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By Root 1453 0

acknowledged the need to defer to their more experienced and better-educated white allies. If nothing else, the fear persisted that if blacks pushed themselves too quickly into the center of the political arena, they would confirm the worst fears of native whites, fracture the party, and provoke a backlash in northern public opinion. When a leading clergyman in the AME Church advised blacks to restrict their political aspirations, he warned that “a colored ticket” would most likely turn thirty million white people against them. And when one overly enthusiastic abolitionist suggested that a Negro be nominated for Vice-President of the United States, many black leaders thought the proposal ill-timed and counterproductive. While he wished “to see black men (or colored, if you prefer the term) in every position socially and politically, attainable,” Martin Delany wrote from South Carolina, such objectives need not be achieved at the cost of destroying the Republican Party and uniting “the conservative Negro hating elements North and South.” Like Delany, black leaders found initially acceptable the maxim “Let us not attempt to reach the top of the tree without climbing by means of the lower branches,” and thought it best to curb their political aspirations, leaving the more prestigious and conspicuous places to their white allies. “What fuel that would be to feed the flame of prejudice!” James H. Harris of North Carolina would declare in refusing a nomination to Congress in 1868. “I am not willing to sell out my race, for such a sale would my acceptance virtually be.”93

Whatever considerations prompted some blacks initially to refuse nominations to public office, the projected political apprenticeship would be short-lived. Within two years of the elections to the constitutional conventions, Martin Delany himself told a political rally in Congo Square, New Orleans, that in every state in which blacks comprised a substantial portion of the electorate, “a pro rata of positions and places belong to them.” That stand must have gratified those black spokesmen who from the very outset had advocated proportional representation and had warned their people not to concede anything to which their political strength entitled them; in Louisiana, in fact, where the population was nearly evenly divided between whites and blacks, the Republican Party in 1867 pledged itself to reserve half of all nominations and appointive offices for blacks. “That plank is our protection against absorption and intrigue,” said the New Orleans Tribune. “It is the safeguard of the destinies of the African race in the State.” Nor did the Tribune have much patience with those who argued for a delay of black political ambitions until they had acquired more education and experience. No people possessed more experience and education in the meaning of oppression than former slaves, the Tribune editor noted, and that fact alone would ensure democratic safeguards in any constitution they helped to frame.94

With the elections approaching, black canvassers and newspapers cautioned black voters about the critical importance of their political debut. If the “black vote” became the means by which “unscrupulous renegades” and “political vagrants” were elevated to office, the very legitimacy of this experiment in biracial democratic government might be jeopardized. Without wishing to reject the friendship and assistance of northern whites, the New Orleans Tribune, among other black spokesmen, found little reason to place any dependency on politicians who “cannot be so well informed as to our wants as we are ourselves.” All too often, that same newspaper warned, their “good friends” from the North came to them “not through philanthropy, not for the affection they have for black men, but for the love of power and spoils which is devouring them.” Such individuals invariably took credit for emancipating the slaves, offered blacks a “tutorage” that only perpetuated the dependency of slavery, and lavished praise on black people only when able to control them. If a Union officer came