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Having recalled the nightmare of slavery, black spokesmen could be expected to voice a deep gratitude for their liberation and for the work of northern benevolent associations and Federal officials in the South. But praise for the North was often mixed with a bitter denunciation of northern emissaries who had allegedly betrayed their trust and mission. The Alabama state convention found the actions of Union Army soldiers “a source of great perplexity and discouragement to us”; far more scathing condemnations of the occupation troops came from local meetings dealing with local grievances, many of which spared few words to complain of daily robberies and beatings by men wearing Union Army uniforms.29 Nearly every black convention endorsed the Freedmen’s Bureau; nevertheless, the praise was apt to be tempered with criticism of the actions and racial attitudes of various local agents. In Georgia, two blacks were elected as “Anti-Bureau” delegates to the state convention of 1866 but they may not have reached their destination; after denouncing the Bureau at a local meeting as “mischievous and creative of disturbances between the races,” they were arrested and jailed by the same agent they had criticized. Several months later, the convention in Georgia, although supportive of the Bureau, heard from a number of delegates about local agents who were indifferent to the fate of the freedmen, giving them no protection from hostile whites and always siding with employers in labor disputes. Still another convention that same year blamed the problems of the Bureau on the appointment of native whites to official posts and urged that any new openings be reserved exclusively for blacks or northern whites. Despite the Bureau’s shortcomings, blacks recognized that even the minimal protection it provided was better than none at all. In New Bern, North Carolina, freedmen complained of the “atrocities” committed by several local Bureau agents but thought them insufficient reason to dismantle the entire structure. “As a few leaky places in the roof of a man’s house would not be considered a sufficient ground for pulling it down and living out of doors neither can we see sufficient reason in these abuses for removing the Bureau but a greater reason why it should be perfected and maintained.”30

Notwithstanding the often severe condemnations of slavery, the black convention movement in its appeals and strategy reflected far greater concern with the oppressions of the present than with the atrocities of the past. But blacks willingly drew upon the past, and in particular the revolutionary heritage of the American people, to press their case for a future. To be subjected to taxation without representation, said Missouri blacks, was as “gross and outrageous” a violation of their rights as that which had moved colonists to wage a war for independence. Not only did blacks revive the issues of the American Revolution but they invoked its imagery as well. The Zion Church in Charleston, for example, where delegates to the statewide black convention assembled in 1865, was compared to Faneuil Hall in Boston, where patriots had plotted the struggle against British tyranny, and Martin R. Delany, who spoke at the Charleston meeting, was introduced as “the Patrick Henry of his race in this, the second revolution for the rights of the colored man.” The several conventions which drew up Declarations of Rights and Wrongs modeled their recitation of grievances on the most revered document of the nation—the Declaration of Independence—and black spokesmen borrowed heavily from it to underscore their claim to the “inalienable rights” guaranteed every American.31

Few moments in the freedmen’s conventions were as dramatic and emotional as those set aside to hear the reports of individual delegates about conditions in their respective localities. Clerics, teachers, field hands, and urban artisans rose to their feet to describe the brutalities inflicted upon their people back home—the mutilated