CHAPTER 6

African Americans and the Call for Rights

In 1868, Kentucky’s superintendent of freedmen’s affairs, Benjamin P. Runkle, announced in a speech to blacks in Louisville, “At last when the government, casting aside the last lingering remnants of prejudice, determined to use all the power it could command to crush the rebellion it offered the musket to the Black man—the musket without the promise of bounty and without the sword—How they responded let the names of 125,000 black men on the rolls of the National Army answer! How they used their arms, let Fort Wagner and Port Hudson respond!” Runkle inspired his audience by reminding them that, “amid the ringing of steel, the roar of cannon, and the crash of musketry, was a people born, from darkness to light, from bondage to freedom; and stood, their shackles broken, forever free, waiting in the dim uncertain morning of this new day,” beginning “to become fitted for citizens of a free nation.”1

Runkle distinguished between social equality, and averred that blacks did “not want, ask for, or expect it,” and equality before the law sought by blacks and ordained by the Declaration of Independence: the right to live, possess property, pursue happiness, receive a fair wage, support families, have educational opportunities for children, worship as they chose, testify in courts, sit on juries, vote, and enjoy personal security. For Runkle, “every man who is liable to be called upon to bear arms in defence of his country, should have a voice in the government of that country,” and he further pronounced to his audience, “when we saw ‘Old Glory’ surrounded by the glittering bayonets coming to the rescue, did it matter to us whether the faces in that column were white or black?…Why should we who stood side by side in the same armies…object to vote with them side by side at the same ballot box to support the same eternal principles? I do not believe we would be called upon to answer whether we fought in a white or black regiment; but on what side we fought, on the side of God, liberty and humanity, or on the side of darkness, the Devil and Slavery.” After recognizing the allegiance blacks showed to the United States, Runkle urged them to embrace the Republican free labor ethos by pursuing education and property, cultivating moral character, and avoiding alcohol.2

Little over a decade before Runkle’s speech, the Supreme Court excluded blacks from American citizenship pursuant to its holding in Dred Scott. In March 1861, Congress sent to the states a thirteenth amendment, never ratified, to protect slavery from federal interference in the states where it existed. In the mid-to-late 1860s, however, discussion focused on the ramifications of emancipation and the place of blacks in American society, and opinions formerly viewed as belonging only to extreme abolitionists became increasingly conventional.

Black soldiers understood while in the armed forces that their status had changed as a result of their service, even if the extent and permanence of these changes remained in a state of flux. As a black newspaper pronounced in the war’s waning months, “Within two years the standard of ‘Justice’ has been raised in our favor; an admission of our valor, our manhood, our courage, has been made by our former oppressors; partial equality has been extended to us, and our rights as citizens have been recognized, in a great measure.” Yet, as the war wound down, whether blacks would be able to move the country to enshrine permanently in the law these wartime ways of thinking remained uncertain. Blacks had served in past American wars with no lasting change to their status, and they now faced two questions with much at stake: Would all blacks finally become part of “the people” and be considered as national citizens by the law? And what would any such citizenship status actually mean?3

The War’s Closing Days

One of the most compelling moments experienced by many black soldiers in the war’s closing days was the reception they received by freedpeople as the Union army advanced toward ultimate victory. A sergeant of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts reported that, when his regiment entered Charleston, South Carolina, in 1865, the streets “thronged with women and children of all sizes, colors and grades.” One elderly black woman threw down her crutch and “shouted that the year of jubilee had come.” Another soldier rejoiced as freedom came in late February 1865 to Wilmington, North Carolina, where a major slave market had existed before the war: “Where once the slave was forbid being out after nine P.M., or to puff a ‘regalia,’ or to walk with a cane, or to ride in a carriage,” black soldiers now marched in front of cheering black civilians, “with banners floating” and “splendid brass bands and drum corps” playing patriotic music. Some of the newly liberated distributed tobacco, bread, meat, or water to the soldiers, while one nonagenarian stood with “long white locks and his wrinkled cheeks, saying ‘Welcome, welcome!’” Another touching scene came when a woman ran to embrace her son with pride as one who left as a slave but “returned in the garb of a Union soldier, free, a man.”4

As blacks joined the festivity of triumphant unionists both in the North and South, they did so with the satisfaction of knowing that their community played a critical role in achieving the success they celebrated. Black nationalist Major Martin Delaney addressed jubilant freedmen on St. Helena Island, South Carolina, in July 1865: “Do you know that if it was not for the black man this war never would have been brought to a close with success to the Union,” nor “the liberty of your race if it had not been for the negro?” Delaney thundered to his audience, “I want you to understand that—Do you know it, do you know it, do you know it[?]”5

Yet, these celebrations went beyond the exhilaration blacks felt at participating in the Union’s triumph. Blacks realized that their military service helped create the necessary context for the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, which eliminated slavery. Participation in the Union victory now invigorated blacks to assert stronger calls for defined citizenship rights based on equality. A member of the 119th USCI wrote of several regiments and thousands of black civilians from a local refugee camp who partook in a “grand spectacle” at Camp Nelson, Kentucky, on July 4, 1865, congregating “in the heart of a slave State” and celebrating “the day sacred to the cause of freedom” as “an assemblage of colored people…never before beheld” in Kentucky. Together, the black troops and freedpeople enjoyed singing, speeches, a review of black regiments, and a good dinner. “By laboring for our own cause,” the black veteran argued, “we show, in the first place, that we understand and appreciate what our rights are; in the second place, that we have the courage and manhood to ask for them; in the third place, that we are determined, sooner or later, to have them.”6

On the other hand, interracial tension increased in some areas once combat ceased. “During the actual existence of the Rebellion,” related a member of the Third USCI days before a mutiny in that regiment, “we have been told by our commanding officers on the eve of battle to forget old grudges and prejudices, and fight like men for a common cause.” Where officers “have nothing now to fear from stray bullets,” however, they tormented their black subordinates with hated punishments reminiscent of the plantation, such as tying up by the thumbs. The soldier reported that the word of the “smooth oily tongue of the white planter” often proved enough to “condemn” black soldiers and civilians, “the only true and avowed friends” of the United States in the South.7

The words of George M. Turner, a Third Rhode Island Artillery sergeant who served in South Carolina and Florida, reveal the struggle of a white soldier who attempted to reconcile reluctant respect for black bravery with deep-seated racism. In December 1861, Turner recounted to his cousin laughing “until our sides are nearly bursting” at the singing and dancing of contrabands, and in June 1862, he wrote his father that he “despised [blacks] more than dirt.” By late July 1863, Turner showed a marked change of heart: “When you hear any one remark that nigger soldiers will not fight, please request them to come down here and judge for themselves,” and he deemed the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts “as good a fighting regiment as there is in the 10th Army Corps.” Yet, by the following May, Turner reverted to racism, expressing anger at the idea of black equality, resenting blacks for being “the ‘bone’ over which the Northern and Southern dogs are quarreling,” and declaring that he was “not willing to fight shoulder to shoulder with a black dirty nigger.” When Captain Charles B. Brockway addressed an August 1865 Democratic rally in Columbia County, Pennsylvania, he condemned emancipation as a divisive measure that had destroyed morale in the North and stiffened Confederate resolve in the South. Brockway called black troops “cowardly,” identified them as “government pets” kept away from real danger, and he demanded an end to organizations created “especially for the care of negroes.”8

Black soldiers witnessed grave atrocities committed by fellow whites in the blue uniform while serving on garrison duty near Charleston, South Carolina. Soldiers of the 127th New York hurled epithets and rocks at the new freedpeople, while the Twenty-first USCI (executed mutineer William Walker’s regiment) attempted to shield black civilians and help them transition from slavery to freedom. Racial tensions boiled as conditions deteriorated in Charleston, a city stripped of supplies, barren of food, and facing a smallpox epidemic. Some of the New Yorkers destroyed booths in the blacks’ marketplace, assaulted and reportedly raped former slaves, sacked black homes, and demanded that blacks move aside when whites wanted to pass on the sidewalks. Orders prohibiting such behavior had little effect, while blacks retaliated by hurling bottles, and brandished knives for protection.9

On June 18, 1865, members of the New York unit fought with those of the Thirty-fifth USCI who defended two black women from insult. Little changed after the 165th New York replaced the 127th. By July 8, skirmishing between that regiment and the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts exploded into a full-out melee that lasted until another white unit deployed on July 10 to restore order. Major General Quincy Gillmore moved the New York regiment to Morris Island, forbade its members to enter Charleston, and dispatched an officer from the Twenty-first USCI to confiscate its regimental banner, a humiliating act of punishment. Gillmore also transferred the Twenty-first USCI to Hilton Head and tried to minimize contact between white and black troops. Other attacks persisted by members of other white federal regiments, however, leading to the recall of both the Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth Massachusetts by the fall of 1865.10

Black garrisons in the South also generated tensions with the local white population. On one hand, the presence of black troops often dissuaded whites from retaliating against freedpeople—an empowering position. H. M. Turner reported that whites within reach of black troops felt “afraid to kick colored women, and abuse colored people on the Streets.” According to one officer, black soldiers cheerfully rendered service because they felt they did so to advance the interests of fellow African Americans. Yet, for white Southerners who already viewed African Americans with disgust, the presence of black soldiers serving in their midst underscored the mortification of Confederate defeat and represented the societal changes associated with the end of slavery. The notion of armed black soldiers proved a terrifying social and physical threat for Southerners who before the war feared the potential for slave revolt. Rumors swirled in some areas that black soldiers would lead a widespread Christmas 1865 slaughter of white planters in the South, highlighting, in the words of one historian, the “symbolic power of African American troops and their role in fueling the fear of white southerners during the closing months of the year.”11

Fear and resentment against black soldiers, especially as they served as a protective force for freedpeople, eventually led to brutality against African Americans in blue. In Columbus, Georgia, a black soldier overheard a drunken white man call him a “God damn black son of a bitch” before shots rang out, wounding him in the hand and each arm. Officers had to restrain the black soldier’s 103rd USCI from retaliating, and the town nearly exploded in violence after a federal detachment arrested the perpetrator: hundreds of white Southern civilians, some of whom brandished pistols, turned out to demand his release. Columbus’s white civilians also petitioned Georgia’s governor to try to get the black garrison removed, claiming that the black soldiers had shown “a disregard of moral and legal restraints” by “robbing and insulting our citizens both male & female,” and that after one of the soldiers was shot, black troops “fired indiscriminately into the street wounding one of our peaceable & orderly citizens necessitating the amputation of his leg.”12

Yet African American soldiers also felt emboldened to take tangible action against white southerners who insulted them or black civilians. The garrisoning of Kinston, North Carolina, with “smoked Yankees” in 1865 exasperated local residents, but they soon saw “the smoked Yankees marching some of their fellow citizens to jail at the point of a bayonet.” At Olustee Station, Florida, one white man found twenty guns pointed at him after he declared that “all the niggers should be in [hell].” One soldier actually fired, grazing the offender’s head, but when Brigadier General Benjamin Tilghman arrived on the scene, he ignored the breach of discipline and merely led “the wounded man aside…and bid him depart in peace, lest a worse evil come upon him.” Sergeant E. S. Robison wrote directly to Major General Quincy Gillmore to report that whites had ransacked the home of a black man outside Columbia, South Carolina, and that the local federal commander ignored the aggrieved man’s complaint. “I am only a sergeant and of Course Should be as silent as possible,” wrote Robison, “But in this I Could not hold my temper After fighting to get wrights that White men might Respect By Virtue of the Law.”13

Such incidents reveal the strong reactionary forces that marshaled to oppose integration of blacks into society, as well as the uncertain position blacks held. At the same time, these episodes show how some blacks felt empowered to stand up against mistreatment and reject prior expectations of submission. Moreover, in the context of persistent inequality and prejudice, blacks understood that the Thirteenth Amendment would ring hollow if emancipation meant freedom in name only, especially should the states remain arbiters of what rights citizens enjoyed. Blacks especially realized, in the closing days of the war, that they needed federal protection to exercise defined rights of citizenship uniformly enforced across the country, and that the Union’s victory afforded them the opportune moment to seek it.

Mustering Out from One Fight, Mobilizing for Another

As the war wound down, muster-out ceremonies helped many black soldiers transition into a civilian life formerly unknown to most of them, that of freedmen. By autumn of 1866, only thirteen thousand blacks remained in the Union army, in contrast with eighty-three thousand a year earlier. The last Civil War USCT regiment, the 117th USCI, disbanded in August 1867, though blacks would continue to serve in the regular army in the Ninth and Tenth cavalry and Twenty-fourth and Twenty-fifth infantry regiments. In most regiments, the men gathered on their last day of service to receive their discharge papers and any pay owed them, turn in equipment they did not wish to purchase, and listen to a final address from their colonel. Such moments revealed an opportunity for the redefinition of racial relations in the aftermath of the Civil War. As the Sixth USCI mustered out, its officers adopted a resolution illustrating the impact that black service made on at least some white comrades: after noting that blacks “have shown themselves to be brave, reliable, and efficient as soldiers,” the resolution stated that, “being satisfied with their conduct in the high position of soldiers of the United States, we see no reason why they should not be fully recognized as equals, honorable and responsible citizens of the same.”14

Colonel Theodore H. Barrett declared to the troops of his Sixty-second USCI, out of Missouri, “It is you yourselves, that have made yourselves soldiers and men,” and that through their actions, the men and their families transformed from slaves living in “negro quarters” to freedpeople living in homes, with children who would experience not the auction block but the schoolhouse, and wives under the protection of a husband instead of the dominion of a master. Barrett reminded his men that these changes created new responsibilities and opportunities, and he counseled them to save their money, remain sober, find good wives, put a premium on education, and buy land and cultivate their own living, if possible, rather than working as wage laborers. Most importantly, Barrett told the men, “It is not the color which is hereafter to make the difference between men. You are to have an equal chance with the white man. You wish to be citizens? Show to the country then that you are capable of citizenship.” Acknowledging that the law did not yet recognize blacks as American citizens (the Fourteenth Amendment had not yet overturned Dred Scott), Barrett declared, “If you shall deserve citizenship, you will in the end receive it, with every right and every privilege enjoyed by those who now deny these rights to you.” Nonetheless, Barrett announced the inevitability of equal rights as a result of military service, and that even former slaveholders would soon have to acknowledge, “to have been a colored soldier, is to be a citizen.” Identifying his veterans as leaders within the black population, with a duty to instruct the new freedpeople, Barrett closed his valediction by recalling a time when the regiment crossed the Mississippi River, so that its right rested on the Illinois side and its left remained in Missouri, “thus, uniting slave soil with free, you marched out of bondage, with muskets on your shoulders.” As Barrett had, other commanders noted to blacks the opportunity for legal change as a result of African American military service, and urged them to pursue self-reliance and embrace the Republican Party’s free labor ideology as well.15

For the Fifth USCI, recruited out of Ohio, the disbanding of the regiment juxtaposed the sadness of parting with a new confidence for future political action. As one black correspondent wrote,

When discharged, see them turn away with a sad, lingering gaze upon that old flag which they have borne so proudly upon the many battlefields…. Then, as the order is given to break ranks, see how eagerly they grasp the hand of their comrades in earnest friendship for the last time. A tear courses down their bronzed cheeks, as they hastily say the parting word in final adieu to that comrade who has with them passed through all dangers.

In discussing persistent prejudice and opposition to giving blacks the vote, the author identified in a very explicit way the expectation that these veterans would take the lead in vindicating black demands: “We will not revert to these acts of oppression again…. We, who have, for the last three years, been so closely connected as to have formed a seeming brotherhood, now, when these ties are about to be dissolved, are we not willing to continue this connection in some form, which may bring us together in something like the former organization?” In proposing annual reunions of Ohio’s black veterans, the author nominated thirteen sergeants from the Fifth and Twenty-seventh USCI regiments to establish “an organization which will…be a guiding star to our future advancement in the cause of liberty and justice.”16

Black soldiers elsewhere made similar calls. From the ranks of the Twenty-second USCI, W. A. Freeman argued after Appomattox that “the blood of our comrades who have fallen upon the fields of battle, while assisting to plant the tree of liberty,” and the “tears of our widows and mothers, which have watered” that tree, meant that “liberty and equality have been purchased at too great a sacrifice” to be forfeited. In August 1865, Sergeant Norman B. Sterrett recognized the inextricably linked battles black soldiers fought, one on the battlefield and the other against racism. Exasperated at the tension that existed between emancipation and prejudice, a “new idea struck” Sterrett, that “when three or four thousand brave colored soldiers, who have endured privation and suffering to crush the wicked rebellion, return to their homes in Maryland,” the result would be that “respectable colored people will be able to walk the streets without being insulted.” Seven hundred black Iowans of the Sixtieth USCI convened at Davenport on October 31, 1865, to petition their state legislature for the right of suffrage on coming home from the field. The veterans resolved that Iowa had a “duty” to allow blacks to vote, reminding legislators that “he who is worthy to be trusted with the musket can and ought to be trusted with the ballot.”17

While Americans wrestled with the ill-defined contours of the postbellum racial and political landscape, ceremonies similar to those given Irish American and native-born regiments welcomed the return of at least some black regiments recruited from the North. A week before the African American Twenty-ninth Connecticut Volunteer Infantry returned to Hartford, the state rejected a law that would have extended suffrage to blacks. In counterpoint, the Twenty-ninth Connecticut’s homecoming celebration matched that given to white regiments and afforded blacks access to public space in the state’s capital city. Hartford’s mayor greeted the men on November 24, 1865, and the veterans followed a brass band to City Hall, where they ate a meal prepared by the city’s white and black citizens. Afterward, local militia escorted the Thirty-first USCI, half recruited in Connecticut, to City Hall, where both regiments received the mayor’s official salutation. Governor William Buckingham and the Twenty-ninth Connecticut’s former commander praised the men’s service before they marched through Hartford’s flag-adorned main streets, observed by handkerchief-waving crowds.18

Welcome-home celebrations also provided blacks a forum with which to articulate publicly their vision of a new postwar legal scheme. On November 14, 1865, a crowd of whites and blacks thronged Harrisburg’s flag-adorned streets in a ceremony hosted by the city’s chapter of the Pennsylvania State Equal Rights League. Members of the 3rd, 6th, 8th, 22nd, 24th, 32nd, 41st, 43rd, 45th and 127th USCI, 11th USCHA, and the 54th and 55th Massachusetts regiments marched (and disabled soldiers rode in carriages) in a parade marshaled by black correspondent Thomas M. Chester. Wreathed banners bearing slogans such as “HE WHO DEFENDS FREEDOM IS WORTHY OF ALL ITS FRANCHISES” decorated the streets of Harrisburg’s black district. When the procession reached the state Capitol, a prayer and the singing of “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” opened the program.19

The Harrisburg ceremony went beyond welcoming the return of thousands of black veterans in blue; it allowed African Americans to announce their constitutional views in front of a multiracial audience on the grounds of the most important governmental space in Pennsylvania. A black speaker condemned to the audience “the shame of the Keystone State…that she remands back those dark hued warriors, who risked life in her defence, to a degrading tutelage, and that she grudgingly accords to them the inalienable rights of men, while she withholds from them those governmental instrumentalities whereby alone these rights can be perfectly secured.” Resolutions read aloud honored the service of thousands of black soldiers, both living and dead, and linked black claims of manhood and citizenship with the proof of loyalty validated by their sacrifice. Other resolutions held that federal power trumped that of the states and declared that race-based distinctions violated both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution’s Article 4 Section 4 “guarantee to every State in this Union a republican form of government.” Perceiving that states would be uncertain defenders of their rights, blacks increasingly called for a federal definition of citizenship, along with a pledge that the national government would protect the rights associated with it.20

5. National Convention of Colored Citizens, meeting in the House of Representatives at New Orleans, Louisiana, April 1872. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, May 4, 1872. Courtesy Library of Congress.

Meanwhile, some blacks continued to seek advancement through military service after the war. An encouraging symbol of postwar respect came with the July 28, 1866, army reorganization act, which provided for four black infantry and two black cavalry regiments within a sixty-regiment regular army. In contrast to prewar exclusion from the army, black regiments now were to receive the same uniforms, weapons, and pay as white soldiers, and they did not serve in a separate corps. The act also provided for schools at all permanent posts. About half the blacks who joined the regular army in the late 1860s served during the Civil War. At least 533 men transferred directly from mustering out USCT regiments and about 2,500 other USCT veterans joined shortly after their discharge, many of them listing their occupation as “soldier” when enrolling.21

On a public level, William Wells Brown, in The Negro in the American Rebellion: His Heroism and His Fidelity (1867), took up William C. Nell’s mantle to detail black valor at battles such as Fort Wagner and atrocities suffered at such places as Fort Pillow. Other blacks used the lessons that they learned in the army to serve as leaders in civilian life, standing within their community as individuals especially qualified to assert demands for equality. On an personal level, “If we hadn’t become sojers, all might have gone back as it was before,” freedman and veteran Thomas Long wrote after the war, “But now tings can neber go back, because we have showed our energy and our courage and our naturally manhood.” When a white man insulted a black soldier in South Carolina by asking, “What are you, anyhow,” the African American retorted, “When God made me I wasn’t much but I’s a man now.” Black veterans assisted other freedpeople, inspired in them long-lasting pride, and helped build institutions such as churches and schools for their community. The existence of thousands of black veterans across the United States generated self-respect and energized the African American community to demand equal rights.22

Conventions and Equal Rights Leagues

During military service, blacks witnessed firsthand the power of large-scale organization at the same time that many, especially ex-slaves, became politically aware for the first time. While black veterans demanded that whites remove impediments against them, they also expected fellow African Americans to work actively for self-improvement. Both themes intensified as black veterans took lessons learned in the army into an energized black convention movement. The shared experiences of military service strengthened unity and American identity within the black community. Military service also helped inform black expectations of what citizenship entailed and afforded African Americans a powerful argument that those who defended the Union deserved full membership in its society. During the Civil War, blacks began to meet once again to assert their demands through national and state conventions that directly addressed governmental officials and spoke to white and black Americans. The convention movement not only showed that blacks could rationally engage with questions of constitutional importance, it allowed blacks to highlight inequality against them across the country. Through conventions, blacks further asserted their American allegiance, called on the federal government for recognition and protection as citizens, and articulated their expectations as to the contours of that citizenship.

The heritage of blacks gathering in national conventions dated to 1830, with the establishment of the National Negro Convention. Meeting eleven more times, with the final convocation in 1855, dissension prevented most of the plans discussed from ever coming to fruition. Black leaders also organized numerous state-level conventions before the Civil War. All but one of these prewar state conventions occurred in the North (the lone one on Southern soil occurred in Maryland in 1852), and they generally reflected the different priorities of Northern and Southern blacks. While Southern slaves likely would have placed full emphasis on the abolition of slavery had they been allowed to convene, Northern black antebellum conventions frequently debated voting rights and other strictures against them.23

This does not mean that Northern conventions ignored slavery, but many Northern blacks viewed political equality as a weapon with which to kill it and argued that improving rights for themselves would hasten emancipation in the South. Additionally, the Northern antebellum convention movement spent much of its energy debating the issues of colonization and emigration, as some blacks urged a return to Africa. These debates divided the Northern black leadership and dissipated attention from other issues facing the black community.24

The Emancipation Proclamation, Attorney General Bates’s 1862 opinion that included blacks as American citizens, and the arming of thousands of black soldiers galvanized a new convention movement during the 1860s. Blacks seized the opportunity provided by their wartime participation to engage, with greater clarity, issues regarding their place in the polity. This reinvigorated convention movement promoted the notion that loyalty to the Union trumped race in determining citizenship status. While continuity existed from before the war in some areas, such as calls for the franchise and invocations of the Declaration of Independence as a guiding document, blacks now entered constitutional discourse with increasingly focused arguments. African Americans presented a more united front, generally eschewed emigration and colonization, and offered an expansive definition of the bundle of rights that comprised citizenship. Efforts to deny blacks their equal rights perverted the natural law, delegates declared, much as antebellum laws supporting slavery deviated from the spirit of the Declaration of Independence. Black conventioneers cast themselves as the keepers of the “true” American Founding and challenged whites to live up to its ideals.

The convention movement reflected and fed off of black military service in several ways. Experiences in the army helped inform black expectations of what citizenship meant. Moreover, the valor of black troops in uniform, both on the battlefield as well as in demanding equal pay, inspired delegates with a sense of pride in African American manhood and confidence in black leadership ability. Time and again, references to black service, whether in speeches or by the hanging of American flags sometimes literally stained with the blood of black troops, marked the proceedings. Delegates repeatedly asserted that in addition to birthright, service during the Union’s crisis automatically conferred citizenship and rights on blacks.

Additionally, conventions adopted a martial spirit, rousing the black community as a whole with references to duty, sacrifice, and continued struggle. That nearly all black soldiers served in federal, not state, regiments helped bolster African American identification of the national jurisdiction as superior to that of the states. Combining entertainment and political propaganda, conventions popularized among blacks songs that linked the service of African Americans in uniform with the fight to redefine citizenship. In addition to songs like the “Battle Cry of Freedom,” “Are You a Member of the League,” challenged black men and women to participate in the struggle for equal rights. Equating membership in the Equal Rights League to the role black soldiers played in saving “this glorious land,” the song incorporated the chorus, “They look like men of war.”25

Black conventioneers now deployed on a different type of battlefield, one where Americans wrestled with how they would interpret the Constitution after the Civil War, and where blacks insisted that their birth within the United States and military service gave them every right to participate. Convention delegates used military service to quash any remaining impulse in support of colonization or race-based exclusion. Blacks now centered their discussions on whether a simple test of loyalty could determine whether one was a citizen, and they articulated their expectations of real freedom, not just in name only, complete with equality and better-defined and guaranteed citizenship rights.

The 1860s convention movement also stimulated greater communication within the black leadership, reflecting the breaking down of sectional boundaries begun by participation in the Union military. As African American soldiers from across the country found themselves in closer contact with one another, so also did national conventions allow for local delegates to bring their perspectives to the collective center of black debate. State Equal Rights League chapters remained subordinate to the National Equal Rights League. Moreover, because black activists realized that the goals of the black movement transcended state boundaries, greater solidarity of purpose connected local conventions. Accordingly, when black conventions met in New York and Illinois on the same day in 1866, they greeted each other by telegram.26

Reflecting their American identity, delegates to the black conventions believed that they acted in a spirit of representative democracy that comported with republican political practices. Conventions also distributed their proceedings in pamphlets, called for more black newspapers, and encouraged publication of appeals that disseminated their message to the black and white communities. Furthermore, whites frequently observed these conventions and, in some instances, found themselves elected as honorary members or asked to address the assembly.27

Conventions, and the equal rights organizations they created, flaunted white prejudice by publicly demonstrating a high level of competent black self- governance. Many conventions kept precise minutes that reveal meticulous devotion to the rules of parliamentary procedure, as delegates formed committees, debated motions, and drafted reports. The Equal Rights League set out constitutions for national and local governance, which included provisions allowing for trial and censure, suspension, or banishment of members who violated bylaws or committed offences contrary to the league’s interests. In so doing, the league sought to position itself and its members within the broader rule of law and carry forth the lessons learned from black encounters with general courts-martial during the Civil War.28

Comparable to Irish nationalism within Irish America, an undercurrent of black nationalism ran through African America during the 1860s. Postwar black conventions rejected Martin Delaney’s emigrationism but carried forth his mission to contrast racist degradation by restoring to blacks a sense of pride in their ancient heritage. Black delegates also extolled African America’s accomplishments and encouraged a communal sense of responsibility to those of African lineage, calling for self-regeneration to prove, among other reasons, that blacks were as capable as whites. Talk of black pride and identity, as well as a black nation within the United States, pervaded African American conventions and organizations, and sometimes created tension between the principles of color-blindness they espoused at the same time. In 1866, the Pennsylvania Equal Rights League petitioned Congress as “true children of the Republic,” but distinct, with a “color which mantles our cheeks and of which we may justly feel proud.” Addressing a proposal to eliminate use of the word African in connection with the African Methodist Episcopal Church, George A. Rue asked, “What is there so detestable in that word?” Rue urged his readers to embrace the word African, reminding them, “no crime is attached” to it. Some of the paradoxes and dualities of black nationalism during the 1860s anticipate the “double consciousness” identified by W.E.B. DuBois, even where DuBois espoused a nationalism different from that of earlier black leaders such as Delaney.29

The first black national convention since 1855 shows how deeply the experiences of the Civil War unified and nationalized blacks, and energized their more coherent call for far-reaching rights. Its delegates gathered in 1864, before constitutional emancipation and at a time when not all Northerners accepted the idea of permanent emancipation as a prerequisite to peace. Moreover, the Republican Party seemed to blacks unsettlingly noncommittal about the matter in the face of hotly contested upcoming elections. On the evening of October 4, 1864, approximately 150 delegates from seventeen states and the District of Columbia convened in Syracuse, New York, and elected Frederick Douglass the convention’s president. Although dominated by delegates from New England and the Mid-Atlantic states, attendees included representatives from Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Missouri. These delegates declared their vision of freedom both to the nation but also to equivocal Republicans, and they served as that party’s broadly egalitarian conscience in calling for the irrevocable abolition of slavery, full inclusion of blacks into the American people, and a fulfillment of the nation’s founding principles.30

On October 5, after creating several committees and determining the convention’s rules of order, the delegates cheered while the battle flag of the black First Louisiana Native Guards was suspended across the main platform. Captain James H. Ingraham, present with the regiment during its attack at Port Hudson, described the assault and his fellow delegates applauded, with their multiracial audience, the black heroes and “the battle-flag which they bore.” The night’s session ended with the singing of “Battle Cry of Freedom,” evoking in the delegates a sense that they now rallied “round the flag” in calling for equal rights for all.31

On October 6, the convention founded the National Equal Rights League and, despite an East-West rivalry, established its headquarters in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. While not seeking to interfere with other organizations, the delegates called for increased unity through the league in order “to obtain by appeals to the minds and conscience of the American people, or by legal process when possible, a recognition of the rights of the colored people of the nation as American citizens.” In keeping with their call for equality among all people, the delegates mandated that membership in the league should remain open regardless of color or sex.32

Speakers then ascended the rostrum. Dr. P. B. Randolph declared to the world, “WE ARE COMING UP!…and going up to stay,” and honored dead black soldiers as “the seeds” of a “mighty harvest.” Reminiscent of William C. Nell’s prewar arguments, black Boston attorney John S. Rock vowed that the experience of their grandfathers, who fought in the Revolution only to be cheated of their rightful due, could not repeat itself. Rock further assessed that black soldiers on and off the battlefield “have done wonders for the race.”33

The delegates identified themselves as offering the true interpretation of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. In a powerful Declaration of Wrongs and Rights, the convention reminded all Americans that whites had “by brute force” caused blacks to suffer “every cruelty and indignity possible,” divested them of ownership of their bodies and the fruits of their labor, equal pay while in the army, and the rights of trial by jury, representation in the government, and education. Accordingly, the delegates reasserted the “fundamental principle” that “all men are born free and equal,” and they rejected tortured antebellum readings of the same principal that permitted racism and slavery (e.g., Chief Justice Taney’s logic in his Dred Scott ruling that blacks were never intended to be included in the words of the Declaration of Independence). Blacks urged a racially inclusive rule of law as well as official affirmation of their citizenship, but they also proffered definitions of what rights they expected that citizenship to include by listing what had been denied them up until that point. Blacks realized that their status as citizens would remain meaningless and rhetorical unless citizenship had concrete definition in the law.34

In an address to their “FELLOW-CITIZENS,” the delegates argued that forces conspired to reverse the progress of equality, exclude black men from the ballot box, deny the black soldier “his claims to the gratitude of his country,” and “scout his pretensions to American citizenship.” Concerned that the Republican Party remained equivocal, and fearing that a single military defeat could destroy the potential presented by the North’s slow but ongoing march toward victory, the delegates called for a permanent abolition of slavery and granting black men the vote. Without the franchise, they argued, property ownership, and freedom and its associated rights, became mere privileges held at the sufferance of others.35

Tens of thousands of black soldiers grasped these rights for all African Americans, declared the convention, holding “the American people bound in honor thus to reward them.” The delegates interrogated the nation,

Are we good enough to use bullets, and not good enough to use ballots? May we defend rights in time of war, and yet be denied the exercise of those rights in time of peace? Are we citizens when the nation is in peril, and aliens when the nation is in safety? May we shed our blood under the star-spangled banner on the battle-field, and yet be debarred from marching under it to the ballot-box? Will the brave white soldiers, bronzed by the hardships and exposures of repeated campaigns, men who have fought by the side of black men, be ashamed to cast their ballots by the side of their companions-in-arms?

In answer, these black leaders reminded all Americans, including hesitant Republicans, that where the Union “required, demanded, and in some instances compelled, us to serve with our time, our property, and our lives…we claim to have fully earned the elective franchise; and that you, the American people, have virtually contracted an obligation to grant it.” Having earlier affirmed the notion that birthright and mutual service to the Republic united black and white Americans in citizenship, the address scorned conservatives who would continue to deny blacks natural rights they had additionally purchased with their blood. Having declared that the African American’s right to citizenship superseded that of naturalized immigrants, these representatives also asserted that black loyalty trumped Southern treason and reminded whites that the votes of Southern ex-slaves would further safeguard the “ark of Federal Liberty” for all Americans at the ballot box. Allegiance, not race, defined the idea of citizenship espoused at the convention. Moreover, the concept of citizenship offered by the 1864 National Convention included political and civil rights linked to a national status.36

Following the 1864 National Convention, the first meeting of the National Equal Rights League convened in Cleveland on October 19, 1865. In good Republican terms, the national league sought “to encourage sound morality, education, temperance, frugality, industry, and promote every thing that pertains to a well-ordered and dignified life” In addition to moral suasion, the league sought to use the “legal process” to gain recognition of black citizenship in theory and practice.37

An oration by Philadelphia delegate William D. Forten on the last day of the meeting placed the significance of black military service in even blunter terms than did the 1864 convention. Forten recounted that the Republican Party “sprang from the sympathy…[for the] agonizing sufferings” of American-born slaves. Seeing “the rapid approach of national death,” Republicans “invited us, as citizens and sons, to its bosom,” Forten continued, binding themselves “before God and the world, to emancipate, enfranchise, and crown us with all the rights of citizenship, and bid us welcome within the magic circle of common brotherhood.” Forten reminded his audience, and the nation, that black men “cast up their sinewy bodies as a living rampart” against Confederate forces.38

Forten’s speech rose in tone as he reached his point: the betrayal of promises to blacks, and the response by blacks that their needs be placed at the center of postwar debate. White Republicans “begged” blacks with false promises, Forten argued, and “like the supple and fierce tiger,” blacks “rushed to the battle-field.” Yet, Forten fumed, these soldiers had been “wooed…to [a] deadly embrace with the soft cadence of a lover’s note,” and subsequently “deserted by those whom we faithfully supported, and insolently informed that this is a white man’s country, though it required the strong arms of over 200,000 black men to save it, and that the elective franchise is not now a practical question, and we must find homes in some Territory separate to ourselves, as white and black men cannot live together upon terms of equality.” Forten sought defeat of the view that blacks can “moisten the cold ground with their warm blood, in defence of the spangled banner, but there can be no abiding place for them here, as freemen and citizens.”39

Forten called for the league to fill the nation with “trumpet-toned, shrill, and loud, and stern” appeals, demanding justice for the “sacrifice” of the nation’s “sable defenders.” Forten’s clarion call sounded radical but he assured his audience that blacks “ask nothing new,” because “every right enjoyed by the pale-skinned and highly-favored class, is ours” through “birth, by taxation, and loyalty, and sealed…with our hearts’ blood.” Forten demanded that the martial sense of duty displayed by black soldiers on the battlefield manifest in this constitutional fight as well, and that blacks refuse to yield until final victory, with the “same unyielding pertinacity which led us to face the iron hail of death on a hundred battle-fields.”40

State Conventions North and South

Forten did not need to remind his fellow blacks of the opportune moment for action, however, in light of the striking proliferation of statewide or regional conventions as early as 1865: blacks convened in Louisiana in January and May, in Pennsylvania in February and August, in Virginia in June and August, in Connecticut in June, in New Jersey in July, in Tennessee in August, in Indiana in September and October, in North Carolina and Michigan in September, in California and Missouri in October, in South Carolina in November, and in Arkansas and a regional New England conference in December. In Alabama, blacks assembled to call for federal protection in the face of church burnings and other racially motivated attacks, though Mississippi blacks could not do so because their fear of violence against them was so strong. Blacks in Louisiana, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and probably other states as well founded state Equal Rights Leagues by July 1865.41

Statewide meetings and organizations allowed even more black spokesmen to participate in the energetic discourse regarding Reconstruction and their own citizenship status, and to address local concerns. Statewide conventions did not occur in a vacuum, but had a broad significance for the national civil rights movement. The records show that resolutions, debates, and speeches in state conventions percolated through their national counterparts. Moreover, these local conventions asserted persuasive arguments that helped secure ratification of the Civil War amendments and passage of statewide legislation. Many of these local conventions petitioned state legislatures and engaged the white populations of their respective states during discussions about the Civil War amendments. Southern conventions especially highlighted conditions and inequality in the former slave states, helping give rise to congressional response pursuant to the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments, and the Enforcement acts of 1870–72.

Pennsylvania’s convocations serve as a microcosm of the statewide convention movement in the North during the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction. On February 8–10, 1865, ninety-six black representatives gathered in Harrisburg to assert their expectations and found a state chapter of the Equal Rights League. By the afternoon of the first day, the Pennsylvanians secured a national flag for the proceedings and praised advances such as Bates’s opinion on black citizenship, the enlistment of black troops, the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment by several states, recognition by the United States of the countries of Haiti and Liberia, and the admission of black attorney John S. Rock to the Supreme Court’s bar. Nonetheless, the delegates demanded the franchise, identifying it as a right they held as a result of birthright citizenship, and they called for “every native born colored citizen over the age of twenty-one” to have the same right to vote as “their white fellow citizens.” Echoing the 1864 National Convention, blacks began defining their expectations of citizenship through what had been denied them thus far: access to educational institutions, the jury, and ballot boxes, and public places such as churches, theaters, and streetcars.42

The Pennsylvania convention, like other national and statewide conventions, served as an opportunity for blacks to gather and consider intraracial issues as well. For example, the Pennsylvania delegates resolved that black teachers should receive preference to teach black pupils, “not by reason of their complexion, but because they are better qualified by conventional circumstances outside of the school-house.” Though hedging on the idea of racial preference, the resolution demonstrates a movement on the part of most delegates that blacks should educate themselves. On the other hand, after much debate, the representatives resolved that black proprietors should serve all customers, black and white, and not prefer whites for the purpose of trying to gain their business patronage. The delegates also called for members of the black community to embrace the Republican Party’s free labor ideology and focus on self-improvement by obtaining real estate, pursuing education, and becoming involved in mercantile or mechanical pursuits. All of these goals linked with the definition of citizenship that blacks sought to make permanent in the law. Within months, thirty-five delegates of the state Equal Rights League again convened at Harrisburg on August 9–10, 1865, and by 1866, the state league had chartered chapters in fifty counties across the Keystone state.43

The state league energized blacks to promote their citizenship rights and elevate their condition by their own local efforts. The state league organized public rallies, circulated petitions, and sent letters to newspapers. By funding court cases and lobbying politicians, the state league also brought the issue of streetcar segregation to the foreground, until state legislators enacted a bill in 1867 prohibiting segregation or exclusion of blacks by railways. The state league encouraged local chapters to conduct “literary exercises, lectures, essays” to attract attendees, raise funds, and educate the black community, as well as to combat “rowdyism, intemperance, gambling, profanity and Sabbath breaking.” Local chapters proved active: the 220 members of Philadelphia’s Garnet League, for example, established schools, sponsored essay contests, and hired lawyers for wronged black soldiers.44

Even more dramatic, the aftermath of war generated a round of statewide conventions across the South, where blacks had formerly been unable to gather, much less weigh in on constitutional issues. Though mirroring many of the same themes as the conventions held in Northern states, the Southern state conventions more directly dealt with the impact of slavery, emancipation, and the more virulent white racism their delegates experienced. These conventions even more vividly contrasted black loyalty against the treason of white Confederates, even more stridently argued that choice of allegiance trumped race, and they articulated consistent definitions as to what they thought citizenship meant.

Unsatisfied with a legal freedom that rang hollow, Southern blacks particularly highlighted the inequalities of Black Codes passed across the South in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. Black Codes gave African Americans some rights, but heavily restricted them at the same time, including labor provisions that governed contracts and wages, licensing at exorbitant fees for certain crafts or occupations, and the arrest of blacks who without “good cause” quit their employment. In many former slave states, legislation applicable to loosely defined vagrants (for instance, Alabama included in its definition of vagrant a “stubborn or refractory servant,” or a “laborer or servant who loiters away his time”) subjected unemployed blacks to heavy fines, and sometimes authorized their being hired out or forced to labor as part of a chain gang. Some states, such as Alabama, instituted apprenticeships, whereby a white “master or mistress” assumed responsibility for children whose parents were judged unable to support them. Preference was to be given to the “former owner of said minor,” who had a duty to provide medical care, food, clothing, and education to his or her ward, but also the authority to inflict “moderate corporal chastisement.” Florida authorized thirty-nine lashes to any black who possessed a bowie-knife, sword, or gun without a license obtained from the probate court on recommendation of two “respectable citizens of the county,” or entered into any “religious or other public assembly of white persons,” or any railroad car set aside for whites. South Carolina obliged blacks who migrated into that state to pay a bond or face expulsion, and required black shopkeepers to pay an annual license fee of a hundred dollars, and mechanics, artisans, and tradesmen to pay an annual license fee of ten dollars, all subject to satisfying a judge of their sufficient skill and moral character. The concepts embodied in the Black Codes diametrically opposed the idea of citizenship proffered by blacks and Republicans. Black Codes perpetuated the continuing economic dependence of blacks and made it excruciatingly difficult for them to pursue self-sufficiency and land ownership on a meaningful scale. Along with continued racist treatment by many white Southerners, the Black Codes demonstrated for blacks and Republicans what would occur in the absence of a federal arbiter of citizenship rights.45

Within two months of Appomattox, blacks in Norfolk, Virginia, occupied by the Union army in May 1862, acknowledged the Thirteenth Amendment under consideration by the states, but demanded more than just abolition in the name of the law. Instead, the delegates sought to define what freedom and citizenship entailed by calling for an end to race-based legislation and for blacks to be granted the right to education, legal recognition for their marriages, the ability to hold real estate, the freedom to move about on public ways, make and enforce contracts, testify in court, and have political representation.46

In another powerful display soon after Appomattox, sixty black Virginians gathered in Alexandria for a statewide convention in early August 1865. One speaker rejected white contentions about black laziness by noting that blacks had supported both themselves and their former owners with their labor. The delegates diplomatically (and likely, grudgingly) assured the American people that they felt “no ill-will or prejudice toward our former oppressors,” but they also took note of the “chaos and disorganization” of the moment and called for equal protection by the law and the right to vote. The delegates rejoiced at the death of slavery and expressed a willingness to “forgive all those who have treated us as the beasts of the field” but also reminded whites, “while we forget all the innumerable wrongs which our people have endured for hundreds of years past, let our opposers remember that we are now free.” One speaker noted that former slaveholders had tried to prevent some delegates from attending, while another “contended that there was no real prejudice between the white and black race of this State. We had slept together in childhood—we had toiled together in manhood, until our interests had become common.”47

Another address, however, proved more vocal about the realities of blacks in Virginia. Declaring that they had been “denied the ownership of our bodies, or a right to our wives, our children, and the products of our labor,” and “compelled, under pain of death, to submit to injuries deeper and darker than the earth ever witnessed in the case of any other people,” these black delegates rejected slavery and prejudice with a boiling hatred. “We have been forced to silence and inaction; to look on the infernal spectacle of our sons groaning under the lash; our daughters ravished, our wives violated, and our firesides desolated,” the authors raged; even when “the nation in her hour of trial called her sable sons to arms, we gladly went and fought her battles, but were denied the pay accorded to others until public opinion demanded it.” The Virginians demanded their equal rights as native-born American citizens, and in a subsequent resolution, explicitly rejected Dred Scott exclusion:

We claim to be a part of the United States, as represented in the preamble to the Constitution of the United States. Also as a part of the people which the Declaration of Independence declares to be free and equal, and we believe that the framers of the Constitution and originator and signers of the Declaration of Independence never contemplated otherwise than a perfect equality before the law to all the inhabitants of the Government.

Contrasting the loyalty shown by blacks, from hiding escaped Union prisoners to fighting as soldiers, with Confederate betrayal of the country, these blacks demanded more than the closing of the “auction block.” Instead, these Virginians claimed the ballot as the only way to defend themselves, and they located their expectations at the heart of national debate.48

Blacks in other slave states followed the Virginians’ lead. A convention in Nashville, Tennessee, in August 1865 emphasized the role of black veterans and included as delegates and honorary delegates veterans of the Second Light Artillery USCT and the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and Seventeenth USCI regiments. Openly recognizing their former life of “chains, lashes, bloodhounds and slave marts,” black Missourians in October 1865 met to “demand” (a word used repeatedly in their address) suffrage based on the principles of the Founders as well as their nativity, labor, good character, and in contrast to Confederate treason, the nine thousand loyal black troops “enlisted under the banner of Missouri.”49

The following month, black delegates gathered for six days in the bastion of secessionism and slave power: Charleston, South Carolina. Forty-five delegates urged the establishment of schools and declared that “we cherish on our hearts no hatred or malice toward those who have held our brethren as slaves, but we extend the right hand of fellowship to all, and make it our special aim to establish unity, peace and love amongst all men.” The attendees proclaimed to the people of South Carolina that they “resolved to come forward, and, like MEN, speak and act for ourselves.” Reminding all South Carolinians that blacks embraced the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution with the same pride felt by native-born white Americans, the delegates contrasted black loyalty to the United States with the treasonous sectionalism of Southern whites, and assured whites that they addressed them, “not as enemies, but as friends and fellow-countrymen, who desire to dwell among you in peace, and whose destinies are interwoven, and linked with those of the American people.” Calling for “even-handed Justice,” the convention rebuffed Black Codes and the lack of suffrage that kept them from equality. Instead, the South Carolinian blacks announced a different vision that also served as a coherent theory of what citizenship meant: “We simply desire that we shall be recognized as men; that we have no obstructions placed in our way; that the same laws which govern white men shall direct colored men; that we have the right of trial by a jury of our peers, that schools be opened or established for our children; that we be permitted to acquire homesteads for ourselves and children; that we be dealt with as others, in equity and justice.”50

In Little Rock, Arkansas, William H. Grey, who became the first black to address a national nominating convention when he seconded President Grant’s renomination by the Republican Party in 1872, placed black calls for equal rights squarely within traditional American legal values. Grey claimed that “we are not asking that the people should try any new experiment in this matter; we do not ask them to go outside the great charter of American liberty—the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence—but rather that they should strictly conform to the letter and spirit of those time-honored documents.”51

In Augusta, Georgia, black conventioneers wrote the state legislature in poignant terms. After recounting that they passed on the opportunity to arise in a slave insurrection during the Civil War and endured the “degradation of two hundred and forty-six years’ enslavement,” the delegates also pronounced their willingness “to bury the past, and forget the ills of slavery, and assume the attitude of a free people.” At the same time, the black Georgians warned, “We shall expect your encouragement by the creation of such laws as are equitable and progressive.” Gratified by a recent law permitting black testimony in court, the Georgian delegates reminded whites that “we trust you will not stop there.” In exchange for their promise to loyally defend the United States against any foe, and to “maintain the honor of our State,” Georgian blacks asked for schools and colleges for their children who aspired now to become “doctors, lawyers, ministers, army officers,” and for suffrage, jury rights, self-control of labor through reasonable wages, equal treatment on railroads and public conveyances, and the end of antiblack prejudice and white vows of reprisal once the Union army and Freedmen’s Bureau withdrew.52

The thread of military service connected all of these black conventions, whether national or local, Northern or Southern, and delegates pressed for some of the lessons learned in the armed forces, such as encounters with due process in general courts-martial, to be recognized by civil law. The new freedpeople demanded concrete rights that gave a broader definition to their freedom beyond emancipation in name only. Ex-slaves in the South particularly delighted in their opportunity to convene in gatherings after the war where formerly they could not, a powerful extension of their newfound freedom to move about, vote, speak, and do other things formerly prohibited to them when in bondage (including, for black maids in Mississippi, wearing buttons into the homes of their employers that portrayed General Ulysses Grant during the 1868 presidential campaign). Moreover, blacks used the convention movement, and organizations such as the Equal Rights League, to keep their claims and definition of citizenship at the forefront of complex Reconstruction era discussions.53

Blacks, Global Republicanism, and Human Rights

Strikingly, just as Irish Americans did, Reconstruction-era African Americans located their movement within a global context, breaking national boundaries to embrace the idea of a broader international drive for human rights and liberal democracy. Blacks from Illinois argued in 1866 that America could not cede the first place on the cutting edge of the tide of liberalism, while they identified all over the world the rights of sovereign citizen advancing toward triumph. When Californian blacks gathered in a convention in late October 1865, they not only addressed local concerns but also debated the Fenian movement. Subscribing to universal liberty, equating Ireland’s oppression with that of American slaves, and resentful at Britain’s actions during the Civil War, W. H. Yates went so far as to offer that “we should be willing to assist our Irish brethren in their struggle for National Independence; and 40,000 colored troops could be raised to butt the horns off the hypocritical English bull.” The Reverend J. H. Hubbard countered Yates, scorning Ireland as “the most deceitful of all nations” and controlled by the Roman Catholic Church, but another delegate responded that it was Democratic politicians who had prejudiced Irish Americans against blacks. Robert H. Small declared that “one of the proudest things a black man could do would be to assist with forty thousand men, or more, in writing Emmett’s epitaph.” Another delegate suggested a more broadly worded resolution, noting that “the Chinese and Indians in our very midst stand in need of our sympathy and encouragement.” The black Californians eventually adopted a resolution stating that they “sympathized with the oppressed of all nations,” lamented the failures of the Polish and Hungarian revolts, and declared that “notwithstanding the opposition we receive from Irish immigrants in America, whose prejudices are excited against us by the misnamed Democratic Party, every effort to rid Ireland of English bondage, and establish Irish independence meets our cordial approbation.”54

This confrontation of African American idealism with the realities of Irish American racism created a complicated and unexpected intersection in the 1860s. African American calls for integration into political life at times echoed nativist sentiments, just as Irish Americans sometimes employed racist rhetoric in advancing their own points. Entering the juncture of birthright and naturalized citizenship, “You allow the foreigner to come here and enjoy the privileges of a free citizen after the short residence of five years,” complained the Christian Recorder in mid-1865,

without even inquiring into his previous character. He may be a banished convict from the country which gave him birth, it matters not; the magnanimity of our republican institutions gives him free access to the best society, which he not infrequently poisons with his monarchical heresies, while the respectable colored man, born and reared under the influence of freedom, and instilled with the principles of civil and religious liberty from the cradle up, is cut off from the rights he was born to inherit, by the same magnanimous laws which cry “welcome” to every illustrious foreigner who may set foot on our shores.55

On the other hand, black leaders found the ideal of Irish liberation appealing, even where they honored British abolitionism which helped energize that movement in this country. In 1866, John Mercer Langston linked “that tendency towards an enlarged freedom which distinguishes our age; which in England bears the name of Reform; in Ireland the title of Fenianism; in Europe the name of Progress; and in our Government the name of Radicalism; impresses us with the firm conviction that our claims to universal suffrage will, with no long delay, be…decided by the rule of pure and speedy justice.” Moreover, blacks recalled abolitionism in Ireland as embodied by Irish nationalist Daniel O’Connell, who attacked slavery and organized a petition signed by thousands of Irish asking their brethren in America to support the abolitionist cause. Strikingly, J. F. Quarles, speaking in 1871 to a convention of Southern blacks, equated the cause of Irish liberation with that of the Union:

On the one hand were arrayed the friends of human liberty and human progress; on the other were marshaled all the hosts of despotism and caste. The principles involved were the same as those which produced the English revolution of 1688; the same for which the patriots of ’76 so earnestly contended, in the struggle between the colonies and the mother country; the same for which Ireland, that deeply wronged, but unconquerable people, struggles to-day.56

The Christian Recorder proved more equivocal toward Fenianism. In mid-1866, the black newspaper printed an article that jokingly began: a man asked “if we had done any thing for the Fenians” and learned “that we had bought a half peck of Irish potatoes the day before.” Yet the newspaper at the same time reported (with surprise) that a deputation of black Philadelphians offered to the Fenians a hundred veteran troops to march immediately to the Canadian border. While vowing that “colored Fenianism will be as scarce as apple trees in the desert of Sahara,” and scorning the invasion of Canada as “wicked and absurd,” the article also stated, “We had no justification to offer for the tyranny of the English Government in Ireland, and can fully appreciate their desire for riddance of its merciless exactions.” In another editorial, the newspaper even foreshadowed efforts of the Irish National Land League by calling generally for “more equal distribution of property” and asking “if Irish character seems more brittle and less dignified, more open to temptation and less elevated in moral tone, than that of England, are we not in justice compelled to trace back the cause…to the crime of England in wresting from the people their legitimate right to the Irish soil?”57

By early 1868, the Christian Recorder printed one article which used Fenian statements that the Civil War served as training for future fighters of Irish liberation to question the meaning of Irish American service for the Union. The paper argued that Irish Americans acted only out of self-interest and relied on traditionally nativist language to lament that the “unquestioning submission to the command of the Priest,” and the “violence of Irish Catholic bigotry” seen in the United States would occur in Ireland should the Fenians triumph. Yet the same paper within two months reprinted an article announcing, “Hope for Ireland, it seems, is dawning at last,” after passage of legislation disestablishing the Anglican Church of Ireland, which all Irish, regardless of their faith, had to support with their taxes. “With all our heart,” the article offered, “we extend to the Irish people—in whom beats as noble a spirit as in any other people under the sun—the hand of warm congratulation in view of this beginning of still better and grander things to come.”58

For Frederick Douglass, the tension between English and Irish mirrored the racial conflict in the United States. Douglass could, in 1861, announce his hope that the United States would soon take its place “side by side with noble old England” in terms of emancipation, but in 1871, also describe English governance of Ireland as “tyrannical and oppressive.” In 1872, Douglass went so far as to declare himself, “something of an Irishman as well as a Negro,” linking radical thought in both populations. Yet Douglass also resented Irish American racism, describing members of that community as “warm-hearted, generous, and sympathizing with the oppressed everywhere when they stand on their own green island” but taught to “hate and despise” blacks on arriving in America. Douglass sometimes characterized Irish Americans in nativist terms, protesting the treatment of “native born colored Americans” compared to Irish “foreigners swarming in your midst, those who fill your jails, and alm-houses as well as build them.”59

In January 1865, Douglass juxtaposed his equation of Irish and black degradation with scorn for Irish American behavior. Douglass declared that “wherever men oppress their fellows…they will endeavor to find the needed apology for such enslavement and oppression in the character of the people oppressed and enslaved,” so that “when England wants to set the heel of her power more firmly in the quivering heart of old Ireland, the Celts are ‘an inferior race.’ So, too, the negro, when he is to be robbed of any right which is justly his, is ‘an inferior man.’” Yet lines later, Douglass noted that if the black man could fight in the army and pay taxes, “he knows enough to vote. If he knows as much when he is sober as an Irishman knows when drunk, he knows enough to vote, on good American principles.”60

In late 1869, speaking about America’s “composite nationality,” Douglass scorned anti-Chinese violence in California, as did the Christian Recorder earlier that year. Douglass lamented that “already have our Celtic brothers, never slow to execute the behests of popular prejudice against the weak and defenceless, recognized in the heads of these people, fit targets for their shil[l]alahs.” Douglass instead dreamed of an egalitarian America open to all, just as Wendell Phillips proclaimed to his audience of Bostonians in April 1861, and Michael Corcoran wrote about in The Captivity of General Corcoran, published in 1865. “We should welcome to our ample continent all nations,” Douglass pronounced, “kindreds, tongues and peoples, and as fast as they learn our language and comprehend the duties of citizenship, we should incorporate them into the American body politic. The outspread wings of the American eagle are broad enough to shelter all who are likely to come.” Douglass credited “the arm of the negro and the muscle of the Irishman” as generating and spreading “much of the wealth, leisure, culture, refinement and civilization of the country” across the land, and asserted that without them, “English civilization” would have “still lingered this side of the Alleghenies, and the wolf still be howling on their summits.” Declaring that “man is man the world over,” Douglass professed his wish that “we shall spread the network of our science and our civilization over all who seek their shelter, whether from Asia, Africa, or the Isles of the Sea. We shall mould them all, each after his kind, into Americans; Indian and Celt, negro and Saxon, Latin and Teuton, Mongolian and Caucasian, Jew and gentile, all shall here bow to the same law, speak the same language, support the same government, enjoy the same liberty, vibrate with the same national enthusiasm, and seek the same national ends.”61

Douglass thus linked Ireland to oppressed nations such as Poland and Hungary, and noted how “Ireland keeps us in chronic tears by her wail from across the sea.” Douglass embodied the duality of black thought about Irish Americans during the postwar era: hostility toward them based on their behavior and prejudice, resentment at avenues open to them that remained closed to blacks, but also empathy for Ireland and genuine hope for its liberation as part of a global dawn of freedom that both Irish Americans and African Americans welcomed.62

Such moments of fraternity show that not all African Americans and Irish Americans expressed insurmountable hostility between them, and even pointed to a brief hope that racial tensions between the two groups would dissipate in the changed climate after the war. On the afternoon of April 4, 1865, for example, a public meeting convened in Boston’s Faneuil Hall to celebrate the fall of Richmond included blacks and Irish-born alongside white native-born Bostonians. Two black men sang a spiritual, followed by speeches from Irish-born Colonel Patrick R. Guiney, Frederick Douglass, and Massachusetts’s senator Henry Wilson and ex-senator Robert C. Winthrop. In 1875, a joint ceremony by Irish Americans and blacks in St. Paul, Minnesota, commemorated the birth of Daniel O’Connell, and blacks in Baltimore planned to participate in that city’s St. Patrick’s Day celebration. Even Boston’s Irish American newspaper, the Pilot, showed a little more sympathy for blacks in the aftermath of the Civil War. Editor John Boyle O’Reilly, fervently interested in the cause of Irish nationalism and Catholicism but also in all the downtrodden, helped fuel this brief but hopeful shift.63

Citizenship Defined

Congress took note of the arguments that came out of black conventions, and Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner and others routinely presented their petitions for consideration. On December 21, 1865, Sumner presented a memorial from the August 1865 Tennessee convention, before Republican senator Jacob Howard presented a petition of South Carolina’s blacks calling for protection of their civil rights in light of “their unquestioned loyalty, exhibited by them alike as bond or free, as soldier or laborer, in the Union lines under the protection of the Government, or within the rebel lines under the domination of the rebellion.” Similarly, on January 5, 1866, Sumner presented a petition from a convention of Alabaman blacks who assembled in Mobile, “representing four hundred and thirty-six thousand nine hundred and thirty citizens of the United States,” and called for federal protection in the face of church burnings and violence against them, along with a petition from Mississippi blacks who could not meet in convention due to the fear of violence against them. At the same time he highlighted the explosive situation in the Deep South, Sumner submitted petitions from the citizens of Philadelphia and half a dozen other Pennsylvania towns calling for implementation of the Constitution’s guarantee to every state of a republican form of government.64

Reports issued by black conventions about the racial inequities of state legislation and conditions in the South, as well as their demand for definition of what rights they enjoyed as citizens, helped bring about passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Republicans in Congress recognized that deferring to the states to define the rights and privileges of citizenship, as was done before the war, would render that title hollow for millions of blacks. The act mandated, in harmony with the Republican Party’s free labor ideology, that “all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are…citizens of the United States,” and that

citizens, of every race and color…shall have the same right, in every State and Territory in the United States, to make and enforce contracts, to sue, be parties, and give evidence, to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold, and convey real and personal property, and to full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and property, as is enjoyed by white citizens, and shall be subject to like punishment, pains, and penalties, and to none other, any law, statute, ordinance, regulation, or custom, to the contrary notwithstanding.65

Congress went beyond simply prohibiting a reconstitution of slavery under a different name. The act provided a definition of national citizenship rights in the law for the first time, including economic rights of contract and property, as well as access to court enforcement so as to ensure practical enjoyment of these rights. Alongside the activities of the Freedmen’s Bureau, created in March 1865, and with agents who, among other things, worked to ensure fair and consensual contracts between black laborers and white landowners in the South, the Civil Rights Act of 1866 sought to provide blacks, and all Americans, with access to the growing capitalist economy and the means for self-sufficiency as a right of citizenship. Moreover the Civil Rights Act of 1866 altered the practice of federalism by recognizing the federal government’s responsibility to protect these rights. Federal, not state, courts had jurisdiction over offences under the bill.66

On January 5, 1866, Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, introduced what would become the Civil Rights Act of 1866. During debate, Trumbull noted that the act meant “to give effect to [the Thirteenth Amendment] and secure to all persons within the United States practical freedom.” Referencing Black Codes that discriminated against African Americans, “deny them certain rights, subject them to severe penalties, and still impose upon them the very restrictions which were imposed upon them in consequence of the existence of slavery,” Trumbull emphasized that “there is very little importance in the general declaration of abstract truths and principles”—the freedom of the slaves and the principles of the Declaration of Independence—“unless they can be carried into effect.” Revealing how citizenship expanded gradually to incorporate both civil and political rights during the 1860s, Trumbull assured his fellow senators that this act concerned itself only with civil rights, and not political ones.67

Some opponents challenged the act on the grounds that it subverted federalism: it applied nationwide, went beyond protection for freedpeople alone, and truncated the traditional view that state law created citizenship rights. “Can any man believe that the founders of this Republic…would have ever entered into the Union,” asked Democrat senator Eli Saulsbury of Delaware, “if they had supposed that in the short term of eighty years their children would be subjected to the absolute control and the omnipotent will of the Federal Congress?” Saulsbury further queried, “What becomes of the powers of the States? What becomes of the rights of the States? Sir, they have not even the privilege of administering their criminal laws; they have not the privilege of saying who shall give evidence and who shall not in their own courts; they have not the privilege of saying who shall hold property and who shall not.” Kentucky Senator Garrett Davis bluntly summed up a racial objection to the act: “This is a white man’s Government,” and “the negro is not a citizen here” unless made so by force.68

On the other hand, Republican senator Jacob Howard of Michigan asserted that the act did not invade the “legitimate rights of the States,” but “simply gives to persons who are of different races or colors the same civil rights.” Moreover, Howard trusted that, having employed “nearly two hundred thousand” blacks “in the prosecution of our just and righteous war,” the nation could not “now be found so recreant to duty, so wanting in simple justice, as to turn our backs upon the race and say to them, ‘We set you free, but beyond this we give you no protection; we allow you again to be reduced to slavery by your old masters, because it is the right of the State which has enslaved you for two hundred years thus to do.’” In response to Senator Davis’s admonition that “the power to change the Constitution is a power simply to amend; it is not a power to revolutionize…it is not a power to change our form of Government,” Republican senator Lot Morrill of Maine asked, “Are we not in the midst of a civil and political revolution which has changed the fundamental principles of our Government in some respects? Sir, is it no revolution that you have changed the entire system of servitude in this country?” According to Morrill, the changes comprised a “revolution grander and sublimer in its consequences than the world has witnessed hitherto.” Trumbull reminded the Senate that the act applied to whites as well as blacks, and asked what could be so repugnant about legislation providing that all people shall have equal rights.69

Toward the end of the debates in the Senate, Massachusetts Republican Henry Wilson provided an eloquent summation on February 2, 1866, reminding his colleagues that at least six of the former Confederate states “passed laws wholly incompatible with the freedom of these freedmen,” laws “as iniquitous as the old slave codes.” Wilson proclaimed to the Senate that, by the Thirteenth Amendment, and

by the will of the nation freedom and free institutions for all, chains and fetters for none, are forever incorporated in the fundamental law of regenerated and united America. Slave codes and auction blocks, chains and fetters and bloodhounds are things of the past, and the chattel stands forth a man with the rights and the powers of the freemen. For the better security of these new-born civil rights we are now about to pass the greatest and the grandest act in this series of acts that have emancipated a race and disenthralled a nation.

Later that day, the Senate approved the act by a vote of 33 to 12, with 5 not voting; the House followed suit by a vote of 111 to 38, with 34 not voting, on March 13, 1866.70

President Johnson vetoed the act on March 27, 1866, because, in his opinion, the freedpeople were not fit for citizenship, and the legislation inappropriately revised the relationship between the federal and state governments by now allowing the federal government to interfere with a state’s ability to discriminate between the races as its government saw fit. On April 9, 1866, exactly a year after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, the House of Representatives joined the Senate’s vote a few days earlier to overturn Johnson’s veto. The first national civil rights legislation in American history became law, and at long last, national citizenship began to have practical meaning.71

In the context of legislative uncertainty—a future Congress could repeal the act, for example, especially where Democrats had mounted a vigorous challenge against it—Republicans sought a further, more permanent safeguard for the new, national definition of citizenship. On June 13, 1866, Congress passed and sent to the states for ratification the Fourteenth Amendment. The amendment, declared ratified by the nation on July 28, 1868, defined in the law that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States…are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside,” without distinction as to color or race. The Fourteenth Amendment further mandated that “no State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Calling for Political Rights

Although welcoming the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the proposed Fourteenth Amendment sent to the states, blacks continued to exert pressure for their political rights. This objective became especially urgent in light of the race-based opposition articulated by leaders such as Senator Davis and President Johnson, and the specter of increasing violence against freedpeople by white supremacists.

African Americans asserted both idealistic and pragmatic arguments to support this call, and their contentions gradually helped persuade Republicans to support the idea of giving black men the vote. Frederick Douglass forcefully argued as early as December 1863 that “when this rebellion shall have been put down, when the arms shall have fallen from the guilty hands of traitors, you will need the friendship of the slaves of the South.” Douglass foresaw that enfranchised blacks would be “your best protector against the traitors and the descendants of those traitors, who will inherit the hate, the bitter revenge which will crystallize all over the South, and seek to circumvent the Government that they could not throw off.” As Douglass, and subsequent black conventions, argued, “You will need the black man there, as a watchman and patrol; and you may need him as a soldier. You may need him to uphold in peace, as he is now upholding in war, the star-spangled banner.”72

In autumn 1866, four black men thus wrote “to the People of the United States” that the black vote would not only “lift us from the lap of hate and scorn” and “place us on the footing of full citizenship, where we ought to be, and where God intended men should be,” but also safeguard the Union victory. “We will act as we did when we became Soldiers in the Army of the Republic,” the four men assured the country in a letter published in the Christian Recorder. “Give us the ballot and the country is safe.” The authors identified depriving blacks of equal political rights as not only an immoral breach of their natural rights and manhood but also a betrayal of the Constitution, which jeopardized the safety of the Union at a time when it was reintegrating millions of ex-Confederates. Instead, they argued, blacks had proved their allegiance and thus had a higher claim to the franchise than former Rebels who tried to destroy the Union. The letter stemmed from a resolution, passed at a convention of the Colored Soldiers and Sailors League in October 1866, to convene another national meeting of black veterans in Philadelphia on January 8, 1867, to demand the vote. The day chosen for the meeting held great symbolism: the anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans during the War of 1812, in which blacks played a prominent part, highlighted the length of African American loyalty and contribution to the United States. Through such meetings and activities, black veterans stood as the vanguard of the effort to gain equal political rights as part of the definition of American citizenship.73

Black citations of their loyalty, in counterpoint to Southern white treason, gradually resonated with white Republicans, especially after Lincoln’s assassination. By the fall of 1865, Ohio Republican (and formerly, unofficial advisor to Lincoln) William M. Dickson identified black loyalty to the Union as the decisive factor for the federal victory. “While I am not one of those who place the bravery of the negro soldiers above that of the white,” Dickson assured, “it is a fact which will hardly be denied, that but for the opposition of the entire negro population to the rebel cause, we could scarcely have succeeded.” Dickson wished to see blacks “continue this good work” because “if [the president] may confide reconstruction to the loyal whites, he may also to the loyal blacks.” Dickson echoed African American conventions in his support of granting blacks the ballot:

The protection of the black man himself requires it; gratitude for his devoted loyalty requires it; the protection of our civilization from the influence of a degraded and barbarous element requires it; the protection of ourselves from the insidious rebel ballot requires it; the speedy restoration of the rebel states to their proper relation to the General Government requires it; the fundamental principles of our Government require it; the Golden Rule of our most holy religion commanding us to do unto others as we would that they should do unto us, requires it.

Massachusetts Republican George B. Loring similarly claimed that “the government which can make soldiers of its people, should also make citizens, and of citizens, voters.” For Loring, “whatever means are required to secure to the American citizen everywhere, the privileges of the church, the school house, the ballot box and jury box, should become a part of the machinery of reconstruction,” and he vowed to reopen the Civil War if need be to accomplish these goals.74

Blacks thus shrewdly connected their loyalty to ongoing debates about suffrage and the success of the Republican agenda at a time when determinations on these issues had not yet been made. Immediately after the war, Massachusetts Republican congressman George S. Boutwell took up the point articulated by African Americans, recognizing that “the black man, despised, down-trodden, with no reason to cheer or bless the flag of the Republic…has proved true to the country.” Boutwell asked, “Can it be in the heart of any man of the twenty million inhabitants in the North, with an ingratitude unexampled save in the instance of Judas Iscariot, now to consign these people, their race, and their posterity to the tender mercies of the men who instituted Libby Prison and Andersonville…and finally closed their career of systematic and organized crime by the assassination of the President of the Republic?” Boutwell could think of “no excuse that we can offer to mankind in the coming ages, if, after having accepted the services and the blood of these men in defence of the flag, of liberty and of the Union, we turn and conspire with these their ancient oppressors and trample our faithful allies in the dust.” Yet, at the same time, Boutwell asked for suffrage for blacks not “because they are competent to judge of questions of public policy, but…because they are in favor of this government, and the white people of the South are against it.” Blending idealism and pragmatism, Boutwell argued, “I am in favor of allowing him to vote, without going into any inquiry whether he can read and write, because his power at the ballot-box is now essential to us, just exactly as his power in the field with the bayonet was essential to us during the war.”75

Republican Pennsylvania congressman William D. Kelley echoed a black argument that failing to reorder society so as to reflect racial equality comprised a continuation of treason and jeopardized the rights of all. Kelley urged inclusion for blacks not only out of self-interest for white northerners (“Make him secure, and your own rights can never be infringed”) but because of the contrast between Confederate treason and black loyalty. As many Republicans of both races sought a genuine definition to freedom, Kelley warned that “you may change the name without changing the thing,” and he argued that leaving millions of blacks without rights to testify, make contracts, or pursue education permitted the anti-republican and treasonous machinations of the slave power to survive. Only in eliminating race prejudice, Kelley further argued, could America “harmonize the practical workings of our institutions and the sublime truths that underlie them.” Yet Kelley also cast the choice as one between “the poor, ignorant masses who, during the war, have been your friends” or taking the “brothers and friends and associates of John C. Breckinridge and Jefferson Davis as your rulers.”76

The impact of black arguments about obtaining the vote shows how idealism and pragmatism converged to effect legal change during the 1860s. Blacks used their military service as the cornerstone of their demands for political and civil rights, and to thrust these claims into the center of Reconstruction debate, but they also shrewdly connected their loyalty to deliberations over suffrage, the fate of the Union, and the success of the Republican agenda at a time when even most Republicans remained unenthusiastic at best about giving the vote to the black man nationwide. African Americans persuaded Republicans that blacks could help support their agenda for reconstituting the country, just as blacks aided the Union’s military victory. This point became especially important after emancipation nullified a clause in the Constitution under which slaves counted as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of apportioning congressional representation and would permit the South to send even more representatives to Congress than before the war.77

Pursuant to three Reconstruction acts passed by Congress in 1867, blacks not only gained the vote in the former Confederate states but, in a stunning moment, began to attend state constitutional conventions as delegates and hold important elected federal, state, and local offices in those states as well. Of the slightly more than a thousand delegates who attended state constitutional conventions held in the South between 1867 and 1869, 268 were black. During Reconstruction, in addition to local offices, 682 black men served as representatives and 112 as senators in their state legislatures, six served as lieutenant governor, and one, P. B. S. Pinchback, briefly served in December 1872 and January 1873 as Louisiana’s acting governor. Attorney Jonathan J. Wright served as a justice on South Carolina’s Supreme Court until he resigned his seat in 1877, facing a threat of impeachment by the Democratic state legislature on unsubstantiated corruption charges. Fourteen blacks served as U.S. congressman and two, Blanche K. Bruce and Hiram Revels, represented Mississippi in the Senate. Blacks represented the United States abroad for the first time in history, with Don Carlos Bassett as ambassador to Haiti (1869–77) and James M. Turner as ambassador to Liberia (1871–78).78

Military service launched some blacks into politics. For example, Josiah T. Walls had been a Virginia slave before his capture by Union forces. After receiving some education and enlisting in the Third USCI, Walls mustered out in Florida with the rank of sergeant, and he represented that state in Congress from 1871 to 1873. On the whole, black veterans were underrepresented as Reconstruction officeholders: they comprised 16 percent of America’s adult black male population at the war’s conclusion but made up less than a tenth of 1,510 documented black officeholders between 1867 and 1877. Historian Donald Shaffer found that nearly 80 percent of veteran officeholders (and 60 percent of black lawmakers overall) served in Louisiana, Mississippi, and both Carolinas. Shaffer further noted that relatively few black veterans hailed from Florida, Georgia, Virginia, and Alabama, and that many black veterans came from Border or Northern states where the opportunity for postwar office remained largely unavailable.79

Many Northerners, however, including Republicans, initially showed apathy or opposition to allowing blacks to vote in their own states. Accordingly, African American conventions and organizations maintained the black call, petitioning and agitating for the vote nationwide. Conditions for success became more favorable when, in 1868, a resurgent Democratic Party jolted Republicans to the realities earlier raised by Frederick Douglass when it took both houses of the New York, New Jersey, and Ohio legislatures, and the governorships of Connecticut, Maine, and California. In that year’s presidential election, Republican candidate Ulysses S. Grant won against Democrat Horatio Seymour by only slightly more than 300,000 votes out of a total of 5.7 million votes cast, with an electoral vote of 214 to 80 (of the former Confederate states, Texas, Mississippi, and Virginia cast no electoral votes, Louisiana and Georgia went to Seymour, and Grant carried Arkansas, Alabama, Florida, Tennessee, North Carolina, and South Carolina). Half a million black Republican votes in the South, cast pursuant to the Reconstruction acts of 1867, proved decisive to Grant’s winning the popular vote.80

Persistent black pressure, coupled with political realities, thus helped set the climate for ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment. Blacks continued to demand suffrage and other measures so as to make reality comport with the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendment rights their actions had also helped to secure. Another National Convention of Colored Men met in Washington, D.C., on January 13, 1869, in the context of the recently adopted Fourteenth Amendment. Delegates from twenty-one states, North and South, as well as the District of Columbia, focused on divergences between the ideals of the Fourteenth Amendment and its practical application. A letter read from Bishop D. A. Payne of Ohio emphasized an urgent need for blacks to address federal and state legislatures about increasing violence against them in the South. In all but five eastern states and two western states, Payne cautioned, “the heel of the oppressor is still upon the neck of the colored American.”81

From this convention, nine black delegates met with the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee on February 16, 1869. After some flattery of the committee members, Pennsylvanian Isaiah C. Weir lectured the committee on constitutional doctrine in a lengthy speech (it seems he enjoyed his chance to address the committee) that argued the superiority of the Constitution over state law and urged the necessity of granting suffrage to blacks. Weir pointed to the naturalization debate discussed in the next chapter and asked, “Is it not folly to talk about protecting our naturalized citizens in their rights abroad, by war, if needs be, with one of the greatest powers of the earth, while the smallest State at home can strip them of all their rights?” After attacking the power of the states to impact suffrage and other citizenship rights, Weir argued that regulating who could vote by color jeopardized property rights, the right to personal liberty, and the right to life itself.82

Weir then adopted a more radical tone, shaking the argument that uneducated blacks were not fit for the franchise by observing that whites “used it so stupidly” that they brought about a massive Civil War. The “fidelity and splendid soldiership” of “black heroes,” Weir claimed, “entitled themselves not only to liberty, but to citizenship,” and he identified as “unworthy to participate” in national affairs those Democrats or conservative Republicans who would deny blacks their rights. Suffrage was no more a bestowal, according to Weir, than allowing blacks to “eat our own victuals, wear our own clothes, go to market with our own money, pay our own debts,” and he declared that the “community that releases to us our rights…long withheld from us…has no right to demand our gratitude.” The right to vote, Weir instructed the committee, “is ours because it is yours, and for the same reason that it is yours.”83

In the end, several factors, many of them underpinned by black military service and illuminated by black conventions, converged to establish the conditions for the Fifteenth Amendment. Just as African American military service helped fuel the push for the Thirteenth and Fourteenth amendments, continued black pressure helped bring about the Fifteenth Amendment as well. Many Republicans came to embrace a genuine moral commitment to blacks, desired to formalize black status (at the urging of African Americans), and wished to resolve the paradox whereby the black suffrage imposed in the South by the Reconstruction acts of 1867 remained optional in the North (by 1868, blacks could not vote in eleven of twenty-one Northern states and five Border states). As their concern mounted over the Democratic Party’s postwar resurgence, Republicans coupled these ideological impulses with the need to consolidate their agenda after the Union victory won, in part, by black participation. Black agitation, Republican moral commitment to civil rights enforcement, and the idea that citizens stood entitled to protection in exchange for their service, themes all buttressed by the black military experience, converged with Republican pragmatism at a moment when idealism and expediency overcame racism.84

Many Americans hailed the Fifteenth Amendment’s ratification in the spring of 1870 as the end of the “black question.” Blacks celebrated across the land, from a gathering of three thousand in Boston that included veterans of the Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth Massachusetts regiments to one in Detroit where blacks carried likenesses of Lincoln, Grant, and John Brown and sang about voting. Wendell Phillips’s American Anti-Slavery Society disbanded ten days after ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, and Frederick Douglass jubilantly announced, “Never was revolution more complete,” creating “a new world” where “the black man is free, the black man is a citizen, the black man is enfranchised…no more a despised and hated creature, but a man, and, what is more a man among men.” According to Douglass, blacks now stood “upon an equal footing with all other men, and that the glory or shame of our future is to be wholly our own,” with access to the means of self-sufficiency in a new country where “character, not color, is to be the criterion,” and blacks had the opportunity to rise or fall, succeed or fail, as their own actions and choices dictated.85

Counterrevolution in the South

On the other hand, states remained free to define voting qualifications so long as they avoided exclusion based on race, color, or previous condition of slavery, leaving open their use of poll taxes and literacy tests. Such provisions seemed race-neutral on their face but had a disparate impact in excluding blacks. Even more troubling was the rise of a vicious racist counterrevolution, organized and implemented from the highest to the local levels across the South, with apologists in the North, which sought to tamp out blacks’ new enjoyment of citizenship rights and intimidate white Republican governments. In opposition to legislation and constitutional amendments enshrining the Union victory and blacks’ rights in law, the Ku Klux Klan operated across the South by 1868 to preserve white dominance and the political and economic subordination of blacks. Through the murder and beatings of black students and those involved in politics, attacks on whites seeking to assist the freedpeople, and the burning of black churches, schools, and homes, Southern white racists spread a wave of intimidation and terror through the South by the time black troops had demobilized. A night attack on the family of Jackson and Jane Surratt in South Carolina involved Klansmen thugs ordering everyone out of their house, snatching an infant from his mother’s arms, and having everyone lie down, nearly naked. Jackson escaped but his wife and children suffered a lashing; Jane staggered away in such bad shape she could not hold her son to suckle him, and a daughter whipped in the assault exhibited signs of post-traumatic stress. On July 30, 1868, three days after the Tennessee state legislature convened an emergency session to deal with the Klan, the Klan attacked ex-slave and army veteran Richard Moore by administering 175 lashes with a buckled whip. Highlighting the tension that existed between Moore’s roles as Union veteran and citizen versus conceptions that he was a disrespectful black man, a Republican paper in Cincinnati reported that Moore’s offense was his Union military service, vocal opposition to white racism, and supposed defamation of a white woman, while a local paper announced that Moore was a bad slave. Ten percent of black delegates to state constitutional conventions in the South in 1867–68 became victims of racist violence, and seven of them were murdered.86

In contrast to focus on political rights, an early 1871 state convention of black Tennesseans petitioned Congress about Klan violence and asked assistance to gain property, access to education, fair treatment of laborers, and an end to de facto slavery and poll taxes. An October 1871 Southern States Convention of Colored Men met in the House chamber in Columbia, South Carolina, to contend literally with matters of life and death. Delegates from Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and the District of Columbia demanded an end to the persistent injustice of state legislation against them, and Southern white attempts to circumvent the Union’s military victory and the Civil War amendments through the use of vicious extralegal secret organizations such as the Klan. J. H. Burch of Baton Rouge called for legal doctrine and real life practice to converge: “If we look all over the Southern States, we will find the highways and the byways marked by the bleaching bones of white and colored men, who have fought, bled and died that colored men might assume, even in South Carolina, the rights and privileges of manhood. We stand here in the hall of the House of Representatives of South Carolina, a body of colored men discussing American politics, civil rights, education and labor. Let me ask those gentlemen who now look me in the face, how long is it since they dared walk the streets without a pass after the clock struck nine at night?” J. F. Quarles of Georgia similarly called for strict, swift enforcement of laws to quash extralegal violence, ensure just remuneration to laborers, allow exercise of a truly free ballot, secure a commitment to educational advancement, provide equality of rights to all citizens without any distinction, and reject not only state discrimination but, anticipating the Civil Rights Act of 1875, also prejudice by private individuals on street cars, hotels, and theaters.87

Congress responded to this resurgence of open warfare in parts of the South with five Enforcement acts passed between 1870 and 1872, which recognized that without security of person, other citizenship rights became meaningless because they could not be enjoyed in practice. The first Enforcement Act of May 31, 1870, reiterated that American citizens could vote without regard to race, color, or previous slavery, provided enforcement provisions to secure this Fifteenth Amendment right, and mandated that the civil rights secured by prior legislation such as the Civil Rights Act of 1866 applied to everyone, including aliens. Subsequent Enforcement acts emphasized the link between civil and political rights, and mandated an increasingly nationalized system of elections, complete with federal supervision. The Enforcement acts highlight a debate within the Republican Party on the need to protect black rights versus conservative constitutional tenets; the expansion of the federal government to secure enforcement of federal laws versus the danger of centralization and damage to federalism; and protection of black rights versus the possibility that doing so would injure the rights of whites. The Enforcement acts imposed criminal penalties against those who tried to interfere with black voting rights and sought to suppress organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan, including by presidential suspension of the writ of habeas corpus and use of federal troops.88

The Department of Justice, established in 1870, punished civil rights violations in the South in the early part of that decade. Pursuant to the Enforcement acts and other civil rights legislation, hundreds of members of white supremacist groups faced prosecution, conviction, and imprisonment. While this again vindicated black rights and equal enjoyment of equal citizenship rights before the law, it also illuminated in no uncertain terms that powerful forces of resistance would challenge the developments of the Civil War era, and that these changes would not go untested. If contingency and choice of action led to the advancement of rights in the Civil War era, they also allowed for their erosion for African Americans.89

Moreover, Congress passed in early 1875 an act signed by President Grant that desegregated public accommodations and outlawed racial discrimination in inns, public conveyances, and theaters, though not schools. First proposed years earlier by Charles Sumner, the Civil Rights Act of 1875 recognized that permitting the humiliating exclusion of blacks from public accommodations destroyed equal citizenship by allowing whites to impose on blacks a race-based caste system. Blacks serving in Congress reminded their white colleagues how segregation contradicted civil and political equality, and threatened to truncate black access to the market economy as well. According to free-born black Alabama congressman James T. Rapier, “Just think that the law recognizes my right upon this floor as a law-maker, but that there is no law to secure to me any accommodations whatever while traveling here to discharge my duties as Representative of a large and wealthy constituency. Here I am the peer of the proudest, but on a steamboat or car I am not equal to the most degraded. Is not this most anomalous and ridiculous?” Despite its potential, however, the Civil Rights Act of 1875 went poorly enforced until the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in 1883.90

Conclusion

As Frederick Douglass pointed out at a recruiting rally in Philadelphia within days after the battle of Gettysburg, accepting the blue uniform and federal musket turned the lowliest ex-slave into a man and citizen. Regardless of prejudice in the armed forces and society at large, blacks used their participation in the Civil War to place their expectations squarely at the center of Reconstruction debate and make sure that Douglass’s 1863 declaration of citizenship became enshrined in the law and meant something concrete. Many black soldiers equated their military service and bravery as validating their worthiness for equal citizenship, even while the broadness of that concept remained vague. As James H. Hall of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts declared in the summer of 1864, “If we fight to maintain a Republican Government, we want Republican privileges.” After assuring whites that blacks did “not covet your wives nor your daughters,” Hall informed them, “All we ask is the proper enjoyment of the rights of citizenship, and a free title and acknowledged share in our own noble birthplace.”91

Black soldiers drew on their experience in the army when contemplating what rights they expected as a result of this citizenship status. Moreover, the political awareness black soldiers gained during their service percolated throughout the entire African American community and resulted in a more powerful and unified movement demanding equal rights. In the 1860s, African American leaders and tens of thousands of black soldiers in blue built on William C. Nell’s important theme that their service to the Republic affirmed and guaranteed their citizenship. After the war, through participation in conventions, service as local leaders within the black community, and appeals such as one listing the names of the officers and men of Company C of the Tenth USCHA under the words “We fight for our Rights, Liberty, Justice and Union,” black soldiers kept prominent the meaning of their service and what they expected to result from it.92

Moreover, blacks acted with unprecedented vigor and success; they had participated in past American wars but never on the scale made possible by the Civil War. Changes wrought by the war allowed conventions patterned after antebellum meetings to have stronger focus and a greater impact. Personal, geographical, and philosophical differences persisted, but the elimination of slavery and the new history of blacks in the Union’s armed services allowed for a greater sense of unity, and a more national emphasis, to pervade these meetings.

In the end, blacks identified two inextricably interrelated battles, one waged on the battlefield and the other to make permanent their interpretations of what their loyalty to the Union meant in terms of citizenship. Rejecting second-class citizenship or caste, African Americans energetically called for tangible definitions of inclusion, striving for a freedom that went beyond the death of slavery in name only. Blacks engaged in constitutional debate and addressed the multiracial nation on an unparalleled scale and with great impact. Delegates used the conventions to commemorate black veterans and their sacrifices, but they also capitalized on this military service as the cornerstone to buttress their new vision of citizenship, demand equal rights and the vote, and speak out against antiblack violence. Mobilizing in local, state, and national organizations and leagues, black leaders not only discussed the contours of citizenship amongst themselves but directed their views—and their expectations—to governmental leaders and the general polity. Casting their position as one of orthodoxy maintaining the true spirit and meaning of the Revolutionary generation, these blacks embraced the ideas of participating in republican democracy and society as a whole.

While the nation as a whole considered how to reconstitute the nation after the Civil War, blacks asserted their American identity, moral calls based on their military service, and the pragmatic argument that their votes could help safeguard the Union victory and consolidate Republican power at the polls. At the same time, the loyalty African Americans showed to the Republic, as well as continued Democratic power at the polls and persistent tension in the South, led at least some whites to change formerly exclusionary opinions and accept the idea of black citizenship and voting rights for men.

Action and argument from African Americans thus helped bring about measures which expanded and more fully defined both their rights and ideas of American citizenship as a whole. Black pressure helped secure national ratification of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments (in 1865, 1868, and 1870, respectively), as well as the Civil Rights acts of 1866 and 1875, the Reconstruction acts of 1867, and the Enforcement acts of 1870–72. In addition to helping save the Union, promoting a broadened definition of freedom and citizenship became another great legacy of African American Civil War soldiers. Now, the concept of citizenship became primarily national, and a formerly hollow vessel began to be filled with certain civil, economic, and political rights. Even where rights victories eroded in the 1870s, and confronted the dark and violent opposition of white racist groups, future generations brought to fruition the hard-won ideals of black citizenship championed during the Civil War era.