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By Root 1457 0

delegates with conditions in their respective counties; some of them lost their patience altogether and scolded their more experienced colleagues for wasting precious time in parliamentary wrangling and trivialities and urged them to get on with the more pressing issues of freedom from economic oppression and the two-faced judicial system—issues that they confronted in their daily lives. Whatever their limitations in education and vocabulary, they often projected a wisdom that few of the wordy ministers and northern-educated delegates could surpass. “There is an eloquence in experience,” one black reporter wrote after hearing an ex-slave relate the problems his people confronted, “which can never be had elsewhere; no, not even by the most polished culture of the schools.” And if the white newspapers chose to dwell upon the ungrammatical utterances and plantation speech of some delegates, and mock their pretensions to oratory, several of the more literate blacks who were present saw no reason to be embarrassed. “I hope the reporters will take me down as saying ‘dis,’ ‘dat,’ ‘de oder,’ and the ‘deformities of de constitution,’ ” James D. Lynch told the State Convention of the Colored People of Tennessee. “I know more of syntax than all of them put together.” Nor would he tolerate the demeaning ways in which whites addressed black people, both the ex-slaves and the freeborn, outside the convention hall. “A white man said to me this morning, ‘Well, Uncle, how are you getting along?’ I was glad to know that I had a white nephew.”12

That these were conventions of black people, called and managed and financed by black people, was a source of considerable pride. Although whites (usually Freedmen’s Bureau officers) were invited to address them, and dignitaries (like Horace Greeley) sent messages replete with moral injunctions, the delegates wished to make clear that they were not the dupes of white men. A delegate to the Virginia freedmen’s convention proudly asserted that the Appeal to the American People, which had just been read aloud, was “the production of our own people, and not the work of our northern friends.” He knew the charge would be made and he wanted to forestall it. The point would have to be made more than once, that having been controlled and manipulated as slaves, they had no desire to perpetuate that relationship in freedom, even with whites who claimed to be their liberators. After all, some would argue, the underlying purpose of these meetings was to show the world that black people, most of them only recently slaves, were perfectly capable of coming together to discuss and act upon the critical issues of the day. In New Orleans, after a Federal official criticized the actions of a recent colored convention, the Tribune lashed out at his presumptuousness. “He seemed unwilling to understand that the Convention felt as colored men feel, while Mr. Conway could only feel as a white man feels.… We need no apprenticeship to take the place of slavery, no social minors, no political children.”13

To proclaim their independence of white influence did not always make it so. Actually, the question of what relations they should sustain with their white friends remained an ongoing source of divisiveness within the ranks of black leadership. The matter came to a head at the Freedmen’s Convention of Georgia in early 1866 when a majority committee report nominated a white Freedmen’s Bureau official as president of the newly formed Georgia Equal Rights Association, while a minority report nominated a black clergyman. After some debate, the delegates elected the white man, who proceeded to commend them for the wisdom they had exercised “in choosing your President from among your white friends.” But in Mobile, Alabama, when a black meeting considered a proposal to make a white man the editor of their newspaper, at least one participant strongly dissented. Such an appointment, he argued, would acknowledge that blacks still needed whites to act and think for them. “There is none but colored men that can truly sympathize with their