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By Root 1493 0

techniques they brought to their religious gatherings. More often than not, they heard what they had come to hear and cheered their avowed champions, while making certain the candidates understood their concerns. But if necessary, they revealed a political shrewdness capable of unmasking any candidate, white or black, old friends and professed converts alike. In Lebanon, Tennessee, a white Republican candidate and former slaveholder found his talk interrupted by a freedman who demanded to know if he had freed his slaves unconditionally. No less insistent was a freedman in Charlottesville, Virginia, who found unconvincing a candidate’s recital of his Unionist record and opposition to secession. “While I believe a white man instantly who comes out flat-footed and says he was for the war, when there is no profit nor advantage in his saying so; when I hear another say that he was against the war … I cannot help suspecting him instantly.” And in Washington County, Georgia, a white candidate quickly discovered that he had stretched the credulity and patience of his audience too far when he sought to win them over by advocating social equality even if that resulted in intermarriage; the blacks shouted him down and refused to listen to the remainder of his speech. With slightly more toleration, an assemblage made up largely of freedmen listened to “a very intelligent, educated Negro” tell them that most of his people were not yet prepared to exercise the suffrage and he feared they would vote with their old masters as a way of gaining their good will. Before the speaker could proceed, an elderly freedman asked to be heard. “Every creature has got an instinct,” he explained, punctuating each of his words. “The calf goes to the cow to suck, the bee to the hive. We’s a poor, humble, degraded people, but we know our friends. We’d walk fifteen miles in war time to find out about the battle; we can walk fifteen miles and more to find how to vote.”91

The overwhelmingly black participation in these meetings raised the inevitable cry that the Republican Party in the South had become a “black man’s party” in fact as well as in spirit. When Laura Towne, the white schoolteacher, attended “a mass meeting of Republican citizens” in the Sea Islands, she was surprised to find only one white man on the platform and few if any whites in the audience. Even white Republicans did not attend, she noted; “they are going to have a white party, they say.” When one black speaker indicated he wanted no whites on the platform, the others took him to task for his intolerance. “What difference does skin make, my bredren, I would stand side by side a white man if he acted right. We mustn’t be prejudiced against their color.” After some further verbal exchanges of this kind, the assembled freedmen agreed that men should be judged by their acts, not by their color, and they invited whites to join them at their next meeting. When talk of a “black man’s party” began to circulate in Louisiana, no doubt inspired by the aggressive stance of the New Orleans colored community, the black newspaper in St. Landry Parish recoiled at such a prospect and suggested it would be tantamount to political suicide. “Not only would we be crushed in the attempt, in most of the Southern States; but we may be sure the Northern States would not countenance our plan.”92

With white men—both Northerners (Carpetbaggers) and natives (Scalawags)—assuming the prominent positions in the Republican Party, while remaining dependent on their overwhelmingly black constituencies, certain questions were bound to surface, and the talk of a “black man’s party” only begins to suggest the dimensions of the problem. Forced in every state to coalesce with whites, what price would black leaders be willing to pay to maintain that coalition? Would the political influence they wielded, the posts they held in the party, and the number of elective and appointive offices they filled be commensurate with the electoral strength of their people? On the eve of Radical Reconstruction, black leaders in some instances