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By Root 1218 0

uses of political power. With that objective in mind, black activists canvassed their respective counties and states, discussed with prospective voters the issues that should determine their selection of candidates, warned them that a failure to exercise their newly acquired rights might result in the forfeiture of those rights, and explained to them the mechanics of voter registration. Everywhere he traveled in the interior of South Carolina, Benjamin Franklin Randolph reported, he came across hundreds of his people who were at a loss to know how to register or vote, some of them the victims of “bad advice” and threats from their employers. “A short comprehensive lesson will any where satisfy them,” he added, though local whites often made it difficult if not perilous for him to impart such instruction. (While canvassing these same districts the following year, Randolph was assassinated.) In urging blacks to register, a newspaper in Georgia framed its appeal in terms of black indebtedness to the North and the Republican Party. But the New Orleans Tribune, which no doubt would have seriously questioned any such obligations, chose to frame the issues so that few freedmen could afford to ignore them. “The vote is the means to reach the composition of juries, the dispensation of education, the organization of the militia and the police force, in such a manner that the interests of all races be represented and protected.”88

Few prospective black voters needed any “political education” to recognize that their best interests lay with the party which had made possible their citizenship and franchise. But the candidates who might best advance Republican principles while acting on issues of daily concern to blacks were not so easily discerned. “They see clearly enough that the Republican party constitutes their political life boat,” the Tribune observed. “But they claim the right to select the captains whom they can trust.” In the many meetings called to mobilize support for the party, participants often utilized such occasions to define their concerns and to draw up a platform on which they expected candidates to run. Invariably, the demands included state-supported public schools (preferably without racial distinctions), unrestricted right of testimony, representation on juries, equal access to public facilities, and legislation that would ameliorate the plight of landless agricultural laborers.89 Reflecting regional concerns, a former slave asked a political meeting in New Orleans to condemn the imminent introduction of Chinese coolie labor into the cotton and sugarcane fields, warning that such an immigration “will fill our jails, our lunatic asylums and our State prisons.” In South Carolina, a black candidate coupled his opposition to confiscation with a promise to tax lands in such a way as to force the owners of large tracts to make some of that land available for purchase by freedmen. And when a black candidate in Georgia vowed to repeal taxes which discriminated against small farmers, he had only to share his personal experience with the audience. “Last year I rented a small farm of Dr. Simmons, of this county. After paying him the rent, I had 5 bales of cotton. On them I paid a tax of $15 a bale, making $75. It is needless for me to tell poor men how much I have needed that money this year. It would have breaded my family the whole year. I have felt its hardness.”90

Not since the weeks preceding secession had the South witnessed as much intensive and enthusiastic political activity. But this time the participants were people who had been politically voiceless, most of them only a few years removed from slavery. When the Virginia Republican convention got under way in the African Church in Richmond, more than three thousand blacks waited outside to gain admittance, forcing party leaders to move the next day’s session to Capitol Square. More important than any head counts, however, was the spirit in which black participants entered into these meetings, resembling in many instances the emotional fervor and call-and-response