A Black Belt Anomaly: Biracial Cooperation in Reconstruction-era Perry County, 18651874

BERTIS ENGLISH
N THE AFTERMATH OF THE CIVIL WAR, Alabamians wrestled with the transformations that accompanied the Union victory. Like the rest of the South and the nation, sociopolitical, economic, and cultural issues beset Alabama during the states nine- year reconstruction from 1865 to 1874. This period was traumatic for most Alabamians, but it was particularly hard for blacks living in the racially divided and often violent Black Belt. Situated in the south-central region of the state between the Piney Woods, the Coastal Plains, and the Wiregrass subregions to the south and the Central Piedmont subregion to the north (see Map 1, p. 5), the Black Belts dark, fertile soil and the dark- skinned slaves who had worked it before the Civil War enabled the Black Belt to become one of the wealthiest and most productive cotton- growing areas in the United States.1

Bertis English is an assistant professor of history at Alabama State University. The author thanks the editorial staff and the outside reviewers of the Alabama Review for numerous helpful suggestions. He also thanks Richard Bailey, Kendall Dunson, Johnny Green, Michael Fitzgerald, William Harper, Sharron Herron, Christopher Pitts, Cleophus Thomas Jr., and Joyce Yette for commenting on a previous draft of the essay; Patience Essah, Wayne Flynt, and Larry Gerber for guiding the dissertation from which the article is drawn; the public- service staff at the Alabama Department of Archives and History especially Rickie Brunner, Nancy Dupree, Norwood Kerr, Willie Maryland, and Frazine Taylor for helping to locate many of the sources that are cited in the article ; and Elizabeth Wells at Samford University Special Collections. 1 Acts of the Session of July, September and November, 1868, of the General Assembly of Alabama: Held in the City of Montgomery. . . . (Montgomery, 1868), 38, 64, 477; Alabama Department of Agriculture and Industries, Agriculture of Alabama (Birmingham, 1930), 54, 58; Charles S. Davis, The Cotton Kingdom in Alabama (Montgomery, 1939), 12, 6 8, 42 43, 45; John Witherspoon DuBose, Chronicles of the Canebrake, Alabama Historical Quarterly 9 (Winter 1947): 475 76; Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Boston, 1974), 44, 19899; James B. Sellers, Slavery in Alabama (Tuscaloosa, 1950), 129, 163, 22223, 225, 251.

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Confederate Gen. Richard Taylors surrender to Union Maj. Gen. Edward Canby in Mobile County on May 4, 1865 (almost one month after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox) ushered in a new day for blacks and whites alike. Whereas most blacks anticipated legal and psychological freedom, nostalgic whites yearned for the days of old, when the lowest white was higher in society than the most privileged black. Reminded daily of the Confederate defeat by military occupation and facing political uncertainty, embittered whites refused to fathom, let alone accept, the legal status guaranteed to African Americans by the Thirteenth Amendment.2 Although most Black Belt counties had emerged from the Civil War intact, the war nonetheless altered the centralized, highly productive, slave- dependent plantation system for which the subregion had been known before 1861. No longer able to rely on slaves to produce such staple crops as cotton, postbellum planters and other white employers compensated black workers in cash, foodstuffs, clothing, medical attention, shorter workdays, and similar prewar perquisites. Additionally, whites had to deal with inclement weather, which caused considerable agricultural hardship, and the oversight of local labor relations by the federal Freedmens Bureau. Upset by the changed economic and political structure of the immediate postwar era, numerous whites vented their frustrations by harassing, intimidating, or physically assaulting blacks. Other whites made it difcult for African Americans to buy land and homes, secure employment, or gather socially. And once the Fifteenth Amendment granted black men voting privileges, conservative whites tried to sabotage blacks attempts to organize and attend political meetings, register to vote, or hold important political ofces often using violence.3
Elizabeth Bethel, The Freedmens Bureau in Alabama, Journal of Southern History 14 (February 1948): 70; John W. Beverly, History of Alabama: for Use in Schools and for General Reading (Montgomery, 1901), 202; Michael Fitzgerald, Urban Emancipation: Popular Politics in Reconstruction Mobile, 1860 1890 (Baton Rouge, 2002), 26 29; John B. Myers, Reaction and Adjustment: The Struggle of Alabama Freedmen in Post-bellum Alabama, 18651867, Alabama Historical Quarterly 32 (Spring and Summer 1970): 5; William Warren Rogers Jr., Confederate Home Front: Montgomery during the Civil War (Tuscaloosa, 1999), 133, 138 39; Robert G. Sherer Jr., John William Beverly: Alabamas First Negro Historian, Alabama Review 26 (July 1973): 202n29; New York Herald, May 12, 1865. 3 James Alex Baggett, The Scalawags: Southern Dissenters in the Civil War and Reconstruction
2

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Map 1: Alabama Counties and Subregions, 1860

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One Black Belt county was an anomaly. In Perry County, a predominantly black locality with Marion as the county seat, racial and political upheavals were less common than they were in surrounding counties. Conservative Perry County whites threatened several insolent blacks and white Republicans, but only a handful of people were hanged, maimed, shot, whipped, or killed on account of prejudice between 1865 and 1874. Usually, whites and blacks developed relationships and institutions that helped African Americans realize citizenship. Such biracial cooperation and mutual uplift were different from the prevalent patterns of racism, political tension, and violence that characterized the Black Belt during Reconstruction. Yet to understand fully how unusual Perry County was during this period, one must at least review the general conditions in the Black Belt following Gen. Taylors surrender.4

(Baton Rouge, 2003), 31937; Bureau of the Assistant Commissioner for the State of Alabama, List of Murders in the Dist. of Alabama, 1866, in Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, 18651870, Miscellaneous Papers, M809, Roll 23, National Archives, Washington, D.C.; Bureau of Refugees and Freedmen, Report of the Assistant Commissioner of Alabama, 1866 (Montgomery, [1866]) (hereafter cited as 1866 Freedmens Bureau List); W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860 1880 (1935; repr., New York, 1992), 48889; Michael W. Fitzgerald, To Give Our Votes to the Party: Black Political Agitation and Agricultural Change in Alabama, 18651870, Journal of American History 76 (September 1989): 489505; Michael W. Fitzgerald, The Ku Klux Klan: Property Crime and the Plantation System in Reconstruction Alabama, Agricultural History 71 (Spring 1997): 186 206; U.S. Senate, Laws in Relation to Freedmen, Senate Executive Document 6, 39th Congress, 2nd sess., 1867, Serial Vol. 1276, p. 3; John B. Myers, The Freedman and the Law in Post-bellum Alabama, 18651867, Alabama Review 23 (January 1970): 5861; John B. Myers, The Alabama Freedmen and the Economic Adjustments during Presidential Reconstruction, 18651867, Alabama Review 26 (October 1973): 253; Lewis Parsons to Andrew Johnson, October 2, 1865, and Wager Swayne to Lewis Parsons, September 30, 1867, both in Alabama Governor, Administrative Files, 1865: Parsons, SG 24884, Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery, Alabama (hereafter cited as ADAH); Journal of the Session of the House of Representatives of the State of Alabama, Held in the City of Montgomery . . . 1869 (Montgomery, 1870), 331 (hereafter cited as Alabama House Journal 18691870); Harold D. Woodman, Post Civil War Southern Agriculture and the Law, Agricultural History 53 (January 1979): 31937. 4 Mary Ellen Curtin, Black Prisoners and Their World: Alabama, 18651900 (Charlottesville, Va., 2000), 183 84; Wayne Flynt, Alabama Baptists: Southern Baptists in the Heart of Dixie (Tuscaloosa, 1998), 237; U.S. Department of the Interior, The Statistics of the Population of the United States . . . Compiled from the Original Returns of the Ninth Census, June 1, 1870 (Washington, 1872), 11, 81 (hereafter cited as Ninth Census Compilation).

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Under an 1868 contract stipulation that replicated Alabamas 1852 legal code, one postbellum planter required his sixteen African American workers to obey all white commands, regardless of who gave them, or risk being red. Blacks were expected to be ready for work at sunrise each morning, Sundays included, and to render good, faithful service until noon. At this time, the workers were given ninety minutes to feed and water the planters livestock. Another stipulation reduced wages for damaged tools or wasted time.5 The labor regulations that Alabama Freedmens Bureau Assistant Commissioner Wager Swayne issued required black men to be paid between ten and twelve dollars per month, and black women between six and ten dollars. Numerous blacks, however, were paid as little as two dollars, and some blacks nothing at all. A number of blacks continued to receive food, clothes, and other necessities because these items were more tangible than money. Other blacks preferred cash but did not understand the nancial terms of the contracts they signed. Such occurrences were common in the Black Belt. African Americans who lived in the most remote areas of the subregion, where formal education was limited, were particularly hard pressed to get a just labor contract. In these places, reported Swayne, black tenant workers were constantly vulnerable to the dirty dealings of better educated, greedy, or discontented white employers.6 It did not take long for blacks to gure out that unfair labor contracts, tenancy, and similar schemes made them little more than free plantation labor. Nevertheless, tens of thousands of blacks were forced to endure these conditions because they had few alternatives. Public land was reasonably priced following the war, but it was scarce. Some private land was available, but few whites were willing to part
5 Code of Alabama: Prepared by John J. Ormond, Arthur P. Bagby, George Goldthwaite . . . (Montgomery, 1866); H. L. Whipple, Freedmans Labor Contract, 1868, SPR 473, ADAH; Sellers, Slavery in Alabama, 76. 6 John W. Alvord, First Semi-Annual Report on Schools and Finances of Freedmen, January 1, 1866 (Washington, D.C., 1866), 15; Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, Report of the Assistant Commissioner of Alabama, 1866, 6; Records of the Assistant Commissioner for the State of Alabama, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, 18651870 (Washington, D.C., 1969), microlm, reel 13; Margaritte Gilmore, Contract with Freeman, SPR 503, ADAH.

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with it if prospective buyers were black. Even fewer blacks had the nances needed to be buyers or the wherewithal to protest the most disgruntled whites, whose insistence on restoring antebellum normality could have grim consequences.7 Between 1865 and 1871, at least 109 people were killed in Alabama for economic, political, or racial reasons. Hundreds of conrmed incidents of violent white-on-black crime were carried out in 1866 alone. In Sumter County, a black man was killed because he refused to sign a labor contract. Another African American was murdered for telling one of his associates that he planned to inform local Freedmens Bureau ofcials how badly his white employer was treating him. A third black man attempted to report similar mistreatment to the bureau and was never seen again. Elsewhere in the county, a white arsonist burned a black church and threatened to kill a black man who saw the act. Several white arsonists ignited a black mans home and red gunshots at him and his family as they struggled to escape the blaze; two family members were wounded and one was killed. Yet another black man probably was killed after a group of whites abducted him for feuding with a white man over money. One can only speculate about the mans fate as his body was never recovered.8 Though most white assaults in the Black Belt were carried out against black men in 1866, black women were targeted as well. In Montgomery, the state capital, a white man hacked a black woman with an axe. Using nightfall as cover, three whites kidnapped a black
7 Peter Kolchin, Free Plantation Labor, in First Freedom: The Responses of Alabamas Blacks to Emancipation and Reconstruction (Westport, Conn., 1972), 3055 (quotation), 132, 134 35; Martin Abbott, Free Land, Free Labor, and the Freedmens Bureau, Agricultural History 30 (July 1956): 15056; Horace Mann Bond, Forty Acres and a Mule, Opportunity 13 (May 1935): 141; LaWanda Cox, The Promise of Land for the Freedmen, Mississippi Valley Historical Review 45 (December 1958): 413 40; Gavin Wright, The Economics and Politics of Slavery and Freedom in the U.S. South, in Frank McGlynn and Seymour Drescher, eds., The Meaning of Freedom: Economics, Politics, and Culture after Slavery (Pittsburgh, 1992), 94. 8 1866 Freedmens Bureau List; William Pierce Randel, The Ku Klux Klan: A Century of Infamy (Philadelphia, 1965), 114; Walter R. Fleming, The Ku Klux Testimony Relating to Alabama (n.p., [1903]), 6, Books Pamphlet File, MFB 299, R3130, Samford University Special Collections, Birmingham, Alabama; Report of the Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States. . . ., vol. 3 (Washington, D.C., 1872) (hereafter cited as Klan Committee: Alabama); Allen W. Trelease, White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction (Baton Rouge, 1971), 247.

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woman as she lay in her bed, steered her toward a nearby swamp and, once there, whipped her before cracking her skull with a pistol.9 Occasionally, white authorities took part in violent acts against African Americans. A white Montgomery police ofcer burned a black woman who was being held in a guardhouse for unknown reasons. A white judge and his son beat the wife and daughter of a black man who had committed no crime. The judge himself then drew a pistol on the black man. Other white assailants went one step further. After shooting a black man in the head, they discarded him close to a nearby hospital, where caregivers could do nothing. One of the assailants bullets had penetrated the mans brain, and he died within minutes.10 Over the next two years, numerous black churches were burned, and thousands of blacks and white Republicans were subjected to political or physical harassment. In Hale County, which was organized from Greene County in 1867, a white shopkeeper who refused to be registered by a black shot and killed the one African American registrar that state law mandated. In 1868, a few white college students performed the rst unofcial Klan raid in Hale. The students primary target was a northern white Republican who operated a black school, but they also terrorized the homes of three unsuspecting blacks. In the wake of the raid, a group of prominent Democrats who had encouraged the act protected the students from prosecution and organized an ofcial Hale County Klan. In Tuscaloosa, one county north of Hale, conservative Democrats used violence to interrupt an 1868 rally that Republicans were holding for their partys presidential and vice-presidential candidates, Ulysses Grant and Schuyler Colfax. The Democrats leader was an openly racist newspaper owner and politician who wanted Klan dens organized throughout the Black Belt to control white Republicans and disrespectful blacks. In Macon County, a former Confederate general commanded white night riders to punish African Americans for actual and imaginary transgressions since the summer of 1865. Violence had gotten so bad in Butler
9

10

1866 Freedmens Bureau List. Ibid.

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and Pickens counties by the end of 1868 that a special state commission recommended that federal troops be sent to these areas.11 Some of the most publicized disturbances that occurred in or around the Alabama Black Belt during Reconstruction took place in Greene County, where on March 21, 1868, Klansmen burned the courthouse. Following a failed attempt to burn the Hale County courthouse the next day, the same Klansmen returned to Greene and forced a northern white Republican who taught African Americans to leave the county. Afterward, the Klansmen turned their attention to a local Freedmens Bureau agent. He, too, was forced out of the county during the early stages of a two-year reign of Klan terror that climaxed during 1870. In March of that year, Klansmen murdered the county solicitor, a white Republican who had tried to prosecute several whites who had killed two blacks. In April, Klansmen red on and then poisoned the family of a black man, killing his wife. In October, a planned political debate between nationally known Republicans and local Democrats turned into a riot during which several people were wounded, some fatally. Such outrages caused one observer to assert that the Devil seems to be loose in the Black Belt, and only . . . God knew what was next.12
11 Alabama Beacon, June 15 and 22, 1867; Alabama Weekly State Journal, May 22, 1869; Lonnie A. Burnett, The Pen Makes a Good Sword: John Forsyth of the Mobile Register (Tuscaloosa, 2006), 15759; John W. DuBose, Alabamas Tragic Decade: Ten Years of Alabama, 18651874 (Birmingham, 1940), 246; Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 492; Walter L. Fleming, Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama (1905; repr., Spartanburg, S.C., 1978), 686 87; Philip S. Foner and George E. Walker, eds., Proceedings of the Black National and State Conventions, 18651900 (Philadelphia, 1986), 1:3, 23, 36n69 n70; Melinda Meek Hennessey, Political Terrorism in the Black Belt: The Eutaw Riot, Alabama Review 33 (January 1980): 35; G. Ward Hubbs, Guarding Greensboro: A Confederate Company in the Making of a Southern Community (Athens, Ga., 2003), 211, 21214, 218 23, 298n33; Marion Commonwealth, July 12, 1866; New York Times, May 15, 17, 1867; William Warren Rogers Jr., Black Belt Scalawag: Charles Hays and the Southern Republicans in the Era of Reconstruction (Athens, Ga., 1993), 75 77; Tuscaloosa Monitor, September 21, 1869; Trelease, White Terror, 82 88, 246. 12 Your Friend to Charles Hays, April 8, 1871, Alabama Governors Administrative Files, 18701872: Lindsay, SG 024883, reel 2, ADAH. See also DuBose, Alabamas Tragic Decade, 246 47, 296; Fleming, Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama, 686 87; Hennessey, Political Terrorism in the Black Belt, 35 48; Gene L. Howard, Death at Cross Plains: An Alabama Reconstruction Tragedy (Tuscaloosa, 1984), 11213; Hubbs, Guarding Greensboro, 220; Klan Committee: Alabama, 2:127273, 129091; Ninth Census Compilation, 11, 79; Rogers, Black Belt Scalawag, 7577, 81; Trelease, White Terror, 259 60, 304 5.

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Klan Grand Wizard Nathaniel Bedford Forrest had ordered the organization to disband in January 1869, but his order had done little to stem the tide of racial and political violence that deant members were determined to carry out against blacks and white Republicans. In May 1870, Congress had reacted to public outcries for justice by passing an enforcement act to protect the voting privileges of newly enfranchised African American men. Congress passed two additional enforcement acts the following year. Collectively called the Ku Klux Klan Act, the 1871 measures held counties as well as individuals accountable for Klan and Klan-like physical and political aggression. Also in 1871, Congress established the Joint Select Committee on the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States, commonly called the Klan Committee, to investigate white terrorism in the South.13 Cognizant of numerous terrorist acts in Alabamas Black Belt and Tennessee Valley subregions, the Republican chairman of the committee posed a simple but provocative question to Alabama Congressman Charles Hays, a wealthy white Republican from Greene County who represented the predominantly African American fourth district (see Map 2, p. 12): does the future peace and security of the State depend upon republicans suppressing their sentiments and keeping entirely quiet? Hayss immediate response, I think that has a great deal to do with it, was unsettling and misleading. Clarifying what he meant, Hays presumed that most Alabamians were tired of the corruption, intimidation, and physical violence that had taken place in the state since the Civil War. I know I am, uttered Hays, concluding: I think if we just keep the military away . . . and let things alone as they are for the present, the people will probably see that it is better to have peace and order all over the country; and I think that is what they intend to do; at least I hope so.14
13

Michael Fitzgerald, Splendid Failure: Postwar Reconstruction in the American South (Chicago, 2007), 66 69; John Hope Franklin, Reconstruction after the Civil War (1961; repr., Chicago, 1994), 162, 167; Report, 42nd Congress, 2d. sess., 1871, Rept. No. 6, 16, in Index to the Reports of the Committees of the Senate of the United States, for the Second Session of the Forty-second Congress, 187172 in Four Volumes (Washington, D.C., 1872). 14 Luke Poland and Charles Hays, quoted in Klan Committee: Alabama, 1:20.

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Map 2: Traditional Counties of the Postbellum Alabama Black Belt and the Fourth Congressional District

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Much of Hayss testimony did not apply to Perry County, where black self-help and biracial cooperation ourished in the aftermath of war. Several African American politicians were appointed or elected to political ofces, one of whom, former slave Alexander H. Curtis, was the only black man selected to preside over the Alabama Senate during the nineteenth century. Curtis also delved into education. In July 1867, while state lawmakers grappled with the military authority that the federal government had extended through the First, Second, and Third Reconstruction acts, Curtis and eight additional former slaves, a handful of prominent Perry County whites, and the American Missionary Association founded the Lincoln School in Marion.15 In December 1873, as most white Alabamians prepared for the restoration of almost complete Democratic rule at the state level, effectively ending Reconstruction in Alabama, the Lincoln School became the Alabama State Lincoln Normal School and University, the rst state-sponsored liberal arts institution for the higher education of blacks in the country.16 Curtiss standing among black Baptists and his labor advocacy were as notable as his political and educational activities. Alabamian Charles O. Boothe, a distinguished African American theologian, considered Curtis one of the most inuential black Baptists in the
Alabama Department of Education, Administrative Files, 18691870, 1870 Teachers Monthly Reports, SG 15916, and Teachers Reports, SG 15918, both in ADAH; Horace Mann Bond, Black American Scholars: A Study of their Beginnings (Detroit, 1972), 39 42: Horace Mann Bond, Negro Education in Alabama: A Study in Cotton and Steel (1939; repr., Tuscaloosa, 1994); Charles Brown, A. H. Curtis: Alabama Legislator, Negro History Bulletin 26 (February 1962): 100101; Joseph Daniel Caver, Marion to Montgomery: A Twenty Year History of Alabama State University, 18671887 (masters thesis, Alabama State University, 1982); Allen J. Going, Bourbon Democracy in Alabama, 1874 1890 (Tuscaloosa, 1992); Clifton H. Johnson, Powerful Little School, Crisis 79 (May 1972): 156; Records of the Superintendent of Education for the State of Alabama, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, 1865 1870 (Washington: National Archives, 1971), microlm, reel 4; Loren Schweninger, The American Missionary Association and Northern Philanthropy in Reconstruction Alabama, Alabama Historical Quarterly 32 (Fall and Winter 1970): 145. 16 An Act to Establish a State Normal School and University for the Education of Colored Teachers and Students, in Acts of the Board of Education of the State of Alabama (Montgomery, 1874), 16 19; Horace Mann Bond, The Education of the Negro in the American Social Order (1934; repr., New York, 1966), 49; Horace Mann Bond, Negro Education in Alabama, 110; John F. Knight Jr., v. The State of Alabama (Civil Action No. CV83-M-1676_S), Post Trial Proposed Findings of Facts and Conclusions of Law Jointly Submitted by the Knight and Sims Plaintiffs and Defendants the Boards of Trustees for Alabama A&M University and Alabama State
15

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South. In addition to being a regular nancial contributor to Baptist churches, Curtis was instrumental in the development of a theological school that the Black State Baptist Convention founded in Dallas County during the late 1870s. Earlier in the decade, Curtis had been a trustee of a white primary school in Marion as well as the Lincoln School and its successors. Likewise, Curtis had helped found the Perry County Labor Union (PCLU), an organization created in July 1871 to combat the horrors of postbellum sharecropping, unjust labor contracts, and other forms of economic neoslavery.17 The PCLU was a testament to the countys anomalous nature. Unlike other labor organizations in the state and the nation, the PCLU was envisioned as a bridge to connect all common laborers irrespective of their skin color, previous conditions of servitude, or any social, religious, or political afliation. Contemporary records do not indicate whether the union ever had nonblack members, but that its organizers extended a genuine invitation to other ethnic groups showed how committed the PCLU was to a peaceful social reconstruction.18
University, 1:78, 80, Alabama State University Archives and Special Collections, Montgomery, Alabama (hereafter cited as Knight Post Trial Proposed Findings of Fact); Thomas McAdory Owen, History of Alabama and Dictionary of Alabama Biography (1921; repr., Spartanburg, S.C., 1978), 2:1269; William Warren Rogers Jr., The Prospect before Us: A Massachusetts Congregationalist in Reconstruction Alabama, Alabama Review 60 ( January 2007): 17; Robert G. Sherer, Black Education in Alabama, 18651901, also titled Subordination or Liberation? The Development and Conicting Theories of Black Education in Nineteenth Century Alabama (Tuscaloosa, 1977), 156n68. 17 Alabama Department of Education, Report of Joseph Hodgson, Superintendent of Public Instruction of the State of Alabama, for the Scholastic Year, January 1st, 1871, to September 20th 1871 (Montgomery, 1871); American Baptist Home Mission Society, Baptist Home Missions in North America. . . . (New York, 1883), 456; Greensboro Beacon, July 22, 1871; Charles O. Boothe, The Cyclopedia of the Colored Baptists of Alabama: Their Leaders and Their Work (Birmingham, 1895), 132; Kolchin, First Freedom, 34 36, 3839, 41 42, 46 47; Marion Commonwealth, July 13, 1871; Ninth Census Compilation, 11, 79; Ralph Shlomowitz, Bound or Free? Black Labor in Cotton and Sugarcane Farming, 1865 1880, Journal of Southern History 50 (November 1984): 56996; William Warren Rogers Sr., The One-Gallused Rebellion: Agrarianism in Alabama, 18651896 (Baton Rouge, 1970), 12; Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy since the Civil War (New York, 1986), 85 86, 91, 101. 18 Alabama Weekly State Journal, January 6, 1871; Richard Bailey, Neither Carpetbaggers nor Scalawags: Black Ofceholders during the Reconstruction of Alabama, 18671878, 3rd ed. (Mont-

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Greene S. W. Lewis, a leading Black Belt Republican, was president of the union. Alexander Curtis was the vice president. The secretary was William R. Pettiford, a young Baptist preacher, student-teacher, and aspiring politician whom elder blacks mentored well. With their help, he was elected to the Perry County Commission in 1874. After relocating to Jefferson County during the early 1880s, just as Birmingham was becoming an important industrial center, Pettiford became pastor of the First Colored Baptist Church. He also cofounded and served as president of the Alabama Penny Savings Bank and Loan Company, one of the most successful late nineteenth and early twentieth century black banking enterprises in the United States. As Pettiford later noted, serving as secretary of the PCLU was one of the rst leadership positions that he ever held.19 Rather than relying on white planters and merchants, the Republican Party, or the federal government to determine the course of labor relations in Perry County, Pettiford and other union ofcers took matters into their own hands. Attempting to ensure a smooth economic reconstruction, the ofcers encouraged rank-and-le

gomery, 1995), 15859; John H. Bracey Jr., August Meier, and Elliott Rudwick, eds., Black Workers and Organized Labor (Belmont, Calif., 1971); Peter M. Bergman, The Chronological History of the Negro in America (New York, 1969), 248, 253; Michael W. Fitzgerald, The Union League Movement in the Deep South: Politics and Agricultural Change during Reconstruction (Baton Rouge, 1989), 168 69; Eric Foner, Freedoms Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Ofceholders during Reconstruction, rev. ed. (Baton Rouge, 1996), 94, 177; Philip S. Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 16191973 (New York, 1974), 43 44; Ray Marshall, The Negro and Organized Labor (New York, 1965), 11; Loren Schweninger, James Rapier and the Negro Labor Movement, 18691872, Alabama Review 28 (July 1975): 1819. 19 Alabama Department of Education, Acts of the Board of Education Presented to the Legislature, 18701874, also entitled Board of Education Captions of Laws Fall Session 1873 (Montgomery, 1874), SG 23722, ADAH (hereafter cited as 1870 1874 Board of Education Acts); Alabama Department of Education, Annual Report of the Condition in Each County Board of Education ([Montgomery], 1871), SG 32760, ADAH; Wilson Fallin Jr., Uplifting the People: Three Centuries of Black Baptists in Alabama (Tuscaloosa, 2007), 14956; Lynne B. Feldman, A Sense of Place: Birminghams Black Middle-Class Community, 18901930 (Tuscaloosa, 1999); Carol Jenkins and Elizabeth Gardner Hines, Black Titan: A. G. Gaston and the Making of a Black American Millionaire (New York, 2004), 88 90; Marion Commonwealth, December 3 and 10, 1874; Robert Glenn Sherer Jr., Let Us Make Man: Negro Education in Nineteenth Century Alabama (PhD diss., University of North Carolina, 1970), 29 32, 161; William J. Simmons, Men of Mark: Eminent, Progressive, and Rising (Cleveland, 1887), 460 65.

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members to meet every contractual obligation that they had made to their white employers. At the same time, employers were warned that, despite substantial familial and religious ties in the county, union members were prepared to relocate to other parts of the state and the nation if contracts were not just.20 African American landownership was another testament to Perry Countys irregularity. Whereas most white landowners in the Black Belt refused to sell property to people they once held as property, many Perry County blacks acquired one- or multiple-acre homesteads on which they built comfortable homes. One Perry County black, the Reverend John C. Dozier, had particularly impressive landholdings. A multilingual educator, journalist, and Republican whose respect among his white colleagues in the Alabama House of Representatives mirrored the admiration that Alexander Curtis received in the Alabama Senate, Dozier was one of only twenty black Reconstruction ofcials in the state whose real estate holdings were worth at least $1,000 in 1870 (see Table 1, p. 18).21 Dozier and the eighteen thousand or so Perry County blacks he represented in the Alabama House improved their conditions through religious and secular education. In a state where illiteracy was widespread during Reconstruction, few Perry County blacks under the age of thirty were unable to read and write by 1874, according to Eli A. Heidt. Co-owner of the ultra-conservative Marion Commonwealth and one of the Black Belts most inuential and prejudiced journalists, Heidt was denitely qualied to assess black literacy and nancial accumulation in Perry County. Even during the recession-ridden rst half of the 1870s, Perry Countys only Reconstruction-era newspaper (the Marion Commonwealth) had numerous black subscribers.22
Greensboro Beacon, July 22, 1871; Marion Commonwealth, July 13, 1871; Rogers Sr., OneGallused Rebellion, 12. 21 Frederick L. Brownlee, New Day Ascending (Boston, 1946), 124, 126; Curtin, Black Prisoners, 55, 185; Fallin Jr., Uplifting the People, 45, 49, 66, 11112; Kolchin, First Freedom, 37, 39; Sherer, Black Education in Alabama, 160n16; U.S. Department of the Interior, A Compendium of the Ninth Census (June 1, 1870) Compiled Pursuant to a Concurrent Resolution of Congress, and Under the Direction of the Secretary of the Interior, by Francis A Walker, Superintendent of Census (Washington, D.C., 1872) (hereafter cited as Ninth Census), 81. 22 Marion Commonwealth, June 19, 1873; Ninth Census Compilation, 396, 401, 48293, 623; Selma Times and Messenger, March 1, 1868.
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17

There is no single explanation for the African American prosperity and the mutual uplift that the PCLU or the countys black property ownership and literacy rates represented; however, the countys tremendous concentration of white educational and religious institutions and its sizeable, rened, and politically active black population were principal factors in these occurrences. By the outbreak of the Civil War, Marion had become the educational and Baptist capital of the state. Besides hosting the renowned white Baptist Judson Female Seminary and the all-boys Howard English Classical School, later renamed Howard College, Marion had numerous private academies for whites and two of Alabamas oldest predominantly white Baptist churches, Ocmulgee and Siloam. The Southern Baptist Convention located its domestic mission board in Marion, and the conventions ofcial newspaper was founded there. A number of prominent state politicians lived in Marion, where wealthy planters and merchants depended on skilled slave laborers to build the stately mansions kept by dependable black and mulatto house servants.23 Marions enlightened antebellum environment softened many prosperous whites positions on race and symbolized the general mood in the county. As a result, local slaves were afforded more educational, economic, and religious opportunities than most Black Belt slaves received. In Marion, a female slave attended the Judson Female Seminary alongside white girls. By all accounts, the slave was an outstanding, well-respected student. Other slaves were allowed to grow
23 Alabama Baptist, January 6, 1844; Alabama Department of Education, Report of Gabriel B. Duval, Superintendent of Education, of the State of Alabama: Made to the Governor for the Year 1858 (Montgomery, 1858), 39; Richard Bailey, They Too Call Alabama Home: African American Proles, 1800 1999 (Montgomery, 1999), 97 99; Baptists in Alabama, 18081958 (Birmingham, 1958); Andrew Billingsley, Black Families in White America (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1968), 11719; Baptist Churches by Name, Historic Sketches of the Siloam Baptist Church, Marion, Ala., typescript, 1849, and Ocmulgee Church, typescript, April 19, 1860, all in Alabama Church Records, Coley 7N, ADAH; Early History of Perry County Vividly Portrayed by Confederate Veteran, in Mrs. James A. Smith Collection, 1853 1982, A-5-5, Judson College Archives, Marion, Alabama; Marion Commonwealth, July 22, 1869; Glenn N. Sisk, Churches in the Alabama Black Belt 18751917, Church History 23 ( June 1954): 154 57; Charles A. Stakely, The Baptists of Alabama in the States Centennial, in W. B. Crumpton, Our Baptist Centennials (Montgomery, 1923), 6 15; Samuel A. Townes, The History of Marion: Sketches of Life in Perry County, Alabama (Marion, 1844), as reprinted in Alabama Historical Quarterly 14 (Fall and Winter 1952): 171229.

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Table 1: Black Reconstruction Ofceholders in Alabama whose Real Estate Holdings Were at Least $1,000 Dollars in 187024 Name County Principal Postbellum Occupation(s)
Carpenter, Justice of the Peace Constable Farmer Registrar, Storekeeper, Street Commissioner Farmer Blacksmith, Registrar Educator, Legislator, Minister, Politician, Physician Farmer

Landholdings

Jacob Anderson William Bates Samuel Blandon James Bragg

Mobile Mobile Lee Mobile

$1,500 $1,000 $2,000 $4,000

Nathan Brewington George W. Cox John C. Dozier

Lowndes Mobile Perry

$30,000 $1,200 $1,600

William D. Gaskin (alias William Turner) Alexander Goldsby James Reuben Lloyd Leftwich Willis Merriweather Cleveland Maulton Constantine Perez

Lowndes

$1,000

Dallas Madison Greene Wilcox Mobile Mobile

Blacksmith, City Councilman, Minister Blacksmith Minister, Planter Farmer Judge Alderman, Constable, Hotelkeeper, Inspector of Weights and Measures, Storekeeper Barber, Registrar

$1,100 $1,500 $1,200 $1,500 $11,000 $6,000

John H. Rapier Sr.

Lawrence

$4,000

JANUARY 2009
Table 1 (continued)

19

Name

County

Principal Postbellum Occupation(s)

Policeman

Landholdings

Lewis Roberts Benjamin Royal

Mobile Bullock

$1,100

Farmer, Register $6,000 of Bankruptcy for the United States Treasury Department, Registrar, Legislator City Councilman, Farmer, Livery Stable Owner, Philanthropist, United States Congressman Policeman $2,150

Benjamin S. Turner

Dallas

Isaac Young

Montgomery

$2,500

24 Bailey, Neither Carpetbaggers nor Scalawags, 98, 116, 341, 345; Charles Brown, John Dozier: A Member of the General Assembly of Alabama, 18721873 and 18731874, Negro History Bulletin 26 (November 1962): 113, 128; Fitzgerald, Urban Emancipation, 182; Foner, Freedoms Lawmakers, table 13, 7, 65, 169.

20

THE ALABAMA REVIEW

their own crops once they nished working in their owners elds. In most instances, the slaves were permitted to keep what they grew for personal consumption or sell it at the Marion market. One Perry County planter allowed a few of his most trusted slaves to transport and sell their crops at a larger market in Selma, Dallass county seat. Another planter helped his slave build a makeshift barbershop and took only a small portion of the prots once the shop was open. The slave, Alexander Curtis, used the remainder of the prots to become one of Alabamas most afuent postwar blacks.25 The majority of white churchgoers in antebellum Perry County were equally cooperative. A number of churches had large, active slave memberships. Ocmulgee, for example, had more than a hundred regular slave members. At Siloam, slaves were permitted to sit in the churchs lower sanctuary as well as in the gallery. James Childs, a crippled mulatto slave who eventually earned enough money as a leather worker and a shoemaker to buy his and his wifes freedom, held private services in Siloams basement. Few Black Belt slaves experienced this much religious autonomy, which fostered a belief in a liberating spirituality that emancipation sharpened. Though the Reverend Childs and other black Siloam members deed the Alabama Baptist State Convention by hunting for Jesus in their own place of worship during Reconstruction, they were careful not to extinguish the cooperative spirit that had existed between them and their white brothers and sisters in Christ. In 1871, Childs and a few other African Americans paid a leading Perry County Democrat $480 for a small plot of land about two blocks below Siloam. White church ofcers donated an additional $1,000, and the First Negro Baptist Church was raised. Among First Negros most inuential members were Childs and his fellow Lincoln School cofounder Alexander Curtis.26
25

Bailey, Neither Carpetbaggers nor Scalawags; Brown, A. H. Curtis, 100101; Caver, Marion to Montgomery; Weymouth T. Jordan, Hugh Davis and His Alabama Plantation (Tuscaloosa, 1948), 106 7; Weymouth T. Jordan, ed., System of Farming at Beaver Bend, Alabama, 1862, Journal of Southern History 7 (February 1941): 7684. 26 Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited (1949; repr. Boston, 1996), xx; Bowyer Stewart, The Work of the Church in the South during the Period of Reconstruction (Milwaukee, 1913), 39. See also Harriet E. Amos, Religious Reconstruction in Microcosm at Faunsdale Plantation, Alabama Review 42 (October 1989): 243 69; Berean Baptist Church, in Perry Coun-

JANUARY 2009

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Black and white churchgoers in Uniontown, Perry Countys second largest town, were as cooperative as their Marion contemporaries. During the summer of 1866, several black members of the Uniontown Baptist Church petitioned its white ofcers to form a separate house of worship. Not only did the whites accept the petition, they were instrumental in the development of the First Colored Missionary Baptist Church. Its initial services were held in the old church, and the rst preacher was white. Later, John Dozier was pastor. His and his white neighbors religious efforts support the belief that ethnic and racial divides existed in Perry County, but they were not as rigid as they were in neighboring counties.27 A January 1867 religious conversion provides additional evidence that Perry County residents were not as ethnically or racially divided as their Black Belt neighbors. The Reverend Jabez L. M. Curry, a former Confederate ofcial and president of Howard College, preached a revival where the son of a wealthy antebellum planter was converted. As soon as the young man was baptized, two of his fathers former slaves walked past other congregants and extended the right hand of fellowship. Afterward, the pious blacks thanked God in plain but touching words for making the white youth a Christian.28 The year 1873 was a banner one for black churches in Perry County. Several buildings were constructed, and demand for theological study increased. In each endeavor, white Baptists and other denominationalists helped. Additional assistance came from the biracial Young Mens Christian Association, the Perry County Bible Society,
ty Heritage Book Committee, The Heritage of Perry County, Alabama (Clanton, 1999), 38; Sylvia Krebs, Funeral Meats and Second Marriages: Alabama Churches in the Presidential Reconstruction Period, Alabama Historical Quarterly 37 (Fall 1975): 206 16; J. Hugh Le Baron, Ocmulgee Baptist Church, Slave and Black Freedmen Members, Perry County, Alabama, private record sent to the author, July 6, 2004; Ward M. McAfee, Religion, Race, and Reconstruction: The Public School in the Politics of the 1870s (Albany, N.Y., 1998), 25, 162; Minutes of the Forty-third Annual Session of the Alabama Baptist State Convention, 1865 (Atlanta, 1866), 10; Report of the Committee of the Alabama Association, upon the Relation of the Colored Members to the Churches, with the Speech of I. T. Tichenor. . . . (Montgomery, 1865). 27 First Colored Missionary Baptist Church, in Perry County Heritage Book Committee, The Heritage of Perry County, 41, 54; W. Stuart Harris, Perry County Heritage (Summereld, 1991), 79. 28 Christian Index and South-western Baptist, January 17, 1867; Flynt, Alabama Baptists, 141.

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and the Perry County Sunday School Union over which Alexander Curtis presided. Their cooperation strengthens the argument that most local residents were able to overcome the misunderstandings, stereotypes, and irreverent secular and religious divisions that the Civil War and Reconstruction produced. Rather than accepting complete racial segregation as a fait accompli during the postwar years, blacks and whites met in common purpose and mutual affection.29 Alexander Curtis was particularly proud of most Perry County residents ability to live, work, and worship alongside each other in relative peace. In a May 1869 letter to a northern editor who had written about alleged Klan activity in the county, Curtis presumed there was no place in the entire South where black and white folk lived in more harmony than they did in Perry County. Curtis conceded that heated political debates had taken place during the previous campaign season from which he, John Dozier, Greene Lewis, and several of their Republican colleagues had emerged victorious (see Table 2), but Curtis denied that any signicant physical confrontation had taken place during the historic race.30 Joseph Speed, Perry Countys most powerful white Republican, was in partial concurrence with Curtis. In testimony before the Klan Committee in July 1871, Speed swore that Perry County had been perfectly peaceful since the end of the Civil War. Not even the divisive partisan politics of the late 1860s had caused a major disruption in the county, avowed Speed, who claimed that the perfect peace of the early postwar years had spilled over into the 1870s. Reinforcing his point, Speed stated that the Klan had never been organized in Perry County. He admitted that one of his former slaves had mentioned that scores of disguised men . . . what we call Ku Klux in Perry had ridden through the county from time to time, but Speed
29

Flynt, Alabama Baptists, 141 (quotation), 181. See also Harris, Perry County Heritage, 75 76; Kolchin, First Freedom, 112, 117; Cal M. Logue, Racist Reporting during Reconstruction, Journal of Black Studies 9 (March 1979): 33536; Marion Commonwealth, April 10, May 22, June 19, 1873; David M. Reimers, White Protestantism and the Negro (New York, 1965), 25; George H. Watson and Mildred B. Watson, History of the Christian Churches in the Alabama Area (St. Louis, 1965), 5253. 30 Marion Commonwealth, July 29, 1869.

JANUARY 2009
Table 2: Perry County Election Results, 186831

23

Ofce
Probate Judge Solicitor Circuit Court Clerk Sheriff Assessor Tax Collector State Senator State Representative

Candidate
Benjamin S. Williams Rufus Reid (or Reed) Daniel Slawson (or Slauson) J. F. Williams W. H. Smith John T. Harris W. H. Stewart F. Daniel Wyman Thomas Lee (or Lea)* Greene S. W. Lewis* Thomas C. Steward

Votes Polled
2,742 2,197 2,741 2,742 2,741 2,741 1 2,741 2,743 2,741 2,741 618 500 618 2,741 2,741 2,741

Justice of the Peace

John C. Dozier* W. R. Nutt B. R. Thomas

Chancellor Circuit Court Judge United States Congressman Registrars**

W. B. Woods B. L. Wheelaw Charles H. Pierce George W. Brown Alexander H. Curtis* A. A. Hickey

State Board of Education

Jesse H. Booth H. W. Davis

2,741 2,741

* African American ** Appointed

31 Alabama Department of Education, Administrative Files, to 1869, 1868 Returns of Votes for County Ofces, SG 15915, ADAH.

24

THE ALABAMA REVIEW

was doubtful that they were ever violent and was certain that they did not live in the county.32 Before Congress, Democrat Robert Christian, a successful Perry County planter and respected civil servant, also claimed to have no rsthand knowledge of disguised men assaulting African Americans in Perry. Christian, however, did recall a great deal of lawlessness in the county following the Civil War. He alleged that most offenders were feuding or thieving blacks who had stolen whites crops and farm animals, but his allegation distorted black and white lawlessness in Perry County. Numerous sheriffs reports, Freedmens Bureau records, circuit-court documents, and newspaper articles conrmed that black and white crime rates were similarly low during Reconstruction. Considering that Christian had been a probate judge and a bureau agent in the county, his testimony was designed to prevent partisan Black Belt Democrats from criticizing him for cooperating fully with a federal committee investigating the actions of purportedly respectful white Southerners and to keep federal troops from returning to the South.33 Christians distortion of Perry County criminality was not the only deciency in his congressional testimony. Like Speed, he overstated how good race relations were in the county. The witnesses might not have seen an actual Klansman in disguise or known about any Klan outrage, but they certainly knew that the Klan or Klanlike groups were present. At one point Marion had a Klan headquarters, which clever Lincoln School administrators used to deride the Klan by turning it into a dormitory called the Forrest Home. Marion also had a white institution of Chivalry, Humanity, Mercy, and Patriotism known as the Knights of the White Camelia.34
Joseph Speed, quoted in Klan Committee: Alabama, 1:422. See also Hubbs, Guarding Greensboro, 21824; Selma Times and Messenger, February 711, 1868; Wyn Craig Wade, The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America (New York, 1987), 1819. 33 Franklin, Reconstruction after the Civil War, 166; Klan Committee: Alabama, 1:422 and 3:1558; Perry County Circuit Court Bar Docket, 1834 1887, LG 4639, ADAH; Perry County Circuit Court Case Files, 18601879, LG 5403, ADAH; Perry County, Alabama, County Court Case Files, 1863 1869, ADAH; Perry County, Alabama, Probate Judge Minute Book, 1859 1872, ADAH. 34 Revised and Amended Prescript of the Order of the [Knights of the White Camelia] (n.p., [1868]),
32

JANUARY 2009

25

According to the Prescripts of the Order of the Knights of the White Camelia, the organization was established to protect the weak, the innocent, and the defenseless . . . from the indignities, wrongs, and the brutal; to relieve the injured and oppressed; to succor the suffering and unfortunate, and especially the widows and orphans of Confederate soldiers. Perry County Knights executed some of these charges well. In June 1866, almost one year before the organizations recognized founding in Louisiana, Marion Knights sponsored a tournament in nearby Hale County to raise enough money to build a fence around the dilapidated Confederate cemetery behind Howard College. On other occasions, Marion Knights and their female relations helped host fundraisers to benet white orphans as far away as Macon County.35 Perry County Knights opposition to African American political activity in 1867 through 1868 demonstrated that not all their actions were noble. In 1871, Dr. George P. L. Reid, a leading Marion Knight and one of Perry Countys best citizens, claimed that he and other Knights could have assembled a thousand men to participate in coercive acts, including nonviolent intimidation, against black people attending Republican sociopolitical gatherings. Reid exaggerated. Unless participants were recruited from outside Perry County, an assemblage this large would have required the participation of almost every white man in the county. At any rate, four important differences between the Knights and the Klan can be found in Reids admission the Knights tended to be less violent, wealthier, better organized, and more disciplined than the Klan. Yet both groups struck fear in the hearts of blacks living in the Black Belt, many of
SPR 84 and 372, ADAH. See also Fleming, Ku Klux Testimony; The Heritage of Perry County Alabama, 21; Marion Commonwealth, January 19, 1871; T. C. Steward to E. M. Cravath, February 8, 1871, American Missionary Association Papers, August 15, 1867, Dillard University, New Orleans, Louisiana. 35 Revised and Amended Prescript of the [Knights of the White Camelia] (n.p., [1867]), SPR 372, ADAH. See also An Act to Incorporate the Howard College in Marion, Perry County, typescript, Educational Publications, LPR 139, ADAH; Harris, Perry County Heritage, 248; Jordan, Hugh Davis, 164 65; Livingston Journal, June 9, 1866; Marion Commonwealth, July 12, 1866; Trelease, White Terror, xxii, 81, 82.

26

THE ALABAMA REVIEW

whom were skeptical that white law enforcement ofcials would bring the lawbreakers to justice.36 Blacks had reason to worry, even in Perry County. Although the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment had changed their legal status from subject to citizen in January 1865, time soon proved what numerous African Americans in Alabama had always feared: most whites thinking could not be legislated, and attempts to control blacks in virtually every aspect of their lives continued. In September 1865, seventy-ve of ninety delegates to the all-white state constitutional convention accepted section one of the Thirteenth Amendment, protecting a citizen from involuntary servitude without being tried and duly convicted of a crime; but the delegates rejected section two, which gave Congress the power to enforce the amendment through appropriate legislation. Taking a strict states -rights position and misapplying a states ability to police personal contracts under the Thirteenth Amendment, Alabama lawmakers in December 1865 decided that only local and state ofcials could determine the political status of blacks. The lawmakers then enacted oppressive black codes governing apprenticeship, gun ownership, language, vagrancy, and other matters to regulate blacks conduct. Because of the codes, countless black Alabamiansmost notably those in the Black Belt and the Tennessee Valley subregions found themselves trapped economically, physically, and psychologically.37
Marion Commonwealth, April 14, 1872; Trelease, White Terror, xxii, 8182, 83 (quotation). See also Fleming, Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama, 670; Marion Commonwealth, January 9, 30, 1873; Jordan, Hugh Davis, 164 65; 1907 Census of Confederate Soldiers: Perry and Pickens Counties (Cullman, 1983), 12; Jonathan M. Wiener, Social Origins of the New South: Alabama, 18601885 (Baton Rouge, 1978), 52. 37 Article IV, sec. 5 and sec. 8, Constitution of the State of Alabama, 1865, in The Revised Code of Alabama, Prepared by A. J. Walker (Montgomery, 1867), 34, 72; Bergman, Chronological History of the Negro, 244 45; Bond, Negro Education in Alabama, 24, 63; Burnett, Pen Makes a Good Sword, 152, 154; Curtin, Black Prisoners, 6 7, 33, 46, 227n12; Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 48789; Fitzgerald, Urban Emancipation, 64 65; Labor Contracts Laws and the Thirteenth Amendment, Harvard Law Review 24 (March 1911): 39193; Myers, Freedman and the Law, 56 69; The Penal Code of Alabama; Prepared by Geo. W. Stone and J. W. Shepherd, and Adopted by the General Assembly at the Session of 18656. . . . (Montgomery, 1866), 31, 66 67, 69, 91, 164 65; The Reach of the Thirteenth Amendment, Columbia Law Review 47 (March 1947): 299307; Malcolm C. McMillan, Reorganization Following the War, in Constitutional Development in Alabama, 17981901: A Study in Politics, the Negro, and Sectional36

JANUARY 2009

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When legal restrictions did not control blacks, supremacist whites used intimidation, extralegal violence, and political fraud to produce the desired result. Even in Perry County, where white supremacy was not as acute as it was in other parts of the Black Belt, the color line was never completely erased. Yet Perrys long history of white cultural and educational institutions, wealth, political inuence and, to a lesser extent, antebellum amalgamation helped create a countywide anomaly in which black self-help and biracial cooperation were widespread during Reconstruction. The development of the Lincoln School is one of the greatest testaments to the Perry County anomaly. Following a rough start in 1867, Lincoln grew over the next two years. In 1868, state legislators authorized Lincoln to become one of eleven state- sponsored normal schools, meaning that its principal mission would be to educate aspiring teachers. Subsequent legislation halted the process that year, but in early 1869 Lincoln became one of four black state-sponsored normal schools. During the summer, a new schoolhouse and a Presbyterian church were built. The Reverend Thomas Steward, a white Republican and American Missionary Association agent from the North, was principal and pastor. The politically active Steward also represented Perry County in the Alabama House of Representatives. His prominence gave the countys most conservative whites a convenient object against which they could mobilize antinorthern and anti-Republican sentiment. Blacks and liberal whites, on the other hand, were given another crusader for universal equality.38
ism (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1955), 90109; Joseph H. Taylor, The Fourteenth Amendment, the Negro, and the Spirit of the Times, Journal of Negro History 45 ( January 1960): 24 25; Trelease, White Terror; Theodore B. Wilson, The Black Codes of the South (Tuscaloosa, 1965). 38 Alabama House Journal 18691870, 322; Alabama Weekly State Journal, May 29, 1869; Bailey, Neither Carpetbaggers nor Scalawags, 350; Idella J. Childs, The Lincoln School, in Harris, Perry County Heritage, 29; John Hart, Schools for Professional Education of Teachers, Barnards American Journal of Education (January 1868): 401, 405; Some Churches in AlabamaMarion, Selma, Mobile, and Montgomery, American Missionary 46 ( June 1892): 182; W. H. Ruffner, What are Normal Schools in Fact? in vol. 68, book 63, J. L. M. Curry Pamphlet Collection, ADAH; John Silsby, Congregationalism in Alabama (address delivered at the twenty-fth annual meeting of the Congregationalist Association of Alabama in Florence, Alabama, April 3, 1900), Pamphlets and Brochures Vertical Files, Subjects, LPR 117, ADAH.

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Stewards desire to place the Lincoln School on a more solid nancial footing compounded the resentment that he faced from white conservatives because of his northern birth, political activism, and equalitarianism. The schools late-1860s growth and the trustees desire to make Lincoln a college or a university comparable to Howard in Washington, D.C., or Fisk in Nashville required more funds than Perry County blacks and compassionate whites could provide by themselves. The Perry County Education Board did not give Lincoln any money, and the recently established Alabama Education Board could not guarantee Lincoln additional funds. The American Missionary Association faced substantial debts, a budget shortfall, and changing leadership, and federal legislators denied the Freedmens Bureau adequate appropriations for education. By the end of 1869, the bureaus aid to Lincoln had dwindled to $329, and most of this money had been used to rent buildings before the new schoolhouse was completed. Meanwhile, many northern corporate-industrial philanthropists and other private contributors had shifted their gift-giving away from southern institutions.39 Realizing that the Lincoln School might be forced to close without adequate funding, Steward introduced an act into the 18691870 session of the Alabama legislature calling for a 1.5 percent tax on the assessed value of all personal and real property in Marion. The property was worth approximately $500,000 when the act was passed in early 1870, so Lincoln got a meager nancial boost. Later in the year, Lincoln received more substantial assistance when legislators closed every other state-sponsored black normal school and raised Lincolns allocation. In addition to Lincolns reputation as a quality educational and cultural institution, the political power that Perry Countys African American leadership wielded and the cordial relationships
Alabama on Reconstruction: Memorial of Loyal Citizens of Alabama, on the Subject of Reconstruction, 39th Congress, 1st sess., H. Misc. Doc. 42, Serial Set Vol. No. 1270, Session Vol. No. 2; Alabama Weekly State Journal, October 7, 1870; Alabama State University 100th Year Celebration Day, Alabama State University Publications, SG 011965, ADAH; James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 18601935 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1988), 23941; Ullin Whitney Leavell, Philanthropy in Negro Education (1930; repr., Westport, Conn., 1970), 33; Bethel, Freedmens Bureau in Alabama, 70; Bond, Education of the Negro, 128; Sherer Jr., Let Us Make Man, 248 51, 259, 264, and Black Education in Alabama, 4.
39

29

The Lincoln Normal School in 1872. Picture courtesy of Samford University Special Collections.

JANUARY 2009

30

THE ALABAMA REVIEW

that most blacks and whites had enjoyed since the antebellum period were key factors in the decision to keep Lincoln open.40 The legislators paid Perry County a notable compliment. Lauderdale and Madison counties in the Tennessee Valley, Mobile County in the Coastal Plain, and Dallas, Montgomery, and a number of other Black Belt counties had similarly long white cultural, educational, and political histories. These counties also had considerable wealth and inuential black leaders, but the color line was much thicker in these counties than it was in Perry County. In general, Lauderdale and Madisons majority white populations opposed the upward mobility of the relatively few blacks who lived there and in other Tennessee Valley locales. Black Alabamian William H. Councill, founder of the Lincoln School in Huntsville, spoke often about racist whites attempts to destroy his school. Mobile whites were more receptive to African American advancement, but many of the countys most notable black and mulatto leaders were disunited during Reconstruction. Geographically, Dallas was ideal for a statesponsored black normal school, but the county had a smaller percentage of literate black elites than did Perry. Dallas Countys white leadership had little interest in African American education in 1870 because the county was still recovering from the physical and economic devastation of the Civil War. In contrast, the war had caused little material damage in Perry County, where leading whites such as J. L. M. Curry and Andrew B. Moore (Alabamas governor from 1857 to 1861) had supported black education since the May 1865 surrenAn Act to Establish a New Charter for the Town of Marion in the County of Perry, Acts of the General Assembly of Alabama, 18691870 (Montgomery, 1870), 120 21; An Act to Provide Support for the Colored Normal Schools, in Alabama Department of Education, Acts Passed by the Board of Education of the State of Alabama, at the Session of 1872, and Approved by the Governor (Montgomery, 1873), 14; An Act to Suspend the Normal Schools and Classes Now in Existence in this State, in 1869 1871 Board of Education Minutes, SG 23724, 170, 171, 223 (hereafter cited as 1869 1871 Board of Education Minutes); Elias Dunkin v. Mayor, Council Town of Marion, James H. Graham, and George M. Brown, Perry County Circuit Court Case Files, 1860 1879, LG 5403, ADAH; Marion Commonwealth, March 3, 1870. The property value is an approximation based on gures provided in Joseph Hodgson, The Alabama Manual and Statistical Register for 1869 (Montgomery, 1869), xxxi. According to Hodgson, Perry County had 405,993 acres of land valued at $1,553,000 in 1869. Town property, assessed in lots, equaled 332 and was worth $506,485.
40

JANUARY 2009

31

der to Gen. Canby. No one believed it feasible to place the only statesponsored black normal school in Montgomery, the rst Confederate capital, a mere ve years after the war.41 From 1870 until 1872, the Lincoln Normal School amassed an impressive record. Graduates taught at black primary schools throughout the state. Unlike many black teachers in the South, white education administrators in Alabama and other southern states commended Lincoln graduates for their competency. All the same, Alexander Curtis, white Alabama lawmakers, and poor economic conditions produced uncertainty among Lincoln supporters. In numerous public statements, Curtis objected to the Alabama Education Boards early 1870s decision to replace him and every other black Lincoln trustee with white ones. Equally important, Curtis worried that the state legislature might stop funding Lincoln if the economic recession worsened. Although Curtis did not want the state government or any other predominantly white body controlling Lincoln, he doubted that the school would ever become a college or a university without state support.42 Electoral politics added to Curtiss concerns. Following a Republican gubernatorial victory in November 1872, the Alabama Democratic and Conservative Party adopted a policy promoting white supremacy and intimidation as appropriate means to end Republican rule in the state. Resultant hostilities were heavy in 1873, but they peaked during the 1874 campaign cycle. According to Congressman Hays, almost forty Black Belt Republicans were assaulted for political or racial reasons in 1874. Hays could not conrm every assault, but many were certain. Two notable attacks occurred in August in Sumter County, where Democrats murdered a white Republican as he rode home
41

Alabama Weekly State Journal, February 6, 1869; Fleming, Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama, 456; Montgomery Advertiser, January 27, 1869. 42 1869 1871 Board of Education Minutes, SG 23724, 53, 240, 249; Acts of the Session of the General Assembly of Alabama and of the Board of Education, 1872 (Montgomery, 1872), 14 15; Alabama Department of Education, Report of Joseph Hodgson, 73; An Act for the Establishment of Normal Schools, in Alabama Department of Education, Journal of the Board of Education and the Board of Regents for the State of Alabama, 1871 (Montgomery, 1871), 39 (hereafter cited as 1871 Education and Regents Board Journal); Knight Post Trial Proposed Findings of Fact, 53; Marion Standard, January 12, 1887.

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from a political rally and shot and killed a black Republican who had campaigned for Hays.43 One dubious Hays claim involved Joseph Speed, who had been elected state superintendent of education in 1872. Allegedly, H. Clay Cooke, editor and co - owner of the Marion Commonwealth, physically attacked Speed for personal and political reasons during the summer of 1874. Cooke and other local Democrats rebutted the claim, contending that Hays and other Black Belt Republicans would say or do anything to acquire votes. Although unethical behavior was more common among conservative Democrats than Republicans in 1874, the Democrats contention contained a degree of truth. While professing to belong to the party of equality and inclusiveness, white delegates to the Republican state convention demanded an all- white state ticket when they convened in Montgomery in August. Ignoring the advice of the biracial Equal Rights Association, of which Alexander Curtis and John Dozier were important members, the white delegates also rejected integration, agreed that the Civil Rights Act of 1873 had no place in the state platform, and drafted a resolution clarifying most white Alabama Republicans objections to universal equality.44 Alexander Curtis presided over the meeting that created the platform and the resolution, which he and other African American delegates accepted due to necessity. Curtis feared that white Republicans in the Tennessee Valley would not support a state platform that introduced race or ethnicity into the canvass. Nor would they vote for a state ticket that contained black candidates. Curtiss fears were deepened by white Republicans attempts to form a Citizens Union party that backed every part of the national Republican Party plat43 Alabama State Journal, August October 1874; Going, Bourbon Democracy in Alabama, passim; Hartford (Conn.) Daily Courant, September 15, 1874; Rogers Jr., The Hays-Hawley Letter, in Black Belt Scalawag, 110 20; Livingston Journal, August 21, 1874; Marengo News-Journal, September 26, 1874; Marion Commonwealth, October 15, 1874; Meridian (Miss.) Mercury, October 1, 1874; New York Tribune, August 24, 1874; William Warren Rogers Jr., Reconstruction Journalism: The Hays-Hawley Letter, American Journalism 6 (Fall 1989): 719; William Warren Rogers Sr. and Ruth Pruitt, Stephen S. Renfroe, Alabamas Outlaw Sheriff (Tallahassee, 1972), 45 48; Selma Times, October 2, 1874; Tuscaloosa Blade, October 22, 1874; West Alabamian, August 19, 1874. 44 Alabama State Journal, AugustOctober 1874; Jacksonville Republican, August 22, 1874; Marion Commonwealth, AugustNovember 1874; Mobile Daily Register, May 27, 29, August 22, 1874; Montgomery Advertiser and Mail, August 23, 1874.

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form except integration. He also worried about the willingness of a small cadre of frustrated blacks to join the black-and-tan faction a splinter group within the state Republican Party made up of blacks, mulattoes, and a handful of liberal whites.45 With the Republican Party bitterly divided during the fall of 1874, Perry County Democrats were certain that their gubernatorial candidate, George S. Houston, a wealthy Tennessee Valley businessman who had served in the U.S. Congress, would win the November election. One Marion Democrat expressed his certainty through verse: Well take them the hundred good fellows/And place them all in a row/And drink from a Democrats bottle/Farewell to Radicals, O! The lyrical writer was partly correct. Houston was elected governor, but Perry County Republicans scored huge victories on every level. Numerous Republicans were elected to local ofces, and several Republicans were either elected or reelected to the state legislature. Thirty-three black Republicans won salaried positions, and Congressman Hays returned to Capitol Hill.46 Of all the African American Republicans elected to local ofce, the Reverend William Pettiford was the most talked about. At twentyseven, he was deemed too young and too politically inexperienced by conservative Democrats to serve on the county commission. The Democrats urged him to resign from ofce, but he refused. Pettiford knew that the Democrats were more concerned about the ethnic composition of the commission than they were about his age or his political record. As matters stood, two blacks and two whites composed the commission. If Pettiford resigned and was replaced by a white Democrat, the possibility of gridlock would be reduced. Moreover, local Democrats could truly share in Alabamas second and nal postbellum Restoration.47

45 Alabama State Journal, September 5 and November 3, 1874; Congressional Record: Containing the Proceedings and Debates of the Forty-third Congress, Second Session (Washington, D.C., 1875), 3:1001; Hanes Walton Jr., Black Republicans: The Politics of the Black and Tans (Metuchen, N.J., 1975). 46 Alabama Department of Education, Report of John M. McKleroy, Superintendent of Public Instruction of the State of Alabama, For the Scholastic Year Ending September 30th, 1875 (Montgomery, 1875), 7172; Marion Commonwealth, May 28, AugustNovember 1874. 47 Marion Commonwealth, October 22, December 3, 10, 1874.

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As important as the 1874 elections were, they did not monopolize public discourse in Perry County. Other important topics included agriculture, economics, and education. Unable to pay the tuition and related costs to attend Howard and neighboring denominational colleges because of the worsening economic recession, a number of white conservatives wanted the state government to create a free college or university for whites in the Black Belt similar to the allwhite, state-supported University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. The conservatives preferred Marion, where Lincoln was located and where its administrators constituted one of the most representative executive bodies in the state. A politically neutral white from the North served as Lincolns rst president, and the trustee board was mixed. Trustees Alexander Curtis and John Dozier were African Americans who moved well in any cultural, political, or social circle. Southern whites John Foster and John Sears were liberal Republicans who supported universal equality. Fellow southern whites John Harris and Joseph Speed were socially conservative Republicans who altered their political positions to t the given situation. Porter King, one of the Black Belts wealthiest citizens and the only Democrat on the board, was a sociopolitical moderate who once owned the land on which Lincoln sat.48 Lincoln had three divisions, or departments: primary, normal, and university. Basic liberal arts courses were taught in the primary department. Advanced liberal arts courses and pedagogy were taught in the normal and university departments. The president and trustees principal task was to make sure that students in the normal and university departments were provided the same liberal arts coursework that white students received at the University of Alabama. The states only white university had no normal department, but Joseph Speed
18701874 Board of Education Acts ; Alabama Board of Education Meeting Minutes, pp. 8990, 120, SG 23752, ADAH; 1871 Education and Regents Board Journal, 72; Alabama Department of Education, Report of John M. McKleroy, 32; Bond, Negro Education in Alabama, 10910; Marion Commonwealth, May 26, December 15, 1870, JulySeptember, October 15, 1874; William B. Paterson, The State Normal School for Colored Students at Montgomery: Its History for Thirty-seven Years and Its Needs of Today (n.p., [1900]), 8; Michael Perman, The Road to Redemption: Southern Politics, 1869 1879 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1984), 3536, 5556; Sherer Jr., Let Us Make Man, 52, 258 259, 263.
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and a handful of other state education board members had suggested establishing a normal department there since 1870. Speed and his associates suggestions were prompted by the need for competent white public schoolteachers, which normal departments helped develop, and by Lincolns success. Alabamas premier public black educational institution continued to thrive into the early 1880s, when it was moved to Montgomery and ultimately became Alabama State University.49 Perry Countys storied nineteenth-century history underscores the importance of historians avoiding making sweeping generalizations about entire regions and subregions when there are clear exceptions to such generalizations. From Alabamas 1819 statehood through the Civil War, Perry County grew into one of the states most promising counties. Perry County whites held major political ofces, built important educational and religious institutions, and became wealthy from the Black Belts rich soil and the enslaved blacks who worked it. Following the war, the county was transformed from a white, plantercontrolled slave society into one in which afuent free blacks, northern white Republicans, and southern white Democrats shared governance. Because Perry had been a racially moderate and educationally advanced county with little caste or religious variance among blacks before the war, several African Americans were prepared to hold important business, educational, political, and religious positions following the war. Equally as important, there was far less competition and difference of opinion within the countys black leadership than there was in other counties with large or inuential black and mulatto populations. In Mobile, for instance, the perceived social status of some mulattoes caused considerable strife between them and darker blacks. Perry County had its share of mulattoes during Reconstruction, but the vast majority of them had been slaves in a tight-knit Baptist community where individual attainment had been less signicant than collective uplift. Consequently, Alexander Curtis and other African American leaders brokered substantial gains for
49

18691871 Board of Education Minutes; William B. Paterson, Facts Relating to the State Normal School at Montgomery (n.p., n.d.), Alabama State University State Publications, Various, SG 011965, ADAH; M. E. Wilcox, Anniversary Exercises: Lincoln Normal Institute, Marion, Ala., American Missionary 48 (September 1894): 31819.

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ordinary blacks without sacricing their personal or political probity. The consensus among the countys black population and whites willingness to accept black advancement, which allowed Perry County to weather the economic, political, and sociocultural disruptions of Reconstruction, made the community stand out as an anomaly in the Alabama Black Belt.