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. These networks also provided a ready-made framework for the paid canvassing and

patronage system that dominated in the North. With money from their white coalition partner –

money the national Republican Party had never provided them – Black Virginians organized an

immense voter mobilization and upended politics in a state unfamiliar with the workings of mass

democracy.

The local Black networks that carried these lawmakers to Richmond would shape the

policymaking and horse-trading that characterized legislative politics. Elected during a surge of

Black representation following a long fallow period, these assemblymen boldly pushed for

equality but never forgot the daily sufferings of their family and communities back home. Shed

Dungee, for example, was a former slave who worked as a cobbler and preacher in Cumberland

county where his brother-in-law Reuben Turner Coleman was a large land-owner and “patriarch”

of a local political clan.10 In the legislature, Dungee pushed unsuccessfully to repeal anti-

miscegenation laws. Undeterred, Dungee continued working to deliver tangible benefits to his

constituents. This is why debt repudiation—the central plank of the Readjuster’s program—held

such appeal to Black politicians: doing so would free resources to improve the lives of their

constituents, including by helping to realize the long-held dream of schools for all.

9 Elsa Barkley Brown, “To Catch the Vision of Freedom: Reconstructing Southern Black Women’s Political History, 1865-1880,” in African American Women and the Vote, 1837-1965, ed. Ann D. Gordon and Bettye Collier-Thomas (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 69. 10 Quote from Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet, 371; Jackson, Negro Office-Holders in Virginia, 1865-1895, 13. 5

In seeking to increase the provision of public goods by writing-off large portions of

Virginia’s debt, Dungee and his fellow Black assemblymen joined a wide range of repudiation

supporters – from the state’s pre-war, conservative governor to an organization of Black labor

unions – who argued that the state should not fulfill its obligations to its creditors before

providing basic services to constituents. Across the South, states were similarly burdened by debt

accrued before the War in order to fund infrastructure that the Union Army would later destroy.

Virginia’s peers chose to repudiate portions of their debt.11 Yet, Virginia’s legislatures and

governors, bound by arguments of honor and their personal stakes in bonds, repeatedly agreed to

pay the debt and its interest (minus a small portion assigned to West Virginia) even as the economic panics of the 1870s further damaged the state’s capacity to pay.12 Dungee agreed with

those advocating repudiation in order to better pursue programs for his community. He thus

ignored Republican President Rutherford B. Hayes’ personal plea, delivered during an 1880

meeting with a delegation of Black Readjusters, to side with the debt-paying, anti-school

coalition.13 Dungee knew that he must provide for his constituents – he, along with Virginia’s

other Black politicians were representatives in the truest sense and they zealously pursued their

communities’ mandate to glean all that was possible through operating the levers of state power.

Black legislators efforts to make the Readjuster’s a party of racial equality and expansive

public services may be read as attempting to push the state, with its greater fiscal and

administrative capacity, to help shoulder the burden of caring for the Black populace—

11 Dailey, Before Jim Crow the Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia, 29. 12 Brent Tarter, ed., A Saga of the New South: Race, Law, and Public Debt in Virginia, Race, Law, and Public Debt in Virginia (University of Virginia Press, 2016), 27; Peter J. Rachleff, Black Labor in Richmond, 1865-1890 (University of Illinois Press, 1984), 77. 13 Dailey, Before Jim Crow the Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia, 92; Marriane E Julienne and Dictionary of Virginia Biography, “Shed Dungee (1831-1900),” in Encyclopedia Virginia (Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, April 20, 2018), https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Petersburg_Convention_of_March_14_1881. 6

institutionalizing the work already done on an ad hoc basis through churches, benevolent

societies, and other community organizations. The Readjuster era, in some ways, represented a

re-articulation of the collective ethos of Black life reformulated in the language of public governance. All Readjusters argued the state should have a greater responsibility for its constituents and that public money should be used towards public goods for all. For Black

Readjusters this accomplishment required destroying a politics organized around racial subjugation and replacing it with one where each race could flourish. It was not an advocacy for color-blindness, but an argument that the Black Virginians could not enjoy their rights under a state regime of white supremacy nor without remedies for the impediments facing the only- recently emancipated. That Readjuster politics succeeded on the organizational capacity of Black collective networks is perhaps the path by which these sentiments turned into a legislative plan.14

The political choices of these Black politicians help us understand the possibilities and limits

of multiracial democracy after the Civil War. In their writing and actions, Black politicians

articulated the “color-line” as both the framework for race-class subjugation and the mechanism

for stymying multiracial class solidarity.15 This subjugation was accomplished by the many

mechanisms of white supremacy, including disfranchisement, criminalization, and long-running

disparities in access to resources. In naming the Black citizens of Hampton, Virginia “Freedom’s

First Generation” historian Robert Engs points to both the sheer novelty of rights given the

proximity to slavery. Looking backwards from today, Reconstruction politicians’ deeply held

hopes for multiracial democracy seem impossible and almost incongruent with the history of the

14 Elsa Barkley Brown, “Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom,” 1994, http://drum.lib.umd.edu/handle/1903/13704. 15 The term “color-line” was regularly used in newspapers and in Black lawmaker’s writings and speeches. In 1881, Fredrick Douglass used it as the tile of an essay propagating it to W.E.B Du Bois who used it a key analytical framework. 7

twentieth century. But for these Black politicians, most of whom were born enslaved, their lives

and their world had changed tremendously over a mere fifteen years. Their lives marked a

rupture with the past in ways deemed impossible near to the moment it happened. There was no

iron law that progress must stop, that stated the forces of capital and white reaction would once

again deny Black Americans their fundamental rights for decades to come. In taking seriously

both freedpeople’s optimism and their eagle-eyed assessment of the constraints which shaped their strategy, we can understand the radical contingency of post-War American life and the

deeply held inequities that subverted and transformed freedom into bondage once more.

Without arguing that 1880s Virginia was an American utopia, it is still possible to think

critically about the possibilities Reconstruction offered to remake the United States as a

pluralistic, multiracial democracy. I aim to continue in the tradition laid out by W.E.B. Du Bois

in the seminal history of the era, Black Reconstruction in America. In subtitling that work the

“part which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America” Du Bois

points to the need to tell the history of Reconstruction through the stories of Black actors, stories

often obscured by the reactionaries who ended the era. He argues that Black people expanded

public services and the franchise, for all, with their votes and shrewd alliances with white

politicians – as was exactly the case in Virginia.16

To consider, as well, what C. Vann. Woodward calls the “forgotten alternatives” of this era,

this thesis builds on the work of Jane Dailey and Steven Hahn to relay the fluid and dynamic

16 I owe also an immense gratitude to early Black historians of the Readjusters without which many records of the party and of Black participation would have been lost. These clear-eyed historians saw the truth of Black politics in Virginia decades before white historians began to come around James Hugo Johnston, “The Participation of Negroes in the Government of Virginia from 1877 to 1888,” The Journal of Negro History 14, no. 3 (July 1, 1929): 251–71, https://doi.org/10.2307/2713853; J. H. Johnston, review of Review of William Mahone of Virginia, Soldier and Political Insurgent, by Nelson Morehouse Blake, The Journal of Negro History 21, no. 2 (1936): 214–16, https://doi.org/10.2307/2714570; Jackson, Negro Office-Holders in Virginia, 1865-1895; A. A. Taylor, “Democracy Crushed by Caste,” The Journal of Negro History 11, no. 3 (1926): 513–37, https://doi.org/10.2307/2713952. 8

character of Reconstruction and to understand exactly how, as Dailey writes, “white dominance

was continuously re-created rather than a product which was merely perpetuated.”17 Along these

lines, historians have recently pushed to re-think Reconstruction as the period between

(tentatively) between 1865-1900, not only because movements like the Readjusters occurred after the withdrawal of federal troops in 1877, but because inserting historical space between emancipation and Jim Crow helps demonstrate the depth of negotiation and conflict over the

construction of the twentieth century order; de jure segregation did not spring forth fully formed

and freedpeople did not allow its establishment without a fight.18 It also clarifies that white

solidarity in post-Slavery south was not inevitable. A new mass of white voters was exercising

the franchise for the first time. It was neither easy nor inevitable to unite white voters separated

by geography, class, and culture into a single, reactionary political party. Labor laws, poll taxes,

anti-elite sentiment, and, perhaps most importantly, public schools all stood as planks which

appealed to the Black and white masses alike and thus a chance to foster multiracial solidarity. It

was only by re-inscribing racial subjugation under a new set of institutions that white elites fixed

race as the central fissure of political choice and then disfranchised freedpeople.

Hahn, in A Nation Under our Feet (2003), provides an invaluable resource for understanding

organizational Black Southern rural politics at large in this era, but the breadth of his study

leaves significant space to consider the Readjusters in greater depth. Moreover, what coverage

Hahn offers of the party is written almost entirely from the perspective of how the organization

17 Dailey, Before Jim Crow the Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia, 10. 18 Gregory P. Downs and Kate Masur, “INTRODUCTION: Echoes of War: Rethinking Post-Civil War Governance and Politics,” in The World the Civil War Made (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 1–21, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5149/9781469624198_downs.4; David W. Blight and Jim Downs, Beyond Freedom: Disrupting the History of Emancipation (University of Georgia Press, 2017); Bruce E. Baker and Brian Kelly, “Introduction,” in After Slavery: Race, Labor, and Citizenship in the Reconstruction South (Gainesville, UNITED STATES: University Press of Florida, 2013), 1–15, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/brown/detail.action?docID=1323613. 9 looked from the vantage of party leader Mahone.19 Looking more closely at how Black

Readjusters navigated their alliance with their white allies makes clear both the depth of their reliance on local political networks and their continual success in moving the party’s platform to their ends. I also hope to augment Jane Dailey’s recent and excellent general history of the

Readjusters, Before Jim Crow, and her critical work in laying bare the gendered ideology key to the party’s rise and fall. Focusing on the organizational work that sustained the politics of freedpeople in the era, which Dailey covers but does not center, illuminates how Black lawmakers maintained a radical optimism and an expansive political imagination alongside a transactional politics that worked to bring relief and help to their constituents. This tracks also how white voters on both sides of the debt issue began to see, as Black voters themselves long knew, that the franchise made freedpeople “a power” in the words of one white official.20 Black

Readjusters posed a bona fide threat to white hegemony; Jim Crow and other institutions of white supremacy resulted when the Readjusters lost power and their white opponents worked to contain the threat of a enfranchised Black population. In seeing the construction of Jim Crow as the aim of decisions made by historical actors, it allows us to understand construction of hierarchies in the present as a negotiation, a space of constant conflict, and an arena of Black action in the face of oppression.

Black Politics in Virginia (1865-1879)

Congress placed Virginia, along with the rest of the former Confederacy, under military rule and removed its Congressional representation in the Reconstruction Act of 1867. President

19 Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet, 372, 379–81, 390, 400. 20 Hahn, 407. 10

Johnson opposed it, along with most measures for punishing Confederates and protecting

freedpeople’s rights. But, a veto-proof majority of Republicans overruled him in hopes that

requiring states to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment and enact new constitutions with suffrage

for all men before rejoining the Union would prevent an immediate return to the pre-War hierarchies.21 For a brief moment in the late 1860s and early 1870s this plan worked, with

Republican majorities sustained in most Southern states. Soon, however, paramilitary white

violence, often in the form of the Ku Klux Klan, attacked Black voters, and insurgent whites

regained power in the recently subdued states.

Freedpeople demanded suffrage from the first moments of postwar negotiation. At an August

1865 Black convention in Alexandria, Virginia Reverend J.M. Brown argued that without the

vote, freedpeople had “no where to look for that protection which is essential for the safety of

our persons or our property, our wives or our children… we are left without redress.” Here, in

the first moments of constructing the new political order, Brown sought rights and equality through a particular articulation of patriarchal citizenship, the vote. “We claim the right of suffrage,” Brown continued, “because we see no other safe-guard for our protection…and because nothing short of equality in the law will ever secure to us the wants which every freeman needs and must enjoy if he will be at peace at home and in the community in which he lives.”22

In his claim that “peace at home” and the protection of “our wives our or children” were to be

21 For detailed discussions of these conventions across the South see Luis-Alejandro Dinnella-Borrego, ed., “The Politics of Uncertainty: Emigration and Fusion in the New South,” in The Risen Phoenix, Black Politics in the Post– Civil War South (University of Virginia Press, 2016), chap. Introduction, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1c5ch79.10; Detailed procedural account of the Congressional journey towards the Reconstruction Act of 1867 can be found in Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863- 1877 (New York: Perennial Classics, 2002), chap. 6. 22 Philip Sheldon Foner and George Elizur Walker, eds., Proceedings of the Black State Conventions, 1840-1865. 2: New Jersey, Connecticut, Maryland, Illinois, Massachusetts, California, New England, Kansas, Louisiana, Virginia, Missouri, South Carolina (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Pr, 1980), 262–63. 11

found in suffrage, Brown located private goods in public expressions of power and their

consequences. Brown appealed to the state to help construct and protect an ideal private life, a

task the Readjusters would take up in articulating an expansive, positive view of citizenship and

using government to directly help citizens.

With equal ardor the 1865 convention called to control the unreformed rebels who sought to

maintain control of the state. Black convention goers anticipated the fundamental conflict of the post-War era: would the previous white elite class be restored to its former power? And, in contrast, would freedpeople have the rights they needed to prevent this re-ascension? The convention’s “Address to the Loyal Citizens and Congress of the United States of America,” printed contemporaneously in the New York Times, touted Black loyalty to the Union and wartime service while asking for protection from that old class, the “subjugated but unconverted rebels” whose “loyalty is only ‘lip deep’”23 The disfranchisement of all Confederates who

reneged on their oath of loyalty and the complete ban of all former Confederates from electoral

office remained a cornerstone of the Virginia Republicans throughout the 1860s. These clauses

appeared in the draft of the new Virginia constitution but failed to make it into the ratified version.24 Instead, Virginia reentered the Union with suffrage for all men, a novelty for whites, too, who had only gained the right to vote in 1851. The franchise’s effectiveness in safeguarding

Black Virginians and contributing to their imagined futures remained to be seen.

In all parts of Black politics in the era, the voices of the masses, and especially the formally disfranchised, shaped outcomes. Freedwomen, children, and others banned from formal

23 “The Late Convention of Colored Men; ADDRESS TO THE LOYAL CITIZENS OF THE UNITED STATES AND TO CONGRESS.,” The New York Times, August 13, 1865, sec. Archives, https://www.nytimes.com/1865/08/13/archives/the-late-convention-of-colored-men-address-to-the-loyal- citizens-of.html; Foner and Walker, Proceedings of the Black State Conventions, 1840-1865. 2, 271–72. 24 Dailey, Before Jim Crow the Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia, 21. 12

participation played an integral role in Black politics during the 1865 convention by guiding

delegates’ actions inside the hall during large, open meetings outside the halls where important

decisions were made on behalf of the community.25 Women received equal votes in this informal

political space outside the conventions and wielded their influence to help make crucial

decisions. When convention goers were unsure of their next step they looked to the packed

galleries for guidance from the greater community.26 Although Black women did not gain the

franchise during the constitutional process they continued to participate in politics by founding

benevolent and mutual aid societies, raising funds, and administrating the collective institutions

which served as the centers of Black political power.

Women greatly expanded the administrative and organizational capacity of Black politicians

and offered critical protection for the franchise. Black women took up arms on election day and

enforced community norms to vote for the interests of all, ostracizing those who did not.27 As

John Mercer Langston, founder of Howard’s law school and elected in 1889 as the only Black

Congressman from Virginia until 1992, summarized “women could and did exert large influence

in controlling and directing the men in their political conduct.”28 Although harder to trace and

recreate than the recorded actions of male Black leaders participating in formal politics, the actions of women in this era were integral to Black politics and thus the Readjusters. Black lawmakers could not make it to Richmond, nor serve their constituents effectively, without the organizational backbone provided by women.

25 Brown, “To Catch the Vision of Freedom: Reconstructing Southern Black Women’s Political History, 1865-1880,” 73–74. 26 Brown, 74. 27 Brown, 81, 83–84. 28 Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet, 369. 13

Virginia’s path to a new state constitution was longer and rockier than many of its fellow

Southern states. Unlike its Southern peers, Black Republicans never governed under the

protection of the federal government. Still, some Black candidates ran for and won offices in the

early years of enfranchisement. From there, Black representation declined as the statehouse and

its politics offered little to Black Virginians. The threat of white violence, structural impediments

to fair representation, and most importantly the tacit agreement of white politicians not to court

Black voters locked them out of legislative influence. They were unable to shape formal politics

beyond the margins. While Virginia’s white lawmakers did not want Black citizens to vote, they

also did not prioritize disfranchisement even as they took steps to make voting harder. The poll

tax, for example, was not imposed until 1876. Even at that, the tax was primarily a funding

mechanism intended to help the state pay for schools as it allocated more of the budget to debt

servicing. Ironically, the legislature’s action contributed to its electoral defeat three years later;

the ineffective poll-tax they implemented created a class, white and Black alike, concerned about

losing suffrage and angry that the poll tax money was not actually used to pay for school

expansion.29 The Readjusters activated this class and created a mass organization dedicated to

paying back poll-taxes and mobilizing the state’s poor voters, a possibility earlier legislators had likely never imagined.

The Black politicians who remained in the Virginia legislature despite these sorry circumstances, learned valuable skills and built up political bases in their districts which would pay dividends when new opportunities emerged at the end of the decade.30 Indeed, few could

have stayed in office without access to the money and support of their political networks. The

29 Tarter, A Saga of the New South: Race, Law, and Public Debt in Virginia, 40; Dailey, Before Jim Crow the Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia, 45. 30 Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet, 369. 14

Republican Party’s electoral and political structure certainly could not help. The state party’s

white leaders let the party atrophy to near non-existence, failing to even field a candidate for

governor in 1877.31 By 1879, Black politicians were used to working outside the Republican

party, paving the way for their coalition government.

Elections were one tool in a wide and varied set for the promotion of justice, and Black

Virginians understood that electoral politics were a means not an end. During the 1870s, Black politics found avenues for progress and justice through direct action, including strikes and marches, and local political agitation rather than voting. The skills and activist networks built in this era proved critical to Readjuster-era mobilization and the return to protest after its fall.32

While Richmond offered little to Black Virginians within the confines of the capitol building, its

streets provided a ground for Black Virginians to protest their conditions and push for equality

and full citizenship. In the first years after Emancipation, Richmond’s Black population doubled

as freedpeople from the state sought to reunite with their families and take advantage of the

capital’s economic opportunities. Constant harassment by white officials and low-wages pushed

Black Richmond to organize through kin networks, churches, social organizations, secret societies, and eventually labor organizations and militia groups. These groups served to organize

Black political life and soften the hardships of a precarious economic existence.33

Organized Black life buffered, as much as possible, the harsh economic circumstances of

post-War Richmond. Mutual-aid societies provided help for both acute crises – unexpected

31 Dailey, Before Jim Crow the Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia, 36. 32 Historian Peter J. Rachleff covers this story in-depth as it occurred in Richmond. He shows how Black Virginians moved from militant action, to electoralism during the Readjusters rise, and then returned to militance after they were locked out of formal politics once again. This thesis hopes to show how Black politicians' knowledge of the “strike option” informed their interactions with white Readjusters especially as the party fell apart in 1883. Many Black politicians from outside of the Capital were exposed to this culture of direct action while serving in the legislature Rachleff, Black Labor in Richmond, 1865-1890. 33 Rachleff, 13–14. 15

deaths, sicknesses, and spells of unemployment – alongside permanent aid to the elderly and

others unable to work. In effect, Black benevolent organizations in Richmond formed a proto- welfare system in the face of a hostile and austere government, with voluntary pooling of resources replacing taxes.34 Membership in a group or two, with churches serving as the largest

networks, was near-universal as Black Richmonders could not survive on their own. These

shared fates, both economically and in relation to the power of white Richmond, smoothed over

potential conflict sites in Black life such as the schism between free-born and former slaves.35

Black activists organized mass politics through this dense network of associational life. In the

early years of Emancipation, before the federal government placed the South under military rule

in 1867, Black people in Virginia were subject to a humiliating pass system. White officials,

Union soldiers, and former Rebels alike used passes to control their movement and deny Blacks access to skilled trades. Quickly realizing local officials offered no recourse, Black Richmonders began a national strategy. After collecting complaints in 1865, a group of activists raised funds through Black churches to send a delegation to President Johnson. Their campaign was effective, resulting in a new mayor and a new representative from the Union Army, who immediately

ended the pass system.36 Black Richmonders’ savvy understanding of political power led them to

strategies key to overcoming local political suppression.

The desegregation of Richmond’s streetcars provides another example of a successful direct-

action campaign. In 1867, a Black militia commandeered one of the streetcars in Richmond’s

whites-only system. Upon arrest, hundreds of their fellow Black Richmonders rallied to their

defense and followed the police to the station-house. After a protracted stand-off, local

34 Rachleff, 24. 35 Rachleff, 34–35. 36 Rachleff, 37. 16

politicians conceded freedpeople could ride on four of the six cars, with two reserved for white

women and children.37 With activists at the forefront and the mass networks of Black Richmond

brought in for support, they secured a meaningful victory. But the fault-lines of future losses

appeared too. The protections given to women and children presaged effective future racist

campaigns against Black activism in the future. And the inability of Black Richmonders to effect

change through political power left their victory with little protection from more conservative regimes.38

Throughout the 1870s this pattern held true: mass movements and direct actions secured

victories, but they were always built on a foundation of sand. Black activists articulated and built

a variety of movements to serve their ends including labor unions, newspapers, and political

clubs in movements like the Greenbacks (a national movement that pushed the US Government towards looser monetary policy). Yet, with the increasing erosion of the vote through gerrymandering and white control of the GOP, Black fortunes in Richmond mainly rose and fell with a series of economic depressions. Hard-won progress frequently fell victim to the booms and busts of the business cycle and building lasting power and institutions remained out of reach.39

When political opportunity arrived in the form of Mahone’s Readjusters in 1879, Black

Republicans remained distrustful of white politicians but sensed the potential benefits an alliance

could bring. As Black Delegates in the Virginia House and Senate negotiated a deal to ally

themselves with the Readjusters, rallies and mass movements in Richmond and elsewhere urged

them to move forward with the coalition.40 Black Virginians wanted access to schools and a

37 Rachleff, 42. 38 Rachleff, 69. 39 Rachleff, 81. 40 Rachleff, 91. 17

reprieve from the whipping post. They believed the Readjusters could deliver and were tired of

waiting.

Debt and Schools

Virginia’s unmanageable debt morphed from a fiscal crisis into a political one over the

course of the 1870s. The decade’s regular market panics and depressions shrunk the state’s

capacity to pay its War debts. Additionally, the old tax regime had relied on the slave economy

and Virginia had yet to adapt their finances to the new economic order. When revenue from

raising already high taxes could no longer cover the rising bills from servicing the debt,

lawmakers began slashing minimal public services to the bone. The most politically risky cuts

were to the public-school system. Although the state had never offered education to every

Virginian, Black and white residents alike were deeply attached to their schools and pushed

steadily for their expansion. Dozens of municipalities across the commonwealth passed local

taxes to increase school funding even as the state retreated.41 The schools’ troubles stemmed

from their origins; the system was established, but left unfunded, in the years after the War.

Without guaranteed monies and as the government prioritized debt reduction, the gap between students in school and those who wished to attend kept growing. While the state’s capacity to educate diminished, Virginians’, and especially Black Virginians’, advocacy for expansion grew.42

41 Dailey, Before Jim Crow the Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia, 25. 42 See Hilary Green for a lengthier discussion of Virginian’s passionate arguments for public education in this decade Hilary Green, ed., “Walking Slowly but Surely: The Readjusters and the Quality School Campaigns in Richmond,” in Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (Fordham University Press, 2016), 157–73, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt19x3jb3.11. 18

The origins of public schooling in Virginia lay in the state constitutional conventions of the

1860s when Black Virginians worked alongside whites from the Shenandoah Valley and western

regions of the state – the same groups that would form the base of the Readjuster party—to

define education as a fundamental obligation of the state.43 Public schooling had long been a

source of conflict among whites, exacerbating the dividing between wealthy landowners and

poorer laborers whose race seemed at times their only commonality. The desire to deprive poor

people of state-funded education had organized antebellum state politics, and in the wake of

Emancipation, the same impulse now mobilized elites against a multiracial working class. Now

they could use anti-integration sentiment to prevent the broad coalition of non-elite Black and

white Virginians from creating a strong, well-funded school system. Black Virginians, did

however, win a Congressional stipulation for equal school funding, a clause that would

eventually spare the Readjusters from having to argue over the distribution of resources between

the races. Despite that important victory, the first Virginian administration under the new

constitution implemented the schools on a segregated basis, a choice that would stand until the

Civil Rights Movement. 44

While wealthy whites had employed the fear of miscegenation to prevent a guarantee for

public schooling in the state’s new constitution, they inadvertently fostered even greater

demands for school expansion. Because they knew schools would never be integrated, white

voters (often with the support of local Black minorities) had newfound enthusiasm for funding their schools and voluntarily instituted new education taxes in 73 of the state’s 105 school districts.45 Meanwhile, the Conservative funders in the state legislature maneuvered to ensure the

43 Dailey, Before Jim Crow the Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia, 21. 44 Dailey, 24–25. 45 Dailey, 25. 19

supremacy of debt servicing over public expenditures. In doing so, they created the political

conditions for their defeat at the end of the decade. The legislature authorized the state to issue new bonds after consolidating the debt and then allowed the tax authority to accept receipts for bond purchases instead of tax payments. Under this devious plan it was impossible to spend more on schools or other public goods because coupons were not liquid. The scheme backfired when enterprising tax-payers bought coupons in the secondary market at below face value, further increasing the state’s deficit and debt. The Conservative government refused to change course. Instead, it began a massive austerity push that left teachers unpaid and required mass

school closings.46

Despite public schooling’s perennial popularity, the rich, white, and landed legislative

majority neglected the cause in Richmond. Adding insult to injury, they added one new funding

stream for education, a poll tax. In addition to losing their schools, Virginians began to lose their

right to vote.47 This unrepresentative state of affairs provided an opening for a new coalition

running on public schools. Recognizing the impossibility of paying for both schools and

servicing the debt, politicians and community-leaders linked the two together and campaigned

for education alongside readjusting the debt strategy. Readjustment, while esoteric, had a long

history in the state, and had been employed by other Southern states facing similar burdens.

Black trade-unionists agitated for the state to unilaterally cut its debt obligations, as did state

chapters of the national Greenback movement.48 Eventually a party emerged to capture these

votes and end the white, one-party rule of the last decades. The Readjuster Party would usher in

an unprecedented period of Black political success.

46 A detailed history of the debt and coupon period is found in Dailey, 27–32; Tarter, A Saga of the New South: Race, Law, and Public Debt in Virginia, chap. 4. 47 Tarter, A Saga of the New South: Race, Law, and Public Debt in Virginia, 40. 48 Rachleff, Black Labor in Richmond, 1865-1890, 77. 20

The New Politics of Readjusterism

The Readjusters emerged from factional conflict within the long-ruling Conservative party.

(Conservatives ran as and supported Democrats in federal elections but eschewed the party’s name at the state-level). Over the course of the 1870s, conflict over the debt question split the

Conservative party in two, but they remained under a single banner in elections. Eventually, the

party could no longer manage this conflict internally, and the party system broke down in the late

1870s. A new party system organized around debt emerged from the wreckage.49

The Funders – whose supporters and politicians stood to benefit from the status quo as

owners of Virginia’s bonds – argued the state had to meet its debt obligations even at the cost of

deep cuts to Virginia’s limited public services. Their party was more closely linked to the old

Conservative party and the sentiments of the pre-War politicians who founded it. In speeches and

arguments on the floor of the legislature, its lawmakers marshalled traditionalist arguments about

Southern honor to argue the state should keep its promises by paying debts in full. The party’s

leaders during the contested elections of the 1870s and early 1880s had come into politics during

the furor of secession and were active in Confederate politics. The Funders drew support from

the landed and skilled white populations mainly in the central, more economically developed

parts of the state.50

The Readjusters, by contrast, campaigned on reneging the state’s debt to expand public

services generally and public schools especially. Its coalition consisted of Black voters in the

49 In the years since re-entering the union, the Conservative party’s internecine politics took the place of party competition. Coalitions and factions within the party formed around the debt question and individual men switched sides with some frequency Tarter, A Saga of the New South: Race, Law, and Public Debt in Virginia, 43. 50 Tarter, 48; Dailey, Before Jim Crow the Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia, 33. 21

agrarian eastern counties of the state and the lowland cities on the coast alongside white voters in

the mountain west. As historians of the Readjusters have noted, the party’s supporters were

politically integrated but geographically separated. The important industrial cities, also the sites

of early interracial labor organizing, were the only Readjuster strongholds with significant

populations of both Black and white Virginians.51 Funding the schools linked these voters across

the state together, but it was unclear if this shared commitment could withstand the polarizing

power of racism.

The Virginia Republicans also fielded candidates in the Readjuster-Funder election of 1879, but the historic party of Lincoln no longer held the loyalty of Black voters. First, the highly disorganized party leadership in Virginia consisted of moderate whites primarily interested in benefitting from the patronage system. Secondly, the national party’s fundamental commitment to the sanctity of contract impeded its support for the debt repudiation necessary to fund the public schooling the Black Virginians wanted.52 Finally, both the national and Virginia

Republicans had largely abandoned support for Black voters by the end of the 1870s. Instead,

they focused on protecting and promoting Northern industry, nationally and globally.53

Understandably, Black politicians would be torn between a historic party loyalty and the

complex realities of political possibility. In the new politics of Funders and Readjusters, Black

politicians often continued to run as Republicans as a signal of their independence, even as they

remained aloof from that party’s leadership.

The Readjusters’ leader was William Mahone, a Confederate general turned railroad

magnate. Sensing the Conservative party’s weakness, Mahone began agitating to split the party

51 Rachleff, Black Labor in Richmond, 1865-1890, chap. 3; Dailey, Before Jim Crow the Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia, 33. 52 Rachleff, Black Labor in Richmond, 1865-1890, 45. 53 Foner, Reconstruction. 22

and install himself leader of the Readjuster faction. He first attempted to do so from within,

running for Governor in the Conservative party’s 1877 primary. He hoped to attract the votes of poorer, moderate white voters who cared little for the state’s debt machinations but wished for lower taxes and more schools. After failing miserably in that race, Mahone decided to switch strategies and form his own party, the Readjusters. This would allow him to gain power by combining his small base of dejected white Conservatives with enough Black voters to win seats in the legislature.54

At the founding convention of the Readjusters in February 1879, approximately 175

delegates gathered, galvanized in opposition to the debt and angered by school closings, to seek a

new politics. Republicans and Democrats, Blacks and whites, and independent movements of all

stripes came together. By the end of the convention, the Readjusters had a single conviction:

fund the public schools by any means. To this end, the party’s initial platform had eight points

concerning debt and schooling and zero on other topics. This failed to appeal to the Black delegates. In the 1879 elections Black assemblymen such as Shed Dungee, Ross Hamilton, and

William D. Evans remained in the Republican party and espoused its anti-repudiation platform.55

Some, like State Senator Daniel Norton who began his lengthy political career as delegate to the

constitutional convention, ran on the Readjuster ticket.56 Most however ran as Republicans, and

were elected in three-way races, with a Funder and Readjuster candidate splitting the white vote.

54 Dailey, Before Jim Crow the Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia, 37. 55 Julienne and Dictionary of Virginia Biography, “Shed Dungee (1831-1900)”; Jennifer R. Loux and Dictionary of Virginia Biography, “William D. Evans (ca. 1831–1900),” in Encyclopedia Virginia (Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, April 20, 2018), https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Paige_R_G_L_1846-1904; Forsythe, “‘But My Friends Are Poor’: Ross Hamilton and Freedpeople’s Politics in Mecklenburg County, Virginia, 1869-1901”; Williams, A Sketch of the Life and Times of Capt.R. A. Paul., 15. 56 Matthew S. Gottlieb and Dictionary of Virginia Biography, “Daniel M. Norton, Later Daniel McNorton (d. 1918),” in Encyclopedia Virginia (Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, April 19, 2018), https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Paige_R_G_L_1846-1904. 23

Mahone was a strange candidate to head a party based in Black electoral strength. He was an

early supporter of secession and served in the Civil War as a general and personal advisor to

Robert E. Lee. His wartime fame stemmed from leading a counterattack during the 1864 Battle

of The Crater that resulted in severe Union casualties. Contemporary Black sources, including

Readjuster R.A. Paul, relate it as a massacre where Mahone “hurled hundreds of colored soldiers

into the death-fraught crater,” referencing a division of Black troops decimated in the battle.57

Many have searched for the impetus for Mahone’s evolution, often casting it, as Jane Dailey

does in the most recent scholarly history, as a mix of political opportunism befit for a power-

seeking general and a certain amount of class treason by the new-money, entrepreneurial railroad king against Virginia’s old moneyed aristocrats. Certainly, his railroad business would benefit from renewed public investment in infrastructure.58 Whatever his ideology, it was flexible

enough for Mahone to happily switch from working with white, moderate Conservative to just

two years later breaking the unspoken rule of Virginia politics by courting Black voters.

Mahone did not espouse a vision of radical racial equality, rather he supported civil rights

because it attracted the Black voters his coalition needed to win state power. The official

Readjuster party line was that civil and politics rights could be kept separate from integration,

social rights, and any enforcement of what would now be understood as civil rights in the

market. The Richmond Whig, the party’s official organ, wrote in 1883, “Our party… encourages

each race to develop its own sociology separately and apart from unlawful contamination with

each other, but under a government which recognizes and protects the civil rights of all.”59 White

Readjusters condoned Black participation in a fuzzily defined concept of public life – as state

57 Williams, A Sketch of the Life and Times of Capt.R. A. Paul., 16–17. 58 Dailey, Before Jim Crow the Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia, 39. 59 James Tice Moore, “Black Militancy in Readjuster Virginia, 1879-1883,” Journal of Southern History 41, no. 2 (May 1975): 180, http://www.jstor.org.revproxy.brown.edu/stable/2206012. 24

officials, post office deliverers, and county clerks – but rejected intermarriage, integrated

schools, and sharing the same spaces. Mahone and his Readjusters, as Dailey writes in her

history, were echoing a set of nineteenth century political beliefs in the easy separation between

social and political, between private and public, an argument their own rhetoric neatly undercut.

While this reads like run-of-the-mill segregation to the modern reader, it shared some broad,

if misleading, similarities with Black lawmakers’ and activists’ opinions. For example, in Black

Virginians’ negotiation for better schools they demanded Black teachers for Black students. It

served as a means for stable jobs, self-determination, and to avoid being placed under the power

of racist whites. The same goes for the campaign for Black colleges, hospitals, and asylums that

succeeded under Readjuster governance – Black institutions designed to protect and further the

interests of the race and avoid subjecting vulnerable Black populations to racist abuse. Black

writers at the time would never, for obvious reasons, employ language like “unlawful

contamination.” But they did understand the very real dangers posed when Black people lived, worked, and schooled in white-run institutions. 60 Black and white Readjusters never cohered

their differences on racial equality, but a strong commitment to repudiating the debt to pay for

public schools maintained the coalition in its years of strength.

The Readjusters should be placed among a spectrum of movements that responded to the

depressions and panics of the postwar era with calls for greater power for farmers and laborers

and expanding the money supply such as the Greenbacks, Populists, and Grangers. Mahone certainly did – looking for inspiration and guidance he scrapbooked hundreds of newspaper accounts regarding biracial and independent movements across the South.61 At the time, third

60 Green, “Walking Slowly but Surely.” 61 “The Liberal Movement 1882,” Box 215, William Mahone Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University 25

parties challenging the status quo of Democratic dominance and Republican fecklessness were

having varying levels of success in the South. Underneath a system characterized by bitter,

partisan stalemate lay large groups of disaffected voters, both Black and white, unrepresented by

the current party system and with interests that never reached the legislative agenda.62 It is in this

surprisingly fluid space that the Readjusters, and other third parties in South, formed coalitions

of seemingly strange bedfellows.

Despite the obvious and important questions of ideology and racial caste that shaped

Virginia’s politics, the issues of jobs, money, and public investment, in the most transactional

sense, propelled the decisions of individuals and coalitions. As in any marriage of convenience,

Mahone thought he could use Black voters, and Black voters thought they could use him. A

transactional approach provides the best lens with which to view the formation of the coalition

and the policies it pursued in office. Black lawmakers rightfully linked segregation, anti-

miscegenation laws, and other laws regulating “social” life as inhibiting full civic, political and economic participation. The barrier between public and private life, held dear by the Readjuster platform that “encouraged each race to develop its own sociology separately and apart from unlawful contamination with each other,” as always, remained untenable.63

Despite their disinterest in Black equality, Mahone and his Readjusters catapulted freedpeople to massive influence in the state. The Readjuster party needed near-unanimous support of Virginia’s Black electorate to win and made much of the Black polity’s political interests part of its platform.64 In breaking the compact against engaging Black voters, the

62 Luis-Alejandro Dinnella-Borrego, ed., “INTRODUCTION,” in The Risen Phoenix, Black Politics in the Post–Civil War South (University of Virginia Press, 2016), 1–14, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1c5ch79.4. 63 Moore, “Black Militancy in Readjuster Virginia, 1879-1883,” 180; Dailey, Before Jim Crow the Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia, chap. 5. 64 Dailey, Before Jim Crow the Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia, 54. 26

Readjusters, in a somewhat rough sense, realized democracy in Virginia. By engaging the entire

polity, rather than the roughly 60 percent of white voters, the party briefly gave life to the visons

of suffrage expounded at the 1865 convention: with their votes Black Virginians gained

increased protection from violence, some relief from economic precarity, and a begrudging

acceptance of their citizenship (by the mechanism of the state, if not in the sentiments of their

white compatriots). The history of the Readjusters demonstrates that any party reliant on Black

voters must be somewhat responsive to their wishes. In other words, as long as Black Virginians

had the vote it was a near certainty that an enterprising coalition would seek to recruit them and

represent their interests. The set of political institutions that enabled coalition held only briefly.

After accomplishing their main political goal – reneging on the state’s debt to pay for public

schools- the Readjusters began splintering like any other single-issue coalition. Seizing on a

narrow victory in the next elections, reactionary white forces worked to permanently disfranchise

Black voters. Black Virginians could win and progress under the rules of a fair democracy, but

their access to the vote was first tenuous and then nonexistent. Nevertheless, it was only after

Black voters proved they could affect political outcomes, even at the risk of political violence

and in the face of poll taxes, that reactionary forces in the enacted comprehensive

disfranchisement. As C. Vann Woodward has shown, white Southerners constructed the

collective restrictions of Jim Crow not from a master plan, but one-by-one in response to particular expressions of Black power.65

65 This is the central argument of C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, Commemorative ed (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 27

The Black Politicians of 1879

It is analytically useful, at times, to view the Black legislators of the era as a bloc and to

discern the nature of their politics in their similarities. Nearly all the Black legislators of that year

were born in Virginia, but, as was typical of the postwar Black leadership class, a number had escaped North before the war and returned with skills, knowledge, and an ardent interest to improve the lot of their people. The majority, however, were born into slavery and emancipated during the War. For example, Dungee’s election to the House of Delegates in November 1879 marked his return to the state capital; 32 years earlier, he had accompanied his then-owner to the

1847 legislative session.66 These emancipated legislators had acquired reading, writing and some

professional skills through a combination of informal, formal, and self-taught education.

After the war, their skills provided economic and political influence in their communities,

with many becoming landowners. Of paramount importance to their political careers were family

and extended kin networks. Writing about the period shortly after the war, historian Steven Hahn

argues that Black southerners built “political communities…from many of the basic materials of

everyday life: from the ties and obligations” of kinship, labor, traditions, and religion. This constituted a radical and political act which rejected the family-destruction of slavery, celebrated their new freedoms, and laid the groundwork for creating a rich civic and associational life integral to their political participation. All over the South, Black kin and extended networks formed myriad societies to collectively regulate and bargain for labor, provide aid and charity to the most vulnerable in their populations, and support political activity.67

66 Julienne and Dictionary of Virginia Biography, “Shed Dungee (1831-1900).” 67 Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet, 166. 28

For example, Robert and Daniel Norton, brothers, of Elizabeth City and York County

respectively, served in the House of Delegates and State Senate respectively for most of the

1870s. Born into slavery, they escaped North where Daniel trained to become a doctor.

Returning soon after the war Daniel was active in Freedmen’s Bureau politics and began

acquiring property with the dividends from his profession.68 However, the brothers soon became

frustrated by their local Freedmen’s Bureau officer, Union General Samuel Chapman Armstrong,

who worked against Black enfranchisement and advocated for educational, rather than political

activities. Particularly incensed after being rejected for a judgeship in the Freedman’s Court

despite the community’s support, Daniel Norton founded the “Lone Star Society,” a secret,

political organization based at the Shiloh Baptist Church in Yorktown; it excluded whites as well

as Black members of the Republican party affiliated Union League.69 He parlayed the support of

the Black community to overcome Armstrong’s opposition and represent York in the State

Constitutional Convention and then in the State Senate. The Nortons continued to expound their

own brand of politics, distinct from the white leadership of the Republican party. Robert was a

strong and early advocate of leaving that party to join the first, failed attempt by Mahone to

create a biracial governing coalition. While the strength of the Nortons’ political operations

allowed them to remain in office and influential throughout the 1870s, it was not until the surge

of Black officials in 1879, and their tentative coalition with the Readjuster movement, that they

were able to help accomplish a number of longstanding political goals of the Black community.

Edward D. Bland, a Delegate from Prince George County, used his position in the

legislature to shore up his political base. He formally incorporated the Sons of Temperance

68 Jackson, Negro Office-Holders in Virginia, 1865-1895, 30. 69 Robert Francis Engs, Freedom’s First Generation: Black Hampton, Virginia, 1861-1890 (Fordham Univ Press, 2004), 103. 29 society he belonged through legislation in 1880. Temperance societies were among the first wave of organizations set up by Black communities and churches across the south in the wake of

Emancipation, along with Republican, Union League, educational, and labor regulating associations.70 Members of these societies would learn formal political skills, news from close and afar by means of newspapers read aloud, and form solidarity groups for further action.

Keeping them secret, as most were, bestowed a number of advantages and was the only option in most of the South where white populations aimed to attack all Black organizing. In 1879, Bland and the Nortons felt secure enough in their power to decide that formal recognition and the ability to own state-recognized assets were worth more than that secrecy. Moreover, doing so made it easier to award and support their own political organizations and re-elections.

Black politicians largely rejected Mahone’s coalition overtures before and during the 1879 election. Residual connections to the Republican Party, Mahone’s failure to offer real redress for the Black community’s issues, and skittishness at entering into a political alliance with a

Confederate general led Black voters and leaders to remain independent. In an 1885 biography,

Richmond schoolteacher Daniel Barclay Williams recalls that the future influential Black

Readjuster R. A. Paul remained aloof from the 1879 campaign because “his cool, conservative, deliberate nature led him to carefully watch... [for] those who had been the bitterest and most dangerous foes to the Colored People were calling for their support…those who had fought on the field of blood and labored in the arena of politics to deprive the Colored man… now proclaimed that Colored men should enjoy the full rights and prerogatives of citizens… Paul was quietly waiting to ascertain whether any ‘good thing would come out of Nazareth.’” While the

Republican party was weak and Black politicians marginalized in state government, Black

70 Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet, 179. 30

Virginians were wary of a state government that had never responded to their needs and had,

since the War, been under the rule of a party so egregiously racist that the federal government

had removed it from power in 1867 before allowing it to return to governance in the 1870s.

Whether electoral politics could newly offer Black Virginians a path to justice, a task it had

summarily failed in the post-War decades, remained an open question.

Reticence about throwing their lot in with the Readjusters did not stop Black politicians from

running for office under the Republican name and a platform of readjusting the debt. This allowed them capture newly contestable seats opened up by the splitting of the white vote. In 3- way elections across the state Black politicians surged into office. Immediately, the Funders and

Readjusters began courting them to furnish a majority. Historians of the Readjusters have generally assumed Black Republicans would caucus with the Readjusters, the side more liberal on race and spending.71 However, letters between Mahone, Black lawmakers, and white

intermediaries reveal a protracted and contested negotiation. These letters senbt white Readjuster

negotiators to Mahone also indicate contempt for their Black colleagues: by assuming their

support and reacting angrily when it was refused, complaining about them usurping white

legislators, and using racist tropes. Most importantly, they consistently underestimated their

Black opponents – who played the Funders against the Readjusters to extract serious policy

concessions from Mahone.

Black voters and lawmakers closely guarded their independence despite Mahone’s many

overtures before the 1879 election. Mahone wanted something very specific that fall: a seat in the

71 Most every history of the Party concludes this. A Readjuster-Republican alliance does make sense, but it was a very contested process for the historical actors negotiating their alliance and Black Readjusters talked often with Funders Tarter, A Saga of the New South: Race, Law, and Public Debt in Virginia; Moore, “Black Militancy in Readjuster Virginia, 1879-1883”; James Tice Moore, Two Paths to the New South: The Virginia Debt Controversy, 1870-1883 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1974); Dailey, Before Jim Crow the Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia. 31

U.S. Senate, to be determined by the state legislature as was the practice before the Ratification

of the 17th Amendment in 1913. In exchange for the support of Black legislators, Mahone’s

Readjusters would fund Black schools, appoint Black people to spoils positions, allow them entrance into Readjuster clubs, hire them for paid positions in the party, repeal the poll tax, and generally support Black General Assembly members.72 The December 1879 House and Senate

Journals show near-simultaneous votes for Mahone’s ascent to the US Senate and legislative

maneuvers to end the poll-tax and jury discrimination.73

Leaving the Republican party behind still represented difficulties for many Black politicians

and activists. Despite the party’s failure to represent and fight for Black interests, the legacy of

Lincoln and Emancipation continued to resonate, all the more so when national and racial hero

Frederick Douglass directly addressed the movement and called for party unity. An 1879 pamphlet collected the views of important figures on the debt issue. On one half, two high- ranking Republican officials, President Hayes and Frederick Douglass, admonished Black

Virginians to pay for the debt. And on the other half, Virginia’s first and only school superintendent, the Conservative William Ruffner argued that repudiation might be the only way to continue expanding the schools.

The Republicans echoed the arguments of Funders in the 1879 election in linking personal morality and honor to the character of the state and arguing “capital and labor and good people” will not go to communities that repudiate their debt. The two statements demonstrate how strongly the national Republican party, of which Douglass now played an integral part, was committed industrial capitalism, its rules, and serving their constituents in New York. Hayes and

72 Discussion of the Mozart Hall Convention and founding of the Readjusters in Dailey, Before Jim Crow the Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia, 42–46. 73 Virginia., Journal of the Senate of Virginia., vol. 1879–1880, 1776, 32, 58, //catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/009787857. 32

Douglass effectively echoed and enhanced capital’s threat of flight. In contrast, it was the

Conservative, pro-Segregation, old-school Virginian W.H. Ruffner, near the end of a 12-year run as State Schools Superintendent, who advocated for schools and repudiation. It was a clear sign that the Republican party would not help Black Virginians get their schools and that new alliances might. It would take time for Black Virginians to come around to this argument.74

Some Black lawmakers, already sour on the party, ignored calls for loyalty from Republicans on high. Daniel Norton, a stalwart of the Black political community on the state’s Eastern Shore, continued his lengthy history of political independence in campaigning for and retaining his state

Senate seat as a Readjuster in 1879. His long-term project of building an independent political network eased the decision to ignore the Republicans. Others hewed closer to the national line.

Ross Hamilton, who served as Mecklenburg’s delegate nearly every term between Emancipation and the de facto end of Black electoralism in the 1890s, ran as a Republican and voted against the debt-Repudiation bill in the 1879 session. The vote was symbolic –– the bill would never pass the Conservative Governor’s veto –– but Hamilton notably broke rank from his fellow

Black legislators to do so. Hamilton saw the wisdom in continuing to hold his own against

Mahone. Toeing the Republican Party line had no inherent value, but nor did it have any real costs in 1870. The Republicans could not deliver tangible gains to its members, whereas the possibility of building an unlikely coalition with Mahone might lead to legislation improving the lives of Black citizens. Hamilton was waiting for the moment of maximum leverage to sign-on.

Letters from the Fall of 1879 reveal the negotiations between Black Readjusters and Mahone

as they jockeyed for the better position. For example, Dungee spoke to a “caucus” of Black

74 “Prest. Hayes Speaks on the Debt Question. Fred. Douglass Letter on the McCulloch Bill, Dr Ruffner’s Earnest Support of the Measure,” Box 17, Correspondence Nov 20 – Dec 31, 1879, William Mahone Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University 33

Portsmouth and Norfolk residents and encouraged them support to the Funders who had promised to send a Republican to the Senate. This presented a problem for the Readjusters. Their local representative, A.H. Lindsay, a white timber merchant, wrote an alarmed letter to Mahone, asking “What had we better do to counteract?”75 Mahone’s response is lost, but he scrawled a

telling note on the back of Lindsay’s letter: “in reference to Dungee… take all necessary steps to

counteract efforts.”

The future of Black politics, and the Republican Party in the state, was not decided solely by

a meeting of political elites but occurred through organizing. Both the caucus referenced here

and the call for meeting pay heed to the tradition of Black state conventions and rallies that

would play a key role in the Coalition and allowed large numbers of freedpeople to participate in

politics. Moreover, Dungee, Mahone, and Lindsay all recognized that the power of Republican

lawmakers, especially at this critical juncture, rested upon the power to deliver votes next year

and elect a Governor favorable to their causes.

Despite the likelihood of a Republican-Readjuster coalition, there was room enough for

Black lawmakers, like Shed Dungee, to exploit the uncertainty towards their advantage. Rumors

abounded that the Funders and Republicans were coalescing around their own candidate for

Senator. Reports from the field of the Republicans’ staunch independence from Mahone filtered

back that December. A white Richmonder wrote in December that Republicans were not united

around sending a Readjuster to the Senate, a possibility that must not be allowed “by any

means,” and were amassing as much political power as possible in order to “carry everything

next fall.”76 Mahone could not go to the US Senate without ceding to Black lawmaker’s

75A.H. Lindsay to William Mahone, Dec 1st, 1879, Box 17, William Mahone Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University 76 Edward Daniels to William Mahone, Dec 3rd, 1879, Box 17, William Mahone Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University 34

demands. The rumored plan, attested to in contemporary newspapers alongside these letters,

seems unlikely as it revolved around Black Republicans sending a different Confederate General

with a poor record on Black rights to the Senate. Nevertheless, the possibility served to panic the

Readjusters and Mahone into negotiating favorably.77

Dungee and his fellow lawmakers proved shrewd negotiators and a thorn in the side of both

local officials and Readjusters hoping for an easy resolution to the coalition question. Black

lawmakers repeatedly expressed their power in influencing the appointment of County Judges –

key officials in day to day life in Black communities. Mahone’s plenipotentiaries repeatedly

underestimated the Republicans they dealt with. John R. Hathaway, for example, predicted that

Norfolk lawmaker R.G.L. Paige could “easily be moved” to drop his advocacy for a Republican

candidate for a county judgeship. Hathaway deemed Paige’s preferred candidate to be a

“carpetbagger,” and suggested that the Black legislator “can be made right on the subject if the

proper influence is brought to bear on him.”78 Whatever pressure Mahone and his allies brought

to bear on Paige was of no avail. Six weeks later, Paige’s judge easily sailed to approval in both

houses of the Legislature.79

Paige, who served four terms representing Norfolk County, had escaped slavery to

Philadelphia in 1857. Upon his return to Virginia, he began acquiring land, notably Norfolk’s

Black cemetery, and eventually “ranked among the most prosperous Negroes in the state of

Virginia” due to his landholdings and a successful law practice which reputedly attracted clients

77 See Box 213, William Mahone Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University 78 Jno. R. Hathaway to William Mahone, Dec 5, 1879, Box 17, William Mahone Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University 79 Virginia., Journal of the Senate of Virginia., 1879–1880:120. 35

of both races.80 In 1880, Paige pushed against the segregation of public spaces, in a coordinated

campaign with Black activists in Richmond, by insisting he had the right to sit in the orchestra

section when the Black section was closed.81 As one of the vice presidents of the March 1881

convention which formalized the Republican-Readjuster alliance, Paige insisted that Black

people could and should make independent decisions about allying with white men, contrary to

the Republican party message.82 He proved his dedication to the statement during negotiations

with Mahone.

Readjuster negotiations with Shed Dungee reveal the inherent instability of the coalition and

the concessions Black lawmakers sought in return for their loyalty. A series of four letters from

William A. Perkins in November 1879 reveal Dungee as perhaps the shrewdest and most careful

negotiator in his cohort. Perkins, a loyal Readjuster and soon-to-be County Judge (partially by

Dungee’s vote), writes mainly of two defeated white candidates in his first missive. He bitterly

complains of their loss and asks that Mahone provided a patronage sinecure to support the losing

white candidates and shore up loyal county officials. Perkins writes of “being more mortified and

distressed at” the election of Black Delegate Archer Scott in nearby Amelia County “than at that of any man in state” despite his understanding that is Scott is “an ultra Re-Adjuster.”83

For elite whites, at least, platform continuity could only bring the coalition so far. Perkins,

like the other white officials who wrote to Mahone, was angered and embarrassed by having to

negotiate with self-possessed and powerful Black politicians. Perkins, for example, called

80 Jackson, Negro Office-Holders in Virginia, 1865-1895, 32–33; Diane Kiesel and Dictionary of Virginia Biography, “Paige, R. G. L. (1846–1904),” in Encyclopedia Virginia (Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, April 20, 2018), https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Paige_R_G_L_1846-1904. 81 Dailey, Before Jim Crow the Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia, 86; Kiesel and Dictionary of Virginia Biography, “Paige, R. G. L. (1846–1904)”; Rachleff, Black Labor in Richmond, 1865-1890, 93. 82 Kiesel and Dictionary of Virginia Biography, “Paige, R. G. L. (1846–1904).” 83 William Perkins to William Mahone, November 17, 1879, Box 17, William Mahone Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University 36

Dungee “very ignorant” and says that while his loyalty was unclear, it “will bear nursing.”84

White coalition members remained uninterested in negotiating with their Black partners as

equals, or, given the importance of Black voters to their legislative success, allowing them to

lead the way. The forces of white supremacy and Mahone’s dominance of funding kept Black

Readjusters out of the leadership roles fitting to their service.

This contempt and continual underestimation of Black Readjusters is the through-line of these negotiations. Perkins later clarifies what he means by Dungee’s “ignorance.” It is not stupidity, but the temerity to challenge the status quo. When Dungee agreed to caucus with the

Readjusters, Perkins cautioned the lawmaker was “weak… [and] might be led by wild influences.” The wild influences were detailed by Dungee’s past behavior and his current demands. The prior spring, Dungee delivered a petition to the county judge demanding he allow

Black jurors to serve. He was met with “contempt.” As for his loyalty to the coalition, which worried Perkins, Dungee remained elusive and wanted promises to end to the poll tax and whipping post and an agreement to leave his seat unchallenged by Mahone’s forces in 1883.85

Perkins dismissed the audacity of Dungee’s wishes. A few days later, and just before Dungee

headed to Richmond to take his seat, Perkins wrote that he thought Dungee was now a

Readjuster. Dungee’s demands, previously laughed off, were agreed to. Perkins promised not to

run an opponent if Dungee remained with the caucus.86 And in the legislature’s first month -

84 William Perkins to William Mahone, November 17, 1879, Box 17, William Mahone Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University 85 William Perkins to William Mahone, Nov 27, 1879, Box 17, William Mahone Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University 86 William Perkins To William Mahone, Nov 27, 1879, Box 17, William Mahone Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University 37

immediately after Mahone was finally elected to the Senate - the poll tax and whipping post were

set on the path to elimination and Black jurors were placed on the agenda.87

Mahone’s position on the strength of his negotiating partners is harder to unearth. Even if he

did not share the habitual dismissal common to white negotiators, he appears to have

underestimated, once again, the need to offer real concessions. On the back of a letter concerning

Paige and his preferred Judge, Mahone speculated about his preferred candidates. Beyond their

claims of easily gaining “influence” on Black Delegates, an assertion which conjures up a

Svengali-like terror, letter-writers used words like “bound” to refer to promises – an uneasy

association given the recent end of chattel slavery. One enterprising white Readjuster

recommended Mahone a scheme wherein a Republican friend of his, a doctor, would hide in the

hotel where Black lawmakers stayed in Richmond to spy. This doctor, being a civilized fellow,

would require only “some little clerkship” in return for his services.88

In general references to Black elected officials were couched in the language of watching and

managing, occasionally veering into panic when it appeared that Republicans would subvert the

negotiators’ will.89 Some lawmakers newer to the role, such as Johnson Collins, a first-time delegate from Brunswick County, were dismissed completely. One dispatch from the field, by an

F.E. Burford, rendered him a “good and reliable negro.” Burford seemed to have a better grasp than some of his fellow travelers on the powers within the Republican coalition, writing that particular attention should be paid to Ross Hamilton of Mecklenburg County, the longest serving

Black delegate. Hamilton, he wrote, was a “very shrewd fellow” and a “leading spirit,” and the

87 Virginia., Journal of the Senate of Virginia., 1879–1880:54. 88 D.B. Dauber to William Mahone, Nov 28, 1879, William Mahone Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University 89 See many letters to William Mahone in Box 17, William Mahone Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University 38

Readjusters would do well “to keep a close watch on him” while attempting to persuade him by

means other than flattery (to which Buford claimed he was immune).90

Ross Hamilton, as Mahone’s hand learned, was deeply connected to Black political networks

and a master of negotiating these types of power dynamics. He served seven terms between 1869

and 1891 and remained an influential member of the Black community in Mecklenburg even

when out office.91 A tight alliance with local landowner and entrepreneur Watkins L. Love and

the Republican commissioner of revenue Leander Reed allowed Hamilton to reign as the chief of

county politics. In bars owned by Love, Hamilton spoke to voters regularly. He influenced the

county’s large Baptist population during an annual convention of ministers held at the Boydton

Academic and Bible Institute with which he was closely aligned. Additionally, Hamilton

maneuvered a complex alliance with former Confederate officer Thomas Francis Goode through

which he funded campaigns independently of Mahone. When Mahone attempted to remove him

from the legislature in 1883, Hamilton initially resisted but eventually acquiesced to ensure a

Republican would remain in his seat. Despite his ouster, Hamilton’s political influence ensured

control over the nomination process and an eventual return to the legislature in 1889.92

Hamilton’s close relationship with the collective networks of Mecklenburg, as evidenced by his

ability to continue wielding power even after Mahone blackballed him in the mid-1880s, reminded him constantly of his responsibilities to Black Virginians and Mecklenburgians especially.

90 F.E. Burford to William Mahone, Nov 25th, 1879, Box 17 William Mahone Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University 91 Jackson, Negro Office-Holders in Virginia, 1865-1895, 19. 92 Forsythe, “‘But My Friends Are Poor’: Ross Hamilton and Freedpeople’s Politics in Mecklenburg County, Virginia, 1869-1901,” 418, 422–23, 426, 433; Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet, 369. 39

Mahone already knew where power lay. Hamilton played a central role in nearly every

important election in the period.93 Mahone sent a “welcome letter,” as Hamilton called it, to the lawmaker immediately upon his re-election. In response, Hamilton stated the key background assumption of the negotiation, inaction “would consolidate the conservatives again. Which would be very foolish on our part.” For this reason, he supported Mahone for Senator and pledged to rally his fellow lawmakers in the house.94 Hamilton’s tone appeared convivial, as he

wrote about always being glad to receive Mahone’s advice, but their relationship was quite

complex. Harold S. Forsythe, the author of the most detailed history of Hamilton, argues the

lawmaker managed a complex relationship with wealthy white benefactors, Mecklenburg’s key

Black figures, the church, and benevolent societies – “the deep structure of African-American

Politics,” – to maintain a remarkably independent and resilient political base.95 Hamilton’s

response to Mahone came in the context of the 1879 campaign he easily won against a sole

Democratic opponent in the same district where the Black state senator, and local political rival,

Cephas L. Davis narrowly prevailed in a three-way race. Mahone, it seems, knew better than to

challenge Hamilton at this stage and did not push a Readjuster candidate into the race.96 When the Readjusters introduced a bill to Readjust the debt, their platform in its essence, Hamilton cast the sole Republican vote against it. He voted for Mahone’s opponent in the Senate race, too.97

93 See Forsythe’s treatment of Hamilton Forsythe, “‘But My Friends Are Poor’: Ross Hamilton and Freedpeople’s Politics in Mecklenburg County, Virginia, 1869-1901.” 94 Hamilton To Mahone, Nov 16, 1879, Box 17, William Mahone Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University 95 Forsythe, “‘But My Friends Are Poor’: Ross Hamilton and Freedpeople’s Politics in Mecklenburg County, Virginia, 1869-1901,” 436. 96 Forsythe, 415–16. 97 Virginia., Journal of the House of Delegates of the Commonwealth of Virginia, 1829/30-1940: House Documents, n.d., 60, //catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008603397. 40

A detailed map of every Black lawmakers’ political base, as Harold Forsythe does in his

excellent history of Hamilton, is beyond the scope of this thesis. However, it still possible to glean from their negotiations and biographies a sense of how Black politicians channeled the

wills of the mass of freedpeople who supported and elected them into their politics. Hamilton’s

story, alongside those of Shed Dungee, R.G.L. Paige, Edward D. Bland and the Norton brothers,

shows the pattern of Black politics in the era: bounded in complex relationships between the

polity and the power-brokers, mediated by the important group structures of community life and

focused on rewarding and maintaining close attention to ones’ “friends” (to use a term invoked

by the Black politicians of the era). For the most, part Black lawmakers maintained a good deal of power by allying themselves with the local powerbrokers. Their “friends,” in turn, influenced the lawmakers. Personal history played a role, too. Robert Norton’s distasteful postwar experiences with the paternalistic freedmen’s Bureau and its monopolization of the school led him towards a long and dedicated career in politics against the Republican party. He was among the quickest to endorse the Readjuster project even before Mahone offered concessions to entice other Black Republicans into the coalition.98

It was perhaps during these negotiations with Black lawmakers that Mahone began to

understand the deep networks of Black Virginian life that could jump-start his political

organization. If Black Virginians pursued a full-throated alliance with Mahone, his railroad funds

could provide the missing capital to turn secret societies and mutual aid networks into a full-on

political canvassing machine.

98 “Norton, Robert (d. by October 17, 1898),” accessed April 6, 2019, https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Norton_Robert_d_by_October_17_1898. 41

Organized Politics through Black Networks and Railroad Money

Gilded-Age politics rested on political machines fueled by money and patronage. In the

North, where these politics originated, meticulous records allow for the recreation of the dense network of political life. In the Readjuster-era, Mahone imported aggressive Northern- tactics into a state previously unfamiliar with this emerging mode of mass politics. Virginia had political networks of course: the Black associations that crisscrossed the state. Mahone set out to create a political and organizational machine, relying heavily on these pre-existing Black leaders and associations. He used his railroad fortune to hire lecturers to travel across the state and explain the Readjusters’ positions on debt and schools. R. A. Paul was one of the only Black lecturers and his oratorical abilities received a favorable view in the official Readjuster paper, the

Richmond Whig, where Paul was deemed “exceedingly effective, especially with those of his own color.”99 The Whig recognized that Black voters were best reached by hiring influential members of their community which also induced loyalty in those hired. While these lectures were met with mixed reception and often boredom, they were emblematic of the way the

Readjusters used new and innovative techniques of mass politics.100

Before the 1881 election, Mahone wrote to Black Readjusters asking for the “most active and well-informed colored men in your county who would be suitable to organize clubs” and a “list of the colored churches in your country and the full name of all colored preachers and the Post office address of each” in order to compile “the men of influence with the colored people.”101 He found men like Minister R.G. Tate who could provide “200 votes” because “every Negro in the

99 Williams, A Sketch of the Life and Times of Capt.R. A. Paul., 23–24. 100 Dailey, Before Jim Crow the Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia, 46. 101 Letters to Mahone quoted in Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet, 379. 42

district is a church member.”102 Mahone’s files contain dozens of these requests with the requisite information printed on the back by the many hands of his correspondents.103 The preachers and other church-men identified never served in office, but they were the backbone of the Readjusters’ mobilization project. Hahn calls the organization of the Readjusters in this period a “quasi-military” operation in which Mahone designed a hierarchical organization with a

Black and white lieutenant, paid $10.00 each, for every precinct, a squad captain for every ten voters, and paid Black canvassers to convince voters to join the Readjusters.104 Some of the most

impressive organizing of the party was raising and distributing funds for the payment of back

poll taxes and the collection of receipts to prove eligibility.105 Participation in paid political

organizing, as with appointments to spoils positions, were important for Black Readjusters and

represented not craven opportunism, but that the Readjuster party was recognizing them as full

participants and treating them as it would any white member. Black Readjusters’ influence in the

political machine of their party reflected both their power and full participation.

102 Hahn, 379. 103 See Box 189, William Mahone Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University 104 Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet, 379–80; Dailey, Before Jim Crow the Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia, 62. 105 Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet, 379–80. 43

A list of "colored churches and preachers" in Cumberland County, VA. Mahone's Files contain dozens of these notes from all over the state. Box 189, William Mahone Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University

Compiling lists of preachers and churches proved particularly fruitful for organizing. The

document above is from Cumberland County (home of lawmaker Shed Dungee and an a largely

agrarian economy) and is representative of the extensive numbers of similar documents Mahone

compiled from helpful Readjusters across the state. Like most counties, Cumberland had more

churches than preachers. In this era, preachers often traveled between churches and communities

too poor to keep them on full-time. Congregants, too, traveled between churches and sites of

worshipwished to attend Church weekly. This formed a church network that “crossed district, county, and even states lines” and provided rural counties and politicians a connective framework akin to that of unions and other secular organizations in the cities. It was also independent of Republican party structures, allowing Black politicians to canvass and influence 44

beyond the watchful eyes of the party’s white leaders.106 In the Readjuster organizing machine,

preachers’ traveling ways and genuine influence with congregants made them invaluable

partners – and powerful negotiatiors. For example, the preacher “RT Coleman” listed in the

Cumberland document above, was Shed Dungee’s father-in-law and leader of the local political clan. He helped the lawmaker travel to Richmond unassisted, a task that often forced other Black lawmakers to borrow money from white Readjusters.107 Indeed, it led Mahone’s eyes in the field

to send a hastily-written note, mere hours after sending a lengthier one, that Dungee had left

Cumberland County without fully pledging his support.108 Mahone knew which Black leaders

and insitutions were key to organizing the state’s voters and they, in turn, extracted promises

from him equal to their import.

As demonstrated by Dungee’s reliance on his father-in-law for funds, success as a Black

politician required money. Ross Hamilton, a longtime Black coalition legislator who maintained

a complex and somewhat adversarial relationship with Mahone, wrote to the party leader stating

that it “is almost impossible for me to hold my men without money.”109 Just as Mahone needed

to court Black lawmakers by promising sufficient movement on issues of import to them, Black

lawmakers had to serve their voters’ material interests first and foremost. The character of

Gilded Age politics lacked any compunctions regarding paying supporters for their votes, either

106 Forsythe, “‘But My Friends Are Poor’: Ross Hamilton and Freedpeople’s Politics in Mecklenburg County, Virginia, 1869-1901,” 427. 107 Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet, 372.; William Perkins to William Mahone, Nov 27, 1879, Box 17, William Mahone Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University; See the letter from C.B. Langley to Mahone, Nov 2nd, 1879, Box 17, William Mahone Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University. Langley dismisses lawmaker Littleton Owens as “below average of colored office seekers” and notes he needed to borrow $5 to get to Richmond and asked for more money so he wouldn’t have to travel “without a thing.” 108 Perkins to Mahone, November 27, 1879, Box 17, William Mahone Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University 109 Quoted in Forsythe, “‘But My Friends Are Poor’: Ross Hamilton and Freedpeople’s Politics in Mecklenburg County, Virginia, 1869-1901,” 419. 45

by hiring them as canvassers or delivering them patronage jobs. Mahone’s files contain hundreds

of requests for government jobs, from Navy Yard officers to the astonishingly overstaffed Post

Office.110 In a world with a much smaller state apparatus for welfare, voters wanted a clear sign

that politicians supported their material wellbeing. Moreover, few Black Virginians were rich

enough to take off work to campaign. Despite this reality, white Readjusters often balked at

Mahone’s outlays and his decisions to award patronage to Black men over white ones. To these men, Mahone replied that “it is to be remembered… that the Readjuster party… is composed about 110,000 colored and about 65,000 white voters.”111

National politics helped Mahone deal with conflicts within the Readjuster coalition. After his

election in 1880, President Garfield ensured control of federal patronage jobs in Virginia

remained with the Republican party, despite Mahone’s independent seat in the Senate, giving

Black lawmakers more leverage to demand patronage from within the Readjuster party.

Garfield’s short-lived presidency ended in assassination and his successor, President Chester A.

Arthur, devolved all patronage powers to the Readjusters in 1881 under a strategy to use

independent movements to secure the Electoral College for Republicans in 1884.112 It was a

precipitous time, shortly afterward Black Republicans formally abandoned the Republicans and

the secure, well-paying federal jobs controlled by Mahone played a significant role. Working

with Black leaders, Mahone filled Construction Department and Navy Jobs with Black laborers;

110 Mahone received daily requests from Readjusters for post office jobs alongside asks to reroute the network through their towns (thus creating jobs by hiring clerks from in-town). See Box 71, William Mahone Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University 111 From the Richmond Weekly Whig, June 16, 1883 quoted in Moore, “Black Militancy in Readjuster Virginia, 1879- 1883.” 112 Dailey, Before Jim Crow the Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia, 66. 46

Black men would fill nearly 40% of Navy and Post Office jobs and most jobs in the Secretary’s

Office at the apex of Readjuster influence in the state.113

Within the Readjuster coalition, Black lawmakers used their leverage to help their local communities and their political bases (a distinction difficult to make). Racial and economic conditions were understood neither as neatly aligned or completely separate, a rhetoric sometimes advanced today, but as nestled in a complex, co-constitutive relationship. Arguments for policies which may read today as a matter of purely “racial” justice often rested on

“economic” foundations. As historian Jane Dailey has shown, advocates for repealing miscegenation laws presented the status quo as an unfair restriction on a men’s right to free contract and as unduly restricting Black men from acquiring wealth. Many of the first organized

groups of freedpeople after the War were wage-setting groups, proto-unions bound together in

hopes of assuring greater recompense for labor through collective action. They located justice in

owning the value of their labor.114 The white planter class violently attacked these groups and

invented new legal fictions, including the convict lease labor system, to ensure Black people

remained a source of low-cost labor. The question of whether the violence against freedpeople was racially or economically motivated is moot, for neither party understood a contradiction in those impulses. Not everything reduced to economics— the successful movement to end use of the whipping post for petty crimes, for example, often focused on its humiliating aspects— but

the lines between civil, political, and social worlds could never be neat. And even the whipping

post, a symptom of the postwar assertion of white supremacy through constant punishment for

petty crimes, served to discriminate, criminalize, and disfranchise unemployed freedpeople

looking for work.

113 Dailey, 67. 114 Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet, 176. 47

In Power

By March of 1881, Black lawmakers and activists across the state readied themselves to

combine their fate with Mahone and his Readjusters. Over the past 5 years, Mahone and his

movement had moved from ignoring Black voters to making them, and their push for civil rights,

central parts of the Readjuster platform. With all eyes on the upcoming November elections,

Black politicians had a chance to cash-in on Mahone’s promises – and they were ready. Still, the

question of extending the tentative coalition remained open in the early months of 1881. It would

be resolved, as so many questions in the era were, with a state-wide convention to be held in

Petersburg, Va. Their debate called for unity, but also identified the fault lines that would tear the coalition apart just two years later. Whereas many white Readjusters understood the coalition’s purpose as school funding, Black Readjusters sensed a greater possibility. Once in power they

wished to upend the state’s entire political economy and create a government of and for the poor

and downtrodden – replacing the “color-line” with a class politics to benefit the many over the

few and establish strong institutions to help freedpeople.

Two years previously, Black lawmakers had brokered a deal to send Mahone to the Senate.

Their agreement included funding for Black schools, Black patronage positions, Black inclusion

in Readjuster clubs, paid positions in the party, repealing the poll tax, and general support for

Black General Assembly members.115 For some, Mahone had already proved his merits. State

Senator Daniel Norton, who had joined the Readjusters in 1879, and his brother assemblymen

Robert Norton, forcefully argued for joining the Readjusters during the proceedings in March of

1881. After he was barred from speaking during the convention, Daniel Norton threatened to

115 Discussion of the Mozart Hall Convention and founding of the Readjusters in Dailey, Before Jim Crow the Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia, 42–46. 48

lead a walkout of Republican Readjusters, and participated heavily in the debate. During the

period of intra-Republican negotiations, R.A. Paul wrote to the Virginia Star arguing that “there

is no difference between the Readjusters and Republicans as far as equal rights are concerned”

and claiming that if President Garfield, who had disbursed the Republican patronage to Mahone,

could join with the party then “we little fellows down here who are suffering” should do the

same.116

Paul’s claims were buttressed by the evolution of the Readjuster platform, which by then

included many civil rights planks, including money for schools, “recogniz[ing] our obligations to

support” Black asylums, and institutions for the “deaf, dumb, and blind.” These met

longstanding demands to replace the inhumane policy of jailing mentally-ill Black people and

raised the possibility of Black-run facilities. The platform guaranteed a free ballot, a repeal of the

poll tax (in the name of the 14th Amendment), and repudiation of the debt. Additionally, Mahone

officially joined the Republicans, granting them control of the US Senate and eliminating Black

opposition to supporting a politician who might caucus with the Democrats. With these concessions in hand, Black Virginians gathered in Petersburg and resolved to form a tight coalition in time for the Readjusters’ grand campaign in the 1881 election.117

The Readjuster platform also included many planks pertinent to the poor laborers and

farmers comprising the mass of the state. It was both a “populist and statist” plan that included

“corporate taxation, federal aid to mining and manufacturing, free vaccinations during

epidemics, [and] a food distribution program in case of crop failures.” Many of these more

116 Williams, A Sketch of the Life and Times of Capt.R. A. Paul., 19. 117 Moore, “Black Militancy in Readjuster Virginia, 1879-1883,” 176–77. 49

ambitious initiatives never passed, but the Readjusters made real strides towards helping working

people. 118

Still, it is possible to understand why Black Readjusters, at this moment, saw the platform as

evidence the Readjusters were “the party of progress; the party which neither in law nor practice

makes any distinction in civil rights or political privileges on account of race, color, or previous

or present condition.” Electioneering rhetoric is by nature overheated and should be taken with

many grains of salt, yet Black politicians were not without reason for optimism: conditions in the state had steadily improved. It was for this reason they decided that the Republican party, despite

its great friendship to Black Americans, had to be cast aside temporarily for an election focused

on “principles and not names.”119

The joint Readjuster-Republican campaign proved a stunning success in 1881. When the

next legislative session began, a Readjuster sat in the governor’s chair, party members were

majorities in both houses of the state legislature, and they accounted for six of ten Congressmen

and both US Senators120 While direct action, in the form of strikes, protests, and sit-in like

tactics, won victories for Black Virginians both before and after the Readjuster rule, the members

of the 1881 convention had correctly sensed the new possibilities of electoral politics.121 The

convention’s final hope that “that their interests will be better secured by aiding the [Readjuster

118 Dailey, Before Jim Crow the Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia, 82. 119 "Address to Colored Virginians! The Eloquent Appeal of the Petersburg State Convention for Harmony Between White and Colored Ctizens and for Earnest Co-operation In Behalf of Common rights and Common Interests," Box 213, c. 1, William Mahone Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University 120 Dailey, Before Jim Crow the Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia, 1. 121 Rachleff’s work on labor and Green’s work on schooling demonstrate the Black Virginians fought for rights with and without a significant political presence, but the Readjuster period, and the political power it brought, allowed for significant, if fleeting success, on these issues Rachleff, Black Labor in Richmond, 1865-1890; Green, “Walking Slowly but Surely.” 50

party] in its efforts to achieve and permanently settle the antagonism of races,” still had to be tested.122

Within months of taking power, the new Republican-Readjuster government fulfilled its central promise by repudiating a third of the debt and reducing interest rates on the rest. A

February 14, 1882 bill halved the state’s yearly budget and apportioned to debt to less than 25 percent annually. The new legislature also moved quickly to ease taxes on farmers while ensuring railroads paid their fair share by assigning tax collectors to asses their value instead of allowing them to self-report.123 The party took a generally pro-worker stance in increasing

corporate taxes, chartering new unions and passing laws to help contractors and construction

workers secure their wages.124 They also implemented the demands of Black Readjusters by repealing the poll tax, abolishing the whipping post and funding schools and public services.125

Black men were allowed to serve on juries and the party redistributed the spoils Mahone had

wrought for the Readjusters from his US Senate position to include more Black recipients

thereby encouraging their loyalty.

With the Readjusters in power, Black and white Virginians alike accomplished their

longstanding goal of expanding the state’s public schools to more pupils. The number of Black

schools increased from 675 to 1,715, and enrollment rose from 35,678 to 90,948. Overall, the

number of schools doubled from 2,500 to 5,000 and enrollees more than doubled from 108,000

to 220,000.126 Black instructors increased by approximately three-fold to 1,300.127 Additionally,

122 Williams, A Sketch of the Life and Times of Capt.R. A. Paul., 19. 123 Tarter, A Saga of the New South: Race, Law, and Public Debt in Virginia, 71–72. 124 Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet, 382. 125 The early period of Readjuster rule is covered in Hahn, 382; Moore, “Black Militancy in Readjuster Virginia, 1879-1883,” 178–80. 126 Tarter, A Saga of the New South: Race, Law, and Public Debt in Virginia, 75. 127 Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet, 381–83; Moore, “Black Militancy in Readjuster Virginia, 1879-1883,” 179. 51

Black and white teacher salaries were equal due to a law authored by Ross Hamilton. Black

schoolteachers and principals were integral to Black articulations of citizenship in this era. The

author of November 1882 Virginia Star editorial entitled “An Appeal to the White People of The

South,” writes that “No candid white person in the South will deny that the colored people have been denied their civil and political rights. For, are they not as a class excluded from our juries, from holding office, aye, from teaching their own children in the capacity of public free schoolteachers.”128 And Black Richmonders cheered when at long last two of their own, R. A.

Paul and Richard Forrester, were appointed to the school board in 1883.129 Paul ensured that

three Black men, Albert V. Norell, James H. Hayes, and James Hugo Johnston (who later served

as the new Black university’s president) became principals. The interest in Black schoolteachers

was both practical – white schoolteachers insulted and put little effort into teaching their Black

pupils and, most egregiously, they often doled out corporal punishment – and idealistic: it was

the realization of Black Virginians controlling their public life and the collective responsibility of

educating the next generation.130

While Black Readjusters did not run the party or hold the most influential positions, it is

clear that they held influence, that the party was responsive to their needs, and most importantly,

that their voters would be well rewarded for their support. This support would not only come

through legislation, perhaps years away, but money and jobs immediately. Machine- style politics had much to offer a poor population coming out of years of economic crisis. They had entered eyes-wide open into this coalition which fundamentally believed in a hierarchy and separation of the races because it offered far more than any other political configuration.

128 Quoted in Green, “Walking Slowly but Surely,” 166. 129 Green, 158. 130 Dailey, Before Jim Crow the Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia, chap. 3. 52

Despite their acceptance of the limits of coalition, Black Readjusters championed a number

of far more progressive bills which were stymied in the legislature. Shed Dungee pushed for a

repeal of anti-miscegenation laws arguing they were unconstitutional, but his bill was soundly

defeated.131 Richard G. L. Paige’s anti-lynching legislation was relegated to committee where it died.132 However, A.W. Harris was able to broker a deal which gave $100,000 to establish a new

college for Black Virginians in Petersburg, the Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute, and

guaranteed a $20,000 annuity.133 William N. Stevens, succeeded in passing a bill establishing an

asylum run by Black people for their own mentally-ill.134 Some legislators used the statehouse to

cement their control of political machines and patronage. For example, the Norton brothers

passed a law allowing them and a few of their friends to operate a ferry in their country.135 Black

politicians were able to accomplish much during the Readjusters rule, but many of their truly

radical efforts were denied.

While the debt question was live, and in the legislative session after it was fully put to

rest, Black Republicans leveraged their votes to push their fellow legislators towards full

citizenship for Virginia’s Black population. Soon, however, the limits of cooperation were found

and reached. While white Readjusters were more racially progressive than their Conservative-

Funder Democrats, if merely by their presence in a coalition with Black lawmakers and voters,

they were not interested in a radical platform of racial equality. The Readjuster platform was, in

a simplified, but not fully inaccurate sense, a plan to realize a separate, but equal society. This

only heightened the coalition’s contradictions as the divide between the integration of public life

131 Julienne and Dictionary of Virginia Biography, “Shed Dungee (1831-1900).” 132 Kiesel and Dictionary of Virginia Biography, “Paige, R. G. L. (1846–1904).” 133 Williams, A Sketch of the Life and Times of Capt.R. A. Paul., 21. 134 Dailey, Before Jim Crow the Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia, 61. 135 Gottlieb and Dictionary of Virginia Biography, “Daniel M. Norton, Later Daniel McNorton (d. 1918).” 53 and the segregation of private life was extraordinarily blurry. Richard G.L. Paige, an effective

Black lawmaker from Norfolk, challenged this contradiction when he attempted to sit in the white section of the Richmond theater when the Black section was closed. His fellow white lawmakers did not rally to his support. Later, they voted down his resolution to capture and punish the perpetrators of a recent lynching after he delivered an impassioned speech on the house floor.136 Electoral politics was a limited end for Black Virginians. Black lawmakers pushed for real gains, but the political structures remained unconducive to making an equal society.

The End of Coalition Rule

In his 1928 essay “The Superior Race,” W.E.B. Du Bois wrote “the Black man is a person who must ride ‘Jim Crow’ in Georgia.”137 Du Bois argues that racism creates race, uses race to accomplish its aims. The unreal category of race would not exist but for racism. This is, of course, not an argument that racism does not affect lives. It is a recognition that race is socially constructed and socially meaningful. In Readjuster-era Virginia there was not yet Jim Crow to police the bounds of Blackness and public behavior. Freedpeople enjoyed rights and privileges that were alien to the lives of their descendants just one generation later. There were of course strong social norms of separation and deeply held anti-Black sentiments – but there were not the laws, institutions, and practices that would soon enforce and reinforce white supremacy. In the

1880s, the boundaries of Black-white relations lay in the social spaces – the segregated symphony halls and streetcars where Black activists challenged social inequality. Black

136 Kiesel and Dictionary of Virginia Biography, “Paige, R. G. L. (1846–1904).” 137 W. E. B. Du Bois, “Superior Race (1923),” 1923, http://www.webdubois.org/dbSuperiorRace.html. 54

Readjusters fought to build a new order where Blackness did not mean inequality. Unfortunately,

they did not succeed.

In failing to articulate a vision of racial equality and convince voters of it, the Readjusters left

space for white Democrats to imagine new forms of racial hierarchy and the party fell apart soon

after accomplishing their main goals of solving the debt crisis and expanding the schools. Black

voters dissatisfied at their treatment within the party and their white allies’ lack of support for

legislation to create a truly equal society began running “straightout” Republican campaigns to

re-assert their independence. And white voters no longer needed the coalition to accomplish their

goals – the Readjusters had eliminated the reason for their own existence. White elites seized on

this opportunity to return to power. As had happened just after the war in the initial fight to

create schools, white members of the newly re-formed Democratic party stoked the racial fears

of white voters to counter a politics of multiracial class solidarity. In relying on the mirage of

public integration and private segregation, the Readjusters’ leaders never made a positive case to

white voters that their fates were aligned with Black ones. Coalition politics gave way to a new

white majority formed around accepting the previously radical aims of universal public schools

combined with reinforcement of the color-line. It proved a powerful formula for orienting the

state’s politics around race and its victory led to the disfranchisement of Black Virginians.138

To the benefit of the white elites, the mass of the Readjusters voter remained racist. For two elections, the Readjusters had successfully pushed voters to consider public schools and pro- labor regulation as the issues voters should decide upon. However, the party’s reliance on Black voters and its continued evolution towards equality left it vulnerable to the race-baiting rhetoric of opponents. The Funders sought to make a vote for the Readjusters synonymous with a vote for

138 Dailey, Before Jim Crow the Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia, chap. 5; Rachleff, Black Labor in Richmond, 1865-1890. 55

Black equality. Had the Readjusters misread the political climate in Virginia? To be sure, the

Readjusters’ notion of a racial coalition had been predicated on a false distinction between

private and public life – a belief that Black Virginians could serve as post-office workers and

lawmakers but not as neighbors, classmates, spouses, or fellow audience members at the

symphony.139

This was an untenable separation: Black Readjusters pushed at this pressure point constantly

while they had power, while white Virginians became ever more upset that granting Blacks

political and civil rights would involve their full entrance into social and economic life. In the years of Readjuster rule, white voters began to see the effects of Readjuster policy and that the

promise of private separation was impossible. Granting Blacks political and civil rights had to

involve their full entrance into social and economic life. Seething at this, some white Virginians

began appealing to public power to resolve their private disputes, and most intensely their

feelings of humiliation and dishonor, by denying freedpeople their rights.

As Jane Dailey writes, schools became a flashpoint when they activated white anxieties about

race and gender. The renewal of white dominance was partially accomplished through the

enforcement of gender hierarchy, with white women and their perceived vulnerability used as a

bulwark against the expansion of rights to Black men.140 Indeed, this set a trap for the Black

politicians, whose claim to the same patriarchal prerogatives that white men possessed was used

to fracture the Readjuster coalition once the debt issue had been settled. For example, the

prospect of white female schoolteachers working under the auspices of Black schoolboard

members or principals sparked outrage. White Virginians considered this a moral outrage and a

violation of the proper order of things: Black leadership in schools, they said, took on a deviant

139 Dailey, Before Jim Crow the Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia, chap. 3. 140 Dailey, chap. 5. 56

sexual aspect and threatened to corrupt white women and children alike. Black principals

violated the confusing notion that some public spaces—streetcars and schoolhouses—were

actually private spaces where the races should not co-mingle. White Virginians were particularly invested in secluding white women and children in a “private” realm where segregation and protection reigned. For Black Virginians, the line between public and private was nonsensical.

Per Dailey, a “Black teacher…lives among their pupils, frequently boarding with a family and worshipping with a local Black congregation. As moral and civic exemplars African American teachers were on duty twenty four hours a day and were expected to correct their students in and out of the classroom” and they visited the homes of their students to encourage their parents to find the a way to cope with the loss of their children’s labor so they could attend school.141

Democratic papers immediately called for the removal of the two, recently-appointed Black

members of the school board and echoing the language of generations of segregationists, argued

Black schoolteachers and principals were taking white jobs.142

During the 1883 election, when the Readjusters lost power, the Tazewell Democrat published testimony regarding a Democratic assemblyman’s campaign position: “Capt. Fudge… is now and always has been a friend of the Public School System… he is in favor of a universal education… he will do all he can to perfect our Public school system… and keep it free from all disturbing influences… he in favor of white schools for white people, and colored schools for colored people.”143 The rest of the page contains invocations against “radicalism,” the preferred word for fear-mongering about Black dominance. Fudge’s position is not so irregular except in the context of the absolute refusal of the Democrat candidate for Governor, and the party as a

141 Dailey, 71. 142 Green, “Walking Slowly but Surely,” 160. 143 The Tazewell Democrat, Nov 2nd, 1883, Box 213, William Mahone Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University 57

whole, to even consider public schools as recently as 1881. Many white Readjusters, including

lawmakers who were never comfortable with their Black allies, were enticed to return to the

Democratic fold on the new platform of segregated public goods. Put succinctly, J.W. Vaughan a

lawmaker from Grayson County who was a “Democratic Readjuster” wrote, “I deem it necessary

to state that I am a friend to, and advocate for our Free School system, but am utterly opposed to

mixed schools.”144 Vaughan also registered his disapproval of laws to replace racist judges and superintendents – a desperately needed reform to dislodge a bureaucracy set against Black rights.

Readjusterism reached its limits far before accomplishing the most radical goals of its radical

wing. It was replaced by whites-only public goods, a political regime from which Black

Republicans would not recover until the Civil Rights movement three-quarters of a century later.

The most painful illustration of the Readjuster’s breakdown occurred when a violent

white mob killed four Black men on the eve of the 1883 election in Danville. The most direct

cause of the riot was the printing and distribution of the broadside “Coalition Rule in Danville”

by a group of twenty-eight white businessmen in the weeks before the election.145 The

“Coalition” broadside was a litany of arguments about Black people getting public jobs and

claims that granting political rights to Black people had lead to their invasion of white private

life. The Virginians of the 1880s, both Black and white, were not surprised when anger about

Black participation in public life became fists and guns in the employ of a violent mob because

appointments to spoils positions worked as proxy for the chief political issue: who could

legitimately wield public power. The authors of the Circular quickly moved from the facts to

their rage and embarrassment, writing that the appointments “are the deeds which have so

144 “To the Voters of Grayson County, J. W. Vaughan, Box 213, William Mahone Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University 145 Brendan Wolfe, “Danville Riot (1883),” in Encyclopedia Virginia, June 29, 2015, https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Danville_Riot_1883. 58

humiliated us…and made our town… a by word for shame and reproach.”146 They continued

with a catalog of these deeds, minor offenses such Black people walking on the sidewalk or

using lady and gentleman for members of their own race.

The minutiae of these complaints demonstrated how the line between public and private life

could not be held, if Black people were allowed to fully participate in public life that included

holding power over white people’s private lives as justices of the peace, or more quotidianly, as

post officers controlling their mail. It represented white grievance politics in a racist continuum

from real power to breaches of the etiquette of hierarchy: the election of Black candidates to four

of the nine council spots; Black ownership of the majority of stalls in the public market; and

Black women asking white “ladies” to step aside on the pavement, in a town that was

significantly majority Black. Contrary to presumptions that political and economic grievance

carried the most weight, the fieriest rhetoric in the circular was saved for complaints about social

etiquette with the authors claiming Black people were “infest[ing]” sidewalks. The authors of the

Danville broadside ended with a call to arms, asking Virginians to rescue Danville from its

“awful state of humiliation and wretchedness” by electing Conservative-Democratic candidates

to the state government – a public solution for their private humiliation.147 On issues like the these and the schools, Democrats ran a racist campaign that delivered them control of state government.

Once in power, the Democrats began, as promised, to attack Black rights. Despite a thin victory, the Democrats were able to parlay it into continued dominance by gerrymandering, slowly disenfranchising Blacks, and other uncouth, anti-democratic moves. The Democrats had

146 W. T. Clark, et al., “Coalition Rule in Danville,” October 1883, Special Collections, Library of Virginia, https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/_Coalition_Rule_in_Danville_October_1883. 147 W. T. Clark, et al. 59

learned their lesson from the Readjusters: Black voting would always endanger their power and

posed a legitimate threat to white hegemony. As one Democrat official wrote in 1884 “the colored man is a suffragan [sic] in Virginia –constitutionally and legally…and more particularly, he is a power.”148 Even in 1884, seven years from the end of federal Reconstruction, white power feared Black politics. The Democrats worked to ensure Black men would no longer be a

“suffragan” or a “power.”

Black Virginians, too, bristled at the Readjusters’ failures in 1883. Their issue was the

opposite: supposed white allies would not vote for bills advancing true equality. In the fight to

rewrite the meaning of equality in America after the civil war, Black Virginians stridently

pushed for equality across the board even as they often settled for material gains. Virginia’s

centuries-old, pre-Revolution laws against intermarriage continued thanks to massive support in

the legislature and the perennial use of racist, fear-mongering using tropes of Black male sexual

prowess and white female vulnerability. The Richmond Star, a leading Black paper, opined on

the issue that “The American colored man will never be satisfied until he has all the rights of any

other American citizen. We want a good honest government that does not make a difference on

account of the color of the skin.” Shed Dungee, a Black lawmaker from Cumberland and

Buckingham counties, pushed the subject to a vote where it failed 77-10.149

The campaign against intermarriage was not a politically popular one, but it was undertaken because anti-miscegenation rhetoric and law was a major mechanism of social, and thus civil and political, exclusion. Fear tactics surrounding the purity of women against the racialized other is foundational to America’s racial caste system and tackling it head-on recognized its power. The

power of miscegenation was such that arguments about economic power, such as Black men

148 Quoted in Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet, 407. 149 Quoted in Dailey, Before Jim Crow the Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia, 91. 60

selling wares, could be linked to arguments about protecting the purity of women. And the same

went for the dangers of Black male schoolteachers among white female peers and children. A

gendered fear of miscegenation was the bedrock of a white politics of separation.150

In contrast to other historians who assign blame for the party’s downfall solely to the actions

of white racists, my reading of the archival evidence shows that Black lawmakers and voters left

the party in anger over the slow march of progress.151 In a phenomenon known as

“straightoutism,” some freedpeople returned to vote “straight” for the Republican party line

rather than the Readjuster-Republican one. In a letter written days before the election in 1883, a

William H. Faulk wrote to Mahone that while he had ardently supported the Readjusters because

he believed they were working towards the same end of “political salvation for the Negro,” but

he now believed some Readjusters work only for “self-aggrandisement and have not the interest

of the negro at heart.”152

In specifically decrying the “bossism” of the Readjusters, Faulk echoed Black Virginians

upset that Mahone and other white leaders were content to use Black votes to gain power, but not

allow them to lead. Even at the height of the Readjusters no federal or state-wide official was

Black. And Mahone, when he wanted, would imperiously interfere with Black politicians such as

his machination to get Ross Hamilton removed from the ticket in 1883. Mahone and his fellow

leaders had, in some ways, recreated the white-led Republican party so many of the early Black

Readjusters had bristled against. Of course, some Black Readjusters sensed the danger of

150 Dailey, chap. 3; Green, “Walking Slowly but Surely.” 151 Both Moore and Tarter forward this argument Moore, “Black Militancy in Readjuster Virginia, 1879-1883”; Tarter, A Saga of the New South: Race, Law, and Public Debt in Virginia; Dailey does not endorse this argument as stronly, but does not adequately discuss “straighoutism” Dailey, Before Jim Crow the Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia; Rachleff’s analysis of the Readjuster in Richmond largely agrees with this analysis, but he does not cover the whole state Rachleff, Black Labor in Richmond, 1865-1890. 152 Correspondence November 1883, Box 81, William Mahone Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University 61

allowing the Democrats to win after running a campaign of racist violence and rhetoric. Littleton

Owens, running for his 3rd term, urged loyalty to the Readjusters against the “scheme laid down

by Bourbon Democracy and Straighoutism to deprive [Blacks] of the rights.”153 Owens would go

on to lose and his predictions would, in many ways, come true – in the 1883 election the

Readjusters narrowly lost and some districts that saw ticket splitting between Republican and

Readjuster candidates enabled Democratic victors.

Despite the frightful results of their politics, the presence of the straight-out, anti-

Readjuster faction betrayed the optimism of Black politics in the era. In 1885, two years after the

Readjuster fall, R. A. Paul asked an audience, in reference to their support for the Republican

party and the union: “Can the Negro, with this immense power, be kept in his present abject

condition?” No, he answered and predicted a “glorious future for the Black man” and pointed to

the massive progress already made in the nineteen years since the end of the Civil War.154 Paul could not have known he lived through the high point of Black equality in his state. The straightout movement represented a dissatisfaction with the Readjusters as much a belief in the security of the franchise and in political rights generally. Perhaps more so than politicians themselves, militant Black activists felt comfortable in the politics of direct action, especially when formal politics stalled. Assemblyman Paige and State Senator Cephas L. Davis both staged protests against segregation in conjunction with networks of Black activists – they would not stop fighting for equality.155 In the years after the Readjusters’ fall, Black Richmonders

repeatedly agitated for and won new schools and more enrolled students.156 Black Virginians

153 Correspondence November 1883, Box 81, William Mahone Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University 154 Williams, A Sketch of the Life and Times of Capt.R. A. Paul., 67. 155 Rachleff, Black Labor in Richmond, 1865-1890, 93. 156 Green, “Walking Slowly but Surely.” 62

remained ready to return to the streets, but their lack of legislative power meant many of their

victories were fleeting. Additionally, the poll tax had been repealed just a year ago and the soon-

to-be implemented Jim Crow regime seemed alien to the direction of the state just two years ago.

Yet, it laid in Paul’s future despite his hopes to the contrary.

Black Republicans remained in legislative office throughout the 1880 even as their influence

declined. Many broke with Mahone over his failure to return them to coalition power and his

heavy-handed, unilateral strategy. John Mercer Langston, Virginia’s first Black Congressman, was elected in 1889 and in spite of Mahone’s express disapproval. Following the Danville Riot and the coalition’s losses in 1883, R. A. Paul did not give up despite calling the riot “greater in atrocity than any crime known in the history of the state” besides slavery. Instead, he argued “the

American people are in earnest…while we intend at all hazards to go to the conflict with unfaltering footsteps to do battle for the virtue and honor of our noble women and the education of our children, we believe the good people of this country will render that assistance necessary to crush out” any opposition to equal rights.157 For Black Virginians the fight for electoral representation was not over; indeed they were hopeful. It is only in hindsight that 1883 is marked

as the hard-end of biracialism in Virginia.

Where interests aligned, a marriage-of-convenience realized gains for Black Virginians and poor white ones alike. During the high-point of Readjuster-Republican rule the administration expanded enfranchisement, funded public schools and new universities, and passed pro-labor laws. The coalition created long-lasting change by recasting the role of government in the lives of Virginians – no new regime could end public schooling outright. The new Black university, now known as Virginia State University, outlasted the Readjusters’

157 Williams, A Sketch of the Life and Times of Capt.R. A. Paul., 59–61. 63

downfall and provided critical training and education for Black Virginians through the present

day. Despite their success, however, they never accomplished their chief aim of obliterating the

color-line. Instead, it would be built stronger than ever and rely chiefly on stripping freedpeople

of the franchise they had placed so much hope upon.

Conclusion

Black Readjusters hoped their alliance could change the scope of politics and remake the

Commonwealth. The alliance, they wrote, marked the “dawn of a brighter day” with “equal laws

for all…full citizenship for all… a free education… [and] the poor man, white or colored, shall

have his fair share in the benefits of government.”158 Their optimism is striking. Five years after

the traditional end of Reconstruction, Black Virginians not only boldly pushed for equality but

materially improved their constituents’ lives. The Readjusters were an imperfect carrier of this

message of equality, but their movement delivered real victories, some temporary but others long

lasting, and the divisions they sought to overcome remain embedded in American politics. In the

title of the Black Readjusters address to their states’ Black voters, lays a simple statement of

political realities, a sentiment that perhaps proved their most prescient: they hoped to work

towards “common rights and common interests” of Black and white Virginians. It is the

invocation of these “common” aims that held both the possibilities and limits of this political

arrangement.

The fight to defeat an enemy who saw “no salvation for themselves but the color-line,”

as the Black Readjusters phrased their campaign, is potentially the story of the American march

158 "Address to Colored Virginians! The Eloquent Appeal of the Petersburg State Convention for Harmony Between White and Colored Ctizens and for Earnest Co-operation In Behalf of Common rights and Common Interests," Box 213, c. 1, William Mahone Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University 64

for multiracial democracy. “Our safety,” Black Readjusters wrote, “is the destruction of that line;

and that will not be accomplished… [by] shrinking from a real contest on that line. Proudly

disdaining a sham fight upon it, we honestly combine with the mass our of white fellow

citizens… in the furtherance of the rights, privileges and interests of all.”159 Black Readjusters knew that any politics to improve the lots of the poor and weary needed to face racial hierarchy and its mechanisms head-on in order to dismantle it. The operation of the “color-line,” was the aim of the white Conservatives who wished to “establish a little kingdom in which the poor working classes must be oppressed in order to satisfy the insatiate greed of the rich,” as Black

Assembly Littleton Owens said in an address inveighing against the Funders and the straightouts in hopes of saving the coalition. And no politics that failed to name and defeat racism could usher in an age of equality.

Black Readjusters’ articulation of this race-class dynamics of Reconstruction was shared by

W.E.B. Du Bois, who described it in his landmark work on the era published more than fifty years later: Black Reconstruction. Yet, it differs in an important, if obvious, aspect: whereas Du

Bois sought to understand the failure of Reconstruction to bring about Black equality, Virginia’s

Black legislators and activists, using every tool possible, sought to make their world anew. Even after losing electoral power, they did not give up. Instead they returned to the streets, to protest and continued fighting for equality. The world had been remade in their lives with the end of slavery and they saw no reason they could not remake once more in the image of true equality.

Instead, Black Virginians were subjected to Jim Crow, mass disenfranchisement, and mandated segregation. But, these were not the rule of the law immediately after the Civil War.

159 "Address to Colored Virginians! The Eloquent Appeal of the Petersburg State Convention for Harmony Between White and Colored Ctizens and for Earnest Co-operation In Behalf of Common rights and Common Interests," Box 213, c. 1, William Mahone Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University 65

Instead these institutions were constructed piece by piece in response to the assertion of Black power and political participation especially.160 The history of the Readjusters show just how constructed and unnatural the arrangements of racial hierarchy are, an understanding central to the activism of the Civil Rights Movements and to our own fights for justice today. There can be no salvation without the destruction of the “color-line” – in all its forms.

160 The central thesis of Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow. 66

Bibliography

Title Image

Luther Porter Jackson, Negro Office-Holders in Virginia, 1865-1895 (Norfolk, Va: Guide Quality Press, 1945), vi, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015014725082.

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