school, they would not have been arrested."

The version of Smalls's resolution that ultimately passed provided that all children attend school for a minimum of twenty-four months from age six to sixteen and that each school district keep at least one school open for six months a year. Thus the right to a free education was inserted in the state's constitution for the first time in South Carolina history. Kicking the question of school integration to the state legislature that would enact the relevant laws, the convention resolved that the
state's public schools and colleges would be open to all, without regard to race or color. "We only compel parents to send their children to some school," said Cardozo, "not that they shall send them with the colored children; we simply give those colored children who desire to go to white schools the privilege of doing so." Cardozo did suggest that putting children of both races together in schools might serve, in the long run, to diminish racial prejudice, but at this point in time the relative value or harm of mixed schools was a somewhat abstract concern; freed people were primarily interested in education for its own sake.