Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [385]
Having experienced the hostility of freeborn blacks, a newly freed slave found difficulty in making any sense out of it. “The free fellows felt themselves better than the slave, because of the fact, I suppose, that they were called free, while in reality they were no more free than the slave, until the war set both classes free.” The problem he described became particularly acute in Washington, D.C., where upwards of 40,000 emancipated slaves from Virginia and Maryland confirmed the worst fears of inundation. Many of those who made up the old free Negro class, which had numbered less than 10,000 in 1860, reacted by withdrawing into their own social orbit, as if to draw a boundary between themselves and the “contrabands.” John E. Bruce, an ex-slave who migrated to Washington with his mother during the war, would some years later pen a caustic commentary on the “fust families” that composed the colored elite of the nation’s capital. The older citizens, he noted, manifested an exclusiveness that often bordered on the ludicrous. With an insatiable “love of display” and a frequently proclaimed pride in their ancestry (“forever and ever informing the uninitiated what a narrow escape they had from being born white”), they tried to assume the airs and manners of colored aristocrats “and wouldn’t be caught dead with an ordinary Negro.” If they lacked the means to live as aristocrats, they made up for it by their recollections of previous service to white dignitaries. “He has seen Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, Ben Wade and Joshua R. Giddings. He used to shave these great luminaries, which is the only consolation that the memories of departed days can now give him.”18
Whether based on color or previous status, the distinctions separating blacks seldom assumed such importance outside of the few large urban centers. To make too much of the pretentiousness exhibited by members of these small elites would be to overlook the degree to which most mulattoes, free Negroes, and former slaves had always worked and lived together, sharing a common condition and plight and generally too preoccupied with survival and a hostile white society to cultivate any caste pretensions. When imposing restrictions and reinforcing racial segregation, moreover, whites would pay no attention to gradations of color or to the previous status of blacks. What a northern-born black leader observed of white attitudes in 1876 was no less true ten years earlier: “They call everybody a negro that is as black as the ace of spades or as white as snow, if they think he is a negro or know that he has negro blood in his veins.”19
The sources of divisiveness persisted among blacks, and internal strife would occasionally surface and weaken their movements. But the common hostility they confronted usually forced the various groups that made up the black community to minimize and surmount their differences. Even in the large cities, the colored elites came to understand the futility of divorcing their cause from that of the mass of freedmen. “They must stand or fall together,” the New Orleans Tribune proclaimed, and this mulatto organ consistently urged unity between the freemen and the freedmen.20 Not simply the experience of a common oppression united them but the conviction that they could overcome it together. The black convention movement, as a vehicle for this unity, would play a major role in defining a common future.
3
WITH THE END OF THE WAR, black hopes and expectations seemed almost boundless. “Never was there a brighter prospect before any people,” Richard H. Cain wrote from South Carolina, “than that presented to the colored people of the Southern states.