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The Readjuster Party and Black Organizational Politics in Post-Emancipation Virginia by David Golden

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The Readjuster Party and Black Organizational Politics in Post-Emancipation Virginia by David Golden To End the “Color-Line”: The Readjuster Party and Black Organizational Politics in Post-Emancipation Virginia by David Golden Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts In the Department of History at Brown University Thesis Advisor: Seth Rockman April 12, 2019 ii Dedication and Acknowledgements For my Opa, Arthur Zilversmit z”l, the first historian in my life Acknowledgements I want to express the deepest gratitude to all those who helped me reach this point: To my advisor, Professor Seth Rockman, for his guidance, dedication to my success, and incisive and thorough feedback which improved this thesis and my abilities as a historian immensely. I’m so glad to have worked with and learned from you. I would also like to thank Professor Naoko Shibusawa for her counsel throughout this entire process. Without her astute advice and encouragement, I would not have finished this project. I would also like to thank my History professors in general and especially Professor Robert Self, who guided me early in my time at Brown and in the Department. Professor Emily Owens’ teaching and research recommendations proved very helpful as I was beginning this project. I would also like to thank two professors from my first year when I attended Emory University, without whom I would not have written this thesis: to Professors Patrick Allitt and Daniel LaChance, I did not know I was a History student until I took your courses. Julia Rock, thank you for the time you dedicated in reading my thesis again (and again), for your invaluable edits, and for sharing in the travails of this lengthy project – we made it through this together. I am also grateful for the generous grant provided by the Brown University Department of History which allowed me to travel and research this summer at the David. M. Rubenstein Rare Book Library at Duke University. I owe a debt of gratitude to the archivists there as well. Finally, I’d like to thank my Oma, Charlotte Zilversmit, whose loving kindness has always sustained me. To my parents, Karen and Brad: I would not be here without you, thank for your unconditional love and support. To my siblings, Jess and Adam, it has been a great source of comfort to call you during my long nights of work to hear funny tales and speak to people I love. I thank my friends for their love, kindness, and encouragement. 1 Introduction A motley mix of poor Black and white voters, the Readjusters were a biracial electoral coalition that transformed Virginia politics between 1879 and 1883. In four short years of power, their accomplishments were notable. Carried into office by newly-enfranchised Black voters, the Readjusters expanded free public schools and ended a poll-tax that discriminated by race and class. In these new schools, Black men and women were hired as teachers and principals. Black men served on juries and Black politicians pushed the assembly to establish the first Black asylum and college in the state. The Readjusters also advocated for the laboring class with policies that included a lien law to protect workers’ pay over creditors, a tariff to product nascent industries, and a promise to regulate railroads.1 Sustained by Black voters and pushed forward by the Black politicians who joined the coalition, the party evolved over the years to become more supportive of Civil Rights and to expand the scope of the public goods it believed government should offer. However, after the party accomplished its central mission of lowering the state’s debt burden and expanding its public schools, the Readjusters lost the single issue that could unite Black and white Virginians alike.2 In 1883, their opponents returned to state-wide power in a bitterly racist campaign that conditioned the expansion of public services for the state’s poor on the enforcement of racial hierarchy. It proved a potent strategy, setting the stage for the politics of Jim Crow. 1 Jane Elizabeth Dailey, Before Jim Crow the Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 82. 2 Here, and throughout, I will capitalize Black when referring to the people. I’m joining with Black scholars and publications in a long tradition of conferring capitalization as a matter of respect for and recognition of members of the African Diaspora. 2 Joining the Readjusters was not an obvious choice for Black Virginians. In March 1881, a group of Black legislators, activists, and labor leaders convened in Petersburg, Virginia to consider a coalition that would elevate a former Confederate army General, William Mahone, as the standard-bearer of this political insurgency.3 Black Virginians, unlike many of their peers in other Southern states, entered fusion politics from a position of strength: they held the balance of power in a divided legislature. After the 1879 Election, the Virginia legislature was split between the conservative Funders eager to slash public services in order to meet the state’s debt obligations and Mahone’s Readjusters who believed they could “re-adjust” the state’s debt obligations, lower taxes, and expand public services including the fledgling public-school system. Black lawmakers faced a choice and Virginia’s next US Senator hung in the balance, as might the governorship in the upcoming fall election. But of most importance to the Black politicians was the possibility of expanding their constituents’ hard-won and still-fresh freedom.4 The Petersburg delegates used their leverage wisely, extracting concessions from the Readjusters and forcing them to take a progressive position on Black civil rights. When their coalition won unified control of the state government in 1881, it endorsed free and fair voting, repealed the poll tax, abolished the whipping post, and distributed a fair share of the spoils of patronage to its Black members.5 At the Petersburg Convention, the delegates cast the lot of “the Colored People of Virginia” with the Readjuster party, expressing hope “that their interests will be better secured by aiding that party in its efforts to achieve and permanently settle the antagonism of races.” This was a moment of cautious optimism.6 3 Daniel Barclay Williams, A Sketch of the Life and Times of Capt.R. A. Paul. (Richmond, Va., [c1885]), 16, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/loc.ark:/13960/t76t0xz6g. 4 Dailey, Before Jim Crow the Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia, 46–47. 5 Williams, A Sketch of the Life and Times of Capt.R. A. Paul., 19; Dailey, Before Jim Crow the Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia, 46–47. 6 Williams, A Sketch of the Life and Times of Capt.R. A. Paul., 19. 3 Black politicians in Virginia held leverage because of their extensive political networks and success in getting their own people elected to the state assembly. Since 1865, they had done so as members of the Republican Party, whose leadership in Washington D.C. had stood for Emancipation and Black citizenship claims. No other national party had space for Black officeholders, but Republican partisan identity and organizational infrastructure was not particularly valuable to Black office-seekers in Virginia. Instead, they drew on political practices that had emerged in the time of slavery and extended into collective decision-making processes in the wake of emancipation and during the heady possibilities of Reconstruction. In the decisive election of 1879, fourteen Black legislators swept into office on the excitement generated by the campaign for free schools and the opportunity afforded when the debt issue split white voters’ loyalties. Their independent, personal political bases had helped them survive the diminishing support of the national Republican party and seize the electoral opportunity. Their bases also provided backstops of strength during negotiations with their coalition partners.7 The Black delegation elected that year was an able one, consisting of skilled men who owned land and possessed deep links to the kinship networks, beneficial organizations, churches, and secret societies that formed the basis of Black politics in this era.8 As Elsa Barkley Brown writes, these organizations reflected the politics of post-Emancipation Black communities where 7 There is some disagreement in the historical record concerning the identity of these men. Edward D. Bland, Johnson Collins, Shed Dungee, William D. Evans, Ross Hamilton, Neverson (or Nevison) Lewis, Robert Norton, Richard G. L. Paige, Archer Scott, and Henry D. Smith all served with either Littleton Evans or G. W. Cole comprising the eleventh. In the State Senate, Cephas L. Davis and Daniel Norton (brother of Robert) rounded out the Republican Delegation. Dailey, Before Jim Crow the Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia, 46–47; The first work to identify and write biographies of these men was Luther Porter Jackson, Negro Office-Holders in Virginia, 1865-1895 (Norfolk, Va: Guide Quality Press, 1945), https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015014725082. 8 Steven Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration, 1st Harvard University Press paperback edition (Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 369; In his in-depth study of Readjuster Ross Hamilton’s career, Harold Forsythe calls this the “deep structure of African-American politics.” Harold S. Forsythe, “‘But My Friends Are Poor’: Ross Hamilton and Freedpeople’s Politics in Mecklenburg County, Virginia, 1869-1901,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 105, no. 4 (1997): 436. 4 “collective consciousness and collective responsibility” guided formal political participation. Black politics was directed towards the common good through “collective autonomy” rather than only the formal recognition of individual citizenship rights.9 These post-Emancipation organizations provided Black officials with their political base, and in turn Black politicians understood their own loyalty as belonging to these community institutions, not to any party apparatus.
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