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By Root 1177 0

upon their grievances, blacks in every one of the ex-Confederate states would begin to organize at some level. Freedmen and freeborn alike, the educated and the illiterate, preachers and field hands, teachers and artisans gathered together after church services, in the new schoolhouses, in town meetings, and in county and state conventions to discuss their condition and to frame a response. Previously barred by law, such meetings now took on additional significance as they set the stage for the entrance of freedmen into the political arena and for the fullest expression of their new status as black citizens.

Chapter Ten

BECOMING A PEOPLE

We feel to bee a people.

—A. H. HAINES, BEAUFORT, SOUTH CAROLINA, OCTOBER 19, 18651

We want representative men, without regard to color, as long as they carry the brand of negro oppression. We need power and intellectual equality with the whites. It does not matter whether he be a pretty or ugly negro; a black negro or a mulatto. Whether he were a slave or a free negro; the question is, is he a negro at all?… We want power; it only comes through organization, and organization comes through unity. Our efforts must be one and inseparable, blended, tied, and bound together.

—HENRY MCNEAL TURNER, AUGUSTA,

GEORGIA, JANUARY 4, 18662

THE SCENE HAD NO REAL PRECEDENTS. Seeking to underscore that fact, a white reporter thought it nothing less than “the great sensation of the day” and a harbinger of “great and dreaded innovations.” On September 29, 1865, more than 115 black men, most of them only recently slaves, filed into the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Raleigh, North Carolina, designated themselves a Convention of Freedmen, and elected a northern-born black minister who had never experienced slavery to preside over their deliberations. They had come together from all parts of the state, chosen in some fashion by their people and instructed by them to find ways to eradicate the legal inequities of the past that still circumscribed their new freedom. Meanwhile, several blocks from this site, the same number of white men, some of them former slaveholders, assembled in a legislative chamber to frame a civil government for North Carolina and to determine what they could preserve of a seemingly shattered past.

The dramatic contrasts in the meeting halls and purposes of these two conventions extended as well to the political and economic power whites and blacks wielded and to the occupations, class biases, attire, and formal education of the respective bodies. The distinctions in native intelligence and capacity for self-government were less discernible. Although the delegates to the Constitutional Convention were more literate, how they used their accumulated intelligence in the next six days of deliberations made that advantage less than obvious. If some of them retained charitable feelings for the former slave, in the belief that he bore no responsibility for his freedom, that did not mean they would entertain any foolish notions about his right to participate in the political life of the state.

Located in a back street of Raleigh, the church in which the Freedmen’s Convention assembled was a modest wooden structure, scantily furnished, able to accommodate about 300 persons on the floor and another 100 in the gallery. During the four days of the convention, every seat would be filled with delegates and interested spectators, most of them also black. Affixed to the wall directly behind the pulpit, a lifelike bust of the martyred Abraham Lincoln remained shrouded in mourning more than five months after his assassination, and the inscription overhead repeated the classic words of his last inaugural address: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right.” That proved to be the spirit of this unique gathering. Several of the delegates, however, among them Abraham H. Galloway, a light-skinned man whose black mother had been a slave of the distinguished Galloway family, would have preferred less charity, more firmness, and at least a suggestion