Oh Shenandoah! the Northern Shenandoah Valley's Black Borderlanders Make Freedom Work During Virginia's Reconstruction, 1865-1870
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W&M ScholarWorks Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects Fall 2016 Oh Shenandoah! The Northern Shenandoah Valley's Black Borderlanders Make Freedom Work during Virginia's Reconstruction, 1865-1870 Donna Camille Dodenhoff College of William and Mary, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd Part of the American Studies Commons Recommended Citation Dodenhoff, Donna Camille, "Oh Shenandoah! The Northern Shenandoah Valley's Black Borderlanders Make Freedom Work during Virginia's Reconstruction, 1865-1870" (2016). Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects. Paper 1477068107. http://doi.org/10.21220/S25P41 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects at W&M ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects by an authorized administrator of W&M ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Oh Shenandoah! The Northern Shenandoah Valley’s Black Borderlanders Make Freedom Work during Virginia’s Reconstruction, 1865-1870 Donna Camille Dodenhoff Willliamsburg, Virginia Master of Arts in American Studies, The George Washington University, 1991 Masters of Arts in Liberal Studies, Georgetown University, 1984 Bachelor of Arts, State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1967 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the College of William and Mary in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy American Studies Program The College of William and Mary May, 2016 © Copyright by Donna C. Dodenhoff 2016 APPROVAL PAGE This Dissertation is submitted in partialfulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Approved by the Com-mittee, February 2016 The College of William and Mary Professor Scott Reynolds Nelson, The College of William and Mary , History and American of William and Mary The College of William and Mary ABSTRACT PAGE During Virginia’s Reconstruction, the freedpeople of the Northern Shenandoah Valley experienced an uneven oppression. They took full advantage of a stable Reconstruction regime and the advocates they found among local Republican reformers, northern missionary society representatives and Freedmen’s Bureau agents to make their freedom meaningful. The control the freedpeople gained over their labor, as well as the success they enjoyed in reclaiming their children from white households and establishing independent institutions assured their status as a free people rather than as emancipated dependents. Nor were the freedpeople plagued with persistent, organized white terrorist tactics. But they did not achieve equal treatment before the law. Moreover, despite the diversity of political sentiments among area whites, there was never a broad consensus among whites that the freedpeople should enjoy full citizenship equality. This study also explores how its regional distinctiveness and its borderland location influenced the course Reconstructing took in the Northern Valley. Based on the hundreds of complaints the freedpeople filed with the Valley’s Freedmen’s Bureau agents, the study also examines the ways in which their efforts to achieve racial progress on one front advanced their progress on other fronts. TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ii Dedications iii List of Tables iv Introduction 1 Chapter 1. Reaping the Whirlwind; the Freedpeople Search for Housing 25 in the Civil War’s Aftermath Chapter 2. Black Marriage, the Sphinx on Reconstruction’s Landscape 50 Chapter 3. The Freedpeople Claim their “Idle” Children 84 Chapter 4. Black Women on the Middleground; New Affirmations, Compromised Aspirations 124 Chapter 5. The Freedmen’s Labor Revolution 151 Chapter 6. Black Civic Empowerment and the Undertow of Inequality 174 Chapter 7. White Republicans, Black Worker Citizens and White “Conservatives” in an Evolving Southern Borderland 223 Epilogue 298 Bibliography 309 i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I had an extraordinarily accomplished dissertation committee who inspired me by their scholarly example. College of William & Mary faculty Cindy Hahamovitch, Scott Nelson, Charles McGovern and Kathleen Bragdon stimulated my thinking and provided productive approaches to researching a complex era of Virginia’s, and the nation’s, history. I am forever in the debt of my dissertation advisor, Professor Hahamovitch, whose encouragement stretched me beyond my own perceived limits. This Ph.D. is dedicated to John Stenson Dodenhoff and Ava Gabrielle Dodenhoff, the generational links who inspired its completion. iii LIST OF TABLES 1. Demographic Overview of the Northern Shenandoah Valley 325 2. Pre- and Post-Civil War Demographics in the Northern Shenandoah Valley 326 3. Profile of African American Literacy in the Northern Shenandoah Valley 327 4. Patterns in Religious Diversity in the Northern Shenandoah Valley, 1850 and 1870 329 5. The Civil War’s Impact on Farming in Northern Shenandoah Valley Counties 331 6. Value of Farms Measured in Workers’ Output 331 iv 1 Introduction With Congressional Reconstruction well underway in July of 1867 and with African American men participating for the first time in Virginia elections, Aaron Crane, editor of the Republican Winchester Journal, articulated his understanding of their freedom journey this way: “They want peace and repose, they want a clear field for industry and enterprise; they want the protections of their government, and necessary thereto, participation in it.”1 In the Civil War’s aftermath those African Americans who remained in the Northern Shenandoah Valley were determined to sink their roots even deeper and build lives of meaningful freedom. The Valley’s Freedmen’s Bureau agents consistently described them as a family-oriented, hard-working people desirous of living in peaceful coexistence with whites. Even before the Republican Congress took over the governance of a recalcitrant South and imposed military rule, the freedpeople of the Northern Valley counties of Frederick, Clarke, Shenandoah and Warren had begun taking advantage of the opportunities the area offered for their journey into freedom. They were becoming wage earners in the favorable job market the area’s resilient agricultural economy afforded them. They could count on the Valley’s Freedmen’s Bureau agents to advocate for them as they sought to reunite their families and assert their rights as free laborers. Republican Party operatives in the area worked with them to secure their civil entitlements. Representatives of northern missionary societies collaborated with Valley Freedmen’s Bureaus to establish schools for the freedpeople. 1 The Winchester Journal, July 12, 1867. 2 Yet, even as they capitalized on the advantages a stable Reconstruction regime and the area’s robust economic recovery afforded them, the freedpeople’s progress during Reconstruction could best be described as one of uneven oppression. In the War’s aftermath, the existential terror the freedpeople had initially experienced as whites denied them wages or arbitrarily evicted them from rental dwellings had subsided; nor were they subjected to what W. E. B. Dubois described as Reconstruction’s “reign of terror,” the persistent, organized terrorist tactics of Ku Klux Klan night riders or white para-military groups that freedpeople were victimized by elsewhere in the South.2 But even with the Bureau agents as their advocates, the freedpeople of the Northern Shenandoah Valley never received the color blind justice before the law necessary to defend their federally granted civil rights. Moreover, although a substantial number of area whites were Union loyalists and, although the Republican Party had gained a foothold in the area, there was no broad consensus among area whites that African Americans should share citizenship equality with them in this borderland’s emerging postemancipation social order. In order to better understand the freedpeople’s own concerns as they journeyed into freedom, from its inception this study of the Northern Valley’s Reconstruction period was a “ground up” community oriented study. The backbone of the study are the hundreds of records filed with the Shenandoah Valley Freedmen’s Bureaus. They are a rich deposit of information. These records reveal, for example, that securing housing arrangements was a high priority for the 2 W. E. B. DuBois, “Reconstruction and its Benefits,” The American Historical Review, 15:4 (July 1910), p. 781. 3 freedpeople in the Civil War’s aftermath. Dealing successfully with the housing crisis was, in turn, closely linked to the freedpeople’s gaining control over their terms of labor, since the provision of housing was often part of their labor agreements with white employers. Having stable housing arrangements also strengthened their leverage in claiming their children from white households and shielded family members from being picked up as vagrants. In sum, the freedpeople’s resistance to white recalcitrance on this front had an impact on other fronts as the freedpeople moved forward, advancing their racial progress in solidarity. The timeframe chosen for the study is necessarily arbitrary. Reconstruction was a process, not an event. Race relations in Virginia evolved over time; enslaved African Americans negotiated their terms of bondage with their white owners through the antebellum period. After their emancipation, their freedom struggle did not come to a close when Virginia’s Reconstruction formally ended in January of 1870. Nevertheless, by limiting