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By Root 1221 0

of malice if charity and firmness yielded no results. Whatever might have been Galloway’s blood ties to the aristocratic clan whose name he bore, he harbored no affection for his former owners. Having escaped to Ohio in 1857, where he became an ardent abolitionist, Galloway returned to his native state after the war exuding what one observer called an “exceedingly radical and Jacobinical spirit.” At this Raleigh gathering, he would agree to compromise his advocacy of immediate and universal manhood suffrage only if an educational test for voting was applied equally to both races. But he thought it unlikely that white North Carolinians would wish to disfranchise more than half of their eligible voters. And he refused to believe the threats of leading whites to exile themselves if blacks won political equality. “It wouldn’t be six months,” he thought, “before they would be putting their arms around our necks and begging us to vote [for] them for office.”

Although Galloway called the Raleigh convention to order, the dominant mood was quickly established by the man the delegates chose as their permanent chairman—James W. Hood. Born in Pennsylvania, Hood had been a minister in Bridgeport, Connecticut, before coming South in 1864 as a missionary for the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. The election of a northern-born black to preside over a gathering of ex-slaves did not go unchallenged. “I myself am an adopted citizen of the State,” Hood said in his defense, “having lived here for some two years, and if I am not a citizen here, I am not a citizen of any State.” Upon hearing that some delegates were displeased with his election, he offered to resign, but the convention would not hear of it. In his opening address, Hood implored the delegates to refrain from “harsh language” and recrimination. “I say that we and the white people have to live here together.… We have been living together for a hundred years and more, and we have got to live together still; and the best way is to harmonize our feelings as much as possible, and to treat all men respectfully. Respectability will always gain respect …”

Voicing a similar moderation, James H. Harris, a native of North Carolina, emerged as the most influential figure of this and subsequent gatherings. Although born a slave, he had obtained his freedom in 1850 (his certificate of freedom described him as a nineteen-year-old “dark mulatoe” with a scar upon his head), migrated to Ohio, where he received some formal education, visited Liberia and Sierra Leone to observe the Afro-American settlements there, and returned to the United States in 1863 to help recruit blacks for military service. Two years later, as a delegate from Raleigh to the Freedmen’s Convention, he shared with his new colleagues the results of his varied experiences. He had met enough northern whites, he told them, to know that the “intelligent white class in the South” remained the “best friends” of colored people. He had seen enough of the North to know the depth of racial animosities in that region, manifested in the exclusion of blacks from most non-menial employments and in wartime riots that ranked among the most “diabolical and murderous” exhibitions of racial hatred in history. He had come to recognize, too, that only the law of military necessity, not a benevolent crusade of the Union Army, had freed his people. Finally, his travels elsewhere in the world—“40,000 miles in search of a better country”—had convinced him that neither Africa nor the West Indies were places of asylum for American blacks. The freedmen’s place was here on southern soil, and the only way to win the confidence of white men was to work faithfully and show “a patient and respectful demeanor.” This was no time for recrimination, nor was this the proper moment for radical manifestos. If the present tensions and ill feeling were only permitted to subside, the freedmen would surely “receive what they had a right to claim.” After all, he suggested, God was on their side, and he envisioned “a glorious future” for the black race in the South.