Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [416]
It is impossible that your present power can endure, whether you use it for good or ill.… Let not your pride, nor yet your pretended friends, flatter you into the belief that you ever can or ever will, for any length of time, govern the white men of the South. The world has never seen such a spectacle, and its whole history, and especially the history of your race, gives no ground for the anticipation.… Your present power must surely and soon pass from you. Nothing that it builds will stand, and nothing will remain of it but the prejudices it may create.
Although some black spokesmen derived satisfaction from the sight of former slaveholders trying to win over the votes of former slaves, they did not minimize the seriousness of the effort. “They basely flatter us in order to better betray us,” the New Orleans Tribune warned. “The deeper they bow, the more their detestation and desire for revenge are growing in their bosom.”104
To consolidate any gains they might make among the freedmen, white Democrats even urged groups of “conservative colored men” to organize among themselves. Typical in this respect was a meeting in Montgomery, Alabama, in which black speakers pledged themselves to support in the forthcoming election “the policy of our own tried people, neighbors and friends, whose capital furnishes us employment and whose roofs shelter us, in preference to that inaugurated by strangers and their allies.” The ways in which whites could assess the results of these efforts were easy enough. If the blacks voted with them on election day, that would be a triumph. But if they chose to remain at home, that would be sufficient. Less than a month after noting that most of his laborers had registered to vote, a planter in St. Martin Parish, Louisiana, exulted in what happened on election day: “Not one of the negroes left here to go and vote today. This has been a glorious day—All White!!!”105
If verbal appeals failed to achieve the desired results, as so often happened, southern whites fell back on the more effective weapons of economic coercion, intimidation, and violence. Within weeks after the passage of the Reconstruction Acts, for example, a Freedmen’s Bureau agent in Sparta, Louisiana, requested a detachment of troops to protect the right of laborers to register to vote. Far less could be done, however, to counter the actions of employers who suddenly found they had no work for blacks who evinced any active interest in politics.
This morning I discharged 3 of my hands.… I gave them from last Monday until Saturday night to decide as to whether or not they would vote. They being unwilling to give me a positive answer, I thereupon told them I would dispense with their services.… I retain two who promised me last week without any parley that they would stay at the mill & attend to their work.
With negotiations for new contracts coming in the wake of the first elections, employers like William Gamble of Henry County, Alabama, simply inserted a new clause which forbade the laborers to “attend elections or political meetings” without his consent. The beatings meted out to black voters, the assassination of black leaders, the intimidation of black candidates, and the breaking up of meetings suggested in 1867 some of the techniques of terrorism that would be embellished in the next few years to expedite the political emasculation of the freedmen.106
Despite the threats and economic coercion, blacks voted in overwhelming numbers in their first exercise of political power. On the eve of the election, laborers from the surrounding countryside began to pour into the towns, filling up the streets, attending last-minute rallies, marching in torchlight parades—partaking, in other words, of the traditional election eve festivities they had once watched