“THE ART OF SERVING IS WITH THEM INNATE”: HUNTING, FISHING, AND INDEPENDENCE IN THE POST-EMANCIPATION SOUTH, 1865-1920 by Scott Edward Giltner BA, Hiram College, 1996 MA, University of Pittsburgh, 1998 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2005 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH FACULTY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Scott Edward Giltner It was defended on June 29, 2005 and approved by Dr. Kathleen Blee, Sociology Dr. Seymour Drescher, History Dr. Marcus Rediker, History Dr. Van Beck Hall, History Dissertation Director ii Copyright By Scott Edward Giltner 2005 iii “THE ART OF SERVING IS WITH THEM INNATE”: HUNTING, FISHING, AND INDEPENDENCE IN THE POST-EMANCIPATION SOUTH, 1865-1920 Scott Edward Giltner, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2005 Abstract This dissertation argues that hunting and fishing became central battlegrounds in the struggle over African-American independence between the end of the Civil War and the 1920s. Throughout that period, those deeply-rooted black cultural traditions, carried through centuries of bondage and further developed after 1865, remained important weapons in African Americans’ fight to control their own lives and labor. Drawing on narratives of former slaves, sportsmen’s recollections, records of fish and game clubs and resorts and sporting periodicals, I show that former slaves used hunting and fishing to reduce their dependence on agricultural labor in the service of whites and maximize their freedom. Because they reflected both symbolic and real African-American independence, hunting and fishing became central targets of white efforts to more firmly draw the racial line and protect their own economic and sporting interests. My project contributes to Southern and African-American historiography by illuminating the overlooked connection between hunting and fishing and the evolution of the Southern racial divide. I show that African Americans’ right to hunt and fish became real and perceived sources of labor intractability, establish the importance of African Americans to a Southern sporting tourism industry dependent upon the physical and symbolic presence of subordinated former slaves, and expose fear of black independence as an overlooked motive in the rise of the iv Southern conservation movement. I thus broaden our understanding of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Southern life by showing how African Americans cultivated long-cherished survival mechanisms to meet the changing conditions of freedom. In doing so I clarify how a coalition of whites worked to circumscribe black subsistence for their own ends and illustrate how hunting and fishing played a key role in both processes. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements......................................................................................................................... x Prologue: Hunting, Fishing, and Freedom...................................................................................xiii The Problem of African-American Liberation ......................................................................xviii Dissertation Structure.............................................................................................................. xxii 1. Chapter One: “Idle Time Not Idly Spent”: African-American Hunting and Fishing in the Post-Emancipation South................................................................................................................ 1 Introduction................................................................................................................................. 1 Hunting and Fishing & African-American Subsistence ............................................................. 5 Means, Methods and Social Tensions....................................................................................... 17 Employment & Marketing ........................................................................................................ 30 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 47 2. “You Can’t Starve a Negro”: Hunting and Fishing and the Problem of Independent Subsistence in the Post-Emancipation South................................................................................ 50 Introduction............................................................................................................................... 50 Freedom and the Problem of Subsistence................................................................................. 55 Hunting and Fishing and Black Subsistence............................................................................. 63 Hunting, Fishing & the “Labor Question”................................................................................ 73 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 90 3. “The Pot Hunting Son of Ham”: White Sportsmen’s Objections to African-American Hunting and Fishing...................................................................................................................... 93 Introduction............................................................................................................................... 93 The Context of Postwar Southern Hunting and Fishing ........................................................... 96 African Americans & the White Sporting Ideal ..................................................................... 101 Criticism of African-American Sporting Habits..................................................................... 117 From Sporting Inferiority to Racial Inferiority....................................................................... 130 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 144 4. “The Art of Serving is With Them Innate”: African Americans and the Work of Southern Hunting and Fishing.................................................................................................................... 146 Introduction............................................................................................................................. 146 African-American Sporting Labor.......................................................................................... 153 The Benefits of Sporting Labor, Part I.................................................................................... 176 The Benefits of Sporting Labor, Part II .................................................................................. 186 5. “With the Due Subordination of Master and Servant Preserved”: Race and Sporting Tourism in the Post-Emancipation South ................................................................................... 199 Introduction............................................................................................................................. 199 Southern Sporting Tourism..................................................................................................... 208 Nostalgia, Race, & Sporting Tourism..................................................................................... 225 African Americans and Sporting Resorts/Plantations............................................................. 234 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 245 6. “When He Should Be Between the Plow Handles”: Sportsmen, Landowners, Legislatures, and the Assault on African-American Hunting and Fishing....................................................... 251 Introduction............................................................................................................................. 251 vi Resistance to Southern Fish and Game Regulation ................................................................ 256 African Americans and Fish and Game Laws ........................................................................ 269 Epilogue: Contradiction and Continuity in the Southern Sporting Field................................... 301 APPENDIX A............................................................................................................................. 313 Note on Sources ...................................................................................................................... 313 BIBLIOGRAPHY....................................................................................................................... 319 Abbreviations Used................................................................................................................. 319 Primary Sources...................................................................................................................... 319 Secondary Sources.................................................................................................................. 331 vi i LIST OF TABLES Table 1: 1910 African American Population, By Percentage, of 16 of the 17 South Carolina Counties Covered by the 1914 Ziegler Bill ........................................................................ 316 viii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: How Old Sport Stopped the Game Hog’s Little Game............................................... 183 Figure 2: National African