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By Root 1318 0

who achieved both goals encouraged still others to take their chances. Between 1860 and 1870, census statistics confirmed what the white South had already strongly suspected—a striking increase in the black urban population. In Mississippi, for example, the black population of Vicksburg, to which so many slaves had fled during the war, tripled while that of Natchez more than doubled; the four largest cities in Alabama—Mobile, Montgomery, Selma, and Huntsville—showed an increase of more than 57 percent in black residents; three of Virginia’s principal cities—Richmond, Norfolk, and Lynchburg—now had nearly as many blacks as whites, and Petersburg found itself with a black majority; in Charleston, too, blacks moved into a majority position, while the black population of Memphis increased with a rapidity that made it a likely candidate for a race riot.44 In the smaller towns and villages, comparable and more keenly felt increases in black residents took place. Even if the actual number of blacks moving into a town remained relatively small, it might be sufficient to change the character of the community. The Black Belt town of Demopolis, Alabama, where the slaves were observed in a “state of excitement and jubilee” after being told of their freedom, had but one black resident officially listed in 1860; within the next decade, however, nearly a thousand blacks settled in Demopolis, perhaps in part because of the decision of the Freedmen’s Bureau to locate a regional office there.45

If whites had exercised some perspective in viewing these increases, they might have been less alarmist in their reactions. Despite the number of new black urbanites, the overwhelming majority of black people remained in the rural areas. To have heard the whites talk, however, any observer might have thought that the fields were being literally emptied of laborers. “They all want to go to the cities, either Charleston or Augusta,” Henry Ravenel complained. “The fields have no attractions.” The very language employed by Freedmen’s Bureau officials and native whites to describe the black migration to the cities suggested something akin to an invasion. The freed slaves were reported to be “crowding every road” in Alabama leading to the principal towns, and Montgomery had become “crowded, crammed, packed with multitudes of lazy, worthless negroes”; they were also sighted “flocking” to Savannah, Atlanta, and Houston; “an exodus” threatened to flood Albany, Georgia; Charleston had been “overrun” by blacks of “all sorts and conditions,” while Mobile reeled under waves of immigrants. “Mobile is thronged to a fearful excess,” a Freedmen’s Bureau official reported, “their manner of living there is destructive to their morals and life. These noisome tenements are overcrowded with these miserable people.”46

Even an insignificant number of black migrants aroused cries of inundation, partly out of the expectation that many more would follow. What they were viewing seemed clear enough to the white South: a once productive labor force, released from proper supervision, filled the cities and towns as vagrants, thieves, and indigents, threatening to place an intolerable burden on taxpayers and charitable services. “Before the war,” a newspaper in Baton Rouge observed, “there were but six hundred Negroes in this place. Now there are as many thousand.… We have to support them, nurse them, and bury them.” With increasing reports of petty crimes committed by the newcomers, the outrage mounted, and the ways in which blacks allegedly comported themselves in the cities fired the indignation in places like Memphis until it reached explosive dimensions.

The streets [of Memphis] are filled with them, and at every corner are seen knots of them playing, idling, and sleeping in the sun. The shops are overflowing with them, squandering on themselves and each other what little money they have acquired in anything that strikes their fancy. On the outskirts of the city are small towns made up of rude and wretched hovels that have been collected during the war, built by the negroes